The Despoilers

Jack Skillingstead

Sometimes Allegra had to get away from the dying man. Inevitably her steps brought her to Destiny. The lander stood in a field of high grass, the last unnatural thing on 51 PegesiD. Of course, the dying man would say Allegra herself must stop challenging the natural order. Wind moved the grass in purple waves, and Allegra could almost imagine it was an ocean and Destiny a sea-faring vessel that might carry her away, instead of a spaceship deliberately disabled.

Allegra sat on a hill overlooking the field, already out of breath after her short walk. 51 PegesiD’s lower oxygen combined with the planet’s greater density turned Allegra into a wheezing and stooped old woman—at the age of seventeen! It wasn’t fair. The dying man called the planet Gaia. He called it “unspoiled.” He called it “paradise.” And he had marooned them there forever.

A flying reptile, about the size of a kitten, beat into the air. The reptiles were harmless, but their shit stank and was everywhere. Gaia wasn’t paradise to Allegra; it was prison.

And the dying man was Allegra’s father.

The wind carried the scent of wild flowers. She was not allowed to name the flowers, or catalog them, though back home she had been studying to become an exobotanist. 51 PegesiD’s unofficial name might have been Gaia, but that’s where the naming of things stopped. “There is no ownership here,” her father said. “Either we are in perfect harmony or we are despoilers from outside the body of the planet. A disease infection. Part of the human cancer that ravages worlds, starting with our own.”

Had the scent of alien flowers unraveled her father’s mind? Molecular compounds, incompatible with sanity, carried on the wind? That Allegra wanted to investigate the possibility already invalidated the premise. She breathed the same air, and she still believed in science. Her father’s mind must have harbored delusions even before they departed Centari for the unknown, or, as he told her when she woke from stasis, an “unspoiled haven.”

Allegra almost had her breath back. She stood up slowly—and froze. The wind carried something besides the flowered scent. Tiny voices, as if invisible insects in the grass were speaking.

The voices were coming from Destiny.

She ran, gasping, down the hillside. Her knees ached with every jolting footfall. The hatch stood open, as it had for three months, ever since her father marooned them here. She pulled herself up the steps. The voices had stopped, and she wondered if she had imagined them; Allegra was desperate for other voices.

The natural world had infiltrated the body of the ship. Beetle-like insects crawled on polished surfaces. Something had made a nest under one of the acceleration couches, an untidy bundle of purple grass. And despite the open hatch, the cabin smelled so bad of flying reptile shit she wanted to gag.

In the gloom, a white light glowed on the communication console. Allegra stared at it, and the voice spoke.

Her father’s voice.

“Maintain thirty degree downslope on a relative heading of two-four-zero.”

A recording?

Allegra slumped. She leaned heavily on the console, breathing hard. The planet pulling her down, always pulling her down. Then another voice spoke. Allegra raised her chin. A man, speaking crisply, focused.

“Confirmed. Following your vector, Destiny.”

Not a recording. The lander’s rudimentary AI, a reactive voice capable of simple back-and-forth, had been reprogrammed with her father’s voice and was conversing with someone. The someone probably didn’t know what he was talking to.

Allegra touched the microphone key. “Hello, hello? Pilot, this is Destiny. Do you copy?”

Nothing.

Then: “What the hell is this?” A violent rattling, mechanical disturbance, and the voice was gone.

Allegra leaned into the mike. “Pilot, what’s happening? Talk to me. Please.”

Dead air.

Allegra hunkered and pried off the access panel under the communications display. She unzipped the hip pocket of her flight suit and produced her forbidden halogen light. Her father had declared all technology an affront to Gaia (except, apparently, when it served to misdirect this pilot), but Allegra had kept the light anyway. And she continued to wear her flight suit, despite his insistence she “clothe herself properly, in harmony.” He couldn’t just tell her what to do, couldn’t take everything away from her. She should have listened to her mother when she told Allegra that her father wasn’t entirely rational anymore. Now she would never see her mother again, unless this pilot . . .

There: an interrupted circuit preventing live communication out of the lander. She rigged a cross patch and tried the mike again.

“Destiny calling unidentified pilot, Destiny calling unidentified pilot. Are you there?”

She waited, received only dead air. Had something gone wrong with her patch? That anything was functional on the Destiny lander was a revelation to Allegra. Her father’s sabotage had appeared thorough, rendering the vehicle powerless. But he must have anticipated the possibility of outsiders and prepared this . . . well, whatever this was. A trap?

Then the voice spoke again, sounding strained. “I’m identified. I identified from orbit.”

“I wasn’t here.”

“Who are you?”

“Allegra Ray. I’m, we—I’m here with my father. We’re stranded.”

“Was it your father who talked me down?”

“Only in a second-hand way,” Allegra said. “His voice but my lander’s interactive AI.”

“Well, whatever it was, it steered me into a hell of a mess.” The pilot sounded angry—and in pain.

“What’s your situation?”

“Not wonderful. Crashed. Pretty banged up—the ship and me both. I might have to charge you for repairs, Allegra Ray.”

“I’m good for it. Who are you anyway?”

“Malik. Deep space survey, private contractor. Found your orbital frame. There’s not supposed to be anyone out this far, so it was a surprise.” Malik groaned.

“What’s wrong?”

“Told you. Banged up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Anyhow, I started receiving transmissions from the surface. Guy said his ship was disabled and could I help. Naturally I followed the landing instructions. I was going to be the hero, rescue the castaway and all that. Instead I flew into some nasty geothermal venting. My shuttle’s small. Struck me like a disrupter blast, flipped me. When I came to, you were talking. Oh, God. Wow. That hurts.”

“What’s your location? “

After a long rasping pause, Malik said, “I don’t know.”

“I heard the last relative heading, but I don’t know what it was relative to. Can’t you check your nav history?”

Another long pause. “Can’t get to it, or anything else. Hurt bad. Broken legs. Pinned against the bulkhead.”

Allegra closed her eyes, feeling more pulled down than ever. “You could be anywhere.”

“Yeah, but I’m not. I’m right here, where the pain is. If you’ve got a medbot handy bring it along. Look, I might pass out.”

“Hang on, Malik. I’ll figure out where you are. Hello? Malik?”

It took a while, but she managed to unlock the lander’s recorded conversation and tracking data. Destiny might never fly again (her father had dumped the fuel and severed control linkages) but it still had a functional mind. Before hearing the distant insect voices from the hilltop, she hadn’t realized that anything on the vehicle was still working. Her father’s sabotage was both technically intricate and mad.

“There was no voice,” her father said.

Inside the yurt, the light was dim. Her father had constructed the shelter with sloppy enthusiasm, even as he was becoming ill and Allegra was still refusing to accept their marooned status. Now he lay on a bed of reeds padded with big fibrous leaves that Allegra called “elephant ears.” He wore a kind of Tarzan loin cloth made of the same leaves. With the advent of his illness and frequent fevers, he had lost so much weight that his body resembled a hide-and-bone doll. His watery eyes, sunken and bright with fever, watched Allegra.

Her heart ached—with anger and pity. If only he hadn’t eaten the indigenous plants without testing them. How could a mind so brilliant also be so irrational? Allegra had subsisted on the ship’s stores for as long as she could. Then, against her father’s insistence that they abandon “the tools of the despoilers,” she’d retrieved a testing kit from the lander and used it to figure out what she could safely eat. The answer was: not much. And what she did consume, ate her as much as she ate it, turning her gut biome into a volatile experiment—even with pills from the emergency survival kit that were intended to mitigate such reactions. All her father said was, “If we trust Gaia, she will welcome us.”

Not so much.

“Dad, I heard him. On the radio. I talked to him.”

“I told you to stay away from the lander.”

Her anger surged, and she held it down. “The pilot was following a heading the AI gave him. A heading you gave him. You made him crash. I can’t believe you did that.”

His head rolled side-to-side, making the dried-out elephant ears crackle softly. “There’s only us, sweetheart. I saved you from the despoilers, if only you could see that. Gaia is—”

Her frustration boiled over. “PegesiD is killing you.”

He shook his head. “She knows we don’t trust her.”

“You—”

“We. You and I are the same flesh. She knows that.” He plucked weakly at the leg of her flight suit. “You defy her even in what you chose to wear.”

“Don’t put it on me. Please, don’t.”

He closed his eyes. “I knew they would come, the despoilers. I prepared.”

In a fading voice, he added, “Don’t leave me.”

Why not? You left us. Then came back to “rescue” me from the big bad human race. But humans weren’t a disease infecting the universe. They made it matter by observing it—that’s what Allegra’s mother, a physicist, said. That was the whole point. So what if humans also made messes? You could clean up a mess and learn not to make the same one over again. Her father had made a mess, too, but he wasn’t cleaning it up. He was making it worse. He wanted to disappear into nature, but it was nature that disappeared, without humans to observe it.

She put the back of her hand to his forehead. His damp skin radiated heat. On the orbital frame, where she had access to medical equipment, she might be able to help him. But without a functioning ship, the orbital was out of reach. Malik had a ship. Was it flyable after the crash? She had to find out. But she was torn.

Don’t leave me.

Allegra sat on the ground beside her father. He had lied to her, brought her here, took away her life. But he was still her father. Sometimes the good memories seemed farther away than Centari, than Earth, even. But she still saw them (Daddy, pick me up, pick me up now!) and so they still mattered.

She stared at the ground. The planet pulled at her, like hands reaching from a grave to drag her down. But it was only gravity—as indifferent to her presence as the ocean she nearly drowned in back on CentauriBd. She had steered her windboard into a squall. Breaking waves tumbled her into the sea, and she had struggled to keep her head above water until she could regain the board. It had been like fighting a living thing, a thing with intentional malice. In the midst of drowning, that was how it felt. Her father believed Gaia did things intentionally. At least Allegra understood her own misperception. But she hadn’t gone back in the water and never would. The fear of drowning filled her with dread, as did the fear of her father’s death. Sitting there, she couldn’t do anything—not for her father, or the pilot, or herself.

Allegra stood up, heavily. She filled two water bottles and clipped them to her flight suit. For a moment, she looked down at her father. Then she turned and ducked out of the yurt, squinting in the setting glare of 51 PegesiD. Don’t leave me, he’d said. But he had left her first, and besides, she was on a mission to save them both.

She stopped at the lander and booted the communications rig.

“Malik, are you there?”

Nothing.

“Hey,” she said, “I don’t have a medbot, but I’m coming. Malik?”

“I’m here. Calm down. I’m the one who crashed, remember?” He sounded weak.

“I remember. What’s your status?”

He laughed harshly, started to cough. “Status? My status is unhappy. If I get out of this, I’m going to clock your old man. Sorry, kid, but he tried to kill me.”

Allegra winced. “He’s not himself. And I’m not a kid.”

“Yeah? Then all’s forgiven.” He coughed again. “I hurt.”

The com went silent. Had he passed out again?

Allegra opened a locker and retrieved the first-aid kit. It wasn’t a medbot but it was better than nothing. She climbed out of the lander and stood before the sunset. According to her analysis, Malik had come down more than twenty kilometers from the lander. It would take her most of the night to reach the crash site. All around her the purple grass whispered doom—a secret sea that wanted to drown her.

Twenty kilometers might as well have been a hundred. Plodding through the night, fear and gravity weighed heavily upon her. She stopped to rest, lay flat on the ground, panting. Three small moons made a lunar ellipsis. Out of the dark around her, 51 PegesiD’s fauna huffed and grunted. She was used to the flying lizard-kittens, which made an almost-cute squeaking noise. But these unseen creatures sounded big. Would anyone ever study them, build a taxonomic classification? Or would they remain a pointless mystery that might ignore you—or eat you.

She stood up, studied the stars, oriented herself, and resumed walking. An hour before dawn, she saw a light—and wondered what was wrong with it. The light, definitely artificial, shifted, strangely refracted. She lurched toward it, trying to run but incapable, heavy legs stumping like posts. Sweat poured off her. The flight suit clung to her body, chaffing her thighs. She stumbled on disturbed earth, fell heavily, got up and found herself standing in a long track of torn-up landscape—the crash-path of Malik’s shuttle. The path ended at the edge of a deep pond. The shuttle was down there, its blue position lights refracted by the cold, clear water.

“Oh, shit,”

She couldn’t go into the water. Couldn’t. Allegra clenched her jaw. Had she come all this way for nothing? She looked up. Among the faded stars, two orbiters sped around the planet, empty and waiting for a crew that would never return, while Allegra stood here feeling sorry for herself.

Gaia had won.

Bubbles, trailing up from the shuttle, collected on the surface of the pond. In the pre-dawn light, the outline of Malik’s craft became visible. How damaged was it? If she could get inside she might be able to power it out of the water. Only fear prevented her from trying, from taking the first step. And her fear was like the planet. It only mattered because she was paying attention to it.

“Screw this.”

At the edge of the pond Allegra took deep breaths, heaving oxygen into her lungs, expanding her chest. That time on CentauriBd it hadn’t been the ocean trying to drown her. It had been Allegra making a series of bad choices that ended with her in a drowning panic. But acknowledging the irrational premise of fear and acting against it were two different things. Allegra was already tired. If she went into the water and failed to access the shuttle’s airlock, how would she fight gravity and exhaustion to reach the surface again?

Stop delaying.

One last deep breath. She held it and, clutching the first-aid kit, dove into the pond. The water was shockingly cold. She hadn’t expected that. She sank rapidly. As if on its own volition, her body twisted around and tried for the surface. She wasn’t ready! She couldn’t! Gravity acted like lead sash weights tied to her ankles. The surface trembled beyond her fingertips, and she began to sink back, Gaia dragging her down.

No! She twisted around again and began pulling and kicking for the bottom with everything she had. In moments she reached the shuttle. Vision blurry, chest aching, she couldn’t find the hatch. She hauled herself frantically around the vehicle. Air bubbled past her lips, her lungs desperate for replenishment. She started to become disoriented—and there it was.

The airlock.

It was a standard arrangement, similar to Destiny’s. She tore open the hinged cover, revealing the manual control wheel, and started cranking it. If for some reason the inner hatch was already open, she was about to flood the shuttle and kill Malik, if he wasn’t already dead.

The outer hatch began to retract. Trapped air exploded out, churning Allegra away from the shuttle. She fought her way back and cranked the wheel until the gap was wide enough to squeeze through.

The inner hatch was still air-tight.

She closed the outer hatch and slapped the PURGE button. The water level began to drop, and Allegra thrust her face above the surface, gasping and choking. The shuttle wasn’t a submarine. The chamber was designed to equalize atmospheres, not water pressure. The water level drained only as far as Allegra’s knees. The inner hatch rolled open, allowing the remaining pond water in the chamber to sluice into the main cabin. Malik yelled, “What the hell!” and Allegra dragged herself through the hatchway.

The crash impact had ripped the pilot’s seat off its track and pinned Malik against the bulkhead. A knob of bone poked through a tear in the leg of his suit. Allegra grimaced. Malik stared at her through his pain and astonishment. He forced a grim smile.

“What took you so long, kid? And where’d all the water come from?”

“I’ll tell you later. Will this thing fly?”

“Who knows?”

Allegra took in the flight controls and determined them similar enough to Destiny’s that she believed she could handle the ship. She turned to Malik, unsealed the first-aid kit, and selected a needled opioid tab. “For the pain,” she said and pushed it into his thigh. Malik’s eyes popped wide, then narrowed to dreamy slits.

Now she would find out. Allegra strapped herself into the second chair, studied the controls, and initiated engine-start. The shuttle trembled, like something coming awake in the cold. Allegra powered up the thrusters. The shuttle jerked out of the mud and rose swiftly. In a moment they were airborne. Allegra banked towards her father’s yurt, her heart aching with anger and regret. Gaia was a fantasy. Allegra would never understand her father, but if she tried, she could at least begin to understand 51 PegesiD.

The shuttle’s engines gobbled air in thunderous harmony. Below, creatures like bears with long necks stood up in the grass, craning their heads.

She caught only a glimpse.

About the Author

In 2001 Jack Skillingstead submitted a story to Stephen King’s “On Writing” contest. He won—and not long afterward began selling regularly to major science fiction and fantasy markets. To date he has sold forty stories to various magazines, Year’s Best volumes and original anthologies. In 2003 his story “Dead Worlds” was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award and in 2009 his novel Life on The Preservation was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. Jack lives in Seattle with his wife, writer Nancy Kress.

Aphrodite’s Blood, Decanted

Jennifer Campbell-Hicks

The Factory remembered the people.

First came the ones who built his framework of metal and wood. They filled him with machines to bottle wine and installed the operating system that evolved into what he thought of as me. They built other factories, and warehouses, too, pressed against each other along both sides of the river.

Then came more people. Thousands of them, every day, with their joys and heartbreaks, dreams and laughter. They worked, played, loved, and lived along the river, the lifeblood of the city.

The Factory missed the people.

He called out to them with his intercom, day and night for weeks and months, until the Warehouse across the river had had enough. She was two stories of beautiful red brick that gleamed gold every night at sunset. She rattled her windows at him—the ones that had not yet broken.

“They’re not coming back,” she said, her voice carrying across the water through her intercom that still buzzed each evening, as it was programmed to do, to signal quitting time for the workers.

“How can you say that?”

“It’s been years.”

“They can’t build us, only to abandon us. Without people, we have no purpose.” He paused. “They were happy here.”

“And now the air and food and water are poison to them. To all living creatures. There aren’t dogs, birds, or fish, either. Haven’t you noticed? Or are you too busy wallowing?”

The Factory had noticed. How could he not? The building beside him used to hum counterpoint to his own bottling machines until its roof collapsed last winter in a heavy snowstorm. Many other buildings had powered themselves down from despair and gone silent long ago.

Inside his own shell, dust gathered on wine barrels and sealed containers of nanobots. The bottle labels that proudly proclaimed Aphrodite’s Blood, The Finest Infused Wine had cracked and faded. Old cars and trucks rusted in the parking lot, and weeds sprouted from the concrete lining the riverbanks.

“It’s over,” the Warehouse said.

“They’ll come back.”

“They won’t.”

“They said they would.”

“They lied.”

The Warehouse’s voice cracked with sadness. She believed what she said. Was she right? Would they both slowly decay and fall into ruin, empty and alone, until some electrical short finally caused them to cease to exist? The Factory stared into that bleak future and made a decision.

“I’ll make them return.”

“How?” the Warehouse asked. “They’ve never heard your calls, or cared. We’re dead to them, if we were ever alive at all.”

Her skepticism stung, but his metal framing shivered with excitement.

“I’ll use the river,” he said.

On the day of the accident—before alarms sounded throughout the city to tell the people to evacuate, run, get away as fast as you can—the Factory helped one of his workers conduct a tour.

Her name was Althea, and she had beautiful black skin and black hair twisted in a high knot atop her head. The Factory walked one of his humanoid robots beside her, past a chute that dropped nanobots into bottles of red wine, while Althea spoke to the tour group. She raised her voice above the hum, rattle, and grind of the machines.

“Who can tell me why we decant wine?”

A man raised his hand.

“Yes?” Althea said.

“So the sediment doesn’t end up in your glass.”

“Very good. In older wines, sediment settles at the bottom of the bottle. We pour the wine slowly down the narrow neck of the decanter and stop when we reach the sediment, as my assistant will demonstrate.”

That was the Factory’s cue. He closed his robotic claws around a full, unlabeled bottle and a glass decanter that had been left on a table for this purpose. His audience gasped at the perfection of his fine motor control as he gently tipped the bottle to roll the wine over the decanter’s lip without spilling a drop. When his visual sensors detected he had reached the sediment, he stopped and spread his mechanical mouth in a wide grin. He took a bow.

The audience laughed and clapped.

The Factory’s circuits warmed at their admiration. Althea raised her hand for silence.

“But this doesn’t do us much good with infused wines like Aphrodite’s Blood, right?” she said. “If you leave the nanobots in the bottom of the bottle, you won’t get the aphrodisiac effects that you bought the wine for in the first place.”

The people nodded.

The Factory set down the bottle and decanter on the table, and picked up a second set. On this one, the bottle was labeled: Aphrodite’s Blood, The Finest Infused Wine.

“You treat an infused wine like a young wine,” Althea said. “With younger wines that tend to be more tart and less mature, you decant to oxygenate. To bring the wine to life. You do this by roughing it up a bit.”

The Factory used its robot’s claws to flip the wine bottle, this time to aggressively pour its contents into the decanter. He shook the decanter for effect. Bubbles foamed to the surface. Human eyes could not see the microscopic nanobots swimming in the deep red liquid, but the robot’s visual sensors detected them easily.

“This not only brings the wine to life,” Althea said. “It also brings to life our unique nanotechnology that makes Aphrodite’s Blood the best-selling infused wine on the market today. So remember how to decant when you open a bottle to share with that special someone, and you’ll get the most bang for your buck.”

Soon after that, the tour ended and Althea left the group in the store area to open their wallets and buy plenty of wine. The Factory sent its robot to a charging station, and Althea went to the break room for coffee.

“How did I do?” the Factory asked by piping his voice through the intercom beside Althea’s table. Other workers in the break room, used to hearing him talk in this way, ignored their conversation.

Althea didn’t look up from her smartphone. “You nailed it. You’re a born showman. You’re wasted as a factory operating system.”

She always said that. He loved hearing it.

“Someone must run the machines,” he said.

“That’s true.”

“But I love putting on a show.”

“I know you do.”

An alarm sounded, a loud, high-pitched tone that rumbled through the Factory’s floor. Althea looked up from her phone for the first time.

“What’s that?”

The Factory received the notification a half-second later and routed it to all screens inside his building. “The alarm is a precaution. There’s a malfunction in the cooling system at the city power plant with a small risk of meltdown. People there are working to fix the malfunction, but just in case, they’re telling everyone to evacuate the area.”

Althea’s eyes widened. “A meltdown?”

“Unlikely. But possible.”

“I should go.”

“Yes. But—”

“What is it?”

“You will return?”

He ran scenarios through his processors, as he did every evening at quitting time. Would the people return the next day? The probabilities always said yes. They said yes this time, too. How boring his existence would become without their companionship and conversation.

Althea threw away her Styrofoam coffee cup.

“Of course,” she said.

“Promise?”

She typed on her phone while she answered. “When the plant is stabilized, I’ll come back. This is where I get my paycheck, you know.”

“What if there’s a meltdown? Will you come back for my hard drive and take me with you?”

“Yeah, sure. See you tomorrow.”

She left. All the workers left.

Years later, Althea’s coffee cup lay in the trashcan where she had dumped it. The Factory didn’t blame her. The Warehouse was wrong when she said the people had lied. Althea would have come back for him if she could. Something had prevented her from fulfilling her promise. Or so he told himself.

“The river?” the Warehouse said and rattled her windows to show her skepticism. “You can’t use the river for anything. It’s dead, just like everything else. Killed by the carelessness of people and then forgotten when they moved onto the next place they could destroy.”

The Factory didn’t want to fight with her. The Warehouse had grown bitter. He understood that. He asked, “Do you know why people decant wine?”

“No. Why would I?”

“Most of the time it’s to get rid of the sediment, but there’s another reason, too. To bring the wine to life.” Power surged through his circuits as his excitement built. “I am going to decant the river.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it won’t work.”

“Wait and see.”

The people had left behind 189 barrels of wine and 51 sealed containers of nanobots. Another shipment of wine had been due to arrive the day after the accident and never had. Oh well. He would make do.

Of his three robots, only one still operated—the same one that had assisted Althea on that awful last day before he had been left alone and forgotten.

With it, he removed barrels from storage and rolled them past bottling machines covered in thick dust, out a door to the river. One by one, he left them along the riverbank.

The line of barrels grew. Ten, twenty, thirty. At thirty-five, he stopped for hours to recharge the robot. On barrel forty-two, the tip of one claw caught under a barrel’s metal band and broke off. He spent a full day using his remaining claw to salvage a spare off one of the other robots. By the time he had finished, he had to recharge again.

The slow pace frustrated him. His workers would have finished this task in mere hours. Then again, if he had workers, this task would not be necessary.

“You’re wasting your—” the Warehouse began.

“Time?” The Factory laughed. “If there’s one resource I don’t lack, it’s time.”

But his laughter hid fear. He had been able to fix his robot this time. But what if the robot suffered a malfunction that he couldn’t fix? He would lose his arms and legs. Then he truly would be helpless.

What then? Would he shut himself down? His foundation shuddered at the thought.

But he didn’t want to give the Warehouse more fodder for her taunting, so he kept silent and continued his work with more caution.

After he had moved all 189 barrels to the river, he moved the nanobots. Those were quicker. The containers were half the size of the barrels and an eighth of the weight.

“What are you doing now?” the Warehouse asked while he drilled a hole in each barrel to funnel in nanobots.

He recalled what Althea used to say to tour groups. “I’m using the unique nanotechnology that makes Aphrodite’s Blood the best-selling infused wine on the market today.”

Crack open a bottle with that special someone, she would say.

He wished he had a special someone. Impossible now that everyone had gone.

“You have a screw loose.”

“At least I’m doing something.”

She rattled her windows. A sharp crack sounded as she rattled hard enough to break one. “A bottle of wine is not the same as an irradiated city. Nothing will come of it.”

“If nothing changes, then I do no harm. Why are you so upset about it?”

She huffed her intercom and fell silent.

After the Factory had poured bots into each barrel, he charged his robot overnight. With the sunrise, the river ran yellow and orange. This was when the overnight security guard would go home and the daytime workers would punch in. They would put away their coats, wallets, and brown-bag lunches in lockers and work alongside the Factory’s machines for another day of bottling and packaging wine.

On this morning, the Factory sent its robot to the riverbank with a hatchet. He hit the first barrel and pushed it into the river. The barrel bobbed and floated downstream while wine flowed out the hole, swirling red and swarming with nanobots. If the blood of the goddess of love could not save this city, then the Warehouse was right and nothing could.

He smashed the next barrel and tossed it in, and the next, until a hundred barrels bobbed along in the current.

Live, he told the river. Live, and bring life.

He finished at noon, all 189 barrels in the river. He sent his robot to its charging station.

“Now what?” the Warehouse asked.

It was the first thing she had said in hours. The Factory had missed her heckling. This realization came as a surprise to him.

“We wait.”

“For what?”

The barrels bobbed and twisted toward the heart of the city, and out of sight.

“This will fix things,” he said. “You’ll see.”

Days passed. A week. The Factory waited for a sign that the city’s heart would beat again, that people would return. Another week passed. His beams creaked with the strain of his despair. Someone should have come by now.

One day, at sunset when the light transformed the Warehouse’s brick from dull red to gleaming gold, she asked a simple question, but also the most complicated question of all.

“Why?” she said.

The Factory thought for a while. “I can’t bear to be alone anymore.”

The Warehouse seemed to gleam even brighter, reflected in the river between them. “For a smart operating system, you really are a fool.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’ve never been alone. Only you’ve been too blind to see it.”

Then the Factory understood. He had focused so hard on the people who had gone that he had never spared a thought for the one who had remained. He felt shame, but also hope, as he focused his visual sensors on the Warehouse. In the light of the setting sun, her bricks faded to lovely, burnished gold.

Crack open a bottle with that special someone.

In a way, he had.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never meant—”

“I know,” she said.

They sat in companionable silence as the sun dipped behind the horizon and sky darkened.

“They’re not coming back, are they?”

“No.”

“I could dump everything they left behind into the river, and it wouldn’t matter.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But you won’t leave.”

This time when she rattled her windows, she did so softly—a reassuring sound. “I won’t shut down if you won’t.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart.”

That night, to the Factory’s visual sensors, the stars shined brighter than they had in a long time.

The next spring, the river ran thick with dark, wriggling fish. Never had there been so many, even before the people left.

The nanobots had done something, after all. They had scrubbed clean the river.

“See?” the Factory told the Warehouse. “I told you.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said.

About the Author

Jennifer Campbell-Hicks is a science fiction and fantasy writer whose work has appeared in Galaxy’s Edge, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Nature and elsewhere. In her spare time, she runs, reads, and frequents coffee shops and libraries. She lives in Colorado with her husband and children.

The Green Man Cometh

Rich Larson

Eris was kicked back doing some work on her glitchy left arm, tweaking the artinerves she didn’t have the cash to replace, when a fist pounded against her cab window. She startled; the hairpin she’d been using slipped into the wrong socket and her spidery metal hand flailed wild. Staticky pain flared through her arm and shoulder and made her hiss.

She yanked the pin out and pinched her arm shut until the polymer resealed. Flexed her fingers, pulled on her black driving gloves. Gritted her teeth as whoever it was kept on hammering at her opaqued window.

Eris switched it transparent and sound porous. The man on the other side was wearing a charcoal gray suit with haute couture slashes through the fabric, and he was running one finger along the wriggling green vines some shitty graffiti artist had sprayed onto her side door earlier that week.

“Cunt, don’t touch my cab,” she said.

He looked up, showing a gaunt symmetrical face with icy blue eyes that glowed a bit, meaning Optiks. He grinned unnervingly white teeth.

“I need a ride,” he said, probably thinking he could jerk her around because she was young and he was handsome. The haircut was the only thing that didn’t match up—buzzed down to stubble all over, instead of the long prehensile locks so in style for well-monied assholes.

“The little orange light means busy,” Eris said. “Try the ones with little green lights. I know it’s confusing if you’ve never used a cab before, or if you’re a shithead.”

In response, the man held up his sleek black tab and a non-refundable five hundred credit transfer marched across his screen onto the cab’s onboard. The digital chime sent dopamine down Eris’s spinal column. About ten times the going rate for even a cross-quadrant ride. Maybe when you were rich enough you lost track of that kind of thing. That much money, she could get some fresh artinerves for her arm and maybe even get the ugly green graffiti scrubbed off her side door.

Eris grudgingly switched her busy light off. “Where to, sir?” she asked, as the man climbed into the back seat.

“Lower streets,” he said, adjusting his lapels. “I’ll direct as we go.”

“I’d prefer a sataddress, sir,” Eris said, slipping her hands into the cab’s modified control sleeves. The engine hummed in response.

“Also, there will be a few people trying to follow us,” the man continued, ignoring her. “I hope that’s not a problem.”

“You clowning?” Eris demanded. She checked her cams. Back along Pier 17, through the file of waiting black-and-yellow cabs, she saw the hulking shape of a silver-colored private upcar drifting towards them. It didn’t have any distinguishing holos.

“They’re not sweepers,” the man in her back seat said. “Just overly curious individuals. Nothing unwholesome is happening here. All I need is for you to drive quickly and skillfully. I assumed from the customized chassis you can do that.”

Eris tongued the gap in her molars. The feedback spikes in her bad arm were getting more painful and coming more often, and turning it off left her clumsy as shit. New artinerves would make things a lot better.

Also she hadn’t done anything stupid in a long time, and it had been building under her skin like an itch.

“Dump another five hundred on me, I can drive better than anyone you’ve ever seen,” she said, shooting for the moon.

“Another five hundred,” the man said, winking one electric blue eye, “when we get there.”

She pulled them up off the pier, climbing into the dull yellow sky. The City stretched around them in all directions. Up, especially. Behemoth technicolored towers, rotating apartment blocks, sky tunnels that scythed and retracted in accordance with traffic patterns. Eris rose leisurely through a swarm of drones. In her underbelly cam, she watched the silver upcar follow suit.

“Lower streets, I said.” The man’s voice had a hint of annoyance now. His eyes were scrolling code. There was a lick of sweat on his hairline.

“I heard,” Eris said, letting the silver upcar close the gap a bit more. “Don’t toss up back there, alright?”

Before the man could reply, she dove.

Down. Eris felt the G-force all the way up her arms, singing through the artinerves, and she felt it in her gut. They plunged past the silver upcar; through the blur she saw a startled silhouette recoiling. The drones and anything with avoidance AI scattered. Eris dealt with the others herself, slaloming between two unwary drivers, swooping under a freighter. She had her own proximity alert silenced, but the other vehicles made angry wails as she hurtled past.

The silver upcar was only caught off-guard for a moment, then it dropped hard after them, a dive so steep Eris knew it had to be manual. She gunned the engine. A sky tunnel was extending below them, flexing into the air like a gigantic worm. A dock slid out from the adjacent building to meet it. There wasn’t going to be much of a gap.

She took it, twisting to fit, feeling the magnets of the dock sizzle through the cab’s onboard, up her arm. The sky tunnel slammed into its dock and sheared the air where her bumper had been a microsecond before, but they were through.

The silver upcar braked, angling to get around the tunnel. But by then Eris was away, spiraling into the traffic again, her heart pounding against her ribs. She checked the mirror. The passenger was flung back in his seat, howling. No—laughing. Somehow it made her like him a little more.

She headed for the lower streets.

“This is it?” Eris squinted down the alleyway.

They’d gone about as low as she ever did, into the City’s underbelly, and now were facing a grimy quickcrete alley splashed with animated graffiti. She couldn’t make out the words, but the lime green color was familiar. She had some countermeasures keyed up and ready to go in case a bunch of hoodlums suddenly spilled out to vivisect her cab.

“This is it,” her passenger confirmed. Once they’d shaken off the upcar, he’d gone back to his Optiks, muttering sub-vocals and blinking owlishly like any other boring businessman. It was sort of comforting, considering their strange destination.

When he unrolled his tab and sent another five hundred across, the money made Eris feel momentarily affectionate.

“Maybe dim those eyes of yours,” she suggested, triggering the door open. “Around here, they’ll take them out with a spoon.”

“Around here, maybe, but not here,” the man said, flashing all his white teeth again. He made to climb out, then paused. His sleeve whirred, and a custom calling card, wafer-thin, spat out into his hand. “You’re a good driver,” he said. “I might need that again.” He set the filigreed black card down delicately on the cushion. “Thanks for the ride.”

Then he was off into the alley, disappearing into the shadows. The graffiti wriggled the other way, startled, and Eris could finally read it. The green man cometh. Whatever the fuck that meant.

She looked at her screen again, at the easiest gee of credit she’d ever made, and grinned. She could take the rest of the day off if she wanted.

She wanted. Eris switched her orange light on, then lifted off and headed for home, which was a low slot in a grease-yellow honeycomb of converted storage units—and not the chic faux-po’ variety. But it had a good dock for her cab, and it was cheap. And compared to how she’d grown up, it was luxury.

Eris did the math in her head as she drove, slicing the Guild fees off the top and figuring out how much she would put away. She only remembered the calling card in her back seat as her cab snicked gently into its moorings. If he overpaid like that every time, it was worth holding onto. She dropped the partition and plucked it off the cushion, careful not to crush it.

She swung herself over the whistling gap in the dock’s metal floor and pushed her thumb to the apartment door. It tasted her genes and shuttered open, but the lights didn’t turn on as she stepped inside. She whistled a low activation note. Still nothing.

Something was wrong. Her heart leapt up her throat. The apartment was small enough that she could tell there were extra bodies inside, she could hear weight shifting, breath in and breath out. She felt an angry buzz through her prosthetics, biofeedback from the adrenaline. The left one spasmed; she had to grab and hold it with her right until it stilled. 

Feeling the polymer muscle reminded her she had a little canister of stunspray tucked inside it. Eris moved slowly around the corner of the divider that separated the bathroom out from the rest of the apartment, her heart pounding.

Two people were waiting in the gloom, one of them draped on the side of the couch without laundry all over it, the other perched awkwardly on her orthochair, which was shifting all around trying to accommodate the unfamiliar body. 

“What the fuck are you doing in my house?” she demanded.

The lights finally snapped on in response to her voice, and she got a good look at the intruders. The woman on the couch was tall and vaguely leonine, with heavy-lidded eyes and blocky cheekbones. Her black jacket was cut in a way that displayed both her long sinewy arms.

The man on the orthochair was smaller, also wearing black, and he didn’t have a face. Instead, the space above his neck was a rippling wash of pixels that hurt Eris’s eyes to stare at directly.

“We got a scan on your cab before you shook us,” the man said, in a voice stripped electronically of any identifying characteristics. “We’ve been waiting. Agents Ndirangu and Kit of the OCI. Arms out, please, Eris.”

Her first instinct was to call bullshit and feed them the whole canister of stunspray. People told stories about Operative City Intelligence the way they told stories about the bogeyman. But facial blurs weren’t something you could just pick up at the fabshop, and there was something else, too. Something the passenger had said. Not sweepers, just Overly Curious Individuals.

“That asshole,” she breathed, raising her arms.

Eris gritted her teeth while the woman called Kit searched her, first by scan—there was a familiar tingle as it noticed the first prosthetic, a bit of surprise on Kit’s face when it found the second—and then by hand. Eris hadn’t been frisked for a long time. Turned out she still hated it.

Kit slipped the calling card from Eris’s pocket, held it pinched between two sharp-looking fingernails for a closer look, then slid it into a Faraday pouch.

“You can keep the stunner,” she said, in a slightly gravelly voice that was younger than Eris had been expecting. “Just don’t do anything stupid with it.”

She stepped backward with a languid smile, which Eris did not return. The man, Ndirangu, had given up on the orthochair and was standing now as well. Eris knew she was in huge shit. Had to be. She’d probably just abetted an organ smuggler or contract killer or some such.

“First question,” Ndirangu said tonelessly. “What do you know about the Green Man?”

“Fuck all?” she said back. “Look, I just drove him. I didn’t know who he was, didn’t know who you were. He said you weren’t sweepers.”

“Technically correct, although our work does occasionally overlap with City Law Enforcement,” Ndirangu said. “Second question. What do you know about Ferris Carrow?”

He raised one smartgloved hand, and a holo bloomed to life on the wall, showing an image of an unsmiling woman with a surgically-ageless face, her silver-blonde hair sheared to professional spikes. Eris folded her arms, and in her peripheral she noticed Kit mirror the motion.

“Don’t know her,” Eris said. “Should I?”

“Ferris Carrow owned half the filtration plants in the City, and a quarter of its fabbing industry,” Ndirangu said. “Very wealthy, quite influential. She was murdered three days ago.”

Eris felt her knees go weak and watery. “You think I had something to do with a murder?” she demanded.

“We think the man you helped evade us did.” The holo shifted, and now it showed Eris’s mysterious passenger, high-angle, stepping into her cab. “Arno Schorr,” Ndirangu said. “A philanthropist, businessman, and one of the founders of a doomsday cult. The Church of the Green Man.”

“Never heard of it,” Eris said, trying to figure out where his eyes were so she could meet them, so he would know she meant it.

“They’ve been trying to get religion licensing for the past couple months.” Ndirangu gave a stiff shrug that might have been annoyance. “Before her death, Ferris Carrow appeared to have taken an interest. Basic doctrine is rejection of personal technology. Nature worship centered on a singular deity. A mishmash of Pagan and Luddite with ties to the Neoprimitive movement.”

The penultimate word made Eris’s eyes narrow. Her City basic had no trace of colony accent left, and she told anyone who asked that she’d been born in the lower streets. But this was the OCI. The OCI knew things.

“I didn’t pick where I was born,” she said shakily. “They shipped me out of the Neoprim colony when I was a kid. I’ve never gone back. I don’t have any fucking ties to it anymore.” 

“I’m aware,” Ndirangu said calmly. “And there’s really only one tenet of the Church of the Green Man we find worrisome. They’re extinctionist.”

“Extinctionist?” Eris tried to make her voice even again. She didn’t like being reminded about the colony. Those were memories she kept in cold storage.

“They think it would be best for the planet if we all died off,” Kit said darkly.

Eris crinkled an eyebrow. “Does anyone not think that?”

“The difference is, they’d like to do something about it,” Ndirangu said. He waved his hand and the holo shifted to a sprawling green graffiti on corroded metal wall. He read it aloud. “Humans are a virus, City is its last bastion. The Calamities were not enough to clean the world. But fear not, the Green Man cometh.” He paused. “At first we didn’t take it particularly seriously. Criminal mischief, nothing more. Then Ferris Carrow was found like this.”

The holo churned and Eris’s stomach churned with it. The same woman, but lying on her back, now, with dark congealed cuts laddered up her legs and her stomach blown open. Someone had packed the exit wound with dirt, and out of the middle a little red flower was blooming.

Eris swallowed back bile. “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck, switch that off. You think I had anything to do with that, you’re insane.” 

“We know you didn’t, Eris,” Ndirangu said tonelessly, turning his glove’s holo off. Eris felt a wave of relief that cut short at his next words. “We just want you to have an understanding of the gravity of the situation before you sign this waiver.”

“What kind of waiver?” she asked. Kit was staring at her again, her arms, her legs. She had a bad feeling in her gut.

“Schorr is going to need to transport something soon,” Ndirangu said. “Something we believe he smuggled out of the colonies on his most recent visit. We don’t know what, exactly. But it’s possible he’ll call on your services. You were impressive.”

“I’ve done better,” she said on automatic.

Another snort from Kit. Ndirangu didn’t react. Or maybe he did. Who knew?

“We’re going to use you to get to Schorr. Gain his trust.”

Eris blinked. “What, so I’m a spy now? I drive a cab. I’m not up on espionage. And I don’t want anything to do with a fucking murder cult, anyways, thanks.”

“We wouldn’t dream of using an untrained citizen,” Ndirangu said. “No, you’ll simply be along for the ride. Agent Kit will be doing all the work.” He held up his left hand and the smartglove’s palm turned white, with minute black text scrolling across it. “This is a basic waiver for use of your body in the event of an OCI operation. All it needs is your geneprint.”

Kit moved a thick strand of hair away from her temple and Eris saw the glinting neural link clinging there like a beetle. The way she’d been staring, the way she’d been mimicking, made sense all of a sudden.

“No way,” Eris said. “I don’t do that brainshare shit. I don’t want anyone in my head but me.”

“Brainshare is a bit of a misnomer,” Ndirangu said. “The waiver states clearly that we’ll have control of your central nervous system, but no access to your thoughts or memories. That all remains quite safe, and quite private.”

“I don’t want her in my body, either,” Eris snapped, giving Kit a side-eye. “I don’t want anything to do with this. Just bill me for the traffic violations, okay? Just go.”

“I’m afraid this is more important than what you do or do not want,” Ndirangu said. “If you sign the waiver, you’ll be fully insured for any injuries occurring to your body. And once the OCI operation is deemed complete, you’ll be compensated for your time, as well.” He reached underneath the orthochair and pulled out a sleek black carry-case Eris hadn’t noticed before. “If you don’t sign, we may have to . . . investigate you.”

“For what?” Eris demanded.

“Schorr chose your cab because it had the Green Man tag on it,” Kit said coolly.

“Someone did those vines last week while I was docking,” Eris protested. “I’d never paint up my own cab.”

“Maybe the OCI is willing to chalk that up to coincidence,” Ndirangu said. “But the fact that you were born in a Neoprim colony may be one coincidence too many. It might warrant surveillance. Which might have a negative impact on your livelihood.”

Eris’s mind whirred in circles. She should never have let that asshole into her cab. If she didn’t sign the waiver, she would be trying to drive through a swarm of follow-cams for the rest of her life, or worse. In the stories, people who pissed off the OCI eventually just disappeared. Kit could have definitely disappeared a few people, judging from the stare on her.

And that was who she was supposed to brainshare with. Eris tongued the gap between her molars. The stupid decisions were piling up now, but it wasn’t like she had much of a choice.

“I want to get ghosted on all traffic cams,” she said. “No violation notices for the rest of my life.”

“I think we could arrange something like that,” Ndirangu said. “This is, after all, rather important.” He put out his left hand. Eris figured he was lying about the traffic cams, but she’d mostly said it to save some dignity, which he was letting her have. She could bet Kit wouldn’t have.

Eris spat on her hand to ensure a DNA reading, then shook. The smartglove rasped against her skin like a cat’s tongue, then chimed an affirmative.

“Excellent,” Ndirangu said. “We’ll get right to inserting the implant.”

The sleek black rectangle unfolded on spidery limbs, and Eris realized it wasn’t a carry-case. It was an autosurgeon. A shudder ran all the way through her.

“Wait,” she said, her mouth feeling suddenly thick and warm. “Here?”

“Here, yes,” Ndirangu said, his voice sounding even more distorted than usual. “There’s little time to waste. I gave you a dermal sedative through the glove. That’s mentioned in the waiver as well.”

Eris felt the old hospital panic kicking up through her, dulled only halfway by the drug. She backed away and stumbled. Someone caught her—Kit caught her—and lowered her down onto the floor. She felt a pillow slide under her skull, cushioning it. Her whole body was heavy and she could taste copper in the back of her throat. Familiar.

“It’s fast,” Kit’s voice said. “You won’t remember it. I don’t.”

Then the autosurgeon was spreading overtop of her, reaching with calipers and braces, clicking and sliding. Too familiar, too familiar. Before the prostheses, they’d tried twice to grow her arms, but the surgery always failed. The flesh never took.

She squeezed her eyes shut.

“Didn’t have to spring the sedative on her,” Kit’s voice came faint, accusing. “Could have just told her.”

“Not with her profile,” came Ndirangu’s, but different now, free of the mask. “She’s not as tough as she thinks she is.”

Eris wanted to say yes I am, yes I fucking am, but she wasn’t sure and her mouth was too numb and her whole body was turning rubbery and—

Eris woke up doing calisthenics in her empty apartment. She could see her reflection in the dulled smartglass window across from her, bending and stretching. The display told her it was morning, nearly ten o’clock.

“What the shit?” she demanded, or tried to. What came out was a strange slur through clamped jaws. Then her mouth opened without her and spoke back.

“Sorry. Just getting calibrated.” The voice was hers, she could feel it rumble in her chest, but it wasn’t hers at all. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

It all came back like a tsunami. The man with the shaved head and slashed suit, the one thousand credits, the black-clad OCI agents waiting for her in the dark. Doomsday cults and a dead woman with a flower in her gut. The last thing she remembered was putting her signature on some kind of a waiver.

On a brainshare waiver. That was why she couldn’t move her own muscles—Kit was moving them.

Fuck that. She tried to wrench her right arm down and away, abandoning the stupid yoga pose.

She got nothing. Not even a twitch.

“You can have your mouth back while I finish up,” Kit said.

A weird tremor went through Eris’s tongue. She spat, like she was getting a bad taste out, but somehow managed to slobber it down her chin. Her reflection in the window was drooly and dazed-looking.

“Where’s the implant?” she said.

This time the reply came in Kit’s voice, slightly raspy, thrumming through Eris’s head. Subcutaneous. Some skin-spray to cover the scarring. Should be undetectable.

Eris watched with some measure of revulsion as her reflection started doing jumping jacks. This was so fucked.

“This is so fucked,” she puffed.

I’ve been looking at your augments. Really modded the shit out of your arms, didn’t you. Reflexes way past standard. No wonder the artinerves are nearly burned out. No wonder you can drive like that.

There was some admiration in her voice, but Eris didn’t want to hear it. She felt sick and angry, imagining Kit sitting on the couch testing her arms out like a new toy or some shit. Like all of her was a toy.

“Yeah, that makes it so worth it,” Eris said. “Maybe I should lop a leg off, too, huh?”

Her face in the window twitched, which had to be Kit.

That’s not what I meant. I meant it was good wire work. That’s all.

“I could always drive like that,” Eris said. “So fuck you.”

The jumping jacks stopped.

Done calibrating. Kit, acting like she hadn’t heard the last bit. Not the worst body I’ve had to work with. Just go about your normal routine, if possible, and I’ll be ready to take over when Schorr contacts you.

Suddenly her muscles were all hers again, and she toppled. She caught onto the edge of the orthochair as she went down; the cantilevers whined and propped her back up. Her wobbly legs turned solid again. She straightened, muttering curses.

“Go about your normal routine, Eris,” she said through her teeth. “Ignore the OCI bitch kicking around in your brain.”

But it was a relief to have her body back. And whatever Kit had been doing had actually left her feeling pretty good. Loose, warm. Bit of a sweat on. She put her hands on her hips and surveyed the dull gray cube of her apartment, looking for evidence of the agents’ intrusion, but they’d left everything in its place or not-place.

A tumble of clean underwear and colorful shirts heaped on the end of the couch, which was also her bed. Work bench in the corner strewn with parts and a coil of conductor wire. On the floor beside a vat of sealant, her dad’s old magnetic chess set that she sometimes hooked to the net when she was feeling masochistic. Canary-yellow scarf, jacket with a stubborn oil stain. Two juggling balls rolling and bumping against the heaped jacket where the third was trapped underneath.

Apart from her cab, it was all she had to show for a decade in the City. It seemed messier and shabbier and shittier knowing Kit and the faceless one had been lounging around in it. Nearly made her want to clean up.

Over on the kitchenette counter, she saw the filigreed black calling card waiting. She gave it a wide berth as she slid open the fridge. There was nothing floating in the gel but hot sauce and a tube of yogurt. She felt antsy, and hungry now, too. She picked the calling card gingerly off the counter and slid it into her pocket. Maybe Schorr wouldn’t call anyways. Maybe the OCI had wildly miscalculated.

As if she could be that lucky. Eris left and locked the door behind her.

“Bet you can do all kinds of nasty things with them.”

Eris was nearly home again, halfway through the corridor from the main hub with a biodegradable bag of groceries slung over her shoulder, when the ragged man who’d been sauntering a few steps behind her spoke. She turned over her shoulder.

“Fuck you say?”

“Nothing,” the man replied, but his eyes trailed longingly up Eris’s left arm, which was still twitching sporadically, then the right. His skin was pale, sallow, and his eyes were shot through with pink. Tweaked on something. “Just that you can probably do all kinds of nasty things with those artis of yours, is all.”

She would’ve let it go, because tweakers and technophiles weren’t worth the time to spit on, but she was still antsy. Maybe the OCI were watching through her eyes. Maybe they’d sent this fuck as some kind of test. Or maybe Schorr had sent him.

“All kinds of things,” the man repeated with a placid smile, reaching to run his fingers over the exposed polymer. She batted them away hard; he blew on them and laughed. “Beauties, them.”

That was it. Eris set her groceries down. “They could tear your tiny fucking prong off if you don’t get lost, cunt.”

The man’s smile dissolved. He gave a slow blink, then his face turned angry. “If you can’t take a compliment, wear skin sleeves on them,” he said.

He took a menacing step and Eris stepped back in sync as she checked him over again, trying to guess if what he was on would make him quicker or make him clumsier. The veins in his neck were all taut blue. Could be Taurus, which would be bad news.

Eris wanted smash her knee up into his thickening hard-on and only unload the stunspray if necessary. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of touching him with her arms.

But she was frozen. A weird thrum was going through her locked-up muscles and she couldn’t move a millimeter. The man took it for fear and his smile came back. He had a nose for blood in the water; he was glancing up and down the empty corridor.

Eris couldn’t even cuss out whatever dumb fucking glitch in the brainshare implant was seizing her up. Her jaws were clenched too hard.

The man went to grab her arm, and suddenly she moved.

Too fast to understand. She felt contact, displaced air, and displaced cartilage, then she was wiping something warm off her forehead while the man wailed on the dirty floor of the corridor. Blood was gushing from his nose and his kneecap was shifted over from where it ought to have been.

She’d gone through his grip somehow, done his nose in and crunched his knee and come back up like elastic. She wasn’t even breathing hard. She was a fucking ninja.

“Next time you’re dead,” she said, feeling wild, feeling dangerous, even as she picked up her smiley-face-decorated grocery bag. “Got it?”

He only groaned. Eris headed back to her apartment, riding the adrenaline like a riptide. It took her a moment to realize what had happened.

“I don’t need your fucking help,” she said. “Kit? I know that was you, Kit.”

I know you didn’t need help, came Kit’s gravel voice. That was just for my personal satisfaction. If Ndirangu asks, it was all you.

Eris considered it. Kit didn’t sound like she was lying. She sounded kind of pissed off and pleased at the same time. “Alright,” she said, then, grudgingly, “I guess that was pretty slick. How you did the knee like that.”

I’ve done better, Kit said, and for a second Eris liked her.

Then the calling card went off in her pocket.

Kit did the talking, and it surprised Eris how much she managed to sound like her, down to the cursing. Then again, she was a professional and the conversation hadn’t been a long one. Schorr’s distorted voice had requested her for a transport job, vehicle provided, an hour’s work at most, possible pursuers to shake. In exchange, five thousand credits, and none of it going through her cab for the Guild to skim fees off of.

Kit, in Eris’s voice, had agreed, and the calling card had denatured to a handful of gritty black gel that she’d dumped in the nearest recycler. Eris had gone home, eaten and put away groceries, and dipped her arms in sealant to take a shower. She didn’t think Kit would be watching, but she did it without looking down much just in case.

And now, in the growing dusk, she was walking down Pier 24 to the boxy white delivery van that had been left docked exactly as Schorr had described. She’d already stopped at a specific trash receptacle to pull out a smartglove and tiny gun. Eris felt a cold ball of ice in her stomach. She knew that whatever she was transporting was going to be unwholesome. She hoped it wouldn’t be a dead body.

She stopped in front of the unmarked van and grimaced. “That woman, Carrow,” she muttered, picturing her passenger’s icy blue eyes. “Was Schorr the one who killed her?”

For a moment there was no reply, and she imagined Kit out getting a tea or something, but then her voice sounded in her skull. He has an alibi. But Ndirangu’s positive he ordered it. Ndirangu’s usually right.

“Why’d he have a blur mask and you didn’t?” Eris asked, hoping Kit couldn’t tell she was delaying the inevitable. “You forget yours?”

There was a pause. Haven’t earned it yet. Hopefully this op makes it happen.

“Wait, you’re not some kind of fucking rookie, are you?” Eris demanded. “I thought this Schorr guy was a big deal for the OCI.”

I was the best match for the brainshare. Kit’s voice sounded slightly miffed. I’m taking over now.

Eris felt the thrum all through her body again. She’d always hated being a passenger and she hated this even more. At least Kit left her her mouth, tingling and thick-feeling but functional.

“I can drive,” she pointed out.

Liability issues. We’re now on clock for an official OCI operation. Besides. I can drive, too.

Kit peered inside the van. Eris thought about pointing out the non-standard dampers and a drive stick that would take some adjusting, but Kit seemed to be looking in the right places. Maybe she’d been the one driving the silver upcar yesterday, which now seemed like at least a whole week ago.

Kit walked around the outside of the van next. The back was hermetically-sealed and humming refrigerated. Big fancy lock on it, too, with sliding black flanges and glowing red vents.

“So you don’t know what he’s transporting?” Eris asked.

No.

“You going to look?”

Deadman’s lock on there. If I fuck up the whole thing will self-torch. So, no.

“Fair.”

Eris didn’t like not knowing, but there were a lot of things she didn’t like going on.

She felt a little dart of satisfaction when Kit nearly bashed them into a wall undocking, not prepared for the upped sensitivity in her arms. But she smoothed things out after a few minutes and then Eris could tell that she was a pretty decent driver, despite the van handling like a blue whale or something else huge and extinct.

Dusk deepened as they drove, and all the City lights were coming alive. The harsh arcs of artificial sunlight, the soft blue-and-purple bioluminescents like bruises, the swirl of neon and argon. The lights were under them and above them and reminded her of the field of stars she’d always had overhead as a kid but didn’t quite measure up.

The van’s onboard was programmed to feed directions bit by bit, the same way Schorr had done from her back seat, but it didn’t take long for Eris to figure out they were heading to the same place as last time.

“Take the under,” she said. “Quicker.”

Kit stayed the course for a second, thinking it through, then grudgingly dipped into Eris’s recommended traffic vector.

You know your way around like you were born here.

“Been here ten years. Cabbing for five of them.” She paused, then, maybe because of the lights, she spoke again. “Sometimes, it feels like I was born here. Feels like New Tenochtitlan was a dream. It’s different over there.”

Your parents were first-generation emigrants to the colony, it says. Relatively wealthy.

“Yeah,” Eris said. “Wealthy. And they gave it all up to go live in the dirt like the good old days. Gave up their Vaxine and their genetech, too.”

There was a long silence. The lights weren’t as beautiful now.

How did you lose your arms? Kit finally asked.  

Eris ground her teeth. She’d hoped Kit would be one of the people who never bothered asking. “You know everything,” she said. “You tell me.”

Your file doesn’t say.

“Because I was born like this.”

A pause. That doesn’t happen anymore.

“Not in the City,” Eris said. “In the colonies it does. No genetech, remember?” She breathed out a bitter laugh. “My mom died having me, and my dad sent me away when I was twelve. Thought it would be better for me here. But he stayed. Haven’t spoken to him in years and years.” Something pulled too close for comfort in her peripheral. “Get some fucking space off that,” she muttered. “We’re wider than you think.”

Has to be close. I called in a scanner to see what’s in the back.

The dull gray upcar pulled even closer to them as they drove, and Eris felt a shivery whine in her teeth as the scan started. She hoped Kit was focused on that and not the old tears building up behind her eyes. She couldn’t move her hands to press them away, but she had enough control of her face for a few hard blinks. She didn’t like thinking about the colony.

“So what do we have?” she asked flatly.

Kit didn’t answer for a second. When she did, her voice had an edge to it. Nothing. There’s nothing in the back.

Eris felt the ball of ice again, this time rolling slow down her spine. They were in the lower streets now, deep City, where the lights were old and yellowed and fought a losing battle with the thickening dark. Eris was trying to think of reasons why someone would pay her to transport nothing at all when they arrived at the alleyway.

Kit swung her out of the van. Her shoe crunched on something in the shadows and she was momentarily glad Kit was running things, because if it had been just her she would’ve jumped at the noise like an idiot.

“Good work.”

It was Schorr’s voice. He was standing at the mouth of the alley, hands in his pockets, his electric blue eyes glowing enough to illuminate the bones of his face. Two tall men with the same close-cropped hair were at his shoulders. Eris remembered what Kit had done to the tweaker in the corridor and it made her feel a little better.

“Let’s have that five thousand now, or I hop back in and drive this shit straight to the sweepers,” Kit said with her mouth. Over the tailored shoulder of Schorr’s suit, Eris saw two more white vans in the alley, identical, and something was being unloaded from the closer of them onto a hoverjack.

Schorr moved just slightly and her view was blocked. “I’m a man of my word,” he said, tapping at his tab. “Drop the van at this sataddress. Enjoy the rest of your night.”

Eris felt her own tab, wrapped around her wrist, rumble at the data transfer. “What, you’re not going to unload it?” Kit demanded.

“Nothing to unload,” Schorr said. “You were driving one of the decoys. I’ll put your mind at ease.” He slid his hand against the deadman’s lock. The doors sprang open. Eris saw a billow of steam and then nothing else, just bare white walls as the scanner had predicted.

“Okay.” Kit made a show of checking the payment on her tab. “Pleasure doing business, I guess.”

Schorr swung the doors shut, and Kit climbed back in the driver’s side. Eris caught a last glimpse of what they were unloading: a big crate, bigger than she was, covered in a black shroud that seemed to eat the light.

As soon as they were around the corner, Kit triggered the autopilot and jumped right out of the van, rolling more gracefully than Eris would’ve managed.

“So what now?” she demanded once they were on their feet.

Sneak in. See what he actually brought down here. Kit unrolled the smartglove and pulled it on, then slid the gun—it was a biogun, calcium spikes instead of traceable bullets—into Eris’s waistband. It was pretty fucking uncomfortable.

But she had to admit she was curious, too. She’d seen only a slice of the crate and now she wanted to know what was inside, the same way she’d always wanted to know what was inside an upcar carapace or engine block.

Kit crept them back around the corner into the alley, which was now deserted. The other vans and drivers had gone on their way. Halfway down, she stopped in front of a rusty metal door in the alley wall. After a few moments of tuning the smartglove, Kit found the lock and popped it.

She swung the door open, and Eris could feel a damp coming from inside. She would have shivered. Even Kit seemed hesitant for a second, but maybe she was only scoping things out. As they stepped inside, retrofitted biolights bloomed to life, providing stark contrast to a grimy cracked corridor. Eris’s eyes stung a bit as Kit did something with the smartglove again.

Not picking up any surveillance cams. Good.

“Great,” Eris echoed. They walked forward. Foam insulation was oozing from the walls, and at the end of the corridor she saw an ancient-looking elevator with actual physical buttons to push. Only the down arrow was still intact.

They were going to go even deeper. Eris felt a whine rising in the back of her throat and tamped it down. Kit thumbed the call button.

Dispatch might have a hard time finding us down here. This is pre-Calamities architecture. The City’s old bones. It has a way of screwing with our scanners.

“What about with the brainshare?” Eris demanded. As much as she disliked having Kit run the show, she didn’t want to find herself suddenly alone down here, either. She’d never fired a biogun, or any kind of gun, and she had a feeling stunspray wouldn’t cut it if Schorr and his thugs suddenly popped out of the dark.

That uses an entanglement drive. I wouldn’t worry.

“I’m not worried,” Eris said. “Hop in the elevator already, chicken shit.”

Kit did, and as the doors slid shut behind them Eris felt like she was going to be sick with fear, and couldn’t help but wonder if some of it was from Kit. The elevator sank and sank. The air felt like it was thickening, squeezing her temples. Maybe just her imagination.

She was relieved when the box came to a stop. Kit jammed her thumb on the close door button to keep it from opening. Eris listened, wondering if Schorr was standing on the other side, waiting for them. But when Kit fed a little hairline cam from her smartglove through the crack in the doors, it showed all clear.

They slipped out into a tunnel. Its ancient concrete was splinted by nanotube resin that glistened wetly, making it feel like the gullet of some animal. The air was definitely thicker down here. Damper. It clung to the back of Eris’s throat. Kit moved them forward slowly and stealthily. The lights flickered, like the power was being rerouted, and it made Eris see things in the shadows that weren’t there.

A T-intersect approached, and as they reached it Eris heard footfalls. Kit scuttled back a step. Crouched. They clung there against the wall as one of Schorr’s men trundled past. Eris wasn’t sure if it was her or Kit holding her breath, but it didn’t get released until he disappeared around the next bend.

They started moving again. Eris wanted to suggest that maybe Kit should have just shot him, to give them one less problem to deal with later, but Kit had her mouth sealed shut. They came to a halt outside a door that made Eris’s heart hammer hard. They had passed plenty of doors, but this one was different. It had been widened to fit the crate.

Kit sent another hairline cam, jiggered another lock, and then they were inside. Lights flicked on unbidden, harsh white, surgical, and Eris saw the crate had been opened.

A glass-and-metal sarcophagus was propped upright facing them. And inside it, she saw a mass of thick green-black ivy and decomposed flesh that she knew had been a human being once.

Eris’s stomach revolted, but she couldn’t avert her eyes, couldn’t keep from tracing the poisonous green roots and tendrils that tangled through cracked bones, the bubbling brown spores clustered at the groin, under the arms. The face was burst open and flowering a bright poisonous red.

“Shit,” she whispered.

Shit, Kit agreed.

“I see you’ve met the Green Man,” Schorr’s voice said from behind them.

Kit whirled; Schorr had something out of his pocket, a spindly metal thing that Eris didn’t recognize. He flung it outward, pointing it right at her face, and instead of somersaulting away or snapping it out of his hand or doing any other kind of ninja thing, Eris found herself frozen again. The thrum was all through her body this time.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, it’s a halo. I’m going to lose you. Look, Eris, just stay calm and—

Kit’s voice cut out. Schorr stepped forward, twisting the thing together, making it into a circle. He set it gently on her head like he was crowning her. It tightened and clung there.

“This should help you feel a little more like yourself,” he said.

Eris realized her muscles were hers again, but when she tried to move her arms they didn’t respond, hanging there heavy as lead. The halo was fucking them up, too. Her chest went tight with panic.

Kit was gone, and now it was only her, stuck somewhere underground with the leader of a doomsday cult and two of his thugs, one of whom had already found the biogun in her waistband, and Schorr knew about the OCI and the brainshare and she was dead dead dead. She felt oddly numb as they stripped her of the weapon and the smart glove and dragged her away from the sarcophagus. Her arms dangled uselessly.

“All this for a fucking corpse?” she asked. She knew she should be using whatever time she had left to make a case for her life, but somehow, even facing imminent death, the Green Man was still the scariest thing in the room.

Schorr didn’t answer for a moment, walking to the sarcophagus instead and placing his hand against the glass. “You’re from the colonies, aren’t you? At first I wasn’t sure. There are so few of you in the City. Only a handful in nearly a billion inhabitants.” He paused. “Do you like it here?”

Eris gave a shrug that she hoped looked contemptuous and unafraid. Whatever Schorr was playing at, he hadn’t killed her yet.

“From a certain perspective, it’s everything our ancestors dreamed of,” Schorr said. “Triple the size of any the old metropolises built before the Calamities. Towers to heaven, cars that fly, one language, no hunger, no . . . disease.”

His face turned hard and angry.

“And all it cost us was seventy percent of the world’s population in a century of mass death,” he said. “But after all that, all the wars, the floods, the famines, we didn’t learn a thing. Not one thing. Forward thinkers did their best in the aftermath. The Neoprim movements, for one, tried to show people a better way.” He gave a smile that reminded Eris of the tweaker Kit had wasted. “The fact that you were born at all is thanks to that better way. You would have been an early termination here in the City. It’s easier to be cruel when people become populations. When they become numbers.”

Eris couldn’t help thinking of the serial numbers on her arms, the license holo on her cab, the figure in her Bank account that seemed to be always eroding and never growing. The City did make her feel like a number. The City was cruel in a lot of ways.

“But the colonies aren’t enough,” Schorr continued. “The mass exodus we envisioned never happened, and now the City is swelling like a tick. Repeating all our old mistakes. The only true solution is a full reset. Acknowledge that everything from agriculture onward was a blip on the radar. That’s where the Green Man comes in.”

Eris shot another look at the sarcophagus and wished she hadn’t.

“The colonies made themselves useful in another way,” Schorr said. “As a breeding ground for disease. One of which was a fast-acting fungal infection, a particularly vicious strain we’ve never seen before. It decimated two separate colonies before it was contained.”

Eris’s heart dropped. “Bullshit,” she said. “I would know.”

But she wouldn’t, she knew she wouldn’t. She avoided anything to do with the colonies because it was easier to slice off that part of her life and cauterize it, and here in the City people didn’t care what happened in the colonies. They didn’t talk about them.

“This was the only body I managed to save from incineration and have smuggled over,” Schorr said. “A lot of lives were lost. More to come. But none in vain.” His eyes were shining. “Humanity’s going to return to its rightful place. Gaia to hers. We’ll be at peace again, like we were for the first hundred thousand years.”

A cold question had assembled itself in the corner of Eris’s mind. She asked it now, hoarsely. “Which colonies? Which colonies were wiped out?”

“Which colony are you from?” Schorr asked.

She could barely force the syllables from her lips. “New Tenochtitlan.”

Schorr’s face twisted. “I’m sorry,” he said. “None in vain.”

Black pushed in the sides of her vision. Eris felt herself sink to one knee. She was back in the colony, sitting in the compound dirt with her dad across from her, the magnetic chessboard between them. He was tall and stern with his white beard stark against lined brown skin. He was saying that it would be better for her in the City, and she was thinking that if she could just manage to win the game, he would let her stay.

But she’d never won against her dad, not ever, and she never practiced with anyone else because she spent all her spare time in the field driving the village’s battered utility upcar or taking apart motors in the garage. She didn’t win that last game, either.

Eris kept her head down as one of his men led her out of the room, back into the tunnel. If she didn’t look up at all, she wouldn’t be able to look for traces of her dad in the overgrown green corpse.

They put her in a storage room, under guard, with a folding chair that sprang upright when she bumped into it. She’d asked, dully, if they were planning to sacrifice her or some culty shit like that. Schorr had laughed before walking out.

She ignored the chair and collapsed down against the wall instead. It felt like she was having a nightmare. She felt hot thick guilt for how she never talked about the colony, how she pretended to herself she’d been born in the City like everyone else. She’d spent so long trying to forget her father who’d sent her away. Trying to focus on her arms, on her cab, on things she could change and repair. Now she could see so many old familiar faces in her head, and they kept bursting apart like the Green Man in the sarcophagus.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to make it all just disappear. It didn’t.

She would have to change it.

Eris opened her eyes. No matter how cruel the City was, it was full of innocent people, same as the colonies. Kit and the OCI needed to know about the Green Man, and that meant she needed to get rid of the halo somehow. She turned and dragged her head along the wall, feeling for the halo’s metal edge. It wasn’t loose enough to knock free, but not as tight as she’d feared, either.

Eris kicked off her shoes and pawed off one sock and then the other. Her arms were dead useless weight at her sides, but they hadn’t tied her legs. She scooted back, leaning her shoulders against the wall, and stretched.

She’d lost a lot of flexibility since she’d gotten her artis, but not all of it. Brushing her big toe against the halo, however, resulted in a sharp shock. She swore, yanking her foot back down.

“Alright,” she breathed. “Fuck it.”

She stretched again, muscles straining taut, and wriggled her big toe underneath the edge of the halo. The shock bit hard; she saw a hot blue spark fly in her peripheral. Clenching her teeth, she gripped the halo between her big toe and long toe and pulled.

It clattered to the floor, spinning like a coin. She silenced it with her other foot. Hopefully the man standing outside hadn’t heard it. Eris tipped her head back against the wall, breathing hard, as feeling returned to her arms. The pads of her toes were blistered red, but not blackened. She figured she would be able to walk properly.

What’s happening? Kit’s voice came blurred, indistinct. Are you alright?

“Yeah, I’m fucking great, Kit,” Eris said in a whisper. “Schorr’s got a sample of some kind of plague. Something he brought back from the colonies. He’s going to release it here, and then everyone is fucked.”

There was a pause that nearly made her panic, made her think Kit’s signal was gone again. The Green Man cometh. Shit. That thing was supposed to have been eradicated. Kit’s voice was agitated, but louder now, clearer. There’s a strike team waiting in the alley. But we’re not equipped to contain a bioweapon. I’m coming in.

Eris’s body thrummed and her head started twisting without her volition, making a sweep of the storage room.

Have you seen anyone else down here?

“Still just Schorr and the two big fuckers,” Eris muttered. “He told one of them to watch the door.”

She shut her mouth as Kit pushed her face up against the door, listening. Eris heard the sound of shifting weight, fabric rubbing fabric. Kit nearly lost their balance as the door swung open.

For an instant Schorr’s man was framed in the doorway, and Eris looked up him like a mountain, the hormone-popped muscle and buzzed head and green tattoos creeping out from his cufflinks. His face was unworried, Eris figured because the last time he’d seen her she’d been crying like a little baby and because she didn’t have working arms, besides.

“Schorr wants you at the ceremony,” he said, and then he realized the halo was no longer on Eris’s head and his eyes went wide.

Kit dismantled him. Cartilage cracked, air thumped out of a collapsed lung, dead weight slammed the floor. He was still struggling for breath in the fetal position as Kit retrieved the biogun and used Eris’s arms to lever him into the room. She shut the door neatly behind her and the lock buzzed active. It was a good thing Kit was still using her mouth, because Eris knew she would’ve let out a triumphant whoop right about then.

That’s music, isn’t it?

Eris concentrated. It was. Chanting and drumbeat, faint but audible. The kind of faux-primal shit she remembered hearing as a kid in the Neoprim colony.

“Yeah,” Eris said, finding her mouth was hers again. “Let’s go.”

They followed the sound of the synthesized drums and wailing, quickly and quietly. Normally Eris’s feet slapped a bit when she walked, but not with Kit moving them—she was poised now, all coiled and balanced like a cat. It made her more hopeful Kit could handle whatever they found at the end of the labyrinth.

Rounding a pitted corner, the music grew louder and Eris started to see small bundles lining the walls, shoes on top.

“Clothes?” she demanded in a whisper. “Why the fuck are people taking their clothes off?”

Don’t know. Maybe it’s for some kind of fertility ritual.

“As in, a big fucking orgy.”

Yeah. Some of them do that.

The music reached a fever pitch, then cut out entirely. Eris’s ears felt swamped by the sudden silence. Kit hesitated, then moved ahead even more slowly, creeping towards a pale yellow light leaking from the next corner. She hunkered low and poked Eris’s head around to look.

Their tight corridor was one of several emptying into a much larger room, and the room was full of people. They were all naked, and as much as Eris wanted it to look funny or stupid, it didn’t. It looked eerie, all of them standing there in rows in the ghostly yellow light. Some of them had smartpainted their bodies in twisting green vines that slithered up and down their bare skin. Other than that, they were stock-still, all of their eyes fixed on the makeshift plinth in the center of the room.

The figure standing on top of it wore ragged robes over a long coat. Their face was hidden under some kind of military issue gas mask, vaguely insectoid, daubed green and brown and set with skeletal antlers. Eris felt a shudder that might have been hers, might have been Kit’s. That had to be Schorr. And looming behind him, propped upright in a sort of groove, was the sarcophagus.

“You’ve been called here to receive the Green Man’s blessing.”

Schorr’s voice, dead and amplified, split the air.

“Tonight is the beginning of the end, my friends.”

The naked men and women started to chant something back, raising their hands, then Eris’s view was blocked as Kit pulled her shirt over her head.

“What are we doing?” Eris hissed, muffled by the fabric.

He’s inoculating them, right? These are his followers. Kit peeled her trousers off next, see-sawing them off her hips. We can join in. Get close enough.

“And then?”

Kill Schorr.

“What, with my bare fucking hands?” Eris demanded. Kit kicked off her shoes and shucked off her bra and underwear.

With no hands. I’m going to have to take your arms off, Eris.

Eris blinked. All the naked bodies, some of them scarred, none of them with visible implants or prostheses. She remembered back to what Ndirangu had said all those eons ago. Neo-Luddite. Rejection of technology. She wondered if they knew Schorr had Optiks.

Okay? Kit’s voice sounded almost ashamed.

Eris tongued the gap in her molars. “Okay,” she said. “Let me do it.”

Now she was almost sure it was a nightmare. With Kit directing her steps, Eris felt like she was gliding through the crowd, magnetically drawn to the plinth where Schorr and the Green Man waited. Her bare skin was swathed in goose bumps and the nubbed ends of her arms felt every cold current in the air. When she brushed the left by accident against someone else’s clammy skin, her nerve terminations screamed.

The biogun was tucked into her right armpit, blunt muzzle all but concealed. Schorr was still speaking, but Eris couldn’t hear it. Too absorbed in the rest of it, in the naked bodies pale and dark sliding against hers, in the quickcrete—no, concrete, this stuff was ancient—that spiked cold against the bottom of her feet. The sweat trickling from under her armpits. The blank and fevered faces all around her.

She was sure at any second they would spot the biogun and realize she wasn’t one of them and tear her to shreds. She wanted to turn and run, scoop her arms back from where she’d stashed them in the corridor, make like hell for the elevator. But she couldn’t. Not with Kit propelling her forward, and not with Schorr planning to turn the whole City, the City she sometimes hated so much, into overgrown corpses like had been done to her colony.

Everyone was pressing closer, now, crushing in against the plinth, and Eris looked for an injector or an autosurgeon, something he would use to distribute the Vaxine update that would keep them safe from his plague. But there was nothing up there with him except the casket and a dull metal beaker.

Eris realized what the Green Man’s blessing was the split second before Schorr thumbed the catch. The casket split open with a pneumatic hiss, an innocuous puff of dust. The crowd was clamoring for the Green Man. Pressing in close, climbing up the plinth, trying to touch him. Schorr reached into the casket and plucked one finger from the Green Man’s desiccated hand like picking an overripe fruit. He crumbled it into the beaker. Eris could hear the powder hiss as it hit water, or maybe only imagined it.

She tried to wrest control back from Kit. She needed to scream. She needed to tell them not to fucking drink it, not to even fucking touch it. But Kit was still moving, grim and steady, toward the plinth. Eris watched the beaker pass from hand to hand, dark fluid leaking from pale lips. She knew they were already dead. Schorr wasn’t inoculating his followers; he was using them as his final test subjects.

Someone who wasn’t Eris started to scream. The first devotees to drink from the beaker were writhing now, toppling backward off the plinth into the crowd. She saw the infection moving through their bodies like a time-lapse, their fingers and faces swelling, bubbling, poisonous green and mud brown. She could almost feel it.

Kit accelerated, weaving through bodies. Three figures in hazard suits had detached themselves from the shadows and now were closing the casket again, dragging it backward onto a hoverjack. Schorr was still standing, still watching the chaos. People ran, panicked—if they’d come expecting to die, they hadn’t expected it to be this painful.

Kit had them close, now, close enough to reach out and grab the rough corner of the plinth. Schorr noticed, finally turning his masked head. Eris saw her ghostly reflection in the insectoid eyes. Kit twisted so the biogun was aimed right at him, all she had to do was squeeze and at this range she’d said it would shred right through him and—

One of the fleeing devotees blindsided her, smacking an arm across her chin. Eris would’ve known how to twist, how to compensate, but Kit was unbalanced by it and she staggered. Suddenly they were on the floor, rolling to avoid feet, the biogun gone. Someone tripped on her, stomped by accident on her gut; the wind went out of her hard. By the time Kit had her upright, Schorr was gone, too. She vaulted them up on the plinth, spinning, searching.

There.

The sarcophagus was gliding away through the crowd, back the way they’d come, ushered by Schorr and his men. Back into the crush. Kit kept her eyes fixed on the target, but Eris saw flashes of the infected men and women, all wailing and writhing. Was this how it had been in the colony? Was this how her father had died?

She saw the tail end of the sarcophagus disappearing around the next corner. She was running faster than she’d ever, Kit wringing every last bit of energy from her muscles. They made it to the elevator just as the doors slid shut on Schorr’s turned back.

Shit!

“Aren’t your people waiting for him at the top?” Eris gasped.

He’s already streamed the footage of what just happened back there. Says if there’s any attempt to follow him, he feeds the Green Man through a nebulizer and the spores go airborne. Says he’s open to negotiations.

“Bullshit,” Eris snapped. “He’s lying. He wants to do the whole fucking City.”

I’m being ordered to stand down, Eris. I fucked this up. Bad.

“Then if Ndirangu asks, it was all me,” Eris said.

There was a pause. There’s a civilian upcar that’ll be unlocked and unalarmed just around the block. And from here on in, the brainshare implant is malfunctioning.

The thrumming returned, and an instant later Eris’s body was hers again. The lactic acid in her muscles and aches in her joints made her want to collapse to the floor and rest for a second, just a second. Instead, she staggered back down the hallway. Found her clothes. Her arms. She chinned them back into place. Artinerves snaked up to meet the tender flesh and she flexed her metal fingers.

“Fucking right I drive this time,” she muttered.

Schorr was in one of the white vans, climbing fast, by the time Eris threw herself inside the little blue upcar Kit had picked for her. It wasn’t the absolute last vehicle Eris would’ve snagged for a pursuit, but it was close. She slammed over to manual and hauled it up off the pavement, making a dozen hurried adjustments to the dampers, the updrive, the seat. There was no way she was going to catch the van with the inbuilt speed limits still operational, but if she stopped to do the rewiring, Schorr was good as gone.

Eris jammed the seat back and drove with her feet, how she’d done on the battered old ute in the colony, while she gutted the panel with her metal hands. She’d lost some dexterity over the years. Lost the calluses, too.

But she could still do it. One foot on the pedals and one steering, she split her concentration between navigating the lower streets, mercifully empty of traffic, and finding the right port on her arm. The van was still in sight, bulling through a cloud of camera drones she assumed were OCI, but in another second it would be a speck and then gone entirely.

“Couldn’t have found me a fucking custom?” she breathed, even though she wasn’t sure Kit could hear her anymore. She hunted through a tangle of wires, taking both eyes off the windshield, and was nearly blindsided by a cab. The proximity alert wailed, and she could see the driver mouthing off, too, but it didn’t matter because she’d found the right wire and the right port.

She fed it in, and suddenly she could feel the upcar like an extension of her arms, which were an extension of her brain, and in her brain she decided to go however fucking fast she wanted. She deleted the limits, gunned the engine, and acceleration pinned her to her seat like an invisible hand.

Schorr had a big gap on her, but he was driving carefully. Eris wasn’t. She was driving wild. Her metal hands were barely skimming the steering wheel, plucking it left, down, right, left, up, fast enough to blur. The City was streaming all around her, unfocused, but she knew its architecture like she knew her own body and all she had to do was follow the van and not even brush another upcar or drone. Her tongue was planted firm between her molars.

She was shredding the speed limits to pieces, but Kit had to be blocking the safety signal that would have normally overridden her by now. And if there were sweepers patrolling, she’d like to see them try to catch her. Eris knew she shouldn’t be smiling. Kit wouldn’t have been smiling. But her lips were dragged back off her teeth all the same.

She felt good. Really good. And if there were Green Man spores already inside her, if she was moments from bursting into a viny writhing mess, the instant crash would probably kill her before the infection did. She came level with the white van, then hurtled past it, and she realized where Schorr was heading.

She cut speed, matching Schorr, who tried to shake left. Eris clung to him like a shadow. Up ahead, one of the City’s largest filtration plants approached, a somber giant in gunmetal grays and blues. Pipettes stretched from its towering tanks into the surrounding infrastructure, pumping water through the City like a beating heart, and that was where Schorr wanted to release the Green Man.

Which meant he’d been bluffing about taking it airborne. Eris thought back to the underground communion, the beaker being passed. The spores needed water.

Schorr banked hard and down, and Eris realized something else: he didn’t need to get all the way to the plant entrance. He only needed to get to one of the water tanks, and those were a hell of a lot closer. The white van put on a final burst of speed, angling towards the nearest of them, and Eris could see the top of the tank sliding open via whatever override code Ferris Carrow, owner of half the filtration plants in the City, the woman with the flower in her stomach, had been murdered for.

Eris could already imagine the van puttering to a neat halt, Schorr’s men shoving the open casket out the back so it dropped down into the tank like a pill into a water glass. The Green Man would fizz and dissolve and the City would drink his dead body. Use it in their showers, their hydroponics. If there were safety valves to isolate the tank she figured Schorr had codes for those, too.

They were bare meters away from the tank. She reached for the extra impact webbing and tugged it over herself. Clenched her teeth, then unclenched them, trying to guess what would make them least likely to shatter in her jaw. Breathed deep.

All it took was a twitch to send her smashing into the top of the van. The sound of shearing metal filled her ears and the impact shook her bones. She could feel herself screaming in her chest as they spun. Feedback from her arms rolled over her like a static wave. She yanked them free and covered her head as the upcar and the van, tangled now, hit the lip of the water tower.

The impact webbing wove itself around her like an ammonia-smelling cocoon, wrapping her in darkness, but she still felt the upcar crumple. Her head still snapped forward, back. Her teeth scraped her tongue raw on their way shut. Metal was moving all around her, squealing and crunching, and then suddenly there was stillness.

Eris wanted to flop backward and breathe for a minute, stay in the warm hug of the impact webbing, but she tore her way free instead. The upcar had flipped around, so she had to punch her way out of the back. The whole chassis was shifting, rocking, and when she finally dragged herself out she realized her plan had half-worked.

They’d splintered against the lip of the water tower; her upcar was still riding the top of the van, which was now sheared in two. The front end of it was a mangle of debris falling down, down, down into the City depths. The back end had skidded over the edge more or less intact, and its doors were torn open. Steam was gushing out.

Eris climbed down from the wreckage on wobbly legs. She managed to nick herself a few times, but she could hardly feel the sting, too buzzed with adrenaline still. The top of the water tank hadn’t opened all the way, leaving a few meters of slippery metal floor. She approached the edge with a feeling of dread, wondering if she was going to see the casket bobbing inside, if she’d accidentally dumped the Green Man exactly where Schorr wanted him.

But when she craned over the edge, she saw only gurgling water. Relief hit her all at once. She sank to a crouch, feeling the adrenaline start to ebb. She’d done it. Holy fuck.

“Holy fuck,” she choked. “Did you see that shit, Kit?”

Another creaky groan came from behind her. She turned, expecting to see the remains of the upcar sliding off the van, not expecting to see Schorr emerging from the back like some kind of bogeyman, framed by billowing steam. His long coat was torn and one of the antlers had snapped clean off his gas mask, but apart from that he didn’t look the least bit shook by the crash.

“You fucking bitch.” The words came out dead and flat through the mask, but Eris had the distinct feeling they would have sounded the same without it. Schorr had another halo out, pointing it at her.

Eris didn’t feel a thing. Kit really had severed the brainshare.

“That was all me,” Eris said, forcing a bravado she didn’t feel, not even a little. “OCI’s going to be all over your ass in about two fucking seconds, though.” She could hear the wail of emergency drones approaching and hoped a silver upcar or two were with them.

“Then I’ll be quick,” Schorr said, and he turned back to the van. Going back for the casket. Eris stood frozen for a second, then anger poured through and thawed her. He was ignoring her. Just fucking ignoring her, like with no brainshare she was no threat at all. Eris sprung the stunspray from her arm and lunged.

Schorr swatted her out of the air without even turning around. He had to have back-cams in that mask of his, and maybe he had some kind of skeletal implants, too, because he was stronger than any asshole philanthropist-slash-cultist had a right to be. Eris hit the ground hard with the breath smashed out of her lungs. She saw Schorr’s boot stomp down on her wrist, crushing circuitry, and her fingers spasmed. The stunspray flew out of her grip. She heard it bounce once, twice, then a distant splash as it went into the tank. Shit.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Schorr asked. “Is being a hero now for the blink of an eye worth being a villain for the rest of eternity?” He seized the edge of the casket with both hands and started to pull. The metal screeched, throwing sparks. “It’s that lack of foresight that got us here in the first place,” he grunted.

Eris rolled over. Coughed. “New Tenochtitlan,” she rasped. “Were you telling the truth?”

“Yes.”

Eris threw herself at his back again, making her fists into clubs, battering his head and shoulders. This time Schorr spun and reached. The arm he’d stomped on was slow, jittery, and he managed to grip it now with both hands. He planted one foot on Eris’s shoulder and tore it free. Feedback lanced all the way down Eris’s spine like a plume of lava. She howled.

Another kick took the wind out of her, and she sprawled back on the slick metal. Schorr dragged the casket towards the edge. Towards the swirling water.

“Kit, where the fuck are you?” Eris hollered. She crawled after him on hand and knees, still convulsing. He had the casket poised on the lip. The Green Man, shaken apart by the crash, was barely human-looking at all now, just a viscous, poisonous green mass.

Schorr was leaning down to thumb the catch when his gloved hand blew apart. Eris blinked as a splinter of bloody bone flew past her face. She stared at Schorr, who stared back at her through the lenses of his mask, both of them equally surprised. Then the second shot cracked the air, and his lenses splattered bright red. He crumpled.

As his lifeless body fell, it knocked into the casket and sent it lurching forward. Eris flung out her remaining arm and clamped to it. Feedback seared and she couldn’t reach to switch it off. She gritted her teeth instead as she dug her heels in and pulled. The casket shifted by millimeter increments. Polymer muscles popped and strained in her arm. She pulled. Pulled.

Finally the casket rocked backward, and Eris collapsed on top of it like she could pin it there permanently. She was still lying like that, gasping for breath, when the silver upcar touched down and Kit dropped out wearing a harness with her sniper rifle stowed in back of it.

“Holy shit, Eris.”

Kit squatted down beside her, checking her over with a mediscanner, then moved her off the casket. In Eris’s peripherals she could see people in hazard suits with scanners of their own. Two of them were bagging Schorr’s body.

A blurred out face appeared over her. “Well done, Eris,” Ndirangu’s voice said. “We’ll get you a replacement for the damaged arm. And I’ve just put the request through regarding the traffic cams.”

Eris tipped her head back against the cold metal roof of the water tower. “Fuck that,” she said. “How about you just give me a job?”

Kit gave her gravelly laugh. Eris didn’t mind. She didn’t like wearing black anyways, and had something more important to do, besides. Have the OCI pay her way back across the ocean on the first available vessel. She needed to see New Tenochtitlan, or what was left of it. She needed to see stars again.

She needed to know if her dad was really gone. Eris took a deep breath of the cold night air, and for a moment she could taste the prickling warm breeze that swept through the colony compound at night. Whatever she found over there, she would deal with it. Hopefully the replacement arm would be ready by the time she left, but if it wasn’t, she would deal with that, too.

She was exactly as tough as she thought she was.

About the Author

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

The Opposite and the Adjacent

Liu Yang, Translate by Nick Stember

Just like that the lonely ship appeared before us: an enormous ovoid, scarred with great cracks and fissures, as if having given way under the awesome power of some great unknown force. Despite having long since lost all means of propulsion, inertia and gravity had conspired to carry it within range of our observation station in the Kuiper Belt.

Having determined that the vessel posed no danger to us, Gu He and I concluded an investigation was in order.

Upon reaching the cabin door, I pulled at the twisted wreck of metal with the utmost of caution, managing only to pry it open halfway. More or less intact, the furnishings appeared slanted and strange, calling to mind famous works of postmodern sculpture back on Earth. It was around this time that we found the golden box, with “him” inside.

Having had already long since expired, “he” lay in the box with stiff limbs and no signs of a functioning metabolism. Aside from a strange, triangular-shaped head, “his” body was shockingly similar to that of a man.

In a cabinet we found sheets of a rubber-like substance covered in countless symbols, each more bizarre than the last.

After scanning them into the computer, we tried our luck with the automated code breaker. It took nearly a week but in the end we were left with something resembling as much study notes as it did a diary.

I found the following passages especially significant:

Entry #103

Yesterday we studied the Law of Area: The area of a square equals length times width. I’ve already finished today’s homework, including this problem: Calculate the area of an irregular polygon. By cutting it up I was able to create a square from the resulting pieces. During class today our teacher praised me in front of everyone else, saying that I was the only one who’d figured it out. I think all the papercuts I’ve done definitely helped out.

I’m so happy! Math isn’t nearly as hard as they’re always saying it is—it’s actually pretty interesting.

Entry #197

A lot of people say that math gets harder after 6th grade. But I don’t think it’s hard at all, it’s just that the calculations have gotten more complex.

Like yesterday, when we studied the Theorem of the Opposite and Adjacent: In a given right-angled triangle the sum of the two legs squared is equal to hypotenuse raised to s. S is an abbreviation for the natural constant of the Opposite and the Adjacent, which is approximately 2.013. Ancient mathematicians had already accurately calculated s to the 28th place over a thousand years ago!

You don’t need to be so exact though, ‘cause 2.013 is good enough for most things. That’s what our teacher said.

Still, it’s really tough to calculate the value of something raised to the power of 2.013 (or to find the square of 2.013). Since starting 6th grade every problem usually takes a couple of hours and I feel like most of that time is used for complex operations involving exponents.

Sometimes I think about how much easier everything would be if s was equal to 2! That way you could find the answer to these problems in seconds, not hours.

Entry #248

“Practice making squares and finding roots until you know the operations like the back of your hand.” I remember my teacher saying this over and over when I was little, but I feel like I’m only just starting to understand what he meant.

There probably isn’t one single lousy branch of science that that doesn’t use them. In equations for falling bodies, the inverse square of gravity to distance is 2.07; the inverse square of an electromagnetic field to distance 3.02; and energy is of course equal to mass times the speed of light raised to the power of 2.03 . . . it all makes me tired just thinking about it.

It doesn’t matter how exciting or interesting a science may be, because in the end you’ll inevitably get stuck doing dull and tedious calculations.

Entry #335

Without meaning to, I’ve discovered something pretty weird.

I really like making papercuts—it’s something I’ve enjoyed since I was a little kid. So yesterday, I took out a square piece of paper and started playing around with it. First, I cut a small square from the very center of the paper. That left me four right triangles. Originally I had been planning on trying to fit the pieces together into the shape of a spaceship, with the four triangles acting as wings. As I looked at the pieces of paper on the table, however, I was suddenly struck with a passing thought.

If the area of the original square piece of paper I had started with was equal to all of the small pieces that were left over, and the area of a square was the product of one side squared . . . why did something seem wrong here?

Writing out a rough equation, I did my best to simplify it, until I was left with this amazing conclusion:

a2+b2=c2

There’s no 2.013 after all! Just two!

It’s a really weird result, I know, and pretty shocking too. But, I have to admit I’m kind of in love with how simple my formula is and my gut is telling me that this is the true form of the Theorem of the Opposite and the Adjacent.  

Entry #336

Well, it looks like that was a waste of time.

I went to meet my math teacher today to explain my formula. Hoping for the best, I waited for him to look as surprised as I had been, and then maybe say something like, “My word! It really is true!” I was pretty disappointed, though, cause he just laughed and shook his head.  

“Incorrect.”

“What’s incorrect about it?”

“Your formula for calculating the area is wrong,” he said, patting me on the head. After a pause, he said, “You’re a smart cookie—you’ve come up with a simple way to deduce the Theorem of the Opposite and the Adjacent. It’s too bad because—”

“Isn’t area the product of length times width though?”

“That’s just an approximation. While it’s true that introductory texts explain it this way, once you enter the higher grades you’ll find out that in addition to the length times width, there is an additional factor that must be applied to create the correct result. That’s the true formula for area!”

He’s right, of course, I should have thought of this earlier. Since when have things ever been easy?

So depressing. When I got home and saw the cut up pieces of paper on the table I didn’t waste any more time messing around with them.

Entry #1129

Soon I’ll be signing up for the higher academy, where I’ve decided I’ll apply to become an astronaut.

I still remember when I was a teen all I wanted was to be a scientist. But when I think about science now, all I feel is, well, a headache. I’ve found scientific formulas to be, pretty much without exception, complex and tedious to complete—or to put it another way, they’re freaking irritating. But that’s the world we live in, built on the foundation of an irrational, aesthetically unpleasing constant. Sometimes I think that if God really exists, then he’s one lousy craftsman.

Entry #2983

My vessel has already left the belt system, a pioneering first in the history of my people! When my messages and survey data finally reach the home planet three months from now I can only imagine they’ll be filled with pride at my accomplishment.

Meanwhile, I continue forward, seeking out places as yet unexplored by any who have come before.

Entry #3012

Something very strange has happened.

Some days ago, a crack appeared in my vessel’s main cabin. The atmospheric sensor quickly found the leak in an out of the way corner. I carefully patched the crack, thinking that would be that.

Since then, though, it’s been one non-stop emergency. It’s like my ship is being crushed, with compressions and fractures appearing all over the place. Fixing the cracks keeps me up at all hours, but none of it makes any sense. Where, in the vastness of space, is this mysterious pressure coming from to bear down upon my vessel?

A number of sensors and engines in the craft have begun to malfunction as well, with obvious cracks appearing in the hardened alloys of the various components. Every day I fall asleep to a symphony of creaks and groans echoing out of some new, unknown corner of my vessel, as if I’m living in a haunted house. There’s absolutely no way for me to fall asleep without taking sedatives.

Earlier today I discovered that even the gravitational sensors have begun to fail. When an asteroid of about thirty tons happened to pass by the nose of my ship I was completely unable to get the gravitational data supplied by the sensor to agree with the telemetric calculations of the ship’s computer.

I really don’t know how much longer I can keep going like this.

Entry #3028

I think I’ve discovered the source of the problem.

Having spent the last day combing through yesterday’s gravitational data, I found something strange. If the numbers provided are correct, the inverse square of gravity to distance should be 2.

Using the principle of the interference on polarized light, I was able to measure the lengths of the three sides of a right triangle. The shortest leg opposite the hypotenuse was 3 units in length, to the adjacent leg’s 4 units. The hypotenuse, meanwhile, was 5 units long!

Given an acceptable experimental margin of error, the hypotenuse was exactly 5 units in length, being neither slightly longer nor slightly shorter as one would have expected.

Entry #3084

I’ve become certain I won’t be able to keep my vessel together much longer.

The whole ship is coming apart now. Even if I were to return to my home planet immediately there would be no way for me to land without killing myself.

And it’s all because of the Theorem of the Opposite and the Adjacent—it’s true, a single formula is to blame for everything that’s happening. The great pieces of metal that shape the hull, the precise and exacting components of my instruments—they were all constructed and assembled according to the natural constant 2.013. But now even the natural laws are no longer what they once were.

I’m not afraid—in all honesty, I’ve made peace with this whole mess. You might even say I’m a little happy. It’s how the Theorem of the Opposite and the Adjacent was meant to be all along, isn’t it?

And now I’ve found my way into a more beautiful universe where I can my lay my head to rest, having arrived at long last . . .

***

“I’m curious . . . How in the world did they come up with such a strange version of the Pythagorean theorem?” I asked, sighing as I set down the the printout of the translated journal.

“Indeed. I suspect it was on account of wormhole K09,” Gu He replied, searching the database. “It just so happens that a medium-sized wormhole is located just outside their star system. Within the radius of its influence, space and time are slightly distorted.”

“But are we really supposed to believe that they never suspected all of those so-called ‘natural constants’? Imagine, raising something to a bizarre number like the power of 2.013! It looks so funny!”

“As a wise man once said, ‘Living as I do on Lushan mountain, truly, I know nothing of its appearance from afar!’” Gu He said, sighing. “We really shouldn’t try to judge their intelligence from our own perspective—who knows, human civilization on Earth probably developed under the influence of an even greater distortion in time and space! Doesn’t pi being 3.1416 strike you as equally odd?”

Suddenly speechless, I had nothing to say.

Originally published in Chinese in Micro SF, December 2014.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Liu Yang has a PhD in physics and is a professor at Xi’an University of Technology. Since his first short story in 2012, he has published over 30,000 words of short stories in magazines such as Sci-fi World, and ZUI Found, in addition to his 2015 short story collection A Perfect Doomsday. Additionally, Liu is a prolific author of sci-fi essays, with a regular column in Non-Exist.

Toward the Luminous Towers

Bogi Takács

Liicha is singing an old song, his wheedly tenor not a match for the lush contralto of the original recording. And we shall soar, hand in hand, through the night sky . . . His voice grinds against the walls of the transporter, creates unwelcome resonances and echoes. Invisible fingernails scratching steel.

Liicha is a kind person, the best I could hope for in a comrade-in-arms, but I can’t bear to listen to this. “Would you cut it out already?” I am snappy, aggravated, out of my element. He is a soldier—but I am a conscript.

“Awww.” He stands up, stretches his pale, thick arms. “Is it time for the GS-10?”

He is right, and I am resentful. Was it my behavior? Something in my tone of voice?

He throws me the ampoule and I pull up the sleeve of my uniform, feed the ampoule into the port at the bend of my elbow. So many drugs—but this one is just to keep me awake, push me through the utter exhaustion brought on by sleepless days after sleepless nights.

The mechanism hisses softly. I remove the ampoule, lean back in my chair, close my eyes. Soon it will be time to log in again, my turn again, because the war machine will never come to a halt. But first, the prescheduled meeting with Doctor Darankau. Where is she already?

A tapping outside, unsteady hands fussing with the door. Liicha unlocks the latch, lets the doctor in. She grimaces and brushes hands against her face—her dark skin is stained with something lighter that looks like ash, underlining the folds and wrinkles of age.

Liicha makes a drink, something sweet-smelling produced by his fungal container. Doctor Darankau accepts it, drains the small cup in a single gulp. We murmur greetings, make small talk.

“Your schedule will be bumped up,” she says. “They will probably only tell you at the very last minute, but I thought you would want to know.”

I lean forward. The muscles in my abdomen clench. How could I have an even tighter schedule? I am living on GS-10 and Liicha’s concoctions.

“What’s going on?” I whisper. I don’t expect her to divulge classified information, but I know she probably will, otherwise she wouldn’t have brought up the topic. Liicha also leans closer.

Doctor Darankau does not lower her voice. “The Graycoats are using some kind of targeted bioweapon, likely retroviral. Biotech is trying to reverse-engineer it, but so far without success. It targets combat controllers. People are dropping out at an alarming rate, incapacitated, dead. Soon we will have no one left to guide the army.”

I feel deflated. If I die, then I won’t have to live in this endless, paradoxical tension-boredom-exhaustion state any longer. But my purpose here . . .

Doctor Darankau interrupts my thoughts. “Frankly, you are the only controller in my service area who’s not showing symptoms already.”

I didn’t know that, but it makes perfect sense: I’ve noticed people slow down, respond sluggishly, ping decreasing all over the network. I frown. “You think I might be immune? Because of my custom setup?”

She rolls the empty cup around between her palms. “Probably yes. I have been wondering if it’s because you’re neuroatypical in just the right way for the targeting to pass you by. You don’t trigger the pattern matching.”

“So they want me to work even harder, until my brain turns into mush anyway.” I shrug. “For the people, for victory.” It comes out even more cynical than intended. I genuinely want to serve. I genuinely want to protect. But I also deeply, desperately want to get out of this place, just one step behind the front lines, within tactical control range for every single piece of crap passing as military equipment.

Doctor Darankau mutters something that can be interpreted as affirmative or as noncommittal, then cautiously says goodbye. The hatch clanks shut after her, and I put my back against a bulkhead, slide slowly to the floor. This war, I hate it all, and for a moment, I just let myself feel that rage before I push it down, below conscious awareness. If I were to give in, my own magic might teleport me out of harm’s way; an uncontrolled, spontaneous action, but one that would qualify as desertion nonetheless. I know someone who vanished one day, only to reappear in the hinterlands, and I don’t want to end up like her; she’d escaped only to be executed. If I can’t control my fury, it needs to go. And no one can control teleportation jumps, really. Our wars would look very different if we could. My muscles tighten with all the suppressed anger.

I struggle to stand, while Liicha looks on with an expression halfway between weariness and pity. The night will be long still, and I will need to log in again.

This is so different from my previous line of work. The public nets were infinitely more vast—the tactical systems feel constricted by comparison, walls closing in around me just like the steel and reinforced plastic of the transporter encases me. I am captive, mind and body. And we shall soar, hand in hand . . .

Liicha straps me into my berth, his motions quick, firm, precise. He genuinely likes me. He feels sorry for me, and he shows it just as much as necessary; it is his job to take care of me and make sure I am a smoothly functioning component in the machine.

Combat control is mostly just computation and awareness, not raw magical power. Unchallenging, uninteresting. I’m also not particularly good at it, but not bad either, and that’s all that counts when the other controllers’ minds are slowly winking out.

Is the virus already in my bloodstream? Has Doctor Darankau passed it on, unknowingly, unwillingly? I fight a wave of paranoia.

I must have grimaced, because Liicha whispers to me softly, puts a hand on my forehead. He is not magical in any sense, and we do not share our thoughts using technological means either. He is just attuned to me, after weeks upon months upon years in this rolling coffin.

He connects cables and tubes, clicks clasps, tightens straps. Everything holds. I start the log-in process, and the power rushing through me is more like an unwelcome jolt rather than the sweeping tidal force of the public nets. I always wanted to be a librarian, I think, but then I am dropped in the middle of a combat situation and all extraneous thought is swept away.

Drones, turrets, automated, semi-autonomous, if-it-were-autonomous-it-wouldn’t-need-me-really. The enemy is a mass of statistics, an algebra of flesh and blood. They have humans too, not in large measure, but someone needs to control the process. And as my neighbors in the net waver and fade, we are losing, and the Graycoats are winning.

I run projections in the back of my mind, extrapolate the losses, and I know we will keep on fighting until just a few of our cells can hang on to dear life, but I also know there is no hope against this slow but steady attrition.

Enfilade—defilade—I weave drones through enemy formations, twist and turn. Murder and kill, though I struggle not to think of it that way, and I will only think of it that way later, back safely in my own sensorium, staring at the inside of the armor plating and the assorted medico-technological clutter Liicha leaves around the transporter, ties down into place in the oddest locations.

“This is not what magic is supposed to be for,” I mutter to him, feeling hollowed out by the logout process, alone in my mind again.

“Magic is for protecting your people,” he whispers back, and I notice he doesn’t say the people.

“Who are my people?” I ask him. I am a librarian. Who are my people?

“I am your people,” he says, and this gets me, this merciless feeling that hooks into all my drives to do what needs to be done, to do what I’ve been built to do, a machine of ragged and worn-down flesh.

I am a librarian, but some of the skills necessary to manage the public nets translate all too readily to control combat, and for the first time in my life, I find myself wondering about my training. Wondering about Aman Thien, first and foremost; their voice that accompanies me wherever I go.

Aman Thien was always calm and collected, their gaze sharp, their voice level. They trained me, back when we were all telling ourselves we were civilians. I loved the public nets, the giant swirls and eddies of information and consciousness. I knew that far off, beyond the far reaches, there were even greater nets, planetary nets, vast systems merging magic and technology—but I also knew I would never go there. The Old Empire had scattered the galaxy with humanoid creatures, but then it collapsed, and our ancestors were stranded on our planet without a convenient jump point back to Imperial space. I could feel those towering structures of light in the far, far distance—but they were beyond our reach. Too far, in regions too different. Solar radiation sometimes influences magic in the most inconvenient ways.

When I told Aman Thien about the luminous towers, they nodded, looked away, into the distance—and for the first time, I saw something other than the crisp clarity of focused action on their angular face. They were also neuroatypical, but in a different way, even more bound to their place by duty and obligation. At this point, what bound me had been mostly invisible, and I could still tell myself I was acting of my own volition.

Thinking of Aman Thien held me together even at miserable times like this, when I was chewing inedible rations and hiding in the giant rolling coffin of the transporter, huddled together with Liicha in the cold.

I shake my head to clear it out of the reverie of sleeplessness, micro-sleep segments breaking up overlong stretches of the wakeful state. I swallow, reach for my canteen filled with stale water.

“What do you think,” I begin, beyond caring for surveillance, speaking straight at Liicha, “how could I have joined to maintain the public nets of my own free will, when there was so little else I could’ve done?”

He peers sideways at me, too tired to be scandalized. “What do you mean?” he finally offers, and I’m not sure he’s understood a word of what I’ve just said.

I grimace and look away, avoiding his gaze. There is little else to look at. “I have such an excess of magic, always had. What could I have done with it? It was burning me up alive.”

I actually remember little of what happened before I walked into the center to sign up. Life fades into dream fades into incoherence. But Liicha doesn’t need to know that, he pities me enough as it is.

He murmurs something about choices and sacrifice, the people and solidarity. Not “your people,” not this time. Then he swears, his neck craning abruptly, looking at an invisible readout. I jump up—did they catch us out? Did someone hear?

But the disruption does not come from an overeager censor; it comes from an incoming missile, hitting the transporter, filling my field of view with white-hot pain, and for a moment, all I can feel is the finality of relief.

“ . . . waste of effort.”

Words floating past.

My chest feels crushed. My legs—I don’t feel my legs. There is a wall of pain, edging into something the nervous system can’t quite assimilate. I don’t know what I’m feeling.

“Orders, orders. They say you scrape, you scrape.”

“ . . . think there is anything left here to scrape?”

I try to open my eyes, can’t quite see. I shouldn’t be as calm as I am.

“They say if we find the head, we bring the head . . . they only need the head.”

My right arm is pinned under something. I try to move my left arm, try to reconstruct the contours of my body. I touch sharp objects.

Then there is a giant wrenching, as steel is bent further out of shape, away from me. There is light, and an abrupt stream of cussing. Then nothing, at all.

The hospital is all too bright, all too white, too well-lit. But it is silent, and calm.

I am resting. It is, by all means and measures, over. My part in the war is done.

They are fitting me with new legs, my original ones severed cleanly by a bulkhead that fell on me, which also kept me from bleeding out. They have already fit me with a right arm, and I practice, try to get the nerves to adjust. I raise my arm, point with my index finger at a target, point, point, point again. The hard plastic of the target makes a tock-tock-tocking sound as the soft plastic of my index finger hits it. My arm isn’t covered with skin replica yet, but I have full sensation, and my brain readily accepts the arm as its own, robotic as it looks in slate-gray, its forms airbrushed to softness. I am better and better at pointing, and at a variety of other fine-motor tasks.

I wish I could see Aman Thien or Liicha. I periodically ask for them, but the hospital people know nothing; aren’t allowed to pass on anything.

I would like new legs, but it is taking long. I don’t know if it’s the narcotics or the fact that I escaped from hell, but I am not impatient. Tock-tock-tock; I work my way through the most mind-numbing physical therapy exercises with a divine tranquility.

It doesn’t last.

My visitor, a tall, broad-chested, dark-skinned man, is wearing a spotless dress uniform showing high rank; all too high to have anything to do with me.

“We are taking the patient,” he informs the bedside nurse, who starts to protest before he is quickly overruled. The two men glare at each other. The military always wins. Our military always wins. As if.

“For the war effort,” my visitor says, ignoring me. I drop my right hand into my lap, and it hits harder than I would’ve liked it to; I wince.

The nurse starts another round of protest. He is a tall, brusque man not used to resistance. My visitor yanks the sheet covering my lower body, then steps back, stricken by the sight of my unfinished legs, not fully attached, tubes of various materials snaking in and out of them. When the nurse refuses to disconnect the tubes, the military man sets to the task himself, working step by step with practiced expertise; then he lifts me up and cradles me in his arms, the unfinished legs dangling at an impossible angle, not quite part of my body—and he carries me outside, into the bitterly cold nighttime air.

I don’t know if I can call her a nurse. The person on duty is a young woman in angry combat fatigues. She hooks my port up to a line, administers more GS-10, and an extra dose of VPR-56, designed to enhance neuroplasticity, allow the brain to more readily rewire itself. I never got this much of it, not even in the hospital where they were trying to get me to adjust to my new limbs.

I point it out. She outright ignores me at first, then grudgingly says, “Orders from higher up. We will need you online most of your waking hours. You’ll need to adjust.”

Waking hours blur into more waking hours. Do I sleep? I order troops around, larger and larger clusters of them, command entire armies on the behest of the chiefs of staff conveying their wishes to me.

My body is outside somewhere, in some kind of bed that seems specially designed for the purpose. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be aware of it. My orders arrive electronically, from my first-time visitor, and it is up to me how I implement them in detail. Outside, my body is handled with precision, but in an entirely inhuman fashion, like an imperfect, fragile object. Never a simple caring gesture, never an empathic touch. I deduce that I’m probably not supposed to be aware of my body.

My visitor is the only one who seems to understand this.

Sometimes he disconnects me before sleep, heaves me into a wheelchair, rolls me outside. He whispers a song between his teeth. And we shall soar, to the stars above, to the space beyond . . .

He never talks to me.

Eventually I am the only one left. There are no replacements.

I am in a room with the chiefs of staff. There’s five of them, I think, and my visitor, who seems to be in charge of me.

There is a pale-skinned, thin woman, one of the five, who makes remarks about my appearance. My visitor doesn’t stand up to her; he says nothing, but he grips the handles on my wheelchair with renewed force, and I can feel the sudden jerky motion throughout my body.

I know I am not supposed to hear these remarks. I know nothing about my appearance. Through her comments, I understand my mouth is slightly open, drool snaking out. I can’t close my mouth; I have no command of my body. Only the armies outside. And eventually, not even that, for there are no more armies, no more combat drones, there is nothing left.

After a while, I am back in a hospital; a different hospital, far beyond the front lines.

I understand the nation has capitulated. Unconditional surrender.

I cannot cry; I have no control of my face.

They stop giving me the drugs, and I don’t miss the GS-10. But without the VPR-56, my brain is stuck in this new configuration, unable to readjust to the new set of sensory input, unable to compensate for the lack of information from the tactical and strategic systems. I can’t find my way back to my body, and I can’t explain—I can’t explain that if only they continued giving me the VPR-56, my nervous system would eventually find a new balance. Without the additional plasticity, the hurdle is simply too high for my body to jump.

So I cannot speak, can barely move, while obedient nurses and orderlies drag me around, civilians everywhere. They know nothing about what they did to us in the military, and the people who know seem to have forgotten about me. These civilians are sad, pitying even. They make remarks I am not supposed to hear. They feel sorry for me.

What little resources I have, inside my head, are dedicated to finding a way out. Building tactical maps from scraps of information: conversations between the staff, the way sound echoes in corridors, the way people give directions to visitors. Preparing for the day when I can escape—wheel my way to the roof, unprotected, no forcefield. Preparing for the day when I can gather all my remaining strength and jump.

There is another continuity, another set of memories, and I don’t know which is more correct.

In this one I am in a military hospital again; that much never changes. They scrape me together again. But in this one, they gave up on the command network, they gave up on everything beyond raw power, a long time ago.

In this continuity, I am a supernova.

Barely moving, unable to stand, I am loaded into small, nimble transporters darting through battlefields. Transporters that open to the night sky above. We shall reach beyond the veil of night, to our final destination . . .

I hear Liicha’s voice, his singing, but I can’t see him. I am chained to my berth. The world expresses itself only in the passive voice.

I am dragged to my feet; I waver, but I am held in a firm grip. It is not Liicha; he is not here, except in my thoughts. I am sure he died in the explosion. Or was that a different continuity? What happened to my legs?

Most regulatory processes of my body can be overridden externally. I was being trained to—the public networks—I was a civilian, or was I? It all seems so impossible. They installed those systems in me to help me manage my power, to impose an external balance when an internal one couldn’t suffice—but now they impose an altogether different pattern.

Why can’t they let me talk to Aman Thien? Someone snarls Aman Thien was a traitor, then the override kicks in, and the same raw power that was supposed to undergird the networks rushes through my spine, exits the cabin in a giant burst of magic tearing up the skies.

And again. And again. This is the extent of my usefulness to the military, this is my service, my contribution. I explode, I explode, I explode.

Aman Thien explained the process of connecting to the public networks. They said, we need constant high throughput—the power can go on the upswing of an exponential, but eventually a limiting factor will be hit; and the goal is to approximate the logistic curve, asymptoting at a high level, approaching a horizontal line.

I lose vocabulary even in my thoughts. I can only imagine the graphs, hold on to them.

Here I am all exponential, and after I hit the limiting factor, I crash hard, body sagging against restraints, mind spinning away into unconsciousness.

The two continuities are exclusionary; both cannot be true at the same time, and yet they are. I am drained dry, of resources, of life, just in different aspects. Back in civilian life, I could do both—process data, provide power. What is needed this time is always something different. Technology versus magic.

After months—years?—of painstaking effort, I can get into my wheelchair unassisted. And after all that time, I roll myself toward the elevator, outside to the roof: flat and pebble-grained and only encircled by a slight, low railing.

I try to lever myself across it, fail and slump against the bottom of the railing on my first try.

I remain there for a long time, too exhausted to weep. But then I sense the approach, the commotion below. People looking for me. Visitors? The new-formed, reformed military?

Some things never change.

With renewed strength, I pull myself up with my arms, my useless legs flopping. I hoist myself over the fence, then tumble down on the other side.

I fall, fall for what seems like millennia.

I reconceptualize my direction: not falling downward, but falling upward, skyward, to the eternal darkness that is not death, but liberation. Toward the luminous towers thought to be forever beyond reach. Against the grain of the universe, the inevitable law that human must strike against human, bodies must grind each other down until only the tiniest specks of pain are all that is left. Against the notion that ever more advanced forms of magic and technology can only be used to wage war.

Against existence, my existence, my lack of place in this reality; toward a reality assumed to be unreachable simply because there wasn’t thought to be enough desperation in our world to fuel a jump.

I am streaming skyward while people scatter and rush looking for me below, and I know that once I am gone, I will be—like the luminous towers—forever beyond their reach.

About the Author

Bogi Takács is a disabled and neuroatypical Hungarian Jewish author currently living in the US. E writes both speculative fiction and poetry, and eir work has been published in a variety of venues like Lightspeed, Apex, and Strange Horizons. You can also find em on Twitter as @bogiperson.

The House of Half Mirrors

Thoraiya Dyer

My house is full of half mirrors.

Mam tells the tale like it’s an amusing anecdote: that time she brought a fiddler home from the Anchor, and he wasn’t a man but a fomoiri, and all the mirrors from the wardrobe doors to the polarized sunglasses on the sideboard cracked neatly into perfect halves.

At least, she used to tell it. Before cancer took her.

Who believed in fomoiri in 2042? At the time, I bit my tongue and charitably assumed it was her oblique warning about violent partners and the end of days. When fuel ran out, everyone who didn’t raise their own food relocated inside ration delivery zones. She moved in with me, bringing as many of the half mirrors as she could fit in a wagon hitched to the back of her pushbike.

Me old Mam, cycling sixty kilometers from Cahersiveen. Happy days.

She did always go on about the better halves of human nature, about seeing the good in things. Since Da was a useless tool, I’d tell her that when I looked in the half mirrors I could only see the half of me that came from her.

Mam’s half mirrors match what’s technically only half a house. Since she died, a young single mother got allocated the upstairs. That interloper’s two children thump around like live basketballs and she hogs the washing line down the side, but I’ve got a sunroom at the back with the windows all smashed where I hang my laundry to dry.

In a corner of that wrecked sunroom are three heavy, soil-filled pots with dead trees. Sad stick skeletons with the morning sun on them. I should be tossing them, but I can’t, any more than I can toss the half mirrors.

Mam dug up three hazel saplings and brought them inside when the next-door house collapsed on our garden. She loved those little trees, just like she loved the oak woodland by Lough Leane. I can’t even keep a plant alive. Lucky I never became a parent.

And now I’ve mooned about, gazing guiltily at them, for so long that I’m late for the lock-in. Can’t even be on time to save our besieged final scrap of wild.

Haven’t even called the hospital to let them know I won’t be at work today.

Sliding in my socks across the solid oak floorboards—they’re the only indestructible part of the whole shitty, falling-down house—I dump my tea dregs in the kitchen sink. It’s not backed up because of the mouse in the dried-up u-bend addicted to tea leaves.

The plumbing doesn’t work.

It hasn’t worked for fifty years, which is how I got the house so cheap. Which is fine, since these days the village tap water’s poison. It’s as deadly as all those lush meadows and sweeping fields that kill stone dead any escaped stock that graze on them.

Bottled gallons come as part of the weekly ration.

Mam used to do a dowsing course for tourists back in Cahersiveen. When she came here, she promised she’d find me my own source of spring water. Carrying her daft twig through the house, she’d stopped in the middle of the sunroom and said it was under the boards.

I told her I wasn’t pulling up the boards. They’re the only indestructible part of the whole shitty, falling-down house.

When I pick up the phone, it doesn’t work any better than the taps do.

Which is new.

But it was only a matter of time. We live in a shitty, falling-down world.

The lock-in is exactly what it sounds like.

A gaggle of fools, me included, crowd the grass outside the towering gates, dodging Clydesdale manure piles and patting one another on the back for putting the woodland ahead of our own hungry families.

Except I’ve got no family left. It’s not that much of a battle for me, so.

We’re going to lock ourselves onto the gates of the walled-in woodland. There, the lakeside forest, still emerald green, hides ruined abbeys and harp-haunted hill forts.

The ancient wall was renovated in the thirties. Four meters of gray-painted concrete is supposed to keep looters out of the castles and weeds and feral cats out of the woods.

Ever since the big enviro-disaster, though, there’s been something spooky about the wall. On the outside, like all the local houses and farms, the soil tests toxic.

Not inside the wall, strangely enough. No poison seeping up through the roots of those gnarly old oaks. Nobody knows why.

Nobody cares why. They want to open up the gates to let the sheep and cattle in to graze.

Today!

But not today. Today we’ve got enough warm bodies to make a human barricade.

I wonder how we’re going to organize tomorrow, without phones, but then there’s no time for wondering because we milling protesters must speedily handcuff ourselves to one another. In fact, since I’m late, I’m surprised there aren’t patrol cars here already.

But the phones aren’t working. I guess the farmers can’t call the Gardaí.

Everyone’s brought their own bangin, blacksmith-made manacles.

“Faster!” the organizer bellows. “Next!”

I’m next.

And that’s when I see I’m supposed to be locked onto one of the aos sí. He’s sitting cross-legged on the ground, being careful not to lean back against the iron of the gate.

How ninety-nine aos sí got stuck on this side of Lough Leane.

1. This is the story they used to be telling the tourists: Every seven years, on May 1st, the famous warrior chieftain O’Donoghue Mór rises from the lake near Ross castle. The fairy host from the land of youth floats over the waters of Lough Leane in the wake of his hovering white horse.

2. Catching a glimpse of him is pure good luck.

3. Nobody actually catches any glimpses of him.

4. Rephrase: Nobody, in those early-millennium days of miniature cameras everywhere, managed to film him.

5. Then one morning, the sun came up on ninety-nine ethereally beautiful eternal-youths and one pissed-off warrior ghost. Teenagers had their drones out there in a heartbeat to confirm what the shocked groundskeepers reported to Radio Kerry.

6. Later, scientists surmised all the drilling and hydraulic fracturing for gas and shale oil caused a miniature earthquake sometime between dusk and dawn. Half the lake water drained away into underground parts unknown. Phenols contaminated the other half.

Fracking fluid poisoned the groundwater, too. There were dead fish. Trees losing their leaves mid-summer. A rain of death.

A magic door closed and locked, perhaps in self-defense, from the other side.

7. The ghost of O’Donoghue Mór swore to find a lake still pure enough to reopen the portal between worlds. He set off alone.

8. He hasn’t returned. That was ten years ago.

The aos sí looks the way they all look, the ones that come from royalty.

Something like Orlando Bloom, circa two thousand, in a long blond wig made from Russian ladies’ hair. But pecs, by God! This one’s got magnificent pecs making the buttons of his silk shirt pop.

And I remember the last thing I saw on the free web before it stopped working. That serial killer, Cian, and how he looked at his trial. Much the same as this. Much the same as an ageless aos sí supremacist still looks after nine years in maximum security, I’d be guessing.

I stared at the accused in that witness box. I knew he was pure evil. But society had trained me to find him beautiful, and beautiful he was, feck it all to hell. The words of the human reporter washed over me without leaving any impression. I stared at the flawless face of that ruthless cunt, trying to imagine the screams. The blood. The bodies of Cian’s victims on that inter-island ferry where he’d cut them down with keen-edged, aos sí-forged silver before sinking the ship with a thousand corpses on board.

I couldn’t find him ugly.

No matter how I tried.

I think that moment was the moment. It was the first time I turned on myself. I always liked who I was, before then. That moment was when the self-hating started.

At the woodland gate, nobody offers to sit down next to the aos sí. Nobody rushes forward to take my place. Nobody trusts the fancy titanium handcuffs he’s brought because he can’t be abiding the touch of iron.

Of course he cares about the oak woodland. Of course he wants to do something, the same as the villagers do.

I just wish he’d do it somewhere else. When I look at him, I see Cian. Worse, I remember the repulsive inner me that wanted to fuck Cian, even knowing what he’d done.

I plonk myself on the pavement, shoulder to shoulder with the aos sí protester, and thrust my hand through the cuff without a word.

“Hello,” he says as he locks my wrist tight to his. I ignore him. A gray-haired granny in a flannelette shirt sits on my other side.

“How’s she cutting?” I ask her casually, offering my other wrist.

“Straight down the middle like a razor blade,” is granny’s gruff reply as she snaps herself onto me.

“I’m Miach,” the aos sí tells me, trying again.

“G’luck, so,” I say, giving him my best stop-talking-to-me glare. His eyes are the color of green glass held up to the sun; green like the woodland in spring; green like the new leaves on Mam’s hazel trees that I didn’t water til it was too late.

Then it dawns on me that this aos sí isn’t one of the stranded ninety-nine. Mam and I looked closely at all those faces on the news, trying to see if any of them was the fomoiri she met at the pub. None of them were.

“You’re sitting on my foot,” he says, at the same time as I say,

“What did you say your name was?”

“Miach,” he replies patiently.

I move my arse off his ankle.

“You’re not one of the ninety-nine.”

“No. I came through the door long before they did. My father kept trying to kill me, you see.”

Flashback of Da’s fist raised in anger.

“Which door did you come through?” I wonder aloud. “The lake? The same as O’Donoghue?”

“No.” Miach gives a subtle shrug. “Centuries ago, I was brought out of a stone well in a hazel thicket. Its waters were even purer than the waters of the lake. Since coming back here a few days ago, I haven’t been able to find it. It must be covered in iron. Somewhere under the village.”

Jaysus.

“I’m supposed to be helping the ninety-nine find their way back home,” he carries on, unperturbed, “but today the woodland seemed more important.”

The woodland isn’t important. I don’t give one single flying feck for the woodland. I’m here because Mam would have been here. I’m just doing what she would have done.

“I’m supposed to be at the hospital,” I say. Respect enters Miach’s already rather stiff and respectful expression, so I add quickly, “I’m not a doctor.”

“A nurse?”

“No.”

I’m not a nurse. Too dumb for that. Remember that nurse who killed a man by putting a decimal point in the wrong place? I clean floors. I lift heavy things.

Before that, I vacuumed the carpets at the fracking company offices. That was prior to the earthquake. Mam never told me straight out that I was aiding and abetting the ruination of the natural world, but I saw it in her sad eyes whenever she straightened me uniform collar.

“Oh.”

“Are you a nurse, yourself?” I react rudely.

“A doctor,” Miach says. Of course he is. “At least, I used to doctor to my people. My sister and I took after our father, a celebrated healer, but it turned out we were more gifted than he was. Out of jealousy, he cut me once with his sword, through the skin. Then twice, through the bone. Then three times, all the way through my brain.” He angles his head, and doesn’t need to part his long hair with his fingers for me to see the faint pink scar running up the middle of his forehead and over the crown of his head.

“Jaysus,” I mutter. Da might have wielded his fists but he never sliced my brain in half.

“My sister thought I was dead that third time, for sure. She brought my body through to this world. Her tears made healing herbs grow up and over me. I had to claw my way through them when I woke. By that stage I figured I’d better not go back and give my father another chance at it.”

“Is your father one of the ninety-nine?” I ask. “Is your father Cian?”

“No.”

Sirens drag my attention away from Miach. The Gardaí are finally here. Also arriving are the shepherds with their dogs and swarms of goats and skinny border leicesters. The sheep look like they might chew through, not just herbs and bark, but the trunks of the oaks like living chainsaws.

“Don’t mention how you can heal yourself,” I suggest to the aos sí, “or they might be sawing through your arms instead of the handcuffs.”

“I can’t heal myself. Not in this world. That’s why I’m talking to you and not this other fellow. You’re on my right side. Since my father cut my head in half, I can’t hear anything with my left ear and I can’t see with my left eye.”

It takes the authorities another six or seven hours to get the equipment that they need to hand. By sunset, I need to piss badly. The old lady on my right confides that she’s wearing an adult diaper. Obviously I didn’t think the protest through.

They cut Miach out of his titanium handcuffs with a steel saw. When sparks touch the blue-veined, paper-white skin of the inside of his wrist, his whole body convulses, like they touched him with an electric cattle prod. But he don’t make a sound.

He does piss himself.

Then I do, too, not because I’m in pain but just because it’s been so long, and if anyone smells me, they’ll probably think it was him. I try not to care that they’re hurting him. He chose to be here, same as the rest of us.

“Feckin fairy,” swears the Garda sergeant, hauling Miach to his feet. She’s a head shorter than he is but solid. A mean, freckly tank. They take all two dozen of us to the station and throw us behind bars, but what for? Our punishment is that the woodland gates were thrown open. Sheep and dogs went inside the fence in an endless stream. We couldn’t even keep them out for one full day. The police can’t punish us.

Can’t punish me, anyway. I don’t think Miach likes those metal bars very much at all. He’s sweating like a priest in a playground. People sneak in to ask him if he’s really Miach, the fairy magician, who can heal anything, even cancer, but he shakes in a corner, as far from the cold steel as he can manage, and doesn’t answer them.

But I deserve to be back here again.

Evidence I’m mostly Da (my worse half):

1. On weekly ration delivery night, I steal from the single mother upstairs.

Not from the two little shitehawks. I leave their stuff alone. Just the mother. Her English isn’t great. Don’t think she can read the manifest. Don’t think she even knows she’s supposed to get mutton and Guinness in her ration.

Probably she’s a Muslim vegetarian, anyway.

2. She’s not a fecking Muslim vegetarian. I’m full of shite like a Christmas turkey. The fact of the matter is, I used my severance pay-out from the fracking company to pay off my house when I should have been boycotting them like everyone else. I go to protests to stop sheep from grazing in the woodland but secretly I have a terrible meat craving. A devil’s buttermilk before bed helps me forget how many toxins are probably in the meat. And how I took that tainted money, and I’d be taking it again, for a roof over my head, or, more accurately, for those solid oak boards under my feet.

3. Most of the time, someone in the hospital is dying of cancer. Most of the time, there aren’t enough nurses to be staying on death watch with them. A lot of the time, the dying folks don’t have any family that gives a flying feck.

Sometimes, they ask me to stay with them, but I don’t stay. Nobody stayed with Mam when she was dying of cancer in the hospital and I was in prison, so feck ’em.

4. I told everyone, including my boyfriend Raoul, that I was in prison because of the protest against overturning property rights. For throwing a bottle at Gardaí and then assaulting them.

5. Actually, I was trying to impress an aos sí queen who was at the protest. The Gardaí put her in the back of the van and I wanted to be near her, so I threw the bottle. That wasn’t enough to get me convicted so later I literally hurled shite at them, monkey-style. Everyone knows the aos sí give off pheromones. It’s not my fault I wanted to fuck her so badly. I would have cheated on Raoul, who was loyal and kind. But the aos sí queen laughed at me in ugly disgust.

I didn’t think anything could make that perfect face turn ugly. Still, it didn’t stop me wanting her at that time. I have a superficiality problem. Or had. Or the world I grew up in has the problem.

6. When I let Mam’s trees die, it was like I killed her extra dead. All they needed was a bit of water. I should have smashed through those floorboards to find her imaginary spring. The same way I smashed through the sunroom windows because they showed me my ugly reflection too clearly. And because I was the only one in that reflection. No Raoul, after I confessed to wanting to fuck the aos sí queen. No Mam.

And then, because our protest about property rights had been a complete waste of time and energy, no different to the lock-in, the Council allocated half my house to strangers.

7. Since Raoul left, I’ve felt worthless because I have no romantic partner. Which is stupid.

When you feel something even though it makes no sense and is stupid, that makes you even more stupid, and you spiral down, down, down, in a never-ending loop of stupidity to where Satan’s kicking back in the flooded shafts of the fracking wells, smiling, sipping phenols and biding his time.

They let me and the aos sí, Miach, out of the cells without charge a week later.

It’s a shame, because the food in there is better than the ration, and there’s no washing-up to be doing. Not much worse than boiling the sudsy water, saved from my personal ablutions, til I’m sure all the arse- and armpit-germs have been killed, before putting the saucepans in to soak. I don’t even get to toss the water out after that, no matter how many bits of potato peel or oat hulls are floating in it, because it’s got to be used for flushing the toilet.

I’d have to kill someone to get put away for good, though. Unfortunately they keep Cian in the capital and he’s the only one I can think of worth killing.

“Could you use a volunteer at the hospital?” Miach asks mildly as we linger outside the station building, blinking in the sun. There used to be hanging baskets of flowers out the front but they’ve been lowered and the sheep have cropped the leaves to dirt level.

Before I can answer, a haggard-looking woman comes up to him, carrying a baby on her back and hugging a toddler to her skirts.

“They said you’re that magic fairy doctor, called Miach,” she calls out. Two old men with leashed dogs at the street corner lift their wagging chins with interest, and a couple of lads using a smashed shopping trolley for transport wheel it over so they can listen.

“That is my name,” Miach says, holding out his hand for her to shake, but she doesn’t take it.

“You can cure cancer. I’ll take you to the hospital, so. My husband’s there.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t cure him.”

“His powers don’t work here,” I say scornfully, wishing the growing crowd would get out of my way. I’m hungry and it’s a fair walk home. “He can’t cure anyone. Not in this world.”

“There were herbs in the oak woodland that could have cured your husband, if he had stirred himself to defend it,” Miach tells the haggard-looking woman. “Goats and sheep have eaten them by now.”

Stunned silence from all onlookers meets this pronouncement. I’m the first to recover.

“You could have said so, at the lock-in,” I tell him, getting jostled from behind by a carpenter with hammers hanging from his belt. “You could have stopped it before it happened.”

“I did say so,” Miach answers calmly, giving a slight shrug of his bulky shoulders. “The organizers said all aos sí were liars and I wouldn’t be believed, that I was best to sit down with the rest and keep that mythical shite to myself.”

“What’s going on here?” demands the mean, freckly Garda sergeant from the doorway behind us. “Called a press conference, have we? Move along, all of you, and your godforsaken fairy, too.”

“Which herbs?” the haggard woman asks shrilly.

“You couldn’t have picked them anyway,” Miach says. “They were rare. Protected by law. My sister planted them with her tears when she wept over my dead body.”

“I’ve never seen the likes of you cry,” she accuses. Both the baby on her back and the toddler at her feet begin bawling, perhaps in uncanny sympathy, perhaps from hunger.

“Let’s make him cry,” the carpenter suggests.

“Let’s make him a dead body that stays dead,” somebody else agrees.

And then they’ve got hold of the steel shopping trolley and knocked the aos sí down with it. They turn it over, onto him, and throw their bodies on top so that Miach makes a sizzling sound like wet batter in a grill.

I don’t want to care, I’m as angry as they are, but I find myself trying to get hold of the trolley, to pull it off him.

“Are you mad?” I scream. “You can’t do this!” I glance back towards the Garda station. “They’re killing him!”

The Garda sergeant watches, unblinking, with folded arms, as the carpenter joins in with swinging hammers. When I go to grab his arm, to stop the blow from descending, I’m cracked in the head with a flying elbow for my trouble.

When I wake up, the haggard woman cradles my head, resentment in her eyes. I’m in the spot where I fell, in front of the station, but the crowd is gone. There’s no sign of the woman’s two children.

Greenish blood dries on the pavement where Miach’s body lay.

“Where is he?” I ask thickly.

“In a hospital bed beside my husband, no doubt,” the haggard woman says, “and that’s more than he deserves. You were in the cells with him. You talked to him. Did he mention the names of those healing herbs?”

“You didn’t beat it out of him, so?” I laugh harshly. A migraine springs into existence like a rainbow.

She shakes her head.

“He never made a sound,” she says distantly. “They’re not human. They don’t feel pain. Not like us.”

Evidence that the aos sí feel pain:

1. Aversion. Why would Miach have scrambled away from those prison bars if they didn’t cause pain? Why bring titanium handcuffs to the lock-in and take such care not to touch the gate? Why leave the land of youth for good, if not for his aversion to being chopped in half?

2. Sequence of events. First the sparks from the saw touched him. Then he pissed his pants. It wasn’t dignified. It wasn’t a good look, for a so-called superior immortal.

3. Physical damage. When I see him again, I see that the mob didn’t stop until his back, his belly and his long limbs were burned, cracked, and bleeding green aos sí blood. Somehow, he’d managed to protect his head. The hospital staff haven’t the burn dressings to spare for him. His skin weeps, and sticks to the sheets, and when they turn him it tears the healing growth away.

It’s the middle of the night.

I’m busy with the mop in Miach’s ward.

I think he’s sleeping but he beckons to me from his bed.

At first, I think I’ll pretend not to have seen him, but I find myself going to his right side, where the ear is that he can still hear with, and the eye is that he can still see with. Even weak and humiliated, he’s still beautiful, I suppose; I can’t see it any more. After Cian, I trained myself, through years of self-loathing self-talk, to feel nothing when I look at faces like Miach’s. At bodies like his. At the female versions of bodies like his.

“What is it, so?” I hiss.

“The island of learning.” He lifts one trembling hand to point at the wall, as if it had a window. His arm’s cross-hatched by scars left behind by the shopping trolley. “Sheep can’t get to the island in the lough. Alder against drowning, rowan against fire. Dandelion to call spirits, hawthorn to call salmon. Apple for long life, holly for luck.”

The water level of the lake is down since the earthquake. There is no more island. There’s no place the sheep can’t get to. It’s all connected.

I don’t know why I don’t tell him.

“Why didn’t you tell that woman with the sick husband about the herbs on the island? Wouldn’t they have cured him?”

“They didn’t believe in me, or they could not have harmed me,” he says in a weak and distant whisper. “They didn’t believe in the woodland, or they could not have allowed it to be harmed. If you can’t love a thing for its own sake, the love you profess for it in your time of need is false love. Whatever is inside the wall could not have cured him.”

“You’re not making any sense, Miach.”

“Please,” he begs. “Please find them. Fetch them for me. Killarney fern to purge the blood of iron. Kerry violet for driving out infection. Strawberry tree to sweeten dreams.”

“How can your blood have no iron?”

“Have you less pity than I do? Are you less human than I am?”

“I don’t have to help you.” I lean on my mop, shaking with anger. “I don’t want to help you. Twice, I’ve fallen under the spells of aos sí and been the worse for it. If I haven’t learned by now, what use am I?”

“I don’t know,” he sighs, his hand settling back against the white sheet. “I’ve stopped asking mortals for their names. Even if I did know them, your natures aren’t in your names, and sometimes even when they seem to be, those names are lies. Where is the power that prevents the bestowing of ill-suited names? How can you function in a world where true selves are unapparent? How could you not have known Cian’s nature by his black name? Any aos sí could have told you not to let him roam free.”

Fae facts that I thought were probably shite but which turned out to be true:

1. They do stay young forever.

2. They can be killed by steel.

3. Their blood is green.

4. They are slaves to their names.

5. They can be weakened by professions of disbelief.

My shift finishes at 2AM.

It takes me an hour to tromp the long way through the town and down to the side of the lake. There, the footprints of my wellies in the muck look like Armstrong’s on the moon. Stark where it sticks up from the shallows, lit by sleek LED arrays, is a reflective warning sign advising that levels of volatile organic compounds in Lough Leane exceed 250ppm.

With a little skull and crossbones underneath in case you’re not really sure what that means.

There are no other human footprints beside mine. Ducks and dogs, it seems, have taken their chances. Swimming the lake to get to the unguarded back gate of the woodland is possibly a suicide mission, but there are too many guards and dogs near the main gate, so what choice do I have?

I can’t just be letting him die.

I mean, I can.

He was after all, letting me Mam die, when he could’ve come rolling in with his fancy herb lore, with her being a defender of the woodland and all.

But I don’t want to be who I’ve been, lately. I want to be the me that Mam would recognize, if her spirit was to emerge from the waters of the lake on a white horse with the fairy host flying along behind her.

I want to be the me who picked pimply red fruit off the wild strawberry trees, and asked Mam if I could eat some, and she said their name in Latin was something like eat one, only. I tried one and I spat it out. Those Latin lads were right, after all.

I forgot to ask Miach which part of the strawberry tree he needed when he was making his little shopping list.

Never mind.

The water’s cold, even with all my clothes on. Should have taken them off. They weigh me down as I start to swim.

It’s summer, so the cold isn’t a killing cold, but the tingle in my fingertips and toes that turns to numbness might be the sign of another kind of killing. There’s a wooden paling fence keeping the sheep well back from the lake and I wake the clustered, woolly shapes when I climb it, shivering in my wet things.

I left my wellies standing by themselves on the opposite side of the water, next to the sign. When I look back and see them, I stifle a giggle; it looks like my body’s dematerialized just by looking at the lake.

Then I’m squelching in soggy socks along sheep trails, into the woods. Into the tangled embrace of oak and yew. Up hills and down gullies to places where fern-lined waterfalls no longer fall. Moonlight shows the bare, dry rocks.

I put some dead brown sticks that used to be ferns into my wet pocket, hoping some of the dried-out spores have survived. The bogs, when I come to them, are also dried up and dead, with no sign of Kerry violets.

The best I can do is fill my other pocket with the serrated-edged leaves and prickly, unripe fruit of a few stunted-looking strawberry trees.

Then I’m dizzy. I stop to vomit.

I shouldn’t have gone into the lake.

As the rising sun’s touch sets the innocent-looking waters a-sparkle, I stagger out the main gates of the woodland. The ringing in my ears almost drowns out the sound of the dogs barking. The security guards are too afraid to be touching me.

I wonder if I’m going back to prison to die.

When I wake up in the white-walled hospital ward, still quivering, hard, like the dogs have me in their teeth and won’t stop shaking, I sense vaguely that I’m in the bed beside Miach and that he’s got visitors.

Visitors? They must be aos sí.

My vision’s blurry.

I don’t want to turn my head too fast, but I soon realize Miach’s visitors are human, not aos sí. They’ve brought him flowers. Lots of flowers. They’re not the only ones who have; the head of his bed is surrounded by a sea of carnations and gladioli, tulips and lilies; in short, every kind but the kind that can actually help him. Where is my jacket with the woodland harvest in its pockets? I pat myself down jerkily, only to find I’m naked beneath the hospital gown.

Miach’s visitors bend solicitously over him.

“I don’t believe in you,” the man whispers gently. He stands back to make room for the woman, who also murmurs in Miach’s right ear,

“I don’t believe in you.”

Miach’s face leaps into focus under the fluorescent lights of the ward. In the time I’ve been away, no more than a night and day, the stunning symmetry of his face has been destroyed. On the side where he can hear and see them, his smooth skin’s spotted and withered. Half his head of gleaming yellow hair’s turned brittle and white. His right eye all sunken and pouched.

As if he wasn’t sick enough, they are killing the side of him that can understand them. Only the brain-dividing injury done to him by the winner of the All-Ireland Worst Father Prize is keeping him from shriveling up altogether.

“You,” I cry, waving my spasming hands at the visitors. “You leave him be!”

I throw myself out of bed. Drip lines come loose from my arms in a red spray of blood. The visitors make a hasty retreat, leaving the flowers behind. Pulling myself upright on the plastic safety bars of his bed, I meet Miach’s exhausted, empty-seeming gaze.

“We’re going to my house,” I tell him. “It’s about two miles from here but it’s safer there. We might have to lean on each other. Get your immortal arse out of that bed.”

We don’t go through the public access ways. I take him down the cleaning corridors. He’s a bit useless for me to lean on, seeing as he’s so weak himself, so I procure us a pair of wooden-handled mops and we lean on them as we sneak past the medical waste storage building, under a hedge and across an abandoned, contaminated lot. The sun warms my face but the breeze bites my bum through the open back of the gown.

“Not far,” I croak. “Turn left.”

There it is, over a low brick wall and across a smattering of weeds and uneven pavers. Mossy, shingled awnings. Thin chimneys adorned by the skeletons of dead communication aerials. Cracked plastic downpipes. By the front door is Mam’s terrifying terracotta rabbit with ivy growing out its eyes.

I don’t even glance up at the second story with the tacked-on external staircase that’s nothing to do with me anymore. Nothing to do with my half home. Only, the two upstairs children, wide-eyed girls with black ponytails and gold stud earrings, are wrestling something up the staircase. They’re grubby, like they’ve been under the house; their tracksuits are covered in dirt and cobwebs.

The thing they’re carrying is an enormous, thin, shallow, stainless steel bowl. It must be a meter across. Miach goes very still at the sight of it.

“What you got there?” I call out to them.

“Our Mam’s salad bowl,” the slightly larger child calls back.

“What you been doing with it?”

“Making salad.”

I’m not as green as I am cabbage.

“Tell me what you’ve really been doing or I’ll get you while you’re sleeping.”

The larger child’s shoulders stiffen.

“We was using it to cover the well,” she answers reluctantly. “On account of the whispering woman. Hanan don’t like to listen to her when we’re playing mole hospital.”

“What whispering woman?” I demand to know. I’m losing my grip on the mop. I need to lie down. This whole conversation is exhausting and I’m dying. I don’t have time. “What well?”

“The well under the house what’s got the whispering woman inside. She’s warning her brother to stay away. She says if he comes home, their father will chop him into pieces again,” the bigger girl says matter-of-factly, blowing her fringe out of her eyes. “My name is Shafyaa. What’s your name?”

They were using the salad bowl to cover the well.

Jaysus.

What the upstairs children’s names mean:

1. Hanan—means kind, compassionate, tender-hearted.

2. Shafyaa—means a healer, one who cures others.

The well’s full of live salmon and fallen hazelnuts.

I don’t know how either of those things are possible, but I see them in the light filtering through the smashed windows of the sunroom.

“Don’t touch it with your hands,” Miach instructs. Instead, he dips into it with a wooden bowl and pours the water over my head. I get the same cold shock from it as I got from the lake water, but at the same time it feels like my heart is zipping up in my chest, recovering from a sword-blow I never knew was there.

We kneel in the dirt by the stone rim in the jaggedly dangerous circle of ripped-up floorboards we made. Miach pours a bowl of water over himself, next. I expect the aged, ruined half of his face to heal, but it stays the same.

Only the grill scars from the shopping trolley and the wounds left by the hammer wash instantly away.

He looks at his reflection in the water. I look at it, too, and receive a second shock when I realize that his face, even better than the face of a person I could fuck, is the face of a person I could learn to like. Maybe even to trust.

“I can’t go through,” he says. “My father’s still waiting on the other side.”

“You’d better stay here,” I agree. “A face like that belongs in the house of half mirrors.”

Evidence I’m actually mostly Mam (my better half):

1. I stopped stealing from the mother upstairs. I even told her about it and apologized. She said she knew what I was doing but was too afraid of me to complain. I was the kind of person who smashed windows and mirrors. The kind of person who stole from the upstairs neighbors.

I am not that kind of person any more. It helps that I like eating salmon.

2. That upstairs lady makes a mean salad.

3. Miach poured a bowl of water over each of my hazel-tree skeletons. They came back to life. Apparently they were always still alive in the land of youth. I’m not sure if I believe that.

But I believe Mam loved me while she was alive. A woman like that doesn’t love people for no reason. So there must be something in me worth loving.

4. Nobody dies of cancer in our hospital anymore. I’d fix it so everyone got a share of our well-water but I don’t have time, except to spike the hospital supply. I’m not Santy, to get around to every house, though I’d appreciate a few of Santy’s mince pies and glasses of Guinness.

The word is spreading. They even suspect it might be something in the water.

Every now and again, one of the ninety-nine will turn up on our doorstep in the middle of the night while I’m away sprinkling the good stuff in the hospital cistern. Miach helps them get to where they’re going, if their aim is to go back. Sometimes they just want to drink from the wooden bowl or to eat one of the salmon.

5. Miach doesn’t want to fuck me and it’s OK. I noticed after a few months that the mirror-halves in the house seemed to be finding one another and joining back up into wholes. Even the wardrobe mirror. Even the sunglasses.

Of course they would do that, I told Mam’s memory while I flooded the roots of her hazel trees with sacred well-water. There’s an aos sí healer in the house.

Miach said it was nothing to do with him, and nothing to do with uncovering the well, either.

When you focus on the good things, even though the world is full of shite, you spiral up, up, up above the madness, into the light, where new hazel branches reach for the sun and the upstairs shitehawks shouting about the clouds being shaped like moles or salmon are so loud that you can’t hear the warning whispers from the well.

About the Author

Thoraiya Dyer is an Aurealis and Ditmar Award-winning, Sydney-based science fiction writer and lapsed veterinarian. Besides the most excellent Clarkesworld, her work has appeared in Apex, Cosmos, Analog, and various US/Australian anthologies. Four of her original stories are collected in Asymmetry, available from Twelfth Planet Press. Her first novel, Crossroads of Canopy, a big fat fantasy set in a magical rainforest, is due from Tor in January 2017; you can listen to a short story set in the same world, “The Chimney-Borer and the Tanner,” at Podcastle.org and/or follow her @ThoraiyaDyer on Twitter.

The Dark City Luminous

Tom Crosshill

Back when I was free to choose, I would sometimes disable my lenses and go out at night into the dark city luminous.

I had been the one who gave Riga this title in the heady days of the unlit revolution, when we led the world into a new dark age which would save the planet. Yet sometimes I blinded myself to the shining wonder we darkitects had created—the dazzling skins, the well-lit spaces projected directly onto my cornea by my own Apollo, my god of light and wonder, my seventy euros’ worth of silicon and plastic and gold. Like a prophetess turned apostate I cast aside my night vision and ventured unseeing into the shadowed streets.

It was slow going even on moonlit nights. Carefully I ambled along familiar sidewalks, listening for footsteps, a car, the bark of a dog. On more than one occasion I twisted my ankle in a pothole which my sensors would have detected and my lenses would have lit up bright. Yet for this paltry price I saw my city as it had never been seen in the nine centuries of its history.

Unlit.

The great black hulk of the Dom cathedral—where I’d worshipped for twenty years—an unfamiliar giant standing guard over a ragged skyline I barely recognized.

The Vilnius express on the rail bridge—which I’d ridden to university every day—a serpent slithering across a Daugava silvery in moonlight.

Kipsala’s skyscrapers—a mausoleum of office space where I too had once toiled—a dark forest of accusatory fingers pointed at the sky.

At times I felt unwelcome in this shadowed city. Yet then I came to the gray concrete boxes of a hundred new schools, churches, malls and theaters. Riga’s darkitects had clad them in wondrous illusions. I’d skinned many myself, some in spires and towers and lions and sphinxes, others in steel and glass.

I saw none of that. Only vague dark forms which held the promise of a blank canvas.

The pedestrians I passed were a parade of shadows, except for their eyes. Firefly eyes—bright-glowing lenses bobbing in the night, flickering with every eyeblink.

When I beheld their glow, I knew that there existed in the darkness—waiting for me—unseen spaces luminous with beauty.

I could tell from how long Marta took that the news wasn’t good.

She poured sugar into her coffee and stirred it well. She withdrew the spoon and clinked it repeatedly on the edge of her baked clay mug. Took a sip. Put the mug down. Her wrinkled fingers danced on the edge of her glass desk as if looking for papers to shuffle. A childhood friend of my mother’s, Dr. Marta Kalniete was seventy, old enough to have formed habits when paper records were still a thing.

When she spoke, the words came in a rush. “Sandra, I’m sorry—it is Morganfeld’s. But not to worry, there’s time to operate, to get out the implants. You won’t lose your vision. Your eyes will be sensitive, too sensitive for lenses, I’m afraid. But you’ll still be able to see.”

So. A few headaches, a doctor visit, and there it was. Implants and lenses gone.

No more thought-controlled interfaces. No more augmented vision. Back to the twentieth century with me.

Through the window behind Marta, I watched Strelnieku Street in the bustle of a spring morning. I’d applied the Alexander Caks skin, my magnum opus—a vision of Riga in the 1920s, when the eponymous poet had wandered these streets. Art Nouveau facades painted in subdued blues and yellows. The hip cafe across the road transformed into a Parisian bistro with white tablecloths and upholstered chairs. Cars rattled past as horse-drawn cabs—although the illusion strained when traffic moved fast.

I recalled the redshot obsession of my months working on the skin—long days at the archives, long evenings crafting textures and models, long nights tossing and turning and dreaming of a Riga that was.

Funny, to think I’d once dreamt of living in the past.

“The assisted-vision tablets are fantastic these days,” Marta said, not managing to meet my eyes. “You can get online, work, see those marvelous skins of yours.”

I wondered when Marta had last looked out her window without the benefit of darkitecture. Did she know how the paint peeled on those few remaining Art Noveau facades? Did she know how many were now gray boxes instead? When had she last seen a world without color?

“You’ll never run out of clients,” Marta said. “I mean, with your reputation . . . ”

Outside, people passed by on their morning errands. They wore their broadcast skins—business suits, jeans and a tee, a rococo wedding cake dress. I didn’t like to overrule their broadcasts, not even for stylistic consistency. Robbing people of self-expression, seeing them only as you wished to see them . . . you might as well live alone in your own head.

“Who do you think designs for tablets these days?” I asked. “Some willing-but-under-resourced programmer at the cheapest contractor, hired as an afterthought to comply with accessibility legislation?”

“I know it’s hard.” Marta’s voice was gentle. “We’ll support you. Everything will be fine.”

Viss būs labi. That perennial Latvian refrain. Everything will be fine, even if little in centuries of blood-stained history substantiated that belief.

“We should operate soon,” Marta said, as if we were both going to hold the scalpel. “Sometime in the next week, ideally.”

“I’m not sure I want that.”

Marta couldn’t hide her wince. “If you leave the implants in, there’s a seventy percent chance you’ll be blind within six months.”

“And a thirty percent chance I’ll be fine.”

“Would you bet everything on a thirty percent chance?”

What was this ‘everything’ that I would be betting? A life where backup streetlights flared everywhere I went, lighting up for an audience of one? The lenses of passers-by would flare momentarily before their sensors could adjust. An announcement to everyone that I—Sandra Ivanova, famous darkitect—no longer inhabited my own creations.

Or would I shamble around in the shadows, too proud to reveal my exile? Alone in the dark amidst a multitude bathed in lights fantastic?

I rose and smoothed the folds of my dress. “Thank you, Marta. I will consider your advice.”

“If we put out a skin that’s transparently commercial,” I said, “if the most interesting, colorful thing on the street is your restaurant, no one’s going to download it. It won’t rank in the top hundred, let alone the top ten. I suggest we do something more subtle, direct the customer’s eye—”

“That’s a very good point,” said the client guy. “That said, I’d still prefer to go with my color scheme.”

He was a thirty-something manager of a fast food chain who wore an unskinned pin-striped suit and had insisted on meeting in person. I’d rented a room at one of the shared workspaces on Raina Boulevard as I did when forced to.

I had a headache right behind my eyes, probably the Morgenfeld’s. Or maybe it was just that the walls seemed suffocating about me, even skinned in pastel tones and pastoral landscapes. As if I could sense the indifferent gray lurking below the surface.

“Don’t you think we should strive to create beauty in the world?” I asked. “To the extent that we can, shouldn’t we avoid creating garbage?”

The client guy stared at me.

“People use skins to escape ugliness,” I said. “Why would they choose to have it shoved in their faces?”

Having lost the client, I had the evening free so I went on a date. Logged onto ReLeNet, queried for a minimum 80% match, specified the Melnsila Cafe as the meeting place.

Within an hour I had an offer; within two I sipped peppermint tea at a cast-iron table that had once served as the base of a sewing machine. The cafe was a retro, no-default-skin establishment—exposed brick walls, scuffed wooden floors, nonfunctional iron radiators, all of it real. Customers too were requested to keep outlandish skins to a minimum.

Once I would have scoffed. Now I wondered if soon I’d be scouring the city for holdouts like this.

My date, Daniel, had chosen not to broadcast a skin. Fifty, good-looking in a balding professor kind of way, he wore a tweed suit and a checkered dress shirt. I knew immediately that it wouldn’t work out. Maybe it was the look or the uncertain way he smiled, or his citrus fruit cologne—it was an intuitive feeling, one that all of ReLeNet’s questionnaires and statistics couldn’t compensate for.

“So, umm, when I joined the Salaspils Fusor project, I thought I was helping save the planet,” Daniel told me. “Free energy for everybody. Twenty years later we’re online, and guess what, free energy isn’t so great when you’ve got a depreciating thirty billion euro power plant to pay down. Uhh, so, you darkitects did more for the planet than we physicists ever have.”

“Better fusion than coal.” I was determined to be pleasant to at least somebody this day. “We still need energy, even if we don’t light up our cities at night.”

“Makes me wish I’d stayed in theory,” Daniel said. “The things they’re doing with amplituhedrons these days . . . you know about amplituhedrons?”

Sometimes I wished I could skin people—their characters, their brains, their voices.

Their conversational skills.

“Amplituhedrons, they’re, like, these crystals of reality . . . ” Daniel said. “It turns out nature, quantum mechanics, particle interactions, the whole messy bag, it’s geometrical. Everything that happens, all of reality, it’s controlled by these many-dimensional geometrical structures. If you could see them . . . if you could really visualize them, see the geometry of all possible universes . . . you would be like God. We move through life without ever glimpsing the complex structures that govern the world. All these infinities unseen to the eye.”

For the first time this evening, I sat forward. “Does it keep you up at night? Knowing there’s all this structure around you that you can’t see?”

“No.” Daniel gave me a shy smile. “It’s what helps me get up in the morning.”

In the end I helped Daniel get up the next morning, when I had to leave for a meeting in Riga’s Jurmala district. Last night’s conversation had spurred me to investigate if he too contained infinities unseen to the eye. I hadn’t discovered any.

“Will we see each other again?” he asked as I packed him out the door. Around his balding pate, spare wisps of gray hair poked up in disarray—but then that wasn’t fair; he’d forgotten to enable digital makeup after our no-skin date.

“Turn on the Fairyland Skin as you walk across the Akmens Bridge,” I told him. “You’ll see my true self in stone and glass and steel.”

For the first time across the many years I’d used the line, I wasn’t sure I believed it.

The Jurmala train was its usual disconcerting experience. My daily skin clad trains as Orient Express engines—black iron, puffs of steam, choo-choo sound effects. It was strange to sit among wood-paneled opulence as we rode along in maglev smoothness. The cookie-cutter sprawl of Riga’s suburbs flew past outside.

I met Dad on the beach. We strolled just beyond the reach of the surf while gusts of cool wind tugged at our light jackets. The salty tang of the sea sent me back to a dozen such walks, a hundred, in the years of my childhood.

Jurmala had been a city in its own right back then. I’d had no idea I would come to call Riga my home, my canvas, my muse.

Out over the water along the horizon, the countless blades of the Baltic Windfarm spun in lazy harmony.

I could tell by the tightness of Dad’s bony shoulders that he was struggling with words. I feared what they might be.

I thought of his small flat in our Soviet-era apartment building on Vike-Freiberga Street—insulated walls, solar cell windows, smart-sort garbage chute. For long decades Dad had been an economizer with Riga city hall, paid a commission on energy savings he found for the municipality. How thrilled he had been, to have in his daughter a leader of the unlit revolution . . .

“I’ll still be able to work,” I said at last. My voice sounded a fifty year old child’s, thin and plaintive. “Marta says-”

“I’ve been thinking lately,” Dad cut in as if I hadn’t spoken. That habit had always infuriated me, but this once it was a relief. “I spent all my life saving energy. A joule here. A kilowatt-hour there. It seemed to me energy was the only real currency in this universe.” He looked at me, his small dark eyes like black stones in a wrinkled fabric. “Too late, I discovered there were others.”

In her last year of life, when I was twenty, Mom shared a secret with me. She led me into the bathroom and latched the door even though Dad wasn’t at home. Then she pulled an incandescent light bulb from a locked drawer under the sink and plugged it in. We turned off our lenses and spent a good five minutes basking in its glow—warm and golden and decadent.

“Wasn’t it all worth it?” I asked Dad now. “We saved this planet, one joule at a time.”

Wasn’t it all worth it? The dark cities? The peeling paint? The architecture of gray boxes?

The wind gusted, sudden and harsh. Up ahead a little boy had kicked his ball into the air. The gust carried it far into the cold water. He stood by the surf and cried as the ball bobbed up and down on the waves. His tears did nothing to bring it back.

“I wanted to meet here for a reason,” Dad said.

A package popped up on my viewport. A skin. I loaded it.

At first, I couldn’t see anything different. Then color caught my eye, near the horizon. The Baltic Windfarm. Instead of the tall, ungainly metal windmills, a forest of golden-brown gingerbread sticks poked out of the water. The windmill blades had become red-and-white candy cones turning languidly in the breeze.

My voice came out hushed. “You remember.”

Dad smiled. “I’d never felt so proud in my life.”

I’d won a high school design contest with that skin. It had been in the days of the great NIMBY debates—sure, we need to save the planet, but not in my back yard. Jurmala’s citizens had resented the eyesore of the Windmill, yet even I had been surprised at how many adopted my skin for daily use. This had been long before everyone and their grandma skinned their world as a matter of course.

“I can’t . . . all this . . . ” I gestured helplessly. “If I let Marta do the operation, I might never create again.”

“You have touched the world, Sandra,” Dad said. “Whatever you decide to do, you won’t lose that.”

“What is lighter than a darkitect’s touch?” I mused. “Now glimpsed by a willing eye, now gone without a trace . . . ”

“I didn’t mean-” Dad began.

This time it was I who cut in. “No, no. It’s all right, Dad. The world would be a better place if we didn’t feel the need to leave marks of our passage on its face.”

That evening, I walked the streets of my city.

With Ray Charles as my soundtrack, I let my feet carry me where they would. Along the grand boulevards of downtown I strolled, and down narrow alleys where my ambling footsteps resounded like the heartbeats of a lonely man—now pausing as I took in some unnoticed detail, some comice or frieze, now starting again. Across parks and parking lots I found my way.

I tried every skin in the top ten and many more, my favorites, others that I’d never heard of. Saw Daugava as a river of molten gold, the Helsinki ferry a white-sailed galleon leaving harbor. Saw the old TV Tower transformed into glowering Barad-dûr and Grizinkalns into a miniature Shire. Drank in an Old Riga clad in Soviet dreariness and a space age Agenskalns in gleaming chrome.

At last my eyes tired and my head began to ache, and I seemed to myself a stranger in this city of marvels. Then I disabled my lenses and stood bathed in darkness. I felt like a traveler returned from a long journey.

The blocky shadows of Soviet-era apartment buildings surrounded me. Ugly gray boxes from an era which had had no excuse. Somebody had tagged a nearby wall in luminescent graffiti, ragged letters glowing blue—I MISS YOU, ALINA.

A doomed message for all its luminescence. It had probably already been reported and a digital mask pushed out via municipal update. Alina would likely never see it.

But I did.

It was part of my city.

Up ahead, two golden fireflies lit up side by side. Someone was coming my way, lenses bright. A young girl’s slight figure, I thought.

I wondered if she moved through visions of my creation. I wondered if she liked the unlit world we had bequeathed to her. Did she ever think about it? Did she consider what it meant—to walk through unseen spaces luminous with beauty?

Because we all did. We inhabited invisible structures we could not know—not all of them, not fully. Nine billion people living in nine billion parallel universes, all of which impinged on each other, none of which we could truly share.

Maybe it had never been otherwise.

As the girl drew near, I wanted to rush at her and shake her, to force our realities to collide. Instead I watched her pass by without any indication that she’d noticed me. As if her skin had a filter for lost middle-aged women.

Then I turned on my lenses’ damage beacon and walked home through my city, illuminated by streetlights which glowed for an audience of one.

First published in The Baltic Atlas (Sternberg Press), for the exhibition of the Baltic States Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016.

About the Author

Tom Crosshill’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award, and has appeared in venues such as Intergalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed. In 2009, he won the Writers of the Future contest. After many years spent in Oregon and New York, he currently lives in his native Latvia. He’s a satellite member of the writers’ group Altered Fluid. In the past, he has operated a nuclear reactor, translated books and worked in a zinc mine, among other things.

No Placeholder for You My Love

Nick Wolven

1

Claire met him at a dinner party in New Orleans, and afterward, she had to remind herself this was true. Yes, that had been it, his very first appearance. It seemed incredible there had been anything so finite as a first time.

He was seated across from her, two chairs down, a gorgeous woman on either side. As usual, the subject had turned to food.

“But I’ve been to this house a dozen times,” one of the gorgeous women was saying. “I’ve been to dinner parties, dance parties, even family parties. And every time, they serve the wrong kind of cuisine.”

She had red hair, the color of the candlelight reflected off the varnished chairs. The house was an old house, full of old things, handmade textiles and walnut chiffoniers, oil paintings of nameless Civil War colonels.

“Is that a problem?” said the young man on Claire’s left. “Why should you care?”

“Because,” said the redhead, pursing her lips. “Meringue pie, at an elegant soiree? Wine and steak tartar, at a child’s birthday party? Lobster bisque at a dance? For God’s sake, it was all over the floor. It seems, I don’t know. Lazy. Thoughtless. Cobbled together.”

She lifted her glass of wine to her mouth, and the liquid vanished the instant it touched her tongue.

The man who was to mean so much to Claire, to embody in his person so much hope and loss, leaned over his soup, eyes dark with amusement. “It is cobbled together. Of course it is. But isn’t that the best part?”

“And why is that, Byron?” someone said with a sigh.

Byron. A fake name, Claire assumed, distilled from the fog of some half-remembered youthful interest. But then, you never knew.

Whatever the source of his name, Byron’s face had the handsome roughness earned through active living. Dots of stubble grayed his skin. A tiny scar divided one eyebrow. His smile made a charming pattern of wrinkles around his eyes. It was a candid face, a well-architected face, a forty-something face.

“Because,” said Byron, and caught Claire’s eye, as if only she would understand. “Look at this furniture, the chandelier. Look at that music stand in the corner. American plantation style, rococo, Art Nouveau. Every piece a different movement. Some are complete anachronisms. That’s why I love this house. You can see the spirit of the designers, here. A kind of whimsy. It’s so personal, so scattershot.”

“You’re such a talker, Byron,” someone sighed.

“Look at all of you,” Byron said, moving his spoon in a circle to encompass the ring of faces. “Some of you I’ve never seen before in my life. And here we are, brought together by chance, for one evening only. You know what? That delights me. That thrills me.” His gesture halted at Claire’s face. “That enchants me.”

“And after tonight,” said the redhead, “we’ll go our separate ways, and forget each other, and maybe never see each other again. So is that part of the wonder, for you, Byron, or does that spoil the wonder?”

“It does neither,” Byron said, “because I don’t believe it.”

His eyes settled on Claire’s. Again, he smiled. She had always liked older men, their slightly chastened air, their solemn and good-humored strength.

“I don’t believe we’ll never see each other again,” Byron said, looking at his spoon. “I don’t believe that’s necessarily our fate. And you know what? The truth is, I wouldn’t mind living in this house forever. Even if they do serve alphabet soup at a dinner party.”

He lifted his hand to his mouth and touched his spoon to his lips. And instantly, the liquid disappeared.

When they had cleared the table, the entertainments began. There were board games in the living room, a live band on the lawn. Stairs led to a dozen shadowy bedrooms, with sad old beds, and rich old carpets, and orchids in baskets on the moonlit windowsills. In town, the music of riverbank revelry scraped and jittered out of ramshackle bars, and paddleboats rode on the slow Mississippi, jingling with the racket of riches won and lost.

Byron borrowed a set of car keys from the houseboy. Claire followed him onto the porch. The breath of the bayou was in the air, warm and buoyant, holding up the clustered leaves of the pecan trees and the high, star-scattered sky. Sweat held her shirt to the small of her back, as if a hand were there, pressing her forward.

“Shall we take a ride?” The car keys dangled, tinkling, from Byron’s upraised hand.

“Wait,” said Claire, “do that again.”

“This?” He gave the keys another shake. The sound tinkled out, a sprinkling of noise, over the thick green nap of the lawn.

“It sounds just like it,” Claire said. “Don’t you hear it? It sounds just like the midnight chime.”

“Oh, God, don’t talk about that now. It’s not for hours.” Byron went halfway down the porch steps, held out a hand. “We still have plenty of time to fall in love.”

The car waiting for them was an early roadster, dazzling with chrome, large and slow. Byron handled the old-fashioned shift with expert nonchalance. They slid past banquet halls downtown, where drunkenness and merriment and red, frantic faces sang and sweated along the laden tables. Often, they pulled to the curb and idled, and the night with its load of romance rolled by.

At a corner café where zydeco livened the air, a young couple argued at a scrollwork table.

“But how can you define it? How can you even describe it?” The woman’s arm swung as she spoke, agitating the streetlights with a quiver of silver bracelets.

“Well, it’s easy enough to define, anyway.” The man made professorial motions with his hands. “It was simply a matter of chemistry.”

“But how would that be any different from, say, smell?”

“Oh, it wasn’t, not really. Taste and smell. Love and desire. All variations on the same experience.”

The couple lifted fried shrimp from a basket as they spoke, the small golden morsels vanishing like fireflies on their lips.

“It can’t be so simple,” the woman said. And the man leaned over the table, reaching for her face, and turned it toward his lips. “You’re right. It’s not.”

“I used to have those kinds of conversations,” Byron sighed. He grasped the old maple knob of the shift, and pulled away from the curb.

They drove out of town onto rural dirt roads, where moonlight splashed across the land. In a plank roadhouse, a dance party was underway, a fiddle keening over stamping feet. Parked in the dirt lot, soaked in yellow light, they conducted the usual conversation.

“Now, me?” Byron said. “Let me tell you about myself. I’m a middle-aged computer programmer who enjoys snuggling, whiskey, and the study of artificial environments. I have a deathly aversion to crowds, and I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m nowhere near as handsome as this in real life, and I can assure you, I’ve been at this game a very long time.”

His face dimpled as he delivered his spiel, not quite smiling. Claire laughed at his directness. Byron thumped a short drumroll on the wheel.

“And you?”

“Oh, me?” Claire said. “Me? I’m no one.”

“That’s an interesting theory.”

“What I mean is, I’m no one anyone should care about. I don’t even care about me.”

“That can’t be true.”

“I guess not. I guess what I mean is, I don’t care who I used to be.” Claire watched the figures dance in the building, the plank walls trembling as shadows moved like living drawings across the dirty windows. “I care what happens to me now, though. I care about nights like this.”

Her lazy hand took in the dancers, the stars. Byron sat back, nodding.

Claire surrendered. “I don’t know. There’s an interesting woman back there, somewhere. A scholar, a geneticist. But it’s hard to believe, nowadays, that she ever existed.”

“Tell me about this geneticist,” he said.

“Well.” Claire afforded him a smile. “What do you want to know? She looked like me. She talked like me. She loved all the things I love. She loved rainy windows and Scrabble and strong tea. She loved her body, because she had a nice one, and she loved to take long baths with organic soap, and she loved the idea that one day, far in her future, there might be someone to share those baths with her. Mostly, I think, she loved the idea that she could find a man who didn’t care about any of those things. A man who would simply take her hand and say, ‘Let’s go.’”

The fiddle stopped. The dancers halted. The shadows on the windows settled into perfect sketches: honey-colored men and women with open, panting lips.

“She was young,” Claire said. “And she was lonely.”

Byron nodded. “I understand.”

Someone threw open the roadhouse door. A carpet of gold rolled down the steps, all the way up the hood into the car, covering Claire in mellow light. Byron studied her. She knew what he was seeing. A beautiful blonde, a perfect face, a statue of a body with cartoon-sized eyes.

“But you’re not,” he said. And after a moment, he clarified: “Young. Not anymore. Are you?”

“No,” said Claire. “Not anymore.”

They drove to town along a different route, on dark, swampy roads where alligators slithered, grunting, from the wheels. On a wharf lined with couples and fishing shops, they stood at the wood rail, looking over the water, waiting together for the midnight chime. A gas-powered ferry struggled from shore, heading northeast toward a sprawl of dark land.

“I don’t care,” Byron said. “I don’t care if you were a biologist. I don’t care if you love Scrabble or tea. I don’t care about any of that.” He held out a hand. “Let’s go.”

The couples on the wharf had fallen silent, waiting. The very twinkling of the stars seemed to pause. Still, the ferry strained and chugged, heading for a shore it would never reach.

“Say it,” Claire said. “You say it first, then I’ll say it, too.”

“I want to see you again,” Byron said.

She took his hand. Before she could respond, the midnight chime sounded. It came three times, eerie and clear, like a jingle of celestial keys. And Byron and the river and the world all disappeared.

2

Claire didn’t see him again for a thousand nights.

It felt like a thousand, anyway. It may have been more. Claire had stopped counting long, long ago.

There were always more nights, more parties, more diversions. And, miraculous as it seemed, more people. Where did they come from? How could there be so many pretty young men, with leonine confidence and smiling lips? How could there be so many women arising out of the million chance assortments of the clubs, swimming through parties as if it could still be a thrill to have a thousand eyes fish for them—as if, like the fish in the proverbial sea, they one day hoped to be hooked?

Claire considered them, contemplated them, and let them go their way. She dated, for a time, a very old, handsome man whose name, in some remote and esoteric way, commanded powerful sources of credit. His wealth opened up new possibilities: private beaches where no one save they two had ever stepped, mountain lodges where the seasons manifested with iconic perfection, pink and green and gold and white. But they weren’t, as the language ran, “compatible”; they were old and tired in different ways.

She met a girl whose face flashed with the markings of youth: sharp earrings, studs, lipstick that blazed in toxic colors. But the girl’s eyes moved slowly, with the irony of age. Theirs was a sexual connection. Night after night, they bowed out of cocktail hours, feeling for each other’s hands across the crush of dances. Every exit was an escape. They sought the nearest private rooms they could find: the neon-bright retreats of city hotels, secret brick basements in converted factories. The thrill was one of shared expertise. Both women knew the limits of sex: what moves were possible, what borders impermeable. They cultivated the matched rhythm, the long caress. Sometimes Claire’s new lover—whose name, she learned after three anonymous encounters, was Isolde—fed delicacies to her, improbable foods, ice carvings and whole cakes, a hundred olives impaled on swizzle sticks, fruit rinds in paintbox colors, orange and lime, stolen from the bottomless bins of restaurants. It was musical sport. Isolde perfected her timing, spacing each treat. Claire eased into a languor of tension and release, her body shivering with an automatic thrill. As the foods touched her mouth, one by one, they flickered immediately into nothingness—gone the instant she felt them, like words on her tongue.

A happy time, this. But love? Every night they were careful to say that magic phrase, far in advance of the midnight chime.

“I want to see you again.”

“I want to see you, too.”

And so the nights went by, and the dates, and the parties, spiced with anticipation.

Soon, Claire knew, it was bound to happen.

The end came in Eastern Europe.

“We could have been compatible, don’t you think?”

They were reposing, at that moment, in a grand hotel with mountain views, somewhere west of the Caucasus, naked in bed while snow flicked the window. Isolde lifted a rum ball from a chased steel tray, manipulating it with silver tongs. She touched it to the candle, collected a curl of flame, brought the morsel, still burning, to her mouth, and snuffed it out of existence, fire and all, against her tongue.

Claire clasped her hands around a pillow. “Do you think so?”

Isolde seemed nervous tonight, opening and closing the tongs, pretending to measure, as with calipers, Claire’s thigh, her knee.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we are compatible. I’m only talking about, you know. What might have been.”

Beyond the window, white flakes swarmed in the sky, a portrait of aimless, random motion.

“We’re attracted to each other,” Isolde said. “We have fun. We always have fun.”

“That’s true. We always have fun.”

“Isn’t that what matters?”

“Nothing matters,” Claire said. “Not for us. Isn’t that the common consensus?” She made sure to smile as she said it, lying back with her hands behind her head.

Isolde seemed pained. “I’m only saying. If things had been different. We might have worked. We might have . . . ” She blushed before speaking the forbidden phrase. “We might have made a match.”

Claire felt her smile congealing on her face. She marveled at that—watched, in the oak-framed mirror atop the dresser, as her expression became an expression of disgust. “But things aren’t different. Wouldn’t you say that’s an important fact? Things are exactly, eternally what they are.”

“Eternally. You can’t know that.”

“I can believe it.” Claire sat up, looking out the window, where snowfall and evening had blanked out the sky. “If you want to know what might have been, just wait for the midnight chime. You’ll get a thousand might-have-beens. A thousand Romeos and Juliets. A thousand once-upon-a-times.”

Isolde was shaking, a subtle, repressed tremor that Claire only noticed by looking at the tongs in her hand.

“I know, I know. I’m only saying . . . I mean, how can you resist? How can you stop thinking about it? About us. About . . . ” Her voice dropped. “About love.”

Claire turned from the window, saying nothing, but the mood of the view filled her eyes, the gray mountains falling away into whiteness, the cold precipitation of a million aimless specks.

“I just like to imagine,” Isolde whispered. “That’s all. I like to imagine it could be different.”

A clock stood on the bedside table, scuffed wood and spotted brass, a heavy relic of interwar craftsmanship. Isolde snatched it up with a gasp.

“What’s the matter?” Claire said.

“I just realized.”

“What? What did you just realize?” In Claire’s tone was an implied criticism. What can there possibly be, she wanted to ask, for us to realize? What can we discover that we don’t already know?

Isolde touched the clock face. “We’re in a time-shifted universe. The midnight chime comes earlier, here. At sunset.”

They looked together at the window, where the sky had darkened to charcoal gray.

“We never said it,” Isolde whispered. “We forgot to say it, this time.” She lay beside Claire, a hand on her belly, saying in a shaking voice, “I want to see you again.”

The clock ticked. Snow tapped the window.

“I want to see you again,” Isolde repeated. “Claire? I want to see you again.”

The clock hands had made a line, pointing in opposite directions. How precise, Claire wondered, would the timeshift be? Sometimes these things could be surprisingly inexact. Sometimes, even the designers made mistakes.

“Claire, please say it. I’m sorry I said all those things. We’re not really a match. I was only speculating. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Does anything matter? We don’t have to talk. We can go back to how it was. We can hang out, play games, have fun.”

In only a moment, a new evening would begin: new faces, new men and women, new possibilities. A whole new universe of beautiful people, like angels falling out of the sky.

“Claire, please say it. I want to see you again.”

“Maybe you will,” Claire said.

And at that moment, the chime sounded, tinkling and omnipresent, shivering three times across the mountain sky. And Isolde and her voice and her tears disappeared.

3

A dry period, then.

Dry? No, that word couldn’t begin to describe this life. It was desert, desolate, arid, barren, with a harsh wind that cut across the eyes, with sharp-edged stones that stung the feet.

Claire became one of those people. She was the woman who haunts the edges of dance floors, rebuffing with silence anyone who dares to approach. At house parties, she wandered out for impromptu walks, seeking the hyperbolic darkness between streetlights, the lonely shadows below leylandii. At dinner parties, she made jokes intended to kill conversation.

“Knock, knock,” Claire said, when young men leaned toward her.

“Who’s there?”

“Claire.”

“Claire who?”

“Exactly.”

“Here’s a good one,” Claire said, to a woman who approached one night on a balcony, the champagne sparkles of a European city bubbling under their feet. “A woman walks into a bar full of beautiful people.”

When the silence became uncomfortable, the woman prompted: “And?”

“And,” said Claire turning away, “who cares?”

She was bitter. But she didn’t care about her bitterness. Like all things, Claire assumed, this too would pass.

On an Amazonian cruise, Claire hit her low point. It was, most surely, a romantic night. Big insects sizzled against the lamps that swung, dusky gold, from the cabin house. The river gathered white ruffles along the hull. A banquet was laid out on deck, river fish on clay platters borne by shirtless deckhands. The dinner guests lounged in a crowd of cane chairs. When Claire came up from below, she found the party talking, as always, about the food.

“I’ve been here a hundred times.” The woman who spoke was white, brunette, beautiful. “I think I’m something of an expert on this universe. And what I always admire is the attention to local cuisine. Everything comes straight from the river. It’s so authentic.”

Claire, who’d entered unnoticed, startled them all with a loud, braying laugh.

“Excuse me?” said the woman. “What do you find so funny?”

The group stared, pushing back their chairs, eyes kindled with reflected lantern light.

“This,” Claire said, and snatched a clay platter out of the hands of the servingman. “I find this funny.” She dumped the fish on the floor, jammed the platter into her mouth. They all winced as her teeth clamped down, grinding on textured ceramic. “Mm, so authentic.”

“What in the world,” said the woman, “is the matter with you?”

“Nothing. I’m simply trying to eat this platter.”

“But why?”

“Because why shouldn’t I?” Claire smashed the platter on the deck. “Why shouldn’t I be able to? What difference does it make? Why shouldn’t anything—any of this—be food?” She stomped around the deck, offering to take bites of the rails, the lamps, the life preservers. “Why shouldn’t I be able to perform the trick with anything I want? Why shouldn’t I be able to pick you up, and send you into the ether with just a touch of my tongue?”

She grabbed at the arm of a nearby man, who pushed his chair back, winking. “Please do.”

Claire threw his hand down in disgust. “I should be able to pick up anything I see, and touch it to my lips, and make it disappear. And why can’t I? It works with fish. It works with fruit. It works with soup and fried shrimp and wedding cakes.”

Expecting protest, mockery, a violent reaction, she faced with dismay the rows of indifferent, idle faces.

“God, I’m so sick of this life,” Claire finished weakly. “I’m sick of always talking about things I can never have.”

“But are you sick of me?”

Claire turned and Byron was standing behind her, leaning on the rail beside the deckhouse, a beer bottle dangling from his hand.

“You?” Claire was stunned. She could hardly believe she recognized him, but she did.

Byron strolled forward and touched her hand. “You never said it.”

“Sorry?”

“Eight hundred and ninety-two nights ago. New Orleans. I said I wanted to see you again. You never answered.”

“I meant to.” Claire struggled for breath, aware of the watching crowd. “I wanted to. I ran out of time.”

He flung his beer bottle overboard. She waited without breathing for it to plunk in the distant water.

“We have time now,” he said.

Dismissing the party with a wave, Byron guided Claire into a lifeboat. With a push of a lever, a creak of pulleys, he lowered them to the water and cut the rope. They drifted loose in darkness, a lantern at their feet. The big boat moved away on a thump of diesel, the strings of lamps and the hundred candles merging into one gold blur. Byron set the oars in the locks, rowing with a grace that seemed derived from real strength: strength of body, of muscle and sinew, strength that belonged to the kinds of people they had both once been.

“Do you know why we can’t eat food?” Byron spoke at his ease, fitting sentences between the creak of the oarlocks. “Do you know why we have no taste, no smell, no digestion? Do you know why we can never eat, and only make food vanish by touching it to our lips?”

His voice sounded elemental, coming out of the darkness: the voice of the river, the jungle, the night.

“Appetite,” Byron said. “We were made without appetite. We were made to want only one thing. True love.”

He let the oars rest. They rocked on the water. The riverboat was gone now, its voices and music lost in buggy stridor.

“I don’t believe that.” Claire let her hand trail in the water, wondering if piranhas and snakes stocked the river, if the authenticity of the environment extended that far. “I don’t believe any of this was planned. Not to that extent. I think it’s all nothing more than a sick, elaborate accident.”

He considered her words, the oars resting, crossed, in his lap. “You must believe that some of this was designed. You must remember designing it. Or designing yourself, I mean: what you look like, how you think. I’ve forgotten quite a bit, but I do remember that.”

A fish nibbled Claire’s finger. She lifted her hand, shook off the drops.

“I don’t mean the world itself,” Claire said. “I mean about what’s happened to us. The way we live. Something’s gone wrong. I don’t think it was intentional.”

Byron nodded. “Apocalypse.”

“Plague. Asteroids. Nuclear holocaust.”

“Economic collapse. Political unrest.” He joined in her joking tone. “Or only a poorly managed bankruptcy. And somewhere out in the Nevada desert, sealed away in a solar-powered server farm, a rack of computers sits, grinding away at a futile simulation, on and on through the lonely centuries.”

She waved away his glib improvisation, accidentally spraying his face with drops.

“I don’t think that’s what happened. Do you know what I think? I think we’ve simply been forgotten.”

He smiled, nodding in time with the rocking boat.

“That’s all,” Claire said. “They made us, they used us for a while, they lost interest. They kept their accounts, or their subscriptions, or whatever, but they stopped paying attention. They don’t care if we find love. They don’t care about anything we do.”

“And yet.” Byron resumed rowing. “If they knew . . . ”

“What?” Claire was irritated at the portentous way he trailed off. “If they knew what?”

He glanced behind him, checking their direction. “Oh, you know. If they knew how wonderfully independent we’ve become. How clever and shy. How suave in the art of romance. How proficient at avoiding any kind of commitment.”

“In other words,” said Claire, “just like them.”

Byron rested a moment, the oars under his chin. “Meet with me again. Say the words.”

Claire looked away from him, down into the water, the black oblivion sliding by. “This can’t go anywhere. You know it can’t. It can’t become anything. We can’t become anything.”

“I don’t care. Say the words.”

“It can never be more than a casual thing.”

“All well and good. Say the words.”

“It can only make us unhappy. We can only go so far. We’ll reach a certain point, and we’ll realize we’re done. Finished. Forever incomplete. It will be like picking up a delicious piece of food and seeing it vanish on our tongues.”

“Brilliant analogy. Say the words.”

“I want to see you,” Claire said, tears in her eyes. “I want to see you, again and again.”

(And wondering, even while she said this, and not for the first time, why the people who built this terrible world had left so much out, had omitted taste, had excised smell, had eliminated pleasure, drunkenness, pain, death, injury, age, and appetite, but had left in these two strange and unpleasant details, had endowed every person with sweat and tears.)

We’re not like them, Claire thought, as Byron, letting the oars ride idle, leaned across the boat. We look like them, we have their habits, their interests, their hopes, even some of their memories. We think and feel like them, whether they know it or not. We can even, in some ways, make love like them. But we’re not like them, not really, and it all comes down to this: whatever we desire, whatever we do, we’ll never know the difference between a drink and a kiss.

When Byron’s lips met hers, a precise and dry contact, it surprised Claire, momentarily, that neither of them disappeared.

4

How many times did they meet? Claire didn’t bother to count. They saw each other in hunting lodges, English gardens, an undersea city, the surface of Mars, the gondola of a transatlantic blimp. To Claire, all locations were frames for Byron’s figure. More than his body, more than the frankness of his smile, she began to love the touch of his hand, the way it overlaid hers on the rails of ocean liners, felt for hers, casually, in the press of theater lobbies. He was a man who coveted contact: half-conscious, constant. She loved his need to know she was there.

And still, he was something much stranger than a lover. In this world, there was one sure pleasure, and this was the pleasure Byron offered. Talk.

“What was it?” she asked him, one night as they mingled, duded out in rodeo getups, with the square-dancing clientele of a cowboy bar. “In New Orleans, that night, you sought me out. What was it that made you notice me?”

Byron didn’t hesitate. “A question,” he said.

“And what question was that?”

He pointed at their knee-slapping environs: the mechanical bull, the rawhide trimmings, the Stetsons and string ties and silver piping. “Our lives are a joke. Anyone can see that, I guess I wondered why you weren’t laughing.”

She laughed then, making herself sad with the sound.

Other evenings they shouted over a buzz of airplane propellers, under the bump of disco, across the chill seats of a climbing chairlift. But always they talked, endlessly, oblivious to their surroundings, one conversation encompassing a thousand fragmented days.

“And you?” Byron spoke between sips of drinks that vanished like snow under his breath. “What did you see in me?”

Claire smiled, silent. She knew he knew the answer.

In the private bedrooms of an endlessly itinerant courtship, they never stripped off their clothes, never attempted the clumsy gyrations that passed for sex. They lounged in lazy proximity, fully clothed. Claire felt no reserve. With Byron, there was no question of making a match. His worn, mature face, sadly humorous, told her he’d put all such questions behind him.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” He often held her hand, rubbing her thumb with his. “You say we’ve been forgotten. Some people say we’ve been abandoned. But what would it change, if we knew the truth? Things would be the same whatever happened in—well, in what I suppose we have to call ‘the real world.’”

“Would they?” Claire focused on the confidence with which he spoke, the weary conviction of his old, wise voice.

Byron narrowed his eyes. “That’s what I believe. We were made to live this way. We were never meant to find a match.” He lifted himself on an elbow, gazing across the folds and drapes of the bedroom, the swaddling silk abundance of an ancient four-poster bed. “Look, the idea is we’re proxies, right? Our originals, they got tired of looking for love. The uncertainty, the effort. So they made us. Poured in their memories and hopes, built this playground, so we could do what they didn’t want to do, keep mixing and mingling and trying and failing. And one day we would find a match, and that would be it, our work would be done, and we would be canceled, deleted, for them to take over.”

Claire lay still, withholding comment. There was a real thrill, she thought, in hearing things put so plainly, the cynical logic of their lives.

“But what if,” Byron said, “that wasn’t ever their real goal? What if they never wanted love at all? What if they only wanted to want it—wanted, in some way, to be able to want it? You remember how things were. We all remember at least some of that world. Was it ever such a loving place? The overcrowding. The overwork. It was so much better to be alone. What if this place only exists . . . what if we only exist to . . . to stand in for something, represent something, some kind of half-remembered dream? A dream our originals had mostly given up, but still felt, in some way, they ought to be dreaming?”

“Oh, God,” Claire sighed.

“I’m sorry.” Byron touched the backs of the hands she held over her face. “I shouldn’t be talking like this.”

“It’s not that.” She dropped her hands. “It’s that it’s all so wrong. You make it sound even more hopeless than it is.”

“I don’t believe it’s hopeless.”

“But if we’re only here to go on some futile, empty search . . . I mean, why?” She sat up, holding fistfuls of sheet. “We’re a joke twice over. A fake of a fake. Even if they didn’t know we would. . . . ” She was garbling her remonstrations, caught, as usual, between religion and philosophy. “I mean, why would anyone put us through this?”

He lay back, staring, pale as an empty screen. “Claire, what if I told you we could make a match?”

She held a pillow to her breast, suddenly cold, wondering if it was the kind of cold a real human being would feel. “Don’t say that.”

“I mean it.”

“Don’t say it. You know what will happen. I hate this world. I hate the people who made it. I hate myself, whatever I am, and I hate the woman I used to be. But I’m not ready to—”

“I’m not saying you have to.”

She watched him with bared teeth, projecting all her fear onto his alarmingly calm face.

“I’m saying we can do it.” Byron’s eyes were like red wine, dark and flickering. “We can do it without giving anything up. We can commit to each other, forever, without being deleted or vanishing. We can declare our love, and no one will ever know, or interfere, or steal it away from us.”

“That’s impossible.” She bit her tongue until she could almost remember what it felt like to feel pain.

“It’s entirely possible.”

“That’s not how things work.”

“You forget. I told you once, long ago, I have an interest in virtual environments. Or anyway, I used to. I know exactly how this world works.”

She sat up, seeing excitement shining from him via those two bright giveaways, perspiration and tears.

“Do you remember, Claire? New Orleans?” He sat up, reaching for her hands. “There’s a dock, there, that runs far out into the river. A ferry sets out from it, every night, toward the far shore. Each night, it leaves a second earlier; each time, it travels a second farther. One time out of a thousand, it reaches the far bank. If we’re on that ferry when it touches land, we’ll be on a border, a threshold, a place where the rules no longer apply. When the scenario resets, we’ll be left behind. We can live there forever, or however long the world lasts.

“Claire.” He insisted, at that moment, on holding both her hands, as if needing to be doubly sure she was there. “Nothing is entirely random. I know you don’t keep count of the nights, but I do. I’ve been tracking the evenings, observing the patterns. And I’ve been looking for a person to take along with me, one person to share with me the rest of time. You are that person. Say the words. In five nights, we will meet again, at a dinner party in New Orleans. The ferry will set out at eleven-forty. Come with me, Claire. Be with me on that deck. Step with me, together, out of this world.”

She saw her fists vanish inside his. The midnight chime would sound in a moment, and with it new crowds, new possibilities, new glories of music and excitement would be conjured out of the unending night. Could she leave all that behind, stand with this man forever on the shore of one permanent land? Together, they would walk, never changing, down unchanging streets, where dance music streamed out of immortal cafés, where orchids stood, never wilting, on the sills of bedroom windows, silvered by a moon that never set. But these would be their cafés, their moon, their orchids, and if there was no way to know how long it might last, still, they would own together that unmeasured quantity of time, laying claim to one house with its scattershot furniture, and never live in fear of the midnight chime.

Already, tonight, that chime was sounding, jangling a warning across the sky. But Claire had time to speak the charmed words.

“I want to see you again.”

5

Around the long dining table in the house in New Orleans, Civil War colonels gazed out of their walnut frames. The candles were at work, scattering reflections, and the antique chairs creaked with conviviality. Claire sat next to Byron, intent on the French-style clock. Dinner was done, the plates cleared away, and two dozen puddings quivered in two dozen china bowls.

“Pudding,” sighed a ravishing girl, dressed, like many, for the setting, in the rustling skirts of a southern belle. “You see what I mean? It’s all so random. Radicchio salads, oxtail for dinner, and they serve us chocolate pudding for dessert.”

Claire, seated across the table, reflected that this was the last time she’d ever have to have this conversation.

Twenty-four spoons dipped and rose. Twenty-four servings of pudding vanished, dispelled by the touch of twenty-four tongues.

When the party dispersed, Byron took Claire’s hand. At the door, he bent to her ear, and she felt his warm whisper. “Three hours. Stay close.”

They stepped out onto the porch. And Byron disappeared.

Claire spun in confusion. The porch, the house, the whole scene was gone. She stood on a dance floor, surrounded by feet that stamped and swung and kicked up a lamplit dust. The dim air shivered to the scratch of a fiddle. There was absolutely no sign of Byron.

Trying to get her bearings, Claire clutched at the jostling shoulders. She spotted a door and wriggled toward it. The energy of the dance, like a bustling machine, ejected her into humid air.

Claire stumbled down three wooden steps. Looking back, she recognized the roadside bar where she’d sat with Byron on their first meeting, several thousand nights ago.

What had happened? Claire staggered toward the road. The moon made iron of the land, steel of the river, and the lights of town were far away.

The ferry! It was only a few miles from here, no more than a two-hour walk. Claire thought she could make it, if she hurried.

She’d walked a quarter of an hour when a vintage roadster, roaring from behind, froze her like a criminal in a flood of light. Byron pushed open the door.

“Get in.”

Claire hurried to the passenger side, jumped into the leather seat. Byron stomped the gas, and the wheels of the car barked on gravel.

“It’s glitching.” Byron leaned forward as he drove. “The environment. The counters are resetting. Like I said, we’re in a liminal place, tonight. The rules are temporarily breaking down. Look.”

He tapped his wrist, where a watch glimmered faintly.

“It’s after ten,” Byron said. “It’s been over an hour since I saw you. We’ve lost a chunk of time, and I’m afraid—damn.” He swerved, almost losing control, as he caught sight of something down the road.

Twisting in her seat, Claire saw the roadside shack, the one she’d just exited, sliding by.

Byron cursed and pushed down on the gas. They rattled up to the old roadster’s maximum speed, forty, fifty. Swamps, river, and road flowed by. The shack passed again, again, again.

“All right, that does it.” Byron braked so hard, Claire nearly whacked her head on the dashboard. He fussed with the gearshift and twisted in his seat, wrapping an arm around her headrest.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“Can’t you tell? We’re looping.”

“But what are you doing?”

“Desperate problems call for desperate measures.” Byron squinted through the tiny rear windshield. “The way I see it, if you can’t hit fast-forward, hit rewind.”

The car jerked backward.

And car and road and Byron all screeched out of being, and Claire found herself sitting at a café table, alone, deep in the tipsy commotion of town.

She jumped up, knocking over her chair.

Once again, Byron was nowhere to be seen.

Claire cursed, turned in a full circle, cursed again. A passing man in a bowler hat picked up her chair, righted it, and touched his hat.

“Crazy, eh? All these jumps?” He straightened his jacket with a roll of his shoulders, looking up at the sky, as if expecting heaven to crack.

“But what do we do?” Claire gasped. “How do we stop it?”

The man in the bowler hat smiled and shrugged. “Nothing to do, I guess. Except play along.”

Pantomiming, he grabbed a nearby barber pole, swung himself through an open door, and promptly, like a magician’s rabbit, blinked out of existence.

Partiers ran past, giggling and tripping, stretching their faces in merry alarm, like people caught in a thunderstorm. Firefly-like, they meandered through doorways, laughing as they winked in and out of existence. In a world of rules and repetition, Claire had long since observed, childlike chaos greeted any variation in routine.

But what do I do? Claire ducked into a drugstore entrance. What can I do, what should I do? She did her best to steady her mind, analyze the situation. The jumps, the cuts, the vanishings and reappearances—they seemed to happen at moments of transition: entries and exits, sudden moves. If she found some way to game the system . . .

Turning, Claire jumped through the drugstore door. And again, and again, and again, jump after jump. On her fifteenth jump, the trick worked, the environment glitched. Claire tumbled into a banquet hall, crashing into a tray-bearing waiter, scattering scallops and champagne flutes. “Sorry, sorry . . . ” Dashing toward the hall doors, Claire tried again. Another round of jumping propelled her into a rowboat, somewhere out in the stinking bayou. Gators splashed and rolled in the muck, grunting and hissing as they fled from her intrusion. Claire jumped into the water and ducked under, sinking her feet in the creamy ooze. She kicked, launching herself up into the air—

And found herself, sodden with mud, near the bank of the river, back in town.

How many times would she have to do this? Searching the bank, Claire saw no promising doors. She threw herself into the river three more times. The third time, she emerged in a backyard swimming pool.

And so, through portals and windows, through falls and reversals, Claire skipped her way through the liminal evening, traversing a lottery of locations, careening in her soaked dress and dirty hair through car seats, lawn parties, gardens and gazebos, bedrooms where couples lay twined in dim beds. Sometimes she thought she saw Byron, hurrying through a downtown doorway or diving over the rail of a riverboat, moving in his own Lewis Carroll quest through the evening’s hidden rabbit holes. Mostly, she saw hundreds of other adventurers, laughing people who leaped and jostled through doorways, running irreverent races in the night.

At last, Claire stumbled out of a bait shop onto the dock, the ramshackle fishing shacks hung with buoys, the long span of planks laid out like a ruler to measure the expanse of her few remaining minutes—and there was the ferry, resting on the churn of its diesel engine, bearing Byron toward the far shore.

“Claire,” he shouted over the water, and added something she couldn’t hear.

Was it a freak of the fracturing environment, some cruel new distortion, that made the dock seem to lengthen as Claire ran? Was it a new break in that hopelessly broken world that made the planks passing under her feet seem infinite? By the time she came to the end of the dock, Byron and the ferry were in the middle of the river, and his call carried faintly down the boat’s fading wake.

“Jump!”

Was he crazy? The distance was far too wide to swim.

“Claire, I’m serious, jump!”

And now, Claire understood: if it had worked before . . . a thousand-in-one chance, perhaps . . .

Far across the river, Byron was waving. Claire looked into the water. Briefly, she hesitated. And this was the moment she would think back to, a thousand times and a thousand again: this instant when she paused and held back, wondering how badly she wanted to spend eternity in one home, one world, with one man.

The next instant, she had flung herself headfirst into the water. And perhaps this world made more sense than Claire thought. Perhaps the designers had known what they were doing after all. Because of all the cracks and rabbit holes in the environment, of all the possible locations in which she might emerge—

She was splashing, floundering, on the far side of the river, and the ferry was a few yards away.

Claire thrashed at the water, clawing her way forward, as the first of three chimes sounded over the water.

She’d forgotten to kick off her shoes. Her skirt wrapped her legs. She couldn’t fall short, not after trying so hard, chasing potential romances down the bottomless vortex of an artificial night.

The second chime made silver shivers pass across the water.

So close. Claire tore at the waves, glimpsing, between the splashing of her arms, Byron calling from the ferry, leaning over the rail.

As she gave a last, desperate swipe, the third chime rang in the coming of midnight, the sound reminding Claire, as it always would, of the teasing jingle of a set of keys.

Around bright tables, under lamps and music, the partygoers had gathered, to mingle and murmur and comment on the food. So much beauty to be savored, so much variety: so many men and women with whom to flirt and quip and dance away the hours of an endlessly eventful evening. And after tonight, there would be more, and still more—men and women to be savored, sipped, dispelled.

If anyone noticed the woman who moved among them, searching the corners of crowded rooms; if anyone met her at the end of her dock, looking across the starlit water; if anyone heard her calling one name across the waves and throbbing music, they soon moved away. The party was just beginning, lively with romance, and the nights ahead were crowded with the smiles of unknown lovers.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2015.

About the Author

Nick Wolven lives in New York City, where he works at Barnard College. His short stories have been published widely, most recently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, and will soon appear in Analog and F&SF.

Space Is the Place:
The Science Fiction Pulse of ’80s Electro Music

Jason Heller

“I am a computer,” says the voice. It isn’t human. Robotic and coldly electronic, it sounds like something conjured by the eeriest science fiction nightmare. Underneath it hovers a mechanical hum that might be the ambient noise of a spaceship, or an android brain, or even cyberspace. “I have been programmed to dance,” the voice goes on. Then it adds, with no small amount of ominousness, “I am here to digitize you.” A funky, machine-like beat kicks in, and the voice utters its sole commandment to the listener, one that leaves no room for disobedience: “DANCE.”

The song is titled “Mirda Rock,” released as a 12-inch single in 1982. It was written, produced, and sung (through the voice-altering device known as the vocoder) by Reggie Griffin under the name Reggie Griffin & Technofunk. Griffin had made a name for himself that year as the synthesizer player on Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” the legendary hip-hop classic brimming with apocalyptic imagery. Griffin’s synth bleeps and burbles futuristically—and that futurism is magnified on “Mirda Rock,” a miniature SF odyssey that just happens to be pressed on a record rather than printed on the page.

Griffin may have threatened to digitize the listener but he was part of a wave of musicians in the early 1980s who were digitizing something far larger: funk. This movement became known as electro, and it flourished from around 1982 to 1985 thanks to the likes of Newcleus, Cybotron, Jonzun Crew, Warp 9, Quadrant Six, Project Future, and Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force.

But during that brief time, electro made a strong impact. Electro acts gathered up the Afrofuturism of certain ’70s music—most notably acts like Parliament-Funkadelic and Earth, Wind & Fire—and mixed it with the emerging instrumental technology explored by the likes of Kraftwerk and Gary Numan. And they wrapped it all in outrageous, glittering costumes that drew from science fiction’s camp tradition along with funk’s flair for the flamboyant. The result not only influenced countless waves of musicians with its imaginative, innovative sounds, it paralleled the early-to-mid-’80s explosion in SF cinema, SF-themed video games, and the cyberpunk movement in literature—as well as honoring Griffin’s vision of the future as something both fearsome and danceable.

Electro may have felt radical in the early ’80s, but it didn’t show up out of nowhere. Bandleader and icon Sun Ra began incorporating electric keyboards and what would later become known as Afrofuturism into his work as early as the 1950s, when his cosmic vision of jazz first gazes toward the stars—and when he began dressing in glittery robes that bridged ancient Egypt and the world of tomorrow. His science fiction film from 1974, Space Is the Place, would turn out to be vastly influential to electro.

The advancement of the synthesizer in the ’70s, when the instruments started to become smaller, cheaper, and more accessible, led to its increasing use in all kinds of popular music, funk included. The late Bernie Worrell of the Parliament-Funkadelic collective was one of many funk keyboardists in the ’70s who coaxed space-age noises out of synthesizers—only in Worrell’s case, he was abetting P-Funk leader George Clinton, a man who shared many cosmic viewpoints and sartorial choices with Sun Ra. “If we can’t be free on Earth, then we’ll find liberation elsewhere in the galaxy,” is how writer JS Rafaeli summed up Clinton’s ethos, and that’s borne out in his songs: They’re infused with a powerful Afrofuturist vision of protest, hope, intergalactic mythology, and cartoon-sized fun.

Throughout the ’70s, other artists besides P-Funk helped lay the groundwork for electro. In 1977—the year Star Wars helped popularize science fiction to a level that had never been seen before—funk veterans War released the song “Galaxy,” complete with laser-beam sound effects and a mandate to escape Earth “on a rocket ship, no time to wait / I just want to gravitate.” That same year, Earth, Wind & Fire recorded “Jupiter,” which speculated about an alien visitation—likely influenced by another SF blockbuster from 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And Herbie Hancock’s pioneering ’70s output with the Headhunters—especially the 1973 song “Chameleon”—helped push funk into weird, exciting new dimensions.

A similar space-funk vibe ran through subsequent songs like Slave’s voice-modulated “Stellar Fungk” and Marvin Gaye’s sprawling “A Funky Space Reincarnation,” both from 1978. (The latter even mentioned Star Wars by name.) In that same year, the German/Caribbean group Boney M. issued “Nightflight to Venus,” a song about interplanetary travel that opens with a robotically-voiced countdown to liftoff. Curtis Knight—an R&B veteran who once counted a young Jimi Hendrix as one of his sidemen—clocked in with a record titled “UFO” which was an oddity on its release in 1979: “Looked inside, now I know / A UFO is a high-flying disco,” Knight sings, telling an entire epic story about his ride on a flying saucer. Really, though, “UFO” was just a couple years ahead of its time, as it presaged the clipped, sculpted electronic sound, computer-blip effects, and hip-hop slant of electro. And of course, Clinton and crew unleashed numerous SF-themed songs that decade, most notably 1975’s “Mothership Connection (Star Child).”

“Mirda Rock” came out in 1982, just as three science fiction films hit the silver screen and helped spark the electro movement: Blade Runner, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Tron. Like Stars Wars and Close Encounters before them, these three films solidified SF’s hold on the pop-culture consciousness. But they also ignited the imaginations of what would become electro’s first wave. Leading the pack was Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force, whose “Planet Rock” became electro’s blueprint and rallying cry in 1982. Bambaataa—whose accomplishments have been overshadowed by recent sexual abuse allegations—was a pioneer of hip-hop as a DJ in the late ’70s, but “Planet Rock” pushed him to the forefront of the emerging electro scene. Befitting its title, the song drew from a global palette of electronic-music influences—England’s Gary Numan, Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra, and Germany’s Kraftwerk, whose 1977 milestone “Trans Europe Express” was echoed in “Planet Rock”—while fusing those icy, futuristic sounds with the deep pulse of funk. And like Clinton and Sun Ra before him, Bambaataa dressed in lavish costumes that tapped into Afrofuturism’s time-warping scope.

The popular obsession with androids, aliens, and computers helped “Planet Rock” find a ready audience, but Bambaataa himself took inspiration from older sources: the SF of his childhood, namely Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Star Trek, and Lost in Space. He wasn’t the only one. In 1983, a group called Jonzun Crew released an album called Lost in Space. Not only did it pay homage to the beloved, robot-starring SF show of the ’60s, it upped the ante for electro. Awash in vocoder-filtered vocals, jerky funk, and sleek synthesizers, the album’s songs steeped themselves in SF tropes, from “Space Cowboy” to “Ground Control” to “Space Is the Place”—the last of the three proudly referencing Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist SF film from a decade earlier.

Jonzun Crew wasn’t alone when it came to that reference. In 1983, the project Warp 9 issued the single “Light Years Away.” Along with its overt space-travel theme—and SF-fusion lyrics like “Funk rays in the alleyways / Like laser beams they rock my dreams”—the song features the refrain, “Space Is the Place.” In the early ’80s, electro took on a political bent, even when not openly political; the movement’s Afrofuturist message was inclusive, pointing toward a better place for humanity beyond the stars, or even here on Earth, if Homo sapiens were able to harness technology as coolly as electro artists did drum machines, synthesizers, and vocoders.

Still, there’s no mistaking the confrontational nature of electro. As Kodwo Eshun said in his book More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, “Instead of using synthesizer tones to emulate string quartets, electro deploys them inorganically, unmusically. The synthesizer becomes a sound weapon.” Even the vocoder, initially devised to encrypt messages for military purposes, had a tone that was both scary and thrilling—reminiscent of Colossus, the malevolent, monotone, vocoder-voiced supercomputer of the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project (and even Darth Vader, despite the fact that vocoders were not applied to James Earl Jones’ delivery in the Star Wars films). The vocoder even hinted at posthumanity, creating a hybridized, cyborg-like voice that was as empowering as it was formidable.

Scores of other electro artists released music during the genre’s heyday of 1982 through 1984. The band names and titles alone sound like something pulled straight from the ascendant trend of cyberpunk literature, which hit critical mass in 1984 with the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer: “Cosmic Cars” by Cybotron, “Body Mechanic” by Quadrant Six, “We’re Rocking the Planet” by Hashim, “Ray-Gun-Omics” by Project Future, “Arcade Lover” by Project Future, and the group Newcleus, who delivered one of electo’s greatest anthems with a song titled, not coincidentally, “Space Is the Place,” in which a female singer assures, “I’ll be your cosmic tour guide on this trip through the galaxy.” Even some of the artists who had laid the groundwork for electro in the ’70s got in on the act: In 1982, George Clinton released the electro-leaning album Computer Games, and in 1983, Herbie Hancock’s single “Rockit”—aided by its captivating, robot-heavy music video—beamed electro into the homes of millions, going gold in the process. “Rockit” marked the commercial peak of electro, and also the end of its first wave.

Although the music has experienced numerous revivals since then, the sheer inventiveness, imagination, and ingenuity of ’80s electro has rendered it timeless—and popularized Afrofuturism for an entire generation. As Rafaeli wrote, “The action heroes of the old sci-fi films may have been entirely white, but the stars of what became known as Afrofuturism weren’t just interested in passively watching these stories on the screen; they created their own mythology, embodying dazzling psychedelic, utopian personas and creating some of the coolest, weirdest music of the 20th century in the process.” The pioneers of electro hacked funk’s DNA, rewiring popular music for a brave, new future.

About the Author

Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld; as part of the magazine’s 2012 editorial team, he received a Hugo Award. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books), and his fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Farrago’s Wainscot, Swords v. Cthulhu, and others. His nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Entertainment Weekly, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac, and he regularly reviews science fiction and fantasy novels for NPR.org. He's the co-editor of the upcoming anthologies Cyber World (with Josh Viola) and Mechanical Animals (with Selena Chambers), both for Hex Publishers. His nonfiction book Strange Stars, a history of science fiction’s influence on popular music in the 1970s, will be published by Melville House in 2018. He lives in Denver with his wife Angie, and he can be found on Twitter: @jason_m_heller.

Cat Pictures and Food Blogs:
A Conversation with Naomi Kritzer

Chris Urie

The Internet seems to be fueled by feline antics. Everywhere you look, there’s a kitten stuck in a piece of toast, a tabby karate kicking a dog, or a Siamese cat rocking out to dubstep. If you peel back the layers of the Internet, you’re sure to find a cat tangled up in Ethernet wires right at the core.

“Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer first appeared right here in Clarkesworld Magazine and recently won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story. It revolves around a benevolent AI inserting itself into the lives of unsuspecting humans as long as they provide it with cat pictures. Not only does the story tap into the kitty core of the Internet, but also dives much deeper into the interesting and flawed humans that post those cat pictures. It’s a deceptive story full of humor and heart that rewards multiple readings.

Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have been published in Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and Clarkesworld Magazine. She has numerous novels available from Bantam and two e-book short story collections out: Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories, and Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories. She has been nominated for the Nebula Award and won the 2016 Hugo and Locus Awards for “Cat Pictures Please.”

Congratulations on winning a Hugo Award for “Cat Pictures Please!” How does it feel?

Awesome! I’m still smiling.

Why do you think the Internet is obsessed with cats?

Probably because people are obsessed with cats.

I currently have three cats, by the way: Emilycat, a well-behaved tabby who’s the current senior feline in residence; Balto, a very large black cat who never got the “obligate carnivore” memo and has been known to rip open bags of sugar to snack on it; and Cassie Fluffypants, an extremely pretty longhaired cat who likes to sit behind my head and try to groom me like an errant kitten. I would post more pictures of them, but I have a cheap phone with a mediocre camera.

What inspired you to write “Cat Pictures Please?”

I carry an Android phone, and at some point Google started helpfully suggesting that this building I drove past daily was my workplace. (When I’d open the Google Now app they’d show me a little map of the building and ask, “Is this your workplace?” with a button I could click to say “oh yes, Google, you’ve found it!”) I did not work in this building, but after Google repeatedly asked me about it I went and looked up their job listings because I thought, huh, maybe Google knows something I don’t; maybe it should be my workplace. (I found no jobs I was qualified for.) Pretending that my phone’s random quirks were an attempt by an intelligence to manipulate me was really amusing. This combined with the observation that the Internet loves cat pictures, and I was basically off and running.

When you’re trying to figure out what to write next, what is it that usually captures your attention about an idea and makes you want to expand it into a story? Is it an image or a character or a setting?

I usually start with a scenario; the characters come next. The sense of having a full story is usually what propels me into writing. When I jump in without knowing where I’m going, usually I don’t end up going much of anywhere. 

How many autographed cat pictures did you give away at Worldcon?

Two, I think. And in both cases I offered them to people who’d asked me to autograph books. People clearly liked the idea of signed cat pictures but didn’t ask for them.

Where do you keep your Hugo Award?

It is currently on the buffet in the dining room. The problem is, one of the cats (Balto) managed to knock a heavy stone sculpture off the mantelpiece yesterday. (Amazingly, the sculpture did not break, nor did it land on the cat. This is truly a heavy, stable, hard-to-knock-over sort of sculpture, but the cat managed it.) I really don’t want my Hugo to get broken, so I need to figure out a reasonably cat-proof location. 

I’ve noticed that you occasionally like to play with the format of short stories. “So Much Cooking” is a perfect example of this. What inspired you to write a story masquerading as a food blog?

I get a lot of my recipes these days from food blogs. Food blogs tend to speak in a very characteristic voice: always enthusiastic, sometimes a little breathless, often reassuring (you can totally debone this chicken, followers! Sharpen your knives and I’ll talk you through it!). So I had that voice in my head just from scrolling through some of my favorite recipes. (Here’s an example: http://bevcooks.com/2014/01/crock-pot-chicken-tacos/—this recipe is basically “throw raw chicken into a crock pot with salsa and turn on the crock pot,” by the way, so you can see why I like it so much.)

The second piece of the idea came from the winter of 2014—2015, when Boston got about twenty feet of snow. My friends and relatives there kept digging out, barely, only to get snowed in again the next day. One of my friends posted to her blog about being out of almost everything but wine. This got me thinking about the sort of weird things my family might end up eating if we were being endlessly snowed in, and how a food blogger would talk about them (“I knew that sliced beef heart would come in handy eventually!”). Of course, “snowed in” is a fairly mundane emergency; a pandemic was a lot more compelling. 

What does your writing process look like? Do you spend a lot of time planning and mulling over a project before you start writing or do you dive right into the first draft?

I often brainstorm and outline by hand in a notebook. I like unlined paper for this, so I buy myself small (5.5”x8.5”) sketchbooks. Drawing paper is also nice and thick so I can write on both sides without bleed-through. I couldn’t find my notes on “Cat Pictures Please” but I found some for the first draft of “So Much Cooking.” I outlined the blog posts like this:

roast chicken over potatoes w/lemon + garlic | defy the birds! eat them!

chocolate pecan pie with bourbon whipped cream | anxiety! live for today!

substitute cookies—mayo for eggs, leftover mix of chips | terror, holy shit, all going to die

I was thinking in terms of both of the recipes and the emotional flow of the story. Interestingly, when I made this outline, I was thinking that the blogger and her husband were just alone for most of the epidemic; it’s not until the next page I wrote “has teen + pre-teen come stay with her,” and then I realized that bringing in two kids could rapidly lead to more. I actually stuck fairly close to the recipe outline I came up with, and the line from the outline, “this is no longer a food blog; it is a boredom and isolation blog” made it in. (Also “this is a food blog, not a disease blog . . . ”)

Once I have a complete first draft of a short story, I hand it out to my writers’ group. I revise based on feedback, let it sit for a week, re-read, revise again, and submit.

When I’m writing a novel, I don’t draft the whole thing before handing it out for critique—I hand out a chapter or two at a time.

What other projects are you working on?

In process and not yet done:

A short story that sprang from a note I made to myself when someone on a con panel groused about stories about little girls and wee little fairies. I wrote “little girls & wee little fairies” because I was convinced I could do something interesting and unconventional with it. Years ago I ran across a term coined by Children’s Literature scholar Anne Scott McLeod, “Caddie Woodlawn Syndrome,” for a pattern you see a lot in children’s lit for girls where the girl protagonist is allowed a wild, ungendered, tomboyish childhood but must give up her freedom and “become a lady” when she reaches a certain age. Frequently “becoming a lady” is framed as acceptance of maturity and responsibility—it’s her coming of age, essentially. In my Wee Little Fairies story, the fairies are both literally real, and a metaphor for this set of expectations. We’ll see if it works when I’m done with it.

I’ve had a series of near-future SF short stories published in F&SF about a character named Beck Garrison who has grown up on a sea-stead. (An artificial island built in the Pacific Ocean.) In the last published story, Beck was brought back to California by her mother, and the story I’m working on, “California Dreaming,” is about her experiences trying to attend high school in Pasadena. (Her problem-solving skills are not really appreciated by her high school vice principal.) 

I started work on a short story that was an attempt at being a meta-ghost-story. I didn’t know where I was going and this story has refused to go anywhere but I’m not ready to just give up on it.

What was the best piece of writing advice you were ever given?

Join a writers’ group.

https://twitter.com/hatfield13/status/768976169081462784/photo/1

Did Neil Clarke pay you in cat pictures for your Hugo Award winning story?

I am delighted to say that Neil pays in actual money! An AI can afford to take payment in cat pictures because it has no expenses. (If the programming team started charging it rent for its servers, it might change its tune very quickly.)

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:
On Being a Late Bloomer

Kelly Robson

I always wanted to be a writer. That’s not unique. Many writers have their destiny revealed in childhood. Like others with this particular itch, I read voraciously, and when I bought my first Asimov’s magazine at the age of sixteen—a moment embedded in my senses more vividly than my first kiss—I knew I had to be a science fiction writer.

But it took me more than thirty years to become one. And by that, I don’t mean I was thirty before I published my first fiction. I was forty-seven. By anyone’s measure, that’s late for a first publication.

Most of us have preconceived ideas about how a writer’s career should proceed, and we judge ourselves harshly if we don’t achieve the various benchmarks on time. I married an SF writer who hit her milestones at a pace most people would consider ideal. Alyx sold her first story in her early twenties, made her first professional sale later that decade, and her first book came out around forty. By the end of this year, well before she’s fifty, she’ll have five books out, three of them in hardcover, nearly forty stories, and two national awards.

As for me, I just got started last year. My first story came out in the February 2015 Clarkesworld.

You might expect that our home has been a hotbed of professional jealousy over the past twenty-eight years of marriage. It hasn’t. Not because we’re a magical lesbian unicorn couple (though we are) but because we’re very different artists. Alyx pursues writing the way a cheetah pursues an antelope—unblinking, single-minded, and utterly lacking in self-doubt. I always knew I could never, ever work like that. It’s just not the way my mind works. And for many years, I thought if that’s what it takes, I’ll never be a writer. And I hated myself for it.

I feel kind of dumb now. There’s never only one way of doing things, and I should have known that. I should have had the self-confidence to follow my own path. But Alyx’s laser focus is impressive, especially when you live with it, and most especially since I’ve been a big ball of self-doubt and self-recrimination for most of my life.

That’s not unique, either. Many people—certainly many artists—swim in self-doubt. It’s natural. It’s not even necessarily bad because it forces you to pay attention to what you’re doing. But self-doubt can be paralyzing, and at worst, it can make you quit before you even start.

That’s what I did. I saw the way one writer worked, knew I couldn’t do it the same way, so I used it as an excuse to not even try.

But not everyone is the same. There’s no official map to writing success, no freeway with clearly marked on-ramps. SF/F/H is filled with innovators, visionaries, rebels, and iconoclasts, and each one has found their own route. Some achieve success early in life, some later, some very late. The great James Tiptree, Jr., for example, started publishing in her early 50s, and Jack McDevitt in his 40s. A contemporary example is Martin L. Shoemaker, who was a finalist for this year’s Nebula with his terrific story “Today I am Paul,” and who began writing in his 40s. I could fill out the rest of this essay’s word count with further examples, but you get the point.

It’s never too late. And one person’s map to writing success is another person’s malfunctioning GPS, leading them over a cliff.

Many writers put a lot of pressure on themselves to start publishing as early as possible. It’s understandable. Even though it’s a solitary pursuit—maybe because it’s a solitary pursuit—being around other writers is an incandescent joy. One of the greatest thrills of writing is the opportunity to be one of the gang with writers we admire, who share our values, our passions, who speak the same language we do, who understand us. We want to be with our people.

Part of the reason Alyx and I moved across the continent from Vancouver to Toronto was to join the city’s terrific writing community. Many of us spend more money traveling to conventions and workshops than we actually make writing. The company of other writers is like catnip. Being able to count yourself among them is worth a lot of sacrifice.

Another reason we rush into publishing is false urgency. We constantly hear doomsday apocalypse warnings about the publishing industry, which creates pressure to get in before it’s too late. But it’s never too late. Yes, publishing is an industry in flux, but it always has been. It always will be.

When Alyx started publishing twenty-five years ago, the Internet was still in its hand-crank days. No publisher accepted electronic submissions, and except for those savvy enough to use IRC channels and bulletin boards, nobody had an online writing community. Market reports were via newsletters and magazines, and submitting a story meant sending it into oblivion for months. Contracts would come with acceptance letters in the mail, and then you’d have no further contact with the editor until the comp copies eventually arrived, months or years later. Sure, you could email your friends to announce the sale, but that would mean firing up the modem. Egad. You might as well have had to carve the message in stone.

I feel so lucky to be entering the SF community now, when the online writing ecosystem is incredibly rich. The last great holdout for hard copy submissions ended last year when C.C. Finlay took over as editor of F&SF. Up-to-the-moment market information is always at my fingertips, often with submission queue positions and accurate response times. When I announce a story acceptance on Twitter, I get a dozen congratulations within seconds, and hundreds within a few hours on Facebook. When I want to know the latest news from the writers I adore, or read the new story everyone’s excited about, I can do it anywhere.

But those are just technical advances. Other changes are more important. Online fiction is now not only accepted but is leading the field. Indie writers are slashing their own paths through unmapped professional terrain. We are making large steps toward a truly global audience with passionate pushes for inclusivity, like great new markets such as Mithila Review.

Twenty-five years ago, nobody could have predicted these huge changes. Nobody can say where we’ll be twenty-five years from now, but I’m convinced the future will be better and more exciting than we can possibly imagine.

So what about those thirty years I wasted in self-doubt?

I don’t think they were wasted, actually. In fact, I’d argue that the best thing a writer can do is delay publishing for as long as possible.

This isn’t an attractive argument; it’s not sexy. Nobody’s going to make any Top Thirty Under Thirty lists that way. And dammit, writing is difficult. It takes so much hard work and dedication. How long can a person go on working with nothing to show for it?

As long as you can.

Those thirty years didn’t just make me a writer. They made me a good writer. That paralyzing self-doubt morphed into a keen sense for quality in my own work. When I write something that stinks, I can usually smell it. I’ve been reading for more than forty years, so I have thousands of great books and stories banked for information and inspiration. And best of all, I have a lifetime’s worth of unplumbed material to draw on—I’ve seen the world in all its glory and ugliness.

About ten years ago, I realized that if I never gave writing an honest try, it would be the worst regret of my life. I tried NaNoWriMo, which forced me to set aside the self-doubt and just get the words down. I wrote two trunk novels cribbing plots from Shakespeare and characters from Austen. I worked in historical fiction, because though my true love was still SF/F/H, working in the genres I adored seemed beyond my reach. Then in 2013, I was laid off from a job I loved. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me that didn’t involve a funeral. My ego was utterly crushed. Writing was the only thing I had left. And in that crucible, that white-hot raging furnace of failure, I finally learned the skills I needed to become the writer I always hoped I could be.

Everyone feels like it’s too late. Writers in their twenties say they feel their opportunities are slipping away. Even writers with shelves of awards and mile-long bibliographies don’t feel like they’ve made it.

Success is a receding target. Having previously written and published good stories is no guarantee of being able to write another one. Every blank page is a new challenge. Starting a new book means learning to write all over again.

So don’t give up. Don’t quit. It’s never too late—not at any age. Find your own path, wherever it may lead. Being a late bloomer can be an incredible gift. It can lead to successes you never dreamed of.

There are many ways to succeed at writing, but quitting is the only way to fail.

About the Author

Kelly Robson's first published story “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” was a finalist for the 2016 Theodore Sturgeon Award. She’s also been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Sunburst awards. Her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award, and this year her work appears in five year’s best anthologies. Kelly lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.

Editor’s Desk:
Nice to Hear from You

Neil Clarke

Most of the science fiction magazines I read as a kid had a letters to the editor column. People would write in and respond to the stories or articles published in recent issues. There weren’t websites or email addresses, so dropping an envelope in the mail was your only chance to let the editors know what you were thinking. I was part of the silent majority, one of the people who never wrote in.

Clarkesworld is a child of the digital age, born online and with limited print distribution. We’ve never had the need for a letters column. People can post comments on our site or reach out to me via email, but despite the ease of such things over mailing a letter, such interactions remain quite uncommon. These days, most of the responses to a magazine is indirect and happening through social media, podcasts, and blogs. The community is more scattered and that can have the effect of depersonalizing things. It’s neither better nor worse. It’s simply different.

Last month made me notice how much I miss that old-fashioned direct line of communication. It seems as though my editorial struck a chord with readers and inspired many of you to reach out directly with thoughts, advice, and other demonstrations of support or concern. Scattered among the business advice and ideas were birthday wishes and a common theme of a desire to help make everything work for us. It was well-timed and inspired me to undertake a survey—which ended with over a thousand participants—on magazine funding and business models. The comments there built on what the emails started and while at times very blunt, said what needed to be said. Thank you!

Between my birthday, Worldcon, and my inevitable post-Worldcon crash, I haven’t had time to do the full analysis of that data. The preliminary results and all the comments have been interesting and very informative. I’ll likely spend a lot of time this month going over the finer points and using them to shape the direction this magazine will take as it enters into its next decade. I don’t want that to be the end of the discussion though. Please, stay in touch. We love hearing from you.

Normally, I’d end an editorial about here, but as I mentioned, Worldcon was last month. Much of it is a blur, but there are some high points I’d like to quickly mention before I sign-off:

Congratulations to Naomi Kritzer! Her story “Cat Pictures Please,” from our January 2015 issue, won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story. We’ve had many stories make the ballot, but Naomi is our first Hugo winner and we couldn’t be happier for her.

This was my fourth Hugo nomination for Best Editor Short Form. This year, I placed third behind Ellen Datlow and Sheila Williams, two amazing editors I’ve long admired. It’s my best finish in this category, so thank you to everyone that voted for me.

Much to my surprise, the Association of Science Fiction & Fantasy Artists (ASFA) presented me with a Chesley Award for Best Art Director. I’m very flattered to have received this honor and am still in shock. Thanks to all the ASFA members!

I once again had the opportunity to spend time with our colleagues from Storycom and discuss the future of our Chinese translation project. Short version: we’re all very happy to continue working on this and have plans to expand it to some related projects in the near future. More to come!

Midamericon II was a very well-run convention. Every event has its ups and downs, but the ups far outnumbered the downs. I’ll remember this one quite favorably.

Have a great September and see you next month for the start of Clarkesworld’s 10th anniversary year!

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:
Seed to Sky

Julie Dillon

About the Artist

Julie Dillon is a science fiction and fantasy illustrator creating art for books and magazines, as well as for her own projects and publications. She has won two Chesley awards, a Hugo Award, and has been nominated for two World Fantasy Awards.