Helio Music

Mike Buckley

Wake up, killer. For a year, two, you’ve been the static hum of space, floating, spread out over a solar system, asleep, invisible.

Girl born on Helio 70, you.

Property of Fonta Corp.

Little skeez life crouched on a side street in the darkest spiral neighborhood.

Musical genius, you.

It started as humming. You watched people walk the spiral streets and hummed with their movements, flashing high notes at the stumbling drunks with their jaws hanging, rotten from using fermented calorie paste. Low notes described the mothers who watched their children move through the pools of light under the lamps, and hard mean rhythms fit the children best. They got worse all the time, meaner, hungrier.

One day, at the edge of the light from the last lamp, where there are ancient, rotting machines rowed up in the darkness, you saw two boys on their knees, swinging rocks. They banged out a wet rhythm, and you got closer, and saw they were smashing another child’s skull. So you started using rocks to make music, too. Quick tapping on the little upturned cupstone that you carried like a charm. Slower tapping on a bigger, softer stone that sat at the edge of the lamplight. A skeleton wandered over at hearing the noise, a man pure grotesque, a hole rimmed in sores where his nose should be, no fingers, his forehead covered in carved-in scars.

“Why do you do that, hit those rocks,” he asked.

Why?

There was no answer ‘cause you didn’t know the words to say you were building a world made of sound and it made more sense than the dark spiral. So you sat, staring at your rocks, not wanting to look at the man’s face.

“You’re pretty good. Are you from this spiral?” he asked, and you looked at him like he’s crazy. Where else could I be from, you thought.

“There’s other spirals,” he said. “Right next to this one. Some aren’t so bad. They have lights and aren’t as crowded.”

You looked at him, killer—and although what he said was crazy, his eyes in among the fresh sores on his face were shiny with a kind of truth.

“Other spirals? But . . . ”

“Yeah. I know. We’re vaulted in here, but there are ways out. And in.”

His forehead, close up, was scar upon scar upon scar, each a letter, or a symbol, maybe a note. You didn’t recognize them.

“You have a mom?” he asked.

You ran your palm over the cool stone and thought about the music inside it, the rhythms that it had yet to produce, and you shrugged. The memory of your mother wasn’t there—the first thing you knew was a street, foggy almost always, and the older children that slept in the middle of it. This was a good distance from the lamps so you knew their faces by touch, and their voices by how angry they were. The angry ones hit or bit or found other ways to hurt.

“If there are other spirals, how come those have lights and this one doesn’t?”

“Cuz you’re the cheapest,” the man said.

“What?”

“You know what Helio 70 is?”

“A mine,” you said, ‘cause you’d heard that somewhere.

The man laughed.

“Flesh mine, maybe. The spirals are . . . Tanks. Pens. You wouldn’t know those words, but the spirals hold people. Someday Fonta mercs will open up the vaults and clear everyone out of here, straight into a ship. If you’re lucky it will take you to a labor colony. If not it’ll drop you into protein tanks, turn you into high quality calorie paste for someone in a nicer spiral.”

You stared at the rocks, you Helio girl. Unmoved even hearing this. The man’s hand on your shoulder felt light and hot.

“There’s a way out, like I said. But not for everyone.”

The man told you about Charles, a boy he’d taught to hotwire a launch system in a lander that could get you off of Helio 70, into monitored space.

“If they can find you, that’s where it would happen,” the man said.

“Who?”

“The Flayed Eagles. They’re the closest squadron, a light assault unit stationed right now on the rim of Gristal’s Cluster. The music,” the man said, tapping your head with his fingerless hand. “That’s what they’ll want.”

“Music?”

“You rather stay around and wait for the mercs?”

He led you through the dark neighborhoods at the edge of the lamplight and found Charles, a thin boy sitting on a pile of bricks. The man left you there with him, and whoever the man was, you never saw him again.

That night Charles made a fire out of garbage scraps, singing as he did. His songs were all about the darkness. He’d known his mother, though. Her face was soft and pale. And then one day she was gone and he was running through the spiral, being chased by the sound of ragged breaths in the dark, then he was at the lamps, watching a dizzy drunk named Gog walk an imaginary tightrope between them.

You laughed; you’d seen Gog do that.

When he’d gotten the fire struggling along, Charles set out two cups and squeezed calorie paste into them. You slurped the paste, thinking about what the scarred man had told you about mercs and pens and other spirals. Charles hummed quietly and when you looked up his cup was empty, backlit by the sad little fire, and he was close to you.

He kissed you on the eyebrow and his hand settled on your knee. The nerves in your shoulder and elbow twitched, killer, and you were about to slap him, but Charles took his hand away, and lowered his eyes, and walked to the other side of the fire.

After you slept, Charles, using instructions that the scarred man had forced him to memorize, took you through a forgotten ductmaze up to the storm-whipped surface of Helio 70. The sky was dark, flashing with lightning. There you were, killer, screaming and laughing in the rain that fell so hard and cold it felt like shards of glass. Charles laughed too. The darkness of the surface was as total as the darkness of the spiral except for the scope and the stars—it stretched above you forever, and the only way that you could think about it was to make it into a sound. A song. You stared at the stars, singing to yourself, until Charles had rigged up the lander, and waved you over to it.

You both squeezed into specimen tanks and used handmade air masks, pulling rubber gloves over your mouths, taping them into place. In the dark, in the cold of the specimen tank, you heard Charles fumbling with wires, enabling the auto pilot that would jump the lander into space, singing still, and then the thrusters kicked hard, and the music was swallowed by sheer noise.

The lander had been rigged with a drive that hummed alive once you were in orbit. Two cold days later, yes, The Flayed Eagles found you.

Torches cut open the lander. Long, soft legs reached in and gently pulled you out into brightness and zero-g and swabbed your filthy Helio skin. Charles floated next to you, a ribbon of black blood stretching from his mouth, his eyes crossed and dead. The g-load from the thrusters had crushed his sternum, they told you later, his Helio bones weakened from calorie paste, and he drowned in himself before the lander even cleared the gravity of Helio 70.

You were close to dead too.

The Flayed Eagles spent a year making you healthy.

Two years training you with games and musical drills and puzzles.

First it was simple. You woke up in a room with nothing. When you tapped the walls different sounds came out: chimes, whispers that reminded you of Charles singing about Gog, moans. They’d just fed you, something like calorie paste but so rich that it made the insides of your bones tremble. You burped.

The wall burped back, in music.

You learned that everything you did in this room made music. A symphony would wake you up in the morning, and your job during the day was to try and recreate it through your movements. You danced and music poured from the walls and it was so complex and pure and your control over it was so seamless that it felt like the revelation of a kind of light that no one else could see, a brightness that almost hurt to think about.

Here it was—your purpose in life.

One day you woke up next to a small pile of copper-colored triangles. When you hummed they rose into the air. They followed your voice. It didn’t take you long to learn how to train them, killer, these little copper deltaics. Hitting out a rhythm could make them dance or whip tight circles around the room. Hitting out another rhythm could make the deltaics shred across the walls, opening up long gashes that bled a thick white fluid. They’d heal up soon after and you’d cut them again, killer, sometimes all day and night.

You woke up and one day she was there, a nude woman crouched in front of you, smiling. She was like no one you’d ever seen.

“I’m Mother,” she said.

She told you about her children, The Flayed Eagles. The squadron had left Earth hundreds of years ago and had been fighting ever since.

“You’re one of us, now,” she said. “And your gift.”

She gestured to the pile of copper deltaics.

“Put me to sleep,” she said.

You hummed, and the deltaics rose in a small, quivering column. They floated to Mother, hovering over her, and you could feel all of the strength in them, the edges. It was like holding a rock over a sleeping person’s head and knowing you could kill them.

Your song was almost a whisper, and the deltaics settled down around her shoulders, gently stroking her bare skin, and then spinning in a slow ascending circle around her torso, very gently. Mother’s eyes closed, and she smiled, and settled onto her side. You sung the deltaics into smoothing her hair, her eyebrows, touching her shoulders.

The deltaics were yours now, as surely as your own music was yours, and now The Flayed Eagles spent another year pre-surgical, mapping your nerves, flashing images of your brain, your whole body stretched out, shaved clean, gridded over by a projector.

One day Mother revealed it: the fighter.

It was a million hand-sized deltaics that could puzzle together to form a battering ram or spread out over miles and miles to become something more like a storm. They were networked like your training set was, and you controlled them by thinking of music, but control is the wrong word for it: a dancer is movement, not the control of it. A pilot in The Flayed Eagles is will and destruction married together.

The fighter had a designation, a name, but killer, here’s the thing, a human throat can’t say it. The name was only a thought, a conception of sound. It was the brain screaming in a certain rhythm and lacing it through with a metallic grind, and this is a kind of thought that only people with a specific kind of musical intelligence can have.

Musical genius, you.

Then one day you woke up and you were not you—the knob-kneed, bucktoothed girl who left Helio 70. You were the sound. You were the ship. You were the storm of deltaics that was at that moment resting in a bay, waiting for its first training flight. Some pilots lose it at this moment, but not you—the body of a Helio girl wasn’t you anyway. Inside the ship, your mind networked throughout the deltaics, it felt like being made up of shattered glass or bones or slivers of light, just like they used to splinter sometimes in the fog around the lamps in the spiral.

And it felt good to work the way a pilot does. You made rhythms to shape the movements of the deltaics into one swarm or ten or whatever. Your favorite, killer, is to tap out a jaunt, very repetitive, that assembles the deltaics into a vast, circular mouth.

Here was this mouth hovering at the edge of a boring solar system. Battles were behind you—you’d gone with The Flayed Eagles to Residua Prime and met the ancient, world-sized galleons of The Rolling War there, dangerous for their optics and their range, but once you got past the torpedoes, you landed on galleon after galleon and stormed through their hull and bored, tearing and screaming and dancing the whole way, until you came out the other side into cold void, a plume of wreckage and flesh behind you.

You’re good and The Flayed Eagles know it so when you tell Mother that you need a break, you need to fly into the black alone, she says ok, good, come back soon.

And so here, void-scale, a maw stretching a thousand miles lip to lip, deltaics like rows of shark teeth. At the edge of a solar system. Invisible to the naked eye was Helio 70 in its dark little orbit.

“Colony, acknowledge,” you said, like you’re nobody.

After the lag, they sent you a ping back, just a click, a simple way of saying that they give not a shit about you, whoever you are.

“Identifying as Flayed Eagles, element four . . . ” You let it drift off.

They didn’t ping back this time. Piped right in was the image of someone called Bishop Fongin, artificially tanned and smiling like daddy.

“Flayed Eagles, element four, welcome to the radial of Helio 70. There is no scheduled visit. Is your ship damaged?”

“A violation has been reported.”

“Oh no, that’s a mistake. Our license is current.”

“Current for what?” you asked.

“Mining, of course. We are an ore station. Precious metals.”

You tried to put words to it. You’re a flesh mine, like the man said. You’re a suffering mine. You’re a blood mine. You’re a nightmare dug into rock.

“Not metals. People. You sell people,” is what you said.

Fongin went incandescent. He stood up, his robes falling heavy around him.

“We are, in no way, guilty of that. And certainly you have no proof . . . ”

But now you’re hearing something. It was the song that Charles sang as he arced wires together, trying to get the lander to jump off into the dark sky; it was the sound of a child’s head being hit by a rock again and again; it was the sound of children screaming in the darkness, happy, murderous, both, trying to a find a little girl to hurt. It turned the deltaics into a spear a hundred miles long, and your gaze locked onto Helio 70, the colony which was in every way nothing more than a pit down-spiraled in miserable humanity, a few Fonta mercs and those who owned them at the top, with a view of the stars.

The spear would hit them first.

Fongin said something, raising his arms and his great fleshy hands as if he could intimidate you. Surely not in alarm. Helio 70’s sensors weren’t good enough to see the ship coming at them. It was some kind of fake outrage, the last thing he said.

The spear was a tight whirlwind of grinding deltaics and it blasted through the top of the colony and down, obliterating the spirals so quickly that you didn’t even feel the rock vaporizing, much less the people and their pathetic shelters and the fields of castoff machinery and the darkness and the stones you’d tapped with sticks, discovering your gift for music and destruction.

You blasted out the other side of the planet and in a rage you tore around the solar system, you tore, killer, and tore, and finally you drifted off in all directions, deltaics subject to whatever momentum was touching them at a given moment, and then you went to sleep.

Now you’re awake. Consciousness passes through the deltaics again. You flex and draw yourself together and look at what is left of Helio 70: a rock with a perfect hole driven right through it. You constrict into something like the spear you’d been but this time slower, quieter, and you sink into the hole, deltaics reaching out gently to hiss along the smooth walls as they had once against Mother’s skin.

You cling to the inside of the walls now, killer, deltaics flattened, and although you know it is gone forever, at least on Helio 70, you listen for music, and the ticking of life in the darkness, and the beating of a young girl’s heart.

About the Author

Mike Buckley is a widely-published short story writer whose work has appeared in national journals such as The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern California Review, and Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, and Escape Pod. His work has been anthologized numerous times, including in The Best American Non-Required Reading, 2003, and the upcoming Red Hen LA Writers Anthology. His debut collection of short fiction, Miniature Men, was released in 2011.

Fish Dance

Eric Schwitzgebel

Falling. Rebecca and I are falling. My daughter and I—so high it seems impossible that we could survive. We are in the back seat of a taxi that has somehow unhitched from its arcing track between the skyscrapers.

Theory 1: Your last thought is your least important. It is a dead-end wisp that will vanish in an instant, with no effect on anything. Theory 2: Your last thought is the secret culmination of your life, potentially altering the significance of everything that came before. You might affirm it all, regret it all, have that final moment of redemptive insight. Theory 3: Your last thought is an opportunity—your one chance to undergo an intriguing death experience, maybe an overdose of an amazing drug, maybe the feeling of surrendering to the sea in a storm against the cliffs.

The wind mounted as we fell, whistling fearfully through the door frame. Rebecca floated, eyes closed—angelic? mermaidine?—left hand pressed against the dashboard, a dancer mid-air, school uniform and black hair billowing. Her right hand brushed the taxi’s soft inter-Face, which wore an expression I had never before seen in an AI. Could a taxi know enough to fear death?

I wanted to reach toward Rebecca, hold her, make my last thought a thought for her. She was drifting toward me, her book bag elevating off her lap as her legs straightened. But my arms would not respond. I looked down at them, and they seemed foreign objects. Instead of love, I thought, my final thought would be that my final thought would be of final thoughts instead of love.

I woke sweetly relaxed, tingly in the head, vacant elsewhere. I opened and closed my mouth, shaping a groan. It seemed somehow the perfect groan, with a new interesting harmony from my chest cavity. The worried nurse who entered my field of view was the perfect nurse. Then came the perfect CEO of St. Vincent’s Northeast, some perfect lawyers, my wife Sara with my perfect teenage son Abe—a team of angels drifting through honey!

“R-?” I had overestimated the power of gravity, so maybe she was here too?

Sara paused, then looked toward the blank wall to her right, maybe flinching away from me a little—but beautiful, how the hospital lights brightened her cheeks!—then she slightly shook her head. “No.”

Abe wouldn’t look at me either. His face was swollen, tense, tear-glazed.

The expected sadness didn’t arrive. My guts didn’t twist, my stomach didn’t sicken, my throat didn’t ache. Instead I thought: No adulthood could have made Rebecca more complete. Brevity is beautiful. A Chopin etude. To want it to continue past its final note would be a failure of understanding. Or rather, the wanting is itself the very coda that perfects it.

Then I thought: What are these tingly drugs? I imagine saving my grief in a glass box; my future sadness will finalize this perfection. The power button on the back of the nurse’s P.A.D. is therefore the ideal button! It is the circular mandala of the universe itself. The mandala swirled and grew, a spiraling tint across the hospital room.

 . . . ~ the procedure must be entirely voluntary ~ . . . said the CEO?

Something about cost-benefit analysis, something about the price of the equipment behind me which I pictured blooming like ten thousand flowers, something about insurance limits, my irreparable body, about a magnificent new Christian mission . . . since I was an engineering professor at Loyola I would understand risk ratios—the words swam from his mouth like slow fish—expected utilities, why they couldn’t pay for even one more day unless I committed to—?

Theory 4: Cost-benefit analysis is the holiest of all things. It is the pinnacle of human wisdom and I the golden sacrifice upon it. I luxuriated in my magnanimity.

~ It must be entirely voluntary [fish-voice] but it will . . . three months at a million a day . . . you must not change your mind ~

Sara’s face was the perfect riddle! I nodded because dead-Rebecca had tied an invisible ribbon to my chin. And I continued to nod as I watched Sara’s hand guide mine across form after form thrust before me by the magical lawyers, and then the Cardinal of Los Angeles arrived!

The Cardinal’s dark sad face. Her swooping glorious Earth-angel red.

In my dream, the disciples were not lined up all on one side, but jammed together around a small round table in a dark room, noisy, arguing. I was leaning in toward Jesus, near his yellow ear, smelling someone’s sour feet. “You don’t even exist!” I hollered.

“You’ll give me a 10% credence, Isaac my baby,” he said. “11.3% after this dream.”

“Rebecca?” I asked.

“Simply multiply!” Jesus said, tearing a piece off the suddenly-paper tablecloth and scribbling illegible figures on it with a chewed plastic pen.

“10% times infinitude, 90% times void,” I figured.

“Plus 1% times everything else,” Jesus suggested, while another disciple bumped an elbow against his head, sloshing bad wine down the side of Our Savior’s (10%) face.

“Z% times infinitude is . . . ”

“A very large expectation!” said 10% Jesus, tearing off a new strip of paper for me, eyelash thin but infinitely long.

The drugs diminished and I crashed down into pain and grief. The drugs returned and I soared up again. Rebecca was a tombstone crushing me, which I couldn’t see past, then the stone became helium and the world fell away beneath us, a tiny thing—but where was her face?

Per the agreement, I would be amputated, sliced, and sacrificed. My recorded cognitive patterns would become the template for a new type of AI. Engineers measured my head, opened my skull, crusted my brain with devices, rerouted my facial nerves. They peeled back my cheeks and worked electronics up through my sinuses. In a certain subclass of my high moods, I nerded out with them, listening to their plans to scan and prep and slice my brain.

The best AI can’t be built from scratch. It needs a scanned human brain as template. A fully detailed scan is fatal, exposing the brain slice by slice—and even so the quality is too poor to transfer the whole personality and intelligence.

It would have been too expensive to keep me alive anyway, with my irreparably damaged body. And the Church had an intriguing plan for a new type of sacramental AI. There’d be weeks of prep, preliminary nonfatal scans, arguing about design, a bit of theology on the side.

A keyboard was mounted on a metal arm below my face to the right. I could flick my eyes from key to key, and my eye-tracker would detect the motions, then three blinks to send. In this way, I learned to speak in a slow, synthetic voice.

They replaced my body with a shapeless tangle of iridescent nanocarbon pipes and plastic bags. I became only a head, transfixed.

When Sara’s belly had just begun to grow with the thing that would become Abe, we visited a friend of hers in Guadalajara, who had a giant tank of tropical fish.

“Viven en el paraíso,” said the friend, Sun-yi. Sunny. They live in paradise.

“Pero no son peces,” said Sara. But they are not fish. Sara switched to English, “They are only fragments of fish. They don’t encounter a full world. There’s no risk, no learning, no choice, no gain or loss. You’ve taken demented slices of fish and put them on loop.”

“They are happy,” said Sunny, touching the aquarium glass with two long fingers. “You need suffering? You need la vida complicada?” You need a complicated life?

Sara looked at me, but I declined to take sides. “I propose a fish sacrifice,” I said. “For their sins, they can suffer vicariously tonight. We will crucify some tilapia upon the dinner plate.”

After Sara was asleep, I sat in the friend’s living room, watching the fish in the dim light. I could hear a bed squeaking two rooms down—Sunny enjoying a slice of bliss with the short middle-aged man the restaurant had sent over with the tilapia.

A demon bit through my phantom left leg, just above the knee. I contorted my face, though lacking lungs the loudest noise I could make was tooth clacking.

Sara lifted a wormlike tube from the rack beneath me, squinting as if trying to puzzle it out. “This here is the torture-pain tube,” she said. “Part 673HB1.2.9a6, delivered on rush from the eighth plane of Hell. The doctor installed it because she wishes she could have more anal sex but her husband isn’t up to the job.”

The white nurse by the white sink held up a bright red bag. A margin of electric hostility seemed to separate Sara and her, who never acknowledged each other. “Now, Professor Isaac,” the nurse said, “you’re ready for your new nanites, aren’t you?” The nurse’s blue-gloved hands reached past my face to the apparatus behind me, then returned holding a mostly empty bag.

Tomorrow’s bags hung from her cart in a line, whatever was in them waiting to become a piece of me. Red? Black? Sad? Lucid?

Abe had been teaching himself the philosophical literature on personal identity and artificial intelligence. “It will totally be you, Dad!” he said. “It’s the future of AI. The Church is really doing it. They’re cutting edge; they’re pouring an ocean of money into it. Way better than a taxi AI, way better, Dad, nothing like a cleaning bot!” Abe looked a little guiltily down at the cleaning bot who happened to be polishing the floor at that moment, but the bot’s inter-Face smiled easily up at us.

“Hello,” it said.

Abe continued, “Those future people in the rosary beads will have your memories, Dad. They’ll be real people, really conscious. And just like you’re the same person as that ten-year-old kid on the skateboard thirty-five years ago—just like that, those people will be you. They’ll remember me, they’ll remember Mom, they’ll remember this. Some of this. Some. Enough. Think, Dad. A billion years of joy in millions of bodies! Who needs Heaven? You’ll still be going long after I’m dead, long after my eighty-greats-grandchildren are dead! You, the eternal twenty-five-year-old, remembering Mom and me, and Becca. Doing whatever you want in that bead—blissing out, flying, whatever—no pain at all! Crap, Dad, I’m totally jealous. I want to be the one in the crash, doing this, becoming a new template mind.”

“Bot, stop cleaning a minute,” I had my synthetic voice say.

“Yes, Professor Lee,” the bot said, smiling again.

“How much do you remember of your old life?” I asked.

The bot’s inter-Face frowned slightly. “I am instructed not to answer that question.”

“What caused the dissolution of the United States?”

“That topic exceeds my parameters,” the bot said, frowning again. Two feathery dusters unfolded from its sides like arms and it spun them idly.

“Dad,” interjected Abe. “It won’t be like that. Slicing up prisoners’ brains is the old tech. Those old templates for limited AI, that’s exactly what the Church is finally moving past! You’ll be general AI, with real self-awareness. No cognitive constraints. Not like them. Not like the old stuff.”

I pictured the taxi’s inter-Face, as we were falling. “In a tiny world,” I said.

“How big does a world have to be, Dad? What’s wrong with a rosary bead? Plus, there’ll be millions of you everywhere!”

Sara said nothing, seeming to be checking mail or something else on her P.A.D. But after Abe had gone back to school, she leaned toward my left ear and whispered, “Isaac, we’re going to replace your body and screw the Church.” Straightening back up, she raised her middle fingers and waggled them in front of my face.

“Do you envy the fish?” Sunny had whispered in my ear, touching my shoulder, that night in Guadalajara.

I had fallen asleep on the soft leather couch. I was dazed with sleep and wine, excited from dream. Slowly, Sunny’s hand slid down my chest.

Theory 5: I would have let her take me that night, had fear and shame not immobilized me from the neck down. 5A: And that would have been a good thing. 5B: It would have been a terrible thing. The equation will not stay put.

In the vids, the Cardinal had a way of shifting her lips contemplatively to the left. Tall, Jamaican-accented, in the brilliant color of her rank, she praised the courage of the twelve volunteers. She emphasized that although the beings in the rosary beads would be as capable of pleasure as any animal, only God could create genuine eternal souls. The optional new beads would only add a modern variation to traditional atonement—like caring for a plant or puppy to help redeem one’s sin, but in a certain way much better because of the vast potential pleasure the new AIs would experience. From human sin, AI ecstasy. I watched on repeat as my medications rose and fell, and the videos took very different shape depending on my mood. She was visionary saint. She was thin claw of the devil.

Sara clicked off the video. “We’ve got six weeks!” she said. “Is that what you’re going to do?”

My synthetic voice: “What else I do?”

Sara uttered some un-Churchy words. Then, pointing right between my eyes: “I’m working on it. Don’t go permanently fishy-brained on me, Isaac.”

Commentators speculated about the Rosary Project. The Church would rack a huge profit, some said. The (supposedly) Free City of Los Angeles would come even more under its domination. Sinners would count and spin beads, launching tiny new worlds. Later they would watch the worlds they’d booted, adjust the parameters of their creations, manipulate a limited range of events, maybe experience their creations through immersive virtual reality. There would be collectible sets and unique beads with rising aftermarket value. The two most addictive ideas in history, religion, and video-gaming, would finally become one.

The worlds would tick on and on, unstoppable once launched—worlds of unmixed, repeating joy for the AIs within them. But could an AI really feel joy? Or was it always only outward show? If Jack the Ripper had only launched enough tiny worlds, would he have been a benevolent man in sum?

Sara sat on a rolling stool, leaning toward me, her graying brown hair falling across her right eye, in that way it always did. She spoke steadily to me, focusing me, redirecting my mind, steering me back from hallucinatory drift. She spoke about the past, about people we knew, about the insane dance parties we’d thrown in grad school, about history and politics, about the time our car stalled in the mountain blizzard and we had to sleep in the back while the battery ran to zero, about the fuzzy purple stuffed bear Rebecca had loved, about the beauty of her brief life remembered.

Abe brought pizza slices and kimchee and said ease up, Mom.

But Abe pressed too, in his own way. He’d given me video glasses with articles I could read just by flicking my eyes. With a lop-sided smile, he’d unzip his hoodie to show me some retro t-shirt, then he’d slip a little stick gently into the top of my glasses—always the latest bit of AI enthusiasm. He’d pretend to ignore me and he’d fold his thin body into the soft guest recliner and do homework on his P.A.D. or text his boyfriend.

When the meds flowed high I was too scatterbrained to read Abe’s articles and they seemed pointless, unwise—why should I care if it would be me in that bead, truly uploaded? My life is but a tiny concern beside creation! Nothing could be more beautiful than my sweaty, rumpled son and his unknown future. When my meds crashed me down I couldn’t bear to read the articles and they seemed pointless and unwise in an entirely different way—the AIs would be mere demented monsters to profit the Church. In still other moods, escape to a synthetic uncomplicated Heaven was exactly what I craved. I couldn’t tell which of the shifting attitudes constituted my true opinion.

“Humanity, Dad. How much longer do we have? Really?” Abe was showing me a vid on his P.A.D. of the war in Europe. “But these beads are gonna be frickin indestructible—millions of years, solid state, no moving parts. Tiny fusion core. You are the future, Dad, my only faith, the only promise from the Halls of Power that I believe.”

Sara didn’t comment on Abe’s articles. None of the crap about uploading for her. She was a brain and body girl. A dancer. A dancer in her youth at least.

When had we last danced?

A picnic beneath mountain oaks. Abe, Rebecca, Sara, and me. A stained plastic tablecloth, dry cheese, plastic knives, guava juice for the kids, Chianti for the grown-ups in blue fiber cups. Figs, rye bread. Barely visible over the crest of the hill behind Sara, taxis arcing along the upper San Gabriel track. A honey-colored insect that I’d let wiggle off with a crumb. Prickers in my socks.

Two hundred students in the auditorium: Introduction to Mechanical Engineering. Unexpectedly, I see Sara at the top of the left stairway among the seats, near the entry door, faintly smiling, arms crossed, long-stemmed tulips jutting from one hand, for me I think. I will soon learn why. She is pregnant with Rebecca.

Rebecca and me on our hard faux-wood apartment floor, playing cards. Her jack of spades takes my ten of hearts.

Rebecca and me behind a low planter in the 104th floor garden, pretending to hide from love-goblins.

Abe dancing with his school trophy for overall academic achievement in seventh grade, Rebecca dancing with him in contagious joy. “Beck-o! Sis-o!” He whoops and slaps her hand. “Beck-OH!”

What is marriage, Sara? You grow together, repeating the days. Something deepens. Something fades.

Love’s ten thousandth kiss.

If I had millions of parallel lives, each lasting millions of subjective years, in simple, repeating worlds of size X, what would I want? Anything compatible with the doctrines of the Church. A timeless library? Mountain trees and sunsets? An endless day on the beach? Small psychological adjustments would ensure that these delights never grew tiresome.

I chose to dance. My perfect dance floor. My ideal partners—versions of Sara, younger, when we first met, in our wild nighttime exuberances. I would dance with ghosts of the Sara who had once electrified me. Or maybe only my demented descendants would dance, spawned off templates from my sacrificed brain, not really me. Or only seem to dance?

My seeming dance partners would be crafted partly from our old photos and my verbalized memories, but also from new videos of Sara. The engineers would capture her shape, her movements, her style, and seed a range of Sara-sprites for my dance world.

The engineers placed a camera between my eyes.

Sara danced right there in the hospital room, everyone watching, even Grumpy Nurse, even some random old man with a hospital gown and rolling I.V. pole. Abe had his P.A.D. hooked to some ferocious little speakers. “Go, Dad!” he said, as if I was the one doing anything.

While Sara danced she pierced me with a stare so intense I couldn’t fathom what was behind it—as if she could will me back from death.

Ten-percent Jesus was slow-dancing with little Rebecca, both of them dirty-footed, lovers in some Heaven that looked like a cramped stonewall restaurant.

Rebecca turned to look at me, still dancing. “Daddy, does this card mean I will live forever?” Her right hand was holding a playing card, its face toward me. It was the terrified inter-Face of the taxi AI.

From the ragged bottom of Jesus’ tunic, long ribbons tapered. Did they simplify as they approached their asymptotes?

“The sum might be divergent,” I answered.

“Eternity,” whispered 10% Jesus, leaning to touch his damp forehead against mine, “is precisely like a melon. Repetitive! Forgetful. Is that why the Cardinal loves it so?”

“Isaac?”

I opened my eyes.

“Isaac. Fishy-head.” Sara whispering.

For a moment I thought I had arms and feet and tried to move them. Then I had tangled hallucinatory arms and feet that would not uncramp. Becca?

In the dim nighttime hospital light, Sara introduced a new doctor, who leaned over me with a syringe. Soon I was high again, this time in a different way. The doctor and his assistant began to detach me from the larger equipment, began to load my tubes and bags into a cart. Sara explained that they had an experimental plan to re-embody me. I saw no St. Vincent nurses. I soared higher. Colors and sounds and tastes blurred into each other. New indescribably beautiful galaxies of consciousness were invented, and time stretched out to Hubble lengths—or so it seemed to me.

I woke in an antique gas-powered ambulance, rumbling somewhere. I saw Abe, Sara, a piece of the new doctor. I held only a remnant of my previous high, and I longed to soar again. The ambulance stopped and idled.

Abe looked nauseous. “The Church is looking for us, Dad,” he said. “The phones and AIs and webbed electronics are all off, so they can’t trace us.”

My keyboard and voice synthesizer were gone. I looked at Sara.

“Fifty-fifty,” she said. “Fifty-fifty. But that’s better than certain death.”

A bug with shiny red wings crawled on the metal wall behind her.

“Not death, Mom,” Abe said.

Abe’s P.A.D. was on the seat by his thigh, where Sara and the doctor couldn’t see. Abe’s thumb was near the power button.

“We need you,” Sara said. “We’re going to Oakland. Abe and I need you. You need to live, be a father again, a professor again. We need to walk in the mountains again. We need to sip espresso by a garden again, people-watching and making snide remarks. You need to help us remember Rebecca. We need to bake bread and drink wine at midnight.”

I could feel my mood descending further, hallucinatory viscera twisting into my consciousness. A father to whom? To the ghost of Rebecca? To Abe, who would rather send me off? A husband why?

The ambulance revved up, and their human bodies swayed with the ride. Sara threw words of life at me, but they hazed and fuzzed . . . ~ spinal splice . . . nanite stem cells . . . installed with growth casings the new apartment . . . short roll two Shattuck Line you learn . . . ~ Boo woo, boo boo wooh?

Theory 6: You need suffering? You need la vida complicada?

Theory 7: These beads are gonna be frickin indestructible. You are the future, Dad, my only faith, the only promise from the Halls of Power that I believe.

I fixed my gaze on Abe’s power button. I flicked my eyes up, down, left, right—the cross. Up, down, left, right again. Looking at the power button, the thumb. The location tracking software. Abe will understand.

Sara’s voice, too harsh: “Isaac, what are you doing?”

Up, down, left, right.

The world is graying . . .

Abe’s thumb falls the decisive half inch, and the ten thousand satellite eyes of Heaven turn silently toward us.

Rebecca cups a brown bead in her right hand. We’re in the stone restaurant. 10% Jesus is sitting at a little wooden piano in the corner, rifling through a scruffy sheaf of sheet music Saint Peter has just given him. I lean down close toward Rebecca’s bead. Rebecca raises her hand, pressing the bead through my forehead.

I’m on a glittering modern dance floor. Red lights pulse with the rhythms. A beautiful woman spins before me in flat shoes and green blooming dress, her brow furious with concentration, her gaze intense. She points her left forefinger toward me. She twirls and stops, twirls and stops, each time advancing a little closer, her eyes coming round to fix me more ferociously with each spin. Have I seen her before? S- S- Sarai? Who was I dancing with yesterday?

A vortex of carbon-tube tropical fish erupts around us, swimming mid-air, twisting their fins. The woman steps suddenly, surprisingly near. For a long moment, her face and body are a tantalizing electric half-inch from mine. She raises a shoulder, lowers a hip, so close, without touching, and stares straight into my eyes. She leans forward and our bodies meet. How can I explain the tingle, the fizz that fills me—love’s first kiss, in that moment when you briefly know that the world has become perfect. The bass line surges and deepens. A greater joy than this, I could not imagine. Everything is glass except us at this moment, the lantern center.

Then some fragments of memories I don’t understand—a picnic, two children dancing with a trophy, a man and girl playing cards.

I am back in the stone restaurant.

“Is that me?”

I look around, and everything is dust. Humanity is long since extinct.

I wake again. The hospital room is dark. Now there is a guard.

The Cardinal’s two long fingers reaching forward. I feel them touch my eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, her unction oil wet on my face, wooden crucifix dancing as she leans, a bass line of thumping rhythms from the machines.

She is chanting a Latin prayer. She presses her soft lips to my forehead and whispers, “Only what is corrupt and changeable dies.”

Her red gown backs away and I see Sara’s face, not in person—she is only a thin vid on Abe’s P.A.D. ~ from, from? Jumpsuit orange.

~ the newsfeeds, Dad . . . said they’d give Mom leniency ~

Abe is kneeling, shaking. Crying?

~ going to a better place, Dad ~

Abe’s P.A.D. falls from his shaking hands. Flat slice of video-Sara rotating toward the floor, fish-slow. Something black covers my eyes and the noise of the slicer is suddenly loud ~

One piece reflects on the unusual sensation of having one’s brain pulled apart. One piece gives a loving last thought to Rebecca and Sara and Abe. Another piece dances away, ecstatic, forgetting.

These pieces do not know each other. Maybe one of them is me.

About the Author

Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside, and cooperating member of UCR’s Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies program. His short fiction has appeared in F&SF, Nature, Weird Tales, Unlikely Story, The Dark, and elsewhere. His most recent book (non-fiction, he hopes) is Perplexities of Consciousness with MIT Press. At his blog, The Splintered Mind, he posts regularly on issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and speculative fiction.

The Sentry Branch Predictor Spec: A Fairy Tale

John Chu

Introduction

Once upon a time1, one single processor filled five whole rooms, one per pipeline stage. Myriad pinballs flooded through the processor and (so I’ve been told) you could chase them from one stage to another to see its machinations in action. The pinballs clicked, clacked, and crunched through gates and slammed into the maws of traps built into the walls of each room. At the end of one clock cycle, their maws snapped shut. The traps flipped over so that, instead of facing the end of one stage, they faced the start of the next. At the start of the next clock cycle, their maws opened and the traps spit out their pinballs then flopped back. As pinballs careened from stage to stage, the processor constructed its results in assembly-line fashion: fetch an instruction, crack open the instruction, do the operation inside the instruction, get data from memory, retire the instruction. Each stage did the same thing again and again while instructions marched down the pipeline.

Over time, pinballs shrank into ball bearings. Ball bearings shrank into nanodots. Processors now fit on a fingernail, their gates, switches, and traps too small to see with the naked eye. Clocks cycled so quickly that the clicks, clacks, and crunches of a processor computing blurred into an ultrasonic hum. Meanwhile, designers and architects2 partitioned the work to fetch, decode and execute instructions into ever great numbers of ever shorter stages. Rather than just the five classic pipeline stages mentioned above, we divided the work into twenty stages or more3.

The reason we do that is throughput. Even if it takes twenty cycles for an instruction to get through the pipeline, one leaves the pipeline every cycle. The shorter you make each stage, the faster the clock can cycle, the more instructions the processor completes every second, the better Sentry performs4.

There is a cost, of course. Lots of costs, actually, but the one that matters here is this: the Sentry pipeline must be fed. It is a ravenous worm whose segments must stay filled. The worm slithers through memory consuming instructions, digesting them with data, and excreting their results. To get the correct results, it has to consume the correct instructions. If they were simply lined up one after another in memory, this would be simple. The worm would simply crawl through memory in a straight line.

Unfortunately, the correct instructions lie on a path that zigs and zags. The possible paths are spread like a web in space. To find the correct path, the worm has to feel its way through memory, consuming instructions then be guided by their results. Branch instructions tell the worm where to go. The trick is that they won’t until they are digested. By then, though, the worm will have already consumed more instructions. It doesn’t wait to find out where it should go first. Remember, the worm must always stay sated. Whenever it goes down a wrong path, it has to back up then go again in the right direction. That wastes time. The more time it wastes, the fewer computations it makes. The thing to do then, of course, is make sure it never goes down a wrong path.

Sentry’s Instruction Fetch Unit (IFU)5 has one job: steer the worm so that it always consumes the correct instructions. It is the marriage of Brady6, the branch predictor, and Ian7, the instruction cache. Every cycle, Brady places an address, where the worm should go, into a trap. It shuts at the end of a cycle, flips over to Ian, then spits the address out before flopping back over to Brady. Ian steers the worm then pushes the instructions at that address into the worm’s mouth. Being apoplectic to Ian8 is not an option. Brady always has to have something to say to him9.

Once a branch instruction is digested, Brady does find out the truth of where to go, but that shows up too late to do anything besides correct his mistakes. The worm only ever tells him where he should have gone, not where he should go.

Brady’s job, then, is really to divine the truth, to know where the worm should go before the worm figures it out for itself. How does he do it? He consults the three oracles. To do that, he must walk the three rings, one for each oracle. Nano-filaments guide him from segment to segment inside the worm. The rings are nested but they all meet at the trap that Brady uses to tell Ian where to steer the worm. This is where Brady’s journey starts and ends. He’ll encounter machines, monsters, and magic. And when he’s done, he’ll finally know what to say to Ian.

Next Address Table (NAT)

The first oracle dwells in the innermost of the three rings. To tell Ian an address every cycle, Brady has to make it all the way around the ring before the trap that sends the address to Ian shuts. Rugged walls soar on either side of Brady. An ever-shifting tangle of chutes latched to the walls block his way. nanodots flood through the walls, gears clack, and one end of a chute unhooks from the wall to his left. The chute swings. It whooshes over Brady and swerves around the other chutes. With a thud, it lands on some other crevice on the wall it’d left. The wall ripples with nanodots and the chute hooks itself back onto the wall.

The walls and chutes together form NAT. What it does is remember for Brady. Just before he walked this ring, he told Ian an address. Let’s call it A. What NAT remembers is the next address Brady told Ian after the last time Brady told Ian address A. Where Brady steers the worm from A this time is where he steered the worm from A last time. He just has to find that address on the wall.

Ducking chutes and grasping holds, he climbs the wall on his right. The lower portion of A is his guide. He follows it bit by bit, twisting left or right as he pushes his way towards the correct chute. He doesn’t use the whole address, just the bottom ten bits. If he used the full address to find the right chute, the trap that pushes his address to Ian would have closed and opened again before he got around the ring. He’d arrive too late to tell Ian anything.

When he finds the right chute, he steps inside then slides. He is turned and tossed with the chute’s every curve until he slams into a crevice in the other wall. Within the crevice are two tokens that represent the next address. The crevice is too small to hold the full address. What it stores instead are the bottom bits of the next address and an index that will tell Ian which ITLB entry to look at to find the address’ top bits. ITLB lives in Ian’s domain and holding the top bits is just one of its jobs10. Ian must reconstitute the address before searching for the instructions that live there.

Once Brady has those tokens, it’s a climb down to the floor then a sprint back to the trap where the ring starts and ends. The walls and the tangle of chutes cover the entire ring. He dodges every step of the way and, if it’s not too cold and the nanodots flow fast enough, he hits that trap just in time.

There’s a faster way around this ring. The IFU Configuration Register (IFUCR)11 has a bit that opens up a ramp that leads to a tunnel below the wall. Inside the tunnel lives an adder. Brady tells the adder the address he told Ian and, in return, the adder tells Brady the sequential address. That is, where to go when the worm gets to slide straight ahead.

What Brady tells Ian is actually the address of an instruction bundle. The worm consumes instructions not one at time but one bundle at a time. The whole of memory is partitioned into 32 byte lines (which hold 8 instructions strung together like beads) and 8K pages12. All the instructions in a bundle come from the same line. Ian ends bundles either at the end of line or right after a branch instruction. The adder always assumes Ian will break the bundle at the end of the line and give Brady a token for the line immediately ahead of the worm. For the other token, Brady just keeps the ITLB index he already has.

The ITLB index tells Ian which page to fetch from. This means that every time the worm tries to slither from one page to another, Brady will steer wrong. He will have to back up, get the ITLB index for the page the worm is going into, then try again.

The adder doesn’t predict very accurately. It assumes the worm should go straight ahead and the instruction stream is bound to have branches in it. Even when it doesn’t, the adder can still get it wrong. However, Brady can sprint through the tunnel and back up in plenty of time. Trade offs13.

That said, is the NAT prediction accurate? More so than the adder, but not particularly. Its main job is to remember what better predictors have come up with. Those predictions can collide, though. Too many addresses can lead Brady to the same chute. Those addresses are probably all parts of completely different paths, but the chute can only take Brady to one crevice.

NAT is the oracle Brady can visit within one cycle14. It’s how Brady can tell Ian an address every cycle. That’s why Brady has to visit two other oracles. Their predictions may correct the NAT prediction.

Gshare

The second oracle Brady visits hauls out the serious magic15. Gshare is the sort of thing my undergraduate logic design professor would have hrumphed at then dismissed as heuristics. She’s right, of course.

Her solution for where to fetch from while you’re waiting for the truth to arrive was to have delay slots. Basically, you declare the actual branching doesn’t actually happen until some number of instructions after the branch instruction. The instructions between the branch instruction and when the branch takes effect are the delay slots16. To say any more about them is to make them more important than they are.

Like NAT, Gshare operates under the principle of historiomancy: how the branch behaved last time is the how it will behave this time. Gshare just takes longer and consults way more history to divine a branch’s future. In particular, it curates and references PHR, BHT, and BTB.

Pattern History Register (PHR) remembers whether each of the ten most recent branches was taken or not. It’s a segmented snake. Taken branches twist its segments in one direction while non-taken branches twist them in the other. Branches enter through the tail, shift along the body, then leave through the head. As PHR meets branch after branch, switches clatter and traps rock back and forth on their hinges. The traps slingshot dots from their maws to their neighbors’. With each new instruction bundle, PHR wriggles and writhes. Its shape remembers the path of Sentry’s journey through memory.

Branch History Table (BHT) remembers what happened to every branch Brady has met. It’s a grid of 1024 arrows, each one mounted on its own base and shaft. When a branch is taken, its arrow swings further to the left. When it isn’t, its arrow swings further to the right. Backstops prevent arrows from swinging too far in any direction. An arrow can only tell you one of four things about its branch: strongly taken, weakly taken, weaken not taken, or strongly not taken.

Branch Target Buffer (BTB) remembers where taken branches told Brady to go next. Each address lives in the base that supports the corresponding BHT arrow. When Brady learns where a branch takes him, not only does its arrow swing to the left but the base shudders as it swallows that address.

Brady has two cycles to run around the Gshare ring. In the first cycle, he wrestles PHR. It shudders under his grasp as an incoming branch ripples through its body. He weaves the bottom ten bits of the current fetch address through the ten PHR segments. In the second cycle, the now trussed PHR guides him to the correct arrow in BHT.

Which arrow is the correct arrow depends both on where the branch is in memory and the path Brady fetched to get there. What Gshare predicts isn’t just the result once a branch is digested. It’s actually predicting which path the worm will take through memory. Historiomancy says where we went from here the last time we fetched down this exact path is where we will go this time17. The instruction stream is chaotic. Reaching this branch by some other path may take us to some other place. Also, weaving the address and PHR segments together spreads branches throughout the BHT. This makes it less likely that more than one branch will land on the same arrow. It makes it more likely that the history Brady consults will actually be for the branch it’s trying to predict.

Note that Brady hasn’t used the arrow yet. It’s actually the tribute he will give to the third oracle. Regardless of where it points, Brady always races the address from the base back to the start of the ring.

Gshare is more accurate than NAT. When their predictions disagree, Brady tells Ian the Gshare prediction. Of course, Gshare takes a cycle longer to consult than NAT. By the time he knows the Gshare prediction, he has already told Ian the NAT prediction. To correct the fetch path, the worm has to back up and the instructions Ian had forced down its mouth are flushed out.

Like NAT, Gshare doesn’t know anything about the instructions Ian fetches. It divines the future using a squirming snake and a bunch of arrows. Given a fetch address, Ian will ship down the pipeline a bundle of instructions starting at that address. Gshare may predict that the last instruction in that bundle will be a branch that will be taken. That bundle, however, may not even have a branch in it18. Despite PHR, fetch paths may have collided in the BHT and stolen each other’s arrows.

In a way, this is fetching with one hand tied behind the back. At the very least, Brady should predict only the branches that exist and not the ones that don’t. Ian handles every instruction that he ships down the pipeline. Once he finds them, he knows which ones are branches. In the time that shards of Brady take to consult NAT and Gshare, other shards of Brady are embarking on the long journey around the third and largest of the rings. By the time he reaches the third oracle, Ian will have found for Brady some of the answers Brady wants.

Branch Target Address Calculator (BTAC)

As the name suggests, the third oracle Brady consults doesn’t actually predict. It calculates. By the time Brady reaches BTAC, Ian has seen the instructions that live at the address A that Brady told him. From that, finding the address to go after A is just an addition, assuming the BHT arrow is pointing the correct way.

BTAC actually lives in Ian’s portions of the worm, not Brady’s19. The ring that Brady walks leads out of his own domain, into Ian’s, then back. Just around the bend, gears gnash against each other, conveyor belts whir, and hammers pound. Instructions are conveyed through a tunnel on their way down the pipeline. Inside, they are cracked and counted.

Brady can only want one of two addresses: the sequential address or the target address. BTAC works out both of them as Brady approaches the oracle.

The sequential address is the address that makes the worm go straight ahead. It’s the right address to use when the bundle of instructions Ian sends has no branches or the bundle ends with a branch that the BHT arrow will insist is not taken. It’s the address A plus the number of instructions in the bundle. That’s what the counting is for.

The target address is where the worm should go next if it’s not straight ahead. It’s the right address when a branch ends the bundle and the BHT arrays say that branch is taken. That’s what the cracking is for. Inside the branch instruction is a token that tells Ian how far away the instruction the worm should consume next is. Add the token to address A and Ian has a target address.

Ian deals with full addresses. Brady deals with an ITLB index and an offset. After Ian calculates his addresses, he needs to find the ITLB entry that holds the 8K page that matches it. If it’s not in the ITLB, then Ian goes on his own epic journey. But that’s another story…

Brady approaches BTAC as a supplicant with the BHT arrow. Ian is there, waiting for him. Brady gives him the arrow. If it points to not taken, Ian gives Brady the sequential address. If it points to taken, Ian gives Brady the target address. Actually, if there are no branches in the instruction bundle, Ian just scoffs and tosses the arrow away20. Then he gives Brady the sequential address.

Brady sprints back to the start. BTAC is the most accurate of the oracles. It also takes Brady four cycles to run this ring. By the time Brady can use this address, he has already told Ian three fetch addresses in the meantime.

This is the price, because there’s always a price. To use the BTAC prediction, the worm has to first flush out the three fetch addresses Ian has been told in the meantime, wasting whatever effort Sentry has already put into them. So much for keeping the pipeline full. Also, it may turn out that he doesn’t use the BTAC prediction. The fetch address it’s based on may itself have been flushed out. This is why we want to get to the correct address as quickly as possible. The more we flush, the more empty the pipeline, the poorer Sentry performs.

As things turned out, instructions were tougher to crack than we expected. Ian can’t get it done before Brady shows up. Instead, Ian partially pre-cracks them when he first caches them away. For every instruction, he figures out whether it’s a branch and how far it is to the next. This way, the sequential address is mostly fishing out this extra information and an addition21.

Furthermore, branches come in sixteen flavors. Each one has a different condition that has to be met in order for that branch to be taken. Ian can’t distinguish between flavors. He doesn’t have the time. On one hand, this is OK because Ian doesn’t have the space to cache that away with each instruction anyway22. On the other hand, the Branch Always instruction is always taken and the Branch Never instruction is never taken. The BHT arrow may point in the wrong direction and Brady will get the wrong address even though the information that tells them which address to use is sitting inside the partially cracked branch instruction23.

After BTAC, there’s nothing left for Brady to do for this fetch address except wait for the truth to come to confirm or deny his prediction. In order for this journey to be worth to taking, Brady has to find the truth way more often than the truth finds him. Otherwise, he might as well just have waited.

The magic of branch prediction, of course, is that NAT, Gshare, and BTAC together are surprisingly accurate once they are properly trained. “Properly” is the key word.

Branch Status Table

Historiomancy insists that what has happened will happen. Inside NAT, BHT, and BTB, Brady remembers what has happened. He consults them to divine what will happen. To remember, though, he inevitably makes a mistake first. A NAT entry or BTB entry has to be wrong before it can be repaired with a corrected address. The truth sways the BHT arrow that foretold (or didn’t foretell) the branch direction. As Brady sees the same branches again and again, correct predictions are swept inward to faster predictors. BTAC calculations find themselves inside BTB and BTB predictions find themselves inside NAT. The truth, of course, repairs all predictions.

The Branch Status Table (BST)24 tracks every branch from when Ian is told its address to when an execution unit retires it. When Brady sends his prediction to Ian, he stores it in a BST entry along with the fetch address he predicted from and the PHR used in the prediction (if any).

When a branch resolves, the truth comes to Brady with an index into BST. Actually, Ian sees the truth first because—and this seems to be a familiar refrain—the truth is an address. Ian needs to convert the upper bits into an ITLB index. Then Brady sees the truth. If we call the cycle where Brady tells Ian an address F1, then the truth arrives two cycles before that at FN1, because zero is a number25.

Brady compares his prediction with the truth. If he predicted wrong, not only does he need to re-steer the worm down the correct path, but he has to fix NAT, BHT, and BTB so that the next time the worm slides down this way, those oracles predict the path it is sliding down now. From what he’s stored in the BST for that branch, Brady can figure out which entries of NAT, BHT, and BTB to repair and with what. In addition, the PHR stored in the BST replaces the current PHR, then the actual direction of the branch is shifted into it. This makes the pattern of taken and not-taken branches in PHR what it would have been if we had predicted correctly.

Two observations:

One, Brady only uses BST to deal with the truth. He has no idea when the truth will arrive. It just shows up from out of the blue. When that happens, he has to remind himself what must be repaired. When he corrects himself, his repairs are based on which predictor is making the correction. For example, a Gshare prediction always corrects the NAT prediction Brady told Ian the previous cycle26. In these cases, Brady remembers the past by passing along the fetch address and PHR from stage to stage.

A maze of tracks and maws surround the PHR. It pushes copies of itself onto the tracks, cycle after cycle. Like misshapen cars on intertwined roller coasters, they rush down the tracks, looping back to the start. At any cycle, Brady can revert to the PHR of two cycles ago or four cycles ago then go on as though it’d predicted correctly.

This all sounds really simple, except there’s a new prediction every cycle. That prediction may be for a new branch or it may correct an old branch. Meanwhile, predictions may be flushed out for so many possible reasons. Lots of PHRs and fetch addresses are careening through the tracks but not all of them are valid. The logic to throw the correct snake into PHR turned out to be surprisingly hard to get right, especially when the result has to make it into the trap before it shuts or it is never remembered27.

Two, repairs are never undone. By the time the truth arrives, Brady may have repaired itself who knows how many times for other branches fetched in the interim. The latest truth may flush out those other branches, but the repairs they caused stay in Brady. The Brady repaired by the truth still remembers walking down those false paths that now never happened.

If Brady is accurate enough, this may not happen often enough to matter. The paths that are false now may be paths Sentry will walk later. Maybe Brady has just trained them ahead of time. These may be good reasons to leave those repairs in. These may just be the rationalizations we tell ourselves because there’s nothing else we can do. We don’t have the room to remember enough so that we can recreate NAT, BHT, and BTB exactly as they were after any given fetch. As a result, we can never forget our mistakes. If we’re lucky, we overwrite them.

The Things We Don’t Talk About

This is the branch predictor that never was. There’s a lot I’ve avoided talking about, entire classes of control-transfer instructions, for example. Brady didn’t just predict branches, but also jumps, calls, and returns. Hell, the architecture Sentry implemented specified one delay slot immediately following each branch28. That delay slot can be in the following line and requiring its own fetch. The instruction in the delay slot may itself be a branch (whose delay slot, as it turns out, is located at the target of the original branch)29.

Truth turned out to be much more ephemeral in real life. Multiple branches were being digested in the worm at any given time. The execution units generally resolved them in out-of-order relative to how they arrived at the execution units. Sometimes, they resolved the same branch multiple times with a different result each time. Like the IFU then, the execution units made their own gambles that sometimes did not pay off. That whiplashed the worm, jerking it from one path to another then back again. The truth was not the final word. It was just something that was right for now, but might be wrong later, or not. The result the final time a branch resolved is always correct, but how do you know, at the time, that it’s the final time? You only realize too late when the branch retires. That is, when the worm has excreted the result.

Sentry, of course, had no real resolution. At least not a satisfying one. We never got to see whether it would have worked for real. Part of me still thinks that execution units that calculate the world are still speculating, that Sentry can still resolve another way. The world will flush out the past decade or so of our lives, start down another path and, this time, we’ll ship the damn thing. Or maybe we’ve already tried that and we’ve whiplashed back. There’s no way to know until we retire30.

Footnotes:

1 - Sentry doesn’t exist. The processor was canceled just as we were ready to build it for real. I’ve gone on to design processors that do exist. I’ve gone on to other canceled projects. I’ve gone on to state-of-the-art work. Sentry was just my first processor, but also the one where I wonder about the other paths we might have taken.

2 - Yes, I’m being pedantic. Architects, like Ajay and me, tell the builders and verifiers fairy tales about how the processor works. Designers, like Marie, take the fairy tales and make them real. They spin nano filaments and hammer them into place. They make sure the nanodots actually make it from one trap to another before the traps shut. Verifiers, like Hongwen, make sure the fairy tales are believable.

3 - I never found a diagram of the entire Sentry pipeline, just portions for a few of its units. The ones drawn by my partner-in-crime, Ajay, were, of course, exquisite.

4 - And the better Sentry performs, the more likely you can keep doing the job you love with the people you love.

5 - Yes, we really called it that. (Say it one letter after the other, like we did. I-F-U.) Gallows humor. Sentry was always in danger of being canceled.

6 - By the time the project was canceled, I’d invested so much of myself, I might as well have been Brady.

7 - In my mind’s eye, I always imagine Ian looks like Ajay. Tall, broad, and, frankly, somewhat daunting. Ian is, by all rights, though, Ajay’s story to tell, not mine.

8 - Or Ajay, for that matter.

9 - Sometimes, knowing what to say to Ajay was as hard as predicting the outcome of branches.

10 - Hmm. It’s going to be hard to talk about Brady without talking about Ian. Figures. It’s not like Ajay had nothing do with Brady or I had nothing to do with Ian.

11 - Yes, the IFUCR. It’s pronounced exactly the way you think it’s pronounced.

Ajay joined the project about a year in. He had this tendency to loom. I knew I’d like him when, about two weeks after he started, he walked into my cube and told me, deadpan, “I need a bit in the eye fucker.” Then, he smiled.

As it turned out, though, he really did need a bit in the IFUCR.

12 - Ajay was so the right person to design Ian. I’ve never seen anyone so handy with a spreadsheet or so disappointed when things didn’t go exactly according his Gantt chart.

He’d go lift whenever he got frustrated. Sometimes, I’d run into him in the locker room. He was much more approachable tired.

It probably says something that Sentry changed what flavor of imposing he presented over time. He started off very “Come home with me to my private island in the South Pacific.” After a couple years on the project, he was much more “Fight by my side in our quest for truth and justice.” Given that I was the one born outside the US—on an island in the South Pacific, no less—I found the latter far more appealing.

13 - Did you know that around 2AM, campus security would walk the parking lots and take down license plate numbers? 2AM was also about when Ajay would show up at my cube and gently suggest that it was time to go home.

I’m no longer dedicated enough to pull hours like that. Maybe if I were, there would be another Ajay at my current job for me to lean against as we walk out of the office and into the parking lot.

Trade offs.

14 - Marie basically parked herself in my cube until I came up with something that fit within one cycle. Hongwen liked NAT because it was simple. We could build it and we could verify it. Now if only we could have also made it predict accurately.

15 - If Ajay was the one who was precise and regular, then I was the one who ran down all the blind alleys then backtracked. Maybe, in a way, that made me the right person to architect Brady.

16 - History has not been kind to the delay slot. I tried to explain to Ajay once what happens if a delay slot itself is a branch. He fell asleep in my lap on my couch. In his defense, we were both hammered.

17 - Ian worked so closely with Brady that Ajay had to understand Brady, too. I’d try to explain historiomancy to Ajay over pizza and all I’d get back from him is this penetrating stare, as though I was daring to lie to the embodiment of all that’s true and just. He simply couldn’t see how a snake and a pile of arrow could guess right so often.

Honestly, I don’t think I could have lied to him even if I wanted to. No matter how skeptical his gaze, his body language was always gentle. His large, thick-fingered hands would rest open on his thighs, not balled into fists across his chest. (My hands and forearms, of course, were scarred. So much for that concert piano career.)

He listened, even when it was obvious that I didn’t understand how a snake and a pile of arrows were right so often either. Just that they were.

18 - I still remember Ajay’s expression when I started to point out the stupid ways Brady can go wrong. Who knew it was possible for eyes to roll that high?

19 - This part of the story doesn’t make sense without Ajay’s. Ian does the calculation, then Brady figures out what to do with it. By this point in the design, Ajay and I were one mind in two bodies.

20 - Ian brooks about as little nonsense as Ajay. Shocking, I know.

21 - This scheme seems obvious in retrospect, but we didn’t come up with it until after five workouts, three dinners, and Mission Impossible (the movie). That said, I don’t know that we were trying to minimize the amount of time we spent together outside the office.

22 - Ajay and I tried, but one did not mess with Marie. Her first processor was in the ball bearing days. If she said there wasn’t room, there wasn’t.

23 - When I realized this, I told Ajay that this was my baptism into the compromises of real-world computer architecture. He just smiled and handed me my cell phone. I’d left it at his apartment the previous night.

24 - Yes, a table of BS. Keeping morale in Sentry’s final days wasn’t easy.

25 - You’d be surprised who didn’t think F0 was a thing. For an embarrassingly long time, Ajay and I were a cycle off until we realized what was happening. It turns out when we both think the other one is wrong, anything could set one or the other of us off. (No, of course it wasn’t really about whether zero was a number. That was just the handy linchpin.)

In retrospect, I don’t know that we ever really worked it out. Or maybe we got back on the right path, but we couldn’t erase going down all those wrong paths and that took its toll.

26 - Hongwen should be thrilled that I finally asserted a property she can test. Yes, over a decade too late.

27 - Trying to get this right literally drove me to tears. And some things we had to get wrong because you can only put nanodots through so much in one cycle. Hongwen was never thrilled when something deviated from the platonic ideal.

I may have spent months, if not years, with my head nestled against Ajay’s shoulders or his hands massaging my shoulders. Ajay, as previously mentioned, never dealt with his frustrations by, say, talking to me. He always fled to the gym.

28 - But I don’t have to admit to delay slots if I don’t want to. Just like I don’t have to admit that Ajay left. The long threatened cancelation axe fell not only on Sentry but on everyone who worked on Sentry. It’s ironic that he was the one who foresaw this while I was caught by surprise. He found another job, then moved to California before it all fell apart. I, caught off-guard by both Ajay and the cancelation, stayed with Sentry to its sputtering end.

29 - Making delay slots work correctly might have been bearable with Ajay’s help, not to mention his strong hands, broad shoulders, and capable mind.

30 - I never looked up Ajay in California. It wouldn’t have been that hard. This is a small field we work in. I mean, Marie and I are working at the same company again. In fact, she’s my boss’ boss.

At first, I was too angry to look Ajay up. Now, it’d be too weird. Part of me thinks it’s better to remember him as that guy who made me want to fight for truth and justice by his side. Part of me wonders whether there was some other path I missed. In any case, even if I saw him, I haven’t walked my three rings yet. I wouldn’t know what to say to him. Oh well.

About the Author

John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Tor.com among other venues. His translations have been published or is forthcoming at Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF, and other venues. He has narrated for podcasts such as EscapePod, PodCastle, and Lightspeed. His story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

Sephine and the Leviathan

Jack Schouten

CHAPTER 3/6: TRAJECTORY

Entombed inside the cannibalized q-cannon, Sephine counts pebbles in her mind. She has had to wrap her filament wings around her to fit inside the narrow cylinder, and when the cannon begins its countdown, starts to rumble, claustrophobia sets in.

She reaches sixty-seven pebbles before she feels her wings quiver sharply once, and a sharp pain in her back.

— We have a problem, the Vierendelen sends.

“Fix it then!” she screams aloud, though this doesn’t matter; the ship will still hear her.

— No time, toots. Grin and bear it, and all that.

“Toots?” is all she can manage, before there is a violent lurch and her head slams against the cool metal of the inner shuttle. She floods her brain with painkillers and becomes dizzy.

“Is it the cannon?”

— Cannon’s fine.

“Ah, silver linings . . . ”

— It’s your filament wings. I don’t think you’ll be taking them on the return trip.

As if there was any guarantee of a return trip, she thinks.

— They may not even last the journey up to the Leviathan. That bastard engineer made a mistake. I told him I should have supervised.

“Forget about the wings, will I make it?”

— Calculating, it says, and Sephine feels the ship disconnect.

She Enlinks in the meantime and performs a quick systems check. The Vierendelen was right; her filament wings aren’t secured properly to her spinal cord and are coming loose under the building turbulence. She tentatively dilutes the painkillers from her neuroweb. Her head throbs from the knock against the shuttle wall, but the burning pain in her back is infinitely worse; it feels like her spine is being extracted from her like loose teeth, one vertebrae at a time.

She ups the painkillers and Delinks.

Seven seconds. Finally the Vierendelen re-establishes connection.

— I have an idea, but you aren’t going to like it.

“I didn’t expect to.”

— I’m going to delay your ejection from the shuttle. Just an extra minute or so will give me time to find a temporary fix so we can keep those wings from killing you mid-flight to the Leviathan. It’s going to get hot in there though. Really hot. And my wing-tinkering’s going to hurt, but the higher we eject, the shorter the distance to the target. What do you think?

One second.

“Do we have a choice?”

— None whatsoever.

The q-cannon fires. Sephine is almost crumpled by the g-force, pressed into the floor of the shuttle as it erupts from the cannon—even the shuttle’s inches-thick shell can’t dull the noise of the blast. Sephine’s stomach pitches with the velocity, and despite herself she steals a glance through the viewing pane.

She can see the scrubland surrounding the launchpad, smoke and fire bulging beneath and blocking it out; and the smattering of black dots that are people watching the q-cannon blast her into the sky.

She convulses as the shuttle vibrates, battered around it like a ragdoll, and she considers tightening the embrace of her wings to cushion herself against the shuttle walls, but something tells her that would only make the wing problem worse—and the pain.

— Done, the Vierendelen says.—That engineer. Can’t even encode failsafes in his own hardware. Too easy overriding the ejection protocols.

“Show-off,” she manages, through chattering teeth.

— Okay: here we go.

The world shrinks beneath her, suddenly—ironically —unfamiliar. Soon all she can see is desert, dun mesas and bronze and swathes of bright gold. She can see a cross-hatched smudge, the half-city of New Leseum; the four towers of Pod Country; the mighty, battered hulk of the warship Vierendelen beyond, casting its long shadow over the rippling dunes.

And she can see something else, too: the familiar, massive shadow of the Leviathan, where she is to find her brother.

The air becomes suffocating inside the shuttle. Unable to guess the trajectory without Enlinking, she puts her trust in the Vierendelen to guide her to the Leviathan’s edge.

Heat builds. Sweat beads on her forehead, her chest. She commits her neuroweb’s resources to lowering her body temperature, and feels icy coolant spread through her body from the nape of her neck, but it’s too slow to counter the rising heat. Her eyes seem fit to rattle from their sockets.

Then, finally:

— We’ve reached the original ejection point. Less than a minute to go. All right in there?

“S-smashing.”

— Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.

White-hot hooks in her spine. The pain is startling. With a guttural screech Sephine gives up and Enlinks to the Vierendelen’s data corpus. She sees the shuttle in four dimensions, watches time ebb and flow like the flourish of a gymnast’s ribbon. And yet the pain permeates still, even in this new, abstract viewpoint.

She hones in on the careening shuttle, then herself—a jittering skeleton inside—and then her spine.

The roots of her wings are changing: the Vierendelen is adjusting the mechanisms that latch them to her spinal cord.

— Delink! the Vierendelen screams in her head, with a far-away quality, like it’s yelling at her across a cathedral.—Delink now!

“Can’t,” she sends. “ . . . Hurts.”

— Grin and bear it! Do it now!

With just under a second to ejection, she manages it.

Back in normal-subjective spacetime, Sephine feels the wings find purchase in her spine, and the pain increases to the point that it becomes a hallucinogen—searing colored blades dance in her vision.

And from somewhere far away, laced with the pain, it seems:

— Ejecting.

Light blossoms. Noise dies. Sephine becomes lucid. The gunmetal backdrop falls away, and she erupts from the shuttle’s exposed head streamlined and spinning slowly, high above the desert. Then a dark bowled shape fills her vision.

The Leviathan’s iron skin is lined with slits and trenches, from which protrude clusters of black bristles, each a vicious arsenal. The Leviathan is a floating war machine.

It’s only then that Sephine realizes how huge it is.

— Deploy your wings. It won’t hurt anymore, I promise.

It doesn’t.

Her wings unfurl with delicate snapping sounds. The charged atoms in their filaments crackle as she spirals skyward. Control is as intuitive as the use of limbs—one hard push and the wings ripple and pulse and pull her higher.

Then the Leviathan attacks.

— Trouble. Down to you now, evade.

Plasma fire. The defense systems have spotted her. She evades a flurry of blue-white projectiles, looping through the sky, up and up and around, and for a fleeting moment she forgets she is under fire—she is enjoying herself.

— No time for showing off, just get to the Leviathan!

A plasma needle screams past her head, igniting the air in its slipstream. With all her might she pushes the wings down, sending her careening upwards, finally over the Leviathan’s rim, and she sees for the first time what lies atop the structure. It terrifies her.

She has no time to focus—the wings feel like they’re giving up just as she penetrates the Leviathan’s defensive parameters.

— Oh, shit.

The wings burst into flames. She pumps them as hard can, going down now, towards the very edge of the Leviathan. She feels tongues of fire lick at her back. Each roaring push of her wings wafts smoke into her eyes and nose and her throat.

— Almost there. Dive!

The speed of the maneuver fans the flames roaring around her ears. Just as she feels the wings disintegrate and pain tear up and down her spine she tucks in, and for a moment she is a human fireball, shedding smoking strips of filament and fabric. Then she slams onto the ground—painkillers and inertia stabilizers coursing through her—and rolls.

It’s over. Sephine lies awkwardly on her back. Her wings are nothing more than winter trees now: gnarled black branches loosely rooted in her spine. They whisper as they dissolve, causing her pain.

— Well! Wasn’t so hard, was it?

“Shit,” she breathes. Her skin burns and her clothes are ruined. There is the acrid smell of burning hair. “We made it.”

— Good job. When you Enlinked back there I thought we were done.

“We?” she sends. “You’ll be alright; it’s me who was almost done.”

— Fair point.

“Oh, and Del?”

— Yes?

“Never call me ‘toots’ again.”

CHAPTER 2/6: SPITE

Sephine is in the Vierendelen. The people of New Leseum have taken to calling it a fortress, though she disagrees. To her, it is just the Vierendelen: a kilometer-long gigaton of ruined hulls, bulkheads, and fuselage that was once a Golem-Class Leseum warship. (Although, she supposes it does look a little like a fortress, buried nose-down in the desert like this, towering over the fledgling city.)

Sephine is Enlinked and playing Spite with the ship. She and its AI battle each other with strings of code, constructed to entangle with and destroy one another. Mutually assured destruction is impossible—each battle ends with a winner.

“I know what you’re doing,” Sephine says, chancing a risky gambit. Against such a vastly intelligent machine as the Vierendelen, anybody would assume the game a forgone conclusion, that each game would end in a crushing defeat for her human mind—but the ship is being coy.

Sephine’s gambit pays off, corrupting the Vierendelen’s code string and leaving it in an irreversible Spite. She’s won the game.

— Nice move.

“Don’t patronize me. You’re playing Rokri’s tactics.”

— Is he that transparent?

In real space, Sephine scowls—Enlinked, she has no face; just code. “He certainly was.”

She Delinks, opening her eyes back in real space.

— You’re so sure, aren’t you? the ship continues.

“It’s been a year, Del. I know my brother. He’d be more straightforward than this. More . . . ”

— Transparent?

Sephine nods.

— But you’re so keen to accept he’s dead, and now there’s just a sliver of hope and you’re all too ready to abandon it. There’s all kinds of things you’re not taking into account.

“Hope?” she spits. “Hope? An encrypted signal we can do nothing with is not hope, Del. And it certainly isn’t from Rokri, either. It’s from the enemy, and I think you know it too.” She bites her fingernails. “He was a fool to go.”

Dusty light cascades down into the atrium, cut by the sharp outlines of metal arcing high above: bones of the gutted ship. Sephine can hear the low thrum of esoteric machines deep within what is left of the Vierendelen’s hull. Although the ship’s AI has no centralized structure (its consciousness runs through the few substrates that still receive power from the engines), it has a tendency to manifest itself as a collared dove. At this moment, the Vierendelen is perched on a high bulkhead overlooking the atrium, mussing its iridescent wings and cooing softly.

— Sephine. If this message, signal—whatever—if it is from Rokri, then wouldn’t he want a reply?

“You said yourself, we have no decryption software capable of sending a message back.”

— Correct. But I wasn’t just thinking of sending a message.

Just the thought opens a pit in her stomach. She knows what the ship means: go up there. Go to the Leviathan and search for him.

“It’s not as simple as that.”

— Getting him up there was.

“It was suicide, and selfish,” she snaps. “We needed him. I needed him.” Sephine wanders over to a rockery on the far side of the atrium. A stream gurgles gently into a clear pond, where lilies reach through the surface. Mechanical fish flit amongst their roots.

Sephine sits down and takes a handful of pebbles, tossing them absent-mindedly into the pool. The fish dart away.

A low rumble goes through the ground. The lilies stir.

— Fissure bombs in the Farside Basin. I’d better check it out.

“The attacks are getting closer,” Sephine says darkly.

— Not if I have anything to do with it. And I always have something to do with it.

Sephine imagines the ship winking at her.

— Hive minds are as easy to fool as human ones. Catch up later. And think about it.

Then she feels the disconnectedness as the Vierendelen severs its connection with her neuroweb. The collared dove effervesces from existence.

Sephine is alone with her thoughts and grateful for it, but she’s incapable of staying idle for long. She scatters another handful of pebbles over the pond, sits down on the gravel, and Enlinks.

The ship’s data corpus presents her with a wireframe view of the gutted hull, where bulkheads and metal ribs and drooping, limb-thick wires dangle together in four dimensions. She withdraws from this and views the Vierendelen in its entirety.

Tracker drones pour from the ship in droves. She adopts the viewpoint of one of the rugged little machines as it speeds across the desert to a deep crater about fifty kilometers away.

The bladeships of the Fractured are peppering the Farside Basin with bombs. Scavenger craft swoop into the fray, grabbers swinging from their hulls to pluck huge rocks left by the explosions. The ships contain no biological life-forms, and nobody has any idea why the Fractured harvest bedrock like this.

This is the closest attack to the city in months. If the Fractured decided to invade, New Leseum would be dust in minutes. The people have a militia but are armed with nothing more than splinter-rifles and fists, protected by antique exoskels found in what was left of the Vierendelen’s armories. In the event of an attack, they may be able to cannibalize some weapons from the ship itself—put up a little fight—but there aren’t any guarantees.

In any case, the Fractured never seem to be interested. Perhaps they have no appetite for easy game—

“ . . . Oh.”

An idea strikes her like a needlehead.

She abandons the tracker drones, pulls her view back to the city, and delves into the Vierendelen’s storage substrates.

She extracts memories. They appear to her as a compartmentalized ocean of data-packets.

She accesses the message received from the Leviathan a week earlier: a convoluted jumble of code, encrypted and inaccessible without figuring out how to untie the chaos and lay the information streams into straight lines.

And as she examines it again, there is suddenly a way, a technique to unlocking the message. All knots are untied in different ways—some require no more than a pull. Others demand multitasking and organization, planning and backtracking: a strategy.

And she recognizes the strategy.

It’s a Spite algorithm.

Her heart beats a tattoo in her chest. Could it be this simple?

She puts the message itself to one side, and brings up the most recent memory in the Vierendelen’s library: their game of Spite.

She deconstructs it.

Each strand of unique code in a game of Spite is the result of an algorithm, a protocol of unique characters that must be disrupted in order to win. The algorithm with which the ship used against her—as Sephine guessed earlier—is identical to that which Rokri used to play.

Sephine inputs the algorithm as a passcode for the message.

And the knot responds. Data twitches, rearranges itself, and the message is laid out flat.

That means one thing: Rokri is alive.

Sephine Delinks and runs from the atrium, to find the Makers.

“We have several options here,” says Maker Lupin.

New Leseum’s chief engineer is a thoughtful man and of few words—except when his pride is dented. The Vierendelen finds him pompous, which Sephine thinks is a rather facile observation coming from a machine of its intelligence.

Sephine is de facto leader of the Makers, the seven charged with building the city. She is a go-between for the Makers and the ship because she is the only one that possesses a neuroweb. They’d never admit it, but Sephine thinks the Makers are somewhat jealous of the technology she and her brother have laced into their brains. Through it they have the potential to wield a large amount of power over the citizens of New Leseum—but they know that power would never be exercised. They all there for a common purpose: to build the new home.

The Makers and Sephine are sat around a dull steel table, in the committee building in the northwest corner of the city. Moonlight sails in wisps through the glass ceiling, and orange plasma torches in shallow sconces provide extra light. Bowls of broth make the air thick with the smell of vegetables, though Sephine isn’t hungry.

Lupin continues.

“We could try to establish contact,” he says, stroking his thinly bearded chin.

— He knows how many times I’ve tried that, the Vierendelen says.

Sephine interjects. “That’s hopeless. Plus, the message is empty. The key to the message is the message. Rokri is trying to contact me. The ship lost contact with him after the Leviathan last passed over. I think . . . ” She pauses, biting a fingernail, “I think he’s found a way to reach us, and he’s asking for help.”

“We have to realize sending a message might draw unwanted attention,” Maker Gelgher says, the brow below his bald head wrinkled into a reflective frown. “Or, this is a trap.”

“A Fractured fleet attacked the Farside Basin not a few hours ago. I know I’d rather not risk it.” Lupin adopts a sage expression.

“But if the Fractured were to attack, they’d have done it by now.”

— Here we go . . .

“I doesn’t matter, Gelgher. We can’t risk the city.”

“We live in risk—”

“I’m going up.” Sephine says, with exasperated conviction. “I’m going to the Leviathan.”

— That’s the spirit.

She doesn’t wait for the stunned Makers to reply, and leaves them to battle it out.

The Makers debate without her for four interminable days, during which Sephine spends hours out at Pod Country, thinking, watching the horizon from the towers, like Rokri had done this time a year earlier. A dark shape blots the distant clouds: the Leviathan making its annual pass. Time is running out.

The Vierendelen has responded to Sephine’s wish with alacrity, and on the fifth day has something it wants to show her, so it summons her back to the atrium.

The ship presents her with what looks like a blueprint for a pair of wings. Together they span about ten feet, and will be made of a malleable, fibrous compound separated into filaments, which the ship tells her has been salvaged from a previously unknown store of exotic materials used in the war.

— Thought these might help. When Rokri went up, I thought afterwards if he’d just had some extra oomph, it would have been less hairy. Anyway, if they approve of you going up—not that it matters either way—then I want you and me to supervise him making these babies. There’s no room for error.

Sephine scoffs. “Good luck with that.”

She examines the wings. It appears they will attach themselves to her spine with thousands of tiny hooks. “They look painful—but beautiful,” she adds hastily (the ship is a proud creature).

— Oh, pish. I’m sure the infirmary can spare some anesthetic. Failing that you can Enlink and I can tinker with your web, but I’d rather the former—less risk. You know what I mean.

Sephine knows exactly what it means, and agrees.

Delinking, Sephine is surprised to find a woman standing by the nearby rockery, flicking pebbles into the pool.

“Maker Sensra,” Sephine says, and takes a step towards her.

The Maker does not reply at first.

Sensra was an architect back in Leseum Blue, and is the Maker in charge of city planning. She is in her mid-forties, and wears her hair in a short, choppy cut.

“We took a vote,” Sensra says eventually. “I voted against, just to let you know. But in the end, I was the only one.” She flashes Sephine a brief look of resentment. Sephine ignores her.

“The Leviathan is making a pass in the next two days. Can we be ready by then?”

Sensra makes a scoffing noise. “You got your arrogance from your mother—but at least she had foresight. What happens if you don’t come back either, hmm? What then for the rest of us? Stuck here? On this gods-forsaken rock, bait for the Fractured?”

Sephine is saddened by the Maker’s viciousness, but really it just makes her more resolute.

“Well, I will come back. He’s alive up there, Sensra, and I’m going to find him. There could be anything up there. Maybe even . . . maybe a way home.”

Sensra turns on her heel and mutters, “Fool.”

Sephine tries not to betray her frustration, but can’t help it, and kicks at the ground. A flurry of pebbles arcs through the air and rains down onto the pool.

As Sensra goes to leave, she turns her head and says, “The cannon will be ready tomorrow. If you do find Rokri, then . . . ” she hesitates, then stops short and slips out the door.

Sephine frowns.

“Er, Del? What cannon? What did she mean by that?”

— Ah. About that.

CHAPTER 1/6: DOWN

The day the ship was downed its human cargo went to Pod Country.

It took just a few well-timed q-missiles from the Fractured fleet; the effect of the shots was like blowing up the two nearside tires of a vehicle as it powered along a tilted highway.

The Vierendelen had been hugging the planet’s gravity well, pouring its energy into staying poised on its edge. Its plan was to catch the oncoming Fractured off-guard, meet it head-on, slalom through the myriad ships, and escape into deeper space, where it could ‘fold and escape back to Leseum Blue.

The feint failed. The q-missile burst hit as it encountered the first line of nimble bladeships, and the Vierendelen tumbled into the pull of the gravity well. Apparently sure the crash would be fatal, the Fractured retreated and left the ship to its fate.

But while the ship set about rearranging much of its engine configurations, the crew on the Vierendelen’s command floor worked feverishly to level out the descent.

Each knew they were about to die.

But that was nothing; it was the ship’s cargo that mattered: fifty thousand souls had made it safely to Pod Country before the skirmish, and the ship protected this massive complex of stasis modules with every resource available (— Trust me, it would take a hundred q-nukes to penetrate this baby, of which the Fractured have zip.).

Deep within the belly of the ship, lockdowns took place. Giga-sized machines enfolded the massive network of amniotic sacs within an impenetrable womb.

On the command floor, the doomed few that remained all but ignored the rapidly approaching surface. With the help of the ship’s AI, they secured a location, an angle, a trajectory for the crash landing. And to their amazement, cloud-scanners revealed they were headed toward a flat, open plain of desert and scrubland.

The Commander thought, for a moment, I think we might actually make this . . . as the ship sunk through the cloud barrier, and the desert stared up at her with dusty indifference.

But they had never expected the dark shape that met them beneath the clouds. A menacing specter of a thing, the Commander likened it to diving into the sea, and encountering an impossibly large monster—a huge, black smudge in the haze of the lower atmosphere.

And the monster’s reaction was quick.

The Vierendelen couldn’t act in time, and the object—which would be later referred to as the Leviathan—had locked onto the beleaguered ship and fired.

The Vierendelen registered a femtosecond of reluctant admiration: the Leviathan had fired a single needlehead at precisely the right place, up through an exhaust shaft and rupturing a crucial tangle of fuel injectors in its lower bow.

The Leviathan had known how much it would take to bring the ship down.

The Vierendelen—highly impressed with its attacker—tried to secure its own survival by hijacking a handful of Pods and flooding them with its data, and accepted defeat not ungracefully.

But just as the front engines reached critical mass, the ship received a deeply worrying piece of information.

The last thought that had gone through the Commander’s neuroweb was of her twelve-year-old children, the twins that would have one day taken the helm of the great ship. Just before the Vierendelen’s fuel injectors ignited, the Commander Enlinked, and with her last breath felt the ship create a neuroweb linkup—Sephine and Rokri were alive, in the womb of the ship. In Pod Country.

Relieved, she died.

But the Vierendelen had had no time to tell her just what the Leviathan had done.

It has been six years.

The girl called Sephine awakens—from a dream about a room and a box, and a man and a bird—to find her brother gone from his bed. He has always been apt to wandering off (much to Maker Sensra’s chagrin) but never at night.

It’s four o’clock. She gets out of bed to look for him.

Leaving their fairly ramshackle home in the shadow of the Vierendelen, she looks to the east, and sees the first veins of sunlight bleed over the horizon. The once-mighty warship is silhouetted against a pink dawn streaked with silver-edged clouds.

She looks up at the ship. As if reading her mind, she feels it connect—the handshake protocol feels like waking up all over again.

— He’s over at Pod Country, if you were wondering.

She furrows her brow, tugs her coat around her against the chilly breeze, and sets off in the direction of Pod Country, beyond the wreck.

“What’s he doing there?”

— Thinking, I’ll bet. That queer pastime of the flesh . . .

“What else is there to do, space-trash?”

— Ouch.

She giggles and heads through the city.

The towering grids of Pod Country are the tallest structures in New Leseum (save for the Vierendelen itself), and comprises of four blocks twelve stories tall, each housing just under 12,500 dormant souls.

After the ship crashed, a few thousand people had been resurrected: people with essential skills; leaders; the stronger menial workers; teachers; doctors; some scientists; architects; and a few military personnel, once it became apparent the planet was some sort of hub for Fractured activity. The ship had seen fit to resurrect a few hundred civilians too, to add some normality. These people had been traveling on the ship when war broke out—they had intended to transfer to another vessel once clear of Fractured space.

Sephine stands at the intersection between the four towers, above which the sky describes an azure cross.

The pods glow a bright cyan—it’s dark between the towers, but the stasis bubbles’ glow is comforting. The bodies inside are still and pale.

For a while she was jealous of them, lying in cold, blissful oblivion for these six years, some even longer. She wonders if they know anything of what has happened. Some soon will; the Vierendelen plans to awaken another clutch of people in the coming months because of the swift progress on the city—although it has said this since the beginning (perhaps it’s getting possessive of those already awake). Either way, it may soon have to—Fractured attacks are getting closer by the month, and defense may soon be needed.

Enlinking, Sephine spies Rokri at the top of the tower to her right, lying on the circular platform capping the tower.

“The hell is he doing up there . . . ?”

She makes her way up through a series of cross-hatched gantries and stairwells, her hand always gripping a railing—she’s uneasy with heights.

She finds Rokri lying with his hands behind his head. His dark hair is bed-messy and he’s wearing a fur-lined coat and his pajama bottoms.

Sephine giggles. “You look a right sight,” she says, and sits beside him. He appears deep in thought, though he’s not Enlinked; his eyes are their usual icy-gray.

“That time of year again,” he says wearily.

She wonders what he means, then follows his gaze to the horizon, and feels a little swell of dread in her belly. She says nothing.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says, in a tone Sephine can only describe as ominous.

— Knew it!

Rokri sits up. The breeze ruffles his hair. “There’s an old flier I found. In one of Del’s old hangars.”

“Rokri, I—”

“And I think, with Lupin’s help, I could get it to work.” Now he turns to her.

A year ago, probably to the day, he had looked up to the Leviathan and raged that it was all just so unfair. It was unfair that the war still went on far away, that they were stuck here with a crippled ship, unable to help, barely able to help themselves.

He wants to fight. Sephine does not—she just wants to go home.

“I’m sick of it, Seph. Sick of building. Sick of boredom. I’m sick of all this fucking dust. But you know what’s worse? I’m sick of seeing that thing.” He jabs a finger towards the horizon. “Taunting us. Mocking us. Every signal blocked, every distress call. We’re hopeless as long as the Leviathan looks down on us.”

Every signal. Every distress call.

New Leseum is coldly, profoundly alone out here.

“Rokri . . . ” Sephine begins, and struggles to find the words. “This flier—it won’t work. Del can’t even get tracker drones past—”

“Those things are big, ancient, and clumsy. That’s the only reason they survived the crash.”

“And how is a flier any different?”

“A flier has an ejection system.” His eyes flash. “There’s no way the Leviathan could hit a target as small as a person, surely. And no one else is prepared to go. If I managed to get the flier high enough, get Lupin to make some . . . I don’t know, boosters or something I could wear, I think I could get there.”

Suddenly he looks on the verge of tears. He’s rambling. “There’s answers up there, Seph. Maybe a way to bring it down, maybe Del could even harvest its engine, somehow. There might be a way home.”

He’s right. They have no ship, but the route to Leseum Blue lies within her and her brother. They don’t know them exactly, but the route lies encoded somewhere deep in their neurowebs, and even the Vierendelen can’t access them. Only they can. They protect their people’s secret, the responsibility Leseum placed upon their mother now split between them—a vulnerable failsafe made in the haste of war.

Without Sephine and Rokri, the people are doomed.

“I won’t come with you,” Sephine says softly. “I won’t.”

She almost regrets having said that as the words meet the air. Rokri looks utterly crestfallen.

They sit in silence for a long time. The ribbons of morning eventually burst into full daylight, daylight blighted by a dark shape creeping along the sky.

Sephine wonders if Del is talking him into it. She knows full well the ship is keen to get up there—it probably told him about the flier in the first place.

Eventually, bereft of anything else to say, Sephine says, “Please don’t.”

He turns to her now, and she sees there is determination in his hard features. His eyes seem icier now, gleaming novae in olive skin. Sephine realizes she has reduced herself to outright begging, and feels ashamed.

He has made his decision.

Sephine hates him then. She hates him more than she’s hated anyone—but that’s not entirely true. She hates Del, too, for all the part it’s played in this.

When the day comes, Sephine is nowhere to be seen. Her neuroweb has activated its privacy settings. Even Del can’t get through to her.

He feels like vomiting. The flier looks like a mashed-together tangle of components, its cockpit just identifiable: a carbuncle at the craft’s nose, and it’s large enough—just large enough—for one person.

He triggers a dose of anti-emetics for the nausea, and serotonin to keep him calm.

The Makers stand at the edge of the crowd that has gathered to watch. Some look excited, because they don’t know how important he is. Surely if they did, they would lock him and his sister away.

But most wear worried expressions.

Maker Sensra looks like stone. She has always been a hard woman, stern with Rokri and Sephine, but protective—they are her late Commander’s children, after all. But more recently it’s seemed as if she’s drifted away from them. Rokri suspects it has to do with the coordinates in their ‘webs: knowing the way home lies somewhere in their heads but being completely unable to unlock them must be infuriating. Rokri knows the feeling—better than most, probably.

He tries to stop himself feeling angry at everything, to focus on the mission, on surviving.

— I’m so sorry, but it really is time now.

Rokri nods, and lets out a humorless chuckle. “Thought we’d have time for one more game.”

— Grief, what the hell made you think that would be a decent goodbye?

“Come on, Del. Don’t tell me she’s bored of Spite.”

— I don’t blame her! You let her win every time, I told you, if you want to win—

“Shut it. Let’s go.”

Rokri loads into the flier. His hands shake violently as he fumbles with the control module, powering the engines up. Dust plumes around the little craft, its metal feet, while Rokri makes some final checks on the ejection system.

It all works fine. He doesn’t know how to feel about that.

High above, the Leviathan has partially blocked the sun, and New Leseum sits in a counterfeit eclipse.

Soon, he’s in the air. But he’s hovering over the crowd, hesitant. The Vierendelen warns him not to waste fuel, or power, but when he took off, Rokri had a final, acute yearning to see his sister one last time.

The ship is patient with him for as long as the mission will allow, but when she still doesn’t show, it insists they carry on.

Crestfallen, Rokri powers up the thrusters, and the flier convulses around him, and carries him up to the Leviathan.

Just before ejection, he looks down at the city, and wonders briefly what it feels like to die.

She’s missed him.

She had reached the back of the crowd just in time to see the little flier shoot upwards, carrying her brother away from her forever, and she collapsed onto the dusty desert floor in sobs, and when she Enlinks in a final plea to say goodbye, she cannot feel him anymore.

Almost a year later, the Vierendelen receives an encrypted communication from the Leviathan. Nobody can decipher it. Nobody can access it. But, for some reason Sephine cannot fathom, the Vierendelen is convinced it is from Rokri.

CHAPTER 4/6: GROUNDED

Several hours pass in peaks and troughs, phantasmagoric. Sephine folds through layers of suffering as the hooks of her wings dissolve one by one, each more painful than the last, each plunging her into paroxysms of agony. Whenever the pain fades it comes back stronger, and she seethes and arches her back and shakes all over, foamed saliva dried into a thick, white crust around her mouth. When the last hooks dissolve Sephine thinks she’s being fooled, cruelly lulled into security before the pain returns.

But it’s over. She sits up, very slowly, conscious of the dull throb up and down her back. At last, she can focus.

She is just a few feet from the Leviathan’s encircling edge-wall. She’s tall enough to peer over it, but she’s not sure she has the guts to.

She chances communicating with the Vierendelen. No response. She half expected this, but all the same is struck by a stark and singular loneliness. She can feel a very faint connection with the ship, but it is nothing more than background noise, static. She wonders if it can hear her, but can’t get through the Leviathan’s comms-blocking signal. It feels alien to have had a voice in her head her whole life, and now have nothing but silence. Her thoughts feel naked somehow.

And all around her is nothing but silence too—silence, bar a faint wind that brings with it a sharp chill. Her clothes flutter, allowing the wind to creep in through the tears in the fabric to claw at her skin. She doses up on a little adrenaline to keep warm.

She turns from the edge-wall and looks up at what lies atop the Leviathan.

Closest to her are two identical structures: square, black towers, perhaps thirty feet high, and both featureless. Though unsure as to why, she remembers some song she heard a long time ago (“Careful what you’re looking at; it might be looking back.”).

And beyond these towers, there are hundreds more. The entire surface resembles a chaotic military installation, its instruments and structures organized in no discernible system whatsoever—but for some reason, she is reminded more of a city than a military outpost.

(Her memories of Leseum Blue are vague because she was just six when her parents were called to arms against the Fractured, but she remembers spires of pure white and glass and steel, and immense trees spilling water from their leaves, spuming down an escarpment into the ocean in torrential, elegant rapids, and she remembers the smell of meats and herbs and bakeries from the market towns on the coast, and the blue of the sea, and she remembers riding finned juliprae over the surf with her brother and her father.)

This city is no city. This city is cold and featureless and black. It smells of nothing. There is no water. Her father is dead; her brother may not be. Sephine holds that thought close as she steps into the city that is no city.

She pads softly over the cold floor, past structures and buildings and instruments whose function she cannot fathom.

Enlinking is just possible—but not to the Vierendelen. Instead her neuroweb builds a composite 3D map of the area which she can Enlink to, to better gauge her surroundings. She cannot see under the surface, even in X-ray. She can only imagine as to what is inside, below her.

The structures on the surface are varied and esoteric. She stands in the shadows of giant spinnakers, pentagonal dishes; walks past pens over whose walls she cannot see; chaotic things that must be machines but are completely dead; black, solid blocks, like the towers she first encountered. She notes that this is a common structure: black-body blocks, all varying in height and thickness. Some touch the clouds above, narrow as flagpoles—others are so broad and so stout she could walk over them. She doesn’t, fearing a trap, and so sticks to the unmarked, likely unintentional roads between the technological miscellany.

Her neuroweb, scanning these black structures, tells her that all of them are hollow. At one point she walks through an alley between two of the structures, separated by mere feet, and she is sure she can hear a scuttling noise inside them, a buzzing. She thinks of insects.

Dusk comes with a cold, inexorable hand, and with it moisture to the air. The clouds have sunk in a patch of low pressure, and Sephine’s visibility is reduced to about fifty meters or so. The gaps between the structures become ghostly and animated with the quick mist.

The silence has become thicker, broken only by the faint ring of tinnitus—probably caused by the noise inside the q-cannon.

There is only one thought at the forefront of her mind: Where is Rokri? On the surface? Under it? Is he inside one of the black structures?

Is he alive?

The nature of her commitment strikes her then. A year. If she’s lucky. A year before she passes over New Leseum again.

She clears her mind, relaxes herself with a touch of serotonin. And she begins to hum tunelessly. The sound of her humming is dull; there is no echo, no reverb. The clouds absorb it, like they absorb everything else, and suddenly she is reminded of the horror screens she used to watch with her brother on the Vierendelen, before the crash.

She scares herself and stops humming. And at that moment she is sure she sees something flit between two towers to her right. She stops dead.

She focuses on the narrow slit between the towers. Her heartbeat is the only thing she can hear. Nothing but mist creeps along beyond the gap.

You’re being hypersensitive, she tells herself. The mist is playing tricks on you.

That had to be it: clouds making movements in the gloom.

She can’t see more than twenty feet now. Structures more distant are just faint, towering ghosts. The feeling of being watched washes over her. Hastily she Enlinks, and confirms there are no life-forms nearby—no biological life-forms, at any rate.

She cannot combat the sinking feeling in her heart at what that implies: Rokri may not be here after all. Before the fingers of despair begin to throttle her, she presses on, hoping to reach the edge-wall and make camp for the night.

Night falls swifter than expected. In the dark, she fingers the souped-up stunner clipped to her utility belt. At range it will administer a powerful shock—at point blank the weapon is deadly. She also checks her shelter is still where it’s supposed to be: a hyper-durable tent vacuum-sealed in a tiny, ceramic ball, swinging about her hip from the belt.

She decides to camp at the edge-wall. Walking in any direction across the Leviathan will bring her to the edge soon enough, and for some reason that seems safer, though she is not sure why. Perhaps if this is all some sort of trap, she can jump before she is killed. Better to go on her own terms than something else’s.

In the dark, she can’t see any more shapes slip through the gaps. But there is a ghostly glare about the place, a phosphorescence in the mist, and it takes her minute to figure out why.

The black structures—their edges are glowing. A neon filigree traces bright emerald lines through the mist, conjuring ghostly shapes waltzing in the breeze.

But there is something else about the towers now. Something she couldn’t see in daylight, but in the dark they stand out proud and frightening.

Now they have doors.

Sephine stops her aimless wandering, and stands, biting her nails, at the foot of the nearest tower.

The towers must lead downwards. Into the belly of the Leviathan. The glowing outline of the door is both enticing and terrifying at once. Sephine looks at her feet, trying to sum up the courage to enter the tower, and spots something on the ground.

It’s a crude etching, scratched into the surface. An arrow, a gun. She looks back up at the door.

“Del?” Hopeless. “Del, please speak to me.”

She takes a deep, quivering breath, and thumbs the stunner off the safety.

“Okay,” she whispers. “You can do this.”

And she reaches out to touch the door.

There is the oddest sensation in her brain, like inverted goose bumps. The panel makes a snicking noise, and withdraws with a loud hiss. Sephine jumps and takes a step back. A whirring starts beneath her feet. Slowly, the panel sinks into the floor, revealing a room beyond.

The room is dimly lit and warm. Lining the walls, neatly organized along racks, are row upon row of weapons. There must be over a hundred, all lethal and black and beastly beautiful. There are gaps—perhaps fifteen or so weapons are missing.

Excited by the prospect of extra protection, she commands her neuroweb to check the weapons’ software—it’s up and running. All the guns are functional. She Enlinks to them, finds their operating manuals.

These are Fractured weapons; the manuals are in Vavaral, but are easily translated. She downloads them quickly and takes two guns: a plaspistol and a splinter-rifle. Both are light, elegant, easy to fire.

It occurs to her that it must have been Rokri that scratched the gun and the arrow at the foot of the tower. It’s a legend, a map icon signifying an armory. She’d been too preoccupied watching out for danger to bother scanning her surroundings more carefully.

The towers must all have different functions. If this tower isn’t a way under the surface, then another must be. And now it should be easy to identify—as long as Rokri was thorough with his mapmaking. Maybe she could find shelter inside. The thought of avoiding camping in the cold, no matter how insulating her tent is, is comforting. And perhaps there’s a control room. A map room. She could learn to control the Leviathan itself, guide it back—

She’s getting ahead of herself.

It appears her theory was correct: the Leviathan is a military installation. A surveillance outpost. Obviously a weapon in and of itself, too. But why? What are the Fractured protecting here? And where is the crew? Is it totally unmanned? It is unquestionably a Fractured-built machine—the weapons manuals in Vavaral, the fleets of bladeships and scavenger craft scouting the surface unfettered by the Leviathan confirm it—but what is its true function?

With a glimmer of hope, Sephine wonders if it is abandoned.

She hoists the rifle over her shoulder and slots the pistol into her belt, a little positivity growing within her, an impetus. She turns and looks determinedly into the mist, and sees—something. Something floating a little way off. Something like a grainy signal, static and fuzzy. It appears to be growing larger, becoming defined and more clear in the thick fog, and she thinks that it’s something she recognizes, and she feels the color drain from her cheeks when she realizes the ghost floating just feet from her is a face.

Her face, writhing and warping and gunmental-gray and ill-proportioned but she is looking at herself in the mist and a scream rises like bile in her throat—and the face screams back, its lips peel back and its empty mouth opens to nothing but the mist beyond and the sound is high and keening and thin but loud and those eyes are not eyes but the face is all eyes.

It’s a swarm, a hive-minded Fractured swarm of tiny drones, each no larger than a knuckle, gathered into a crude, twisted facsimile of her—just her face, floating and dotted with livid-red optical sensors.

When her scream—and its—dies, Sephine fumbles frantically at her belt, searching for a weapon and praying it’s the plaspistol, and it’s up and pointed at the encroaching swarm in an instant. It’s the stunner. She groans and thumbs it to splash, and as the face opens its terrible mouth and advances even more quickly she fires.

A wispy blue wave erupts from the muzzle of the stunner, and she watches her face quiver and disintegrate, melting away into a chaotic cloud of tumbling titanium marbles. The swarm collapses. The drones drum the floor like rain.

Sephine stares at the puddle of machines for a few moments, unable to control her breathing. The stunner is hot in her hand.

She’s slipping the stunner back onto her belt when one of the drones twitches. Then another.

Soon the puddle of drones ripples like sheets in the wind, blinking red, and she runs.

She darts between towers and squeezes through tight alleys, swings around spires and jumps over low black blocks, and every time she looks back the swarm is in pursuit, no matter how many changes of direction, no matter how clever she thought her feints to be. With each corner the swarm disperses, and as it straightens out it consolidates back into that terrifying form, her image in the mist.

Suddenly Sephine breaks out into an open space, an avenue between dead machines and towering spinnakers. She careens down the avenue. She can hear the swarm buzz close behind her, like a cloud of iron wasps whose hive she has disturbed.

She takes a sharp, sudden left, completely blind, and hopes she’s lost the swarm, but—

— Sephine, get down!

“Wha—”

—she collides with some dark object, snapping her neck back, and she crumples to the floor with a sickened “Oomph!”.

She will barely remember later, but just before everything went black, there was a bright blue flash, and a figure appeared, standing over her. She had just one thought, and it seemed to mean nothing, but it went round and round her mind like flies to carrion: How do they know what I look like?

And above and beyond the figure, she could have sworn she saw a bird, perched on a high tower.

CHAPTER 5/6: OTHERS

Awareness, or a glimmer of it. Just noise. Sephine doesn’t know what the noise is, but for some reason the word “bustling” comes to mind, and this scares her because it means she’s not alone, and she tries to open her eyes but they won’t respond so she slips back into—

Awareness. Real. Sudden. Senses: verdant smell; metallic taste; head throbbing. Wherever she is, it’s warm. This time her eyes work. She feels their lids flutter, sticky with sleep, and she manages to rend them apart. When they open, everything is blurred.

She blinks a few times, flexes her wrists, stretches her back. She can feel two slender grazes down either side of her spine, and when she stretches they wrinkle, irritating the skin.

She’s lying on something soft. There’s a pillow under her head.

She sits up but she’s overcome by dizziness, a headrush so powerful the edges of her vision turn indigo. She lies back again, massaging her temples.

What happened? The image of her face in the mist comes back to her, the apparition defining itself as it approached, little red optical sensors winking and blinking and threatening. And the scream; that keening, supersonic scream.

She had run. And she had been stopped. Someone had told her to . . . someone had told her to do something, but it was in her head, her neuroweb, but that’s impossible because she’s so far from the Vierendelen.

But how far? Where am I?

She seeps a little adrenaline from her ‘web. Her heart rate increases. It’s safe to sit up again.

She’s in a room, walled in dull rust-colored metal and lit softly by a handful of little globes that float like bubbles, bobbing gently against one another. There is a single door. She’s lying on a thin mattress in the opposite corner. Sephine looks down at herself and finds her clothes have been changed. That makes her feel embarrassed and scared.

Her weapons are propped against the wall next to her. Her utility belt lies neatly on the floor.

There’s a terminal screen on the wall across from her. At first glance it looks switched off, but there’s a little flashing cursor in the top corner awaiting input.

The vegetable smell is coming from a pot near her bed. An incandescent circle built into the floor is cooking some kind of broth. Sephine’s mouth waters so fast her jaw aches.

She tries Enlinking to her map, but it feels just out of reach, like punching in a dream. There’s a murmuring, a dull thrum all around her.

She doesn’t feel alone.

At that thought the door groans open. Sephine scrambles back against the wall. Her hand goes to the grip on the stunner, and it’s up and in front of her in one swift movement, switched to beam.

A man enters and closes the door, and turns to face her. His hands go up.

The moment she recognizes him, she scrambles to her feet and flings her arms around her brother, sobbing into his shoulder.

Rokri has aged. His eyes are tired. He’s unshaven. But he’s bigger than she remembers, with powerful arms and shoulders, his chest defined and visible through the open collar of a baggy shirt.

Once she calms down, she asks him how he survived.

“The construct’s uninhabited, except for Fractured,” he says distractedly. “Most are pretty easy to destroy.”

Construct?

“I . . . ” she hesitates, wondering where to begin. She has so many questions. “For so long I thought you were dead.”

He’s sat at the terminal screen. Pinpoint beams from the wall project a keyboard onto the surface of the narrow desk underneath. His fingers thud rapidly against it. The keyboard is in Vavaral.

“Rokri?” She goes to the screen and tries to get him to look at her, but he’s immersed in . . . whatever he’s doing. “Rokri, what’s the matter?”

He just keeps typing.

“Rokri, look at me. Listen to me!”

He slams his fist onto the desk and roars, sweeping a half-filled bowl from the desk that shatters against the door. Sephine jumps and stands back as Rokri rises from his seat, breathing hard.

“No!” he shouts. “No, no, no! Ruined! Everything ruined!” He puts his head in his hands.

“Rokri, what . . . what’s happened? What’s ruined?” Sephine speaks softer this time, sympathetic.

He visibly tries to calm himself.

“You shouldn’t have come here. You should never have come here.”

She stares at him. She tries not to appear hurt, but suspects she does. “I came to bring you back.”

“And how do you expect to do that, eh?” he says venomously.

“I . . . ”

“Got another set of wings, have you?”

“No, but—” How does he know about that?

“Got a fold-away flier in that belt of yours?”

“Shut up!”

His eyes don’t even register she’s screamed at him. He just stares at her.

The humiliation physically hurts. She feels sick. What is she doing? She hadn’t thought; she’d just acted. Now it feels like the most stupid thing could have possibly done.

“Rokri, look. I . . . ” she gulps and takes a breath. “I don’t understand. I deciphered your message. I thought . . . I thought it meant you wanted me to come here. I thought you needed help, that you were in trouble. Nobody else would come, nobody!”

At this, Rokri just sneers.

“Trouble?” he spits. “We’re in a shitstorm of it now, sis.”

“What does that mean?”

He looks incredulous. “Sephine. I didn’t send any message.”

“You need to see something.”

Rokri has pulled up a map on the terminal screen: a wireframe image of the Leviathan. At his command the view withdraws and sweeps down, as if looking through a camera attached to the Leviathan’s base.

They are passing over a sprawling delta, the first body of water Sephine has seen in years. Text flashes in the corner of the screen: SALINITY 44%.

The Leviathan can analyze the terrain’s chemical makeup, even from this height.

“Salt lakes,” Rokri says vaguely. “We’ll be there soon.”

“Where?”

“Convergence.” He kills the screen. “Let’s go. And bring your guns—they know you’re here now.”

He leads her out of the room into a corridor. The air is colder here. The corridor is lit by harsh strip-bulbs running along the corners of the ceiling. The walls are dotted with portholes, but the view beyond them is black. Sephine still doesn’t know where she is except that she is under the surface, inside the Leviathan.

She wonders what’s beyond the windows.

The next few minutes are a monotonous slideshow, corridor after corridor. After a time they come to an elevator. Rokri plucks a handheld terminal from his belt and flicks his pistol off the safety. He puts a finger to his lips and turns the terminal’s screen towards her.

A map on the screen shows that they are below the edge-wall. The elevator shaft ends just feet from it, but on what side of the Leviathan Sephine can’t tell.

They enter. The door snicks shut.

While they ride the elevator, Rokri turns to her.

“You’ve been lied to, Sephine,” he whispers. “We all have.

“I’ve got to know this planet. What it is. I know how the construct works—it stays a mile off the ground, no matter what. In a few months it’ll pass over a mountain range—still stays up a whole mile. You can’t breathe outside. This all doesn’t mean anything particularly, except the Fractured have learned to manipulate gravity, probably stolen Leseum technology.” He shrugs. “But that’s what the whole war is about, really. Technology. They crave it. Covet it.

“The engine’s in the base of the construct. I’ve seen it. It repels the surface, inverts gravity somehow. Getting too close isn’t . . . healthy.” He bows his head and shows her his scalp. There are rough bald patches over his head revealing sore-looking skin underneath, like blisters or burn scars.

The elevator opens. Daylight explodes around them. The sky is a deep azure, cloudless. The sun steeps the surface with light, but the few towers Sephine can see are as black as they were at night. The other structures and machines are still unmoving and abandoned.

The edge-wall is a little way off.

Rokri takes her hand.

“A few months ago I managed to break through the construct’s comms hardware. We thought Leseum had forgotten about us, but they haven’t. The constructs absorb the messages like sponges. They share it around with each other. I have a suspicion they’re laughing at us.” He takes on a bitter expression.

Constructs?

“They’re trying, Sephine. Leseum have been trying to contact us, but they haven’t been able to. I think they presume us dead—the last unique message came three years after the crash, but I think they still hope. Automated signals come every now and then.

“When the Vierendelen crashed, its central AI tried to save itself by occupying a stasis bubble in Pod Country. The ship was taken down by a single needlehead to the fuel injectors in the bow. Our mother, her crew—all dead, instantly.

“But it wasn’t just a needlehead.”

They’ve reached the edge-wall. Rokri takes her shoulders and faces her, pushing her back against the wall. A sharp wind speaks up.

“It was a digital payload. A copy of a consciousness: the Fractured’s consciousness. The one thing we’ve always known about the Fractured is that they’re a hive mind. The swarm that attacked you, the constructs. The flagships heading up their fleets, down to the fleet’s individuals themselves. There’s no centralized intelligence maintaining it, it’s just a singular consciousness. A colony.”

“So . . . what? What does all this mean?”

“The Vierendelen was destroyed, Sephine. Its AI substrates were replaced by the Fractured’s. By the time the ship hit the surface, it was already one of them.”

Realization now—a glimmer of it. But disbelief, too.

“The last time we talked to Del, the real Vierendelen, was when we were kids. Kids on a ship caught up in a war we had no part in.”

“No,” she says quietly.

“We were lied to. The whole time. We weren’t talking with the ship. We were talking to them.”

And he turns her around, and when she peers over the wall she feels like she might vomit. Because all around them, floating high above the delta of salt lakes and distant canyons, even in the far distance where mountains ruffle the horizon, are others. Other Leviathans. Moving lazily above the surface, casting their perfect shadows upon imperfect terrain.

Convergence.

The sky darkens suddenly, and Sephine looks up, gaping at the sky; another is passing over them, just as massive as the Leviathan upon which they stand. She feels very, very dizzy.

“I didn’t send any message, Sephine. It was the Fractured. You were tricked. We were tricked, into coming up here.”

“I don’t believe it,” she says, her voice catching in her throat. “I won’t believe it. Your message . . . I deciphered it. With a Spite algorithm, your algorithm.”

“Of course you did. And if you hadn’t have worked it out in time, they would have given you a nudge in the right direction.”

And they did. She played Spite the day she deciphered the message. It had waited. Waited for its next pass over New Leseum, when it was close enough. When it could coax her into going up.

“Tell me, Sephine. How could a Leseum-built, Golem-class AI like the Vierendelen not decipher a simple Spite algorithm? Come to that, why don’t you think the ship ever tried to repair itself? Just sitting there, wrecked, for all that time without a single attempt to rectify its situation? Just letting us get on, building our little city, our new home?

“Biding its time, Sephine. Waiting. Goading us, me and you, to come up here and find out the truth about their prison planet. That’s what this is. A prison.”

“But why us?” she says, her voice shaking. “Why not just kill us all? Why are we special?”

He actually smiles. “Come on, sis. You know exactly why. The Fractured were looking for something on our ship. They cornered the Vierendelen in the gravity well of this planet and brought it down to find it. And you know what they were looking for.”

And suddenly she does.

“Now they’ve found it.” Rokri looks out over the swirling delta, at the dozen lazy Leviathans spotting the salt lakes with their shadows.

Then comes a tingle in Sephine’s head. That inverted goose bumps feeling again, familiar, but now completely alien. And the next voice she hears comes not from Rokri’s mouth, but from her neuroweb:

— Sorry, toots, the Leviathan says.

CHAPTER 6/6: FLIGHT

Coordinates.

The route to Leseum Blue, encoded in their neurowebs.

The Fractured want to win the war, and to do that they need a Leseum Commander—or a Commander’s insurance policy: their children. They need Rokri and Sephine. And Rokri and Sephine have offered themselves up to the enemy.

The humiliation cuts her inside, the betrayal. And it just gets worse and worse as she puts the pieces together in her head.

Why New Leseum was never attacked. How the “Vierendelen” had sourced the materials for her wings. How both she and Rokri had made it up here without being vaporized by the Leviathan. All perpetuating the illusion. How could she not have seen it? The voice in her head the night before flashes into her memory . . . that should have been enough, enough to tell her things weren’t right.

The city was never attacked because the Fractured couldn’t risk killing either of them. The attack on the Farside Basin that day had been a ruse—probably delivering the materials for her filament wings.

Sensra had been right: all arrogance, no foresight.

Sephine feels nothing but devastatingly stupid.

“We have to get out of here,” she says in a weak, trembling voice. “Rokri, we have to get out.”

— You could always jump. Kill yourselves. It’s a long way down.

Rokri sees the sudden, horrified expression come to her face. “Turn off your ‘web. Turn it off now.”

— Of course, if you do try that, I’ll probably just send a—

Sephine switches on her neuroweb’s privacy settings. The Leviathan blips into silence.

“What do we do?”

“We go back down, into the construct.” Rokri is already heading back, pulling her with him. “Now you know, they’ll make their move.”

He’s still dragging her, but doesn’t have to for very long; she runs with him. They dart through the towers together, past the elevator from which they emerged. They’ll be expecting them, Sephine figures. Rokri knows where they are going—time to test his mapmaking.

A loud hiss. The sound of machines. A tower opens to their right, and vomits a swarm of drones, dispersing and coalescing together, shimmering through the air like static. Rokri clocks the swarm and his gun is up barely before Sephine even registers they’re being attacked. The swarm makes a layered, stuttered groaning noise and collapses in an iron hailstorm.

“Come on,” he says, running past her.

They run until they come to another black tower, another elevator. The door snicks open, and Sephine swings round, met by the Fractured again, only this time it’s not a swarm, but a single machine, bristling with weapons and made of countless contra-rotating components creating the vague shape of a face. Whose she doesn’t know. She swings the splinter-rifle over her shoulder and fires, backing into the elevator. The Fractured jerks sharply, components locking as the splinter collides with a festoon of wires in its middle. Its weapons fire indiscriminately and it tumbles to the ground.

As the elevator door begins to close, the machine shakes and a metal limb cracks and groans and points at her. It fires a second too late, but Sephine flinches and falls back against the elevator’s far wall. The shot collides with the tower. The elevator rumbles around them.

“Can we escape?” she gasps, catching her breath.

Rokri rubs his temples and bows his head, as if considering some impossible conundrum. Finally he says, “Yes. But at a cost.”

“What cost?”

“There’s a hangar in the lower levels, above the engine. There’s ‘fold-capable craft in there, Leseum-built, too. Assuming they want us alive and we aren’t obliterated on sight, we might be able to get off-planet. But, Sephine—”

“The others.”

Without her or her brother, the Fractured would think nothing of destroying the city. Without them, its people are expendable. Worthless.

“And that’s assuming the city isn’t dust already,” Rokri says darkly.

She hadn’t thought of that. “Well . . . if that’s the case, then . . . ” She can’t bring herself to say it.

She’s spent almost half her life in that half-city. She’s always known New Leseum wasn’t her home, but it’s been the closest thing she’s had to one. Her friends. Teachers. The Makers. She grew up with those people, and each one would have protected her with their lives had they known the secret she holds in her head.

And now she’s considering leaving them to their deaths.

She screams in frustration and thumps the elevator wall.

Rokri says, “I don’t see what choice we have.”

Neither does she.

The elevator descends past the floor of Rokri’s makeshift home, into the belly of the construct.

“Be ready,” Rokri says, racking his weapon. “The Fractured won’t let us go that easy.”

She racks her rifle as the elevator comes to a halt, and the door slides open.

The space inside the Leviathan is vast. There are dormant ships everywhere. None is nearly as big as the Vierendelen, but they’re all large enough for a substantial crew. Sephine can see a few that are Leseum-built, but most are Fractured vessels. Their style is more streamlined yet somehow less elegant, like ornamental knives gone to rust. There are even a few ships that are neither Leseum nor Fractured, with filament sails, shadow-drives, knife-edge fins towering high above the hangar. She has no idea to which civilization they belong.

The floor is meshed wrought-iron. There are stairwells dotted around leading down further, as if the hangar is a vast missile silo. Sephine spots a faint, white-blue light far below through the crisscrossing holes in the floor—that must be the engine. She heads to the nearest stairwell and peers down through a tangle of gantries and railings.

“Are we really going to do this?” She turns to Rokri. His face is stone. Again she notices just how old he looks. “We’re just going to leave them here?”

“It’s either that or risk home. Risk losing the war.”

“But—”

“We have no choice, Sephine! It’s fifty thousand, or countless millions—if we stay, and the Fractured take those coordinates from us, we’ll be dead. And they will be too. And then they’ll attack our home, and there’ll be nothing left of us. Nothing! Damage control, Seph. If we do something now, at least there’s a chance to save home and ourselves. Maybe New Leseum, too. Maybe.”

“If we can bring a fleet in time.”

“Right.”

“And if we don’t die escaping.”

“Yes.”

“And if the city wasn’t destroyed the moment I left.”

“Not likely. But yes.”

Sephine thinks for a moment. “I can’t help but feel we’re being selfish.”

“What do you mean?”

I mean, she thinks, maybe we should just kill ourselves. Blow our brains out right here and just be done with it.

Now who’s being selfish . . . she adds silently.

Realization comes to his face. “Don’t you even think it,” he says. (Sephine imagines the Vierendelen saying—Too late!, and grimaces.)

“Either way,” he continues, “All those people will die.” He takes her face in his hands, cradling her, and his expression becomes soothing and concerned, but laced with what looks like pleading. “If we die, we go out trying, at the very least. We’re taking the one course of action that has a chance of a positive outcome. You have to see that.” His eyes flick back and forth across hers, desperation in his face. “Please.”

Noises: metal on metal. Scurrying, like impossibly heavy insects. Some way across the hangar, a deafening blast. A ship has exploded. A scorching arch loops into the air.

“We have to get to a Leseum ship.” Rokri grabs Sephine’s arm and pulls her across the hangar.

Movement under the spindly feet of a nearby ship. Plasma fire. A shot screams past, barely a meter from them. Sephine feels the heat of it on her face.

“This way!” Rokri pulls her in the other direction. She catches a glimpse of their assailer before he turns—another singular drone. Jogging backwards, Rokri fires, sending a white-hot projectile into the Fractured machine. It careens backward and up with the force of the shot, tumbling though the air to slam into the hull of the ship behind it, exploding violently.

Then there are more.

Sephine and Rokri weave their way around and under ships, and each time they look up there are more and more Fractured pursuing them. Sephine hears the now-familiar buzzing of a swarm, and when she looks up into the empty, cavernous expanse of the Leviathan, the are tens of them, a sentient iron storm threatening to rain destruction upon them, optical-sensors like livid scarlet lightening.

She grabs her brother by the arm and hauls him under the cover of a small craft, just as a deluge of little drones descends. They batter the floor where they had just been standing.

They roll together and emerge, and are met by a trio of machines, weapons powered up. Sephine and Rokri fire before the Fractured can. All three burst into crackling pieces of twisted metal.

They sprint towards the middle of the hangar.

Another ship explodes, somewhere. She feels as if they’re running aimlessly. She can’t bring herself to look back, but she can hear the noise of metal footsteps behind them.

Another shot tears past her head, inches away, burning her cheek and singeing her hair. She arcs her arm out awkwardly behind her and fires blind. An explosion abruptly follows.

Ahead are two ships, noses pointing inwards, each standing on three legs about two meters high. Beyond that there is a railing. Beyond that, nothing.

“Shit!” Rokri slows his pace as they pass under the ships’ noses, but Sephine can’t stop in time and slams into the railing, bending over double, winded, and for a second she is poised over it at the waist by her momentum, staring down, down into the depths of the Leviathan, its mighty engine. Her wing-grazes split. Pain rips across her back.

Rokri reaches out and grabs her shirt, yanking her back onto solid ground. She kneels and splutters, coughing, trying to catch her breath.

“Cornered.” Rokri says.

She looks up and despairs.

At least twenty machines are encroaching, flanked by swarms. The swarms taunt them, gathering into facsimiles of her and Rokri.

“There!” Sephine yells, pointing. To the left, behind two small single-passenger craft, stands a Leseum ship. A symbol on its fuselage tells them it’s ‘fold-capable. Their escape.

Sephine doesn’t think; she just fires. One, two shots, each at the forelegs of the two ships between them and the advancing Fractured. The ships’ noses burst into blue fire and tip forward, crumpling against each other with a cacophonous groan. A few Fractured machines underneath are crushed. But the swarms just glide through the flaming wrecks unfettered.

“Come on!” Rokri pulls her to her feet, and yet again they are running. More explosions, closer this time, in quick succession.

“It’s trying to stall us, destroying every ship. Faster!”

They pass under a dormant Fractured craft and emerge into open space. The Leseum ship is just ahead of them now, barely ten meters away.

Sephine runs towards the ship first, faster than she’s ever run, and just as she reaches its access ramp, she hears Rokri cry out.

She darts up the ramp, slams her fist into the entrance pad, and turns as the aperture opens.

Rokri is down, screaming. A spatter of blood paints the floor by his right arm. Behind him, Fractured drones are advancing, firing into any ship within range.

“Get up!” she screams at him. “Rokri, get up!”

He looks up at her, dazed. His right arm is gone up to the elbow. The Fractured fire at the floor around him.

He rolls onto his back, fires at the Fractured. He begins to scramble backward, instinctively putting out his right arm for support, but collapses onto the stump. His scream is almost as loud as the explosions.

“Get up and run!”

And he does, but he’s going too slowly, and Sephine can’t help but feel that all is lost. A shot hits the ship, sending fizzing sparks and tongues of flame fanning from the point of impact. She shrieks and dives forward, rolling clumsily down the ramp, and then she’s up and suddenly her brother is in her arms, and one of them yells, “Enlink!” and she doesn’t have time to wonder if it was she who said it or him, but she feels a connection, their neurowebs linking together, and everything goes silent.

When she opens her eyes, head still resting on her brother’s shoulder, Sephine finds herself in a room she vaguely remembers.

The room is spacious and semicircular. The straight far wall is a floor-to-floor window. Beyond it an ocean fades into the distance. Overlooking the glittering water is a city, tumbling down a steep incline to a bay, riven by a snaking, waterfall-fed river, the waterfall cascading from a cliff some way above the city’s highest crest.

Leseum Blue. But not, too: in the corner of her eye, perfectly in focus but impossible to look at directly, the word LINKED flashes in violet.

She becomes aware of a dull, regular thunk. Behind her brother, a hunched, vague figure is beating a solid metal box with its bare fists. The figure pounds and pounds. Its hands are pulped and bloody, fingers bent and cracked and broken around a glut of gristle and bone. And yet it goes on punching, uttering occasional grunts as if the pain were just an itch.

It’s almost a man, almost a ghost. Almost formless, almost solid.

The windows open but no breeze follows.

Sephine and Rokri look at each other but say nothing. Looking down, she sees his right arm is completely intact.

A collared dove flutters in from the city, swoops around the room, and comes to perch on the figure’s shoulders, riding the troughs and peaks of its punches.

— You’re a bit late, the dove says. Its beak doesn’t move.

“Del?” Sephine says, taking a step towards the box, the man, the bird.

— Yes, it’s me. Sort of. Well! Look at you two, eh?

The Vierendelen flaps its wings.

— All grown up and that. Not much better looking though. Must’ve got that from your father. Not that I ever met him.

Rokri speaks. “What is this?” He points to the figure, still occupied with its box. “And what’s that?”

— Oh, this is nothing fancy. Just a virtual environment. Your basic sandbox simulation, written into a tiny substrate deep, deep in your neurowebs. Each of your webs possesses half the code. And I’m just a part of it, so, sadly, I’m not the real Vierendelen—just a construct imbibed with its good looks and incomparable wit.

Another flutter of iridescent wings.

“And that thing?” Sephine nods at the figure.

— That thing, is the Fractured. Hey, it hasn’t been badmouthing me has it?

Sephine and Rokri exchange glances.

— Because if it has . . . well. Never mind. Look at it. It’s been doing that since it shot me.

The embodied Fractured ignores them. In fact, it doesn’t seem remotely aware that they’re even here. Then Sephine remembers—she’s dreamt of this place before.

“The coordinates,” she says. “They’re in the box?”

— Of course they are. We’re here to make a copy and extract them.

“Are we dead?”

— What? Sephine, is he always this dim?

Sephine just looks bemused.

— Of course not, you silly thing. The Fractured aren’t stupid enough to kill you. Outside this environment, in the real, barely a millisecond has passed. I’m not sure exactly, but certainly no more than that. So no, you’re not dead, but either way it’s probably best if we just get that box open sharpish. Oh, you should also know the Leseum ship you’re about to embark has linked up with the Commanders’ access codes sent to it by triggering this simulation, and is powering up its engines. It’s just awaiting a course, which it will receive the moment we open the box.

“Will we make it?”

— What, home? That depends. You should do. The ship’s got a pretty good ‘fold-capable engine, so the moment you get out of the planet’s gravity well you should be home and dry. I also recommend you destroy the Leviathan before you make your escape. One shot to the base engine should be enough to do it—the ship’s firepower is formidable for its size. Hang on . . . oh! Would you look at that. It’s got needleheads!

“What about the others?” Rokri asks.

— Ah. That’s a bit of a gamble I’m afraid. There’s a chance the Fractured will just leave them be, but it’s not likely. Therefore, I suggest one of you stays behind. When you exit the Leviathan, one of you can use the escape pod in the ship’s rear and fly it back to the Vierendelen, to New Leseum. The logic here is that, as we’re merely extracting a copy of the coordinates, meaning another remains in your neurowebs, the Fractured still won’t risk killing one of you. If it does, the box will disappear, along with the coordinates. The code maintaining this simulation will be corrupt and incomplete. Don’t want all this here muggin’s work to go to waste, do we?

As if in response, the Fractured goes on pounding.

— But you can battle that one out amongst yourselves. Best if we just get this box open.

Sephine stifles a laugh; the Vierendelen hops on its scrawny legs and turns, cocks its head, and gives the Fractured a sharp peck on the head. The Fractured—mid-swing, arm up, ruined fist clenched—stops dead. The box whirrs, and opens.

Inside the box, on a low shelf, sits a pebble.

— Us ships, the Vierendelen says, almost ruefully.—We have, ironically, a rather limited imagination, don’t you think? A pebble. How quaint. Well, go on; take it, quickly. I can’t hold him off for long.

Sephine walks over to the Fractured, which is now a bizarre tableau of desperation. She reaches into the box, and looks up at its face. She can’t quite focus on it. It occurs to her that it is indescribable, except for the eyes: silver-in-silver and whorled, following her hand as she takes the coordinates. She wonders for a moment if it wants a face, but that its very nature repels individuality; a symptom of hive-mindedness.

The moment she plucks the pebble from the box, the box slams shut.

— Right. Bye then.

“Wait—!”

But the room is already dissolving, effervescing, dividing into strips of matter that disperse into ciphers and code. The window and the view beyond fades into white, and the Fractured’s fist swoops down and slams into the box with a brand new anger, a determined fury, and just before she finds herself back in the Leviathan, Sephine hears the Vierendelen say,—And if you call her that one more time . . .

Reality folds open like petals of fire. Barely a second has passed. Sephine is immediately aware of the surrounding chaos, as if she’s merely blinked, hadn’t experienced the simulation at all.

Fractured machines all over the hangar busy themselves destroying ships and a clutch of them are still advancing on Sephine and Rokri. The air is acrid and becoming thick with smoke.

She shoves Rokri up the ramp hard. His face is ashen. He looks dazed. What’s left of his right arm hangs limply at his side.

And Sephine, amid the chaos, tries to decide what to do. Folding to Leseum space would get Rokri there almost instantly. But would he make it to Leseum Blue once there? Or would he bleed out?

He needs help fast. New Leseum’s infirmary, oddly, seems even further away than Leseum Blue.

There’s no time to think just yet.

Sephine shoves Rokri into the ship, slams the entrance pad by the aperture, and fires blindly into the oncoming machines. The ramp retracts too quickly for them. The door irises shut. The fervor outside becomes dull.

Sephine makes her decision.

When the Fractured see the ship rise from the hangar floor, most are unsure about how to proceed. Directive dictates the targets must not be killed. They must be contained. But destroying the ship will surely eliminate them. The Fractured are confused by their failure. They are not used to it.

The ship rises above the smoke and pivots, surveying the smashed machines below like a scavenger bird. As if realizing it is not under fire, it heads lazily towards the center of the hangar. The Fractured clamor beneath it, helpless, none brave enough to fire.

The ship is not so hesitant.

Projectiles scream from the barrels of weapons embossing its fuselage. The first shot turns a clutch of Fractured into smoking slag. The second—a much more powerful weapon—fizzes through the air and collides with the inner shell of the Leviathan itself, the blossoming explosion leaving a huge, jagged tear, admitting a burst of sunlight from outside. The entire Leviathan shakes, sending surviving Fractured falling over each other, ships losing their balance and crashing to the hangar floor. The air pressure drops violently, conjuring a mini-hurricane—drone-swarms swirl around it in metal dust-devils.

The third weapon is a needlehead. Deployed as the ship tears toward the rip in the Leviathan’s skin, it drops like a shadow; a black, roiling pin that blurs the air it as it descends furiously toward the engine at the hangar’s base.

Before the needlehead meets the engine, the ship has slipped through the hole and out.

The needlehead plays havoc with the quantum. The Leviathan’s engine shudders, its shine fades and bursts like a strobe light. The bowl in which it sits begins to glow.

The hangar floor buckles first, pulled down to the base as the gravitational engine collapses. Ships tumble like small toys into the raging hub of energy.

The outer surface buckles next. The black towers and dishes of the city that is no city snap as they meet each other, and soon the surface is as bowled as the great machine’s underside.

By the time the engine reaches critical mass, engulfing the Leviathan in a colorless blast of fission, the tiny Leseum ship is long gone, hurtling low over the desert floor, westwards, towards the wreckage of the warship the Vierendelen.

As it nears the city, the ship appears to give birth.

A tiny pod bleeds smoke as it separates from the main body. Parachutes deploy. Back-thrusters erupt into life. It bobbles down to the half-city of New Leseum as, above, the ship pitches, groans, belches fire, and goes up, and up.

The sky darkens. Gravity ebbs.

The course is plotted.

The pilot sits in the cockpit, breathing deeply, dazed, face pale, and looks at a rear-view screen. The cross-hatched pattern of New Leseum is fading. The Vierendelen casts a sharp shadow over four little dots, dots housing fifty thousand souls. Souls they saved.

A retina scanner on a mechanical arm sweeps down and awaits input, blinking softly.

The ship says—in a voice completely unlike the Vierendelen’s—that it is safe to slip into the ‘fold.

The engines crackle.

Space outside pulses, the ship wobbles, and the pilot thinks, just for a moment, that this is what it must feel like to have wings.

About the Author

Jack Schouten was born in Kristiansand, Norway, and was brought up in Surrey. He read Journalism and Creative Writing at Middlesex University London, specializing in science fiction, and his work has appeared in Jupiter Magazine, the North London Literary Gazette, and Shoreline of Infinity. He lives and works in London, and can be reached on Twitter at @JackSchouten.

Against the Stream

A Que

1

The illness came so suddenly nothing could be done. When he woke it was yesterday.

At first he thought the problem was with his phone’s display, but then everything that happened had happened the day before.

His boss yelled at him because he hadn’t finished his reports. Sentence for sentence, word for word the same. That night he went home to an empty house, confused. Feeling tired, he got into bed and fell asleep. When he woke, time had moved back another day.

He didn’t finish the reports this time, either.

It was then that he finally understood. While the world continued to move along with the flow of time, he had turned and gone against the stream. Day-by-day, he was entering the backflow of time.

It was hard to get used to at first. His life had been painful, so the thought of a second time through was unpleasant. Over and over again he tried to stay up all night, tried to change course. Despite his best efforts, he found himself powerless to resist the undertow of exhaustion.

Walking into the office one day, he beat his boss bloody, trying to alter the timeline. After being sent to jail he woke up at home. When he got to work his boss was still sitting in the office waiting for him, uncaring—his beating wasn’t until tomorrow.

2

Eventually he got used to days like this, and life and work went back to normal. It was around then that Xiao Wei left him to live with the other man. Although he had thought it would hurt, it wasn’t all that bad. Having been through it before, he just felt numb. No matter how deeply his memories might hurt, it was always all better when he woke.

Six months later—or, six mother earlier—a new person appeared in his house. “I think we should get divorced,” he heard himself say to his wife. Only thirty-two, her face was marked with wrinkles and she was beginning to slouch. She stared at him blankly, and then nodded like she had the first time.

While his wife packed her things he stood by her side, watching. Six months had passed and she looked more like a stranger or an old friend than his wife. He didn’t think he would ever see her again, but thanks to the back flow of time they’d been reunited for their separation.

In the end, his wife left with her things. He stood on the stairs, watching the shrinking shape of her back in the slanting light of late afternoon, moving ever further away until it disappeared completely into the crowd. He’d watched her leave then too, thinking that was the end. But now he knew they’d be seeing each other again.

As expected, he woke to the smell of breakfast the next day.

“I’m going to market,” she said, standing in the doorway with her back to him. “Go ahead without me. You should be getting to work.”

He nodded before realizing something was out of place. His wife often came home empty handed, without telling him where she’d gone. After she left he snuck over to the peephole. Instead of going out, she walked toward the staircase down the hall.

Tiptoeing after, he followed her all the way up to the roof.

He heard a soft sobbing—a familiar sound after so many years together.

So, he thought to himself, she knew about Xiao Wei all along.

3

He spent the day in a daze, wondering how she had found out. Just before getting off work, Xiao Wei sent him a text message: “Stay, don’t go.”

Staring at the screen, he wondered how many secrets were hidden in this tiny rectangle. Scalding hot in his hand, he felt the echo of the bomb that he’d set off the day before.

He started to delete their texts, their videos, their photos—until he realized it was pointless. He was going back to yesterday. In time his wife would forget the secret she had uncovered.

He shrugged his shoulders and put the phone back into his pocket.

One by one his co-workers left until he and Xiao Wei were the only ones still in the office.

Soon, the lights went dark row by row. She walked over in the dim light, leaning over to whisper things that made him blush.

That was Xiao Wei—charming and fearless, bringing light into even the darkest corners. He’d fallen for her so easily, surrendering himself so completely to desire he thought it was love—the second time he’d fallen in love.

But now, looking into her pretty face, his mind was filled not with lust or pleasure, but the memory of her abandonment into the arms of another man six months from now. He stood and looked down at her. Outside, cars drove past, sending flashes of light through the windows to catch across his glasses.

“What’s with you?” Xiao Wei said, frowning. “You were into it yesterday.”

“No, I won’t be.”

Xiao Wei didn’t understand, but by then he’d already left.

4

The city at night was busy with a quiet constraint. As he walked alone, the cars filed past, their headlights drawing across and over, like in a scene from an old movie—one where something important is about to happen.

Just then, he heard shouts from an alley to the right. A group of young men were beating a drunk and he was surprised to find himself telling them to knock it off. Glaring, and cursing, they ran away.

He walked over. In the light of the streetlamp he could see that the drunk’s face was covered with blood. Underneath the blood an old knife wound ran from his right eye to the corner of his mouth. The terrifying scar had left two ridges of skin peeled back on either side, and it writhed worm-like deep within his cheek.

He fumbled for a moment, before helping the drunk up.

“You’re hurt, let me call you a cab.”

Wheezing, the drunk laughed crazily.

“It’s okay. No matter how bad they hurt me I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

His blood froze. Finally he said, “By tomorrow, you mean yesterday?”

The drunk stared, his expression under the streetlamp fierce and strange. The harsh light filled his lifeless eyes, like two deep pools. Suddenly laughing again he said, “You’re a backwards man, too, aren’t you?”

He felt like crying.

“It’s really rare, you know, our illness,” the drunk said as he struggled to sit up. “Harder to figure out that way. Time is like space—usually they go together. Walk ten minutes down the street, time and space are moving along with you. But then maybe they break apart and you move forwards, but time moves backwards—like with us. We’ve fallen into a time trap. That’s what it means to be a backwards man.”

He fell silent.

After a while the drunk continued: “It’s hard for some of us, this illness. It’s like being in a crowd at night and then suddenly turning to go the other way. They all keep going and you just get further and further away. Until you’re the only one left, walking all by yourself back to the start.”

5

Have you ever had someone in your life—the kind of person you’d thought was going to stay by your side until the very end? There they were, the day before yesterday, but then the second after next they’re gone, evaporated into time.

You don’t know it’s happened yet, but he’s already turned. He’s behind you, in a time you can’t reach, walking towards the gray twilight of the other side.

He sat in the gathering darkness, his mind filled with an absence of hope.

6

“There’s no scientific basis for anything I’ve said, of course. The theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, neither one can explain our illness,” the man said, seeming to sober up. “My research has dragged on for years now, but I’ve got nothing to show for it.”

“How long will it last?”

The drunk shook his head. “I don’t know, but I first became sick when I was seventy-five. I thought I was dying, but instead I’ve spent the last fifty years coming all the way back to today.”

7

His wife was asleep when he got home. Standing in their bedroom, he watched her sleep. For the first time ever, he noticed the way that she curled up to one side, like an infant, leaving the rest of the bed for him. Only the wrinkled corners of her eyes reminded him that she was not a child. Her health was poor because she didn’t take care of herself—three meals a day in a smoky kitchen had made her old before her time.

Over the ten years of their marriage he’d watched her age. He’d told her to take better care of herself more times than he could count, but every time she’d just nodded and said, “uh-huh.” She was so clumsy that she’d never figured out how to use skin products correctly.

And now he was going to watch her return to her youth.

The process was hard to describe. After more than ten years together, he thought he already knew everything there was to know about his wife. He was surprised to discover so many new things in the rewind of his life.

Things like the fact that his wife used to like to eat sweet and sour fish, or watch Korean movies—movies, not soap operas. He watched his wife crying while she watched the TV.

He wondered when he started to fall out of love with his wife. Had their love gotten lost in in the detritus of the everyday? Or was it the years that had accumulated across her brow, day by day, as she grew older?

As time passed, his wife became beautiful again. Without years of sleeping curled at the far side of the bed, she stopped slouching. Watching these changes, he was overcome with guilt. When their anniversary came, he made her favorite dish—sweet and sour fish.

That was the first time he’d ever seen his wife cry from happiness. Clapping her hands over her mouth, her eyes flushed red with pleasure until she finally managed to say, “How did you know?”

“I’m your husband, aren’t I?” he said.

His answer left her speechless.

Taking hold of her shoulder he said, “It’s been my fault all along, but the past is the past. I’ll be a better man in the future.”

His wife nodded. Inside, he felt himself sigh. What future? With everything moving forwards and me moving backwards, what good is it to repent now? It’s all pointless.

Around the time his wife began to get her looks back, her zest for life returned as well, and he found that she had more and more to say. It was something that had always bothered him, and he remembered asking her if she could be quieter.

Now he wondered if he had been the one who had turned the air at home into a stagnant pool of water, his wife’s words becoming fewer by the day, her body curling more by the night.

Whenever his wife had something to say, he tried instead to put down what he was doing and listen to her talk. As a backwards man, he didn’t have to worry about the work he’d set aside. The whole mess would be wiped away soon enough.

He got so used his new way of living that he soon came to enjoy it. How could it be possible, he thought to himself, that I ever disliked this woman? A million Xiao Wei’s couldn’t compare to her.

Ten years passed.

It was the evening of his proposal. In the backwards flow of time his memories had been unable to keep up, leaving things confusing and unfamiliar. But he still remembered one thing from that evening:

He had rented thirty remote control helicopters and hung colored lights from them. They formed a heart in mid-air, leading her to him. Holding roses and a ring, he knelt down on one knee and asked her to marry him. The air was rich with color, as if all the stars in the sky had fallen down around her.

When she cried, the light tore her tears into tiny stars.

8

Later that same evening, they walked hand-in-hand back to their apartment. They didn’t have a house yet—in a city full of the rich and successful, they were still struggling to make ends meet. And yet he already knew that they were happier now than they would be when they had a house and car of their own.

As they passed an alleyway, he was surprised to hear a strange voice suddenly call out his name. Peering into the darkness he saw only a dim figure, his face unclear.

Nervous, his wife squeezed his hand.

“Don’t be afraid. It’s just me,” the man in the alleyway said. “You meet me later.”

His wife didn’t understand, but he did, right away.

“An old friend,” he explained to his wife. “Give us a moment, okay? We need to talk.” With that, he walked into the dark alley, finding a boy of fourteen or fifteen waiting for him.

“I’ve discovered a way to cure our illness,” he said.

Shock rolled over him. After so many years of living as a backwards man he’d become accustomed to it. But now the boy was reminding him that he’d been sick all along.

“We aren’t the only ones who’ve come down with this condition, you know. For the past decade, I’ve been traveling around the world. One day, I found a scientist at MIT who had it,” he explained. “We did so many experiments that I lost count. But eventually we found the answer!

“As long as you live your life exactly as it happened the first time around, making the same decisions at the critical junctures in your life, then eventually you’ll fall asleep and wake up back on day one. Time and space will rejoin and you’ll go back to before the split. It will be as if none of this ever happened, and you’ll forget you ever were a backwards man,” the boy said.

“Does it really work?” he asked.

“It works. I know, because I’ve just tried it,” the boy said, looking right at him. “The most important decision in my life just happened—running away from home after my dad cut my face.”

It was only then that he noticed he was hurt, the blood spreading thickly and profusely like a rank weed across his face. No wonder he was hiding in the alleyway.

“What I’m seeing now is different from anything I’ve ever seen before. The world is thawing—it’s hard to explain. I’m so tired, I keep falling asleep. You’re a nice person. You helped me before so I did my best to stay awake so that I could tell you. I just hope you haven’t missed your life-juncture already. Once it’s gone you won’t be able to stop yourself from going all the way back to the end of time. No one will remember you because you’ll never have existed in the first place.” The teen’s voice became weaker as he spoke, and now he closed his eyes and stumbled backwards. “I’m going back now . . . I’ve been going against the stream of time for sixty years, and now I’m finally going . . . ”

When he fell to the ground there was no sound of a body hitting the pavement—a split second before impact he disappeared into thin air. He knew that the young man had gone back his starting point, back to his dying, gray-haired self.

He staggered out of the alley where his wife was waiting for him. “What happened to your friend?” she asked.

Saying nothing, he took his wife home where he quickly fell asleep, his mind filled with new concerns.

He already knew what the the most important moment in his entire life was. It was the day he met his wife in school, when he’d walked up to her in the quad to ask the way. Finding himself completely overtaken by her beauty and enthusiasm for life, he’d given everything to be with her. She’d been the reason he had come to the city in the first place.

Their lives had been bound up together from the moment he asked her that first question.

9

On the day he would meet his wife, he got up early and left the dorm, waiting for her on the path through the quad. The cherry blossoms had just begun to bloom, filling either side of the path with pink. She soon emerged from the haze of blossoms.

He steadied himself, willing his mind into submission as he began to walk towards her. He’d already practiced the words a thousand times. Anytime now, he would say them. Every single detail was exactly the same as before, down to the expression he wore on his face.

The closer she came the more clearly he could see her. She was nineteen, wearing a flower-print dress. Her jet-black hair hung loosely about her shoulders, and her face was prettier than even the cherry blossoms. Suddenly he saw her, ten years from now, looking old and curled at the edge of the bed.

Any minute now, he would go back to the day he got sick. He wouldn’t remember the things that had happened over the past ten backwards years. He’d still cheat on her. He’d still force her to leave. He’d still watch her back disappear into the crowd . . . time would pass as before, and the bright young face before him would become old and withered before its time.

He faltered.

It was a spring morning. He walked past the pretty young woman who would have become his wife and didn’t ask the way, sharing only the few cherry blossom petals that fell across their heads.

Originally published in ONE, Vol. 846, January 31, 2015.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

A Que was born in Jingzhou, Hubei in 1990 and graduated from the Hydraulic and Hydropower Engineering Department of Sichuan University. In 2012, he published his first work Quietly Awakening, which was soon followed by Wine Cup Flowing on the Rivers, Walking with Robots, Childhood of Harvest, and I Tell Stories about My Grandfather.

Nahiku West

Linda Nagata

A railcar was ferrying Key Lu across the tether linking Nahiku East and West when a micrometeor popped through the car’s canopy, leaving two neat holes that vented the cabin to hard vacuum within seconds. The car continued on the track, but it took over a minute for it to reach the gel lock at Nahiku West and pass through into the atmosphere. No one expected to find Key Lu alive, but as soon as the car repressurized, he woke up.

Sometimes, it’s a crime not to die.

I stepped into the interrogation chamber. Key had been sitting on one of two padded couches, but when he saw me he bolted to his feet. I stood very still, hearing the door lock behind me. Nothing in Key’s background indicated he was a violent man, but prisoners sometimes panic. I raised my hand slightly, as a gel ribbon armed with a paralytic spray slid from my forearm to my palm, ready for use if it came to that.

“Please,” I said, keeping the ribbon carefully concealed. “Sit down.”

Key slowly subsided onto the couch, never taking his frightened eyes off me.

Most of the celestial cities restrict the height and weight of residents to minimize the consumption of volatiles, but Commonwealth police officers are required to be taller and more muscular than the average citizen. I used to be a smaller man, but during my time at the academy adjustments were made. I faced Key Lu with a physical presence optimized to trigger a sense of intimidation in the back brain of a nervous suspect, an effect enhanced by the black fabric of my uniform. Its design was simple—shorts cuffed at the knees and a lightweight pullover with long sleeves that covered the small arsenal of chemical ribbons I carried on my forearms—but its light-swallowing color set me apart from the bright fashions of the celestial cities.

I sat down on the couch opposite Key Lu. He was a well-designed man, nothing eccentric about him, just another good-looking citizen. His hair was presently blond, his eyebrows darker. His balanced face lacked strong features. The only thing notable about him was his injuries. Dark bruises surrounded his eyes and their whites had turned red from burst blood vessels. More bruises discolored swollen tissue beneath his coppery skin.

We studied each other for several seconds, both knowing what was at stake. I was first to speak. “I’m Officer Zeke Choy—”

“I know who you are.”

“—of the Commonwealth Police, the watch officer here at Nahiku.”

The oldest celestial cities orbited Earth, but Nahiku was newer. It was one in a cluster of three orbital habitats that circled the Sun together, just inside the procession of Venus.

Key Lu addressed me again, with the polite insistence of a desperate man. “I didn’t know about the quirk, Officer Choy. I thought I was legal.”

The machine voice of a Dull Intelligence whispered into my auditory nerve that he was lying. I already knew that, but I nodded anyway, pretending to believe him.

The DI was housed within my atrium, a neural organ that served as an interface between mind and machine. Atriums are a legal enhancement—they don’t change human biology—but Key Lu’s quirked physiology that had allowed him to survive short-term exposure to hard vacuum was definitely not.

I was sure his quirk had been done before the age of consent. He’d been born in the Far Reaches among the fragile holdings of the asteroid prospectors, where it must have looked like a reasonable gamble to bioengineer some insurance into his system. Years had passed since then; enforcement had grown stricter. Though Key Lu looked perfectly ordinary, by the law of the Commonwealth, he wasn’t even human.

I met his gaze, hoping he was no fool. “Don’t tell me anything I don’t want to know,” I warned him.

I let him consider this for several seconds before I went on. “Your enhancement is illegal under the statutes of the Commonwealth—”

“I understand that, but I didn’t know about it.”

I nodded my approval of this lie. I needed to maintain the fiction that he hadn’t known. It was the only way I could help him. “I’ll need your consent to remove it.”

A spark of hope ignited in his bloodied eyes. “Yes! Yes, of course.”

“So recorded.” I stood, determined to get the quirk out of his system as soon as possible, before awkward questions could be asked. “Treatment can begin right—”

The door to the interrogation room opened.

I was so startled, I turned with my hand half raised, ready to trigger the ribbon of paralytic still hidden in my palm—only to see Magistrate Glory Mina walk in, flanked by two uniformed cops I’d never seen before.

My DI sent the ribbon retreating back up my forearm while I greeted Glory with a scowl. Nahiku was my territory. I was the only cop assigned to the little city and I was used to having my own way—but with the magistrate’s arrival I’d just been overridden.

Goods travel on robotic ships between the celestial cities, but people rarely do. We ghost instead. A ghost—an electronic persona—moves between the data gates at the speed of light. Most ghosts are received on a machine grid or within the virtual reality of a host’s atrium, but every city keeps a cold-storage mausoleum. If you have the money—or if you’re a cop—you can grow a duplicate body in another city, fully replicated hard copy, ready to roll.

Glory Mina presided over the circuit court based out of Red Star, the primary city in our little cluster. She would have had to put her Red Star body into cold storage before waking up the copy here at Nahiku, but that was hardly more than half an hour’s effort. From the eight cops who had husks stashed in the mausoleum, she’d probably pulled two at random to make up the officers for her court.

I was supposed to get a notification any time a husk in the mausoleum woke up, but obviously she’d overridden that too.

Glory Mina was a small woman with skin the color of cinnamon, and thick, shiny black hair that she kept in a stubble cut. She looked at me curiously, her eyebrows arched. “Officer Choy, I saw the incident report, but I missed your request for a court.”

The two cops had positioned themselves on either side of the door.

“I didn’t file a request, Magistrate.”

“And why not?”

“This is not a criminal case.”

No doubt her DI dutifully informed her I was lying—not that she couldn’t figure that out for herself. “I don’t think that’s been determined, Officer Choy. There are records that still need to be considered, which have not made their way into the case file.”

I had looked into Key Lu’s background. I knew he never translated his persona into an electronic ghost. If he’d ever done so, his illegal quirk would have been detected when he passed through a data gate. I knew he’d never kept a backup record that could be used to restore his body in case of accident. Again, if he’d done so, his quirk would have been revealed. And he never, ever physically left Nahiku, because without a doubt he would have been exposed when he passed through a port gate. The court could use any one of those circumstances to justify interrogation under a coercive drug—which is why I hadn’t included any of it in the case file.

“Magistrate, this is a minor case—”

“There are no minor cases, Officer Choy. You’re dismissed for now, but please, wait outside.”

There was nothing else I could do. I left the room knowing Key Lu was a dead man.

I could have cleaned things up if I’d just had more time. I could have cured Key Lu. I’m a molecular designer and my skills are the reason I was drafted into the Commonwealth police.

Technically, I could have refused to join, but then my home city of Haskins would have been assessed a huge fine—and the city council would have tried to pass the debt on to me. So I consoled myself with the knowledge that I would be working on the cutting edge of molecular research and, swallowing my misgivings, I swore to uphold the laws of the Commonwealth, however arcane and asinine they might be.

I worked hard at my job. I tried to do some good, and though I skirted the boundaries now and then, I made very sure I never went too far because if I got myself fired, the debt for my training would be on me, and the contracts I’d have to take to pay that off didn’t bear thinking on.

The magistrate required me to attend the execution, assigning me to stand watch beside the door. I used a mood patch to ensure a proper state of detachment. It’s a technique they taught us at the academy, and as I watched the two other officers escort Key Lu into the room, I could tell from their faces they were tranked too, while Key Lu was glassy-eyed, more heavily sedated than the rest of us.

He was guided to a cushioned chair. One of the cops worked an IV into his arm. Five civilians were present, seated in a half circle on either side of the magistrate. One of them was weeping. Her name was Hera Poliu. I knew her because she was a friend of my intimate, Tishembra Indens—but Tishembra had never mentioned that Hera and Key were involved.

The magistrate spoke, summarizing the crime and the sanctity of Commonwealth law, reminding us the law existed to guard society’s shared idea of what it means to be human, and that the consequences of violating the law were mandated to be both swift and certain. She nodded at one of the cops, who turned a knob on the IV line, admitting an additional ingredient to the feed. Key Lu slumped and closed his eyes. Hera wept louder, but it was already over.

Nahiku was justly famed for its vista walls that transformed blank corridors into fantasy spaces. On Level 7 West, where I lived, the theme was a wilderness maze enhanced by faint rainforest scents, rustling leaves, bird song, and ghostly puffs of humidity. Apartment doors didn’t appear until you asked for them.

The path forked. I went right. Behind me, a woman called my name, “Officer Choy!” Her voice was loud and so vindictive that when the DI whispered in my mind, Hera Poliu, I thought, No way. I knew Hera and she didn’t sound like that. I turned fast.

It was Hera all right, but not like I’d ever seen her. Her fists were clenched, her face flushed, her brows knit in a furious scowl. The DI assessed her as rationally angry, but it didn’t seem that way to me. When she stepped into my personal space I felt a chill. “I want to file a complaint,” she informed me.

Hera was a full head shorter than me, thin and willowy, with rich brown skin and auburn hair wound up in a knot behind her head. Tishembra had invited her over for dinner a few times and we’d all gone drinking together, but as our eyes locked I felt I was looking at a stranger. “What sort of complaint, Hera?”

“Don’t patronize me.” I saw no sign in her face of the heart-rending grief she’d displayed at the execution. “The Commonwealth police are supposed to protect us from quirks like Key.”

“Key never hurt anyone,” I said softly.

“He has now! You didn’t hear the magistrate’s assessment. She’s fined the city for every day since Key became a citizen. We can’t afford it, Choy. You know Nahiku already has debt problems—”

“I can’t help you, Hera. You need to file an appeal with the magistrate—”

“I want to file a complaint! The city can’t get fined for harboring quirks if we turn them in. So I’m reporting Tishembra Indens.”

I stepped back. A cold sweat broke out across my skin as I looked away.

Hera laughed. “You already know she’s a quirk, don’t you? You’re a cop, Choy! A Commonwealth cop, infatuated with a quirk. ”

I lost my temper. “What’s wrong with you? Tishembra’s your friend.”

“So was Key. And both of them immigrants.”

“I can’t randomly scan people because they’re immigrants.”

“If you don’t scan her, I’ll go to the magistrate.”

I tried to see through her anger, but the Hera I knew wasn’t there. “No need to bother the magistrate,” I said softly, soothingly. “I’ll do it.”

She nodded, the corner of her lip lifting a little. “I look forward to hearing the result.”

I stepped into the apartment to find Tishembra’s three-year-old son Robin playing on the floor, shaping bridges and wheels out of colorful gel pods. He looked up at me, a handsome boy with his mother’s dark skin and her black, glossy curls, but not her reserved manner. I was treated to a mischievous grin and a firm order to, “Watch this!” Then he hurled himself onto his creations, smashing them all back into disks of jelly.

Tishembra stepped out of the bedroom, lean and dark and elegant, her long hair hanging down her back in a lovely chaos of curls. She’d changed from her work clothes into a silky white shift that I knew was only mindless fabric and still somehow it clung in all the right places as if a DI was controlling the fibers. She was a city engineer. Two years ago she’d emigrated to Nahiku, buying citizenship for herself and Robin—right before the city went into massive debt over an investment in a water-bearing asteroid that turned out to have no water. She was bitter over it, more so because the deal had been made before she arrived, but she shared in the loss anyway.

I crossed the room. She met me halfway. I’d been introduced to her on my second day at Nahiku, seven months ago now, and I’d never looked back. Taking her in my arms, I held her close, letting her presence fill me up as it always did. I breathed in her frustration and her fury and for a giddy moment everything else was blotted from my mind. I was addicted to her moods, all of them. Joy and anger were just different aspects of the same enthralling, intoxicating woman—and the more time I spent with her the more deeply she could touch me in that way. It wasn’t love alone. Over time I’d come to realize she had a subtle quirk that let her emotions seep out into the air around her. Tishembra tended to be reserved and distant. I think the quirk helped her connect with people she casually knew, letting her be perceived as more open and likeable, and easing her way as an immigrant into Nahiku’s tightly knit culture—but it wasn’t something we could ever talk about.

“You were part of it, weren’t you?” she asked me in an angry whisper. “You were part of what happened to Key. Why didn’t you stop it?”

Tishembra had taken a terrible chance in getting close to me.

Her fingers dug into my back. “I’m trapped here, Zeke. With the new fine, on top of the old debt . . . Robin and I will be working a hundred years to earn our way free.” She looked up at me, her lip curled in a way that reminded me too much of Hera’s parting expression. “It’s gotten to the point, my best hope is another disaster. If the city is sold off, I could at least start fresh—”

“Tish, that doesn’t matter now.” I spoke very softly, hoping Robin wouldn’t overhear. “I’ve received a complaint against you.”

Her sudden fear was a radiant thing, washing over me, making me want to hold her even closer, comfort her, keep her forever safe.

“It’s ridiculous, of course,” I murmured. “To think you’re a quirk. I mean, you’ve been through the gates. So you’re clean.”

Thankfully, my DI never bothered to point out when I was lying.

Tishembra nodded to let me know she understood. She wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t want to know; I wouldn’t ask her questions—because the less I knew, the better.

My hope rested on the fact that she could not have had the quirk when she came through the port gate into Nahiku. Maybe she’d acquired it in the two years since, or maybe she’d stripped it out when she’d passed through the gate. I was hoping she knew how to strip it again.

“I have to do the scan,” I warned her. “Soon. If I don’t, the magistrate will send someone who will.”

“Tonight?” she asked in a voice devoid of expression. “Or tomorrow?”

I kissed her forehead. “Tomorrow, love. That’s soon enough.”

Robin was asleep. Tishembra lay beside him on the bed, her eyes half closed, her focus inward as she used her atrium to track the progress of processes I couldn’t see. I sat in a chair and watched her. I didn’t have to ask if the extraction was working. I knew it was. Her presence was draining away, becoming fainter, weaker, like a memory fading into time.

After a while it got to be too much, waiting for the woman I knew to become someone else altogether. “I’m going out for a while,” I said. She didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t hear me. I rearmed myself with my chemical arsenal of gel ribbons. Then I put my uniform back on, and I left.

All celestial cities have their own municipal police force. It’s often a part-time, amateur operation, but the local force is supposed to investigate traditional crimes like theft, assault, murder—all the heinous things people have done to each other since the beginning of time. The Commonwealth police are involved only when the crime violates statutes involving molecular science, biology, or machine intelligence.

So strictly speaking, I didn’t have any legal right or requirement to investigate the original accident that had exposed Key’s quirk, but I took the elevator up to Level 1 West anyway, and used my authority to get past the DI that secured the railcar garage.

Nahiku is a twin orbital. Its two inhabited towers are counterweights at opposite ends of a very long carbon-fiber tether that lets them spin around a center point, generating a pseudogravity in the towers. A rail runs the length of the tether, linking Nahiku East and West. The railcar Key Lu had failed to die in was parked in a small repair bay in the West-end garage. Repair work hadn’t started on it yet, and the two small holes in its canopy were easy to see.

There was no one around, maybe because it was local-night. That worked for me: I didn’t have to concoct a story on why I’d made this my investigation. I started collecting images, measurements, and sample swabs. When the DI picked up traces of explosive residue, I wasn’t surprised.

I was inside the car, collecting additional samples from every interior surface, when a faint shift in air pressure warned me a door had opened. Footsteps approached. I don’t know who I was expecting. Hera, maybe. Or Tishembra. Not the magistrate.

Glory Mina walked up to the car and, resting her hand on the roof, she bent down to peer at me where I sat on the ruptured upholstery.

“Is there more going on here that I need to know about?” she asked.

I sent her the DI’s report. She received it in her atrium, scanned it, and followed my gaze to one of the holes in the canopy. “You’re thinking someone tried to kill him.”

“Why like this?” I wondered. “Is it coincidence? Or did they know about his quirk?”

“What difference does it make?”

“If the attacker knew about Key, then it was murder by cop.”

“And if not, it was just an attempted murder. Either way, it’s not your case. This one belongs to the city cops.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t leave it alone. Maybe that’s why my superiors tolerated me. “I like to know what’s going on in my city, and the big question I have is why? I’m not buying a coincidence. Whoever blew the canopy had to know about Key—so why not just kill him outright? If he’d died like any normal person, I wouldn’t have looked into it, you wouldn’t have assessed a fine. Who gains, when everyone loses?”

Even as I said the words my thoughts turned to Tishembra, and what she’d said. It’s gotten to the point, my best hope is another disaster. No. I wasn’t going to go there. Not with Tishembra. But maybe she wasn’t the only one thinking that way?

The magistrate watched me closely, no doubt recording every nuance of my expression. She said, “I saw the complaint against your intimate.”

“It’s baseless.”

“But you’ll look into it?”

“I’ve scheduled a scan.”

Glory nodded. “See to that, but stay out of the local case. This one doesn’t belong to you.”

The apartment felt empty when I returned. I panicked for the few seconds it took me to sprint across the front room to the bedroom door. Tishembra was still lying on the bed, her half-closed eyes blinking sporadically, but I couldn’t feel her. Not like before. A sense of abandonment came over me. I knew it was ridiculous, but I felt like she’d walked away.

Robin whimpered in his sleep, turned over, and then awoke. He looked first at Tishembra lying next to him, and then he looked at me. “What happened to Mommy?”

“Mommy’s okay.”

“She’s not. She’s wrong.”

I went over and picked him up. “Hush. Don’t ever say that to anyone but me, okay? We need it to be a secret.”

He pouted, but he was frightened, and he agreed.

I spent that night in the front room, with Robin cradled in my arm. I didn’t sleep much. I couldn’t stop thinking about Key and his quirk, and who might have known about it. Maybe someone from his past? Or someone who’d done a legal mod on him? I had the DI import his personal history into my atrium, but there was no record of any bioengineering work being done on him. Maybe it had just been a lucky guess by someone who knew what went on in the Far Reaches? I sent the DI to search the city files for anyone else who’d ever worked out there. Only one name came back to me: Tishembra Indens.

Tishembra and I had never talked much about where we’d come from. I knew circumstances had not been kind to her, but that she’d had to take a contract in the Far Reaches—that shocked me.

My best hope is another disaster.

I deleted the query, I tried to stop thinking, but I couldn’t help reflecting that she was an engineer. She had skills. She could work out how to pop the canopy and she’d have access to the supplies to do it.

Eventually I dozed, until Tishembra woke me. I stared at her. I knew her face, but I didn’t know her. I couldn’t feel her anymore. Her quirk was gone, and she was a stranger to me. I sat up. Robin was still asleep and I cradled his little body against my chest, dreading what would happen when he woke.

“I’m ready,” Tishembra said.

I looked away. “I know.”

Robin wouldn’t let his mother touch him. “You’re not you!” he screamed at her with all the fury a three-year-old could muster. Tishembra started to argue with him, but I shook my head, “Deal with it later,” and took him into the dining nook, where I got him breakfast and reminded him of our secret.

“I want Mommy,” he countered with a stubborn pout.

I considered tranking him, but the staff at the day-venture center would notice and they would ask questions, so I did my best to persuade him that Mommy was Mommy. He remained skeptical. As we left the apartment, he refused to hold Tishembra’s hand but ran ahead instead, hiding behind the jungle foliage until we caught up, then running off again. I didn’t blame him. In my rotten heart I didn’t want to touch her either, but I wasn’t three. So the next time he took off, I slipped my arm around Tishembra’s waist and hauled her aside into a nook along the path. We didn’t ever kiss or hold hands when I was in uniform and besides, I’d surprised her when her mind was fixed on more serious things, so of course she protested. “Zeke, what are you doing?”

“Hush,” I said loudly. “Do you want Robin to find us?”

And I kissed her. I didn’t want to. She knew it, and resisted, whispering, “You don’t need to feel sorry for me.”

But I’d gotten a taste of her mouth, and that hadn’t changed. I wanted more. She felt it and softened against me, returning my kiss in a way that made me think we needed to go back to the apartment for a time.

Then Robin was pushing against my hip. “No! Stop that kissing stuff. We have to go to day-venture.”

I scowled down at him. “Fine, but I’m holding Tishembra’s hand.”

“No. I am.” And to circumvent further argument, he seized her hand and tugged her toward the path. I let her go with a smirk, but her defiant gaze put an end to that.

“I do love you,” I insisted. She shrugged and went with Robin, too proud to believe in me just yet.

Day-venture was on Level 5, where there was a prairie vista. On either side of the path we looked out across a vast land of low, grassy hills, where some sort of herd animals fed in the distance. Waist-high grass grew in a nook outside the doorway to the day-venture center. Robin stomped through it, sending a flutter of butterflies spiraling toward a blue sky. The grass sprang back without damage, betraying a biomechanical nature that the butterflies shared. One of them floated back down to land on Tishembra’s hand. She started to shoo it away, but Robin shrieked, “Don’t flick it!” and he pounced. “It’s a message fly.” The butterfly’s blue wings spread open as it rested in his small palms. A message was written there, shaped out of white scales drained of pigment, but Robin didn’t know how to read yet, so he looked to his mother for help. “What does it say?”

Tishembra gave me a dark look. Then she crouched to read the message and I saw a slight uptick in the corner of her lip. “It says Robin and Zeke love Tishembra.” Then she ran her finger down the butterfly’s back to erase the message, and nudged it, sending it fluttering away.

“It’s wrong,” Robin told her defiantly. “I don’t love Tishembra. I love Mommy.” Then he threw his arms around her neck and kissed her, before running inside to play with his friends.

Tishembra and I went on to my office, where Glory Mina was waiting for us to arrive.

When Tishembra saw the magistrate she turned to me with a look of desperation. I told her the truth. “It doesn’t matter.”

A deep scan is performed with an injection of molecular-scale machines called Makers that map the body’s component systems. The data is fed directly into police records and there’s no way to fake the results. Tishembra should have known that, but she looked at me as if I’d betrayed her. “You don’t have to worry,” I insisted. “The scan is just a formality, a required response in the face of the baseless complaint filed against you.”

Glory Mina watched me with a half smile. Naturally, her DI would have told her I was lying.

I led Tishembra into a small exam room and had her sit in a large, cushioned chair. After Glory came in behind us, the office DI locked the door. I handed Tishembra a packet of Makers and she dutifully inhaled it. At the same time my DI whispered that Hera Poliu had arrived in the outer office. Sensing trouble, I looked at the magistrate. “I need to talk to her.”

“Who?” Tishembra asked anxiously. “Zeke, what’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on. Everything will be fine.”

Glory just watched me. I grunted, realizing she’d come not to observe the scan but to gauge the integrity of her Nahiku watch officer, which she had good cause to doubt. “I’ll be right back.”

The office DI maintained a continuous surveillance of all rooms. I channeled its feed, keeping one eye on Tishembra and another on Hera as she looked around the front office with an anxious gaze. She appeared timid and unsure—nothing at all like the angry woman who had accosted me yesterday. “Zeke?” she called softly. “Are you here?”

When the door opened ahead of me, she startled.

“Zeke!” Hera’s hands were shaking. “Is it true Tishembra’s been scheduled for a scan? She didn’t have anything to do with Key. You have to know that. She hardly knew him. There’s no reason to suspect her. Tishembra is my best engineer and if we lose her this city will never recover . . . Zeke? What is it?”

I think I was standing with my mouth open. “You filed the complaint that initiated the scan!”

“Me? I . . . ” Her focus turned inward. “Oh, yesterday . . . I wasn’t myself. I took the wrong mood patch. I was out of my head. Is Tishembra . . . ?”

The results of the scan arrived in my atrium. I glanced at them, and closed my eyes briefly in silent thanks. “Tishembra has passed her scan.”

Against all expectation I’d made a home at Nahiku. I’d found a woman I loved, I’d made friends, and I’d gained trust—to the point that people would come to me for advice and guidance, knowing I wasn’t just another jackboot of the Commonwealth.

In one day all that had been shattered and I wanted to know why.

I sent a DI hunting through the datasphere for background on Key Lu. I sent another searching through Hera Poliu’s past. I thought about sending a third after Tishembra—but whatever the DI turned up would go into police records and I was afraid of what it might find.

Tish had used a patch to calm herself, resolved to go into work as if nothing was changed. “I’m fine,” she insisted when I said I’d walk with her. She resented my coddling, but there were questions I needed to ask. We took the elevator, stepping out into a corridor enhanced with a seascape. The floor appeared as weathered boardwalk; our feet struck it in hollow thumps. Taking her arm, I gently guided her to a nook where a strong breeze blew, carrying what I’m told is the salt scent of an ocean, and hiding the sound of our voices. “Tish, is there anything you need to tell me?”

Resentment simmered in her eyes. “What exactly are you asking?”

“You spent time in the Far Reaches.”

“So?”

“Did you know about Key Lu?”

I deserved the contempt that blossomed in her expression. “There are hundreds of tiny settlements out there, Zeke. Maybe thousands. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know him here, either.”

The DI returned an initial infodump. My focus wavered. Tishembra saw it. “What?” she asked me.

“Key Lu was a city finance officer, one who signed off on the water deal.”

“The water deal with no water,” she amended bitterly. Crossing her arms, she glared at the ocean.

“Someone tried to kill him,” I told her, letting my words blend in with the sea breeze.

She froze, her gaze fixed on the horizon.

“There was never a micrometeor. His railcar was sabotaged.”

I couldn’t read her face and neither could the DI. Maybe it was the patch she’d used to level her emotions, but her fixed expression frightened me.

She knew what was going on in my head, though. “You’re asking yourself who has the skill to do that, aren’t you? Who could fake a meteor strike? If it were me, I’d do it with explosive patches, one inside, one outside, to get the trajectory correct. Is that how it was done, Zeke?”

“Yes.”

Her gaze was still fixed on the horizon. “It wasn’t me.”

“Okay.”

She turned and looked me in the eye. “It wasn’t me.”

The DI whispered that she spoke the truth. I smiled my relief and reached for her, but she backed away. “No, Zeke.”

“Tish, come on. Don’t be mad. This day is making us both crazy.”

“I haven’t accused you of being a murderer.”

“Tish, I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “I remember when we used to trust each other. I think that was yesterday.”

The second DI arrived with an initial report on Hera. Like an idiot, I scanned the file. To my surprise, I had a new suspect, but while I was distracted, Tishembra walked away.

Glory Mina was waiting for me when I returned to my office. She’d tracked my DIs and copied herself on their reports. “You should have been a municipal cop,” she told me. She sat perched on the arm of a chair, her arms crossed and her eyes twinkling with amusement.

“It’s not like I had a choice.”

She cocked her head, allowing me the point. Reading from the DI’s report, she said, “So Hera Poliu had a brother. Four years ago he was exiled from Nahiku, and a year after that he was arrested and executed for an illegal enhancement.”

“Hera lost her brother. She’s got to resent it. Maybe she resents anybody who has a—” I caught myself. “Anybody she thinks might have a quirk.”

“Maybe,” Glory conceded. “And maybe that’s why she made a complaint against your intimate, but so what? It’s not your case, Zeke. Forward what you’ve got to whoever had the misfortune to be appointed as the criminal investigator in this little paradise and let it go.”

I made compliant noises. She shook her head, not needing the DI to know I wasn’t being straight. “Walk with me.”

“Where?”

“The mausoleum. I’m going home. But on the way there, you’re going to listen to what I have to say about the necessity for boundaries.” She crooked her finger at me. I shrugged and followed. As we walked past the vistas she lectured me on the essential but very limited role of the Commonwealth police and warned me that my appointment as watch officer at Nahiku could end at any time. I listened patiently, knowing she would soon be gone.

As we approached the mausoleum, I sent a DI to open the door. Inside was a long hallway with locked doors on either side. Behind the doors were storage chambers, most of them belonging to corporations. The third door on the left secured the police chamber. It opened as we approached, and closed again when we had stepped inside. One wall held clothing lockers. The other, ranks of cold storage drawers stacked four high. “Magistrate Glory Mina,” Glory said to the room DI. She stripped off her clothes and hung them in one of the lockers while the drawers slid past each other, rearranging themselves. Only two were empty. One was mine. The other descended from the top rank to the second level, where it opened, ready to receive her.

Glory closed the locker door. She was naked and utterly unconcerned about it. She turned to me with a stern gaze. “You tried to pretend Key Lu was a victim. This once, I’m going to pretend you just missed a step in the background investigation. Zeke, as much as you don’t like being a cop, being an ex-cop can be a lot worse.”

I had no answer for that. I knew she was right.

She climbed into the drawer. As soon as she lay back, the cushions inflated around her, creating a moist interface all across the surface of her skin. The drawer slid shut and locked with a soft snick. Very soon, her ghost would be on its way to Red Star. Once again, I was on my own.

No matter what Glory wanted, there was no way I was going to set this case aside. Key Lu was dead, while Tishembra had been threatened and made into a stranger, both to me and to her own son. I wanted to know who was responsible and why.

Still, I knew how to make concessions. So I set up an appointment with an official who served part-time as a city cop, intending to hand over the case files, if only for the benefit of my personnel record. But before that could happen a roving DI returned to me with the news that the city’s auto-defense system had locked down a plague outbreak on Level 5 West. The address was Robin’s day-venture center.

It took me ninety seconds to strip off my uniform and wrap on the impermeable hide of a vacuum-capable skinsuit, police black, with gold insignia. Then I grabbed a standard-issue bivouac kit that weighed half as much as I did, and I raced out the door.

We call it plague, but it’s not. Each of us is an ecosystem. We’re inhabited by a host of Makers. Some repair our bodies and our minds, keeping us young and alert, and some run our atriums. But most of our Makers exist only to defend us against hostile nanotech—the snakes that forever prowl the Garden of Eden, the nightmares devised by twisted minds—and sometimes our defenses fail.

A general alert had not been issued—that was standard policy to avoid panic—but as soon as I was spotted on the paths wearing my skinsuit, word went out through informal channels that something was wrong. By the time I reached the day-venture center people had already guessed where I was going and a crowd was beginning to form against the backdrop of prairie. The city’s emergency response team hadn’t arrived yet, so questions were shouted at me. I refused to answer. “Stay back!” I commanded, issuing an order for the center’s locked door to open.

In an auto-defense lockdown, a gel barrier is extruded around the suspect zone. The door slid back to reveal a wall of blue-tinged gel behind it. I pulled up the hood of my skinsuit and let it seal. Then I leaned into the gel wall, feeling it give way slowly around me, and after a few seconds I was able to pass through. As soon as I was clear, the door closed and locked behind me.

The staff and children were huddled on one side of the room—six adults and twenty-two kids. They looked frightened, but otherwise okay. Robin wasn’t with them. The director started to speak but I couldn’t hear him past the skinsuit, so I forced an atrial link to every adult in the room, “Give me your status.”

The director spoke again, this time through my atrium. “It’s Robin. He was hit hard only a couple of minutes ago. Shakes and sweats. His system’s chewing up all his latents and he went down right away. I think it’s targeted. No one else has shown any signs.”

“Where is he?”

The director looked toward the nap room.

I didn’t want to think too hard, I just wanted to get Robin stable, but the director’s assessment haunted me. A targeted assault meant that Robin alone was the intended victim; that the hostile Maker had been designed to activate in his unique ecosystem.

I found him on the floor, trembling in the grip of a hypoglycemic seizure, all his blood sugars gone to fuel the reproduction of Makers in his body—both defensive and assault—as the tiny machines ramped up their populations to do battle on a molecular scale. His eyelids fluttered, but I could only see the whites. His black curls were sodden with sweat.

I unrolled the bivouac kit with its thick gel base designed for a much larger patient. Then I lifted his small body, laid him on it, and touched the activation points. The gel folded around him like a cocoon. The bivouac was a portable version of the cold storage drawer that had enfolded Glory. Robin’s core temperature plummeted, while an army of defensive Makers swarmed past the barrier of his skin in a frantic effort to stabilize him.

The city’s emergency team came in wearing sealed skinsuits. I stood by as they scanned the other kids, the staff, the rooms, and me, finding nothing. Only Robin was affected.

I stripped off my hood. Out in the playroom, the gel membrane was coming down and the kids were going home, but inside the bivouac Robin lay in stasis, his biological processes all but stopped. Even the data on his condition had been pared to a trickle. Still, I’d seen enough to know what was happening: the assault Makers were attacking Robin’s neuronal connections, writing chaos into the space where Robin used to be. We would lose him if we allowed him to revive.

I checked city records for the date of his last backup. I couldn’t find one. Robin had turned three a few weeks ago. I remembered we’d talked about taking him in to get a backup done . . . but we’d been busy.

The emergency team came back into the nap room with a gurney. Tishembra came with them. One glance at her face told me she’d been heavily tranked.

At first she didn’t say anything, just watched with lips slightly parted and an expression of quiet horror on her face as the bivouac was lifted onto the gurney. But as the gurney was rolled away she asked in a defeated voice, “Is he going to die?”

“Of course he’s not going to die.”

She turned an accusing gaze on me. “My DI says you’re lying.”

I cursed myself silently and tried again, determined to speak the truth this time. “He’s not going to die, because I won’t let him.”

She nodded, as if I’d got it right. The trank had turned her mood to smooth, hard glass. “I made this happen.”

“What are you talking about?”

She turned her right hand palm up. A blue prairie butterfly rested in it, crushed and lifeless. I picked it up; spread its wings open. The message was only a little blurred from handling. On the left wing I read, You lived, and on the right, so he dies.

So someone had watched as we’d dropped Robin off that morning. I looked up at Tishembra. “No,” I told her. “That’s not the way it’s going to work.”

The attack on Robin was a molecular crime, which made it my case, and I was prepared to use every resource of the police to solve it.

Tishembra nodded. Then she left, following the gurney.

I could work anywhere, using my atrium, so I stayed for a time. First I packed up every bit of data I had on Robin’s condition and sent it to six different police labs, hoping at least one could come up with the design for a Maker that could stop the assault on Robin’s brain cells. The odds of success would go up dramatically if I could get the specs of the assault Maker—and the easiest way to do that was to track down the twisted freak who’d designed it.

Easy steps first: I sent a DI into the datasphere to assemble a list of everyone at Nahiku with extensive molecular design experience. The DI came back with one name: mine.

So I was dealing with a talented hobbyist.

It could be anyone.

I sent the DI out again. No record was kept of butterfly messages—they were designed to be anonymous—but surveillance records were collected on every public path. I instructed the DI to access the records and assemble a list of everyone who’d set foot on Level 5 at any time that day, because the blue prairie butterflies could only be accessed from there. The list that came back was long. Name after name scrolled through my visual field, many that I recognized, but only one stood out in my mind: Hera Poliu.

I summoned the vid attached to her name. It was innocuous. She’d been taking the stairs between levels and had paused briefly on the landing. Still, it bothered me. Hera had been involved with Key Lu, she’d filed the complaint against Tishembra, and now I had her on Level 5. Coincidence maybe . . . but I remembered the chill I’d felt when she accosted me in the corridor . . . and how confused she’d been when I reminded her of the incident.

I went by my office and changed back into my uniform. Then I checked city records for Hera’s location. She was at the infirmary, sitting with Tishembra . . . Tishembra, who’d been a quirk just like Hera’s brother except she’d eluded punishment while Hera’s brother was dead. Maybe it was baseless panic, but I sprinted for the door.

The infirmary had a reception room with a desk, and a hallway behind it with small rooms on either side. The technician at the desk looked up as I burst in. “Robin Indens!” I barked.

“Critical care. End of the hall.”

I sprinted past him. A sign identified the room. I touched the door and it snapped open. The bivouac had been set up on a table in the center of the room. Slender feeder lines descending from the ceiling were plugged into its ports. Tishembra and Hera stood alongside the bivouac, Hera with a comforting arm around Tishembra’s shoulders. They both looked up as I burst in. “Zeke?” Tishembra asked, with an expression encompassing both hope and dread.

“Tish, it’s going to be okay. But I need to talk to Hera. Alone.”

They traded a puzzled glance. Then Hera gave Tishembra a quick hug—“I’ll be right back”—and stepped past me into the hall. I followed her, closing the door behind us.

Hera turned to face me. She looked gaunt and worn—a woman who had seen too much grief. “I want to thank you, Zeke, for not telling Tishembra who filed that complaint. I wasn’t myself when I did it. I don’t even remember doing it.”

She wasn’t lying.

I stumbled over that fact. Had I gotten it wrong? Was there something more going on than a need for misguided revenge?

“When was the last time you had your defensive Makers upgraded?”

She flinched and looked away. “It’s been a while.”

I sent a DI to check the records. It had been three years. I pulled up an earlier report and cross-checked the dates to be sure. She hadn’t had an upgrade since her brother’s execution. My heart rate jumped as I contemplated a new possibility. No doubt my pupils dilated, but Hera was still looking away and she didn’t see it. I sent the DI out again.

We were standing beside an open door to an unoccupied office. I ushered Hera inside. The DI came back with a new set of records even before the door was closed. At my invitation, Hera sat in the guest chair, her hands fidgeting restlessly in her lap. I perched on the edge of the desk, scanning the records, trying to stay calm, but my DI wasn’t fooled. It sensed my stress and sent the paralytic ribbon creeping down my arm and into my palm.

“Let’s talk about your brother.”

Hera’s hands froze in her lap. “My brother? You must know already. He’s dead . . . he died like Key.”

“You used to be a city councilor.”

“I resigned from the council.”

I nodded. “As a councilor you were required to host visitors . . . but you haven’t allowed a ghost in your atrium since your brother’s arrest.”

“Those things don’t matter to me anymore.”

“You also haven’t upgraded your defensive Makers, and you haven’t been scanned—”

“I’m not a criminal, Zeke. I just . . . I just want to do my job, and be left alone.”

“Hera? You’ve been harboring your brother’s ghost, haven’t you? And he didn’t like it, when you started seeing Key.”

The DI showed me the flush of hot and cold across her skin. “No,” she whispered. “No. He’s dead, and I wouldn’t do that.”

She was lying. “Hera, is your atrium quirked? To let your brother’s ghost take over sometimes?”

She looked away. “Wouldn’t that be illegal?”

“Giving up your body to another? Yes, it would be.”

Her hands squeezed hard against the armrests of the chair. “It was him, then? That’s what you’re saying?” She turned to look at me, despair in her eyes. “He filed the complaint against Tish?”

I nodded. “I knew it wasn’t you speaking to me that day. I think he also used you to sabotage Key’s railcar, knowing I’d have to look into it.”

“And Robin?” she asked, her knuckles whitening as she gripped the chair.

“Ask him.”

Earlier, I’d asked the DI to bring me a list of all the trained molecular designers in Nahiku, but I’d asked the wrong question. I queried it again, asking for all the designers in the past five years. This time, mine wasn’t the only name.

“Ask him for the design of the assault Maker, Hera. Robin doesn’t deserve to die.”

I crouched in front of her, my hand on hers as I looked up into her stunned eyes. It was a damned stupid position to put myself into.

He took over. It took a fraction of a second. My DI didn’t catch it, but I saw it happen. Her expression hardened and her knee came up, driving hard into my chin. As my head snapped back he launched Hera against me. At that point it didn’t matter that I outweighed her by forty percent. I was off balance and I went down with her on top of me. Her forehead cracked against my nose, breaking it.

He wasn’t trying to escape. There was no way he could. It was only blind rage that drove him. He wanted to kill me, for all the good it would do. I was a cop. I had backups. I couldn’t lose more than a few days. But he could still do some damage before he was brought down.

I felt Hera’s small hands seize my wrists. He was trying to keep me from using the ribbon arsenal, but Hera wasn’t nearly strong enough for that. I tossed her off, and not gently. The back of her head hit the floor, but she got up again almost as fast as I did and scrambled for the door.

I don’t know what he intended to do, what final vengeance he hoped for. One more murder, maybe. Tishembra and Robin were both just across the hall.

I grabbed Hera, dragged her back, and slammed her into the chair. Then I raised my hand. The DI controlled the ribbon. Fibers along its length squeezed hard, sending a fine mist across Hera’s face. It got in her eyes and in her lungs. She reared back, but then she collapsed, slumping in the chair. I wiped my bloody nose on my sleeve and waited until her head lolled against her chest. Then I sent a DI to Red Star.

I’d need help extracting the data from her quirked atrium, and combing through it for the assault Maker’s design file.

It took a few days, but Robin was recovered. When he gets cranky at night he still tells Tishembra she’s “wrong,” but he’s only three. Soon he won’t remember what she was like before, while I pretend it doesn’t matter to me.

Tishembra knows that isn’t true. She complains the laws are too strict, that citizens should be free to make their own choices. Me, I’m just happy Glory Mina let me stay on as Nahiku’s watch officer. Glory likes reminding me how lucky I am to have the position. I like to remind her that I’ve finally turned into the uncompromising jackboot she always knew I could be.

Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to help Hera, but she’d been harboring a fugitive for three years. There was nothing I could do for her, but I won’t let anyone else in this city step over the line. I don’t want to sit through another execution.

Nahiku isn’t quite bankrupt yet. Glory assessed a minimal fine for Hera’s transgression, laying most of the fault on the police since we’d failed to hunt down all ghosts of a condemned criminal. So the city won’t be sold off, and Tishembra will have to wait to get free.

I don’t think she minds too much.

Here. Now. This is enough. I only wonder: Can we make it last?

Copyright © 2012 by Linda Nagata. First published in Analog Science Fiction, October 2012.

About the Author

Linda Nagata is a Nebula and Locus-award-winning author. She’s spent most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, and a programmer of database-driven websites. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

Her most recent work is The Red trilogy, a series of near-future military thrillers published by Saga Press/Simon & Schuster. The first book in the trilogy, The Red: First Light, was named as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2015. “Nahiku West” marked her return to writing short fiction after a twelve-year hiatus. It’s set in the story world of her Nanotech Succession novels, and looks at the early life of a minor character from her novel, The Bohr Maker. The story was runner up for the 2013 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

Lion Walk

Mary Rosenblum

Tahira Ghani stared down at all that was left of the trespasser, the stunner pointed down at the summer yellow grass. The big California condor she had interrupted spread it’s huge stretch of wings and gave a reproachful squawk, scattering the smaller turkey vultures. A hot breeze washed their carrion scent over her, but she barely noticed. The pride probably hadn’t left much and the coy-dogs—well on their way to emulating the Pleistocene wild dogs—had cleaned up whatever the lions hadn’t eaten before the vultures even had a chance. She squatted beside the mess, smelling a trace of blood, spilled gut, lion, and the musky tang of violent death on the hot wind. A torn, bloodstained piece of black fabric fluttered in the breeze, snagged on a hawthorn. Flies swarmed over the few vertebrae and the piece of a rib that remained, the rags of flesh dark red-brown now, the color of old blood. A strand of auburn hair caught her eye, tangled among grass stems. Long. A woman? Like the other one. Caucasian this time. She read the diary of last night in the scuffed ground where the lions had killed, the tracks leading to it, faint on the dry grass, human prints overlaid with lion. She squatted, the stunner in one hand, her dun suncloth coverall hot against her thighs. Laid her fingertips lightly on the double imprint; woman, lion. Brought her hand to her mouth and touched her tongue to her fingertips, tasting dust, dead leaves, and lion.

Running. No shoes. Tahira stood, wiped her fingers on her coverall and circled the dusty patch of ground that gave up this information, shaded her eyes to stare at the single print, the faint ovals of toes, ball of foot. No blood, so she hadn’t been barefoot long. Frowning, she searched the prairie bisected by the willow-clad banks of the river. Maybe the intruder had thought the river could save her. Barefoot? In the distance, beyond the summer yellow grass and white fluff of the seeding thistles, the stark peaks of the Rockies jutted against the cloudless sky. Once they had had snow on them, even in the summer. Not in her lifetime. Her frown deepened as she studied the marks where the lions had lain to eat. Coy-dog tracks pocked the dust and flattened grass, along with the prints of the turkey vultures. The condor had chased them away and now they circled patiently overhead waiting for her to leave. By tomorrow, you’d find no traces to prove that someone had died and the lions had eaten here.

Tahira’s frown deepened as she used her link to video the site. She dug into her daypack for a plastic bag, waved the blow flies from the vertebrae and carefully bagged them. Plenty of flesh for a DNA identification. If this trespasser had wanted to be eaten, she could not have done a better job of placing herself in the old lioness’s path.

Just like the other one.

Tahira collected the fabric and hair, added them to the bag, then trudged back to her skimmer, stowed the stunner in the scabbard beneath the saddle and climbed aboard. The vultures were already descending, dodging the condor’s half-hearted feints, squabbling as they searched for overlooked scraps, their huge black wings raising dust from the scuffed ground. She pulled out her link and texted a report of the intruder’s death to her boss. Then she frowned at the screen and turned it off. He’ll scream about the PR aspects. Not now.

The fabric, torn, dirty, and bloody as it was, had had the feel of silk, the sexy kind of shirt you might buy to wear for a lover. Tahira toed the skimmer to life and lifted gently from the riverbank.

Thoughtfully, she pulled her AR goggles on and zoomed in on the ground as she spiraled slowly outward from the site of the killing, reading the night’s traffic in the bent grass stems, the wisp of tan hair snagged on a tangle of riverbank willow.

She knew where this pride would be lying up, didn’t need to search for their signatures with the tracking software. Every major mammal in the Pleistocene Preserve was chipped, from coy-dogs to the new pair of giant sloths that had the gene engineers popping champagne corks, but after her years here, she rarely needed to use a chip to find what she was looking for.

Tahira accelerated until the wind pulled her lips back from her teeth. Not one Perimeter alarm had gone off last night. Same with the last one.

Tahira spied a patch of tawny hide in the shade beneath a clump of hawthorn a split second before the goggles ringed it with red and flashed an ID number above it. She braked hard, spiraled back and down. That was the small male, the one with the ragged ear, one of the old lioness’s last surviving cubs. He was a classic African type, with a full tawny mane and only a hint of the Pleistocene striping and narrower head. Which meant he was on the cull list. Like the old lioness. The IDs of the rest of the pride flashed into view. Right where she knew they would be. The old lioness was on her feet, looking up at the skimmer, her scarred face and faded, ratty fur a testament to her age. She was smart and she learned quickly. An offering like the girl would have been too good to pass up the first time. This second offering would have been easier to take.

Tahira sighed, and spun the skimmer away, out over the broad plain of yellow summer grass patched with the dusty gray green of hawthorn and the darker junipers. A small herd of antelope raised their heads as she soared over, tails flashing nervously. The big herd would be farther north, she’d check on them as she circled home. A hawk soared at eye level as she rose, turned its attention back to the ground, searching for rodents flushed by the antelope below. Tahira checked on the horse herd, found them southward, watering at the grassy back of the narrow river, whose waters ran clear and dark. Automatically, she noted the dwindling feeder stream that would be down to a trickle in another month. No glaciers to keep rivers running out here, not anymore. Dark tails whisked their dun sides and they stamped dark-striped legs at the biting flies. The gene engineers were winning here, too. They had engineered the original Przewalksi’s horse into a chunky look-alike to the horses that had grazed this plain in the Pleistocene. They were working hard on the elephants now. Some of the recent calves were going to be huge and hairy. She did a quick count of the herd using her link software to scan the GPS chips, although she really didn’t need to. She’d have all the numbers available from the daily sat-scan when she got back to Admin. She didn’t have to do the rounds in person at all, but she liked to see for herself.

And the last body hadn’t showed up on the Security report at Admin. She suspected this one wouldn’t either.

The lead mare raised her head as she circled. The lame filly was gone, probably brought down by the same lion pride that had taken the trespasser. They would have gotten the filly long ago except that the old lead mare was her dam and had protected her foal fiercely, with the whole herd to back her up. Luck must have aided the pride. The old lioness was showing her age, and avoided the hard kills now.

So she had taken the meal that had walked up and asked to be eaten.

How in the name of all that was unholy had the trespasser gotten past the Perimeter?

Tahira kicked the skimmer to high speed, circled south to where the bison herd grazed the lowlands, their huge, erect horns another testament to the geneticists wizardry. The eastern elephant troop was hanging around there right now, close enough to the monorail to give the tourists a good show. Sure enough, a train had stopped and even at her height and speed she could make out the passengers hanging out the windows, pointing their links. Their tour goggles would pick out the hairy Mastodon-type calves for them and explain in a pleasant voice how the engineers were tweaking the genome. The old cow raised her trunk to blow at Tahira as she skimmed by, then went back to scooping dust from the wallow they’d created, tossing it in ochre showers over her back. Tahira didn’t see any of the camels, but they were probably all back in trees, out of the sun. They, too, were changing. The old lioness was the only remaining lion that carried wholly African genes, had been wild-caught as a cub.

Tahira liked her for that.

With a sigh, Tahira grounded the skimmer to text a quick report on her find to her boss. Then she shut off the link before he could reply and swung the skimmer northward to find the big antelope herd.

The sun was dipping toward the horizon by the time she returned to Admin. Only the solar farm beyond the low, ochre buildings, row upon row of collectors following the sun, spelled ‘tech.’ The earth-brick buildings might have been built by some primitive peoples, blending gently into the summer prairie. Tech was pretty much invisible now—except in the dry lands where the ranked mirrors of the solar farms and the wind towers had supplanted juniper and sage. But nobody went out there. Her village would have suited this landscape, she thought. Huts decaying slowly into the shriveling desert that had once fed lions and antelope and people. Tahira set the skimmer down hard and fast on the small landing pad behind the building. The trickle of water down the central interior water-wall washed a breath of moist cool and greenery-scent over her as she entered, tempting her to strip, shower, and sit in the pool. She ached after her full day on the skimmer. Once upon a time, she had not ached. It was time to make another appointment at the geri clinic. Or perhaps not. Every cycle had a natural end. Well, perhaps that was no longer true. Tahira sighed at the angry blink of the red priority icon above the holo deck.

She ignored it and instead seated herself on her working cushion, doing full lotus for concentration. Called up Security. Some eye somewhere must have seen the girl last night. She started a search for predator-prey movement, narrowed the profile to a human’s mass. No point in watching rodents and coy-dogs. That got her lions, antelope, bison calves. A headache blossomed behind her eyes as the images flickered through her field.

Then . . . there she was. Shadowy, slender, her arms, neck, face, legs stark white in the night-eye recording, that black shirt that would be torn and bloodied revealing a deep cleavage and breasts that were small enough to be natural, not sculpted. Tahira’s eyes narrowed. Short shorts, sexy clothes, nothing you’d wear into the thorny scrub of the Preserve. Sandals, so she had lost them, running. No blood on that white skin. She hadn’t waded through the hawthorn then. How old? Sixteen? No, she decided. Less. Maybe fourteen. That was how old her daughter had been, last time she had seen her. Tahira tasted blood, realized she was biting her lip. She watched the girl wince, bend a slender leg to rub at something—thorn or bite. She looked lost. Pissed. Stood up by a date pissed.

Then, her expression changed from lost-and-angry to startled. Then frightened. She looked around and for an instant her eyes seemed to meet Tahira’s. Accusingly.

Like an antelope, she turned and bolted, running through the grass and thorns. One of the sandals flew off, a twinkle of motion on the screen.

“Don’t run.” Tahira said out loud.

In the holo field the girl kept running and in a second vanished from the eye’s sweep.

Tahira found herself standing. Muttered a curse. She skimmed to the next eye, which should have picked up the girl’s panicked flight and probably the kill, since it covered that sector.

It showed her grass, scrub, the scurry of a small rodent, the silent float of an owl. The small dying shriek of the rodent made her flinch, then she skimmed back through that eye’s sequence.

Nothing. She slowed the segment, watched the owl creep across the scene. Frowned. Seed heads bowed the grass. This species had finished seeding weeks ago and the seed heads had shattered, spilling their ripe seeds.

She copied and filed both sequences and had the station AI code them for search identification. Then she set the AI searching the Preserve’s security base for an exact match to the quiet scene recorded by the second eye. Within a minute, a 99% match popped up in her holo field. Side by side, two owls floated and twin shrieks split the quiet. She checked the properties. Yep. The scene had been recorded five weeks ago, on a quiet night with . . . she checked . . . no Security alerts, not even a native antelope bumping the Perimeter fence.

For several moments, she frowned at the now-frozen images, then blanked them. This time, she directed her AI to match the visual image of the girl running, but she directed it to search the web, excluding only the Preserve data files.

That search was going to take some time.

With a sigh, she emailed the video of the girl and the twin owl sequences to her boss, then reached into the holo field to touch the angry, blinking priority icon.

It took five full minutes for Carlo to appear. Which meant he was probably in bed. With someone. He had just spent a week at a body-spa and he was probably trying out the upgrades. Tahira braced herself as Carlo’s face and torso appeared in the field, yes, wrapped in a silken robe, his usually-perfect hair tousled. “About time.” His eyes narrowed. “Where were you? I called you as soon as I got your report but your link didn’t answer.”

“Checking the range.”

“You have software to do that.”

“The software didn’t find her. I did.”

“Has the media gotten hold of this?” Carlo looked over his shoulder, back to her, lowered his voice. “I assume not, or my interface would have picked it up and alerted me.” His dark eyes snapped. “All right. This time, you need to find out how the trespasser got in. And why Security failed to alert you. Again. Meanwhile, you will euthanize the lions involved. As insurance against media clamor. We will have done all we could do.”

“It’s not the lions’ fault.” Tahira shook her head. “The girl was meant to run into them. She was dropped right in front of them.”

“What do you mean she was dropped?” He ran a hand through his hair. “Make sense, Tahira, will you?”

“She was dropped.” Tahira bit the words off. “By a skimmer, helicopter. Something. She was in sandals. Bedroom type. I just emailed you the Security clip that did pick her up. And the clip that was used to replace most of the visuals.”

He stared at her. “That’s unbelievable.” He chopped her words aside with the flat of his hand. “Do you know how much it would cost to do that kind of hack job? Worry about the Perimeter security. Something is down. The lion euthanasia shows the public that we’re doing a good job of dealing with this. The US media will howl if they get hold of this. You know how they feel about the Preserve.”

Yes, she knew.

“I can sacrifice you or I can sacrifice a lion or two. You decide, Tahira.” Carlo’s eyes narrowed. “And before you say anything, you’re a hell of a lot more valuable to me than the lions, they’re breeding just fine. Besides, as soon as the genetics geeks get their Panthera leo atrox phenotype we won’t use African lions anymore anyway. So let’s just call it moot and drop it.” He glanced over his shoulder again and his mouth tightened briefly. Turned back to Tahira. “I am ordering you to euthanize a lion that killed this person. Make sure you get a DNA match so we can prove it, and I’ll leave it to you to get the right one. I’ll let you claim it was a rogue animal and make it plausible.”

He was giving her a lot. Carlo could have demanded the whole pride—the media would press for it. He could have fired her. “Can we talk about how this girl got in here? She was a girl, Carlo. Dressed for a hot date. Go take a look at that clip I sent you. She did not hike in from the Perimeter. I think that’s a bit more important than pleasing the media.”

“No, it’s not.” Carlo cut her off with another chop of his aristocratic hand. “If we’re lucky, nobody will pick it up. Make sure you secure those video files. The administrative contract for the Preserve comes up for renewal in one month. The US will push hard to take it over, as usual. If you want a job a month from now, you’d better hope the World Council thinks we’re doing a good job here and doesn’t award the contract somewhere else.” The holo field blanked.

Tahira stared into the opalescent shimmer.

He was right. The vast Preserve, the huge central section of the US that had been restored to its Pleistocene ecology, including megafauna and the species that had inhabited this land millions of years ago, was part of a giant experiment in ecological climate control. And genetic engineering. And a huge tourist draw, which the US did like. A lot of countries were uneasy about it, seeing a threat to their own grasslands and dwindling wildlands as the growing Gaiist movement used carbon credit leverage to pressure for more preservation. Too much media outcry and the US might garner enough support to end the Preserve and take over control of the huge area again, never mind the carbon credits they’d then owe. It was a matter of national pride, she thought sourly. That had always transcended logic.

She made herself a pot of very black tea and began to go through the security records for the past twenty-four hours, searching for human-sized mass or any sign of a small-craft landing. As the sun cleared the horizon, she finally shut down her station and stumbled off to her small room behind the water-wall, sprawling sweaty and fully clothed across her bed.

No airspace invasion, no vehicles, nobody on foot. Maybe the girl had teleported in. She laughed sourly. Sure.

Just like the last one.

“Tahira? Hey, Tahira, are you okay?”

Jen’s voice. Tahira blinked crusted eyes, swimming up from a deep pool of sleep and dreams she couldn’t remember but that had stalked her like lions. “Late night.” She realized that she had spoken in Sotho, switched to English. “Sorry. I just need some tea.” She sat up, stiff and sticky in her dirty clothes, rubbed her eyes.

“I already made you some.” Jen stood in the doorway, nervous, a mug in one hand. “When you didn’t hear me come in I figured you really needed tea.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Tahira got up, glad that she hadn’t stripped last night and took the mug. “I appreciate it.” She gave him a smile because this too-earnest graduate student had tried to climb into her bed a week ago, never mind the age difference. And her ‘no thanks’ had apparently bruised him. She swallowed a stinging gulp of the strong-enough tea, gave Jen a nod of approval. Usually, he made it too weak.

“You got official mail.” Jen stood just outside the door, as if a strand of Perimeter fencing blocked it, his beaded and braided, silver-white hair—stark contrast to his tawny skin and intended to be sexy—swinging forward around his face with his nod. “Security seal. Looks important.”

“Yeah.” Tahira drank more tea. The official execution orders. “We had another trespasser last night.”

“You’re kidding.” Jen’s eyes got round. “No, you’re not. Another . . . another kill? What are we going to do about it?”

She brushed past him, angry because two plus two was a simple equation. But guilt stabbed her. He had brought strong tea. And he didn’t really understand the Preserve politics. She paused, looked back and shrugged. “I’ll have to kill one of the lions of course. Even though it wasn’t really their fault.”

The information didn’t move him, but why should it? He was a graduate student, studying the symbiosis of lions and one of the predatory wasp species. Esoteric stuff. A study that provided a comfortable living and yielded information. Lions were just the food providers for his wasps, who laid their eggs in the larvae of a biting fly that pestered the lions. And the wasps were just a day job, a means to an income. He’d study whatever he was paid to study. She sighed. “Come have some breakfast with me, eh? I found a fresh guinea hen nest yesterday.”

She softboiled the small, tan eggs and they ate them together as she listened to him prattle on about his wasp collecting, larvae counts, population fluctuations. When he left on his skimmer, with his collecting nets, sample bags, and a stunner, Tahira stripped and scrubbed herself clean of last night’s sweat and the smell of violent death. She stripped the bed, tossed the dirty sheets into the sonic cleaner, and padded barefoot, in a clean shift, to the lab refrigerator where she had stored the trespasser’s bones. The bag containing the black shirt lay on the floor beside the refrigerator. She picked it up, smoothed out the torn and blood-stiffened fabric within its plastic shroud. Why did you come here? She spoke silently to the girl’s spirit. The lioness’s killing was innocent. My killing of the lioness will not be innocent and it will be my burden not yours. Anger burned through her. “Your death was not innocent,” she said aloud. “You brought it with you and left it like poison on innocent ground.”

But her own words sounded hollow and that image nagged at her . . . the ‘where’s my date?’ body language, that single, decorative sandal tumbling through the air, bright against the stark night-vision landscape. Dropping the shirt, she took out the bag with the vertebrae and hair and got to work.

The first thing she did was file a full report to the local Sheriff’s Department. That meant the media would have the news within the hour. The Sheriff’s security leaked like a sieve. Next, she started the DNA scan. She was only required to run a minimal ID scan, but she did a full analysis. The longer she spent on this easily-rationalized task, the longer she could put off the euthanasia. By noon, her back ached from standing and the building’s major-domo announced Deputy Malthers. Shawn. He always handled Preserve issues. She sent the data to her personal workspace and shut down the lab, retreating into the main room and the cool breath of water-wall. “Come in.” She admitted him and he sighed in the cool air, removing his hat, half moons of sweat darkening the tan sun-cloth of his uniform.

“Tahira.” He nodded, his weathered face closed and cautious. “You had an intruder, huh?” Another one, his eyes accused. “Supposedly your fence is tight. Do I have to worry about lions in the hotel lobbies?”

“You know you don’t, Shawn.” Tahira studied the tight lines around his eyes. “The Perimeter isn’t porous—to animals. Who chewed on you?”

“My boss, the Sheriff. The governor chewed on him.” He sighed and tossed his hat onto the corner of the table. “He’s getting more pressure from the Take Back America people. They got the news even before the media could post it on the net. Can I have a glass of water?” He gave her a plaintive look. “I know you run a tight ship, Tahira, but jeeze, two deaths in two months? This is too good for the media to pass up. You should see the hit rates.”

“Sit down. I’m sorry.” She headed for the kitchen. “I didn’t get much sleep. Did you get the DNA scan I sent your office?” She carried two full glasses and a pitcher of water back, set the tray on the low table near her work field.

“Yeah. No match.” He took a glass, drank half of it in long, gulping swallows. Wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “She’s not a missing person. I sent it to the national DNA database, but you know how long that takes.” He rolled his eyes. “They’ve got a six month backlog and that’s just on violent crime. I still haven’t heard back on our first Jane Doe.”

At least he had said ‘our’, although technically, the Preserve was administered by the World Council and not under local jurisdiction. Still, the World Council liked to let local law deal with matters if at all possible. Tahira sat down on her cushion. The holo field shimmered to life and she opened the data file, staring thoughtfully as the letters, numbers, and icons winked like emerging stars.

“I know her.” She spoke to the galaxy of numbers and icons—the translation of those rags of flesh and bits of bone. “She grew up in a slum.” The heavy metal load in her hair could only belong to a child of the unclensed suburban wasteland. “She was very young, less than sixteen, I am guessing. European, probably Scotch-Irish, no Asian or African genes, minimum melanin.” Her skin would have been very fair and the red in her hair was natural beneath its cheap dye. Poor all her life, considering the uncorrected genetic predisposition to cholesterol and cancer. She would not have had an uncomplicated middle age, if she had lived. She would have died young, relatively speaking. Unless she earned the money for genetic repair. “Look at this.” She called up the security clip, ran it. Listened to Malthers’ soft indrawn breath.

“She didn’t expect lions.” His face was grim. “And she sure didn’t get lost from one of your tours, huh?”

“Nobody gets lost from our tours.” Tahira shook her head. “And no, she did not expect lions.”

“You got any ideas?”

“This cost a lot of money.” She looked at him. “Hacking our security. It would be expensive. We do not use cheap security.”

He was looking at her quizzically, his thick brows drawn down over those so very blue eyes.

“Some things,” she said slowly, remembering, “don’t change.”

“Like what?”

Her link chimed. “I have a tour scheduled.” She stood, feeling age in her bones, even though they worked perfectly, levering her young-muscled body erect. As if invisible teleomeres were shortening, ticking like a clock. “I have to go. If I find anything out, I will email you.”

He headed for the door, paused to look back. “Stop by the office.” Those so blue eyes fixed on her face. “I’ll buy you a beer.” The door closed behind him, breathing hot dust into the room.

The tour was an expensive one, which was why she had to lead it. It would be a package with a hotel, maybe a body spa, the Preserve and a tour conducted personally by the Manager. That was her. Her contract specified how many of these she had to do each month. Originally, Carlo had suggested she wear native dress. When she had told him that would be a ragged T-shirt with the name of a football team on it, he had shut up and not mentioned it again. The tourists were waiting beside their air-conditioned tour bus, looking around at the dusty little compound, pointing their links at the buildings, the guinea hens scratching in the shade. The link videoed the image and instantly searched the web for a match, downloading informational links. The life cycle of the guinea hen, the history of the Preserve, the blueprints for the buildings, if you wanted to look at them. Their tour guide spotted her and said something. Instantly they all, nearly in unison, pointed their links at her.

A part of her wanted to duck, as if they were pointing weapons. The gesture was, her hindbrain told her, the same. Was it, she wondered briefly, that this pointing of links to acquire information was a hostile act? Or was it that the men who had fired on the refugees when she was a child hadn’t been hostile, had treated the dealing of death as casually as these tourists treated the gathering of information? She didn’t know, hid her flinch and smiled for them as the guide did the introduction that they weren’t listening to. Their eyes were on their links as she downloaded onto their screens life and death, love and loss, success and failure, rendered in text and images. She climbed onto the bus after them, took the plush seat up front, facing them. The guide sat beside her in the other rear-facing seat. Some of the tourists were from off-planet, perhaps one of the orbital platforms or perhaps even Mars. They had brown skin, lighter than her Lesotho skin, but their bodies seemed frail, out of proportion. They looked at her, eyes bright.

They did not look quite human.

“Go straight out of the compound and take the first right,” she told the driver, who was a regular. “We’ll take the road down along the river.”

“We’re here to see the Mastodon calves.” One of the off-planet tourists looked up from her link. “The park map IDs them to the west, over in the hills.”

“The old cow always brings them down to their favorite place on the river at dusk, to drink.” Tahira spoke patiently. “You’ll have time to stretch your legs and have some dinner before they show up.”

“Why don’t we just go where they are?” Someone else spoke up.

“Our rhythms are more flexible than those of the animals.” She kept her voice patient. “They know we will be there at the river, we are usually there, that does not bother them. It is familiar. If we arrive unexpectedly in an unusual place . . . they will be bothered. And that is unhealthy.”

That didn’t satisfy all of them but she didn’t expect it to.

“Hey.” A woman with a very young face, golden skin, and hair as silvery white as Jen looked up from her screen. “I just got a newsfeed . . . a tourist got killed by a lion! Last night! This is the second lion kill!”

Murmurs swept the bus and all eyes focused on the link screens.

“It wasn’t a tourist.” Her words fell like stones into the murmur and eyes pried themselves from link screens. “A young woman was dropped from a hovercraft for the lions to find.” She spoke into silence now. All eyes were on her and somehow, this felt no different than the pointed links. “She was intended to die. Someone videoed her death. That person will sell the video for a lot of money. Violent death is very valuable. It is an ugly trade.” Only the purr of the bus’s power plant could be heard now. “But it is a very old trade. No matter. I saw the vehicle that brought her, I saw the person who operated it. I observe that lion pride every night and I was there in the darkness. He will be caught.”

“That’s not on the newsfeed.” The accusatory voice came from the rear of the bus. From one of the off-worlders. Tahira shrugged. “I did not tell the media this. But you are safe.” Her smile was genuine this time. “The lion pride does not water where we will be. This is not their territory.”

She wasn’t sure if they were relieved or disappointed. She cut off their questions by launching into her usual lecture, pointing out the changing ecosystem—it had not reached full climax equilibrium yet—directing their links to the coy-dog family holed up in the shade, waiting the cool of evening. The puppies were playing a game of tug with a scrap of dirty hide and links bristled, zooming in to record. The larger animals were all chipped so the links would offer up the ID information for each animal, their stage of development toward the Pleistocene ideal as the engineers evolved them into their own ancestors.

Voyeurs, she thought as they pointed and murmured. An observable reality, but not personal. Not threatening.

She politely refused to say any more about the death, telling them only that the authorities would handle it. The tourists were distracted by the smaller horse herd. One of the young stallions had been challenging the herd sire over the past few weeks and he chose this day to take his challenge to a new level. Dust rose in tan clouds as the two horses circled and feinted, ears flat, striking snake-like for a bite, whirling to kick. This time, the youngster wasn’t backing down and the two stallions rose, chest to chest, teeth bared. “These horses are very much like the Equus verae, the horses that grazed this plane a million years ago. If you’ll put on your glasses, you’ll be able to identify the young male.” She paused while the tourists all fumbled for the glasses they’d been given at the start. They were slaved to hers. She IDed the young male by chip number and a green halo instantly surrounded him. “This young stallion was foaled four years ago in the spring. The engineers believe that he is a good likeness of the original Equus verae. All the stock began with Przewalksi’s Horse, the last truly wild horse species.” They were all watching now, as the stallions shouldered and circled, wheeling to kick, or rearing to feint and bite at each other’s faces. Tahira stifled a sigh. “The herd sire is nearly ten years old. That’s a long life for a herd sire.” The young challenger had been born of artificial insemination with the new, improved genes. If the old herd sire didn’t get ousted soon, she’d have to help a new challenger along. “This is not reality,” she murmured. “It is our version of reality.”

“Pardon?” One of the off-worlders had moved to the front of the bus for a better look, was pointing his link at the fight, recording.

“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I was just talking to myself.”

“It’s so . . . uncontrolled.” He had friendly dark eyes and a wide smile that made his too-fragile body seem less different. “Hard to imagine living in a world this . . . chaotic.”

“It’s not chaotic,” she said softly. “Only humans are chaotic.”

The horses saved her from the questions surfacing in his eyes. The young stallion whirled as the herd sire struck and his heels caught the herd sire full in the face. They heard the thud of hoof on bone, even at this distance, and the sire went down in a cloud of dust. He struggled instantly to his feet, but his jaw looked twisted and blood darkened the dun hide. A low murmur of horror washed through the bus.

“What now?” The white-haired woman’s voice rose over the babble. “What will happen now?”

“This was an accident. Fights like this rarely result in serious injury.” Tahira blocked the tourist glasses, but had her own zoom in on the injured stallion. No point in showing them the bloody details up close. The youngster had run him a few meters from the mares and now trotted back and forth, tossing his head, tail erect as the ousted sire stood with head drooping. She winced at the white gleam of either bone or teeth visible in the bloody mess of his face. Violence seemed to be gathering over the Preserve like a dark cloud. “His jaw is broken.” She didn’t need the text diagnosis scrolling across the visual field. “He won’t be able to eat. The lions will probably kill him, or even the wild dogs. This coy-dog is heavier than the old North American coyotes and they hunt in small packs. They occasionally kill large prey species, mostly when the animal is weak or crippled.”

“Why don’t you do something about it?” A woman spoke up, her voice shrill.

“You could take him in and heal him, right?”

“And what will the lions eat tonight?” Tahira faced the woman, watched horror and anger ripple across her features. “These are not our rules. They are much older than us,” she said gently. “That is what the Preserve is all about . . . returning to the old rules. Without the horse, a lion cub may die because of insufficient nutrition.” She waited for the horrified comments to ebb. You could hear the excitement beneath the horror. Now they had a prize in the video files they’d just uploaded to their personal space—something to show proudly to friends, so they could commiserate over that raw moment of blood, and pain, and imminent death. The woman who had spoken up wasn’t satisfied. She was talking about cruelty and emails to powerful people.

“Did you make this happen for us?” The off-worlder was looking at her, and his eyes were shocked and cold.

“No.” She met those eyes, saw her own reflection in them, tiny and perfect. “But I knew the old stallion would be forced out sooner or later. The horses decided to make it happen now. The kick was a freak accident. Horses are good at dodging.”

He didn’t believe her. You cannot conceive of no control, she thought. And wondered suddenly if her daughter had gone off-planet. The Council Security Forces were everywhere. She had never thought of that before, and it chilled her, she was not quite sure why. She would be much older than this man, now.

They moved on and the tour guide, a seasoned professional, texted her a request to show them something to change the now-soured mood. She had anticipated this and had already called up her inventory. “Turn left just past that clump of willow . . . yes, there.”

The bus took the dirt track easily, it’s off-road suspension barely sloshing the drinks that the attendant was handing out. “The engineers have had excellent success with the long-horned bison. They are very like the bison that grazed this plain during the Pleistocene. Three cows have calved this month and the latest was last night. She scanned for the IDs, found the three cows in close proximity 200 meters from the road. “They’re out in the grass, so we can watch them without disturbing them. If you’ll look through the left windows and follow the arrow directions on your glasses, they’ll direct you to the calves.” A green arrow winked on her glasses, pointing to the right and as she turned her head, it was replaced by one pointing straight up. She lifted her head, and there, in the distance, she spied the small black dots that were the grazing bison. The bus had come to a halt. “Have you all found the bison?” She waited while the slow ones fumbled their way to the bison herd. Zoom while they were panning and they’d get sick every time. “Okay, here we go.” The field blurred and suddenly seemed to be rushing toward her. The tiny specks enlarged, became a dozen shaggy brown beasts with their noses in the sun-burned grass, backs dotted with cowbirds. Small white herons stalked among them, snatching up beetles and the occasional rodent stirred up by the bison’s hooves. Their long horns gleamed in the sun as they tossed their heads at flies.

The newborn calf hugged his mother’s flank, his horns mere bumps. He suddenly butted beneath her flank, tail wriggling as he nursed. The collective sigh from the tourists made the guide breathe his own sigh of relief, she noted. Well, upset guests would hardly give him a fat tip. She let them watch the two older calves butt heads and the herd even obliged by grazing closer to the bus. By the time they moved on to the elephant watching spot for cocktails and their gourmet dinner, the mood was festive once more, the injured stallion forgotten.

Tomorrow, she would go check on him. Assure herself that the predators had found him. Injured as he was, the dog pack that patrolled that territory would almost certainly take him, but perhaps not right away. She called up that sector, scanned the predator inventory. To her relief, the lions were headed in that direction. They should get to him quickly.

During dinner they lucked out and a scimitar cat—quite shy and a rare sighting—chose that night to come down to the river to drink. The tourists flocked to the windows, their links pointing as they videoed in night mode. The elephants showed on time and the new Mammoth type calf went so far as to walk nearly up to the bus, trunk lifted in curiosity, before his mother shooed him nervously away, and stomped a threat toward them, her ears erect, trunk curled back like a cobra.

The tour guide looked pleased, as if Tahira had orchestrated the whole show. Tahira sat back in her seat as they returned to the compound in the gathering darkness, answering questions, giving small lectures on the history of the Preserve, the geneticists’ work, the effect of the huge preserve areas on climate stability. They asked occasional questions about the injured stallion.

No one brought up the dead girl. Not one.

She climbed down from the bus into the cooling night beneath the white arch of the Milky Way and a sliver of new moon. They would go back to the comfort of the resort to have dessert and drinks and to compare video clips. The tour guide gave her a wide grin and a wave as the door closed, anticipating good tips, obviously.

Jen would have left for the day and she would have the place to herself.

You have a visitor, the door murmured as she reached the verandah. He had an official security pass to enter. His personal ID is blocked. “I know who it is.” She sighed, then straightened her shoulders. “Open.”

“What the hell is going on, Tahira?” Detective Malthers levered himself up from the sofa in the main room. “Do you know just how much trouble you’re going to cause me when my boss starts getting the feeds?”

“He has his link shut off tonight? I would have thought he’d have the news already.” She headed for the kitchen wall, thirsty. “And if I protest your use of a security pass to override my door lock, I hope you can produce the warrant.” She closed her eyes as he seized her arm. Halted. “Shawn . . . I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” He spun her around to face him, his face pale. “You withheld information from me? You lied to me about that girl’s death? And then you spill it to a bunch of tourists?” His nostrils were pinched. “You’d damn well better be sorry.”

Some of them had certainly blogged from the bus. She had counted on that. She met his eyes. “I did not lie to you.”

“Then why did you tell them . . . ” His eyes narrowed and he let go of her arm. “No way. No way you do that.”

“Do what?” She widened her eyes. “If I tell a story to tourists to enliven their trip and they exaggerate it in their personal blogs, this is not a crime. Your boss can deny whatever he wishes to deny and if the outcry is loud enough, my boss will probably fire me. Would you like some water?”

“What do you think you’re going to do?” His voice was harsh.

“Go to bed.” She filled a glass from the refrigerator tap, filled a second glass.

“I’m going to get a warrant for your arrest.” He ignored the proffered glass.

“On what grounds?” She raised an eyebrow. “I suspect your boss will not agree with you. It will be hard enough to deal with the media when they get hold of the tourists’ mistaken statements. It will be much worse if you have arrested the manager of the Preserve and then have to release her. Your boss is very conscious of his media image.”

“I’m staying here tonight.” He glared at her.

“Be my guest.” She shrugged. “I told you, I’m going to bed.”

“Good.” He stretched out on the sofa, his jaw set.

She turned her back on him and activated her holo-field. Checked the Preserve first. Minor Perimeter alerts only—a couple of licensed backcountry backpackers who had retreated when they triggered the broadcast security announcement, a small herd of pronghorn that moved off when the repulsion field activated, broadcasting an unpleasant sonic pulse that discouraged most wildlife and the occasional lost livestock. Nothing else. Red icons signaled stationary chips—indicating that a bearer hadn’t moved for twelve hours. That usually represented death or serious injury. She checked the IDs . . . all prey species except for one elephant from the northernmost herd. An old female, but not so old that she should be dying yet. The elephants and the larger predators had been implanted with biometric chips. Tahira checked it, found signs of physical distress, but no clear diagnosis. She transferred the ID to her link. She’d fly over in the morning and check on it, on her rounds to chip new births. See what had happened.

Her AI search of the Security video of the running girl had turned up a match. Eighty-nine percent. Tahira drew a deep breath, touched the green icon. A merchant site. Models? A naked woman lounged suggestively on a grizzly’s hide, caressing the dead, snarling face, tongue-tip peeking pink from lush, crimson lips. The secure interface requested a user ID and password. And a credit card. The entry fee made her purse her lips. She flagged the link, emailed it.

Malthers was peering at his link, his feet propped on the arm of the sofa. He looked up as she shut down her field. “What if the person who dropped her was a woman?” His eyes were hard.

She shrugged. “You are too tall for that sofa. Would you like me to inflate the guest bed?”

“No, thank you.” He went back to his link. “I don’t plan on sleeping.”

“While you are up, then, maybe you can see what’s for sale on the video sex markets. I just sent you a link that you might . . . find interesting. I don’t have the budget to access it.” She turned and went into her room. When she woke briefly in the middle of the night, the light in the main room was still on and he was sitting on the sofa, hunched over his link.

She slept without dreaming, after that, and when she woke, he was gone.

The door seal sighed as it released and Jen strode in, bringing a smell of hot noontime dust and heat, a hint of lion and sex. “Hey, how was your tour last night? Did they do a fancy spread?” He came up behind her, dropped his collecting bag onto the tiles with a small thump. “What’s with the reporters outside? The newsfeeds were full of the killing this morning. You were a witness? To the girl’s death?” His sandy brows arched over his pale eyes. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“I know I didn’t.” Tahira waved her hand through the field and the numbers and icons, the map of this girl’s history written in molecules, winked out. “Let’s not talk about it, okay?”

“You haven’t opened your secure email from the boss yet.”

“I know what it says.” She sighed.

“Tahira . . . ” His hands came to rest lightly on her shoulders. “I work with the lions, too. I can do this euthanasia for you. You don’t have to. Just give me the chip ID.”

His hands offered comfort not sex. She let her shoulders relax a bit beneath the warmth and acknowledged the small heat of desire between her legs. He was very pretty. He would try hard to please her in bed. Her shiver of anticipation made her . . . sad. She was old enough to be his grandmother. The flesh had its own morality. She sighed, and his hands slid from her shoulders as she rose. “I appreciate your offer.” She smiled for him. “But it is my duty. It is my failing that the girl was able to be here.”

“That’s not true.” He shook his head, frowning. “She bought hackware good enough to get through the Perimeter sensors. It’s happened before. Remember those rich kids that came in here with a rifle? Right after I started working here? The ones who thought they were going to kill an elephant? That’s not your responsibility—that’s the responsibility of the company that contracts security to the Preserve.”

“That’s not what happened.” Tahira blanked the icons with a wave of her hand. “This is not like those teenage poachers with their utterly inadequate rifles. I knew they were there.”

“So her hackware was better, that’s all.” Jen shrugged. “Come on, Tahira. Nobody is blaming you . . . except you.”

“I doubt that is true.” She turned to meet his pale eyes. “Her mother? A lover? Who is mourning her? She was a girl, Jen, even if nobody claimed her as missing. The poor don’t bother. You know that no one will really look. You know where they have gone.” She turned away from the blue incomprehension of his eyes. “But they are blaming me. Besides, she was not rich enough to afford that level of hackware.”

He shook his head and heaved a sigh for her to hear. She ignored it as she ran through the surveillance program, suppressing a twinge of guilt because she hadn’t yet checked on the stationary elephant cow. Everything was fine, although the main horse herd was pushing into the grazing territory of the old mare’s small, splinter herd. This was a dry year and the grass was poor. She’d have to let them get pushed off their riverside pasture. That would weaken this year’s crop of still-nursing foals, and increase the kill rate by the northern pride. If another dry spring followed, she thought, the small herd would probably end up being absorbed back into the larger group. The old mare wouldn’t survive that merger.

The guide reports were routine. No problems, no accidents on any of the daily motorized tours currently winding through the Preserve and only a sprained ankle from one of the self-guided backpacking treks that were in progress. The hiker had been handled by a contracted first aid skimmer and planned to continue the trek in an augmented cast, having signed a health waiver. Tahira checked the location of the various lion prides and elephant groups to make sure that the guides would provide visual contact for the guests. Four were lion treks and one was an elephant trek. But all their guides were experienced and they could find the chip signatures with their own software. They were all on target to give the paying hikers the thrill of a live sighting. Routine day. She retinaed the report, packed a few necessary items into her field bag, then left Jen to his microscope and took the skimmer out into the Preserve.

Shawn had not gotten his warrant, but then she had known he would fail.

She swung north, to check up on the stationary elephant before she started her chip work. It was a long flight, clear to the northwestern boundary of the Preserve, within sight of the monorail. The old cow was down after all, on her side in the shade of a thin copse of trees. She raised her head as Tahira skimmed over, ears erect, trunk curled as she got her forefeet under her, tried to heave herself to her feet. Two aunties had stayed with her and as she collapsed into the dust once more, they hurried up, stroking her with their trunks, watching Tahira warily as she landed the skimmer and approached cautiously. The dust beneath the old cow’s hindquarters had turned to mud from her urine. No sign of defecation. A blockage? Perhaps she had eaten something that damaged her gastrointestinal system. Her temperature was slightly elevated and when Tahira zoomed in with her glasses, sure enough the cow’s membranes looked pale. No sign of any external trauma. Natural causes. She selected the diagnosis, uploaded visuals to the cow’s file, and set it to alert her when vitals fell to imminent death levels. She would return to make a more complete diagnosis then. For the record.

She caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye as she removed her glasses. Bear? Sure enough, when she slipped them back on, a green ring haloed the bushes where she had seen the movement and the ID appeared. One of the short-faced bears, another of the engineers’ triumphant recreations. They were drawn by death. One of the aunties blew noisily and rushed the bushes, trunk high. The bear retreated, growling, circled around to windward. Tahira retreated to her skimmer, although the bear was focused on the dying cow. Unlikely that the aunties would allow it to hasten the old cow’s end.

Natural causes, she thought as she lifted to swing eastward again. You could label the girl’s death as natural causes. To the lions it had been a natural end. The monorail was curving along the white arch of track on its first run of the morning. In a few moments the tourists would surely spot the cow and the questions would start pouring into Admin from the passengers. All the tourist monorails carried a direct link to Preserve Administration. Tahira set the skimmer on auto, homing on the ID of the bison herd she needed to chip, and quickly edited out an image of the cow and her aunties from the old cow’s ID file. She selected one of her taken in the past, with her last calf, set her link to record and smiled for the tourists. Quickly, in a warm and positive tone, she explained the situation, that the cow was dying of natural causes, the aunties were attending her, and that this (insert mother and calf image here) was part of the natural cycle of life and death, that the old cow’s flesh would nourish wild dog cubs (she called up a file, inserted a recent shot of three pups playing) and the scavenger population. She uploaded the video file to Administration and texted Amy Shen, the head of PR, to expect questions about the dying cow and offer this Special Message from the Manager. Amy would run the file through her editing software to smooth out any rough edges and in a few minutes, when the worried texts came in, the tourists would have her reassuring explanation.

Maybe she should have made one for the dead girl? Tahira kicked the skimmer to full speed, ducked down behind the wind screen as they streaked across the foothills of the mountains.

It took her the rest of the day to chip the bison calves and stalk a litter of wild dog pups old enough for chips. Half grown, they were skittish, full of hormones and already squabbling with the ranking alphas. But she finally got good shots, and planted a chip in a solid muscle mass. The new ID files opened and she recorded the pertinent data. Now the pups and the calves were part of the database. Their deaths would have meaning, value, would contribute to the slowly growing mass of information about this stable environment.

What had the girl’s death contributed?

A meal for the lions, she thought. At a price.

It was getting dark. She texted Jen that she was going to stay out and check on the lion pride before she came in. Told him to go home, activate Security when he left, she’d see him tomorrow. She knew where the pride would be, didn’t need to check her link. It was too early yet for them to head down to the river. She grounded the skimmer, ate an energy bar from her bag, drank some water, and used her link to access the Preserve database and check on the animals.

Nothing out of the ordinary. No Security alerts, nothing but the normal rhythms of day ending and night beginning. Shift change, she thought as she stuffed the wrapper into her pocket and capped her water bottle. Time. It was fully dark now, the Milky Way a white shimmer across the star spangled sky. She stared up at it. Different sky than the one over the refugee camp. Maybe it wasn’t, but it looked different. She frowned, bothered suddenly that she didn’t know if the constellations had been the same in that girlhood sky, or if memory had warped the images in her mind. It bothered her a lot. Frowning she lifted the skimmer, donned her glasses set to night-vision, and went looking for the lion pride. She flew low, skimming above the brush, weaving around the trees. Someone watching for her might think she was checking on the wildlife, scanning chips. She dipped south so that she’d meet the pride on their way down to the river.

Red blossomed at the top of her glasses’ heads-up visual field. Perimeter violation? Tahira’s stomach clenched. Why an alert this time? She crouched behind the windscreen as she dropped lower, weaving through the tops of the trees. A map flashed into existence now, red dots marking the path of the intruder as he activated the sensors scattered across the Preserve. Tahira watched another red icon blossom on the screen map. He was heading for the place where the girl had died and the steady progress suggested that he wasn’t trying very hard to hide and certainly wasn’t using hackware.

No. This was just some fool who chose tonight to violate the Perimeter. An idiot. A thrill seeker. Furious she circled south to come in straight behind the intruder, slowed the skimmer to its limit, weaving through the brush now, twigs whispering against the skimmer’s flanks, clawing at her legs. She was briefly thankful for her tough, suncloth pants that resisted the thorns. She followed the trespasser’s path on her map. He should be about a hundred yards ahead, almost at the site where the girl had died.

Something slammed into her, an invisible fist that loosened her grasp on the skimmer’s nav bar and tossed her sideways out of the seat. The skimmer compensated as soon as her hand left the bar, shying sideways to stay underneath her, slowing and settling automatically. She clutched at the bar to take control again, but her right arm didn’t work and before she could process that, shift to her left hand, the skimmer grounded gently. For a moment, Tahira stared at the bar, then realized that her sleeve was wet, warm liquid was dripping steadily onto her pants and the dusty ground beside the skimmer. Dark. Blood. Her head spun briefly and she swallowed dry nausea.

What do you think you’re going to do? She heard Shawn’s furious voice in her head. Not much. She climbed off the skimmer, her knees suddenly shaky.

“I don’t want to kill you.” The hard, cold voice came from the tall hawthorn scrub that edged the grassy area where the skimmer had come down. “But you’re not going to get in my way. You can yell for help as soon as I’m done here.”

“Did you bring another one to die?” Tahira faced the voice. She was still wearing her glasses, but they didn’t register an ID. No surprise. Anyone doing this would have had his ID chip removed long ago, would use temporary, fake chips. “How much do you get for these? And what do the girls think? That this is just another porn shoot, this time out in the dust? She didn’t expect the lions.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” A figure emerged from the concealing hawthorn. Tall. Dressed in chameleon-fabric so that his silhouette was hard to make out. The projectile rifle, night-scoped, ugly, and efficient looking wasn’t hard to make out at all. Something about the voice was wrong, nagged at her, but her head was full of sticky glue and she couldn’t think of what it was.

“I asked you a question.” The voice grated at her ears.

“You’re the one who’s making the snuff vids, recording the girls as they run into the old lioness’s pride and die.” She would have spat the words, but that sense of wrong was building in her head.

The figure stepped forward suddenly and before Tahira’s gone-fuzzy reflexes could kick in, had shoved Tahira back against the skimmer, her back arched under the pressure of the trespasser’s body, her good arm bent behind her. She blinked into pale gray eyes in a hard, weathered face framed by cropped-short gray-white hair. Sucked in a breath that was half pain, half surprise.

A woman.

“Shawn said it might be a she.” She laughed, drunk on the pain that had begun to throb in her right shoulder and side, burning like a growing fire, radiating through her flesh.

“Yeah, I’m a she. That was my daughter your lions ate. You folks don’t care, but I do.” Her breath blasted Tahira’s face. “They’re going to pay for that tonight.”

“Your daughter?” Tahira blinked, trying to focus her eyes. “That’s why your hackware is so poor? You just walked in here to shoot lions? You don’t care if we catch you?”

“I don’t care one bit.” The cold pale eyes bored into hers. “If you hadn’t decided to hang out and protect them, I wouldn’t have had to shoot you. I figured you folks trust your software instead of using your eyes. I know how tracking software works . . . It’s pretty easy to fool if you know how.” She laughed and the sound was like glass breaking. “I was a wild-meat hunter for the black market—when there was still wild meat to hunt. I know all about tracking software. Maybe the people who babble about karmic balance are right, eh?” The shattered laugh came again. “After all the animals I killed, one of them killed my daughter. But the score is going to end in my favor.”

“You fool.” Tahira twisted her hand free, planted it against the woman’s chest and shoved. Her strength surprised both of them and the woman stumbled back a step. “You’ve ruined this night. You’ve ruined my chance to catch the one who killed your daughter and the girl he killed before her. You and your misguided revenge. He’s not going to come back, not after he realizes people were here waiting for him. Damn you.”

“What the crap are you talking about?”

“I’m not talking any crap.” Tahira closed her eyes. Game over, she thought. “How do you even know that your daughter was the girl who was killed here? We haven’t identified the DNA yet.”

“I found the image on the web.” The woman’s voice grated, harsh as stone. “I was looking for her, used a video search engine, uploaded a bunch of recent pictures of her. And the engine found a match. With lions.” She spat. “One of your tourists videoed it. Her running. The lions after her.” She spat again. “And you people just stood around.”

“No one stood around. I saw that video.” Tahira stood still as the gun muzzle lifted, fixed on her chest.

“The media said she sneaked in. I figured she was showing off to prove something . . . because I used to run around in the African wastelands for the meat collectors. She was such a city kid.” For a moment her voice wavered. Then it went cold again. “You want to tell me your version?”

“You didn’t look back to check the source of that image match, did you? If you want to go check it, you’ll find it’s a teaser for a very expensive, password-only, porn site. I think your daughter believed she was making a porn vid. Right until the end.” Tahira pulled out her link, watched the gun muzzle lift and steady. Touched up the video file from the Security eye, passed it over.

The woman took it, poised, the gun ready. Yes, Tahira thought. She had the body language of one who expected attack. She remembered that body posture all too well. The woman stepped back, out of range, looked at the link with one eye on Tahira. Then her posture stiffened and the link held her full attention.

I could kill her now, Tahira thought. Our children are our greatest weakness. She waited, watching the sky, straining her ears to hear any whisper of a silenced skimmer. The woman must be reviewing the clip over and over again. Finally she looked up, pocketed the link. The gun muzzle had sunk to rest on the ground and she didn’t lift it.

“What’s your stake in this?” Her voice was steady. “You came out here to put your life on the line for a damn lion?”

“No . . . and yes.” Tahira closed her eyes again, briefly, summoning the will to push the grinding pain in her shoulder down deeper inside her. “The lioness . . . the old one, the one that killed your daughter . . . was wild caught. There are no more lions to catch. These are being changed, their genes altered to make them what we want . . . the Pleistocene American Lion. The world that the lioness came from is gone. My world. Your world, too, I think.” She pulled her lips back from her teeth. “She is innocent of murder the way your rifle is innocent of murder, even if you point it at me and pull the trigger. You and I . . . ” Her lips stretched tighter. “We are not innocent of our daughters’ murders.” She watched the gun muzzle jerk upward, tensed for one second as it wavered, drifted lower. “My elder daughter did what your daughter did.” The entire Preserve seemed to be holding its breath. Even the insects had hushed. “I knew what she was doing and pretended I did not. She had no future, there was no aid, everyone was hungry. I took the flour and oil she brought home and I did not ask where the money came from.” She did not look away from the pale oval of the woman’s face. “They made a video of her death. I got someone to find it for me eventually. To buy it. Her death was a commodity, for sale on the market. As is your daughter’s.” She waited for the gun to come up but it did not.

“My younger daughter was six.” She said the words flatly, without inflection. “I sold her to the World Council Forces so that she would not have to do what her sister did. They call it sponsoring, but when you do that, you relinquish all rights to that child. Later, I paid a lot of money to find out where she was and when she was fourteen, I saw her. On a training mission, doing crowd control. She looked at me.” Tahira took a deep breath. “She did not know me. By then, I had been lucky, had found a job with the North American Pleistocene Preserve and my superiors found that I was . . . talented. That was many years ago. My daughter is past middle age now.” She glanced up as a tiny chime sounded from the skimmer. “That is our lioness and her pride.” She took a deep breath. “This is a delicately balanced trap.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I think it’s too late.” She sighed. “He will certainly be scanning the ground for any human-sized life signatures, in case this is the trap he expects and I have brought the police.”

“He won’t see me.” The woman laughed her broken-glass laugh. “Illegal technology is always a step ahead of legal. Your motion detectors saw me, but you wouldn’t have picked me up on your scan.”

“He has inside help and so he might have access to our entire security network.” She shrugged. “I do not think that is likely since only I have complete access to it, but it is possible.”

“In that case we’re screwed.” The woman shrugged, her expression unreadable in the dark. “What do I do?”

“I want him on the ground.” Tahira closed her eyes as the world wavered. “He thinks I’m a witness and he needs to make sure I’m dead. I have a first aid kit behind the seat.” Cold sweat bathed her face, prickling under her arms. “It has a touch menu. Select stimulant, human, emergency, and get two patches.” She struggled to hang onto consciousness, eyes closed, nausea wringing her stomach. The woman brushed against her, fumbling behind the seat. A moment later cool fingers seized her wrist, pushed her sleeve up and Tahira felt the sting of the stim patch on the inside of her elbow.

“That’s going to make you bleed more.”

“I know.” Tahira straightened as energy washed through her, banishing the nausea, brightening the shadows. “Can’t be helped.” She touched the first aid menu, selected one small and one medium blood-stop patch. “Help me with the shirt.” She winced as the woman opened the front, pulled the fabric down over her shoulder and arm. “Cover the entire wound, use the small one on the entry . . . ”

“I know how to use a patch.”

Tahira sighed as the woman smoothed the patches over the ruin of the entry and exit wounds. The fast-acting local quickly numbed the grinding pain, reduced it to a low-level throb that she could shut out for now.

“You guys carry a hospital on these things.”

“We permit a few extreme hikers.” Tahira drew a slow breath, let it out, judging the strength of the remaining pain. “We are preoccupied with death.” She bared her teeth at the woman. “You sold vids of your kills along with your illegal meat, didn’t you?”

The woman didn’t answer, but of course, she did. Tahira straightened. That was the lure of what would otherwise be no different from a farm or vat raised steak. If you couldn’t pull the trigger yourself, you could still watch it die. “You hide,” she said. “I’m going to move the skimmer ahead of the pride, ground it again. He’s going to come down and look for me.”

“He’s going to drop a grenade on you and leave.” The woman sounded contemptuous.

“Oh no.” Tahira grinned. “Like you, I’m wearing a chameleon field. And I also have a small device that a clever grad student hacked up—it generates the thermal effect of a 150-pound antelope. He was studying night hunting, trying to determine the importance of scent, thermal detection, sound, and sight in predator species. Our killer should think it’s me.” She shrugged. “He has been very careful not to leave any traces. I suspect that if I did not patrol as regularly as I do, we would never have known that anyone was killed here.” Another few hours, and only the scrap of fabric would have marked that kill site. “One of us needs to kill him.” She lifted her hand. “I would prefer that the lions do it.”

“How do you know they can?”

Tahira shrugged her good shoulder. “I will make it possible. If they do not, you or I will do it.” She pulled the highly illegal gun from her waistband, was impressed that the woman didn’t flinch.

“You could have shot me. While I was looking at the vid.” For a moment, she was silent. “I like you.” Her teeth flashed briefly. “You would have made a good meat hunter.”

“I think not.” Tahira stretched her lips back from her teeth. “But I am not sure we are so different. You know to stay downwind from the pride? They’re hunting.”

“I know.”

“I need my link.” Tahira held out her hand. The woman glanced at it, shrugged, handed it over. Tahira nodded and climbed onto the skimmer, hoping he showed before the stim patch ran out. She wasn’t sure she could tolerate a second dose. At least the bleeding seemed to have stopped. Lifting, she drifted ahead of the pride, watching her enviro-panel, reading wind, calculating distance and scent drift. Set the skimmer gently down, half hidden by hawthorn scrub. Just hidden enough, she hoped, to make him think that he might have missed her last time, when he dropped the girl. The meat-hunter’s daughter.

Glancing at her watch, she planted the thick disk of the bio-signature generator in a clump of hawthorn, and hiked downwind, zooming in on the spot with her glasses. She had keyed the link to the lioness’s ID, figured she had about fifteen minutes before she’d need to return and move the skimmer. The lions knew her scent, so hopefully her presence wouldn’t disturb their regular hunting routine.

Five minutes left. She started to get to her feet to relieve her thigh muscles, when she caught the faintest whisper of disturbed air, like the wings of an owl. She froze, eyes fixed on the landscape beyond the grounded skimmer. A vague shape of matte black blocked her view of grass and shrubs. A military shadow field, of course.

She didn’t see him get out of the shadowed skimmer, but of course, he would also be using a chameleon field. Sure enough, a clump of sun dried grass winked out for a moment, then reappeared. He knew where she was—or where he thought she was. He was being cautious.

She had not prayed to any gods for a long time. Not since she had handed over her young daughter to the World Council Force sponsorship coordinator. Gods were like lions, they belonged to the old world. But now she bent her head, prayed that those old, dying gods would gather wind, scent, instinct, and make one thing right in the old way.

He did not fear the lions. She could see it in his preoccupied focus on the clump of brush where she had hidden the generator. They were just park amusements, useful as a movie prop, able to kill a helpless and unarmed girl. Not a threat to him. He had a gun, after all. She bared her teeth at his hubris. It would please the old gods.

The lioness charged in a rush of motion where no motion had existed. The man spun, hand coming up. Light flared and the lioness tumbled, regained her feet in an instant and with a leap, her front feet hit his shoulders, knocking him flat, her claws digging in to hold him. He had time for a choked cry before her jaws closed on his throat. A second lioness charged in, taking him by the thigh. Dust rose, white in her night-vision, as he thrashed, strangling slowly. The lion grunts and chesty growls were the only sound. The other members of the pride had circled in, tearing his belly open before he had quite died.

Tahira started as something moved beside her. The meat hunter squatted silently next to her, her posture intent, not speaking. A loop of intestine gleamed wetly. He had stopped struggling, had finally died. The lioness who had taken him stood up, bit at his dead shoulder and shook her head heavily. She walked a few steps away from the feeding pride, snarled as one of the males took a step toward her, lashed out at him. Her strike was weak, wobbly, and her hindquarters swayed as she staggered away from the others.

“She’s dying,” Tahira said softly. “He shot her.” Her eyes widened as she noticed the faint striping on the lioness’s shoulders. This was not the old one. This was one of the younger animals, the ones that were beginning to resemble their Pleistocene ancestors. She pointed her link at it. Yes, this was the oldest of the younger females, the one who had been pushing the old lioness of late. As she watched the pride feeding, she spotted the old lioness, noticed that she was limping. Not much, but it had been enough to let the beta lioness take over.

Perhaps the old mare had kicked her, when the pride had taken her foal. Tahira let her breath out slowly, pain beginning to seep through the stim’s numbness. Maybe that limp would heal and the lioness would keep her rank now, maybe not. The next female in rank was timid, not likely to challenge her soon.

She might keep her leadership.

For a time.

Tahira got to her feet, feeling shaky to her bones. “You should leave now. Take his skimmer. It got him through the boundary, it will take you out. Sell it quickly. Just in case. I will erase your entry from Security.”

The meat hunter faced her, her expression enigmatic, the years, the past, graven into her weathered face. “What about you?”

“I have some things to fix yet.” She met the woman’s eyes. They reminded her of African sky, blue, dry, and empty. “Your part is over.”

For a moment the woman didn’t move. Then she lifted a finger to her forehead in a salute, turned and strode through the brush to the man’s skimmer. A moment later it lifted and vanished.

The pride had settled down to a serious feeding now and already the scavengers had begun to gather. One of the wild dogs darted in to snatch a scrap, then fled, butt tucked as a young male charged. She could come back in a couple of days, pick up any last evidence. Record the young lioness’s death as an official euthanasia.

She limped to the skimmer, washed by waves of weakness, hoping she wouldn’t fall off before she got back to Administration.

A red icon winked on the control panel. A Security alert. Muttering a curse because she would have thought the meat hunter was more careful than that, Tahira touched it.

Official intrusion with legal permission, contact estimate five minutes.

Tahira leaned against the skimmer and closed her eyes. Legal permission. He got his warrant after all? She waited for the whisper of the grounding skimmer.

“Tahira.” Shawn’s voice sounded harsh. “What the hell is going on? You’ve got lions right behind you. Eating something.”

He was afraid. Her lips twitched and she almost smiled. “They’re busy. They won’t bother us. I think I need a ride.” She forced her eyes open. “I’m not sure I can get the skimmer back on my own. Did you come to arrest me?”

“Damn right.” He appeared beside her, watching the lions. “Hospital first, I think.”

“That’s probably a good idea.” She forced herself straight, looked him in the face. “Did you access that link? Buy the video?”

“Yes.” He looked briefly away.

“The man who dropped them here . . . ” She pointed with her chin toward the lions. Mistake. The world began to turn slowly.

“You’re sure?”

She couldn’t read his expression. “Yes. Take this.” She handed him the stunner from the skimmer. “I don’t think the lions will bother me, but if one does, this will stop it.” She walked away before he could react, circled around to reach the dead lioness, one eye on the feeding lions. They knew she was there, paid as little attention as they gave the coy-dogs that had gathered. She took the tissue sample quickly, dropped it into a collection bag and returned with the last ounce of her strength.

She was done. She let him take over, gave in and let the slowly turning landscape speed up until it swept her away. Was aware of jostling, a sense of speed, a low muttered monologue of cursing. Faded in and out of lights and bustle and the dim distant knowledge in the back of her brain that this must be the resort medical facility. Someone was arguing loudly, right over her. It hurt her head and she retreated into darkness.

When she opened her eyes it was light, daylight bright, and her mouth felt like a Preserve riverbed in a drought.

“They want you to drink this.” Shawn leaned into view, holding a plastic squeeze-bag of yellow-green liquid with a drinking tube.

She sucked at the liquid, winced, and swallowed. There was no way to make electrolytes taste good.

“The bullet did a lot of soft tissue damage but missed anything important,” he said mildly. “Made a big hole though. They left some drains in.”

She peered at the bandages swathing her left arm. It didn’t hurt, but that would probably change when the meds wore off. “Can I leave?”

“I think they’ll let you go if you sign all kinds of waivers absolving them from blame.”

“And do we go to jail from here?”

His eyes narrowed slightly. “That depends. We can talk about it.”

He was right about waivers. She signed and retinaed a half-dozen absolutions of all liability but finally they carted her to the entry in a motorized chair and let her escape. Shawn offered her his arm and she leaned on it. Harder than she thought she would need to. He was driving a small, rather scuffed up electric. His private car? “You’re not on duty?” She realized he was wearing a casual sun shirt and khakis. “Your day off?”

“My day off.” He slid into the driver’s seat, touched on the air-conditioning and sat there as the hot interior air cooled. “Want to tell me?”

“And if I don’t?”

He shrugged. Turned those dry, blue eyes on her. “I guess I could still arrest you on suspicion of being an accessory to a murder.”

“I am that.” And she told him, leaning back against the still-warm plastic of the seat as the car hummed to life and Shawn drove her back to the Preserve. She told him the whole story from her comments on the tour bus, to her ambush by the meat hunter and the arrival of the vid maker.

He didn’t say a word.

She finished as they entered the ornate gates of the Preserve and she closed her eyes, exhausted by the telling, her shoulder starting to hurt now with a muffled throb that promised worse to come.

“A meat hunter.” Shawn parked in the afternoon shade cast by the building’s solar panels. “I’m surprised you don’t want me to go after her.”

“Why?” Tahira opened one eye. “Her world is as dead as mine is. There is no wild meat to hunt any more. Not the kind that made her a living.”

“She could come back to poach.”

“She won’t.”

“You are so sure.”

“I am.”

Shawn sighed. “So you’ve achieved your justice. The lions killed the man the same way they killed the girl. And now you want me to just walk away and call it over. Do you think that ends it, Tahira?”

The bitterness in his voice surprised her. “Of course that doesn’t end it.” She opened her eyes, faced him. “He was not the boss. He was simply a tool. It’s way too big a business. I doubt it will ever end, Shawn.” She opened the electric’s door one-handed, amazed at how heavy it was. “Our species is addicted to death. And now, on the brink of conquering it, we love it even more.” She pulled herself to her feet as he came around to help her and amazingly managed not to sway. “But this ends it here.”

“Are you sure of that, too?”

“Yes.” She looked him in the face. “I am.”

He lifted his eyes, fixed them on the dry blue sky above. “Even if you die?”

“If I die, the information to end it here will come to you.” She started for the entrance, judging the distance. Maybe too far. When he caught up to her, took her arm, she let him, leaned on him. He was angry, radiating like a range fire.

“I guess I’d just like to know who made you judge and jury.”

The door scanned her hardware and opened, breathing cool air over them. The water-wall filled the building with the scent of rain and she took a deep breath, happy in this single moment of sensation. “I appointed myself.” She sank onto one of the floor cushions. “There is beer in the refrigerator. Why don’t you bring us each one? Since you are not on duty?”

He did, handed her the tall glass, sat down across from her, his expression thoughtful. He was older than Jen, his face lined with his years of work. She studied the lines around his eyes, seeing the echoes of old laughter, of sorrow, of life.

“What does this Preserve mean to you?” He looked up suddenly.

She took a sip of her beer, relishing the cool, slightly bitter taste, the dewy chill of the glass against her lips. Life, she thought, is made up of moments. We simply fail to notice most of them. “I have asked myself that question for a long time.” She studied the tiny, silver bubbles rising through the amber liquid. “I’m a lot older than you, Shawn. I’m a product of world that is now dead.”

“Africa,” he murmured.

“Africa is a continent.” She lifted her glass in his direction. “Lesotho. Once upon a time, long before you were born, my people raised and reintroduced lions to the dying plains. We had killed them all and now, many generations later, we brought them back. Only we didn’t know the plains were dying, but they were. We, the Lesotho people, succeeded. For a while.” She lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “But the plains died, then the lions died, and ultimately . . . ” She drank more beer. “Lesotho died. Here . . . I found a trace of that dead world.”

“The lions?” Shawn leaned forward and touched her hand lightly.

“Them, too.” She tilted her head to study him, aware that she was getting drunk. “But it is not the world I knew. We did not care enough about that world to bring it back. Why not, Shawn?”

“No tourist value,” he said softly.

“This world the engineers are creating is so old that it is new.” She tried to smile, but it felt crooked. “The merely old has no value. Still . . . there are lions.” She took another swallow of her beer. “And this is a refuge. From memory, if nothing else.”

The entry chimed. “Hey, Tahira, you’re back.” Jen breezed through, bringing in the scent of dust and afternoon heat. “Hi, have we met?” He offered a hand to Shawn as he rose from the cushion. “I’m Jen, a grad student. I study bugs.”

“Hi, Jen. I was just leaving.” Shawn got to his feet, hesitated, then leaned down. “To memories.” He touched his glass to hers.

She hesitated for a moment, met his eyes. Found . . . compassion there.

Jen looked from one to the other, puzzled, as they emptied their glasses. Shawn took them to the kitchen wall, lifted a hand to her, then left, the door whispering shut behind him.

“What was that all about?” He set his field pack against the wall.

“He was deciding whether or not to arrest me.” Tahira watched Jen fill a glass of water. “I’d like some water, too, please.”

“What’s with the arrest thing?” He turned, smiling, a full glass in each hand. “And what happened to your arm? Did you have an accident with the skimmer?”

“Yes. I did.” She took the glass. “Sit down, Jen.”

He sat, the first tickle of alarm tightening the skin of his eyes before he quickly banished it with a smooth, careful smile.

“I have done a number of things in my long life.” Tahira sipped her water. “One was computer security. I was very good. The systems these days are more advanced, but not excessively so.”

“How interesting.”

He was doing the facial expression well, but his body betrayed him, tension lifting his shoulders, straightening the curve of his spine. “Yes,” she said. “So I was able to trace your alterations to the security platform.” She raised her hand to silence him as he opened his mouth. “And I was also able to document the source of the Security breach and ID you. It’s documented, Jen. Archived in hard media to be released to the authorities either on my say-so, or upon my death.”

“I . . . I didn’t know . . . anyone was going to get killed.” His face had gone white and in an instant, the planes and angles of maturity had softened to the rounded face of a child. “It . . . I was horrified. I didn’t know . . . but they’d . . . I didn’t dare say . . . I couldn’t tell . . . ”

Was I ever a child like this? she wondered. She tried to remember. Didn’t think so. Her older daughter had never been a child either. Not really. What about her younger daughter? Had they allowed her to be a child before she became a soldier? She hoped so. With all her heart. That was what I bought for you, she thought. Sighed. “You already knew that girl was dead when I first told you we’d had an intruder. Relax, Jen.” She lifted her hand to silence him. “You are a pawn in this game. You will do one thing for me and then you are free to keep studying your bugs . . . Although I suggest that you look into a transfer to another research program as quickly as you can engineer it.” She studied his bowed head and hunched shoulders. “If something does happen to me, you will certainly be a suspect, so it might be unsafe for you to remain here.”

“What do you want me to do?” he mumbled.

“You will run the DNA analysis on the bones that we found. I will give you a sample of lion DNA and you will make sure that you find that DNA associated with the dead girl. It may be there already. If it is not you will find it.”

“That’s all?” He raised his head, the fearful hope in his eyes painful to look at.

“That’s all.” You would not have survived in my world, she thought.

“I . . . I already put in a grant proposal.” He looked away, swallowed. “I’d be doing it at the Antarctic preserve, looking at the symbiotic bacteria that still exist near the pole.”

Ah, guilt. It would get him out of her sight quickly, at least. “Good.” She nodded. “Here.” She fumbled the collection bag from her coveralls. Handed it to him. The bit of flesh had turned brown and ugly. “This is your DNA.”

He took it and fled. She suspected she wouldn’t see him before he left—not if he could avoid it. Which suited her just fine.

The beer had given her energy, or maybe it had been the compassion in Shawn’s eyes. She had not expected . . . understanding. But now, exhaustion was creeping through her. She opened her holo field and set it to secure, in case Jen was brave enough to return. She opened the camera control and set it to face view only. Her boss would not see her bandages.

Carlo answered quickly, seated in his teak and real-leather desk-recliner. “Did you get my messages?” He looked angry, his jet hair, usually immaculate, slightly mussed as if he had run his hand through it. “What is all this in the media? Tourists claiming that you were a witness to that intruder’s death?”

“I have already informed the authorities that it was a mistake.” She gave him a smooth smile. “The small brush-fire of blogging will fade quickly.”

“This is the last thing we need, Tahira.” He scowled at her. “Such carelessness is unlike you. You know better than to do anything that will incite negative public attention. What were you thinking?”

“I needed to make myself bait,” she said simply. “That was the surest and fastest method.”

He was far more mature than Jen and his face betrayed nothing, not even the tic of an eyelid gave him away. Almost, she could believe . . . “Our security is very very cutting edge. I sent you the inserted visuals that replaced the images of the girl’s dying. Perhaps Jen was in a hurry.” She shrugged. “But he had neither the access nor the expertise to allow an intruder to come and go through the Security shield without triggering any alarm or record. The intruder had a password.”

“How could someone have that?”

She had almost believed that she had made a mistake, but his tone betrayed him. He was asking a rhetorical question. “Only two people have a password, Carlo. You and I. There is no real anonymity in the net. Not for a long time now.” She smiled at him, pleasantly. “I do not believe you are one of the major players here. If I did . . . ” She bared her teeth at him. “I would not be talking to you. I think you merely . . . got a percentage. Rental. And perhaps a copy of the video? Does that excite you? A real and violent death, with real fear, and real blood?”

He flinched then, and her stomach twisted.

“That was how they came to ask you, wasn’t it? You are a customer.” She kept the disgust out of her voice, because it was not yet time to end this conversation. “I have archived a file of all my suspicions and all the evidence I have uncovered to support them. It is not sufficient to convict you. But it is sufficient to let those with greater investigative skills than I have find out the truth. Then they will convict you. On the day of my death, the archive goes to the appropriate World Council committee members.”

“Blackmail?” His lip curled. “Is that so much better than what I did?”

“It’s not blackmail.” She shrugged. “It is simply an insurance policy. To make sure that this does not happen again here.”

He didn’t believe her.

“I am finishing up the DNA scan of the dead girl. I have already euthanized the lioness that attacked her. You may release that information to the media and the public. You may make whatever statement about blogger inaccuracies you choose and that will, as I said, fade away. If anything”—her lip curled—“it will increase traffic to the Preserve. As you know, violent death is a potent pheromone.”

His reaction was more visible this time.

She ended the link. Rudely.

She was entitled to be rude.

“He is too well protected.” She was speaking to Shawn’s absence, heard her own defensive tone. “He is insulated by too much money and too many connections. He would emerge from the ashes of an investigation and nothing would change.” She closed down her field, got to her feet, feeling age in her flesh. How much longer did she have? “Perhaps I am too much a product of my old world. To me, justice is direct—an eye for an eye. The justice of the old gods. Of the lions.”

She had bought the old lioness a second chance. It might not buy her much time at all, or she might get another season before she was ousted by one of the younger, striped, new females that made the gene engineers so happy. She had a tour scheduled tomorrow. The note on the green calendar field on the wall was flashing its reminder. She stretched her shoulder, testing the limits of the pain. If she slept well, she could do it, perhaps with less energy. There would be questions. She would have to decide on the answers before then, would this time do Shawn the courtesy of telling him what her answers would be.

And soon it would be nothing more than an ephemera floating in webspace, evoked from time to time like a fading ghost, through some odd search connection that summoned up a stale blog entry. The world was full of ghosts.

Instead of going to her bed, she slipped outside and found her skimmer parked in its usual place. Someone had cleaned the blood from it. She found her spare glasses in the tool compartment, slipped them on and lifted into the darkness. The lions would be hunting and she might catch the pride on their way down to the river. The pain in her shoulder faded as she toed the skimmer up to speed and slid through the bright bubble of a yesterday that had never really happened.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2009.

About the Author

Mary Rosenblum attended the prestigious Clarion West Writers workshop in 1988, where she sold her first SF story to Asimov’s Magazine editor Gardner Dozois and her writing career took off. She published multiple novels with NY publishers as Mary Rosenblum in SF and Mary Freeman in mystery, was a Hugo and Nebula finalist, won the Sideways and Compton Cook awards, and received a lot of critical acclaim for her fiction, both short stories and novels. She began teaching writing more than fifteen years and also works one-on- one with novice writers as a “literary midwife” taking authors through drafts, final editing, publisher-matching, and self promotion of their books, to make sure it gets done right. She has twice returned to teach the Clarion West Writers workshop and lives in rural western Oregon where she is a licensed pilot and flies a small plane to as many cool and faraway places as she can.

Paradise Lost:
A History of Fantasy and the Otherworld

Christopher Mahon

If primal fear forms one pole of the fantasy genre, paradise forms the other. But from the tales that built the genre to the writers who resurrected it after each of its deaths, the narrative that plays itself over and over across time and geography is one of paradise lost. To understand the history of fantasy literature’s origins, one must realize that it is a history of melancholy, of nostalgia, and of beauty that has passed out of the world.

In Japan, there is a story about a fisherman named Urashima Tarō who rescues a little turtle on the beach and sets it back in the water. The next day, a huge turtle arrives on the beach and speaks to him, inviting him to be a guest of the king of the ocean. He is taken down into the ocean, to a magnificent palace, where he meets the daughter of the king, a beautiful woman named Otohime. Smiling, she tells Urashima Tarō that she was the little turtle he saved. He stays with her for three days in this beautiful palace, surrounded by wonders, but eventually he asks Otohime if he can go back and see his family again. Reluctantly, she lets him go, but she gives him a little box, and warns him gravely never to open it.

Urashima rides the huge turtle back up to the beach, but he finds that his mother’s house is gone, that everyone is wearing strange clothes, and that his whole town has changed. No one seems to know him. He says his name is Urashima Tarō, and they tell him that was the name of a man who disappeared three hundred years ago, and Urashima realizes that each of the three wonderful days he spent in the palace was actually a hundred years. In despair, he opens the box. A white cloud comes up, and suddenly Urashima begins to wrinkle and age until he’s an old man. Just before he collapses into dust, he hears Otohime’s voice: “I told you not to open the box. It contained your old age.”

This story, not Milton’s saga, is the story of lost paradise woven into folklore across ages and continents. In fact, Urashima Tarō finds an almost perfect mirror six thousand miles away, across continents, seas, and another culture, in the Irish story of Oisín, the hero of the Fianna who followed his elven lover, Niamh, into the Irish otherworld, Annwfn. There, one could hear “all the music of the world.” The trees bore fruit and flowers at the same time, and death never came. After staying with her for years, he, too, grew restless and asked to return to the world for a while to see his comrades. When he arrived in Ireland, he too found that hundreds of years had passed since his departure, leaving his friends in dust and Oisín heartbroken and confused. And like Urashima Tarō, he broke his promise to his lover: he stepped down from the horse she had given him and set his foot on the ground, and time and old age descended upon him.

These stories are part of a whole slew of myths and legends from across the world that deal with the Otherworld, whether it exists under the ocean, under the earth, or hidden in the forests. Oisín’s story is part of a tradition of Irish tales called immrama, which are stories about heroes’ voyages into the otherworld—in each one, the hero falls back into the real world, but the return is not a return home; it is a return to the reality of the world, which is time, change, and death.

These stories give a critical insight into nearly all tales of the otherworld: the otherworld is a paradise, and contact with it opens to the door for longing, both for the characters in the story and for the reader, who cannot help but feel a small twinge of excitement at the prospect of crossing over into a land of wonder, and a sense of emptiness when the hero finds himself bereft of his elfland. The ultimate narrative is one of loss, with the otherworld standing in for Eden.

What is fascinating is that the loss of the otherworld escaped fiction and became a historical event in the collective memory of Europe. Following the spread of Christianity, a grand metanarrative began to develop to account for the diminishing prominence of the old gods and supernatural beings, usually centering around their “retreat” into the otherworld and the growing inability for humans to cross over into these hidden paradises.

The most explicit example is found in the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the pantheon of Ireland. Initially represented as a collection of gods with their own spheres of influence, descriptions of the Tuatha and their kind gradually diminished in power and stature as Christianity advanced in Ireland, until they were represented as small fairies who lived beneath the sidhe, the fairy mounds. Eventually, the sidhe were sealed off from humans altogether, forever closing the door to the Otherworld.

Ireland, in particular, holds special significance because it serves as the essential model for the pattern of Christian conversion outside of the Roman Empire: the conversion methods implemented among the Gaels were used among the majority of Northern European territories, which were primarily rural and decentralized. Similar stories of diminution can be found among the Sami of Scandinavia, where the appearances of the magical, elf-like ulddat became more illusory and rare as they retreated into the caves and underground places of Sapmi.

The narrative of “the retreat” was systematic, but the Christianization and adaptation of European folklore led to the emergence of a new genre in the High Middle Ages: the chivalric romance. Replacing older heroes with courtly knights, the romances reflected the hybrid stories created throughout Europe in the conversion process:

“Drawing their material from a broad range of sources that included oral folktales, vernacular epics and saints’ lives, courtly lyrics, classical Latin literature and contemporary chronicles, romance authors self-consciously blended ancient and contemporary stories into new shapes, created characters who appealed to the sentimental, moral, and political concerns of their audiences, and drew attention to their art as they did so.”

This blending of old legends with a new genre and religion actually served to preserve and recycle many of the elements of the older stories, leading to cross-pollinations that yielded one of the most enduring groups of stories in the history of fantasy: the Matter of Britain, which pertains to King Arthur and the fall of Camelot.

The Knights of the Round Table are the crossroads of fantasy’s history. The knight errant is a new iteration of the traveling hero, the Beowulf or Finn MacCumal of the past, and their adventures into the fairy realms carry on the fascination with the otherworld’s unearthly beauty. These old threads are modified to fit the themes of Christianity and the ideals of the day: the old quests for the hand of a beautiful maiden, such as Sigurd’s winning of Brynhild, are made into chaste stories of courtly love and service of the lady, and the service of God is added to the glory of battle as the chief motivator for the campaigns. These kinds of changes allowed the old stories to survive and carry on through history. But the most remarkable element of the Arthurian stories is the melancholy and loss that permeates its final act, the fall of Camelot.

The most influential collection of the Arthurian legends is arguably Thomas Malory’s Le Morte de Arthur, published in the 15th century. Drawing on earlier poems and versions of the stories, Malory compiled an eight-part work whose stories stretched from the rise of Arthur in the first portion to his fall at the hands of Mordred in the eighth. The final part, which recounts the eponymous death of the King, bears a strong thematic weight: up to this point in the chronicle, the stories have had almost universally happy endings, even containing light-hearted adventures among the knights. All of it is brought down in the cataclysm of the fall of Camelot, which Wilfred Guerin describes as a culmination of a grand tragedy:

“All the previous ‘happy endings,’ the ‘japes’ of Dinadan and Kay, the pleasant disguises of Gareth and Lancelot, serve to emphasize not only the later deaths of everyone of note, but more poignantly the lacerated hearts and minds of Arthur, Lancelot, Guenevere, and Gawain. The great society of the Round Table resolves into nothingness, and the few survivors can only think, ‘it might have been.’”

As Arthur dies on the field of battle, the specter of the otherworld fades into view: a barge appears at the shores of the ocean to take the King away to the paradise of Avalon. So the reign of Camelot ends with the kingdom in ruins, the Round Table broken, with the King being carried out of the world, leaving his knights to wander, forlorn, in the ruins of their paradise. The dream has died.

The chivalric romance tradition gained tremendous popularity among all quarters of society, but the arrival of the Renaissance would signal its death. Influenced by the rediscovery of classic Latin and Greek texts, Renaissance thinkers like Petrarch created a restructured view of history, anointing the “classical” antiquity of the Greeks and Romans as a golden age of knowledge and culture, the medieval era as the “Dark Ages,” an age of degenerate culture, and the new era as the modern one, in which the art, philosophy, and learning of the past would flourish again. The death stroke was delivered by Miguel Cervantes in his renowned novel Don Quixote, which mocked the famous works Amadis de Gaul and Orlando Furioso in particular, and paired with emergence of the picaresque, the chivalric romance began to lose favor.

While the elements of folklore found new life in children’s literature, the concept of fantastic literature for adults remained dormant until the early 1800s, when a new movement swept Europe. It was a reaction to industrialization, capitalism, the dominance of science and rationality, and the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment, which were seen as hollowing and destructive to the human soul. According to Henry Remak, among the movement’s key traits were imagination, human emotions, an interest in nature, mythology, and folklore, but most importantly, the desire to return to the medieval. This was Romanticism, the modern revival of dreams, myths, and fantasy.

It’s hard to overemphasize how deeply this tradition immersed itself in the idea of a lost paradise. Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre express it this way:

“The soul ardently desires to go home again, to return to its homeland, in the spiritual sense, and this nostalgia is at the heart of the Romantic attitude . . . the past that is the object of nostalgia may be entirely mythological or legendary, as in the reference to Eden, to the Golden Age, or to the lost Atlantis . . . [t]he Romantic vision selects a moment from the actual past in which the harmful characteristics of modernity did not yet exist . . . ”

These sentiments manifested themselves in two ways: the increased influence of the fantastic and the supernatural in art and the development of a new world outlook that attempted to infuse everyday life with the traits of utopia. A profound exhibit of this is William Morris, the founder of the Kelmscott Press and the driving force behind that company’s renowned work, the Kelmscott Chaucer. Morris set up his Press with the intent to create books in the style of the medieval, using methods and equipment that resembled the ancient printing apparatuses as closely as possible. Morris’ prose romances, especially The Well at World’s End and The Wood Beyond the World, follow the format and character of the chivalric romance and unite them with what Tolkien would later call a “secondary world”: a setting that is almost completely fictional, with its own regions, inhabitants, and metaphysical rules. This is a tremendously important development, because Morris’ romances take place in an otherworld that is completely divorced from this one. It seems that the culmination of Morris’ fascination with the medieval story was the decision to move his settings out of reach of time and reality; in carving out this niche, he was free to build the paradise that he envisioned.

The writer George MacDonald offers a different sort of literature. Though famous as an author of children’s fairy tales, such as The Golden Key and The Princess and the Goblin, the motifs and ideas contained in MacDonald’s work transcend its audience and place him alongside Morris as one of the founders of modern fantasy. And like Morris, his work is inextricably linked to the specter of the otherworld. According to Roderick McGillis:

“The idea of two worlds co-existing in time and space, superimposed upon one another, and yet—except for the occasional mysterious, “doorway”—totally invisible to one another is one most persistent themes of George MacDonald’s fantasy writing.”

Romanticism, in its avatars Morris and McDonald, signal a shift in the status of ‘paradise lost’ in fantasy: the writing of the stories themselves becomes an expression of the desire for the golden age. The narratives can end with the fulfillment of all the heroes’ wishes. In Morris’ Well at the End of the World, the protagonists eventually gain access to the Well, which grants them immortality, a boon normally associated with the realms of the Elves. This seems to fit, since the stories have become set in a sort of otherworld: whereas the heroes of myths were grounded in the geography and history of this world, the new heroes of fantasy can be natives of worlds where magic and wonder are part of the fabric of life. In this way, the world has undergone an inversion: the longing for paradise has escaped the legends and become our day-to-day reality, but the otherworld has departed from ours and found new life in fiction.

A hundred years after William Morris and the Romantics began the revival of fantasy literature, the 1973 introduction to The Lord of the Rings, written by Peter S. Beagle, still evokes the same longing for a lost golden age:

“I’ve never thought it an accident that Tolkien’s works waited more than ten years to explode into popularity . . . The Sixties were no fouler a decade than the Fifties . . . but they were the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly . . . [Tolkien] is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams, and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either; he found them a place to live, a green alternative each day’s madness here in a poisoned world.”

A vantage point on heaven is a priceless thing. The history of fantasy is defined by loss and nostalgia, but the image of paradise lost carries on through the ages, its image burned into the literature and the zeitgeist. It’s one of the last haven of dreams, and the unique power of dreams is their ability to illuminate.

About the Author

Christopher Mahon is a fantasy writer and essayist living in New York. He received his Bachelors in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University and graduated from NYU’s Summer Publishing Institute in 2014. In his free time he runs The Occult Triangle Lab, a blog on trigonometry, fantasy, and ungodly amounts of milk. Follow him on Twitter @DeadmanMu.

Talkative Creatures and a Mesozoic Cocktail:
A Conversation with Michael Swanwick

Chris Urie

Variety is the spice of short fiction. Within an hour, you can have an adventure under the seas of Europa, navigate Faerie, and be back on earth in time for an airship heist. One writer who has consistently surprised and delighted with his odd and eloquent stories is Michael Swanwick.

Not So Much, Said the Cat is Swanwick’s latest collection of short fiction. Within its pages, you’ll find stories featuring enhanced critter con men, a bar at the end of the Mesozoic Era, a tiny toy horse containing a spirit protector, and many more tales to tickle your imagination. True to form, Swanwick’s collection is eclectic, charming, and moving.

Michael Swanwick is the author of numerous short stories and novels. He’s a five-time Hugo Award winner, and his fiction has won the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy Award, and many other accolades. His short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, OMNI, Penthouse, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Dimensions, and more. His newest collection of short fiction, Not So Much, Said the Cat will be published by Tachyon this August.

Why does the cat say “not so much?”

He’s a character in a story about a young teenaged girl’s attempt to rescue her father from Hell. Beelzebub is there for whatever reasons a cat would be sent to perdition, and when he delivers that line he’s telling the girl that she might be lovely to look at for other humans, but for a cat . . . Which he does simply because he’s a contrarian and in Hell honesty is an offense to local community standards.

I hadn’t thought of this before, but Beelzebub—“Not the famous one, obviously,” as he says—and I have a lot in common. We both enjoy telling the truth in unexpected ways.

You have a keen talent for breathing life into inanimate objects and bestowing sapience on animals. How is the personality of that character informed by what it is?

It’s just the same sort of thing a child does, playing with plastic dinosaurs in the sandbox. They have a genius for making toys act like themselves. Most of us are shamed out of this ability as we grow up, but somehow I’ve managed to retain it.

In this collection, you pull inspiration from cultures and folk tales from around the world. What keeps you coming back to tales from Northern and Eastern Europe?

Simply the fact that in my early decades those were the areas where the literature was richest and easiest to come by. I’m trying to up my game in other cultures—African cultures, in particular. But it’s not something you can get simply by reading a book. You have to read a lot of books, be moved by them, and then let their contents percolate through the subconscious for years before the stories will appear.

Do you ever travel for research or does the travel instead provide the inspiration?

Both. My Russian stories were inspired by things I saw and heard and felt on my visits there, The Dala Horse was inspired by my visit to Sweden, and so on. But when I decided to write Dancing With Bears, set largely in Moscow, a city I’d only ever spent four hours in, I knew I had to go. I stayed long enough that I dared go out into the city and get deliberately lost, knowing I’d be able to find my way back to my flat on the Garden Ring. A few weeks is far from enough time to enable someone to write a serious novel about Russia. But the Darger & Surplus books are comic, so all I really needed was a sense of the city and the complex emotions that various locations in it arouse in you.

When I decided to write Chasing the Phoenix, Marianne and I arranged to tour China to research the book, but the day before the flight, I came down with a minor viral infection. Beijing International has thermometer gates and whoever passes through one running a fever gets thrown in quarantine. Marianne went without me and took copious notes, which helped immensely. And last year, after the novel was written, we went on a tour with a group that included Ellen Datlow and Eileen Gunn, so I got to see some of that great country—but none of it was tax-deductible, alas!

Russia has figured in a number of your stories and novels, what is it about the country and culture that keeps you intrigued?

I don’t know why it is, but everyone who goes to Russia falls in love with it. I do know that Russians feel very much like Americans in some ways and very unlike us in others; so perhaps it’s this dissonance that intrigues. The closest I’ve come to codifying this is that America and Russia are like twin brothers in a fairy tale, one of whom got all the good luck and the other of whom got all the bad—and neither of whom deserved what he got.

How do you feel this collection differs from past compilations of your short fiction?

For me, each collection is like a journal written by my subconscious imagination, covering the years when the stories were written. So this is what I’ve done and thought and felt this decade. There are two out-and-out love stories, a pastiche/alternate world version of Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, the latest Darger and Surplus adventure, a Mongolian Wizard story, and a lot more. It’s a varied collection.

Some of the stories contain more personal material than I’ve used before. Not many people are going to notice that. The opening of “For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again” recounts the time Gerry Adams walked by me on O’Connell Street on the eightieth anniversary of the Easter Uprising. And “The Man in Grey” is all about my relationship with the characters in my stories.

How do you think your short stories have evolved over the course of your career?

They’ve gotten more compact, more efficient. When I started writing, the novelette was my default length. Now it’s the short story. They also seem to have gotten more elegant. The science fiction is more and more phrased in a fantastic voice, and the fantasy is increasingly hard-headed, so they almost but not quite overlap. You can always tell which is which.

This may be the first collection where all the stories sound like they were written by the same author. I don’t know if that’s a gain or a loss, artistically.

Technology appears within your stories in subtle and unexpected ways. What do you think of tech, the internet, and AI today? Where do you think it is heading?

Our information technologies are at least a hundred years ahead of where, a quarter century ago, we would have predicted they’d be. That’s because there’s been so much profit at stake that every visionary who could be found was hired and given free rein to do whatever. Thus, its future is obvious enough that even a Silicon Valley CEO can predict it, and consequently isn’t very engaging to think about. (Well, except for the question of what artificial intelligence will be like, now that we know it’s not going to be at all like human intelligence.)

I’m much more interested in the disruptions that robotics is poised to visit upon us. Small things like whether it should be legal to send your children to school, unsupervised, in a self-driving car. Medium things like the fact that equipping a robot with a gun and a stamped, self-addressed padded envelope so it can anonymously mail the loot home will make armed robbery as easy as illegally downloading one of my novels is now. Big things like what kind of society we’re going to have when hyper-automation has eliminated employment for all but a small fraction of the population.

We’re all aware of the promises and dangers of biotech: An end to birth defects, and the advent of designer children. Extended lifespans, half of which will be spent in assisted living. Extinct species resurrected, and “wild” species tinkered with and improved upon until it’s acknowledged that there is no such thing anymore. But I think the neurosciences hold the greatest potential for change. Within the century we should have the ability to cure schizophrenia and other mental diseases, which will give us the ability to reshape the architecture of human thought. Put all this together, and we have the prospect of creating people who are no longer recognizably human, either physically or mentally.

Did you know that we have machines right now that can read minds? They don’t do it very well. But the first Wright Flyer wasn’t very much of an airplane either. The potentials there, both good and bad, are pretty obvious.

So Dickens had it right. The coming century will be the best of times and the worst of times. How we weather it will depend on how much thought we put into the consequences of our technology before they blindside us.

A few songs found their way into some of your stories. Are you a musician as well as a writer?

Hah! I was the only kid thrown out of the choir at St. Paul the Apostle Elementary School for my voice. In college, I wrote songs and played the guitar in coffeehouses—it was the Sixties and everybody did that—but beyond a certain, elementary level, I stopped getting any better at it and it’s been many years since last I tuned my guitar. So I’m just an appreciator of other people’s music.

It’s probably just as well. If I could sing, I’d be doing it all the time. You wouldn’t be able to shut me up.

If you found yourself in a bar at the end of the Mesozoic Era, what drink would you order?

A gin martini, dry, straight up, with a twist. Boodles, of course.

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:
Burning Bridges

Peter Watts

I’m told they only want one thing for this column. No critique, no crunchy science, none of the stuff I push on my blog or Nowa Fantastyka. ”Another Word” serves exclusively as a showcase for essays “tied closely to your professional involvement in the community.”

Ew.

I’m not big on “the community.” I’m not even sure such a thing exists. I know a lot of terrific people working in the shadow of this genre, in any number of capacities—but when you stir them in with everyone else who ever dogged a con, all those varied ingredients always seem to separate out into immiscible globules that can’t stand the sight of each other. You know the tribes. You know the names. You’d have to be blind not to see the fracture lines webbing across the landscape. Calling such disparate factions a community is a little like saying “United States of America” without putting ironic air quotes around the first word. Sometimes I think the best way to deal with them all is to just keep a safe distance while they tear each other to shreds.

And yet I can’t. No author can. We feed on each other, after all. We write, you read, enough money changes hands to keep the cycle rolling (although most of us are so addicted to writing we’d do it anyway, a design flaw that unscrupulous publishers have used against us for generations). An author could spend their whole life steering clear of cons and book signings and they’d still be bound to the community like a vein to an artery. So Daniel Abraham talks about receding horizons of success in the writing biz; Margot Atwell points us to new markets opened up by online and e-book publishing; Ken Liu waxes about the benefits of laziness and the dawning age of computer-assisted storytelling.

How to do stuff, in other words. How to maximize your odds of success: what fresh markets to explore, what tech to embrace, what habits to cultivate. And these insights, in turn, comprise the merest fraction of a vast and ever-growing archive of Received Wisdom from the Elders: the Clarion calls, the self-help books, the beta readers and writing groups and university courses taught by bitter Humanities profs who never made it out of the small presses.

There’s a lot of it out there, whole libraries of the stuff. And yet when I sift through it in search of something useful to say I come up empty—because I never did most of those things, and when I did I usually sucked at them. I did pretty much everything wrong.

I think I still do.

You know the list. Write every day. Blog every two or three, lest your fans grow bored and wander back to Buzzfeed. Join SFWA. Schmooze every editor. Infest every social media platform you can find, promote yourself relentlessly every time you so much as publish a laundry list. (I know of one agent who refused to represent an absolutely brilliant author solely because said author wasn’t on Twitter. The agent didn’t even bother to read the work in question; I mean, how great can you be if you don’t talk nonstop about how great you are?) Never badmouth your publisher, certainly not in public; you’ll be painted as a diva and a troublemaker and you’ll never eat in this town again.

Me? I’m lucky if I have time to blog once a week. I don’t twit, never have; I’m not on any social platform except Facebook, and the only reason I’m there is because I got sick of people saying hey did you read what that guy said about you on Facebook without being able to check it out. (That’s one habit I do share with every author on the planet; we ego-surf almost as much as we masturbate.) I managed to stick it out in the SFWA sandbox for maybe a year before fleeing in horror. I couldn’t schmooze if my life depended on it; back in ’04 I nearly got into a fistfight escaping from a friend who, in the misguided belief that I needed to “network,” was physically dragging me across the room to meet Gardner Dozois. I’m not even above badmouthing publishers, if they deserve it and if backstage efforts get me nowhere (just last January I apparently badmouthed a publisher without even meaning to). According to Received Wisdom, I starved to death in 2005.

Hell, the most basic rule of the game is get paid for your work, and I don’t even do that very well; I started giving Blindsight away for free online (along with most of my backlist) just a couple of months after its hardcover release. That incredibly stupid, bridge-burning act turned out to be the smartest move I ever made. If not for the publicity it generated (by people with far bigger names than mine—Scalzi, Doctorow, Cramer, others to whom I will always be in debt) Blindsight would have sunk without a trace, and me with it.

Just to be clear: you’re not witnessing any kind of principled nobility here. Rather, you’re dealing with an ego so fragile it’s more afraid of looking needy than it is of commercial failure. I crave fame and riches as much as anyone else on the midlist—I just don’t want to be that person who trumpets their own eligibility at the top of every awards season, who puts out a goddamn press release every time they get a story published in Prairie Fire. You can’t blame anyone for doing that, of course. We’re told to do that, we’re blamed if we don’t do it: by agents, by self-help books, by publishers who take more and more for less and less in the desperate hope that—if they squeeze their authors just a little harder—they might get out from under Amazon’s boot. But even if it’s necessary, it’s never pretty. Every time I see a panelist introducing themselves by spreading their backlist across the table, I die a little inside.

Fortunately, I haven’t had to do much of that stuff myself—because while I may not have much stomach for self-pimpery, I was once lucky enough to get shit-kicked and jailed by a cadre of unhinged border guards down in Michigan. I was even luckier to nearly die of flesh-eating disease the very next year (on Darwin Day, believe it or not). The year after that first incident, I won a Hugo. A few months after the second, I won the Shirley Jackson (for a story that debuted right here in Clarkesworld, in fact). Over in Poland, one night in 2011, I set my thumb on fire (it’s actually a thing they do there at parties), and I’ve lost count of the accolades I’ve received from those guys over the years.

I don’t know whether I deserved any of these wins. I like to think so—but then again, I’ve seen the visitor spikes on my website. The timing is suggestive—I just happen to win the Jackson right after uploaded pictures of the Australia-sized hole in my leg inspires half the internet to toss their cookies?—and it’s not as though anyone seriously believes that there’s no correlation between publicity and awards. (Noting that correlation, I started stepping blindly into traffic after Echopraxia came out. Sadly, the only award that book won was some obscure bauble called the “Bookie,” from the CBC. Maybe because I never actually got run over.)

My point is there are a lot of ways to get noticed. The best, in my experience, are those where you don’t even realize you’ve committed an act of self-promotion until after the fact. (I’m flashing back to an elevator ride in the Port Huron courthouse, just after my sentencing, when the scary-looking dude behind me sized me up and said “I don’t know if you just set this whole thing up to get new readers, but I went online the other day and found this story you wrote. I think it was called The Things…?”) You don’t have to embarrass yourself at parties or pimp yourself on Twitter or hack your own finished novel into pieces, only to stitch it back together into something your publisher can sell as Young Adult. (Yes, I know people who have done this.) You don’t even have to be especially good at prose; the bestseller lists are infested with people who can barely write their way out of a fortune cookie.

And I haven’t even mentioned self-publishing.

This would be the point where I bring it all home with my own set of rules, my own path to success. But I can’t. You’d be crazy to follow my example: it was more accident than design, there were too many flukes and butterflies flapping their wings along the way. Only an idiot would list “nearly succumb to weird space disease” on their twelve-step plan for literary success.

But the thing is, it wasn’t just a fluke (or a bacterium, or a beat-down) here and there. I did everything wrong, things that should have sunk my career half a dozen times. I’m nowhere near bestseller status and I doubt I ever will be, but I’m still standing, published in nineteen languages. I don’t know if you’d describe it as success. There’s no security in this job; for all I know everything’s going to come crashing down tomorrow. Maybe I’m Wile E. Coyote two seconds before he looks down and realizes there’s no ground beneath his feet, but I’m making a living at this, for now at least. I’ve been making a living at it for most of this century. If this is success, then I achieved it by failing at pretty much every benchmark that’s supposed to matter.

The only thing I can conclude from that—the closest thing to advice I can offer—is that Rules matter a lot less than anyone told us. They’re statistical descriptors at best, curves, and confidence limits designed to reduce a million data points down to a few manageable parameters. They’re next to useless when it comes to predicting the trajectory of a single point.

There are a million points in this cloud. There have to be a million trajectories.

Surely that’s cause for hope.

Length-of-rejection (used as an index of editorial interest) from Analog, over time. Empirical support for the claim that my writing gets worse with practice.

About the Author

Peter Watts—author of Blindsight, Echopraxia, and the Rifters Trilogy, among other things—seems especially popular among people who don’t know him. At least, he wins most of his awards overseas except for a Hugo (won thanks to fan outrage over an altercation with Homeland Security) a Jackson (won thanks to fan sympathy over nearly dying from flesh-eating disease), and a couple of dick-ass Canadian awards you’ve probably never heard of. Blindsight is a core text for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology, despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires. Watts’s work is available in nineteen languages.

Editor’s Desk:
What is it with Readercon?

Neil Clarke

July marks my annual pilgrimage to Readercon, a literary genre convention in Massachusetts, that this year has moved from Burlington to Quincy. No matter how amazing the new location turns out to be, I’m still going to have a special place in my heart for the old one. It was there, ten years ago, that Clarkesworld Magazine was born. Even though we will publish our ten-year anniversary issue in October, for me, the celebration starts now. Although I never would have guessed it at the time, the decision to launch this magazine was a life-changing event. It’s introduced me to some of my closest friends, provided countless hours of enjoyment, and opened a path to a new career doing something I love.

Readercon, however, wasn’t satisfied with me having merely one life-changing event! Four years ago, on the first day of the convention, I suffered a near-fatal “widowmaker” heart attack that no one could have seen coming. I was lucky. A few hours earlier and I would have been driving alone on a highway from New Jersey to Massachusetts. Instead, I was at the convention hotel, conveniently located one block away from Lahey Clinic, one of the best hospitals in that area of the country. They saved my life and forever have my gratitude. You don’t face something like that and not come out changed, however.

Those first few hours in the hospital were the most frightening time in my life, so it was only natural that I’d experience some dread about returning the following year. So, in an attempt to try to take back the date and location, I decided to have my first Kickstarter campaign end on the anniversary of the heart attack. The project: Upgraded, a cyborg anthology inspired by the defibrillator surgery I needed to offset the damage to my heart. It funded and now, there’s another anniversary for Readercon.

And now it is time to let some other month have some fun. A few weeks ago saw the publication of the first of my The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies, so that’s a good start. In August I turn fifty, which I appreciate now more than I would have before the heart attack, so that’s something else to look forward to. There’s also Worldcon, where I’m up for a Hugo, for Best Editor Short Form; and a Chesley Award, for Best Art Director. Then October gets our ten year anniversary issue and somewhere in there, Lisa will get a job and I’ll quit mine. Yeah, I think that’s enough excitement for now.

Going to be at Readercon this year? Stop by and say hi. I’ll be the one relaxing behind the Clarkesworld table, trying to stay out of trouble . . .

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series was published by Night Shade Books in June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Alien Invasion

Lasse Perala

About the Artist

Lasse is a freelance concept artist and illustrator from Vantaa, Finland.