Editorial, November 2010
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue six of Lightspeed! We’re six months in, and we’ve had a great run so far, and the enthusiastic feedback of readers like yourself goes a long way toward letting us know what’s working and what’s not.

With that in mind, before I get to this month’s teasers, I just wanted to remind our loyal readers: if you want to support the magazine, one of the best things you can do is spread the gospel of Lightspeed. We love it when you leave comments on lightspeedmagazine.com, but I would also like to invite you to post a review of any of our issues on Amazon.com (where it is available on Kindle) or in the iBooks store (for iPhone and iPad), or wherever else you might find the ebook edition available. Also, you can go to iTunes, find the Lightspeed Magazine story podcast, and leave a review there. Or if you don’t want to spend time writing a review, just giving any of our issues a positive “star rating” might encourage other readers to try the magazine.

With that out of the way, on to this month’s teasers!

In our lead story this month, “Standard Loneliness Package,” Charles Yu—author of the debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe—takes us to a strange future in which those who don’t want to feel pain, don’t have to: You can hire someone else to do it...whether it’s suffering through a root canal, a migraine, or the loss of a loved one.

And in our feature interview this month, Matt London talks to Chris Avellone, the acclaimed video game designer of such games as Fallout: New Vegas, Planescape: Torment, and Alpha Protocol. In this in-depth interview, Chris explains the art of video game design, making players make moral choices, and how valuable tabletop dungeonmastering is to being a game designer.

“Faces in Revolving Souls” by Caitlín R. Kiernan depicts a future in which body modification has reached an extreme: not only can people modify their bodies, they can become a unique species entirely by incorporating attributes of other creatures into their own physiology.

In the related nonfiction, expert Lori St. Leone shares “The Art and History of Body Modification,” detailing the origins of tattoos and piercings to scarification and beyond.

In “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim, poor eponymous Hwang is slipping through time, but that’s what you get when you try to use a time machine to solve your problems.

In the related article, Genevieve Valentine does some temporal research and presents “Five Freaky Futures Your Kids Might Face.” (Pro tip: Hold onto those IKEA Allen wrenches!)

For our final story this month, we present “Ej-Es” by Nancy Kress. In it, we follow a team of medicians who provide medical relief around the galaxy. But the people of Good Fortune prove challenging to communicate with...

And riffing off some of the science in “Ej-Es,” we have the return of Neurotopia’s Evil Monkey, who explains the science behind “God Spots”—the results we perceive when our brains misfire.

That’s it for our fiction and nonfiction selections, but be sure to also look for our author spotlights, and keep an ear out for our original podcasts of “Standard Loneliness Package” by Charles Yu and “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim, along with a resyndication of Escape Pod’s performance of Nancy Kress’s “Ej-Es.”

So that’s our issue this month. I hope you enjoy it. And remember, if you don’t want to wait for the content to be released on the site throughout the month, or you’d just like a handy, downloadable version of the magazine on your favorite handheld electronic reading device, Lightspeed is available directly from our publisher, Prime Books, in DRM-free ePub format, and is also available in Kindle, iBooks, and Mobipocket format from external vendors, or from Fictionwise, which offers a variety of formats.

Fiction editor John Joseph Adams is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Wastelands, The Living Dead (a World Fantasy Award finalist), The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Barnes & Noble.com named him “the reigning king of the anthology world,” and his books have been named to numerous best of the year lists. Prior to taking on the role of fiction editor of Lightspeed, John worked for nearly nine years in the editorial department of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In addition to his editorial work, John is also the co-host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Standard Loneliness Package
Charles Yu

Root canal is one fifty, give or take, depending on who’s doing it to you. A migraine is two hundred.

Not that I get the money. The company gets it. What I get is twelve dollars an hour, plus reimbursement for painkillers. Not that they work.

I feel pain for money. Other people’s pain. Physical, emotional, you name it.

Pain is an illusion, I know, and so is time, I know, I know. I know. The shift manager never stops reminding us. Doesn’t help, actually. Doesn’t help when you are on your third broken leg of the day.

I get to work late and already there are nine tickets in my inbox. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, open the first ticket of the day:

I am at a funeral.

I am feeling grief.

Someone else’s grief.

I am feeling a mixture of things.

Grief, mostly, but I also detect that there is some guilt in there. There usually is.

I hear crying.

I am seeing crying faces. Pretty faces. Crying, pretty, white faces.

Nice clothes.

Our services aren’t cheap. As the shift manager is always reminding us.

Need I remind you? That is his favorite phrase these days. He is always walking up and down the aisle tilting his head into our cubicles and saying it. Need I remind you, he says, of where we are on the spectrum? In terms of low-end/high-end? We are solidly towards the highish-end. So the faces are usually pretty, the clothes are usually nice. The people are usually nice, too. Although, I imagine that it’s easy to be nice when you are rich and pretty. Even when you’re at a funeral.

There’s a place in Hyderabad that is doing what we’re doing, a little more towards the budget end of things. Precision Living Solutions, it’s called. And of course there are hundreds of emotional engineering firms in Bangalore. Springing up everywhere you look. I read in the paper that a new call center opens, on average, like every three days.

Okay. Body is going into the ground now. The crying is getting more serious.

Here it comes.

I am feeling that feeling. The one that these people get a lot, near the end of a funeral service. These sad and pretty people. It’s a big feeling. Different operators have different ways to describe it. For me, it feels something like a huge boot. Huge, like it fills up the whole sky, the whole galaxy, all of space. Some kind of infinite foot. And it’s stepping on me. The infinite foot is stepping on my chest.

The funeral ends, and the foot is still on me, and it is hard to breathe. People are getting into black town cars. I also appear to have a town car. I get in. The foot, the foot. So heavy. Here we go, yes, this is familiar, the foot, yes, the foot. It doesn’t hurt, exactly. It’s not what I would call comfortable, but it’s not pain, either. More like pressure.

Deepak, who used to be in the next cubicle, once told me that this feeling, which I call the infinite foot—to him it felt more like a knee—is actually the American experience of the Christian God.

“Are you sure it is the Christian God?” I asked him. “I always thought God was Jewish.”

“You’re an idiot,” he said. “It’s the same guy. Duh. The Judeo-Christian God.”

“Are you sure?” I said.

He just shook his head at me. We’d had this conversation before. I figured he was probably right, but I didn’t want to admit it. Deepak was the smartest guy in our cube-cluster, as he would kindly remind me several times a day.

I endure a few more minutes of the foot, and then, right before the hour is up, right when the grief and guilt are almost too much and I wonder if I am going to have to hit the safety button, there it is, it’s usually there at the end of a funeral, no matter how awful, no matter how hard I am crying, no matter how much guilt my client has saved up for me to feel. You wouldn’t expect it–I didn’t–but anyone who has done this job for long enough knows what I’m talking about. It seems unbelievable, but it’s there, it’s almost always there, even if it’s just a glimmer of it, and even though you know it’s coming, even when you are waiting for it, in fact, when it comes, it is always still a little bit of a shock.

Relief.

Death of a cousin is five hundred. Death of a sibling is twelve-fifty. Parents are two thousand a piece, but depending on the situation people will pay all kinds of money, for all kinds of reasons, for bad reasons, or for no reason at all.

The company started in corporate services. Ethical qualm transference. Plausible deniability. That kind of stuff. Good cash flow, which the founder—now retired to philanthropy and heli-skiing—plowed right back into R&D, and turned Transfer Corp. into a specialist: a one-feeling shop. Cornered the early market in guilt.

Then the technology improved. Some genius in Delhi figured out a transfer protocol to standardize and packetize all different kinds of experiences. Qualia in general. Don’t feel like having a bad day? That’s a line from one of our commercials. Let someone else have it for you.It shows a rich executive-looking-type sitting and rubbing his temples, making the TV face to communicate the stress of his situation. There are wavy lines on either side of his temples to indicate that the Executive is! really! stressed! Then he places a call to his broker, and in the next scene, the Executive is lying on a beach, drinking golden beer from a bottle and looking at the bluest ocean I have ever seen.

I saw this on American television at the lunch counter across the street that has a satellite feed. I was eating at the counter and next to me was a girl, maybe four or five, scooping rice and peas into her mouth a little at a time. She watched the commercial in silence, and after it was over, turned to her mother and softly asked her what the blue liquid was. I was thinking about how sad it was that she had never seen water that color in real life until I realized that I was thirty-nine years old and hey, you know what, neither had I.

That someone else they are talking about in the commercial is me—me and the other six hundred terminal operators in building D, cubicle block 4. Don’t feel like having a bad day? Let me have it for you.

It’s okay for me, a good job. I didn’t do that well in school, after all. It was tougher for Deep. He did three semesters at technical college. He was always saying he deserved better. Better than this, anyway. I would nod and agree with him, but I never told him what I wanted to tell him, which was hey, Deepak, when you say that you deserve better, even if I agree with you, you are kind of also implying that I don’t deserve better, which, maybe I don’t, maybe this is about where I belong in the grand scheme of things, in terms of high-end/low-end for me as a person, but I wish you wouldn’t say it, because whenever you do, it makes me feel a sharp bit of sadness and then, for the rest of the day, a kind of low-grade crumminess.

Deep and I used to go to lunch, and he always tried to explain to me how it works:

“Okay, so, the clients,” he would say, “they call into their account reps and book the time.”

He liked to start sentences with, okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code geeks, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, every word a term of art, every sentence packed with logic, or small insights or a joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit.

Okay, so, he said, they book the time, and then at the appointed hour, a switch in their implant chip kicks on and starts transferring their consciousness over. Perceptions, sensory data, all of it. Okay, so, then it goes first to an intermediate server for processing and then gets bundled with other jobs, and then a huge block of the stuff gets zapped over here, where it gets downloaded onto our servers and then dumped into our queue management system, which parcels out the individual jobs to all of us in the cubicle farm.

Okay, so, it’s all based on some kind of efficiency algorithm–our historical performance, our current emotional load. Sensors in our head assembly unit measure our stress levels, sweat composition, to see what we can handle. Okay?

(He would say, okay, when he was done. Like a professor. He wanted so badly to be an expert at something.)

I always appreciated Deepak trying to help me understand. But it’s just a job, I would say. I never really understood why Deep thought so much of those programmers, either. In the end, we’re all brains for hire. All I know is they seem to have gotten it down to a science. How much a human being can take in a given twelve-hour shift. Grief, embarrassment, humiliation, all different, of course, so they calibrate our schedules, mix it up, the timing and the order, and the end result is you leave work every day right about at your exact breaking point.

A lot of people smoke to take the edge off. I quit twelve years ago, so sometimes when I get home, I’m still shaking for a little bit. I sit on my couch and drink a beer and let it subside. Then I heat up some bread and lentils and read a newspaper or, if it’s too hot to stay inside, walk down to the street and eat my dinner there.

When I get to work the next morning, there’s a woman sitting in the cubicle across from mine. She’s young, at least a couple of years younger than me, looks right out of school. She has the new employee set-up kit laid out in front of her and is reading the trainee handbook. I think about saying hi, but who am I kidding, I am still me, so instead I just say nothing.

My first ticket of the day is a death bed. Death beds are not so common. They are hard to schedule—we require at least twenty-four hours advance booking, and usually clients don’t know far enough in advance when the ailing beloved one is going to go—so we don’t see these too often. But this isn’t regular death bed. It’s pull-the-plug.

They are pulling the plug on grandpa this morning.

I open the ticket.

I am holding grandpa’s hand.

I cry.

He squeezes my hand, one last burst of strength. It hurts. Then his hand goes limp and his arm falls away.

I cry, and also, I really cry. Meaning, not just as my client, but I start crying, too. Sometimes it happens. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because he was somebody’s grandpa. And he looked like a nice one, a nice man. Maybe something about the way his arm fell against the guard rail on the hospital bed. Maybe because I could sort of tell, when grandpa was looking at his grandson for the last time, looking into his eyes, looking around in there trying to find him, he didn’t find him, he found me instead, and he knew what had happened, and he didn’t even look mad. Just hurt.

I am at a funeral.

I am in a dentist’s chair.

I am in a queen-sized motel bed, feeling guilty.

I am quitting my job. This is a popular one. Clients like to avoid the awkwardness of quitting their jobs, so they set an appointment and walk into their bosses’ offices and tell them where they can stick this effing job, and right before their boss starts to reply, the switch kicks in and I get yelled at.

My teeth throb.

My kidneys seethe.

My lungs burn.

My heart aches.

On a bridge.

My heart aches on a bridge.

My heart aches on a cruise ship.

My heart aches on an airplane, taking off at night.

Some people think it’s not so great that we can do this. Personally, I don’t really see the problem. Press one to clear your conscience. Press two for fear of death. Consciousness is like anything else. I’m sure when someone figures out how to sell time itself, they’ll have infomercials for that, too.

I am at a funeral.

I am losing someone to cancer.

I am coping with something vague.

I am at a funeral.

I am at a funeral.

I am at a funeral.

Fourteen tickets today in twelve hours. Four half-hours and ten full.

On my way out, I can hear someone wailing and gnashing his teeth in his cubicle. He is near the edge. Deepak was always like that, too. I always told him, hey man, you have to let go a little. Just a little. Don’t let it get to you so much.

I peek my head to see if I can steal a glance at the new woman, but she is in the middle of a ticket. She appears to be suffering. She catches me looking at her. I look at my feet and keep shuffling past.

It used to be that the job wasn’t all pain and suffering. Rich American man outsources the nasty bits of his life. He is required to book by the hour or the day or some other time unit, but in an hour or two or twenty-four hours of unpleasantness, there are always going to be some parts of it that are not so bad. Maybe just boring. Maybe even not so bad. Maybe even more okay than not. Like if a guy books his colonoscopy and he hires us for two hours, but for the first eight minutes, he’s just sitting there in the waiting room, reading a magazine, enjoying the air conditioning, admiring someone’s legs. Or something. Anyway, it used to be that we would get the whole thing, so part of my job here could be boring or neutral or even sometimes kind of interesting.

But then the technology improved again and the packeting software was refined to filter out those intervals and collect them. Those bits, the extras, the slices of life that were left over were lopped off by the program, and smushed all together, into a kind of reconstituted life slab. Like American baloney lunchmeat. A life-loaf. They take the slabs and process them and sell them as prepackaged lives.

I’ve had my eye on one for a while, at a secondhand shop that’s on my way home from work. Not ideal, but it’s something to work for.

So now, what’s left over, what we get to feel at work, it’s all pretty much just pure undiluted badness. The only thing left that can be a surprise is when, even in the middle of badness, there is something not so awful mixed in there. Like the relief in the middle of a funeral, or sometimes when you get someone who is really religious, not just religious, but a true believer, then mixed in with the sadness and loss at a funeral, you get faith, and you get to try different flavors, depending on the believer. You get the big foot on your chest, or you get the back of your head on fire. (A cold fire, it tickles.) You get to know what it is like to know that your dead lover, your dead mother, father, brother, sister, that they are all standing in front of you, tall as the universe, and they have huge, infinite feet, and their heads are all ablaze with this brilliant, frozen fire. You get the feeling of being inside of a room and at the same time, the room being inside of you, and the room is the world, and so are you.

The next day is more of the same. Eleven tickets, including a two-hour adultery confession. To my husband of twenty-six years.

After lunch, I pass her in the hall. The new woman. Her name badge says Kirthi. She doesn’t look at me this time.

Walking home I swing a block out of the way to check in on the secondhand shop.

Someone bought my life.

It was there in the window yesterday, and now it’s gone.

It wasn’t my life, technically. Not yet. It was the life I wanted, the life I’ve been saving for. Not a DreamLife®, not top of the line, but a starter model, a good one. Standard Possibility. Normal Volatility. A dark-haired, soulful wife. 0.35 kids, no actuals—certainties are too expensive—but some potential kids, a solid thirty-five percent chance of having one or more. Normal life expectancy, average health, median aggregate amount of happiness. I test-drove it once, and it felt good, it felt right. It fit just fine.

I don’t know. I’m trying not to feel sorry for myself. I just thought there might be more to it all than this.

Still, I’ve got it better than some people. I mean, I’m renting my life out one day at a time, but I haven’t sold it yet.

My father sold his life on a cold, clear afternoon in November. He was thirty. It was the day before my fourth birthday.

We went to the brokerage. It felt like a bank, but friendlier. My father had been carrying me on his back, but he put me down when we got inside. There was dark wood everywhere, and also bright flowers and classical music. We were shown to a desk, and a woman in an immaculate pantsuit asked if we would like anything to drink. My father didn’t say anything, just looked off at the far wall. I remember my mother asked for a cup of tea for my father.

I don’t want to sell my life. I’m not ready to do that yet.

So I sell it bit by bit. Scrape by.

Sell it by the hour.

Pain, grief, terror, worse.

Or just mild discomfort.

Social anxiety.

Boredom.

I ask around about Kirthi. People are talking. The guys are talking. Especially the married guys. They do the most talking.

I pass her in the hall again, and again she doesn’t look at me. No surprise there. Women never look at me. I am not handsome or tall. But I am nice.

I think it is actually that which causes the not-looking at me. The niceness, I mean, not the lack of handsomeness or tallness. They can see the niceness and it is the kind of niceness that, in a man, you instinctively ignore. What good is a nice man? No good to women. No good to other men.

She doesn’t look at me, but I feel, or maybe I wish or I imagine, that something in the way she does not look at me is not quite the same. She is not-looking at me in a way that feels like she is consciously not-looking at me. And from the way she is not-looking at me, I can tell she knows I am trying to not-look at her. We are both not-looking at each other. For some reason, for the first time in a long while, I have hope.

I don’t know why, but I do.

I am at a funeral.

I’m flipped to green.

You can be flipped to green, or flipped to red.

You can be there, or can just feel the feeling.

This is the one improvement they have made that actually benefits us workers. There’s a toggle switch on the headset. Flip it to green and you get a rendering of the client’s visual field. You see what he sees. Flip it to red and you still feel all of the feelings, but you see what you see.

You can do whatever you want, so long as you don’t leave your cubicle. You can just stare at the cube-divider wall, or play computer solitaire, or even chat with neighbors, although that is strongly discouraged.

I was hesitant at first, but more and more these days I am usually flipped to red. Except for funerals. Funerals, I like to be there, just out of some kind of respect thing.

This morning’s first ticket is your standard affair. Sixtyish rich guy, heart attack in the home office, millions in the bank, five kids from three marriages, all hate him.

The client is one of those kids, trust fund baby, paid extra for amnesia after the event. No feeling, no pre-feeling, no hangover, no residue, no chance of actually having any part of it, long enough to ensure that he will be halfway in the bag before any of the day’s events start nibbling at the corners of his awareness.

I see the fresh, open plot. A little rain falls on the funeral procession as they get out of the cars, but there’s a break in the clouds so that it’s raining and the sun is shining at the same time.

As usual, everyone is well-dressed. A lot of the rich look mildly betrayed in the face of death, as if they are a little bit surprised that good style and enough money weren’t quite enough to protect them from the unpleasantness of it all. I’m standing next to what I am guessing is widow number two, late thirties, probably, with beautiful sand-colored hair. We make eye contact and she is staring at me and I am trying not to stare at her and then we both realize the same thing at the same time. Raj, I say, under my breath. She smiles. Rajiv is on night shift now, but back in the day, we had beers once in a while.

The pastor talks about a full life lived, and the limits of earthly rewards, and everyone nods affirmatively, and then there is music as the body goes into the ground, I’ve heard it at a lot of funerals. Mozart, I think, but I am not sure.

Death of an aunt is seven hundred. Death of an uncle is six.

Bad day in the markets is a thousand. Kid’s recital is a one twenty-five an hour. Church is one-fifty.

The only category that we will not quote a price on is death of a child. Death of a child is separately negotiated. Hardly anyone can afford it. And not all operators can handle it. We have to be specially trained to be eligible for those tickets. People go on sick leave, disability. Most people just physically cannot do it. There hasn’t been one booked the whole time I’ve been here, so most of us aren’t even sure what is true and what isn’t. The rumor is that if you do one, you are allowed to take the rest of the month off.

Deep was always tempted. It’s not worth it, I would tell him. Okay, so, maybe not for you, Deep said. Okay, so, mind your own business, he would say.

The first time I talk to Kirthi is by the water fountain. I tell her we are neighbors, cubicle-wise. She says she knows. I feel a bit stupid.

The second time we talk, we are also by the water fountain, and I try to make a joke, one of those we have to stop meeting like this things. I probably saw it on TV and it just came out. Stupid. She doesn’t laugh, but she doesn’t frown, either.

The third time we talk, I kiss her. By the microwave in the snack room. I don’t know what got into me. I am not an aggressive person. I am not physically strong. I weigh one hundred and fifty-five pounds. She doesn’t laugh. She actually makes a face like disgust. But she doesn’t push me away, either. Not right away. She accepts the kiss, doesn’t kiss back, but after a couple of seconds, breaks it off and leans back and turns her head and says, under her breath, you shouldn’t have done that. And she doesn’t say it in a nice way. Or like a threat. Just real even, like she is stating a fact.

Still, I am happy. I’ve got three more tickets in the bucket before lunch, and then probably eight or nine before I go home, but the whole rest of the day, I am having an out of body experience. Even when I am in someone else’s body, I am still out of my body. I am double out of my body.

I weep.

I wail.

I gnash my teeth.

Underneath it all, I am smiling. I am giggling.

I am at a funeral. My client’s heart aches, and inside of it is my heart, not aching, the opposite of aching—doing that, whatever it is.

Kirthi and I start dating. That’s what I call it. She calls it letting me walk her to the bus stop. She lets me buy her lunch. She tells me I should stop. She still never smiles at me.

I’m a heartbreak specialist, she says.

When I see her in the hallway, I walk up behind her and slip my arm around her waist.

She has not let me in yet. She won’t let me in.

Why won’t you let me in, I ask her?

You don’t want in, she says. You want around. You want near. You don’t want in.

There are two hundred forty seven ways to have your heartbroken, she says, and I have felt them all.

I am in a hospice.

I have been here before. A regular client.

I am holding a pen.

I have just written something on a notepad in front of me.

My husband is gone.

He died years ago.

Today is the tenth anniversary of his death.

I have Alzheimer’s, I think.

A memory of my husband surfaces, like a white-hot August afternoon, resurfacing in the cool water of November.

I tear off the sheet on the notepad.

I read it to myself.

It is a suicide note.

I raise a glass to my mouth, swallow a pill. Catch a glance of my note to the world.

The failsafe kicks on, just in time. The system overrides. I close the ticket.

It’s her father.

That’s what Sunil tells me, one day over a beer.

Kirthi hasn’t been to work for the past two days.

Sunil is in Tech Support. He has seen all of the glitches. He knows what can go wrong in the mechanics of feeling transfers. He has seen some ugliness. He is fond of saying that there is no upper bound on weirdness.

Her father is still mortgaged, Sunil explains. Locked in. A p-zombie, he says. Sold his life.

“This is going to end badly, man,” he says. “You have to trust me on this. Kirthi is damaged. And she knows it.”

Sunil means well, but what he doesn’t know is that I am fine with damaged. I want damage. I’ve looked down the road I’m on and I see what’s coming. A lot of nothing. No great loves lost. And yet, I feel like I lost something. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? How about this: I lost without the love. I’ve lost things I’ve never even had. A whole life. Just like my father, I get to have my cake and eat it, too. Except that it’s a great big crap cake.

Still, as the weeks go on, I am starting to think Sunil is right.

“Kirthi won’t let me in,” I tell him. “She tells me to get away from her, to run.”

“She is doing you a favor, man. Take her advice.”

I ask her about her father.

She doesn’t talk to me for a week.

And then, on Friday night, after we walk for an hour in silence, before going into her apartment, she turns to me and says, how awful it is to look at him in that state.

We draw closer for a moment.

Why won’t you just love me, I ask her.

She says it’s not possible to make someone feel something.

Even yourself, she says.

Even if you want to feel it.

I tell her about the life I had my eye on.

It’s gone, she says.

I’ll find another one just like it, I tell her. Standard happiness package. Decent possibility. The chance of a kid. It wouldn’t be enough for us, not quite, but we could share it, take turns living the life. One works while the other one lives, maybe I work the weekdays and she gives me a break on weekends.

She looks at me. For a few long seconds, she seems to be thinking about it, living the whole life out in her head.

She doesn’t say anything. She touches the side of my head.

It’s a start.

When Deep was happy, before it got bad and then worse and then even worse, he was always talking about how he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. Stuff like that. He talked like that, he really did. He loved telling stories. About a week before he cracked up, he told me a story while we were in the coffee room about a guy at Managed Life Solutions, a physical suffering shop across town, who somehow made arrangements with a prominent banker who wanted to kill his wife. The banker was going to do it, he’d made up his mind, but he didn’t want the guilt. Plus, he thought it might help with his alibi if he didn’t have any memory.

Bullshit, I said. That would never work.

No, really, he says. He tells me all about it, how they met, how they arranged it all while talking in public, at work in fact, but they talked in code, etc.

Could never happen, I say. There are twenty reasons why that wouldn’t work.

Why not, he said.

It’s just too much, I said.

Too much what? There is no upper bound on cruelty, he said.

The next Monday, I came to work, and they were pulling Deep out the door, two paramedics, each one with an arm under Deep’s arms, and two security guards trailing behind. I wanted to say something, anything, to make them stop. I knew I would never see him again. But I froze. As they dragged him past me, I tried to make eye contact, but I looked in there, and no one was left. He had gone somewhere else. He was saying, okay, so. Okay, so.

And then the next day, there it was, in the newspaper. The whole story about the banker. Exactly how Deepak told it to me. There were rumors that he was the one the banker hired; he was living with murderous guilt. Other people gossiped that he had done death of a child.

I don’t think it was either. I don’t think it was any one thing that did it. Deep just knew. He knew what was out there. There is no upper bound on sadness. There is no lower bound on decency. Deep saw it, he understood it, what was out there, and he let it seep in, and once it was in, it got all the way in, and it will never come out.

I open tickets. I do the work. I save up money.

Weeks go by. Kirthi opens up. (Just a little.)

She still refuses to look me in the eyes when we are kissing.

That’s weird, she says. No one does that.

How am I supposed to know that? I have not kissed many people, but I don’t want her to know it. I have seen in American movies that people close their eyes, but I have also seen that sometimes one person or the other will sneak open an eye and take a peek at the other one. I think it makes sense. Otherwise, how would you know what the other person is feeling? That seems to me to be the only way to be sure, the only way to understand, through the look on their face, what they are feeling, to be able to feel what they feel for you. So we kiss, she with her eyes closed, me looking at her, trying to imagine what she is feeling. I hope she is feeling something.

I am at a funeral.

I am having a bypass.

I am in drug rehabilitation.

I am in withdrawal.

She takes me to see her father.

He has the look. I remember this look. This is how my father looked.

He is living someone else’s life. He is a projection screen, a vessel, a unit of capacity for pain, like an external hard drive, a peripheral device for someone’s convenience, a place to store frustration and guilt and unhappiness.

We stand there in silence.

We go back to work.

I am at a funeral.

I am at a root canal.

The thing it is uncomfortable to talk about is: we could do it. We could get him out.

Finally, she can’t take it.

He has only four years left on his mortgage, Kirthi tells me.

The thing is, the way the market works, sellers like us never get full value on our time. It’s like a pawnshop. You hock your pocketwatch to put dinner on the table, you might get fifty bucks. Go to get it after payday and you’ll have to pay four times that to get it back.

Same principle here. I love Kirthi, I do. But I don’t know if I could give sixteen years of my life to get her father out. I could do it if I knew she loved me, but I don’t know it yet. I want to be a better man than this, I want to be more selfless. My life isn’t so great as it is, but I just don’t know if I could do it.

I am in surgery.

I am bleeding to death.

It doesn’t hurt at all.

Things progress. We move in together. We avoid planning for the future. We hint at it. We talk around it.

I am being shot at.

I am being slapped in the face.

I go home.

I rest.

I come back and do it again.

When I turned thirteen, my mother told me the story. She sat me down in the kitchen and explained.

“The day your father sold his life,” she said, “I wore my best dress, and he wore a suit. He combed his hair. He looked handsome and calm. You wore your only pair of long pants. We walked to the bank. You rode on his back.”

“I remember that,” I said.

“A man with excellent hair came out from some office in the back and sat down behind the desk.”

I remember that, too, I told her.

You get—we got—forty thousand a year, she said.

My dad sold his life for a fixed annuity, indexed to inflation at three percent annually, and a seventy percent pension if he made it full term: forty years, age seventy, and he could stop, he could come back to us, to his life.

There were posters everywhere, my mother said, describing that day, the reunion day. The day when you’ve made it, you’ve done it, you’re done.

There was a video screen showing a short film describing the benefits of mortgage, the glorious day of reunion. We would all drink lemonade in the hot summer air.

Just forty years, it said.

In the meantime, your family will be taken care of. You will have peace of mind.

“Time is money,” the video said. “And money is time. Create value out of the most valuable asset you own.”

“Don’t miss out on a chance of a lifetime.”

When we went home, I remember, my father went to lie down. He slept for twelve hours, twice as long as normal, and in the morning, while I was still asleep, he went and sold his life.

Things stop progressing with Kirthi.

Things go backward.

And then, one day, whatever it is we had, it’s gone. It won’t come back. We both know it.

Whatever it is she let me have, she has taken it away. Whatever it is when two people agree to briefly occupy the same space, agree to allow their lives to overlap in some small area, some temporary region of the world, a region they create through love or convenience, or for us, something even more meager, whatever that was, it has collapsed, it has closed. She has closed herself to me.

A week after Kirthi moves out, her father passes away.

My shift manager will not let me off to go to the funeral.

Kirthi doesn’t even ask if I would like to go anyway.

I should go.

I will be fired if I go.

But I don’t have her anymore. If I leave, I won’t have a job, either. I’ll never get her back if I don’t have a job.

I’m never getting her back anyway.

I don’t even know if I want her back.

But maybe this is why I don’t have her, could never, would never have had her. Maybe the problem isn’t that I don’t have a life. Maybe the problem is that I don’t want a life.

I go to work.

I open tickets.

I close tickets.

When I get home my apartment seems empty. It’s always empty, but today, more empty. The emptiness is now empty.

I call her. I don’t know what to say. I breathe into the phone.

I call her again. I leave a message. I know a guy in the billing department, I say. We could get some extra capacity, no one would know, find an open line. I could feel it for you. Your grief. I could bury your father for you.

I would say that I am tired of this substitute life, except that this is the only life I will ever have. It is a substitute for itself. A substitute for nothing. A substitute for something that never existed in the first place.

Three days later, when I get to work, there is a note on my desk, giving the time of the funeral service. Just the time and, underneath it, she scrawled, okay.

Okay.

I arrange for the hour. At the time, I open the ticket.

I am expecting a funeral.

I am not at a funeral.

I can’t tell exactly where I am, but I am far away. In a place I don’t recognize. She has moved to a place where I will never find her. Probably where no one will ever find her. A new city. A new life.

She paid for this time herself. She wanted to let me in. For once. Just once. She must have used up everything she had saved. The money was supposed to be for her father but now, no need.

She is walking along a road. The sun is hot, the air is dusty, but the day is alive; she feels alive, I feel alive for her.

She is looking at a picture we took—the only picture we took together, in a photo booth in the drugstore. Our faces are smashed together and in the picture she is not smiling, as usual, and I am smiling, a genuine smile, or so I have always thought about myself, but now, looking at myself through her eyes, I see that she sees that my own smile starts to decompose, like when you say a word over and over again, so many times, over and over, and you begin to feel silly, but you keep saying it, and then after a short while, something happens and the word stops being a word and it resolves into its constituent sounds, and then all of a sudden what used to be a word is not a word at all, it is now the strangest thing you have ever heard.

I am inside of her head.

I am a nice person, she is thinking. I deserve more, she wants to believe. She wants to believe it, but I can feel that she doesn’t. If only she could see herself through my eyes. If only she could see herself through my eyes looking through her eyes. I deserve to be loved, she thinks, but she doesn’t believe it. If only I could believe it for her. I want to believe in her, believe inside of her. Believe hard enough inside of her that it somehow seeps through.

She turns up the road and the hill gets steeper. The air gets hotter. I feel her sadness with every step, and then, right near the top of the hill, just the faintest hint of it: a smile. She is remembering us. The few happy moments we had.

I am standing on a hill. I am not at a funeral. I am thinking of someone I once loved. I don’t know if I am her thinking of me, or if I am me thinking of her, or if maybe, right at this moment, there is no difference.

Charles Yu received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection, Third Class Superhero. He has also had work published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Eclectica, The Gettysburg Review, The Malahat Review, Oxford American, and Sou’wester. His first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon) was published in September. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

Author Spotlight: Charles Yu
Erin Stocks

What made you decide to set this story in this particular country? India, is it?

Yes, that’s right. By placing the story in India, I was hoping to do two things. First, I wanted to evoke a near-future, fairly plausible world, which I hoped would heighten the emotional realism of what is, admittedly, a not-very-plausible premise. The other idea I had was that by setting it in India, which is, of course, a major outsourcing center in our real world, the story might be able to explore some of the socio-economic and psychological consequences of exporting our crappiest jobs to people on the other side of the world, to wonder a little bit about the limits of outsourcing.

Our narrator claims that his job is a good one, yet I can’t help but wonder if he’s trying to convince himself of that. Why go through this emotional torment, day after day? Is it just another job for him, or do you think his loneliness is a subconscious factor in why he’s remained there? To feel more, consistently? A way of connection?

I think it’s both: his job is a good one, and yet at the same time, he also has to remind himself of that, because it’s grueling, punishing work. That’s how rough his life is, how impoverished he is, that he, on one level, knows he is lucky to have this job, which is literally filled with pain and misery that other people don’t want to feel. This sort of goes back to the first question, and the issue of what outsourcing is. It’s a completely rational transaction from an economic standpoint. At the same time, what you’re talking about is substituting one person’s blood, sweat, tears, time and suffering for another person’s blood, sweat, tears, time and suffering. It’s interesting what you’re saying about whether subconsciously he might be drawn to the job, as excruciating as it is, because of some kind of connection or even vitality he might find in the felt experience of other people’s minds and hearts. I honestly hadn’t thought of that; in my mind, I assumed he didn’t have much of a choice, practically speaking. But I like your reading better!

Some people argue that feeling emotion is what makes us human. If these emotional depths & experiences are taken away from us, what kinds of side effects do you think that could have?

If something like emotional transference technology were ever possible, I’d be terrified, as much for the people who could afford to outsource their pain as for people to whom it would be outsourced. I think life would be pretty empty without any bad parts, but I’m probably also a totally insensitive jerk, because “bad parts” is obviously a relative term, and for people like me (and probably most people reading this, on a computer, living in the first world), the “bad parts” of life are probably laughably trivial to large parts of the world, where clean water and getting enough calories to survive are not givens.

Having said all that, I do think that in a lot of ways, large and small (including modern conveniences, entertainments, modes of communications, and yes, outsourcing), we have already had some of our emotional depths and experiences taken away. I don’t mean to suggest that’s a brand new phenomenon; with each major technology, we have some new kinds of experiences, but some others taken away, right?

One has the ability to mortgage out his or her life in this story-a new take on the phrase “time is money.” Where did you get this idea from?

When I heard a term like, thirty-year-fixed mortgage, or when I think about life insurance, annuities, even things like an employee 401(k) plan, what really strikes me is that, in a sense, we’re talking about a calculus that involves two variables: chunks of your life and money. And those variables are put together into projections, into formulae, into estimates of what you’ll need to be happy, someday, to be comfortable, working for wages and pension contributions, putting money into financial instruments is really about trading part of your present for your future. I wanted to make this equivalence, this commensurability between time and money as concrete as possible, and it struck me that the simplest way to do that was to imagine a world where it was literally possible to trade time for money.

Our narrator doesn’t express much emotion regarding the loss of his father, but we can read between the lines that he felt it keenly. How do you think it influenced him both growing up and in the present day?

As you pointed out earlier, I think he’s an incredibly lonely person, someone for whom basic connection is not easy. This story definitely would have been different if the narrator was an outgoing guy with a bunch of friends!

Kirthi is a relief and true joy for our narrator, in the middle of what he calls a life of “pure, undiluted badness.” But she has her own issues to go through, and they split up. Do you think her presence in his life changes him permanently? For the better or worse?

I think for the better, although that’s not to say I imagine a happy life for him or for her. But one in which the possibility of connection now seems possible, thanks to Kirthi. And that’s about as hopeful a place I think he could have gotten to, in the course of this short story.

Erin Stocks is a writer and musician newly transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in Flash Fiction Online (upcoming), the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading slush for Lightspeed Magazine and Fantasy Magazine, critting works for her SFF writing group, the Self-Forging Fragments, and rambling on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Fallout: New Vegas by Matt London Feature Interview: Chris Avellone, Game Designer Fallout: New Vegas
Matt London

The term “video game author” has perhaps never applied to someone more than to Chris Avellone. Foremost, he is a storyteller, a crafter of worlds. His snappy dialogue and unconventional narratives have long placed him in the top echelon of video game writers. He began his career designing quests and campaigns for Dungeons & Dragons, later joining Interplay Entertainment where he worked on a number of D&D-related games. Most noteworthy is Planescape: Torment, a unique RPG that turns fantasy conventions inside out and upside-down, landing the title on countless best-of lists. In recent years, Avellone has worked on a variety of titles from the hit Star Wars RPG Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords to the modern-day RPG spy thriller Alpha Protocol. His next project is the follow-up to Game of the Year Fallout 3, entitled Fallout: New Vegas. In this in-depth interview with Lightspeed, Chris answers a variety of questions covering the breadth of his career.

The story of your rise from humble teenage dungeonmaster to one of the most respected writers in the history of video games has become something of industry lore. What other early experiences do you think shaped you as a writer and guided you to the path you’re on now?

“Respect” and “dungeonmaster” are two words I never thought I’d see in the same sentence in any publication, so your question has fulfilled one of my lifetime goals. As for respect, you’re usually being reviled by either your players (even as they ask when the next session is going to be, sometimes with veiled threats) or the community at large in high school, college, or in the working world, and your dating pool slowly and surely shrinks to the radius of a Lilliputian dime.

The early inspirations aren’t terribly praise-worthy. They were the twin muses of loneliness and starvation. Aside from being lonely, the biggest motivation was not having enough people willing to gamemaster a game in my neighborhood; everyone was always up for playing role-playing games, no one would ever run a game, however.

Adding insult to injury, sometimes players wouldn’t stop at not running games, they couldn’t even be bothered to flesh out their disadvantages for their character build so I had to wing those. Guess what? They didn’t like that. Guess what? Finish your character sheets next time and maybe you won’t be attacked by multiple Mysterious Hunteds at once, Captain Lazyass.

In short, I was a starving artist in the sense that I was starved for playing RPGs. If I wanted a fix, I had to run game sessions myself—drawing the maps, setting up the cinematics (we had opening vignettes to set the stage), detailing out the characters, and sometimes even drawing the characters (superhero RPGs). Oh, and all the accounting work that came after each session to dole out Experience Points.

Still, here’s why I advocate gamemastering as a training tool for game designers: one, you get immediate, direct feedback as to why your adventure sucks and why your players aren’t having fun. Two, you have to start training yourself to be prepared for any direction your players might end up taking (which is a lot like normal computer game development). Third, you start training yourself to pay attention to each character’s build, motivation for playing, and their skill sets. And you begin to look for ways to make them shine during the adventure, which again translates directly into game development (and it’s one of the things that Fallout does really well).

What books, movies, and video games inspired you growing up?

Zelazny was a big influence, as was Robert Pirsig (outlook on life and craft, as well as how to approach writer’s block when you’re stuck), Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game appealed to my gamer instincts), David Gerrold, Harlan Ellison, and a number of graphic novel authors: Alan Moore, Garth Ennis (his run on Hellblazer was amazing), Bill Willingham (Elementals— the fact that the heroes in that comic could suffer grievous harm and regenerate was a big source of inspiration for the Nameless One’s ability to recover in Planescape yet leave parts of his body behind), Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol: Crawling from the Wreckage all the way until the end of the run, Animal Man, etc.—and Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol was the source of inspiration for the pregnant alley in Planescape: Torment—Morrison introduced a character called “Danny the Street” in Doom Patrol who was a living street who was also a transvestite, and I’ve never gotten that character idea out of my head). I also read a lot of Choose Your Own Adventure books, which also helps train you for game development.

As far as movies go, most of the Coen Brothers movies were a big source (esp. Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller’s Crossing). In terms of games, Bard’s Tale 2 allowed me to realize a game could be my gamemaster and set me down the road of computer game development, and after that Wasteland, Ultima Underworld, System Shock 2, Chronotrigger, Final Fantasy III, Myth, and more all ended up being big influences on me for different reasons.

Is there one author that had a particular impact on you, that influences your writing?

Kurt Vonnegut—especially Galapagos and Bluebeard. He wasn’t afraid to play around with the writing and tie the stories together, and seeing the “*” in front of the characters in Galapagos was always a reminder to me you can play around with literary conventions with surprisingly effective results. I miss him.

Prior to your video game work, you made content for tabletop roleplaying games. What is the trick to writing a quality tabletop campaign, and how has that work influenced your current career?

Don’t dictate the path of the adventure or character builds, and pay attention to the character builds of your group—each player is at the role-playing game session for a particular reason. One wants to be the sharpshooter and the critical hit master—one shot, one kill. Another wants to be the disgraced tortured ex-NCR officer who was court-martialed and is fighting to redeem himself, and he’s more about the emotional experience than the combat experience. Another one wants to be the smooth-talking card shark and outwit all his enemies. Realize why the players are there, realize what skills they—both as players and as characters—shine at, and what challenges you can throw at them to emphasize those traits. Your job is to entertain them, and you can set up a custom adventure that lets them play the characters they want, that lets them take the stage and have their moment, while having a challenging session along the way.

Secondly, you are not there to be entertained as a gamemaster. The satisfaction you feel should be secondary to the players having a good time—and if they do, your satisfaction comes after the session is over and they want to play more.

Also, lastly (and this took me a few years to figure out): let the dice fall where they may. The best gaming stories and events can result, and they’re ones you never saw coming. It’s better that way.

One of the first video game projects you worked on was Fallout 2. How did you become part of this project? What was your involvement?

I was in the middle of Planescape: Torment at Interplay. Everyone who went on to form Troika [Games] suddenly left, and Feargus [Urquhart, currently CEO of Obsidian Entertainment] got us into a room, passed out area summary docs, and said “go.” We did. I took over New Reno, finished up Vault City, did the Raider Cave (I was proud of New Reno and Vault City, not so much the Raider Cave), and the Special Encounters. I had to move back on to Planescape full-time after that (I was juggling both at the same time), and the experience was pretty brutal, but worth it. I learned a lot about how to script and lay out dialogues. I made a lot of mistakes, and was able to carry those narrative designs into Torment, which I feel made it a better game.

New Reno is a section of Fallout 2 that is totally non-linear, allowing the player to pit the town’s criminal factions against each other. What was your inspiration for this concept?

I got a 1.5 page summary of the location left over from the previous team: four crime families, a list of events that needed to happen (get Myron, find source of Jet, exposure to Enclave, etc.), and then I just started designing. I wanted to make sure each character build, skill set, and stat-build had something fun to do in town, and that was a lot of work.

What is your process for writing non-linear stories with branching plots? Do you start with a single “correct” path, and then fill in the alternate routes?

Start with a moment or event you want to create, and why you want to create it. For example, talking down an adversary and showing why his plan is flawed would be a good example from Fallout 1. For Torment, I knew I wanted the following moments: waking up from the death screen, seeing the outside of the Mortuary, the idea of encountering a pregnant alley and helping it give birth, the concepts for Fhjull and Trias and what it would be like to talk to otherworldly creatures like them with their peculiar outlooks, a floating skull, a puritan succubus, a buried village, and the idea of having a conversation with your own mortality on a plane of the dead. With those elements in mind, I asked “Okay, so how do I get the player to all those moments,” and then started fleshing out the paths to get there.

Planescape: Torment shows up on several best-game-of-all-time lists. Many standard mechanics of video game RPGs (like repeatedly dying and leveling up) are incorporated into the narrative of the game so that each death and level up is part of the protagonist’s story. Take us through the development of Planescape. How did you set out to make this game different from other D&D games?

I had a long list of things I wanted to do with an RPG and a long list of things I hated about RPGs when Planescape rolled around, so that all added fuel to the fire. I started with all the elements I hated, cut those out (no halflings, dwarves, elves, evil wizards, no saving the kingdom, no swords, no attempt to make the undead scary, re-loading after death, regimented class system, and pre-determined alignment) and added stuff I’d always wanted to do (puritan succubus, making the dead more sympathetic, dungeons-in-a-pocket, selfish main quest, fragmented personality of main character, pregnant alleys).

The fact that it was set in the Planescape universe was a plus, because Planescape consciously disregarded D&D conventions in favor of the setting, and that allowed a lot more breathing room for adventure and character ideas than a normal D&D campaign.

The length of the Planescape: Torment script has become quite notorious. What was the process like writing it? Hundreds of hours alone in your room? I’m curious about the construction of both the big picture (The Nameless One’s quest, backstory, the world) as well as the details (supporting characters, the creation of quests and sub-quests).

That’s not off-base. I would sit in my office, write, drink unhealthy amounts of OJ mixed with Mountain Dew until I became a soft, blobby creature with incredibly dexterous fingers. It started with a high level vision document that had all the hopes and dreams for the project. Once the vision document was approved, we scaled it down and outwards and turned each bit into reality. The lead artist, Tim Donley, did sketches of each of the major locations one by one before they were arted on the computer. I then took the characters and quests and did area design documents. I wrote a first pass of much of the dialogue and companions (many of which made it all the way to the final draft). All the while our programmers started digging into the Infinity Engine (which wasn’t done at that time, since Baldur’s Gate 1 was still going on) and learning more about how it worked so we could see if our ideas were feasible or not. A plus of BioWare’s Infinity Engine is you could paint the backgrounds of the locations for the player to explore, which made bringing [the city of] Sigil and Planescape to life much easier than it would have been in a traditional 3D game. A lot of the crazy, mind-bending architecture was able to be done by our artists and inserted into the game only because of the engine, and it really helped us bring the campaign setting to life.

If there is a theme that threads throughout your work, it might be neutrality, or moral ambiguity. Many of your games put the player in a situation where there is no “right” answer. Do you do this as a way of letting the player write her own story, or do you have a bigger message?

Players should be able to play an RPG the way they want, and they don’t need my moral judgments getting in the way of how they have fun. I also am not a fan of pre-determined attitudes and alignments for players—my hope is that at the end of the game, they’ve answered the question, “What kind of character am I really, and how did that depart from what I thought I would be?” I always considered Torment a sort of role-player’s experiment, where each incarnation of the Nameless One had the potential to be a different personality and a different type of gamer, depending on the choices he made in the game world. It’s echoed a bit in Alpha Protocol at the end of game with Leland, where he asks if you became the person you set out to be when you joined the agency, and it’s something I like to keep asking players when possible because moments of self-reflection never hurt.

As lead designer of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, you may have gotten away with writing the most un-Star Wars Star Wars story ever, going so far as to depict the Dark Side as perhaps not being a bad choice. How did you convince LucasArts to let you take The Force in a new direction?

They may have been too busy with Episode III, although they did review our work and seemed pleased with it. They only had five or six comments over the course of development, and one of them was our Devaronian’s horns were off, and there was one instance where we’d misspelled Atton’s name in a document or dialogue as “Anton.” That said, we took great pains to pay attention to the franchise enough so we didn’t cause continuity problems, and we wanted to make sure we were treating the planets, cultures, and societies accurately. While there’s an unorthodox take on Kreia’s view of the Force in KOTOR II, that was still portrayed within the context of the Force in the Star Wars universe, and that’s what she’s rebelling against.

Tell us about your approach to creating characters. Do you take inspiration from life, or other media? How do you build quests organically from the characters you create?

When I design characters, I usually approach it in the following way (I’ll use Kreia in Knights of the Old Republic II for this example).

—Examine their role in the story. Kreia in KOTORII serves multiple purposes: companion, foil, and a means of acting as a sounding board for the game theme (the role of the Jedi and the nature of the Force in a living galaxy).

—Name them properly. This is more important than it may seem. Kreia, for example, was consciously intended as a twist on Leia with a harsher prefix—she basically acts as an ally as Leia does in Star Wars, but her life before she met you was...well...brutal.

—Set up a visual signature for the character with the concept artist. Kreia blends elements of the wise mentor (Obi-Wan’s robe) mixed with the Dark Side elements (Palpatine’s hood design).

—The character must be someone who can give voice to shit that bothers me or is something I really, really want to write about. Kreia is my mouthpiece for everything I hate about the Force, and then I let her rant.

Note that character designs all depend on the character’s function. Sometimes having a one-note or zero-note character is important to help show the contrast of a more important character in the same environment—and sometimes, a merchant should just be a merchant. At other times, you’ll want an NPC to showcase a particular aspect of the world...for example, in Fallout 3 in Megaton, the character of Nathan is clearly set up to portray how the common people of Fallout might fall under sway of President Eden’s propaganda, and that’s part of Nathan’s role in the story.

Overall, I prefer having a smaller cast and finding ways to ditch one-note or zero-note characters and just make the smaller cast more reactive (like in Alpha Protocol).

Alpha Protocol was Obsidian Entertainment’s first original venture. How did the project come about? What was the initial germ of an idea, and how did it enter production?

It was a concept developed by our CEO, Feargus Urquhart and our tech director, Chris Jones. They proposed an espionage-style Jason Bourne RPG where you could play as a spy. SEGA wanted an RPG for their line-up and to build a franchise around, so they signed it up and put it on the roster. From that point on, it entered production. It didn’t have a Project Lead or a Lead Designer for a chunk of its early inception and production, and then at the two year mark, Chris Parker became Project Director and I volunteered to become Lead Designer on it in the absence of a Lead Designer. SEGA also participated in the design (not so much the narrative) and they also dictated the marketing and release schedule for the title as well.

Do you think people shy away from modern-day RPGs because it’s so easy to get campy? “You discover Hillary Clinton’s pantsuit. Provides +2 to Diplomacy, -1 to all other Charisma checks.” What are the challenges to writing RPGs in a contemporary setting?

People don’t shy away from those kinds of games, they just don’t make them. I loved Bully, for example, and that had a lot of RPG mechanics in it. Not sure how well it sold, but I wish Rockstar would make more in the series. In terms of challenges, it’s a lot of work to make the real world an interesting place to adventure in if you strictly adhere to real-world elements—without some element of the fantastic about it, it’s a lot harder to create the art, character looks, and even quest threads. When players make modern-day games, half the fun is messing up the environment in those real-world games, and that’s the real joy. In Fallout: New Vegas, some of our most interesting locations are the ones taken from real life and then given the Fallout “touch” (usually nuclear with a slight 1950s sci-fi aftertaste).

You’ve written for some of the most beloved franchises in video games, from Fallout to Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons. Is there a dream project you would love to work on someday? Or an original idea you’ve always wanted to try?

The Wire RPG, a Harry Dresden-style RPG, an ’80s High School RPG (although Bully covered a lot of this already, so I’m less enamored of this idea than I was), and Alpha Protocol II (which would be an original idea with where we want to take it, IMO). I’d be interested to work on a Shadowrun game as long as there was less dice-rolling in the system. I’d also like to lead a Fallout title, just once.

You’re going back to your roots with New Vegas. How did it feel to revisit the Fallout world? What were the lessons you brought from past games when you approached Fallout: New Vegas?

It’s like finding an old pair of favorite shoes you lost in the back of a closet, putting them on, and finding out they fit just as well as they used to. In terms of lessons—make sure that you design modular, so you can cut as needed and not break elements.

What are the challenges of balancing all the stuff that goes into a game, from the story elements and gameplay to the technical stuff like programming and troubleshooting? No game development company has unlimited resources (unless there’s a cheat code I don’t know about). How do you decide where to focus the team’s energy?

The genre and the franchise focus your attention. As an example, Fallout: New Vegas needs to focus on the elements that made all the Fallouts great, but especially Fallout 3, since that’s what most people played and that’s what they’re going to expect from any Fallout title following Fallout 3 using the same engine. So when focusing on New Vegas, you choose (1) open-world exploration, which was core to Fallout 3, (2) similar skill sets and character building that Fallouts have always done, just give more options for each and new ways to use those skills (for example, more crafting recipes for different skills, melee skill unlocks for special moves, using skills in dialogue), and (3) focus on what your studio and development team do well—one of Obsidian’s strengths is character and story, so we make sure that’s one of the elements we bring to the title.

Have you ever written a quest or character that you loved but for whatever reason could not implement in the final game?

Yep, it happened in Fallout: New Vegas. There’s a character on one of the trading cards, Ulysses, who was supposed to be a companion. Oddly enough, tearing him out of the game was almost as hard as putting him in because companion scripts touch almost everything (and he also was a complicated character in terms of some of the hooks into the storyline). Maybe he’ll come back at some point. I miss him.

What were the highlights of the development process of New Vegas?

There were a few things, in no particular order:

—Having a chance to play Fallout 3 for research.

—The owners brainstorming the “box” for New Vegas in terms of what elements the title should have (Vegas as signature city, start with a reversal from Fallout 3, Fallout elements, etc.).

—The first time I saw Dinky the Dinosaur in Fallout: New Vegas and walked into his belly, and then into his mouth to look at the Mojave wasteland.

—Getting to meet Felicia Day and getting my Guild DVD signed. And listening to her talk about killing bunnies in Red Dead Redemption.

—This is a little random, but marketing support from Bethesda, and how it changed my opinion on game development marketing and how much it can help your title when they are involved early and they understand the title. They didn’t just meet us halfway, they did more than I’ve ever seen a marketing department do in all the companies I’ve worked with. As an example, one of the first marketing meetings I’d had for the game was very early in the development process, and during the meeting, the head of PR/Marketing said “I’ll start playing the builds so I can demo this myself,” which amazed me. Then he did it. You’d be surprised how often marketing doesn’t want anything to do with talking about or demoing a title, they leave that to the developers. Bethesda really stepped up in all these aspects.

—We also had a marketing plan. This is a rare thing—and even more rare, we had a marketing plan early. This may be a difficult thing for someone outside of game development to realize, but it was a godsend to actually hold it in our hands and know what the future of the product was and how to plan for it.

—Getting to write the graphic novel for the game and tell stories about the characters for insights you might not have otherwise seen...and meeting Geof Darrow, the cover artist, and learning that he was going to do the cover for it.

—Going to the Goodsprings graveyard at night, looking north, and seeing the lights of New Vegas.

—Everything yet to come.

Recently the game industry has been very hush-hush about future projects. It’s almost as if companies are afraid that announcing a game in development will jinx it. Why all the secrecy? Or better yet, tell us what’s next on the Pip-Boy radar for Chris Avellone.

Making games isn’t cheap, and the timing for when games come out can make or break a game. Alpha Protocol’s delayed release date contributed to its reception; had it been released before Mass Effect 2 and Splinter Cell, I think some of its elements wouldn’t have suffered by the contrast, but frankly, those games are excellent at what they do. Knowing when a competitor is planning on releasing a competing title is valuable knowledge and it helps you develop a strategy for when you should release your game. As a better example, no one wants to release a movie the same time as a Pixar release because no one will see it on opening weekend. Game development is similar. Your title can get lost, buried, or lose out by comparison depending on what other titles are released around the same time, and that’ll definitely hurt reviews and sales.

But considering Obsidian’s focus, an RPG isn’t too far off base.

Matt London is an author and filmmaker who lives in New York City. He is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, and a columnist for Tor.com and Realms of Fantasy magazine. His story “Mouja” appears in John Joseph Adams’s anthology The Living Dead 2. He has no less than three escape plans should the zombies take Manhattan.

Faces in Revolving Souls
Caitlín R. Kiernan

The woman named Sylvia, who might as well still be a child, is waiting for the elevator that will carry her from the twenty-third floor of the hotel—down, down, down like a sinking stone—to the lobby and convention registration area. She isn’t alone in the hallway, though she wishes that she were. There are several others waiting to sink with her—a murmuring, laughing handful of stitches and meat dolls busy showing off the fact that they’re not new at this, that they belong here, busy making sure that Sylvia knows they can see just exactly how birth-blank she is. Not quite a virgin, no, but the next worst thing, and all that pink skin to give her away, the pink skin and the silver-blue silk dress with its sparkling mandarin collar, the black espadrilles on her feet. The others are all naked, for the most part, and Sylvia keeps her head down, her eyes trained on the toes of her shoes, because the sight of them reflected in the polished elevator doors makes her heart race and her mouth go dry.

No one knows I’m here, she thinks again, relishing the simple nervous delight she feels whenever she imagines her mother or sisters or someone at work discovering that she lied to them all about going to Mexico, and where she’s gone, instead. She knows that if they knew, if they ever found out, they’d want explanations. And that if she ever tried to explain, they’d do their best to have her locked away, or worse. There’s still a multitude of psychiatrists who consider polymorphy a sickness, and politicians who consider it a crime, and priests who consider it blasphemy.

A bell hidden somewhere in the wall rings, and the elevator doors slide silently open. Sylvia steps quickly into the empty elevator, and the others follow her—the woman who is mostly a leopard, the fat man with thick brown fur and eyes like a raven, the pretty teenage girl with stubby antlers and skin the color of ripe cranberries—all of them filing in, one by one, like the passengers of some lunatic Noah’s ark. Sylvia stands all the way at the rear, her back turned to them, and stares out through the transparent wall as the elevator falls and the first floor of the hotel swiftly rises up to meet her. It only stops once on the way down, at the fourth floor, and she doesn’t turn to see who or what gets on. It’s much too warm inside the elevator and the air smells like sweat and musk and someone’s lavender-scented perfume.

“Yes, of course,” the leopard says to the antlered girl with cranberry skin. “But this will be the first time I’ve ever seen her in person.” The leopard lisps and slurs when she speaks, human vocal cords struggling with a rough feline tongue, with a mouth that has been rebuilt for purposes other than talking.

“First time, I saw her at Berkeley,” the antlered girl replies.

“And then again at Chimera last year.”

“You were at Chimera last year?” someone asks, sounding surprised, and maybe even skeptical; Sylvia thinks it must be whoever got on at the fourth floor, because she hasn’t heard this sexless voice before. “I made it down for the last two days. You were there?”

“Yeah, I was there,” the girl says. “But you probably wouldn’t remember me. That was back before my dermals started to show.”

“And all the girls are growing antlers these days,” the leopard lisps, and everyone laughs, all of them except Sylvia. None of them sound precisely human anymore, and their strange, bestial laughter is almost enough to make Sylvia wish that she’d stayed home, almost enough to convince her that she’s in over her head, drowning, and maybe she isn’t ready for this, after all.

Another secret bell rings, and the doors slide open again, releasing them into the brightly lit lobby. First in, so last out, and Sylvia has to squeeze through the press of incoming bodies, the people who’d been waiting for the elevator. She says “Excuse me,” and “Pardon me,” and tries not to look anyone in the eye or notice the particulars of their chosen metamorphoses.

Fera is waiting for her, standing apart from the rest, standing with her long arms crossed; she smiles when she sees Sylvia, showing off her broad canines. There’s so little left of Fera that anyone would bother calling human, and the sight of her—the mismatched, improbable beauty of her—always leaves Sylvia lost and fumbling for words. Fera is one of the old-timers, an elder changeling, one of the twenty-five signatories on the original Provisional Proposition for Parahuman Secession.

“I was afraid you might have missed your flight,” she says, and Sylvia knows that what she really means is, I was afraid you’d chickened out. Fera’s voice is not so slurred or difficult to understand as the leopard’s. She’s had almost a decade to learn the mechanics of her new mandibular and lingual musculature, years to adapt to her altered tongue and palate.

“I just needed to unpack,” Sylvia tells her. “I can’t stand leaving my suitcases packed.”

“I have some friends in the bar who would like to meet you,” Fera purrs. “I’ve been telling them about your work.”

“Oh,” Sylvia whispers, because she hadn’t expected that and doesn’t know what else to say.

“Don’t worry, Syl. They know you’re still a neophyte. They’re not expecting a sphinx.”

Sylvia nods her head and glances back towards the elevator. The doors have closed again, and there’s only her reflection staring back at her. I look terrified, she thinks. I look like someone who wants to run.

“Did you forget something?” Fera asks, and takes a step towards Sylvia. The thick pads of her paws are silent on the carpet, but the many hundreds of long quills that sprout from her shoulders and back, from her arms and the sides of her face, rustle like dry autumn leaves.

“No,” Sylvia says, not at all sure whether or not she’s telling the truth.

“I know you’re nervous. It’s only natural.”

“But I feel like such a fool,” Sylvia replies, and then she laughs a laugh that has no humor in it at all, a sound almost as dry as the noise of Fera’s quills.

“Hey, you should have seen me, back in the day. I was a goddamn basket case,” and Fera takes both her hands, as Sylvia turns to face her again. “It’s a long road, and sometimes the first steps are the most difficult.”

Sylvia looks down at Fera’s hands, her nails grown to sharp, retractable claws, her skin showing black as an oil spill where it isn’t covered in short auburn fur. Though she still has thumbs, there are long dewclaws sprouting from her wrists. Sylvia knows how much those hands would scare most people, how they would horrify all the blanks still clinging to their illusions of inviolable, immutable humanity. But they make her feel safe, and she holds them tight and forces a smile for Fera.

“Well, we don’t want to keep your friends waiting,” Sylvia says. “It’s bad enough, me showing up wearing all these damned clothes. I don’t want them to think I’m rude in the bargain.” Fera laughs, a sound that’s really more like barking, and she kisses Sylvia lightly on her left cheek. “You just try to relax, mon enfant trouvé. And trust me. They’re absolutely gonna love—” but then someone interrupts her, another leopard, a pudgy boy cat clutching a tattered copy of The Children of Artemis, which Fera signs for him. And she listens patiently to the questions he asks, all of which could have been answered with a quick internet search. Sylvia pretends not to eavesdrop on an argument between one of the hotel staff and a woman with crocodile skin, and when the leopard boy finally stops talking, Fera leads Sylvia away from the crowded elevators towards one of the hotel’s bars.

And this is before—before the flight from Detroit to LAX, before the taxi ride to the hotel in Burbank. This is before the bad dreams she had on the plane, before the girl with cranberry skin, before the elevator’s controlled fall from the twenty-third floor of the Marriott. This is a night and an hour and a moment from a whole year before Fera Delacroix takes her hand and leads her out of the lobby to the bar where there are people waiting to meet her.

“What’s this?” her mother asks in the same sour, accusatory tone she’s wielded all of Sylvia’s life. And Sylvia, who’s just come home from work and has a migraine, stares at the scatter of magazines and pamphlets lying on the dining table in front of her, trying to make sense of the question and all the glossy, colorful paper. Trying to think through the pain and the sudden, sick fear coiled cold and tight in her gut.

“I asked you a question, Sylvia,” her mother says. “What are you doing with this crap?”

And Sylvia opens her mouth to reply, but her tongue doesn’t want to cooperate. Down on the street, she can hear the traffic, and the distant rumble of a skipjet somewhere far overhead, and the sleepy drone of the refrigerator from the next room.

“I want an answer,” her mother says and taps the cover of an issue of Genshift with her right index finger.

“Where did you get those?” Sylvia asks finally, but her voice seems farther away than the skipjet’s turbines. “You’ve been in my room again, haven’t you?”

“This is my house, young lady, and I’m asking you the questions,” her mother growls, growling like a pit bull, like something mean and hungry straining at its fraying leash. “What are you doing with all this sick shit?”

And the part of Sylvia’s mind that knows how to lie, the part that keeps her secrets safe and has no problem saying whatever needs to be said, takes over. “It’s one of my stories,” she says, trying hard to sound indignant, instead of frightened. “It’s all just research. I brought it home last week—”

“Bullshit. Since when does the network waste time with this kind of deviant crap?” her mother demands, and she taps the magazine again. On the cover, there’s a nude woman with firm brown nipples and the gently curved, corkscrew horns of an impala.

“Just because you don’t happen to approve of the changelings doesn’t mean they aren’t news,” Sylvia tells her, and hastily begins gathering up all the pamphlets and magazines. “Do you have any idea how many people have had some sort of interspecific genetic modification over the last five years?”

“Are you a goddamn lesbian?” her mother asks, and Sylvia catches the smell of gin on her breath.

“What?”

“They’re all a bunch of queers and perverts,” her mother mumbles and then snatches one of the Fellowship of Parahuman Evolutionists pamphlets from Sylvia’s hands. “If this is supposed to be work for the network, why’d you have to go and hide it all under your bed?”

“I wasn’t hiding anything, mother, and this isn’t any of your business,” and Sylvia yanks the pamphlet back from her mother. “How many times have I asked you to stay out of my room?”

“It’s my house, and—”

“That means I have no privacy?”

“No ma’am. Not if it means you bringing this smut into my house.”

“Jesus, it’s for work. You want to call Mr. Padgett right now and have him tell you the same damned thing?” And there, it’s out before she thinks better of pushing the lie that far, pushing it as far as it’ll go, and there’s no taking it back again.

“I ought to do that, young lady. You bet. That’s exactly what I ought to do.”

“So do it, and leave me alone. You know the number.”

“Don’t you think I won’t.”

“I have work to do before dinner,” Sylvia says, as calmly as she can manage, turning away from her mother, beginning to wonder if she’ll make it upstairs before she throws up. “I have a headache, and I really don’t need you yelling at me right now.”

“Don’t think that I won’t call. I’m a Christian woman, and I don’t want that filth under my roof, you understand me, Sylvia?”

She doesn’t reply, because there’s nothing left to be said, and the cold knot in her belly has started looking for a way out, the inevitable path of least resistance. She takes her briefcase and the magazines and heads for the hallway and the stairs leading away from her mother. Just keep walking, she thinks. Whatever else she says, don’t even turn around. Don’t say anything else to her. Not another word. Don’t give her the satisfaction—

“I know all about those people,” her mother mumbles. “They’re filth, you understand? All of them. Every single, goddamned one.”

And then Sylvia’s on the stairs, and her footsteps on the varnished wood are louder than her mother’s voice. She takes them two at a time, almost running to the top, and locks her bedroom door behind her. Sylvia hurls the stack of changeling literature to the floor in a violent flutter of pages, and the antelope girl’s large, dark eyes gaze blamelessly back up at her. She sits down with her back against the door, not wanting to cry but crying anyway, crying because at least it’s better than vomiting.

And later—after her first three treatments at the Lycaon Clinic in Chicago, after the flight to LA, after Fera Delacroix takes her hand and leads her into the murmur and half light of the hotel bar—she’ll understand that this afternoon, this moment, was her turning point. She’ll look back and see clearly that this is the day she knew what she would do, no matter how much it terrified her, and no matter what it would mean, in the end.

They sit in a corner of the crowded, noisy bar, two tables pulled together to make room for everyone, this perfect, unreal menagerie. Sylvia sits to the left of Fera, sipping at a watery Coke. Fera’s already introduced her to them all, a heady mix of changeling minor royalty and fellow travelers, and Sylvia has been sitting quietly for the last fifteen minutes, listening to them talk, trying to memorize their names, trying not to stare.

“It’s a damned dangerous precedent,” the man sitting directly across from her says. He has the night-seeing eyes of a python, and he drums his long claws nervously against the top of the table. His name is Maxwell White, and he’s a geneticist at Johns Hopkins. Her last year in college, Sylvia read his book, Looking for Moreau: A Parahumanist Manifesto. It’s made the American Library Association’s list of most frequently banned books seven years straight.

“What the hell,” Fera says. “I figure, it’s just fucking Nebraska—”

Maxwell White stops drumming his fingers and sighs, his long ears going flat against the sides of his skull. “Sure, this year it’s just fucking Nebraska. But, the way things are headed, next year it’s going to be Nebraska and Alabama and Utah and—”

“We can’t afford to be elitists,” says a woman with iridescent scales that shimmer faintly in the dim light. As she talks, the tip end of her blue forked tongue flicks across her lips; Sylvia can’t recall her name, only that she was recently fired from Duke University. “Not anymore. That asshole De Vries and his army of zealots is getting more press than the war.”

“Oh, come on. It’s not that bad,” Fera says and frowns.

“How bad does it have to be?” Maxwell White asks and starts drumming his claws again. “Where do you think this is going to stop? After these anti-crossbreeding laws are in place and people get used to the idea that it’s acceptable to restrict who we can and can’t marry, who we can fuck, how long do you think it’s going to take before we start seeing laws preventing us from voting or owning property or—”

“Maybe that’s what we get for signing a declaration of secession from the human race,” Fera replies, and Maxwell White makes an angry snorting sound.

“Jesus Christ, Fera, sometimes I wonder which side you’re on.”

“All I’m saying is I’m not so sure we can realistically expect to have it both ways. We tell them we’re not the same as them anymore. That, by choice, each of us will exist as our own separate species, and then we act surprised when they want to treat us like animals.”

“De Vries has already started talking about concentration camps,” a woman named Alex Singleton says; she glances apprehensively at Fera and then quickly back down at the napkin she’s been folding and unfolding for the past ten minutes. Alex Singleton has the striped, blonde fur of a tiger-lion hybrid, and six perfectly formed breasts. “Are you still going to be talking like this when they start rounding us up and locking us in cages?” she asks, and unfolds the napkin again.

“That’s never going to happen,” Fera replies, and scowls at Alex Singleton. “I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of scary people out there. Of course, there are. We’ve just given the bigots and xenophobes something new to hate, that’s all. We knew there’d be a difficult adjustment period, didn’t we?”

“You have the most sublime knack for understatement,” Maxwell White laughs.

And then Fera turns to Sylvia and smiles, that smile so beautiful that it’s enough to make her dizzy, to make her blush. “You’re awfully quiet over here, Syl. What do you think of all this? You think we’re all about to be rounded up and herded off to a zoo?”

“I’m afraid I’ve never been much for politics,” Sylvia says, not meaning to whisper, but her voice is almost lost in the din of the bar. “I mean, I don’t guess I’ve thought much about it.”

“Of course, she hasn’t,” Alex Singleton mutters. “Look at her. She still wears clothes. She’s pink as—”

“I think maybe what Alex is trying to say, in her own indelicate way,” the woman with iridescent scales interrupts, “is that you’re probably going to find the political ramifications of our little revolution will suddenly seem a lot more important to you, once you start showing.”

“That’s not at all what I was trying to say.”

“Some of us forget they were ever blank,” Fera says, glaring at Alex Singleton, and she stirs at her martini with an olive skewered on a tiny plastic cutlass.

The thin man sitting next to Maxwell White clears his throat and waves at Sylvia with a hand that’s really more of a paw. “Fera tells us you’re one of Collier’s patients,” he says, speaking very slowly, his lupine jaws and tongue struggling with the words. “He’s a good man.”

“I’m very happy with him,” Sylvia replies, and takes another sip of her Coke.

“He did my second stage,” the wolf man confides, and his black lips draw back in a snarl, exposing sharp yellow canines and incisors. It takes Sylvia a moment to realize that the man’s smiling.

“So,” Maxwell White says, leaning towards her, “what’s your

story, Sylvia?”

“Like Fera said, I’m a journalist, and I’m preparing to write a book on the history—”

“No, that’s not what I’m asking you.”

“I’m sorry. Then I guess I didn’t understand the question.”

“Apparently not.”

“Max here is one-third complete bastard,” Fera says and jabs an ebony thumb at Maxwell White. “It was a tricky bit of bioengineering, but the results are a wonder to behold.” Half the people at the two tables laugh out loud, and Sylvia is beginning to wish that she’d stayed in her room, that she’d never let Fera Delacroix talk her into coming to Burbank in the first place.

“Is it some sort of secret, what you’re hiding under that dress?” Maxwell White asks, and Sylvia shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “It’s not a secret. I mean—”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Back off just a little, Max,” Fera says, and the man with python eyes nods his head and shrugs.

“He does this to everyone, almost,” Alex Singleton says and begins to shred her napkin. “He did it to me.”

“It’s not a secret,” Sylvia says again. “I just—”

“You don’t have to tell anyone here anything you’re not ready to tell them, Syl,” Fera assures her and kisses her cheek. Fera Delacroix’s breath smells like vodka and olives. “You know that.”

“It’s just that none of us are wearing masks,” Maxwell White says. “You might have noticed that.”

“Excuse me, please,” Sylvia says, suddenly close to tears and her heart beating like the wings of a small and terrified bird trapped deep inside her chest. She stands up too fast, bumps the table hard with her right knee, and almost spills her drink.

“You’re a son of a bitch,” Fera growls at Maxwell White, and she bares her teeth. “I hope you know that.”

“No, really, it’s okay,” Sylvia says, forcing an unconvincing smile. “I’m fine. I understand, and I’m fine. I just need some fresh air, that’s all.”

And then she leaves them all sitting there in the shadows, murmuring and laughing among themselves. Sylvia doesn’t look back, concentrates, instead, on the sound of her espadrilles against the wide stone tiles, and she makes it almost all the way to the elevators before Fera catches up with her.

On the plane, somewhere high above the Rockies and streaking towards Los Angeles through clearing, night-bound skies, Sylvia drifts between the velvet and gravel folds of dream sleep. She dozed off with the volume setting on her tunejack pushed far enough towards max that the noise of the flight attendants and the other passengers and the skipjet’s turbines wouldn’t wake her. So, there’s only Beethoven’s 6th Symphony getting in from the outside, and the voices inside her head. She’s always hated flying, and took two of the taxi-cab yellow Placidmil capsules her therapist prescribed after her first treatment gave her insomnia.

In the nightmare, she stands alone on the crumbling bank of a sluggish, muddy river washed red as blood by the setting sun. She doesn’t know the name of the city rising up around her, and suspects that it has no name. Only dark and empty windows, skyscrapers like broken teeth, the ruins of bridges that long ago carried the city’s vanished inhabitants from one side of the wide red river to the other.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us, and isn’t that what Matthew Arnold wrote, or T. S. Eliot, or Maharshi Ramakrishna, or some other long dead man? Sylvia takes a step nearer the river, and a handful of earth tumbles into the water. The ripples spread out from the shore, until the current pulls them apart.

Behind her, something has begun to growl—a low and threatful sound, the sound of something that might tear her apart in an instant. She glances over her shoulder, but there’s only the buckled, abandoned street behind her and then the entrance to an alleyway. It’s already midnight in the alley, and she knows that the growling thing is waiting for her there, where it has always waited for her. She turns back to the river, because the thing in the alley is patient, and the swollen crimson sun is still clinging stubbornly to the western horizon.

And now she sees that it’s not the sunset painting the river red, but the blood of the dead and dying creatures drowning in the rising waters. The river devours their integrity, wedding one to the other, flesh to flesh, bone to bone. In another moment, there’s only a single strangling organism, though a thousand pairs of eyes stare back at her in agony and horror, and two thousand hearts bleed themselves dry through a million ruptured veins.

And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

Countless talons and fingers, flippers and fins, tear futilely at the mud and soft earth along the river’s edge, but all are swept away. And when the sun has gone, Sylvia turns to face the alley, and the growling thing that is her life, and wakes to the full moon outside the skipjet’s window.

“You can’t expect more of them,” Fera says, “Not more than you expect of the straights, not just because they’re going through the same thing you are.”

“None of us are going through the same thing,” Sylvia replies, not caring whether or not Fera hears the bitterness in her voice. “We’re all going through this alone. Every one of us is alone, just like White said in his book. Every one of us is a species of one.”

“I think you expect too much,” Fera says, and then the elevator has reached the twenty-third floor, and the hidden bell rings, and the doors slide silently open. Sylvia steps out into the hall.

“Please promise me you won’t spend the whole weekend locked in your room,” Fera says. “At least come back down for Circe Seventeen’s panel at eight, and—”

“Yeah,” Sylvia says as the doors slide shut again. “Sure. I’ll see you there,” and she follows the hallway back to her room.

Sylvia is standing in front of the long bathroom mirror, her skin tinted a pale and sickly green by the buzzing fluorescent light. She’s naked, except for the gauze bandages and flesh-tone dermapad patches on her belly and thighs. The hot water is running, and the steam has begun to fog the mirror. She leans forward and wipes away some of the condensation.

“There’s always a risk of rejection,” Dr. Collier said, and that was more than three weeks ago now, her third trip to the Lycaon Clinic. “You understood that before we began. There’s always the risk of a violate retrovirus, especially when the transcription in question involves non-amniote DNA.”

And, of course, she’d understood. He’d told her everything, all the risks and qualifying factors explained in detail long before her first treatment. Everyone always understands, until they’re the one unlucky fuck in a thousand.

No one ever lied to me, she thinks, but there’s no consolation whatsoever in the thought.

In places, the bandages are stained and stiff with the discharge of her infections. Sylvia dries her hands on a clean white wash cloth, then begins to slowly remove the dermapad just below her navel. The adhesive strips around the edges come away with bits of dead skin and dried blood still attached.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” Dr. Collier said, the first time they met. “Even now, with all we know and everything that we’ve been able to accomplish in the last fifty years, what you want is very, very dangerous. And if something does go wrong, there’s very little hope of turning back.” And then she signed all the documents stating that he’d told her these things, and that she understood the perils and uncertainty, and that she was submitting to the procedures of her own free will.

She takes a deep breath and stares back at herself from the mirror, the sweat on her face to match the steam on the glass, and drops the dermapad into the sink. It stains the water a dark reddish-brown. And her mother, and all the faces from the bar—Maxwell White and Alex Singleton and all the rest—seem to hover somewhere just behind her. They smirk and shake their heads, just in case she’s forgotten that the rest of the world always knew she was weak and that, in the end, she’d get exactly what she’s always had coming to her.

I know all about those people. They’re filth, you understand? All of them. Every single, goddamned one.

The rubbery violet flesh beneath her navel is swollen and marbled with pustules and open sores. The tip of a stillborn tentacle, no longer than her index finger, hangs lifeless from her belly. Dr. Collier wanted to amputate it, but she wouldn’t let him.

“I hate like hell to say it, but he’s right,” Fera Delacroix told her, after the scene in the hotel bar, while they were waiting for an elevator. “You can’t keep it a secret forever, Syl. What you’re doing—what everyone here this weekend is doing—it’s about finally being honest about ourselves. I know that doesn’t necessarily make it easy, but it’s the truth.”

“No,” Sylvia says, gently touching the dead tentacle. “This is the truth.” She presses her finger into one of the tiny, stalked suckers, teasing the sharp hook at the center. “I think this is all the truth I need.”

She cleans the cancerous flesh and covers it with a fresh dermapad, then peels off one of the patches on her left thigh and repeats the process. It takes her more than an hour to wash and dress all the lesions, and when she’s done, when all those dying parts of her that are no longer precisely human have been hidden behind their sterile masks, she shuts off the water and gets dressed. She still has time for a light dinner before Circe Seventeen’s talk on the link between shamanism and the origins of parahumanism, and Sylvia knows that if she isn’t there, Fera Delacroix will come looking for her.

© 2005 by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Originally appeared in Outsiders,
edited by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Caitlín R. Kiernan has published seven novels, most recently The Red Tree, which has been nominated for the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards. Her short fiction has been collected into several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others. In Spring 2011, Subterranean Press will release Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One). She studied geology and paleontology at the University of Alabama and the University of Colorado, and has published in several scientific journals, including the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. She’s currently working on her next novel. Kiernan lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her partner, Kathryn.

Author Spotlight: Caitlín R. Kiernan
Erin Stocks

A motion like the “Provisional Proposition for Parahuman Secession” is a fascinating take on polymorphism. Did your knowledge of paleontology play any sort of role in writing this story?

I didn’t so much draw on paleontology specifically as, more generally, my background in biology and genetics. Though maybe my perspective, which comes largely from evolutionary biology, makes it easier to understand the mutability of species, of both genotypes and phenotypes.

It seems, eventually, given one’s stance on evolution and bio-engineering, this could be an issue in our future. How many years ahead do you think we’d need to jump in order for this to be a possibility?

I think we’d have to jump decades, at least, and assume nothing interrupts the current direction of bioengineering. We already have the technology to clone chimeras, hybrids, at an embryonic and chromosomal stage. There have already been successful transspecies fusions. People have applied for patents on chimeric organisms. The Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act has been introduced to the House of Representatives and the Senate, seeking to ban this sort of research. However, here we’re talking about making genetic and embryonic changes. Making radical changes beyond that stage, the sorts of changes depicted in the story, that’s an entirely different problem, changing an organism’s genetic makeup beyond the blastocyst. It’s the difference between germline engineering and somatic engineering, where, in theory, changes could be made to adults. That’s a big, big jump.

We feel Sylvia’s obvious discomfort and awkwardness throughout the story. She’s gone through quite the ordeal in trying to become comfortable in her own skin and with her own desires, which bears similarity to many common prejudices of today; race, gender, sexuality, to name a few. Was this intentional?

Very much so. I don’t feel like I write many “message” stories, not in a political sense. But in “Faces in Revolving Souls,” the metaphor is pretty obvious. As much as it’s a story about parahumans, it’s also a story about very real prejudices that are with us right now. The prejudices, the social and medical difficulties faced by transgendered persons comes most immediately to mind, but it can be extended to sexual orientation, race, sexism, and so on. Also, clearly, I’m addressing the prejudices encountered by people who choose any sort of extreme body modification.

Succession from the human race is an enormous issue, one I don’t think we’ve dealt with yet as a society. Why do you think these parahumans chose to make such a strong statement, rather than considering themselves just a different subcategory of humanity? Was it the severity of their biological makeup, or did it go deeper than that?

We’re already seeing the emergence of fringe groups who call themselves Otherkin, or therianthropes, or parahumanists. But, I think the point is, there are humans who do not see themselves as humans, and we get back around to issues of body image, dysmorphic psychologies, and morphological freedom. In the story, these people do not self-identify as human, and they feel so strongly about this they’re willing to risk social stigma, and maybe even the loss of fundamental human rights, to be seen as they wish to be seen. And, from a scientific perspective, if you could achieve this sort of somatic engineering, fusing the DNA of adult humans with that other species, you’d essentially create new species every time an individual was altered. They’d be unable to interbreed with humans, so would fail to pass the criteria for the biological species concept.

Things don’t go as Sylvia had hoped. She’s trapped–unable to truly be like the others she feels most at home with–and as the doctor says there’s very little hope of turning back, will her body break down completely? And that was a risk everyone took, in order to become the way they wanted?

Well, I intentionally left the story open ended. But yeah, that’s the chance each of these characters has taken to become a “species of one.” Sylvia knew the risks upfront, but made the decision to undergo the process anyway. Again, the comparisons with transgendered people who undergo hormonal and surgical alterations come to mind. Even now, those changes carry varying degrees of risks. Things can go wrong. What will ultimately happen to Sylvia? I don’t know, honestly. I would imagine she’s facing all manner of catastrophic illnesses following from the rampant emergence of retroviruses in her body, cancers and autoimmune disorders and so on. We see it’s already begun at the end of the story.

Erin Stocks is a writer and musician newly transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in Flash Fiction Online (upcoming), the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading slush for Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, critting works for her SFF writing group, the Self-Forging Fragments, and rambling on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

The Art and History of Body Modification
Lori St. Leone

Body Modification. The term can have weird and scary implications for people who have no personal interest or experience in the subject, and it can be all too easy to judge or malign its participants and practitioners. But in reality, to willfully modify one’s body is to take part in a culture and tradition that spans class, race, and human history like nothing else.

In the simplest terms, “body modification” means to deliberately alter one’s physical appearance, though people usually assume the phrase applies only to such practices as tattooing and piercing or the more esoteric branding and scarification. However, all one has to do is look at society’s present definition of aesthetic to discover that almost all of us engage in some form of bodymodding or other. For instance, it would be pretty hard to find a woman these days who doesn’t have her ears pierced, and one of the most involved, long-term, and committed types of body modification, bodybuilding, is not often even considered to be so. And, of course, surgical body modification has become extremely common in the form of cosmetic surgery, but that’s rarely considered shocking or odd unless the procedure goes wrong or the resulting aesthetic is outside of the socially accepted standard of beauty.

In every group of humans in known and recorded history, there have been members who modified their bodies. The reasons behind their choices vary widely, even within a single society. In many cultures around the world, social status, group affiliations, and wealth are advertised with jewelry and adornments; in others, deeper meanings are behind the punctures, scars, and tattoos they wear. In certain African cultures, for instance, rites of passage successfully completed are denoted by scarrings all over the face and body, painfully administered by the practiced hand of an elder or religious leader, the discomfort bravely endured by the new initiate, and the marks worn proudly ever after. In some groups of people in India and Southeast Asia, genital modifications are sought after by devotees of the arts of love, and desired and preferred by their partners. And, of course, in almost every culture there are modifications that are done purely for aesthetic reasons–adornment and beautification of both sexes and all genders, striving towards an accepted goal or standard of human perfection within their culture.

So, with all that said, let’s look at some of the history and present practices of a few of the more common (and uncommon) body mods.

Piercing

It’s a commonly accepted misconception that body piercing is a relatively recent trend or fashion, but ear piercing, of course, is incredibly common in almost every culture throughout history, with a huge range of legends, myths, and meanings behind the jewelry worn and its placement. Nostril piercing has been documented in the Middle East as far back as 4,000 years. The fashion continued in India in the sixteenth century, and is still widely practiced there to this day. Both ear and nostril piercing and jewelry are mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 24:22, Isaiah 3:21). And piercings in other parts of the body, such as labret or lip piercings, are widely practiced often in the form of enlarged piercings and lip discs. Tribes across Africa, in Southeast Asia, and in North and South America all participate in lip piercing.

And today, of course, all of these types of piercings are still practiced in the West, though the primary motivation behind them is aesthetic adornment and enhancement.

Tattooing

Tattooing, as we know it, can be documented as far back as 3300 BCE as seen in the discovery of Otzi the iceman in 1991 and ancient Egyptian mummies bearing tattoos of animals and various creatures. The practice, however, is believed to have originated over 10,000 years ago. The mechanics of tattooing have changed a bit over the years, and the pigments and inks used have wildly improved in recent times, but whether hand-tapped, poked with a single needle, or administered with the telltale buzz of a modern tattoo machine, the basic reasons behind the choice to become tattooed haven’t changed much in all that time: fashion, function, or just to make a statement of some kind.

People have also been forcibly tattooed to identify them permanently as criminals or undesirables in society, and that associated stigma of tattooing as “lowbrow” or undesirable still exists in the minds of many. Despite that, tattoos are enjoying a resurgence of popularity and are very common in modern culture, and for the most part, accepted as the norm.

Scarification & Branding

Traditionally, scarification is seen most widely amongst dark-skinned people in equatorial regions-people who tend to have so much melanin in their skin that tattooing isn’t very effective, visually. The “crocodile” people of Papua New Guinea’s Sepik region, several Aboriginal tribes in northern Australia, and the Karo people of Ethiopia are just a few of the many cultures who, to this day, participate in traditional rites involving scarification.

In the modern-day Western context, scarification and branding, while markedly less popular than tattooing, are still common forms of body modification, with beautiful end results for many devotees. The aesthetic outcome of a healed scarification, however, has less to do with the artist and more to do with the healing and genetics of the wearer, and that (along with the pain and discomfort of the procedure and healing) will probably ensure that scarification never becomes as common as, say, getting a tattoo.

Implanting

The process of surgically implanting a foreign object beneath the skin is a relatively recent development, but genital beading (or “pearling”, as pearls are a very commonly implanted item) has been common among seaman in the South Pacific and the Japanese Yakuza for several hundred years, although specifics about the history of pearling are rather vague. It is also extremely prevalent in the prison systems of the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. Indeed, it’s still a commonly requested procedure in many piercing studios in the western world, with biocompatible Teflon or silicone beads and ribs replacing the non-sterile and possibly dangerous organic implants traditionally installed. And, of course, in Western society, plastic surgeons implant foreign objects into people every day in the form of breast, calf, and chin implants.

Transdermal implants–a surgical implant placed beneath the skin, passing outward like a single-point piercing–have been experimented with by many underground “cutters,” a term for body modification practitioners with a great deal of surgical skill and training who work quasi-legally or illegally performing surgical procedures on select clientele. While somewhat problematic to heal, these forms of implants are still popular with die-hard body mod devotees and in the last decade, transdermal jewelry has been redesigned and procedures refined to the point where one can walk into a piercing studio almost anywhere in the world and acquire a microdermal. Also called “surface anchors,” microdermals are small bases implanted beneath the dermis in a quick, simple procedure with no more trauma than any other piercing. The microdermal’s threaded end then heals flush to the skin, allowing threaded attachments to be worn and interchanged as desired. Metal mohawks of spikes, sparkling gems worn all over the body, and gleaming accents to pre-existing tattoos are just a few ways people are wearing these fashionable implants. However, surface anchors require an ongoing commitment to care and adjusting one’s lifestyle to accommodate the piercing, and therefore, won’t suit everybody, but they are a huge advancement in body modification and wildly popular.

Hardcore

Other surgical modifications seen in recent times are ear pointing, tongue splitting, and many different genital modifications, all offered by “cutters” and in many cases, by sympathetic board-certified surgeons. But even within the bodymod community at large, these types of modifications are often considered “hardcore,” are generally more unusual (though not uncommon) and are mostly of interest to those body modification enthusiasts motivated to push the boundaries of social acceptance.

Body modification has been around as long as humans have lived, and with its rich and fascinating history, the practice is unlikely to die out anytime soon. But despite some lingering societal disdain, modifications, even of the more esoteric variety, are becoming more mainstream and acceptable every day, and the craft behind performing these procedures is being constantly perfected and refined by the artists involved. Professional organizations such as the Association of Professional Piercers and the Alliance of Professional Tattooists promote continuing education to artists to teach new techniques and skills, and educate potential clients as to the risks and benefits of modifications and how best to safely acquire and heal their desired mods. And as new ideas and techniques become reality and traditional standbys are adapted and perfected, it’s safe to say that humans will continue to reshape and redefine themselves by modifying their bodies.

Lori St. Leone is a professional body modification artist with fifteen years of experience, and an internationally recognized expert within the body piercing industry. She resides in Darwin, Australia, where she works with two of the best piercers she’s ever known, and is owned by a tortoiseshell cat.

Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters
Alice Sola Kim

When Hwang finds a time that he likes, he tries to stay awake. The longest he has ever stayed awake is three days. The longest someone has ever stayed awake is eleven days. If Hwang sleeps enough times, he will eventually reach a time in which people do not have to sleep. Unfortunately, this can only come about through expensive gene therapy that has to be done long before one is born. Thus, it is the rich who do not have to sleep. They stay awake all night and bound across their useless beds, shedding crumbs and drops of sauce as they eat everyone else’s food.

Whenever Hwang goes to sleep, he jumps forward in time. This is a problem. This is not a problem that is going to solve itself.

Sometimes Hwang wakes to find that he’s only jumped forward a few days. The most Hwang has ever jumped is one hundred seventy years.

After a while, his daughters stop looking exactly Asian. His genes—previously distilled from a population in a small section of East Asia for thousands of years—have mixed with genes from other populations and continued to do so while Hwang slept. In fact, it all started with Hwang and his ex-wife. Hwang’s daughters are a crowd of beautiful, muddled, vigorous hybrids, with the occasional recessive trait exploding like fireworks—squash-colored hair, gray eyes, albinism.

Backward, fool, backward! You were supposed to take me backward! He wishes he could find Grishkov and scream at him, but Grishkov is dead, of course. He died sometime that night, the first night Hwang slept and jumped through days, years, decades.

Later, Hwang awakes in a world with no men. Reproduction occurs through parthenogenesis. Scientists discovered that the genes of the father are the ones that shorten human lifespan; scientists decided to do something about it.

There are people walking around who look like men, but they aren’t men. But if they look like men, walk like men, talk like men, maybe they are men?

There are new categories of gender that Hwang is unable to comprehend. Men are men. He finds a daughter who is a man, so she must actually be a son, but in Hwang’s mind—his mind that he cannot change—he is his daughter and always will be.

If you could flip through Hwang’s life like a book—which I am able to do—you would see that Hwang and women have been a calamitous combination. It is not Hwang’s fault or the women’s fault but it is unfortunate nevertheless. I wish there was someone to blame.

Once, Hwang awakes to find no one. He walks around the city for hours before seeing a woman in a coverall. She is pulling vines off the side of a building and stuffing them into a trash bag. I am paid millions a year for this work, she says.

Even for the future, that is a lot of money.

It turns out that everyone has been uploaded into virtual space, but a few people still have to stick around to make sure that buildings stay up and the tanks are clean and operational.

Later, everyone comes back, because it turns out that no one really likes uploaded life.

Hwang’s wife was a research scientist. When they divorced, Hwang was granted temporary full custody and his wife went to Antarctica. Sometimes she sent their three children humorous emails about falling asleep on the toilet because it was so cold.

When their daughters were kidnapped walking home from school, Hwang’s wife and Hwang both blamed Hwang. Their son turned fifteen, became a goth, and moved in with his mother when she returned from Antarctica.

Hwang, alone, rested his head on pillowcases permanently smudged with black. And slept for days.

Hwang says, When people are able to live forever, that is when I will get my life back. I can marry again. We can have a family. When I awake, they will still be there, old as cedars. My cedar family, planted in the living room.

I will live forever, but marriage between Hwang and I is out of the question.

Sometimes one of Hwang’s daughters will buy him new clothes, but he always wakes up wearing his old clothes. He has been frumpy, archaic, obscene, unworthy of notice, and perfectly in style—all those things, in that order.

There is a future in which skanky summer is quite popular. People walk around in bathing suits, waterproof briefs, shorts, breast-baring monokinis, sarongs—all with personal climate control units attached to the base of their necks.

Hwang emerges from his room, shivering in a wrinkled button-down, sweater, and corduroy pants. That day, the rain drifts down as gently as snow, and it gets you wet so gradually that you are startled to realize it, like a boiled frog in a pot of water.

Hwang never sees his son again. Upon waking for the first time, Hwang goes out into the world and finds that his son is a computer mogul who lives in a cheesy yet terrifying house surrounded by a moat. This house has no right angles, and a viscous red substance continually flows down the sides and into the moat.

A security guard grabs the back of Hwang’s jacket as he backs up to get a running start so he can jump the moat. You’ll never make it, she says, and he realizes that the security guard is his daughter. She sighs, looking him up and down. There’s a shelter a few miles away. You can get a decent meal. I’ll drive you.

His daughter does not look how he’d expect, but her eyes, when she glances at him in the rear-view mirror, are familiar and bright. But I’m his father, says Hwang. She laughs.

The computer mogul, famously, has no father (and says so often). Of course. Hwang sits in the back seat like a lump. He realizes that he can no longer enumerate to himself the ways in which he has failed, that his failure has turned into an exponential number residing within him, sleek and unutterably dense and deadly.

There is a time during which Hwang’s visits are foreseen. His daughters tell him that his story has been passed down from their mothers. That their great-great-great...will come into their lives, recognizable by his blue sweater and brown corduroy pants (You dress like a fucking teddy bear, his son used to say—it felt like affection).

And then what? It is disputed. Is Hwang a force of good? Is he evil? How does he choose which daughters he appears to? Is he a matrilineal family curse? He tries to explain but it is not satisfying to his daughters.

The next time he jumps, it is a hundred years later and his story has been forgotten.

Hwang’s daughter listens to his story. When he is done, she pulls a pill case from her bag. Sounds like you need to change your point of view, she says. Try a Chip or a Barbara.

Hwang chooses a pill from the compartment labeled “Chip.” Chip and Barbara are personality construct drugs, named for the people from whom they originated.

In an hour, he feels loose. He is young, and has plenty of time to decide what he wants to be when he grows up. He doesn’t know if he wants to have kids yet. Come on, man, that’s ages away. Let’s have some fun before fun ends.

Hwang is still Chip when he goes to sleep, but it wears off in the night. He goes to find it again, to feel simultaneously free yet locked into the right time with no sense of slippage, but discovers that Chip and Barbara have been taken off the market.

In bare feet, Hwang was half an inch shorter than his wife, which seemed within the bounds of acceptability. But the world conspired to tip this delicate balance, with slanted sidewalks, with Italian heels, with poor posture. Hwang and his ex-wife each thought that the other cared more about their height discrepancy.

Your wife is white? said a sophisticated older aunt. Then your daughters will be beautiful. They were, because all daughters were beautiful; that is what Hwang believed. But Hwang was never one to be proud of their beauty. He was proud because they were brilliant, or they were about to be; they were at the age at which youthful precocity grew distinct and immutable. That is where they stayed.

Hwang always wakes up in the lab. The lab is always the same.

The time machine is a gnarled, charred mess on the floor, and the curtains are skeletons. Grishkov’s body is curled like a cat in the corner; his face is untouched like a peaceful waxwork, and for that, Hwang is grateful. Hwang sleeps on the couch, which has blackened and split like a bratwurst. As unkind and sooty as the lab is, Hwang lingers there to hold off timeshock and cultureshock.

When he needs to use the bathroom, he has to leave.

In time, Hwang begins to suspect that he is not only being pulled forward in time as he sleeps; he is also being pulled sideways in space, to parallel universes.

He thinks he has confirmation of this fact when he arrives at a time when everyone is green. (Don’t worry—there is still racism!)

Hwang sits with his daughter at a diner and tries to question her about what has happened. She explains, but language has changed, and he has trouble understanding her. Lincoln, he says. Kennedy. Were they assassinated in this timeline? She opens her mouth and taps at her translator earbud.

Doowah? she says.

Soon there are no more bananas. The iconic Cavendish banana, tall and bright and constant, has gone extinct. It is true that no one’s favorite fruit is the banana. But now that bananas as he knew them are gone, Hwang feels like he’s been trapped in a house without windows.

There is no backwards from this forwards. No more bananas for anyone ever again.

Hwang has learned a valuable life lesson: never allow someone to test a time machine on you.

No matter how certain they are it will work.

No matter how certain you are that it will enable you to fix your life and the lives of your loved ones.

But Hwang must have done some good for his later daughters; he has to have done some good; he has to.

Would it all be worth it, then?

Once, he wakes up, opens the door to the lab, and steps into water. He doesn’t know how to swim. He is a giant lead teddy bear sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and as he flails in the water, his thoughts are not about how it’s all over thank god, they are about expelling water from his lungs and if he could just take another breath please that would be perfect thank you thank you thank you let me live.

Someone grabs him and pulls him up. It’s a woman wearing a cheap waiter’s tuxedo. All around them, houses and restaurants and offices bob impossibly.

Do you have a reservation? The woman, his daughter, asks. He is exhausted. Fine, his daughter says. Wait here. I’ll bring something. Don’t touch anything. You need to be disinfected. His daughters are always so exasperated with him.

The time after that, everything is dry again. Hwang asks his daughter where the ocean is. His daughter shrugs. We put it somewhere else. It was in the way.

Hwang needs to understand that someday he will wake up and no one will be around, for good.

Once, when Hwang was thirteen, he came home to find his father strangling his mother. They rearranged themselves right as Hwang walked into the house; they must have heard his key. Stranglings can be quiet. He stood and saw his father flexing his hands and smiling, his mother wiping water out of her eyes and turning a sob into a smile, the way she turned seemingly random organic matter into food, work into money, disorder into order. If she was anti-entropic then his father was the opposite. Money for booze; so much grain goes into alcohol; carbohydrates are then wasted in the fermentation process; it is not sensible. Hwang had been sent to the library. When he came home early, it was awkward; Hwang did not know before then that the terrible could also be awkward.

His father did not murder his mother that day.

There comes a stable time, a time during which Hwang does not jump forward too crazily. He only goes a few days each time he sleeps. He sees his daughter often. He follows her around and pleads with her not to take the photon train to school; it is too fast. It is unnatural. She laughs. She goes to school in another state and her commute only takes half an hour.

Judgmental Hwang is aghast that people in the future react so placidly to risk, but he remembers things like bisphenol A and airborne toxic events and revealing your crush to a homophobe who will get so embarrassed that he will murder you, and then Hwang must admit that there were so many things in his time that he hadn’t thought to worry about.

Soon enough, his daughter becomes less amused by this great-great-great...popping up in her world every few days. Just go away, she says. Stop interloping. Get your own life. She shakes his arm off and kicks the wall. He watches as the wall slowly bulges out and undents itself.

That night he goes to sleep, vowing to find some way to protect his daughter, and he wakes up one hundred seventy years later.

Hwang wonders: when he dies, will his cells disperse and mass elsewhere to such an extent that there will be achronological patches in the air? Space dust that travels through time?

What is sleep for a single cell?

Once, I built Hwang a new life, made to look and feel like the early years of the second millennium, but he would not accept it. He stepped out of the lab and the lab was where it is supposed to be. There, on the street, a man in basketball shorts was peeling and eating a banana, which was, well, which was a little on the nose, but I wished for him to know that bananas were back and he could be happy again. (Right?) As were vehicles powered by fossil fuels, as was orthodontia, as was AIDS, as was lithium. For a moment, his face was the face of someone who has woken up from a dream and feels enormous relief that it is not real, what just happened.

But it didn’t last. He shook his head until his cheeks wobbled. He stamped his foot. The sidewalk began to sink and whirl beneath him.

Knew it, he shouted. No backwards from this forwards.

Up to his knees in the sidewalk, he sloshed ahead with effort and tried to touch whatever he could. The man eating the banana melted. The car melted. The German shepherd melted. Finally, the world rose above Hwang’s eyes and, after a brief burbling, he went silent.

Well. I did try.

Hwang tries to look at it this way: time jumps forward when you sleep no matter who you are.

The first time Hwang jumps forward in time, he comes out of his room into fifty years later. The time machine had caught fire, and Grishkov had had to pull him out before the sequence completed countdown. The fire spread and trapped them; they knew already that the dusty red fire extinguisher had been emptied three years ago during a prank and never refilled. Grishkov succumbed to the smoke first, bad-heart Grishkov still clutching Hwang by the forearms as he swanned to the floor. Then Hwang fainted, too.

When Hwang awakes, many people are dead and many new people are alive and everything seems somehow worse, despite all the new machines and pills and fashions.

As Hwang is drawn to his daughters, his daughters are drawn to him.

Hwang does not want to die, but there would not be a very good reason to stay alive if life was only jumping through time rapidly. (Wait.) He is now part of the time machine, and although he is broken he remains magnetized to his descendants, his daughters. Down a street, in a tree, in a bar, driving a hovercar–they always find one another. His daughters feed him, imagining that they are experiencing a random surge of kindness toward a dusty, gentle homeless man.

Hwang is guilty about this; he feels that he is enslaving his daughters and the best thing to do would be to release all of them from this obligation. That is when he does want to die.

But he decides to wait it out. He will reach the end of time. He will reach the end of daughters. Then he can end, too.

When Hwang is now, nobody knows. He is sleeping. He has been sleeping all night, and his eyelids fluttering and his mouth twitching from the struggle to stay asleep. He wants time to keep moving; he doesn’t want to stop anywhere, even though the light is seeping in around the curtains and the hours turn to day. I say to him, Dad, I won’t forget. I’ll be the one who remembers the story.

Still he sleeps. I watch him still. In his mind, I am already blurring.

Alice Sola Kim currently lives in San Francisco but occasionally finds herself in St. Louis, where she is completing an MFA program at Washington University. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Author Spotlight: Alice Sola Kim
Erin Stocks

You tell this story using sections that jump back and forth in Hwang’s life, similar to the way Hwang himself jumps back and forth in time. What drew you to that pattern?

Part of the answer is in the question itself—I wanted the structure of the story to mimic the time-jumps that Hwang endures over and over again, in order to evoke at least a ghost of that instability, that sense of unease. I also had some ideas that I wasn’t sure how to make use of individually. Those began to form the substance of the story, as I wrote it. I love throwaway ideas in science fiction—those weird, vivid little things that are more extensive than eyeball kicks but aren’t necessarily vital to the narrative. One favorite of mine is the telepathic Martian jackal (excuse me, WHAT) in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick.

And, someday I’d like to revisit the Chip and Barbara pills. Maybe they’ll get a bigger role, or they’ll pop up briefly but meaningfully, like telepathic Martian jackals.

Hwang is drawn to women, a calamitous combination, and we assume it’s because of what happened to his original daughters. He longs for a family again, for love. Are these feelings what drove him to Grishkov’s lab in the first place, which begot this endless cycle? If he ended up letting go of his daughters, would that change his future?

Like many stories before mine have admonished, never use a time machine to fix your problems. Never use a time machine to settle a score. It’s best to use it for something minor and boring and not-at-all personally meaningful, like traveling two minutes into the future to buy a pen. Even then, something will probably go wrong. Hwang does go to Grishkov’s lab in the hopes that he’ll be able to save his daughters, but everything goes extremely wrong.

As Hwang goes farther into the future, I think it would be increasingly hard for him to let go of his daughters. His daughters are the only constants he would have, as things like bananas and language as he knows it disappear. I think this can be both depressing and not-depressing. Whenever he goes, there is love. Love of a sort. New scenery. A mission to serve and protect. And maybe I don’t need to outline the more depressing implications.

Hwang also has a son, although after waking up the first time, he never sees him again. Why do you think that is, given his obvious desire to belong with those he loves?

There is the tragedy of what happens to Hwang’s daughters in the present-day timeline, but there is also the smaller, less dramatic tragedy of what happens to Hwang’s son. Hwang is consumed by the former, so much so that he can no longer live a normal life and be present for the people who do still need him. As badly as I feel for him, this is something that he has brought upon himself and his son; he is sorry when he realizes it, but by then, it’s too late. I don’t know if Hwang would find sons if he looked, and that’s another little tragedy right there-he never looks.

There are several constants in this story, objects and personas that anchor the reader in this story of time travel, as well as Hwang. Obviously his daughters, but also his frumpy clothes which he always wakes up in, the constantly changing world, and bananas. When bananas—“no one’s favorite fruit”—no longer exist, what does that finally do to Hwang?

The Cavendish variety of bananas is at risk of being wiped out by a fungus, and even though there are many other varieties around to replace it, I plonked Hwang down in a future in which those varieties are gone too. No bananas whatsoever! Bananas are the ever-present background players of fruit baskets; they’re dangling from those weird mobile-like things that are supposed to prevent bruising; they’re even hiding inside bread. The disappearance of this familiar element is a last straw for Hwang. Now he knows he has been flung away from his world, and he’s not stopping. Everything will only get weirder, colder, more alien.

At the end, we learn the nostalgic and sweet tone of the narrator is because she is one of his daughters, watching over her father as he sleeps. Is it possible Hwang is dreaming this all along, fixated on these memories of what might have been, jumping through “time” because of the endless possibilities of his daughters’ futures which he will never truly know?

It’s certainly possible!

What’s coming up next for you?

I’m writing this now from a little studio at I-Park (an artists’ residency in Connecticut), where I hope to get a lot of writing done for a novel. I also have some short stories in various stages of completion. So, after “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” comes out in Lightspeed, what’s next is a lot of writing unleavened by the joys of publication.

Erin Stocks is a writer and musician newly transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in Flash Fiction Online (upcoming), the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading slush for Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, critting works for her SFF writing group, the Self-Forging Fragments, and rambling on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Five Freaky Futures Your Kids Might Face
Genevieve Valentine

Everyone knows the old chestnut about how the children are our future. The good news is, it’s true! The bad news? It’s true.

We’re living in precarious times on a number of fronts-geological, biological, technological-and our actions now will profoundly change the literal and metaphorical landscape for the next generation. Unfortunately for everyone’s children, after a little investigation, we’re pretty sure that the future is the last place anybody wants to be.

Sadly, thanks to time dilation, only future-facing time travel is possible (we tried going the other direction-no dice), so since there’s no chance of changing the past, all we can do now is prepare the children of today for the bizarro, nightmarish situations of tomorrow.

Check out the following five freaky futures we think your kids might have to endure, and then sit them down for a very, very long talk. (And, while you’re at it, maybe you should reconsider Junior’s violin lessons in favor of an instrument that makes a sturdier weapon. Think trombone!)

1. When Animals Attack

We humans like to flatter ourselves that we’re the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. To that, the octopus says: Do each of your appendages have autonomous nervous systems?

Biological research over the last two decades has discovered unbelievable traits about our friends in the animal kingdom that prove one of two things: either we’ve missed something, or there’s some evolutionary sleight of hand going on that no one could have foreseen.

For instance, it’s been determined that ravens can fashion tools in order to perform complex mechanical operations, i.e. hooking a bird-scale bucket out of a well. Amazonian fire ants form rafts with their interlocked bodies to carry their queen to safety in case of flooding. And, in addition to the remarkable nervous system(s) boasted by your average octopus, their circulatory system allows them to be out of water for as long as thirty minutes at a stretch.

Upshot? Unless we start holding How to Make an Interlocking Human Raft workshops soon, it’s not hard to imagine that humanity’s days at the top are numbered and that your kids may someday be embroiled in the creepiest war of all: ravens, ants, and octopi vying for mastery of the Earth.

Picture it: the painful, Hitchcockian battlefield studded with the skeletons of any crow flying low enough for fire ants to get their mandibles on, the human corpses rotting under piles of ink-covered ants where an octopus has bested them, the desiccated corpses of octopi pummeled to death by murders of bucket-carrying crows.

So if your kids are going to be soldiers in this fight, we suggest the following precautions: a good pair of safety goggles, tucking the cuffs of their pants inside their boots, and getting hold of one or two durable, long-range flamethrowers. Beyond that, we can only wish them well.

(Editor’s tip: start a family tradition right now of being super-chummy with cephalopods; they’re our picks for the win, and it can’t hurt to be on friendly terms.)

2. Waterworld

Thanks to some questionable environmental practices over the last century or so, the polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate. And that rapid melt can mean only two things: that penguin-watching is turning into a game of Whack-a-Mole, and that water levels the world over will continue to rise (and rise, and rise).

So in a few hundred years or so, your great-great-grandkids could either be waging war for the last bits of high ground on Kilimanjaro, or they’ll be making their homes on a whole new frontier–the surface of the ocean.

If that’s the case, the technology underlying today’s offshore drilling platforms would most likely be called into widespread civilian service in order to provide a flexible infrastructure that would literally link communities together, not to mention give IKEA a corporate imperative for waterproof furniture that you cannot even believe. (Tell the kids to treasure Allen wrenches!)

This shifting demand in resources will also make desalinization plants the new oil refineries, and the world’s new power alliances would be determined by the wealthy and plant-rich water oligarchs latching their personal floats to the most prosperous artificial-island nations.

Imagine it: your kids would greet the day by walking out the door of their low-riding houseboat and onto a municipal floating walkway where they’ve applied for a citizen berth. Then it’s off in their personal Seadoo to Kevin Costner Memorial Plaza, where Junior-junior-junior-junior the Fourth puts in eight hours at his job as a civil hydraulics analyst while dreamily staring out his office window at the open sea. The extremely open sea.

Suggestion? Swim lessons. Now.

3. Humanity 2.0

In the last fifty years, computers and the internet have made such dramatic changes to the way we live that it’s impossible for many of us to do without them; they’re the nexus of business communications, a global marketplace, a one-click intelligence agency, a social forum. Basically, we live our lives on the internet.

And a few hundred years from now, your kids might be taking that literally.

With startling advances in robotics demonstrated every year, artificial intelligence is developing as fast as component technology becomes available. And as soon as neuroscience catches up, and human memories and brain chemistry can be replicated in fiberoptics, there will be no stopping kids of the future from transferring their consciousnesses into bitchin’ celebrity lookalikes with hydraulic balance and a two-hundred-year warranty.

However, no matter what they do, robotics will hit a wall when we realize no one will ever be able to replicate Rutger Hauer’s winsome, chilling stare. At that point, someone-probably your kid (your kid seems pretty clever)-will point out that humanity is essentially a single social network. After that, as fast as the server farms are ready, the upload frenzy will begin.

Now, while it’s true that our future progeny run the risk of becoming accidentally erased or deemed a bug in beta, the upside of a permanent, online world consciousness is that your descendants can look forward to relative immortality in a world with a scope as big as their collective imaginations. It also offers us a unique opportunity to look beyond physical borders, to foster intellectual debate, and...to make a full-immersion raid on the Arygos server tonight, dude! (Don’t worry, your kids will win, and those jerks will have it coming.)

4. Red Dawn

Since we’ve pretty much botched our shot at Earth, your descendants will likely find themselves looking to the sky for a solution to their habitation issues.

Unfortunately, they’re going to find that choices are limited. Venus is a gasball, space stations are cramped, and the Moon, well, it just doesn’t have any atmosphere (rimshot!). So that leaves Mars, our nearest neighbor, as the most likely candidate for Earth 2.

Sure, it’s a red desert now, but there are some delightfully suspicious delta marks in the terrain–a strong sign that, on its dusty surface, water once flowed. And, being the polite houseguests that we are, humanity is sure to take that as an intergalactic invitation to just move right on in.

An international planet-side space station would be the first step to colonization. From there, it’s a matter of developing an atmosphere that would support life, and then sticking more rivers and trees on it than on a fourth-grade nature diorama. Mars has enough atmospheric density to cling to whatever we introduce (oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other elemental herbs and spices), and as soon as it’s safe to go outside, your descendants can begin the development of an ecosystem, and start planning how to handle birthdays on a planet with a 686-day year.

The downside? Terraforming Mars will be the work of many, many generations, so if your family line is going to make it to Terra Nova, you should probably get started planning sooner rather than later. We suggest either making spaceproof gardens the family business or getting your oldest enrolled in Beginner Astrophysics as her after-school activity. And if she objects, explain that it’s for the best; Mars gravity is only one-sixth as strong as ours, and her soccer skills would be pretty useless up there, anyway.

5. This Future Brought to You By

You’ve been telling your kids for years that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, and that the popular thing isn’t always the right one.

However, our most seductive and enduring image of the future has always been more about its aesthetics than about its mechanics, a sentiment that marketers have always been happy to exploit. We may be no closer to Star Trek’s vision of world peace and prosperity, but at least we have infomercials in our elevators, right?

The rise of corporate culture means that the way we spend our dollars today is casting the vote for the megacorporation that will determine the style monopolies of the future. It’s not hard to imagine that your kids will live a life in which Apple Conglomerate has turned the single-button concept into a universal design aesthetic, Calvin Klein provides a de rigueur close-cut jumpsuit that’s the height of corporate fashion, and next year’s flying Beetle has a trademark glass dome on top.

Now, if you’re cringing at the idea of your great-great grandchildren becoming walking billboards for questionable brands, we sympathize: this isn’t the world you want for them. And, actually, this future is avoidable, if we all just stop falling for advertising pressure, cut down on our shopping, and work towards a culture of sustainable, minimal consumerism that benefits small, independent businesses.

Right.

Face it: this is the future. And the best thing to do is sit back, relax, and start getting used that to Coca-Cola-brand single-button touchscreen, because rest assured, someday while you’re napping, your precocious grandkids are going to install one in your car.

It’s always daunting to think of your children facing the future without you there to protect them, especially if your kid is still at the age where he’s sticking crayons up his nose on a regular basis. So in the interests of furthering humanity, we encourage you to start preparing now. Discuss these possible futures with your children, and explain, where appropriate, that nature is invaluable, that space exploration is a noble endeavor, and that jumpsuits, while hip and fashionable, can be tricky to navigate in small bathrooms.

Then take them on a family outing to the nearest aquarium, so that your children can start kissing up to the cephalopod leaders of tomorrow, today.

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her World-Fantasy-Award-nominated short fiction has appeared in, or is forthcoming from: Running with the Pack, Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Teeth, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and more.

Ej-Es
Nancy Kress

Jesse, come home

There’s a hole in the bed

where we slept

Now it’s growing cold

Hey Jesse, your face

in the place where we lay

by the hearth, all apart

it hangs on my heart....

Jesse, I’m lonely

Come home.

—“Jesse,” Janis Ian, 1972

“Why did you first enter the Corps?” Lolimel asked her as they sat at the back of the shuttle, just before landing. Mia looked at the young man helplessly, because how could you answer a question like that? Especially when it was asked by the idealistic and worshipful new recruits, too ignorant to know what a waste of time worship was, let alone simplistic questions.

“Many reasons,” Mia said gravely, vaguely. He looked like so many medicians she had worked with, for so many decades on so many planets...intense, thick-haired, genemod beautiful, a little insane. You had to be a little insane to leave Earth for the Corps, knowing that when (if) you ever returned, all you had known would have been dust for centuries.

He was more persistent than most. “What reasons?”

“The same as yours, Lolimel,” she said, trying to keep her voice gentle. “Now be quiet, please, we’re entering the atmosphere.”

“Yes, but—”

“Be quiet.” Entry was so much easier on him than on her; he had not got bones weakened from decades in space. They did weaken, no matter what exercise one took or what supplements or what gene therapy. Mia leaned back in her shuttle chair and closed her eyes. Ten minutes, maybe, of aerobraking and descent; surely she could stand ten minutes. Or not.

The heaviness began, abruptly increased. Worse on her eyeballs, as always; she didn’t have good eye-socket muscles, had never had them. Such an odd weakness. Well, not for long; this was her last flight. At the next station, she’d retire. She was already well over age, and her body felt it. Only her body? No, her mind, too. At the moment, for instance, she couldn’t remember the name of the planet they were hurtling toward. She recalled its catalogue number, but not whatever its colonists, who were not answering hails from ship, had called it.

“Why did you join the Corps?”

“Many reasons.”

And so few of them fulfilled. But that was not a thing you told the young.

The colony sat at the edge of a river, under an evening sky of breathable air set with three brilliant, fast-moving moons. Beds of glorious flowers dotted the settlement, somewhere in size between a large town and a small city. The buildings of foamcast embedded with glittering native stone were graceful, well-proportioned rooms set around open atria. Minimal furniture, as graceful as the buildings; even the machines blended unobtrusively into the lovely landscape. The colonists had taste and restraint and a sense of beauty. They were all dead.

“A long time ago,” said Kenin. Officially she was Expedition Head, although titles and chains-of-command tended to erode near the galactic edge, and Kenin led more by consensus and natural calm than by rank. More than once the team had been grateful for Kenin’s calm. Lolimel looked shaken, although he was trying to hide it.

Kenin studied the skeleton before them. “Look at those bones–completely clean.”

Lolimel managed, “It might have been picked clean quickly by predators, or carnivorous insects, or...” His voice trailed off.

“I already scanned it, Lolimel. No microscopic bone nicks. She decayed right there in bed, along with clothing and bedding.”

The three of them looked at the bones lying on the indestructible mattress coils of some alloy Mia had once known the name of. Long clean bones, as neatly arranged as if for a first-year anatomy lesson. The bedroom door had been closed; the dehumidifying system had, astonishingly, not failed; the windows were intact. Nothing had disturbed the woman’s long rot in the dry air until nothing remained, not even the bacteria that had fed on her, not even the smell of decay.

Kenin finished speaking to the other team. She turned to Mia and Lolimel, her beautiful brown eyes serene. “There are skeletons throughout the city, some in homes and some collapsed in what seem to be public spaces. Whatever the disease was, it struck fast. Jamal says their computer network is gone, but individual rec cubes might still work. Those things last forever.”

Nothing lasts forever, Mia thought, but she started searching the cabinets for a cube. She said to Lolimel, to give him something to focus on, “How long ago was this colony founded, again?”

“Three hundred sixty E-years,” Lolimel said. He joined the search.

Three hundred sixty years since a colony ship left an established world with its hopeful burden, arrived at this deadly Eden, established a city, flourished, and died. How much of Mia’s lifetime, much of it spent traveling at just under c, did that represent? Once she had delighted in figuring out such equations, in wondering if she’d been born when a given worldful of colonists made planetfall. But by now there were too many expeditions, too many colonies, too many accelerations and decelerations, and she’d lost track.

Lolimel said abruptly, “Here’s a rec cube.”

“Play it,” Kenin said, and when he just went on staring at it in the palm of his smooth hand, she took the cube from him and played it herself.

It was what she expected. A native plague of some kind, jumping DNA-based species (which included all species in the galaxy, thanks to panspermia). The plague had struck after the colonists thought they had vaccinated against all dangerous micros. Of course, they couldn’t really have thought that; even three hundred sixty years ago doctors had been familiar with alien species-crossers. Some were mildly irritating, some dangerous, some epidemically fatal. Colonies had been lost before, and would be again.

“Complete medical data resides on green rec cubes,” the recorder had said in the curiously accented International of three centuries ago. Clearly dying, he gazed out from the cube with calm, sad eyes. A brave man. “Any future visitors to Good Fortune should be warned.”

Good Fortune. That was the planet’s name.

“All right,” Kenin said, “tell the guard to search for green cubes. Mia, get the emergency analysis lab set up and direct Jamal to look for burial sites. If they had time to inter some victims–if they interred at all, of course–we might be able to recover some micros to create vacs or cures. Lolimel, you assist me in—”

One of the guards, carrying weapons that Mia could not have named, blurted, “Ma’am, how do we know we won’t get the same thing that killed the colonists?”

Mia looked at her. Like Lolimel, she was very young. Like all of them, she would have her story about why she volunteered for the Corps.

Now the young guard was blushing. “I mean, ma’am, before you can make a vaccination? How do we know we won’t get the disease, too?”

Mia said gently, “We don’t.”

No one, however, got sick. The colonists had had interment practices, they had had time to bury some of their dead in strong, water-tight coffins before everyone else died, and their customs didn’t include embalming. Much more than Mia had dared hope for. Good Fortune, indeed.

In five days of tireless work they had the micro isolated, sequenced, and analyzed. It was a virus, or a virus analogue, that had somehow gained access to the brain and lodged near the limbic system, creating destruction and death. Like rabies, Mia thought, and hoped this virus hadn’t caused the terror and madness of that stubborn disease. Not even Earth had been able to eradicate rabies.

Two more days yielded the vaccine. Kenin dispensed it outside the large building on the edge of the city, function unknown, which had become Corps headquarters. Mia applied her patch, noticing with the usual distaste the leathery, wrinkled skin of her forearm. Once she had had such beautiful skin, what was it that a long-ago lover had said to her, what had been his name...Ah, growing old was not for the gutless.

Something moved at the edge of her vision.

“Lolimel...did you see that?”

“See what?”

“Nothing.” Sometimes her aging eyes played tricks on her; she didn’t want Lolimel’s pity.

The thing moved again.

Casually Mia rose, brushing imaginary dirt from the seat of her uniform, strolling toward the bushes where she’d seen motion. From her pocket she pulled her gun. There were animals on this planet, of course, although the Corps had only glimpsed them from a distance, and rabies was transmitted by animal bite...

It wasn’t an animal. It was a human child.

No, not a child, Mia realized as she rounded the clump of bushes and, amazingly, the girl didn’t run. An adolescent, or perhaps older, but so short and thin that Mia’s mind had filled in “child.” A scrawny young woman with light brown skin and long, matted black hair, dressed carelessly in some sort of sarong-like wrap. Staring at Mia with a total lack of fear.

“Hello,” Mia said gently.

“Ej-es?” the girl said.

Mia said into her wrister, “Kenin...we’ve got natives. Survivors.”

The girl smiled. Her hair was patchy on one side, marked with small white rings. Fungus, Mia thought professionally, absurdly. The girl walked right toward Mia, not slowing, as if intending to walk through her. Instinctively Mia put out an arm. The girl walked into it, bonked herself on the forehead, and crumpled to the ground.

“You’re not supposed to beat up the natives, Mia,” Kenin said. “God, she’s not afraid of us at all. How can that be? You nearly gave her a concussion.”

Mia was as bewildered as Kenin, as all of them. She’d picked up the girl, who’d looked bewildered but not angry, and then Mia had backed off, expecting the girl to run. Instead she’d stood there rubbing her forehead and jabbering, and Mia had seen that her sarong was made of an uncut sheet of plastic, its colors faded to a mottled gray.

Kenin, Lolimel, and two guards had come running. And still the girl wasn’t afraid. She chattered at them, occasionally pausing as if expecting them to answer. When no one did, she eventually turned and moved leisurely off.

Mia said, “I’m going with her.”

Instantly a guard said, “It’s not safe, ma’am,” and Kenin said, “Mia, you can’t just—”

“You don’t need me here,” she said, too brusquely; suddenly there seemed nothing more important in the world than going with this girl. Where did that irrational impulse come from? “And I’ll be perfectly safe with a gun.”

This was such a stunningly stupid remark that no one answered her. But Kenin didn’t order her to stay. Mia accepted the guard’s tanflefoam and Kenin’s vidcam and followed the girl.

It was hard to keep up with her. “Wait!” Mia called, which produced no response. So she tried what the girl had said to her: “Ej-es!”

Immediately the girl stopped and turned to her with glowing eyes and a smile that could have melted glaciers, had Good Fortune had such a thing. Gentle planet, gentle person, who was almost certainly a descendent of the original dead settlers. Or was she? InterGalactic had no record of any other registered ship leaving for this star system, but that didn’t mean anything. InterGalactic didn’t know everything. Sometimes, given the time dilation of space travel, Mia thought they knew nothing.

“Ej-es,” the girl agreed, sprinted back to Mia, and took her hand. Slowing her youthful pace to match the older woman’s, she led Mia home.

The houses were scattered, as though they couldn’t make up their mind to be a village or not. A hundred yards away, another native walked toward a distant house. The two ignored each other.

Mia couldn’t stand the silence. She said, “I am Mia.”

The girl stopped outside her hut and looked at her.

Mia pointed to her chest. “Mia.”

“Es-ef-eb,” the girl said, pointing to herself and giving that glorious smile.

Not “ej-es,” which must mean something else. Mia pointed to the hut, a primitive affair of untrimmed logs, pieces of foamcast carried from the city, and sheets of faded plastic, all tacked crazily together.

“Ef-ef,” said Esefeb, which evidently meant “home.” This language was going to be a bitch: degraded and confusing.

Esefeb suddenly hopped to one side of the dirt path, laughed, and pointed at blank air. Then she took Mia’s hand and led her inside.

More confusion, more degradation. The single room had an open fire with the simple venting system of a hole in the roof. The bed was high on stilts (why?) with a set of rickety steps made of rotting, untrimmed logs. One corner held a collection of huge pots in which grew greenery; Mia saw three unfired clay pots, one of them sagging sideways so far the soil had spilled onto the packed-dirt floor. Also a beautiful titanium vase and a cracked hydroponic vat. On one plant, almost the size of a small tree, hung a second sheet of plastic sarong, this one an unfaded blue-green. Dishes and tools littered the floor, the same mix as the pots of scavenged items and crude homemade ones. The hut smelled of decaying food and unwashed bedding. There was no light source and no machinery.

Kenin’s voice sounded softly from her wrister. “Your vid is coming through fine. Even the most primitive human societies have some type of art work.”

Mia didn’t reply. Her attention was riveted to Esefeb. The girl flung herself up the “stairs” and sat up in bed, facing the wall. What Mia had seen before could hardly be called a smile compared to the light, the sheer joy, that illuminated Esefeb’s face now. Esefeb shuddered in ecstasy, crooning to the empty wall.

“Ej-es. Ej-es. Aaahhhh, Ej-es!”

Mia turned away. She was a medician, but Esefeb’s emotion seemed too private to witness. It was the ecstasy of orgasm, or religious transfiguration, or madness.

“Mia,” her wrister said, “I need an image of that girl’s brain.”

It was easy–too easy, Lolimel said later, and he was right. Creatures, sentient or not, did not behave this way.

“We could haul all the neuro equipment out to the village,” Kenin said doubtfully, from base.

“It’s not a village, and I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mia said softly. The softness was unnecessary. Esefeb slept like stone in her high bunk, and the hut was so dark, illuminated only by faint starlight through the hole in the roof, that Mia could barely see her wrister to talk into it. “I think Esefeb might come voluntarily. I’ll try in the morning, when it’s light.”

Kenin, not old but old enough to feel stiff sleeping on the ground, said, “Will you be comfortable there until morning?”

“No, but I’ll manage. What does the computer say about the recs?”

Lolimel answered–evidently they were having a regular all-hands conference. “The language is badly degraded International, you probably guessed that. The translator’s preparing a lexicon and grammar. The artifacts, food supply, dwelling, everything visual, doesn’t add up. They shouldn’t have lost so much in two hundred fifty years, unless mental deficiency was a side-effect of having survived the virus. But Kenin thinks—” He stopped abruptly.

“You may speak for me,” Kenin’s voice said, amused. “I think you’ll find that military protocol degrades, too, over time. At least, way out here.”

“Well, I...Kenin thinks it’s possible that what the girl has is a mutated version of the virus. Maybe infectious, maybe inheritable, maybe transmitted through fetal infection.”

His statement dropped into Mia’s darkness, as heavy as Esefeb’s sleep.

Mia said, “So the mutated virus could still be extant and active.”

“Yes,” Kenin said. “We need not only neuro-images but a sample of cerebrospinal fluid. Her behavior suggests—”

“I know what her behavior suggests,” Mia said curtly. That sheer joy, shuddering in ecstasy...It was seizures in the limbic system, the brain’s deep center for primitive emotion, which produced such transcendent, rapturous trances. Religious mystics, Saul on the road to Damascus, visions of Our Lady or of nirvana. And the virus might still be extant, and not a part of the vaccine they had all received. Although if transmission was fetal, the medicians were safe. If not...

Mia said, “The rest of Esefeb’s behavior doesn’t fit with limbic seizures. She seems to see things that aren’t there, even talks to her hallucinations, when she’s not having an actual seizure.”

“I don’t know,” Kenin said. “There might be multiple infection sites in the brain. I need her, Mia.”

“We’ll be there,” Mia said, and wondered if that were going to be true.

But it was, mostly. Mia, after a brief uncomfortable sleep wrapped in the sheet of blue-green plastic, sat waiting for Esefeb to descend her rickety stairs. The girl bounced down, chattering at something to Mia’s right. She smelled worse than yesterday. Mia breathed through her mouth and went firmly up to her.

“Esefeb!” Mia pointed dramatically, feeling like a fool. The girl pointed back.

“Mia.”

“Yes, good.” Now Mia made a sweep of the sorry hut. “Efef.”

“Efef,” Esefeb agreed, smiling radiantly.

“Esefeb efef.”

The girl agreed that this was her home.

Mia pointed theatrically toward the city. “Mia efef! Mia eb Esefeb etej Mia efef!” Mia and Esefeb come to Mia’s home. Mia had already raided the computer’s tentative lexicon of Good Fortunese.

Esefeb cocked her head and looked quizzical. A worm crawled out of her hair.

Mia repeated, “Mia eb Esefeb etej Mia efef.”

Esefeb responded with a torrent of repetitious syllables, none of which meant anything to Mia except “Ej-es.” The girl spoke the word with such delight that it had to be a name. A lover? Maybe these people didn’t live as solitary as she’d assumed.

Mia took Esefeb’s hand and gently tugged her toward the door. Esefeb broke free and sat in the middle of the room, facing a blank wall of crumbling logs, and jabbered away to nothing at all, occasionally laughing and even reaching out to touch empty air. “Ej-es, Ej-es!” Mia watched, bemused, recording everything, making medical assessments. Esefeb wasn’t malnourished, for which the natural abundance of the planet was undoubtedly responsible. But she was crawling with parasites, filthy (with water easily available), and isolated. Maybe isolated.

“Lolimel,” Mia said softly into the wrister, “what’s the best dictionary guess for ‘alone’?”

Lolimel said, “The closest we’ve got is ‘one.’ There doesn’t seem to be a concept for ‘unaccompanied,’ or at least we haven’t found it yet. The word for ‘one’ is ‘eket.’”

When Esefeb finally sprang up happily, Mia said, “Esefeb eket?”

The girl look startled. “Ek, ek,” she said: no, no. Esefeb ek eket! Esefeb eb Ej-es!”

Esefeb and Ej-es. She was not alone. She had the hallucinatory Ej-es.

Again Mia took Esefeb’s hand and pulled her toward the door. This time Esefeb went with her. As they set off toward the city, the girl’s legs wobbled. Some parasite that had become active overnight in the leg muscles? Whatever the trouble was, Esefeb blithely ignored it as they traveled, much more slowly than yesterday, to Kenin’s makeshift lab in the ruined city. Along the way, Esefeb stopped to watch, laugh at, or talk to three different things that weren’t there.

“She’s beautiful, under all that neglect,” Lolimel said, staring down at the anesthetized girl on Kenin’s neuroimaging slab.

Kenin said mildly, “If the mutated virus is transmitted to a fetus, it could also be transmitted sexually.”

The young man said hotly, “I wasn’t implying—”

Mia said, “Oh, calm down. Lolimel. We’ve all done it, on numerous worlds.”

“Regs say—”

“Regs don’t always matter three hundred light years from anywhere else,” Kenin said, exchanging an amused glance with Mia. “Mia, let’s start.”

The girl’s limp body slid into the neuro-imager. Esefeb hadn’t objected to meeting the other medicians, to a minimal washing, to the sedative patch Mia had put on her arm. Thirty seconds later she slumped to the floor. By the time she came to, an incision ten cells thick would have been made into her brain and a sample removed. She would have been harvested, imaged, electroscanned, and mapped. She would never know it; there wouldn’t even be a headache.

Three hours later Esefeb sat on the ground with two of the guards, eating soysynth as if it were ambrosia. Mia, Kenin, Lolimel, and the three other medicians sat in a circle twenty yards away, staring at handhelds and analyzing results. It was late afternoon. Long shadows slanted across the gold-green grass, and a small breeze brought the sweet, heavy scent of some native flower. Paradise, Mia thought. And then: Bonnet Syndrome.

She said it aloud, “Charles Bonnet Syndrome,” and five people raised their heads to stare at her, returned to their handhelds, and called up medical deebees.

“I think you’re right,” Kenin said slowly. “I never even heard of it before. Or if I did, I don’t remember.”

“That’s because nobody gets it anymore,” Mia said. “It was usually old people whose eye problems weren’t corrected. Now we routinely correct eye problems.”

Kenin frowned. “But that’s not all that’s going on with Esefeb.”

No, but it was one thing, and why couldn’t Kenin give her credit for thinking of it? The next moment she was ashamed of her petty pique. It was just fatigue, sleeping on that hard cold floor in Esefeb’s home. Esefeb efef. Mia concentrated on Charles Bonnet syndrome.

Patients with the syndrome, which was discovered in the eighteenth century, had damage somewhere in their optic pathway or brain. It could be lesions, macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, or even cataracts. Partially blind, people saw and sometimes heard instead things that weren’t there, often with startling clarity and realism. Feedback pathways in the brain were two-way information avenues. Visual data, memory, and imagination constantly flowed to and from each other, interacting so vividly that, for example, even a small child could visualize a cat in the absence of any actual cats. But in Bonnet syndrome, there was interruption of the baseline visual data about what was and was not real. So all imaginings and hallucinations were just as real as the ground beneath one’s feet.

“Look at the amygdala,” medician Berutha said. “Oh merciful gods!”

Both of Esefeb’s amygdalae were enlarged and deformed. The amygdalae, two almond-shaped structures behind the ears, specialized in recognizing the emotional significance of events in the external world. They weren’t involved in Charles Bonnet syndrome. Clearly, they were here.

Kenin said, “I think what’s happening here is a strengthening or alteration of some neural pathways at the extreme expense of others. Esefeb ‘sees’ her hallucinations, and she experiences them as just as ‘real’–maybe more real–than anything else in her world. And the pathways go down to the limbic, where seizures give some of them an intense emotional significance. Like...like orgasm, maybe.”

Ej-es.

“Phantoms in the brain,” Berutha said.

“A viral god,” Lolimel said, surprising Mia. His tone, almost reverential, suddenly irritated her.

“A god responsible for this people’s degradation, Lolimel. They’re so absorbed in their ‘phantoms’ that they don’t concentrate on the most basic care of themselves. Nor on building, farming, art, innovation...nothing. They’re prisoners of their pretty fantasies.”

Lolimel nodded reluctantly. “Yes, I see that.”

Berutha said to Kenin, “We need to find the secondary virus. Because if it is infectious through any other vector besides fetal or sexual...” He didn’t finish the thought.

“I know,” Kenin said, “but it isn’t going to be easy. We don’t have cadavers for the secondary. The analyzer is still working on the cerebral-spinal fluid. Meanwhile—” She began organizing assignments, efficient and clear. Mia stopped listening.

Esefeb had finished her meal and walked up to the circle of scientists. She tugged at Mia’s tunic. “Mia...Esefeb etej efef.” Esefeb come home.

“Mia eb Esefeb etej Esefeb efef,” Mia said, and the girl gave her joyous smile.

“Mia—” Kenin said.

“I’m going with her, Kenin. We need more behavioral data. And maybe I can persuade another native or two to submit to examination,” Mia argued, feebly. She knew that scientific information was not really her motive. She wasn’t sure, however, what was. She just wanted to go with Esefeb.

“Why did you first enter the Corps?” Lolimel’s question stuck in Mia’s mind, a rhetorical fishbone in the throat, over the next few days. Mia had brought her medkit, and she administered broad-spectrum microbials to Esefeb, hoping something would hit. The parasites were trickier, needing life-cycle analysis or at least some structural knowledge, but she made a start on that, too. I entered the Corps to relieve suffering, Lolimel. Odd how naive the truest statements could sound. But that didn’t make them any less true.

Esefeb went along with all Mia’s pokings, patches, and procedures. She also carried out minimal food-gathering activities, with a haphazard disregard for safety or sanitation that appalled Mia. Mia had carried her own food from the ship. Esefeb ate it just as happily as her own.

But mostly Esefeb talked to Ej-es.

It made Mia feel like a voyeur. Esefeb was so unselfconscious–did she even know she had a “self” apart from Ej-es? She spoke to, laughed at (with?), played beside, and slept with her phantom in the brain, and around her the hut disintegrated even more. Esefeb got diarrhea from something in her water and then the place smelled even more foul. Grimly, Mia cleaned it up. Esefeb didn’t seem to notice. Mia was eket. Alone in her futile endeavors at sanitation, at health, at civilization.

“Esefeb eb Mia etej efef—” How did you say “neighbors”? Mia consulted the computer’s lexicon, steadily growing as the translator program deciphered words from context. It had discovered no word for “neighbor.” Nor for “friend” nor “mate” nor any kinship relationships at all except “baby.”

Mia was reduced to pointing at the nearest hut. “Esefeb eb Mia etej efef” over there.

The neighboring hut had a baby. Both hut and child, a toddler who lay listlessly in one corner, were just as filthy and diseased as Esefeb’s house. At first the older woman didn’t seem to recognize Esefeb, but when Esefeb said her name, the two women spoke animatedly. The neighbor smiled at Mia. Mia reached for the child, was not prevented from picking him up, and settled the baby on her lap. Discreetly, she examined him.

Sudden rage boiled through her, as unexpected as it was frightening. This child was dying. Of parasites, of infection, of something. A preventable something? Maybe yes, maybe no. The child didn’t look neglected, but neither did the mother look concerned.

All at once, the child in her arms stiffened, shuddered, and began to babble. His listlessness vanished. His little dirty face lit up like sunrise and he laughed and reached out his arms toward something not there. His mother and Esefeb turned to watch, also smiling, as the toddler had an unknowable limbic seizure in his dying, ecstatic brain.

Mia set him down on the floor. She called up the dictionary, but before she could say anything, the mother, too, had a seizure and sat on the dirt floor, shuddering with joy. Esefeb watched her a moment before chattering to something Mia couldn’t see.

Mia couldn’t stand it any more. She left, walking as fast as she could back to Esefeb’s house, disgusted and frightened and...what?

Envious?

“Why did you first enter the Corps?” To serve humanity, to live purposefully, to find, as all men and women hope, happiness. And she had, sometimes, been happy.

But she had never known such joy as that.

Nonetheless, she argued with herself, the price was too high. These people were dying off because of their absorption in their rapturous phantoms. They lived isolated, degraded, sickly lives, which were undoubtedly shorter than necessary. It was obscene.

In her clenched hand was a greasy hair sample she’d unobtrusively cut from the toddler’s head as he sat on her lap. Hair, that dead tissue, was a person’s fossilized past. Mia intended a DNA scan.

Esefeb strolled in an hour later. She didn’t seem upset at Mia’s abrupt departure. With her was Lolimel.

“I met her on the path,” Lolimel said, although nothing as well-used as a path connected the huts. “She doesn’t seem to mind my coming here.”

“Or anything else,” Mia said. “What did you bring?” He had to have brought something tangible; Kenin would have used the wrister to convey information.

“Tentative prophylactic. We haven’t got a vaccine yet, and Kenin says it may be too difficult, better to go directly to a cure to hold in reserve in case any of us comes down with this.”

Mia caught the omission. “Any of us? What about them?”

Lolimel looked down at his feet. “It’s, um, a borderline case, Mia. The decision hasn’t been made yet.”

“‘Borderline’ how, Lolimel? It’s a virus infecting the brains of humans and degrading their functioning.”

He was embarrassed. “Section Six says that, um, some biological conditions, especially persistent ones, create cultural differences for which Corps policy is non-interference. Section Six mentions the religious dietary laws that grew out of inherited food intolerances on—”

“I know what Section Six says, Lolimel! But you don’t measure a culture’s degree of success by its degree of happiness!”

“I don’t think...that is, I don’t know...maybe ‘degree of sucess’ isn’t what Section Six means.” He looked away from her. The tips of his ears grew red.

Poor Lolimel. She and Kenin had as much as told him that out here regs didn’t matter. Except when they did. Mia stood. “You say the decision hasn’t been made yet?”

He looked surprised. “How could it be? You’re on the senior Corps board to make the decision.”

Of course she was. How could she forget...she forgot more things these days, momentary lapses symbolic of the greater lapses to come. No brain functioned forever.

“Mia, are you all—”

“I’m fine. And I’m glad you’re here. I want to go back to the city for a few days. You can stay with Esefeb and continue the surveillance. You can also extend to her neighbors the antibiotic, antiviral, and anti-parasite protocols I’ve worked through with Esefeb. Here, I’ll show you.”

“But I—”

“That’s an order.”

She felt bad about it later, of course. But Lolimel would get over it.

At base everything had the controlled frenzy of steady, unremitting work. Meek now, not a part of the working team, Mia ran a DNA scan on the baby’s hair. It showed what she expected. The child shared fifty percent DNA with Esefeb. He was her brother; the neighbor whom Esefeb clearly never saw, who had at first not recognized Esefeb, was her mother. For which there was still no word in the translator deebee.

“I think we’ve got it,” Kenin said, coming into Mia’s room. She collapsed on a stone bench, still beautiful after two and a half centuries. Kenin had the beatific serenity of a hard job well done.

“A cure?”

“Tentative. Radical. I wouldn’t want to use it on one of us unless we absolutely have to, but we can refine it more. At least it’s in reserve, so a part of the team can begin creating and disseminating medical help these people can actually use. Targeted microbials, an anti-parasite protocol.”

“I’ve already started on that,” Mia said, her stomach tightening. “Kenin, the board needs to meet.”

“Not tonight. I’m soooo sleepy.” Theatrically she stretched both arms; words and gesture were unlike her.

“Tonight,” Mia said. While Kenin was feeling so accomplished. Let Kenin feel the full contrast to what she could do with what Esefeb could.

Kenin dropped her arms and looked at Mia. Her whole demeanor changed, relaxation into fortress. “Mia...I’ve already polled everyone privately. And run the computer sims. We’ll meet, but the decision is going to be to extend no cure. The phantoms are a biologically based cultural difference.”

“The hell they are! These people are dying out!”

“No, they’re not. If they were heading for extinction, it’d be a different situation. But the satellite imagery and population equations, based on data left by the generation that had the plague, show they’re increasing. Slowly, but a definite population gain significant to the point-oh-one level of confidence.”

“Kenin—”

“I’m exhausted, Mia. Can we talk about it tomorrow?”

Plan on it, Mia thought grimly. She stored the data on the dying toddler’s matrilineage in her handheld.

A week in base, and Mia could convince no one, not separately nor in a group. Medicians typically had tolerant psychological profiles, with higher-than-average acceptance of the unusual, divergent, and eccentric. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have joined the Corps.

On the third day, to keep herself busy, Mia joined the junior medicians working on refining the cure for what was now verified as “limbic seizures with impaired sensory input causing Charles Bonnet syndrome.” Over the next few weeks it became clear to Mia what Kenin had meant; this treatment, if they had to use it, would be brutally hard on the brain. What was that old ditty? “Cured last night of my disease, I died today of my physician.” Well, it still happened enough in the Corps. Another reason behind the board’s decision.

She felt a curious reluctance to go back to Esefeb. Or, as the words kept running through her mind, Mia ek etej Esefeb efef. God, it was a tongue twister. These people didn’t just need help with parasites, they needed an infusion of new consonants. It was a relief to be back at base, to be working with her mind, solving technical problems alongside rational scientists. Still, she couldn’t shake a feeling of being alone, being lonely: Mia eket.

Or maybe the feeling was more like futility.

“Lolimel’s back,” Jamal said. He’d come up behind her as she sat at dusk on her favorite stone bench, facing the city. At this time of day the ruins looked romantic, infused with history. The sweet scents of that night-blooming flower, which Mia still hadn’t identified, wafted around her.

“I think you should come now,” Jamal said, and this time Mia heard his tone. She spun around. In the alien shadows Jamal’s face was set as ice.

“He’s contracted it,” Mia said, knowing beyond doubt that it was true. The virus wasn’t just fetally transmitted, it wasn’t a slow-acting retrovirus, and if Lolimel had slept with Esefeb...But he wouldn’t be that stupid. He was a medician, he’d been warned...

“We don’t really know anything solid about the goddamn thing!” Jamal burst out.

“We never do,” Mia said, and the words cracked her dry lips like salt.

Lolimel stood in the center of the ruined atrium, giggling at something only he could see. Kenin, who could have proceeded without Mia, nodded at her. Mia understood; Kenin acknowledged the special bond Mia had with the young medician. The cure was untested, probably brutal, no more really than dumping a selection of poisons in the right areas of the brain, in itself problematical with the blood-brain barrier.

Mia made herself walk calmly up to Lolimel. “What’s so funny, Lolimel?”

“All those sandwigs crawling in straight lines over the floor. I never saw blue ones before.”

Sandwigs. Lolimel, she remembered, had been born on New Carthage. Sandwigs were always red.

Lolimel said, “But why is there a tree growing out of your head, Mia?”

“Strong fertilizer,” she said. “Lolimel, did you have sex with Esefeb?”

He looked genuinely shocked. “No!”

“All right.” He might or might not be lying.

Jamal whispered, “A chance to study the hallucinations in someone who can fully articulate—”

“No,” Kenin said. “Time matters with this...” Mia saw that she couldn’t bring herself to say “cure.”

Realization dawned on Lolimel’s face. “Me? You’re going to...me? There’s nothing wrong with me!”

“Lolimel, dear heart...” Mia said.

“I don’t have it!”

“And the floor doesn’t have sandwigs. Lolimel—”

“No!”

The guards had been alerted. Lolimel didn’t make it out of the atrium. They held him, flailing and yelling, while Kenin deftly slapped on a tranq patch. In ten seconds he was out.

“Tie him down securely,” Kenin said, breathing hard. “Daniel, get the brain bore started as soon as he’s prepped. Everyone else, start packing up, and impose quarantine. We can’t risk this for anyone else here. I’m calling a Section Eleven.”

Section Eleven: If the MedCorps officer in charge deems the risk to Corps members to exceed the gain to colonists by a factor of three or more, the officer may pull the Corps off-planet.

It was the first time Mia had ever seen Kenin make a unilateral decision.

Twenty-four hours later, Mia sat beside Lolimel as dusk crept over the city. The shuttle had already carried up most personnel and equipment. Lolimel was in the last shift because, as Kenin did not need to say aloud, if he died, his body would be left behind. But Lolimel had not died. He had thrashed in unconscious seizures, had distorted his features in silent grimaces of pain until Mia would not have recognized him, had suffered malfunctions in alimentary, lymphatic, endocrine, and parasympathetic nervous systems, all recorded on the monitors. But he would live. The others didn’t know it, but Mia did.

“We’re ready for him, Mia,” the young tech said. “Are you on this shuttle, too?”

“No, the last one. Move him carefully. We don’t know how much pain he’s actually feeling through the meds.”

She watched the gurney slide out of the room, its monitors looming over Lolimel like cliffs over a raging river. When he’d gone, Mia slipped into the next building, and then the next. Such beautiful buildings: spacious atria, beautifully proportioned rooms, one structure flowing into another.

Eight buildings away, she picked up the pack she’d left there. It was heavy, even though it didn’t contain everything she had cached around the city. It was so easy to take things when a base was being hastily withdrawn. Everyone was preoccupied, everyone assumed anything not readily visible was already packed, inventories were neglected and the deebees not cross-checked. No time. Historically, war had always provided great opportunities for profiteers.

Was that what she was? Yes, but not a profit measured in money. Measure it, rather, in lives saved, or restored to dignity, or enhanced. “Why did you first enter the Corps?” Because I’m a medician, Lolimel. Not an anthropologist.

They would notice, of course, that Mia herself wasn’t aboard the last shuttle. But Kenin, at least, would realize that searching from her would be a waste of valuable resources when Mia didn’t want to be found. And Mia was so old. Surely the old should be allowed to make their own decisions.

Although she would miss them, these Corps members who had been her family since the last assignment shuffle, eighteen months ago and decades go, depending on whose time you counted by. Especially she would miss Lolimel. But this was the right way to end her life, in service to these colonists’ health. She was a medician.

It went better than Mia could have hoped. When the ship had gone–she’d seen it leave orbit, a fleeting stream of light–Mia went to Esefeb.

“Mia etej efef,” Esefeb said with her rosy smile. Mia come home. Mia walked toward her, hugged the girl, and slapped the tranq patch on her neck.

For the next week, Mia barely slept. After the makeshift surgery, she tended Esefeb through the seizures, vomiting, diarrhea, pain. On the morning the girl woke up, herself again, Esefeb was there to bathe the feeble body, feed it, nurse Esefeb. She recovered very fast; the cure was violent on the body but not as debilitating as everyone had feared. And afterwards Esefeb was quieter, meeker, and surprisingly intelligent as Mia taught her the rudiments of water purification, sanitation, safe food storage, health care. By the time Mia moved on to Esefeb’s mother’s house, Esefeb was free of most parasites, and Mia was working on the rest. Esefeb never mentioned her former hallucinations. It was possible she didn’t remember them.

“Esefeb ekebet,” Mia said as she hefted her pack to leave. Esefeb be well.

Esefeb nodded. She stood quietly as Mia trudged away, and when Mia turned to wave at her, Esefeb waved back.

Mia shifted the pack on her shoulders. It seemed heavier than before. Or maybe Mia was just older. Two weeks older, merely, but two weeks could make a big difference. An enormous difference.

Two weeks could start to save a civilization.

Night fell. Esefeb sat on the stairs to her bed, clutching the blue-green sheet of plastic in both hands. She sobbed and shivered, her clean face contorted. Around her, the unpopulated shadows grew thicker and darker. Eventually, she wailed aloud to the empty night.

“Ej-es! O, Ej-es! Ej-es, Esefeb eket! Ej-es...etej efef! O, etej efef!”

©2003 by Nancy Kress

Originally appeared in the anthology, Stars,

edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-six books: three fantasy novels, twelve SF novels, three thrillers, four collections of short stories, one YA novel, and three books on writing fiction. She is perhaps best known for the Sleepless trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain, which was based on the Nebula- and Hugo-winning novella of the same name. She won her second Hugo in 2009 in Montreal, for the novella “The Erdmann Nexus.” Kress has also won three additional Nebulas, a Sturgeon, and the 2003 John W. Campbell Award (for her novel Probability Space). Her most recent books are a collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories; a bio-thriller, Dogs; and an SF novel, Steal Across the Sky. Kress’s fiction, much of which concerns genetic engineering, has been translated into twenty languages. She often teaches writing at various venues around the country and blogs at nancykress.blogspot.com.

Author Spotlight: Nancy Kress
Wendy Wagner

The story begins with a quote from the song “Jesse,” by Janis Ian. The quote fits so perfectly with the piece, I have to wonder which came first—your awareness of the song, or your creation of the story? How are the two connected?

Janis Ian and Mike Resnick conceived of an anthology of SF stories all based on Janis’s songs (Stars, published by DAW, 2003). They invited various authors to choose a song and write a story based on it. I chose “Jesse,” a romantic ballad, because I liked both tune and lyrics. In the debased version of English that this lost colony speaks, “Jesse” became “Ej-es.”

This piece is about a Corps of “medicians” providing medical relief around the galaxy. The Corps has a wonderful flavor that’s something between the Marines and the Peace Corps. What were you drawing upon when you created this organization? And how did you come up with word “medician”

The Corps is based on USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. This group has joined (and sometimes waged turf wars with) the CDC in fighting epidemics in third-world countries; they also have shared jurisdiction, with FEMA and the CDC, for any bioterrorist attacks here (potential turf wars). I don’t recall where the word “medician” came from.

A major plot element is the clash between two different cultures and the ways they fail to understand each other. Were there particular real-life situations that you were thinking of when you wrote this piece?

No particular situation, but the clash of cultures is everywhere in our history, from Native American/European clashes to the failure of the Bush administration to understand the Arab culture of Iraq. This plot is also, of course, a long-standing staple of SF.

The title of the story comes from the language of the people living on Good Fortune. The language is very simplistic, almost babble-y. Are you the kind of writer that spends a lot of time researching and developing languages in your work, or do you work more intuitively?

One thing I wanted to do in “Ej-es” was play with language. The attentive reader learns enough of the colonists’ debased language (the result of a brain virus) to be able to read the last paragraph, which is entirely in the “alien” language. I worked intuitively on creating that language, which was possible only because it is so simple and “babbly.”

More than anything, this story hinges on Mia’s blinding need to find purpose in her life. Throughout the whole piece, she is deeply bothered by the new recruit’s question “Why did you first enter the Corps?” And the ending is her solution, her attempt to make a new and meaningful life. Is this a theme that you’ve worked with in your other works?

Yes. My most successful work, Beggars in Spain, is all about Leisha’s need to make sense of the world around her and her place in it. So have other of my stories, including every single one that has won an award. This is, I believe, the basic question of human life.

This story first appeared in 2003, in the Janis Ian-inspired anthology Stars, and then it was selected for The Year’s Best Science Fiction #21. Is there anything else we should know about this piece or that you’d like to add?

Halfway through writing “Ej-es,” I emailed Janis Ian to tell her that I had turned her ballad of love and longing into a story about a retro-virus in the brain. She emailed back, “How did you know?” A funny moment, if not exactly a funny piece of fiction.

Wendy N. Wagner’s first novel, Her Dark Depths, is forthcoming from the small press Virtual Tales. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology 2012 A.D. and in the online magazine Crossed Genres. Another is forthcoming in The Way of the Wizard, edited by John Joseph Adams. In addition to her fiction writing, she has conducted interviews for horror-web.com. She shares her Portland, Oregon, home with one painting husband, one brilliant daughter, and no zombies.

God Spots
The Evil Monkey

Ever see things that weren’t there? Ghosts? UFOs? Men with feelings?

God?

Sure you have. It happens to all of us, especially on those nights when you polish a whole bottle of Jäger off on your own. But what if you take the alcohol out of the equation and those little green men are still washing your dishes? How is it possible for a sane, sober, rational human to see things that aren’t there, and that maybe don’t even exist? Because your mind is your reality, that’s how. And your mind only exists because your brain exists. And your reality only reflects REALITYTM inasmuch as the information your brain processes accurately represents the world. Which, of course, then begs the question: what happens to us sane, sober, rational humans when our brains misfire?

Well, the answer depends on the part of the brain that malfunctions, and how.

For instance, releasing too much of certain neurotransmitters in one area of the brain is associated with schizophrenia; releasing too little of the same transmitters in a different brain area will beget movement disorders. Unwanted electrical activity in certain visual centers may lead you to hallucinate that your ex-wife is hiding in the bushes with a butcher knife, waiting. Patiently waiting. Biding her time.

Wait, where was I? Oh yes, electrical activity.

Not enough activity in the area known as the angular gyrus can trigger out-of-body experiences, at least in a lab setting, and drugs like LSD create an artificial condition where the users becomes synaesthetic and get their sensory wires crossed, enabling them to “see” sounds and “hear” colors. So, bottom line? When your brain goes tits-up, all manner of inappropriate (and impossible) experiences can suddenly become very real.

Now, one area that readily goes bonkers is the limbic system. The limbic system is a fascinating set of brain structures that contribute to your emotional states, plus some forms of memory, attention, and decision-making. Many of these parts are located in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) or connect with it. Comprised of cortical pain processing areas and MTL areas such as the amygdala (which processes fear-based emotions), memory-related structures (such as the hippocampus), and olfactory bulbs that bypass the usual thalamic relay centers and feed directly into the whole mess—(Ever wonder why smells can generate intense emotional memories? There you go.)-this motley limbic conglomerate is the site of some interesting functions and some even more interesting pathologies.

Pathologies such as seizures.

Limbic system brain seizures can be triggered by many things-traumatic brain injuries, viral infections-and it is common for the hippocampus to be the epicenter of this seizure activity. The hippocampus, by the way, is a seahorse-shaped structure that’s also a working-memory workhorse; it assists in the consolidation and recall of memories, and the formation of spatial maps of your environment. Consequently, the hippocampus is a highly active area of the brain, a site of intense activity. But sometimes that activity can spiral out of control. So as waves of electrical activity synchronize and build to fervor, washing through the brain like Ludwig Van’s Ninth (and potentially leaving behind a little neuron-on-neuron ultraviolence), the individual frequently becomes incapacitated. They can hallucinate. And unfortunately, the hippocampus and other limbic structures are adjacent to those areas of the temporal lobe which control object recognition, perception, and a slew of other visual functions, and when these regions get swept up in the seizure activity, they can contribute to the content of hallucinations. So, in other words, you’re no longer writing that bad Avatar fanfic porn, you’re curled up naked on the couch with your new Na’vi hottie which, alas, is really just a bowl of blue Jello. This phenomenon is a well-documented finding in the scientific literature. (Well, maybe not the part about the Jello.)

Now, oddly enough, researchers have discovered that these MTL seizures are more common in the profoundly religious. Why? We don’t know, exactly. All we do know is that those who say they experience the presence of their deity on a personal level are more likely to show electrical patterns in their brains that are consistent with MTL seizure events.

Armed with this curious knowledge, Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist who studies so-called “paranormal” phenomena and their origins in the brain, has devised a helmet that uses magnets to generate electrical fields in the brain. When he focuses these fields on the MTL area, he can trigger all sorts of “spiritual” experiences. And when he includes the parietal cortex, he can induce out-of-body and other sensations. And it’s for this reason that Persinger’s toy has been dubbed the “God Helmet.”

Now, for some subjects, wearing the God Helmet causes them to experience phenomena as minute as the perception of somebody else in the room. But for others, it can be a full-blown-tent-revival-PRAISE-JESUS-OH-MY-GOD-THIS-IS-THE-BEST-SEX-I’VE-EVER-HAD sort of personal rapture. And the fun isn’t just reserved for the innately spiritual, either; even atheists are prone to these sorts of experiences when wearing Dr. Persinger’s God Helmet. What all this evidence suggests, of course, is that these so-called “paranormal” or “psychic” brouhahas are physical in origin and in nature. Jesus, Vishnu, and Flying Spaghetti Monsters need not apply. (The Blue Jello, on the other hand, is a keeper.)

And, this being the brain, the fun and games don’t stop there. These MTL seizures can also cause brain damage. Here’s how it works: the patient seizes. Afterwards, the brain “kindles,” meaning it becomes more and more likely to experience a seizure as a result of each prior seizure. With each new episode, limbic system neurons dump out a bunch of excitatory neurotransmitters such as glutamate. The glutamate stimulates other neurons to fire. Which then dump even more glutamate. Which, in turn, stimulates even more neurons. Yeah, you get the point. Drop a pebble in the pond, you get ripples; so saith Bruce Lee. Problem is, though, that high levels of glutamate are toxic, hence the damage. When your brain gets damaged, it’s more sensitive to the next kindling event. The problem compounds. And in this fight, misfires are definitely not good, gunslinger. Not if you want to remember the face of your father, or much else for that matter.

So, ghosts? Green men? Gods? When your brain misfires, it has the potential to invent these and other artificial realities as your out-of-control limbic structures create the sensation of things which seem real, but actually aren’t. When you’re in the midst of this brain trauma (and most likely not even aware it’s going on), it’s hard to know that what you perceive isn’t reality, but a distorted reflection of it as brought to your brain via your limited, faulty senses. And when your brain, that Jello-like processing center, screws up badly enough, it honestly doesn’t matter how good your senses are. Because, unfortunately, that lump of Jello between your ears is what creates your reality.

Hopefully, yours isn’t blue.

The Evil Monkey has a Ph.D. in the neurosciences and used to study memory in primates for a living. He now resides in the Midwest and spends his professional time teaching at the local state university and community college. When not teaching, he is often engaged in an endless cycle of home repair or playing with his stepkids or writing his irreverent neuroscience blog Neurotopia.