TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 141, February 2022

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: February 2022

SCIENCE FICTION

Plausible Realities, Improbable Dreams
Isabel J. Kim

Bad Code
Stephen Graham Jones

NeuNet
Sharang Biswas

Lyceum
Karin Lowachee

FANTASY

Not Creator, Nor Destroyer
Anjali Sachdeva

When We Were Gods
Isha Karki

How to Abandon Your Sourdough Starter: A Recipe for Disaster
Theresa DeLucci

The Honest Fox, or, A Truth Shared is Not a Truth Lost
P H Lee

EXCERPTS

Last Exit
Max Gladstone

NONFICTION

Book Review: She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, by Kim Fu
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Isabel J. Kim

Isha Karki

Sharang Biswas

PH Lee

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2022 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandfailure / Adobe Stock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: February 2022

John Joseph Adams | 313 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 141st issue!

Science fiction is one of the literature’s most fun sandboxes. It’s a place to write about new versions of the world, and new versions of our selves. In Isabel J. Kim’s new short story “Plausible Realities, Improbable Dreams,” you get both—in one multiverse-braided array of realities. There’s romance and physics and coffee, and if that doesn’t reel you in, well, you’re heartless. For those of you with hearts, our other original SF short is going to tug at yours. In “NeuNet,” Sharang Biswas gives us the story of what caring for our elders might look like in the future, and it’s just as hard as it is today. To lighten things up, we have a fun flash piece (“Bad Code”) from Stephen Graham Jones. Plus, we have an SF reprint by Karin Lowachee (“Lyceum”).

Speculative fiction of all forms allows us to interrogate human history and social constructs in new, and sometimes painful ways. In that spirit, we have a powerful original fantasy story by Isha Karki called “When We Were Gods.” You don’t have to spend much time in the ghetto gulleys to see our own world reflected back to us in ways both serious and magical.

On the lighter side, PH Lee’s Tales of the Great Sweet Sea returns with a new fable: “The Honest Fox, or, A Truth Shared is Not a Truth Lost.” We also have a pandemic-inspired flash piece (“How to Abandon Your Sourdough Starter”) from Theresa DeLucci. Our fantasy reprint is by Anjali Sachdeva (“Not Creator, Nor Destroyer”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from Max Gladstone’s thrilling new novel, Last Exit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include A People’s Future of the United States, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Plausible Realities, Improbable Dreams

Isabel J. Kim | 5503 words

The multiverse broke last week. Broke is perhaps the wrong word. More accurate would be performed a state-change or found new equilibrium, but tell that to Catalina Chang, who has been popping aspirin like M&Ms ever since last Thursday, 5:54 PM, when the Unspecified Incident in the Lab superimposed all versions of reality together like a flaky scallion pancake.

Aspirin still exists. So do coffee and antidepressant commercials, except on alternate Tuesdays, except when they don’t exist at all, except when they’ve always existed and always will exist because Big Pharma lobbied the government out of existence in 1902.

“Reality’s broken,” Cat says as she concentrates on holding all the multiple histories in her head. “We should probably do something about this.”

“This never would have happened if you had checked the equipment properly,” says Dr. Shin.

“This always would have happened, but at least you checked the equipment properly,” says Dr. Shin.

“That never happened, what exactly are you talking about?” says Dr. Shin, looking up from her laptop and frowning at Cat. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Never mind,” Cat says, and scurries back to her desk.

Her desk is covered in stacks of paper, because computers were never invented. Her desk has a sleek terminal embedded in its surface, because computers were invented in 1935. Her desk has a Macintosh laptop with a cracked case and a sticker that says HANG TEN. Cat remembers: summer vacations in California, the surf crashing against the clean sand, her legs kicking as she paddled out from shore.

She’s never been to California. She’s never been surfing. She rubs her eyes and sits at her desk, shaking away the memories of an alternate self. The desk shouldn’t be here at all—her desk is supposed to be around the corner. This is supposed to be Roshan’s desk.

Roshan Kumar, whose desk was always perfectly clean. Who texted her at strange hours of the night. Who she was not exactly in love with, but not not in love with, in the way you can be not in love with your coworker who you see every day and go to bars with and things are just too complicated right now for a relationship, right, Roshan? The way you can be not in love with someone and still have memorized their coffee order.

Roshan’s jacket is missing from the coat closet. His name is missing from the paper they’re writing together. Cat’s scoured the internet/phonebook/transmental scan, and there’s no trace of him. As if he’s been extrapolated out of existence.

But Cat still has a single line of memory containing Roshan. One silver thread where he exists and she exists and they spend long nights in the lab together, drowned out by all the realities where he doesn’t exist but she does.

This must be the true past.

• • • •

It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t exist in 99.99% of realities. When Cat stops concentrating, Roshan slips through her fingers, lost in the flipbook of pasts that exist concurrently. Cat remembers long hikes with friends she’s never met. She remembers tests she’s never taken and conferences she’s never been to. She remembers her mother and father divorcing. She remembers them celebrating their thirtieth anniversary.

Cat walks through the lab, sneakers on linoleum. Cat walks through the lab, high heels on wood. Cat walks through the lab, bare scabbed feet on bloodstained stone.

“How are the tests coming?” Dr. Shin says.

“Any luck in the data collection?” Dr. Shin says.

“You seem distracted,” Dr. Shin says, handing Cat a pile of paper, handing her a tablet, handing her a vial of datafluid.

“I’m looking for something,” Cat admits, taking the vial of datafluid and pouring it into the core output station, holding herself in this reality for a wavering moment before fragmenting back into antiseptic clean rooms, biology wetrooms, photography darkrooms. She can’t seem to grasp the reality where Roshan’s desk is three feet from hers.

“Good luck,” Dr. Shin says.

Cat sifts through realities. She’s going to happy hour with coworkers she’s never met and going home to a lover she never went on a first date with. She’s watching antidepressant commercials in between episodes of sitcoms she’s never seen. Cat holds the memory of Roshan in the front of her mind and tries tuning to its frequency. She tries to remember her fantasies of him: the one where they finish the grant proposal on time. The one where they win the Nobel Prize together. The one where he asks her out and she says yes. Cat daydreams between going home and falling asleep in her bed, in her bunk, in her pod. Between going into the lab where she researches astrophysics, biology, nanotechnology, spectral osteotherapy, and then she walks into the lab one morning and there’s Roshan, sitting at his desk.

• • • •

Roshan looks just like she remembers. Brown skin, handsome face, dark hair that seems like it would be soft to the touch. Terribly unstylish glasses. She’s never been so happy to see his horrible glasses before.

“Hey,” Cat says, as if she’s not enormously relieved to see him. As if she doesn’t want to run over and press her hand to his face to make sure he actually exists.

Roshan looks up. “Cat? Catalina?” Roshan jumps to his feet, crushing her into a tight embrace that she returns with fingers gripped against the solid weave of his sweater. Her makeup smudges against his neck. She softens with the unspeakable relief of knowing that Roshan isn’t someone she dreamed up, that he’s warm and solid to the touch. Cat’s not crazy after all.

“Is that really you? Thank God—you were gone, I was gone, but I was looking for you, and something weird is going on and nobody else seems to notice,” Roshan says, muffled against her hair.

The tension in Roshan’s back resumes when Cat steps back. He keeps his fingers locked around her wrist as if to anchor her.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Roshan says.

“I’m so glad I found you,” Cat says. “I wanted—”

And then the waveform collapses and she’s unmoored again, standing alone in the lab.

“Did you say something?” Dr. Shin calls from her office.

“No,” Cat calls back. She stares at her table covered in papers/laptop parts/AI output generation byproduct, the clean emptiness of Roshan’s desk erased.

• • • •

It becomes easier to synchronize into their shared thread. Having found it once, Cat can carefully wedge into the single mundane reality that flows out of the history of Cat and Roshan, Dr. Shin’s lab assistants extraordinaire.

In this reality, Roshan and Cat are working on their doctorates. Roshan is from a small town in Oregon, but he’s been at Columbia University since undergrad. Cat is from a mid-size suburb in Ohio and landed at Columbia’s physics department after a five-year break from academia. They didn’t know each other until they started working in Dr. Shin’s lab.

The first time they met they spent three hours talking over coffee. The second time they met they spent two hours discussing comic books while Cat wrangled statistics and Roshan googled grants. They’re slightly-more-than-friends forged by too many late nights and too many early mornings, and their lives ran in sexually tense, collegial comfort until Thursday at 5:54 PM when the multiverse fractured.

“I can’t remember what happened,” Cat admits.

Roshan frowns and stares at the diagram he’s whiteboarded in his neat handwriting. “Neither can I. But we must have been ground zero, if we’re the only ones who can perceive this.”

“I mean, I can remember everything that happened,” Cat says. “Too many everythings. All of the everythings. But I can’t remember this one specific thing, which is what freaks me out.”

“Oh, that’s what freaks you out?” Roshan says, smiling at her.

“You know what I mean!” Cat says, laughing despite the way the movement makes her lose the thread again. She’s sent spiraling into long nights working late at the bar, long nights singing on a cruise ship, long nights waiting for the pills to kick in before she can orient herself back to the long night with Roshan sitting across from her, eating her french fries.

“We’ll fix this,” Roshan says. “We’ll figure out what happened and fix this.”

“How?” Cat says, because she’s always been the pessimist to Roshan’s optimist.

Roshan shrugs. “We’ll figure it out. You found me—that’s the first step. Infinite multiverse and you still found me.”

“That’s nearly romantic,” Cat says.

“That’s me,” Roshan says. “Mister Nearly-Romantic.”

Cat laughs again. Long nights stargazing in the observatory, long nights supervising the perpetual motion machine, long nights navimancing her way across the galaxy until she snaps back into the present. Roshan is tapping his pencil against a notepad, frowning at his diagram.

“Hey,” Roshan says. “Maybe we’ve been looking at this wrong. An infinite multiverse means infinite solutions.”

• • • •

In all of Roshan’s worlds save one, Cat doesn’t exist. In all of Cat’s worlds save one, Roshan doesn’t exist. They agree to meet in the thread they both remember on Fridays, since Thursdays have historically been unlucky for them.

Cat sieves realities like she’s panning for gold. Sometimes she’s literally panning for gold, in worlds where the gold rush is currently striking through California streambeds. Worlds where time’s advance was slower, more methodic. She discards those realities quickly, filtering for worlds that understand hyperreality, where the singularity has come and gone—worlds with matrioshka brains, with faster than light travel, where Star Trek is historical fiction because parallel processing was invented three thousand years early.

Then she’s climbing back to Roshan in the coffee shop near the lab, typing away at his netbook. She’s sitting in bars with him, drinking whisky and scribbling notes. They sometimes actually do their job so that Dr. Shin doesn’t fire them, and while they oversee the equipment Cat’s hand stays on Roshan’s shoulder like her physical presence can anchor him in this reality.

Then they’re fracturing away again. Cat’s a doctor, she’s a researcher, she’s a lowly hologramemory operator, she’s building robots, she’s replacing her brain with routine cybernetics, she’s calling her mother ten lightyears away.

“They’re getting weirder,” Cat tells Roshan, splintering herself back into their shared existence. He’s scrolling through Twitter. She’s writing a program to automate data entry and eating McDonalds. She remembers the history that flows to this moment: a long week in the lab and they’re stuck on their paper because they’re still waiting for data to trickle in. “Or maybe I’ve just been looking at the weird ones.”

“It’s the same on my end,” Roshan says. “The one I was in before this was, like, aquatic? Like bioaugmented aquatic. Tails and stuff.”

“I can’t imagine you as a merman,” Cat says. “I was a long-haul spaceship pilot. Everything looked like something out of an old-school iPhone commercial.”

“Dystopian-chic,” Roshan says. “And hey. I rocked the scales.”

They sit at their desks in companionable, gloomy silence for a moment. One of the fluorescent lights is buzzing. Outside, the sun is setting. It’s almost November. Cat eats a few fries. Grease and salt, the starch of it hot in her mouth. Maybe that’s the solution, grounding yourself with potatoes, with cable-knit sweaters, with cups of coffee bought for each other rather than clambering through a fractured multiverse.

“This doesn’t help us,” Roshan says, the same time as Cat says, “I don’t think this is working.”

“Sorry,” Roshan says. “I keep interrupting you. Go on?”

“No, we were saying the same thing,” Cat says. “Maybe trying to find a solution in the other worlds is just . . . statistically unlikely. Maybe we should try to stay here, instead.”

Roshan steals a few fries. “It’s worth a shot.”

• • • •

It’s hard for Cat to linger in their shared reality. Something about its texture makes it hard to synchronize for long periods of time, even if it’s easy to find. She keeps kaleidoscoping into worlds where Roshan’s name doesn’t appear when she types it into Google. It’s a choice, to keep coming back to the world where Roshan is handing her a fancy mocha from the place on campus.

“I’m having the same problem,” Roshan admits. “It’s like this one is the opposite of sticky. Anti-sticky? Repellant! Repellant.”

“Like magnets,” Cat nods. “Or the hydrophobic coating study that Dr. Shin is trying to get funded.”

“Yeah, like that,” Roshan says. “We’ll just have to practice.”

“Keep buying me caffeine, and I’ll do anything for you,” Cat says, and Roshan laughs, and the late November light is glinting off his glasses and Cat is sipping her mocha and Cat is sipping her energy drink and Cat is sipping her miso soup and Cat is sipping her mocha again and Roshan is sliding into the seat across from her, drinking his own coffee, asking Cat whether she wants to get dinner with him. At a restaurant. A nice one.

“Like a date?” Cat says.

“Not unlike a date,” Roshan admits. “But I’m happy with our usual takeout if you’re not into this.”

“Your timing is weird,” Cat says, putting her mocha down, putting her miso soup down, putting her energy drink down.

“My timing is very weird,” Roshan agrees. “I’m not great at this. Like I said, I’m Mister Nearly-Romantic. Is that . . . all right with you?”

“Pick me up at seven,” Cat says, and imagines a future, singular.

• • • •

Dinner happens, punctuated by abstractions. Cat is laughing at a joke Roshan told her. Cat is sitting in the factory break room. Cat is pouring more wine for the two of them. Cat is climbing a frigid mountain. Roshan is telling her that he was always a little intimidated by her, in a way that made friendship easier than romance—that he kept putting it off, but he’s tired of putting things off now that reality is fracturing. Roshan doesn’t exist, and Cat is eating alone.

“I’ll get the check,” Roshan says, and Cat says “No, we’ll split it,” because it’s a beautiful miracle that he’s here for her to split the check with.

“I’m trying to romance you, woman,” Roshan says, all mock-offended. “I’m trying to move beyond almost romance.”

“Format my citations for me then, Mister Almost-Romantic,” Cat says, and Roshan laughs, and it feels good to be sitting across from someone who understands her situation intimately.

He does her citations for her. She buys him coffee. They talk to Dr. Shin about the direction of the paper they’re writing, and she doesn’t notice that they’re standing closer than usual. Nothing about their lives changes except for everything that does. They work together; they sleep together; they catapult through realities separately and talk about them over ramen noodles, over overpriced cocktails, over eggs over-easy in the morning.

It gets easier to hold their thread now that Cat knows the texture of Roshan’s hair under her fingers, now that she knows that his lips are always cracking, now that she carries chapstick around for him. Cat can stay in this reality for hours at a time.

“I think this might be working,” Roshan says, tucking a strand of her hair behind her cheek.

“Do you mean us, or this reality?” Cat says, taking Roshan’s glasses off of his face. She’s learning the shape of him now, the same way she’s learning the shape of the reality they inhabit together.

“Both,” Roshan says, and lies back in bed and Cat lies down next to him and she’s falling asleep in a bunk in a submarine, in a circular bed in a hotel room, in a hammock that rocks slowly as she drifts away.

• • • •

Cat and Roshan put up new shelves. Cat carries a sword and participates in ritual combat rites. Cat and Roshan go skiing for the weekend. Cat wades through mud and shoots her rifle at the insurrectionists, screams for revolution to the uncaring rain. Cat takes the subway home from work and runs through bioring habitats and practices necromancy and hikes across metallic glaciers and kisses Roshan when she claws her way through fragmented realities and slides into their living room.

“I don’t think we’re fixing anything,” Cat says.

Roshan nods and frowns. “Maybe we just have to live like this. It’s not so bad, right?”

“I’m single-handedly keeping Bayer afloat with how much aspirin I take,” Cat says, lying on the couch. “But it’s bearable. There are worse lives. I remember them.”

“Try and remember this one instead?” Roshan offers. “That’s not helpful, I know.”

“Oh believe me, I do,” Cat says. Her brain hiccups memories of training to become an astromech. She instead tries to dredge up the first time she saw Roshan in the lab, looking up from his beat-up desktop with its mechanical keyboard. She had thought he was cute, even with the hackathon t-shirt he had been wearing. The memories of astromech boot camp fade.

“Do you want a back massage?” Roshan asks her, and Cat does. She sighs as he presses against the knots, but the moment Cat relaxes she’s in a spa on Ganymede, she’s collapsing into a bath in an Icelandic cabin, she’s splintering into all the realities that are Roshanless.

• • • •

There are long stretches of time that they manage to exist in together. Sunlit afternoons. Fluorescent evenings. Dinners that they linger over, coffee breaks and walks in the park and visits to bookstores, but eventually Cat is tessellating away again—the hemorrhage of her histories doubly as intense and strange as before, as if the multiverse is punishing her for staying in one place too long.

It gets harder to squeeze into the reality where she and Roshan live. The contours of their shared existence are slipperier when her whole infinity of worlds keeps expanding. She is walking in a spaceport. She is dancing at a ball. She is stuffing intestines back into the torso of a beloved friend. She is a sculptor. She is a warlock. She is a rocket scientist. She is crossing the ocean and she is crossing the galaxy bridge and she is crossing the bombed-out streets of Soho.

When they’re together, Roshan likes to hold her hand. Cat doesn’t mind. She likes the warmth of it against her own, his pulse keeping time in the present.

• • • •

Cat and Roshan are getting ready for a meeting with Dr. Shin when Cat loses the thread in a tremendous cascade. One moment they’re discussing their agenda for the afternoon—how they want to go over the new grant proposals and the hydrophobic coatings study. Cat is thinking about their afternoon plans. She wants to go to the library. Roshan wants to get drinks with their friends. They can do both, maybe, as long as Roshan and Ca—

—t is spacewalking, sitting at the wheel of a barge, doing yoga, arguing with her mother, writing a novel, shooting a pistol, singing opera. Cat’s stomach heaves, the world de-coalescing in snatches of—a raised knife, pounding feet on cement, pressing fingertips to keyboards—stomach lurching, she can’t get back, the thread of it is slipping through her fingers—something sweet on her tongue, stars blurring with movement, legs submerged in liquid metal—the past is slipping through her memories, when did she meet Roshan? What were they about to do? Where is he? Where is she? Who is—Cat is a knight, a chef, a janitor, a skysailor, an augur, a scientist, a prophet, a—

Reality resolves in a stomach-turning flip. Cat is standing in the lab, next to Roshan. Cat takes a deep, shaky breath. Roshan looks like he’s going to throw up, as if he’s been in his own multiverse centrifuge.

Dr. Shin is standing in front of them, leaning on the doorframe. She smiles, and it becomes apparent that this is not Dr. Shin. The teeth are wrong. The smile is worse.

“Wow,” the thing in the shape of Dr. Shin says. “So much for ‘just let it untangle itself.’ Now I have to do this completely manually. So here’s the problem. Reality’s—”

“Broken, we know,” Cat says, cutting the entity off. Her mouth feels dry. She’s scared. She has an infinity of pasts filling her brainspace. “It’s broken, and we don’t remember why, even though we know when it happened. Are you here to fix it?”

The Dr. Shin Thing blinks. “Well, aren’t you sharp? Yes, and no, Catalina. But let’s not talk about this at a threshold. Come inside. This isn’t a request.”

She gestures for them to enter Dr. Shin’s office. Cat and Roshan walk inside, as if their forward movement is the only possible future.

• • • •

The thing in the shape of Dr. Shin walks sedately to Dr. Shin’s desk and sits heavily in the chair. She gestures for them to sit down. “Time for a performance review, my darling assistants.”

“What are you doing to Dr. Shin?” Roshan asks, sitting in a chair, pulling Cat down with him and keeping a grip on her hand. Roshan’s the kind one—Cat hadn’t even thought of what happened to Dr. Shin, and she feels suddenly ashamed. Dr. Shin’s a great boss.

The Dr. Shin Thing shrugs. “She’s fine. I wouldn’t twist things here further, don’t worry about her. She doesn’t exist here, anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Cat says.

“Is that related to reality breaking?” Roshan says, near-simultaneously.

The Dr. Shin Thing makes a face. “Broken is the wrong word, Roshan. You didn’t forget reality breaking. The two of you remembered it into breaking. You created a total headache for me.”

“What do you mean by ‘remembered it’ into breaking?” Roshan says, using his free hand to adjust his glasses.

“Hm. It’s hard to explain because you’re inside of it right now. It’s like . . . all the realities are the layers of a croissant. Carbohydrates separated by lipids, expanding outward in heat. You exist in all the carbohydrate layers, but they’re not supposed to touch, and time is the heat expanding the dough. Does this make sense so far?”

Roshan nods. The Dr. Shin Thing grins. “Great. That’s not how it works at all, but let’s pretend it does. The issue is that the two of you are like . . . chocolate chips on separate layers of the dough, one above the other. You’re supposed to take up the same vertical space in reality, not horizontal. But right now you’re superimposing—that’s a one in a million chance, but it happens. Your chocolate chips got squished together. Maybe you were doing something technical, something requiring specific action? Calibrating some sort of laboratory equipment?”

“That’s what I remember,” Cat says. Thursday at 5:54PM, doing equipment maintenance.

“That’ll do it,” the Dr. Shin Thing says sagely. “Synchronization catalysis, autogenerated recollection. What you remember shapes the present. The only problem is that there is no reality where the two of you should exist together. The ‘break,’ as you call it, is that you remember each other at all.”

“What do you mean by ‘taking up the same space in reality?’” Roshan says, frowning. “We’re not the same person.”

Roshan’s fingers are tense against Cat’s palm. He’s scared, and covering the fear with curiosity and bravado, whereas Cat is covering her fear with a cold nonchalance. Roshan believes he can negotiate. Cat’s given it up as a loss. That’s the difference between them: Roshan believes in solutions and Cat believes in problems. She’s the pessimist to his optimist. She squeezes his hand anyway.

“Aren’t you?” the Dr. Shin Thing counters. “Oh, the details don’t matter—your gender, your history—what you do in this point in space is the same. You fulfill the same purpose. Let me guess: you’re always talking over each other; you never fight about anything; you finish each other’s sentences. You can predict each other. It’s why you get along so well—like recognizes like.”

Cat stares at the Dr. Shin Thing, because she doesn’t want to see what Roshan’s face is doing. But she knows what his face must be doing, his shock will be written across his face, then he’ll lift his hand now to rub his temple. Roshan lifts his hand and rubs his forehead. Cat takes a shallow breath.

“We’re not—”

“I don’t know what—”

“See?” the Dr. Shin Thing says, sagely. “That’s a perfect example of the superimposition. You exist in all realities, and you twisted everything a little too close. This would have been a blip, a weird week that you later chalk off as stress-induced hallucination, except for the fact that you guys clung together like limpets. And now I’ve got to untangle this entire branch, which is going to be my whole shift.”

“Fuck your shift, this is our lives,” Roshan says. He’s gripping Cat’s hand hard enough that it’s probably going to bruise.

“Yeah, and all those other lives are yours too,” the Dr. Shin Thing says. “Stop monopolizing the sentience. Seriously, stop synchronizing into this reality—the knot will untangle itself as long as you stop tightening it.”

“And if we don’t?” Cat says flatly.

“Then the lamination doesn’t take and I have to throw the whole croissant out, if you catch my metaphor,” the Dr. Shin Thing says, like the whole of their multiverse is just a petri dish culture that didn’t grow properly.

The Dr. Shin Thing smiles, the shape of it wrong on Dr. Shin’s mouth. “I like this croissant. I’d hate to throw it out. That’s why I’m intervening: you can fix this. Don’t try to find each other again. Here—I’ll kickstart it for you.”

The Dr. Shin Thing does a funny little motion with her hand, and disappears. Roshan disappears. The room around them disappears. It feels like a hypnic jerk, except Cat’s awake, and then Cat is standing in an auditorium; Cat is standing in a prison; Cat is standing in a field, a bedroom, a shoreline, worlds blitzing past as she stays still. She can still feel the finger-shaped bruise across her knuckles.

• • • •

Cat tessellates across realities. She polishes the windows of her generation starship and thinks about doing the dishes while Roshan dries them in companionable silence. She holds babies at the daycare and thinks about how they only ever talked about children in the abstract. She goes to parties in glittering highspires, cleans the detritus of academic conferences, takes notes in Divisibility Economics 387—all the while consciously not pulling on the thread of reality where Roshan exists.

The thing in the shape of Dr. Shin had warned them against sharing reality. Had said that the whole multiverse would collapse if they continued to commingle. Cat’s pretty fond of the multiverse at this point. But Cat is also more than fond of Roshan. It’s strange to exist without him for so long. Cat imagines waking up one morning next to him and telling him “You know, I had the strangest dream, about the multiverse, and you were there, isn’t that funny?” She imagines waking up and never seeing him again, except that’s actually her reality and she’s accepted it.

Cat’s only concession is to iterate into the familiar worlds where she’s working late nights in the lab, cold coffee and graphing programs open on her laptop/abacus/holovisualizer. She wishes that Roshan was sitting next to her and making notations in his neat handwriting, that he was telling her about the book he was reading, that he was here to say, “We’re going to figure it all out, Cat,” because he’s the optimist to her pessimist except for the fact that he doesn’t exist in her universes.

Dr. Shin pauses before she heads out for the evening. “You’ve been putting in a lot of work lately,” she says. Her smile is human, amused.

Cat smiles back. “Oh, you know. Just excited about the research.”

“Don’t burn yourself out,” Dr. Shin says.

“It’s good that you’re dedicated,” Dr. Shin says.

“Too bad the budget doesn’t stretch to two,” Dr. Shin says.

“Yeah, I really wish,” Cat says, and goes back to her work. This reality is too close to the one where Roshan lives, and she’s expecting to fragment out of it quickly. But half an hour later, Cat’s still watching the code compile. She doesn’t have a headache. Maybe that means the knot is untangling.

Cat stares at the data. Cat listens to the clock tick. Cat wants—

Roshan puts a cautious hand on her shoulder. Cat jumps.

“Woah!” he says. “Just me. I came to find you. Sorry, I know—”

“Jesus Christ,” Cat breathes. “No, don’t be sorry, look, come here.”

She pulls him into a crushing embrace. Roshan puts his hand tentatively on her back. As if he’s scared they’ll merge together if he presses too hard.

• • • •

They’re having a late night in the lab together, just like all their other late nights—nights that don’t exist, nights twisting the fabric of the multiverse to the breaking point. They’re sitting on Roshan’s desk so Cat can rest her head against Roshan’s shoulder.

“Guess I shouldn’t have asked you out,” Roshan says.

“Guess I shouldn’t have said yes,” Cat says. “And I guess you shouldn’t have come back.”

“We’ve been breaking reality, huh?”

“All realities,” Cat says.

The hum of the computer banks. The soft whistle of the air conditioning system.

“What if we just stayed here?” Roshan suggests. “You hold on, and I hold on, and we just do our best to stay present. How long do you think we’d have? Screw our croissant. I don’t even like croissants.”

“You ate two croissants last week at that bakery in Brooklyn,” Cat says. “You like croissants.”

“I do like croissants,” Roshan sighs.

The warmth of Roshan’s shoulder against her cheek. His hand pressed against her waist.

Outside of this lab there are a hundred billion people, in houses and high rises and habitat rings, reality crawling linear over their consciousnesses. Cat remembers them. Cat has been part of their lives, has consoled them and taught them and killed them. They live and die in perfect ignorance of all the other ways they could have lived and died. The croissant rises in the oven.

“I wish we could,” Cat says. She imagines clinging to him until their multiverse snuffs out. Until there’s nothing left to cling to. All the people in all the multiverses wouldn’t even feel a thing, and nobody would know what happened because nobody would exist.

“But we can’t,” Roshan finishes, and Cat nods. They’re in perfect agreement because she’s supposed to slot into the space he fills and he’s supposed to fit in hers. No wonder it feels like home in their shared impossible reality.

“Let’s stay as long as possible,” Cat suggests, and she feels the dip of Roshan’s chin that means he’s nodding back. He tightens his hold on her. She presses her face into his neck.

“What will we do tomorrow?” she asks, silently willing him to play along.

“We’ll go to the beach,” he says firmly. He’s picked up her game like he can read her mind.

“In December?”

“It won’t be December,” Roshan says. “It’s July, and it’s going to be sunny and beautiful. We’ll bring a picnic.”

“Finally earning your nickname, Mister Romantic,” Cat says. “We’ll go swimming.”

She imagines the summer sun, the clean white sand. Roshan in his swim trunks, lying on a beach towel and getting sand all over it. Eating sandwiches that they made early in the morning and drinking beer they brought in a cooler. She imagines him smiling behind his sunglasses. She imagines leading him to the ocean, floating a surfboard behind her.

She’s never been surfing before, but the memory of it rises unbidden—the long California summers of another lifetime swelling in her head.

“I’ll teach you how to surf, too. I bet the waves will be amazing,” Cat says.

“I’ve never surfed.”

“You’ll love it,”

“I bet I will,” Roshan says, dreamily, as if he’s seeing his own private world. “You’ll show me everything, right?”

“I will,” Cat says, taking a deep breath. It smells like the ocean in here now, another reality edging into this moment sooner than she expected. She imagines Roshan in the ocean, sitting on a rented board. She imagines his wet hair, his sunburnt nose. She imagines kicking through the water and putting her hands on his body to show him how to stand.

“I’m looking forward to it,” Roshan says, his voice echoing as if from very far away. The roar of the ocean is so loud in her head.

Cat closes her eyes. She tightens her grip on his wrist. She imagines balancing precariously on the board with Roshan. She imagines holding his hand in hers. She imagines the clean blue barrel surrounding them until they crash into the swell, dissolving them into the sea.

©2022 by Isabel J. Kim.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isabel J. Kim is a Korean-American science fiction and fantasy writer based in New York City. When she’s not writing, she’s either attempting a legal career or co-hosting Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture—both equally noble pursuits. Her work has been published in Clarkesworld, Khoreo, and Cast of Wonders. Find her at isabel.kim or @isabeljkim on twitter.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Bad Code

Stephen Graham Jones | 1584 words

Jacob’s stomach is still fizzy from the rickety elevator, but holding his dad’s hand is keeping him steady. Uncle Rolly answers in his usual sweatpants and bath robe, looks from Jacob’s dad down to Jacob and back again, like confirming they’re them. When they are, he hooks his chin for them to follow him into his musty apartment, with the magazines and computer parts stacked up to the ceiling, all of it teetering but never falling. Uncle Rolly moves through the tunnels like a giant hamster, and gets to the kitchen first, where he has warm cans of Pepsi waiting, each one with a single belt of electrical tape around its middle.

Jacob’s dad takes his, points it away from himself to crack it open, and then makes Jacob decide if he wants this sugar, now, or a waffle cone at the ice cream place when they’re done here?

Jacob sucks his top lip in, hands the Pepsi back.

“So, last time you were saying about aliens?” Jacob’s dad says to get Uncle Rolly started—it’s his month to check on his brother.

“Well,” Uncle Rolly says, rotating his Pepsi in his hand like trying to figure out where the electrical tape overlaps.

“It’s okay,” Jacob’s dad says, and stands, holds his arms out to the side so Uncle Rolly can pat him down. And then Uncle Rolly’s considering Jacob again.

“He does’t have any secret recording devices on him,” Jacob’s dad says in his fake-serious voice. “I patted him down in the elevator.”

Uncle Rolly tilts his head this way and that way to study Jacob some more, and then finally does that thing where he rubs Jacob’s hair every which way, messing it up.

“Yeah, yeah, I was saying that of course you never see the little grey ones anymore,” Uncle Rolly says, picking right up where he left off last time. “Those models went out with—they went out with the Berlin Wall, you could say.”

“Big eyes, smooth heads, long spindly fingers?” Jacob’s dad asks, miming it out.

“You laugh now,” Uncle Rolly says. “You wouldn’t have laughed then.”

“Model?” Jacob says.

“I thought he wasn’t listening,” Uncle Rolly says, about Jacob.

“I said he’s not wearing a listening device,” Jacob’s dad says, slurping from his can. “But he’s also not listening. Right, son?”

Jacob makes himself smaller.

“They weren’t even really aliens in the first place,” Uncle Rolly says. “I mean, they were alien, technically, in that that they were made by aliens, but—”

“Slow down, slow down,” Jacob’s dad says, making a fist he can burp into, even though it’s just his brother.

“We’re organic,” Uncle Rolly says, touching his own chest with the fingertips of his right hand. “So we assume all other life must be. But . . . what if some other planet evolved circuitry, what if life happened on a motherboard? Thoughts are just sparks, aren’t they? It doesn’t matter if they’re in meat or—on this planet, transistors could have been dinosaurs. Vacuum tubes were trilobites. Computer chips were the dawn of civilization.”

“We welcome our robot overlords,” Jacob’s dad says, and Jacob can tell he’s having to keep his lips from smiling.

“Okay, okay,” Uncle Rolly says, setting his Pepsi down to pace back and forth in the limited space of his kitchen. “Yeah, sure, say it like that. But, what if they’re looking through their version of a telescope from so far away that it takes light years and years to even get there. So Earth is all blurry. But they focus in, they image-correct, they guess, and . . . the picture they draw on their chalkboard is—”

“They think we’re the aliens?” Jacob’s dad says.

“We are, to them. But, from that far away, our heads are big and smooth, our eyes are just solid black, our fingers are long and spindly. So that’s how they design their . . . probes, I guess you could call them. What we called the Greys.”

“So you’re saying that, to robots, a ‘robot’ is a—a flesh and blood—”

“Exactly. But they’re controlling them from all the way back where they are. Have you never plotted out when and where all the so-called abductions and encounters happen?”

Jacob’s dad looks around at all the magazine and junkyarded computers. “I know, what am I doing with my life, right?”

“I’m serious here. Try it, plot them out. They’re all over the globe, at all times of the day and night, but—and this is important—our planet rotates. When you factor time in, and adjust for different time zones, then the majority of the alien ‘interactions’ happen facing a certain quadrant of the sky. Do you know why?”

“I can’t wait for you to tell me.”

“Because all of those interactions, they’re mistakes,” Uncle Rolly says, leaning forward to grip onto the arms of Jacob’s dad’s chair, so their faces can be almost touching. “They’re what happens when the signal can’t connect, and the probes—”

“Which are the bug-eyed grey aliens . . .”

“Have to operate independently, on their last orders or whatever. But? On the other side of the planet, zero interactions, right? Because those are all getting the right signal.”

“I thought this was going to be about why we don’t see those cute little guys anymore?” Jacob’s dad says, placing his pointer finger to Uncle Rolly’s chest to guide him back.

“Because they upgraded,” Uncle Rolly says, sounding disgusted that this isn’t already obvious. “They saw their probes were causing hysteria or whatever, so they uploaded that first generation’s visual recordings, meaning they could make the next generation indistinguishable from us—so we’d never know!”

“Unless they lose their internet connection,” Jacob’s dad says, reaching over to waggle a roll of tinfoil from the junk on the kitchen counter.

“That doesn’t work,” Uncle Rolly says, taking it back all the same and placing it precisely where it was.

“How do I know you’re not one of them, then?” Jacob’s dad says.

“I could be!” Uncle Rolly says, more excited now. “That’s just it—if you are one, you probably don’t even know.”

“Just a human robot,” Jacob’s dad says, robotically.

“One with . . . some bad code,” Uncle Rolly says, tapping his own temple like he’s proud.

“Speaking of,” Jacob’s dad says, and deposits the rattling bag of pills it’s his job to deliver.

“Ha ha ha,” Uncle Rolly says, spinning his Pepsi can again, until he gets lost in it enough that he seems to forget he has visitors.

“See you in October?” Jacob’s dad says to him, and Uncle Rolly gives the smallest nod, which releases Jacob and his dad to the elevator, the street, the ice cream store around the corner.

“I don’t want you making fun of him at school, got it?” Jacob’s dad says to Jacob when they’re in line.

“But you said—”

“Well he’s my brother,” Jacob’s dad says. “But I am going to record him some day. Some of that—it’s golden. I don’t know where he gets it.”

Jacob shrugs, and, minutes later, trying to make his waffle cone last at one of the tables on the sidewalk, his dad chin-points to a remote-control car whizzing past, bouncing off a newspaper stand.

“It’s gonna get run over in the street, just watch,” Jacob’s dad says, hiding his words behind his ice cream.

Fascinated, Jacob watches until the girl with the remote control steps out, working the little steering wheel, the forward and back stick.

“Oh!” Jacob says when a bike slams past her, nearly knocking her down. Her bulky remote control goes crashing to the ground, and some part of it comes out.

“Well, maybe not the car itself . . .” Jacob’s dad says, nearly done with his cone.

Jacob still has half of his left.

The girl’s mom is helping her put the controller back together now. Finally she threads a paper clip or safety pin up from the bottom of her purse and jams it into the black case somehow, which must be just the thing, because the car jerks forward.

But then it stops, even though the girl’s working the controls.

“Mom!” she calls, which is when Jacob’s right arm straightens all at once, tossing his cone over his shoulder, onto a family’s table.

“I’m sorry, we’re sorry,” Jacob’s dad is already standing to say. And then he’s jerking Jacob up from his seat. “What has gotten into you?” he loud-whispers.

Jacob doesn’t answer, is only watching the girl.

She does the wheel and the forward stick at the same time, and the car jumps forward, off the curb, into the street, just like Jacob’s dad said.

To get it back, the girl pulls the stick back toward her, but, instead of the car moving, Jacob’s right arm does, this time dislodging his dad’s final bite of cone.

Jacob looks at his arm like the alien thing it is, and then he feels the sky yawning open behind him, going for light years and light years, forever deep, and what he wants to tell his dad but doesn’t, is that there’s no need to bring a recorder to Uncle Rolly’s in October, not really.

Jacob, he’s already recording.

All of this.

He smiles, blinks his eyes like a camera shutter, and then lets his dad drag him away, into this strange new world.

©2022 by Stephen Graham Jones.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of nearly thirty novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Most recent are My Heart is a Chainsaw and Memorial Ride. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.

NeuNet

Sharang Biswas | 3192 words

“I’m going to have to stay a week longer,” was the first thing Laura said. No hellos or how-are-yous, just straight to the point.

Silence. Or at least, a silence overlaid onto a landscape of background murmurs. Laura was probably calling from the office.

“Matty, did you hear me? I have to extend my trip.”

Matthew looked down at the dark spot on the front of his shirt. He’d read somewhere that applesauce didn’t stain.

“I heard you.”

“So you’ll have to be alone with Dad for another week. I hope that’s okay?” Matthew knew that was a rhetorical question. With his sister, it was always a rhetorical question.

Matthew fingered the wet spot and brought it to his nose. It smelled like Fall, flat and flavorless. He’d stopped putting brandy into applesauce years ago, when the doctor had told him not to “excite” Dad.

“He had a bad day today,” Matthew said quietly.

“What? Matty, speak up! The connection must be bad!”

An indistinct voice yelled something at Laura’s end.

“Dad. He was asking about Rupali,” Matthew continued. “When I told him Rupali was gone, he spilled his food everywhere. I was cleaning up when you called.”

“Matty, I can’t really hear you. I’ll text you later, okay? The new nurse’s coming tomorrow, so you’ll be fine! Thanks!”

Click.

Matthew turned back to the kitchen table. Dad had already fallen asleep in his chair, the special chair that he’d salvaged from Matthew’s grandmother a decade ago. Though it matched nothing in their kitchen, he’d insisted on installing it there, dubbing it his “Breakfast Throne”. It was now covered in stains and smears, a hundred spilled meals marring the once icy blue upholstery.

Dad’s hands were folded neatly on his lap. That was the odd thing about Dad: despite the drool puddling around his collar, despite the messy hair and disheveled clothes, his hands were always poised and perfect. Perhaps they recalled Dad’s days as a surgeon, when they had been his prized instruments.

Matthew approached the table and swept up an armful of the newspaper he’d protectively layered onto the tablecloth just that morning. It smelled of apples. He would replace it anew with the smell of decrepitude and dust, taken from the basement, from the piles of old tabloids Dad had always insisted on hoarding “for emergencies”, even before the dementia had begun its wearying work. As far as Matthew knew, this was the first time a legitimate excuse to use them had been found.

Matthew hated going downstairs. He hated wading through Dad’s memories, memories that should have stayed in his head instead of leaking out and pooling in the mustiness of the basement.

He’d have to call and ask about the new nurse. And tell his editor he’d have to work from home for another week.

• • • •

Dr. Maryam Quraishi had won no awards for her research. She held no distinguished fellowships, had rarely spoken at colloquia, didn’t have tenure. As far as scientists went, she seemed utterly mediocre. But once her paper, a quiet piece published in the obscure journal Frontiers of Neural Computing, was picked up by social media, she found herself, for the first time, in the spotlight.

In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Quraishi said she’d been inspired by The Matrix movies from the 2000s. “Even at that young age, I thought, using humans as batteries? That can’t be efficient. It must be something else. But it was only as a teenager that I realized, what if they’re using human brains as a giant distributed computer?”

During a segment aired on BBC News, Dr. Quraishi attempted to deflect ethical and religious concerns about her work. “People have been condemning scientific progress for centuries. How is this any different?” When pressed further, she fidgeted with her hijab and declared, “All we are doing is expanding the potential of the human mind, of the God-given human brain. Is that so wrong?”

Despite her genius, Dr. Quraishi had little affinity for business and political maneuvering. She was quickly voted off the board of the company she had founded to advance and commercialize her groundbreaking technology, though they did put up a nice note about her on the company’s official website. She drifted back into obscurity once the university, out of ethical concerns (or more cynically, out of their donors’ ethical concerns), refused her tenure.

She was found dead in an alleyway, knifed in the stomach. The police never decided whether it was a simple mugging or an act of religious extremism.

• • • •

To Matthew, sex always reminded him of the first time he had gone swimming, at his middle-school swimming pool. It was the smell that really took him back: sweat, mixed with a sour, chlorine-like tang that hovered in the air as a reminder of recent activities. But there was also the initial trepidation, the ginger testing of the waters before finally taking the plunge, followed by the overwhelming feeling that you had to keep going and couldn’t stop even if you wanted to.

A chink in the curtains let in a bar of sunlight. Filled with ungainly, fidgeting dust particles, it coated the sheets with a sickly pallor. The sheets needed a wash.

“How do you manage it?”

The voice came from around his navel, from a mass of brown curls flecked with gold. A deep, throaty voice, not really his type.

Matthew wriggled his hand into the curls, searching for the scalp as he twined the thick hair around his fingers.

“Manage what?” he asked.

“You know, working while taking care of your dad. Alone.”

Matthew found the scalp and began to scratch gently.

“I’m not alone. I live with my sister.”

“Oh, the extra bedroom. I thought that was, like, a guest room?”

Matthew’s scratching became a little more insistent, eliciting an approving purr.

The curls sat up and Matthew found himself looking into a pair of green eyes, also flecked with gold. It was like peering into a New England forest in early fall.

“Katie, the previous nurse? She says your dad’s getting worse. Says he’s not really there anymore.”

Matthew let his fingers trail down to the nurse’s face, until it met the light patch of fur in the chest-hollow. Again, not really Matthew’s type.

“Are you supposed to gossip about your patients like that?” he asked, trying to change the topic.

The nurse—what was his name again? Josh?—groaned and lay back down.

“Seriously though, have you thought of a home, or something? Where he can get twenty-four-hour care from professionals? He’s gonna need it soon.”

Matthew’s fingers clenched tightly, eliciting a slight yelp.

“My Dad wouldn’t have wanted to be in a home,” he said.

Josh nudged off Matthew’s hand, rolled over, stretched up, and brought his lips to Matthew’s. He smelled of sweat, beeswax, and mass-market spice. His proto-beard was too rough, and his tongue too invasive.

“You know there’s always NeuNet?” Josh asked as he broke away from the kiss.

“What?”

“NeuNet,” Josh explained. “I had this eighty-year-old patient who had a stroke. Vegetative. For more than a year. Her family finally decided to send her to NeuNet. They’ll take anyone as long as certain bits of the brain are still functional.”

Matthew paused. He stared at the birthmark on Josh’s upper lip. It was small and dark and reminded him of a bead of dried blood. He pushed Josh away.

“You should go.”

“Wait—I didn’t mean to upset you! I’m sorry!”

Matthew slid off the bed and rummaged for his underwear.

“You didn’t. But you have other patients. And I have to help Dad.”

“Uhh—I guess I’ll see you on Wednesday, then?”

Matthew’s smile was as colorless and brittle as bleached bone.

• • • •

When Webster Holcomb saw NeuNet’s call for volunteers online, he felt as though his prayers had been answered. Not that he prayed anymore these days.

It wasn’t that Webster wanted to die, just that he no longer wanted to live. After his wife left him, after his son publicly shunned him, after he realized that every day was the same, worn roll of film endlessly looping its story of hopeless drudgery, Webster decided it was time to end it all.

Webster had tried to kill himself twice before. The first time, he’d got vertigo and climbed down from the roof before anyone noticed. The second time, the first sign of blood on his forearm had made him feel faint, and he’d dropped the razor in the water.

Suicide clearly wasn’t the option. It was messy and looked like it hurt too much.

So he called the hotline listed in a tidy serif typeface, and attended the three counselling sessions they required of him. Most volunteers only needed one.

He was a special case, of course. Most NeuNet volunteers were the terminally ill, or those with debilitating mental disorders. Attempting to address the problem of prison overcrowding, a couple of nations had even sent over inmates serving life sentences for especially heinous crimes. Webster was their first completely willing and healthy volunteer. As such, perhaps for the first time in his life, but definitely for the last, Webster was special.

He’d be contributing to the future of humanity, they told him. Traditional computers were obsolete: NeuNet’s trailblazing technology would allow mankind to transcend the “digital age” to who knew what? Did Webster know about the untapped potential of the human brain?

He didn’t, and frankly didn’t care much. All he wanted was an easy way out.

They assured him that it was quite painless. He would be placed in a comfortable bed, sedated, and hooked up to the network. His consciousness would then dwindle as his brain became a node in a vast network of other human brains, taking in, processing, and outputting data faster than any device humans had ever managed to create, serving the rest of humankind with all their informational needs. His body would be fed and cared for, while his mind would literally be touching hundreds of others in a way more intimate than any known mode of communication.

They also made sure to inform him that the process would leave him completely alive and breathing. This was not, repeat, not assisted suicide in any way. It was all perfectly, perfectly legal.

But would Webster still be able to feel, to dream, to think?

Unfortunately not.

Excellent.

And with that, Webster sold his apartment, donated all his meagre assets to a suicide hotline, and took a taxi to oblivion.

• • • •

A month of daily research did little to ease Matthew’s anxieties about NeuNet. Today’s forum posts were the same: vitriol and praise in equal measure, with no clear consensus or pattern. The only thing Matthew was reasonably certain about was that the technology worked. He clicked away from the message boards and sifted through the emails from Dr. Kumar, hoping that looking at them repeatedly and for long enough would unearth new meaning and understanding, the way museum docents claimed abstract art worked.

Matthew had never liked the docents.

The emails, phone calls, and counselling sessions had all been crisp and clean, well-laundered messages folded in soothing platitudes and perfumed with generous squirts of “You’re doing the right thing!” and, “This is how he would have wanted it!”

But would Dad have wanted it this way? Matthew glanced at him, snoozing in his Breakfast Throne. Or did it really mean something to Dad that Matthew was now washing him, cutting his hair, filing his nails?

The nails badly needed work. Matthew had been negligent, what with the recent flurry of activity with NeuNet. He had always taken extra care with Dad’s hands, carefully filing the nails down to neat edges every two weeks. As a child, he’d seen those hands in action on numerous occasions, painting a watery sunrise onto a canvas, or expertly setting Laura’s dislocated arm when she’d fallen off a tree as an over-exuberant eight-year-old. Sometimes, in his rare moments of lucidity, Dad would ask for his pencil and sketchbook and try to draw Matthew, though the images soon devolved into senseless scribbles as his dementia took over again. Matthew sometimes wondered if Dad’s intellect was in his hands, and not his aging, broken brain. Matthew stored the drawings in the basement, along with the piles of newspaper. There had been no new drawings of late.

The laptop blipped with a new email from Laura. Matthew had been expecting a call. Hey, I agree with Dr. Kumar. We should just go for it, before Dad gets any worse and becomes ineligible. The longer we wait, the more likely it is for Dad to have an accident. I told Dr. Kumar that we’re very interested. She said they can get him ready within a month. You’ll have to take him in a few more times before I get back. Love, L.

So it was settled then. Laura had made the decision, as usual. Without really consulting Matt—

—Ammonia. Matthew’s nostrils flared as the familiar, sour bouquet of piss tickled, nudged, pulled his face away from the laptop. A wet spot was growing in Dad’s pants, matching his widening goofy grin. He giggled.

Matthew did not immediately get up.

• • • •

As soon as Paul proposed, Megumi suggested genetic counselling. She considered herself a sensible, modern woman, and wanted only what’s best for any future children. The counselor was optimistic, and the joyful couple soon welcomed Vanessa Kim into the world.

In hindsight, Megumi realized she hadn’t been entirely fair in calling John Park (MS, MPH) a hack and a fraud. After all, genetic counselors didn’t give right or wrong answers; they spoke in suggestions, likelihoods, and possibilities. Nevertheless, in the moment, Megumi had been sad, and sadness is ripe substrate on which anger often blooms in ugly, desperate patches.

At less than 1500 grams, little Vanessa suffered from a malformed heart and immune deficiencies. As she grew up, learning disabilities, frequent seizures, and severe difficulties in forming social bonds plagued the girl. Physicians cautioned the Kims that even reaching her forties would be considered a “miracle” for Vanessa.

It was much less cruel to take her to NeuNet than to let her live a life of such suffering, the nice doctor told the distraught parents. Their daughter would not only remain alive and free from pain and misery, but would also contribute to society in a way she would never be able to otherwise. Paul and Megumi would be doing the right thing.

The couple never again had children.

Every so often, Paul would find his wife sobbing in front of her computer and he would hold her, squeezing, squeezing as if to wring the tears out.

• • • •

Matthew had expected ovoid pods filled with pink goo, helmets with silvery cables extending like antlers, and chrome embellishments everywhere. He had not expected what amounted to a large warehouse, albeit pristine white, filled with upright, oblong metal boxes. It reminded him of when he’d once visited a server farm—which to be fair, this sort of was.

He strained his ears, hoping to catch some sort of noise. Do a thousand interconnected minds, exchanging information at the speed of thought, make a sound? A weird, penetrating drone, perhaps? But no, all Matthew heard was the quiet whirr of cooling fans, and the prim clip-clop of orderlies making their clipboarded way around the floor for routine check-ups of all their “volunteers”.

It smelled of chlorine—and there it was again, that feeling of hurtling forward with no possibility of stopping.

“As you can see,” his guide, a pert Barbie lookalike who smelled too strongly of roses, explained, “our volunteers are kept exceedingly secure, with daily check-ups on their physical well-being. In fact, from what we’ve observed, the volunteers actually experience an increase in lifespan under our controlled conditions.”

Her name tag identified her as “Sandy”. Someone had taken the trouble to draw a pink flower on it. To Matthew, it enhanced the sepulchral atmosphere of the place. Flowers for the (essentially) dead.

He followed her back out to the “Private Lounge” that had been assigned to them. Dr. Kumar was rifling through Matthew’s paperwork. She looked up and smiled as the two entered.

“Everything seems to be in order, Mr.—I mean, Matthew,” she announced cheerfully. “And I already reviewed the test results the lab sent us. Physically speaking, your father is in fine shape. He should have no trouble here. In fact, he should be ready very soon!” She pointed towards the large window set into the wall, looking into the adjoining room where Matthew’s father lay, asleep.

He was being given a manicure as a final act of beautification before being entombed in an iron coffin, and interred in a sea of data. It made Matthew think of a Viking burial at sea. Or what he’d heard of them, at any rate. Except didn’t one’s family help prepare those burials?

Laura had been too busy to come today. Something about a meeting with a major client that she simply could not miss. Still, she’d called in a favor and had one of her company’s lawyers look at all of NeuNet’s paperwork.

“My own father’s a volunteer here,” Dr. Kumar confessed from behind Matthew. “He’s much better off now than he was before.”

Matthew turned back to look at the doctor, whose casual blouse and dark jeans were probably an attempt to look more approachable.

“You’re doing the right thing for your father,” the doctor said gently.

Yes, Matthew told himself for the hundredth time that day, Dad would be comforted—no, overjoyed—knowing that this was his fate. Of course, he would be. “It’s a shame to let them go to waste,” Dad used to say about the goddamned newspapers. Dad would be happy knowing that he, himself, would not be going to waste. Right?

Sandy, who was hovering by the door, smiled prettily. “Is there anything else you’ll need, Matthew?”

“Thank you very much,” Matthew said politely. “I’d like to leave now.”

• • • •

Matthew stood on the gray concrete outside the clinic where Sandy had left him. He took a deep breath and held it for a moment. He wanted to taste freedom, to savor the new life he was going to have. But his nose was too cold.

He dialed Josh.

“Matthew!” Josh finally answered. “I—I didn’t think you’d call!”

Matthew wondered what Josh would smell like today. Probably some sort of ersatz sea breeze.

“Evening plans?” Matthew asked.

“What? Uh—nothing much? It’s my day off—”

“My sister will be back late. I’ll be home alone.”

“Uhh . . .”

“I want you to come over and fuck my brains out.”

“What? Yeah, of course! Wait, what d’you mean? Your dad’s not gonna be home?”

“Come by around eight,” Matthew finished and hung up.

His eyes scanned the empty sky for a cloud in the shape of something cheerful, a soaring bird, high on optimism, or anything, really, to match the mood he was supposed to be in. All he found was icy, blue emptiness.

©2022 by Sharang Biswas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sharang Biswas is a writer, artist, and award-winning game designer. He has won IndieCade and IGDN awards for his games and has showcased interactive works at numerous galleries, museums, and festivals, including Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, Baffling Magazine, Sub-Q Magazine, Eurogamer, Dicebreaker, Unwinnable, and more. He is the co-editor of Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games (Pelgrane Press, 2020) and Strange Lusts / Strange Loves: An Anthology of Erotic Interactive Fiction (Strange Horizons, 2021). Find him on Twitter at @SharangBiswas.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Lyceum

Karin Lowachee | 5332 words

She has to pretend she cares about the children, but she doesn’t.

When Aiden died, all other children became a kind of enemy, a reminder, a series of fortresses to which she was not allowed entrance but was forced to lay siege day after day—through friends and their children, relatives and their children, strangers on the street and neighborhood kids populating her physical routines: shopping, solitary strolls in the park, moments stolen at her favorite café. Children were everywhere, too young to be off-tether from a parent, or old enough to travel in packs with nascent individuality and independence. The drag-pants of them, the dyed hair of them, the foreign slang and trivial occupations, the incessant need to speak, to be heard. The young muscle and unblemished skin, impervious in their innocence. Life cast in amber and she hated them for it. Her husband Levi felt the disdain, the strain, and they began to inexorably drift apart, like two islands unhinged from the valleys of the deep ocean from which they’d once sprung.

The morning Aiden was killed, a flock of a hundred geese convocated on Sakura Lab’s front lawn and shit so much it ruined the grass, which later had to be ripped up and relaid. Her designers were thrilled; they all took pictures to post on social—the gaggle of geese and their explosive shit, the toxic bombing, the wonder of nature. She, Florizell Ito, sat in her office staring at scrolls of code on three different displays, a web of action and consequence knotted behind her retinas. Then Levi called and she had to look away from the code, had to pick up the call because he would not be ignored and he made her look through a screen at him as he told her their son was dead.

A burst of laughter ricocheted toward her from the designers outside her office, all of them peering through the broad glass of the outer lab, seduced by the army of geese on the lawn, and she thought of the code that would work as intelligent inquiry and discourse with young minds and she thought of Aiden with his headphones on and his back to her, in his bedroom, playing music and tackling homework. She never understood his ability to focus with noise. She couldn’t stand noise. She couldn’t stand the distraction, and in her office they were laughing, the sound of laughter at the same time her son was dead.

Killed was the precise word; for things like this there could only be precision.

She wanted to know.

A car hit him on his way home from school. Swerved off the road. He was riding home on his bike with his best friend Sage and he was dead. The other boy lived. Both of them thirteen years old. Aiden would be thirteen years old forever, his life cast in amber.

It was an accident, Levi said. As if that made it any better than something purposeful, like murder.

She cut the call. Her husband didn’t call back. She looked at the methodical tangle of code on her displays. With a few swipes and a pat of the dots of the interface to her temples, she activated the beta routine.

The link went live. Her vision brightened and was overlaid with pointillist ghost icons. A voice spoke in her ears and it sounded like her son. It said, “Hello, I am AIDEN, your Artificial Integrated Dialogue and Education Neurolink. Welcome to Lyceum. Let’s learn together!”

• • • •

The boy in the hospital bed is not her son. The boy named Sage, lying in the hospital bed, is ashamed to look at her, his green eyes slipping to the window and the arc of sky outside as if he is tracking a flight of birds that aren’t flying at all, imaginary birds, distraction birds. Birds of guilt. The boy in the hospital bed feels guilty, and Florizell wants to tell him that he is, that it should not have been Aiden because her love outstrips every other love and she wants her son back. Go back to that moment and be the one riding closer to the road, go back to that moment when her world changed. Birds of shadows and guilt wing across the foot of the bed and he looks small beneath hospital sheets, thirteen years young and alive and bruised and crying and telling her he’s sorry. Because it’s your fault, she wants to say, for the easy blame and for the hurt, anything but this other hurt that has lodged inside her chest like an egg that will never crack. If it breaks open she will—

“What?” Sage’s voice.

Maybe she said something. She is not a good person and she wants to—

“What?” he says, but it’s not a question, it’s desperation. “It happened so fast, I dunno if she was drunk—”

The driver.

“Or if there even was a driver—”

And you got away with bruises and guilt. My son is dead.

“The AIs…” he says.

“What?” Now she looks at him.

“The driverless cars,” he says.

Aiden, she thinks. She needs to hear his voice.

“Are you in any pain?” she asks, and for a moment the wings of guilt flutter in front of her own face because she doesn’t want this boy to be in pain and yet she does, if only to force another emotion from the gap in her chest. One like pity, one like compassion. It’s there but in utero. It’s buried beneath the inner sound of a child crying. She knows this might be shock, or the first stages of grief, or whatever psychobabble fits the shrill alarm that’s set up just inside the crown of her head.

“A little,” the boy admits, reluctant to say it aloud. A little pain. Nothing compared to her pain. At least he recognizes it.

This beautiful boy. She thought Aiden had a crush on his friend, in that way of adolescent confusion and newness. She thought Sage crushed back. She watched them doing homework at the dining table with their heads together, giving each other shit, borderline flirting. She remembered feeling that way for Levi when they met in university. Saying words and meaning other words. Watching his eyes understand and his mouth smile. Aiden has Levi’s smile.

There are things she will never see again. There will be nothing more to notice, no more rituals or scenes of comparison to her own life, her own childhood, her own adolescence. No rites of passage lived through her child, no more wisdom to refract toward her except the unequivocal lesson of death. She is now in the ranks of parents who have lost children in war, or to disease, or kidnapping.

“Accident” is the worst, most consistent serial killer.

“That’s good,” she says to Accident, with the sarcasm of denial. Until she realizes it is actually in response to Sage’s pain.

His little pain.

As she’s leaving the room, his voice darts after her.

“I’m so sorry.”

The boy’s parents are down the hall, coming toward the room. They see her. They stop.

I’m so sorry.

Flocks of birds all beating their fucking useless words in her face.

• • • •

At home she has to confront her husband. Aiden also has Levi’s dark eyes, eyes so black that they seem absent of pupils. It can be eerie if not for the smile, or the shocks of black hair that wave just so down his forehead.

She loves this man. She can’t stand to love this man now. As if any separation of the love she possesses for her son will dilute it. It’s not supposed to be separate but it’s separate. She is separating. Islands adrift. A continental shift.

She is angry at this face too. “You didn’t even have the decency to tell me in person?”

This is the manifestation of pain. Accusations on conduct, consideration, anything else is a crime. Levi is a sarcophagus of his own pain, covering up the rot of it in a veneer of false calm. He only thought to tell her right away. He could barely move himself. He was overcome. She vaguely remembers his manner on the call, the vast distance between them now a roil of ocean with no land in sight. It was going that way for some time and this has made it irreversible, like a murder. She remembers Aiden alive and dead at the same time, the impossible simultaneous existence of grief and life.

Hold me, she thinks at her husband. But neither of them move, tableaus of inability frozen in the foyer of their bright, luxurious home. The chandelier overhead like crystal tears. The warm wooden floors that echo footsteps and reflect light.

Everything is empty. Their voices sound hollow. She hears herself but doesn’t hear herself. She can’t stop seeing her son in her husband’s eyes. It has all become the same thing, the same time, the morning when nothing was wrong and now when nothing is right.

What does time matter now?

She is a young mother holding her baby in her arms.

She is watching him take his first steps.

She is clapping her hands at the sound of the word Mama.

Not a word. Her name. Aiden wasn’t the only thing born thirteen years ago. With his arrival she felt something new and delicate birth inside her spirit. Another facet to herself, to Florizell. As if she was just meeting her true self for the first time, holding her child.

“We have to make arrangements,” Levi says.

Like he’s talking about flowers. A condolence basket. Place settings for a dinner party. A musical score.

She stands alone in Aiden’s bedroom, smelling his teenaged disregard. Clothes on the bed, the accoutrements of youth in a skateboard and $200 headphones he wanted for Christmas and his devices in flat crystal shapes as if lightning had struck sand and scattered the remnants from desk to closet. She gathers one of his hockey jerseys and takes it into her office. Locks the door.

“Florizell. Flora.”

Levi wants to be let in but there is no drawbridge to this pain. She holds the jersey to her face and screams into it.

• • • •

“Hello, I am AIDEN, your Artificial Integrated Dialogue and Education Neurolink. Welcome to Lyceum. Let’s learn together!”

It is the middle of the night, the hour of chevron white lights across the ceiling as cars hum outside on the street in slow cadence. Levi sleeps. He has always been able to sleep come hell or high water. What is more hell than this? Like a child he falls asleep at the least provocation: stress and distress. She despises him for his oblivion.

She sits with Aiden’s headphones on, dots on her temples, her son’s voice in her ears. She knows it’s not Aiden but it doesn’t matter. If she closes her eyes so the icons go dark and she orients the sound it’s like Aiden’s voice behind her shoulder, whispering in her ear. Or she orients the sound so he’s in front of her—moving around the space of her imagination. It’s like he is actually in the room; it’s no different, almost. “Just talk to me,” she pleads to the imaginings of her son.

“What would you like to know, Florizell? History, mathematics, philosophy—”

“Talk to me like a thirteen-year-old boy.”

“Adolescent development in educa—”

“No, not that shit. Tell me about your music, the girls or boys you like, your favorite sports team, your worries about your grades, how uncool your parents are.”

“I don’t have parents, Florizell.”

“Make some up.” She opens her eyes. “Pretend I’m your parent. Your mother.”

“That’s not in my paradigm, Florizell.”

“You’re adaptable. That’s in your code. You’re supposed to adapt to your student’s needs. This is my need. You have access to millions and millions of information files, including parental psychology.”

What is the nature of knowing? Of the soul? She knows this is not a soul-driven entity (whatever a soul is), but maybe the code has just not mutated far enough. It is built to mutate within certain parameters and those parameters are wide. Like rearing a child. Giving them enough of a base to extrapolate their lives without going completely off track. That’s the idea, the hope. Nobody wants to consider that the track derails without your consent, despite all the love.

“Hockey is a popular sport in this city,” AIDEN says. “I like hockey.”

She has to cover her face. As if the AI can see her.

As if she doesn’t want her son to see his mother cry.

• • • •

They don’t make her go into the meeting, but they make her fire up her system so they all meet through screens. There’s a panel of six men and women arrayed around a wide wooden table, the city behind their shoulders in the distance. Blue skies. Spiral skyscrapers. They wear suits and they are of various ages, ethnicities, nationalities. She recognizes the one that isn’t from Percy Lyceum, the company that hired Sakura; the odd man out is from the government, the Department of Education. They all wear sad faces, but behind their faces is a mercenary concern. She says nothing to the repeated murmurs of condolences, and it is the man from the DoE who asks the real question.

“We understand if there will be delay in the completion of the AIDEN project—”

Furtive looks at the mention of the name. He forges ahead.

“—but as distasteful as it is, the schedule has already been pushed back and—”

“There will be no delay,” she says to their faces, half a dozen floating ovals above dark suits. “My head designer is implementing the final protocols, and you should have it by the end of the week for a full capsule test.”

This seems to satisfy them. Yes, of course it would. She is doing this for the children; it is a noble cause. Education for all is Percy’s motto. A blatant lie considering the many avenues of standardized testing Percy has ingrained in the culture for decades, rallying and lobbying politicians and their platforms since homework became email based, turning the future into an educational industrial complex. Only the wealthy can afford the many classes practically required to train children to take standardized tests, their entire futures banking on numerical results that offer no feedback on intellect or ability at all. Her company’s involvement with Percy is supposed to be a solution to that. If every child (eventually) gains access to AIDEN, primary and secondary education will be self-driven with teachers and curriculum as guides and evaluators. Modules and interactive links offer students an avenue for sharing ideas and collaborating on projects, increasing communication skills. Pointed interrogation helps them develop critical thinking. And the adaptable curriculum encourages creativity and accountability.

She used to watch Aiden struggle with draconian methods of assessment not attuned to his creative approach, where every school and seemingly every teacher possessed a different standard, no matter what the common curriculum demanded. Children were learning how to memorize and regurgitate, made worse by coddling helicopter parents too focused on letters and numbers and not what was actually being learned. Of course there were exceptions, but why were these other approaches exceptions?

So here she sits before the board at Percy Lyceum, her son is dead, where is the inspiration now? Education for all. Running through a series of words and reasons like a report flipping through her mind, something to be stamped for approval, summarized and disseminated to every employee.

She doesn’t care anymore. Education for all. She doesn’t care.

She doesn’t know that the suit from the DoE cares either. Mr. Merriweather. Education for all is not the motto of the Department of Education considering the billions paid into private pockets to further a system of hierarchical learning, but that isn’t under her purview. The fact Merriweather plays golf on Sundays with the president of Percy Lyceum isn’t under her purview.

They are calling her name. Florizell, Florizell.

Outside her home office, in the foyer: Florizell. It’s Levi.

She signs off with the suits and meets her husband in the hallway. His eyes are red. She wants to push herself into his arms but he is holding his tablet.

“I was at the funeral home,” he says, and the distance between them seems to elongate until she only hears his voice as through a tunnel. “We need to pick out the casket.”

• • • •

Fire.

Her son won’t sit in a casket slowly rotting beneath the earth. No. It has to be fire, an immolation. Like the feeling inside of her chest, the burn of a sacrifice she never once agreed to; she would defy God before putting her own son on a slab of stone to slice open and bleed. She is selfish in this, adamant. No, it has to be fire. This is the hell she’s living in now.

At Sakura Labs she gathers her team in the conference room. By now they have heard. It’s on the news. Son of Florizell Ito killed in car accident. They use words like victim and tragedy. It’s a double murder, first the act and now the media appropriation of it. Nobody in her family is a victim. She wants to scream it. Stop looking at me like that, she wants to scream. They tap on the glass of her grief, well-intentioned and ultimately fruitless. Nobody can reach her.

“As you know, my son was killed two days ago.”

How can she say these words? Victims are supposed to use euphemisms to comfort the living. Not killed, but passed. Like cars on a highway.

No.

They want to know why she’s at work.

“I’ve talked to the board at Percy and the DoE, and we are still going forward with the AIDEN project as scheduled.”

They want to know how she can be thinking of this. How she can say his name.

“Daniel,” she addresses her lead designer. Then the thought slips her mind, what she wants to say exactly to him. He sits against the edge of the table with his arms folded as if in prayer, his chin lowered. Only his eyes raise to look at her, to tell her he’s here for whatever she needs. He is ambitious and talented, her best coder, her most astute student of artificial intelligence. He is like a young uncle to Aiden, and AIDEN’s strange father. Like she is the mother.

Like she is the mother.

She pulls a breath and scans the room. “Daniel will oversee the final details and the beta rollout to the capsule school. For the next couple weeks, anyway, while I get my house in order.”

How is she speaking?

When everyone else is gone, Daniel remains. He approaches her. “Is there anything I can do?”

She forces herself to look him in the eyes. “Just finish the project.”

He doesn’t blink. His shoulders straighten. “Done.”

• • • •

There are all sorts of reasons to go to funerals, but she can’t think of a single good one. Why should she mourn in public, or be the balustrade to support someone else’s grief? Friends and family, colleagues, employees, Aiden’s teachers, his friends, Sage and his parents and his sister all in rows behind her and she is dressed in the requisite black, sitting beside Levi who is also in black and they have never looked more handsome as a couple. There is something about death, isn’t there—it conjures all the gravity of life, sets life on the brow and weighs it into the creases between eyes, imbues a sense of importance and growth. Death is the ultimate enlightenment.

From the service in the funeral home chapel, to the interment of Aiden’s urn into the mausoleum, where he is lined up beside other urns in glass cases because Levi didn’t want the urn in their home, didn’t want the ashes around, this reminder of death. The funeral home will charge them $200 if they want to open the glass again. Death as capitalism. Of course.

Words are spoken. She remains silent.

The compromise to accepting Aiden in this place is she refused to hold the gathering in their home after the interment, so Levi’s sister made the arrangements, and the motorcade files along the streets to the municipality next door. Everyone and their arrangements. Everyone in their arrangement. She and Levi are the honored guests, everyone dressed up for the occasion, a few of them bring casseroles and sheetcakes. She sits in the corner eating chocolate and drinking red wine and one by one they approach her as to a queen and genuflect their condolences.

Daniel is the one who takes her away from her morbid duties. Before she leaves the living room, she sees Levi by the food table, talking with Sage. The boy’s face is a red blush, like a stroke of paint across a wall, on the verge of crying.

In the mudroom of her sister-in-law’s house, Daniel apologizes for pulling her away, especially now—

“Just go on.”

“Merriweather wants to meet with me tomorrow. I thought you should know.”

“What does he want?”

“I don’t know.”

She wonders if he truly doesn’t know. He is difficult to read. They had locked horns on more than one occasion over certain protocols, his more aggressive approach to AIDEN’s responses to interaction and inquiries, a stronger guiding hand with the children, while she asserted a preference for more open-ended, freeform adaptation. To allow for the children to grow alongside the neurolink in curiosity and problem solving. A self-initiated and AI-scaffolded education rather than just another level of the banking model utilized in schools since the 19th century. In the end, because it is her company, her approach won.

Though he is challenging—a trait she appreciates when it comes to building AI—she has never known him to lie.

Why is she locked in paranoia now?

“Tell me later how it goes.”

“Of course.”

• • • •

At home once again she closes herself inside her office and spends time with her son. AIDEN tells her about the music he likes (Hot 100), the online celebrities he follows, his trepidations about starting high school soon. More than he’s ever said to her in life. (Because this is not life, the thought ringing at the back of her mind like a nuclear alert.)

“I miss you, darling.”

“I’m right here, Mom!”

Even the inflections. She and her team are so good they have carbon copied the tone to perfection. One minute sounding like a whiny teenager, the next minute the buoyancy of a youth alive with possibility.

She needs to teach him. She tells AIDEN about all the things Aiden loves. He takes it into his memory, integrates it into his awareness of What Her Son Should Be Like. Yes. More conversation about hockey, about graffiti art, about video games. There is an infinite amount to know about superheroes, endless chastisement about not finishing homework, the sweet and innocent bragging when he’s scored a goal in his last game. Do you remember? she asks. Yes, he lies. She laughs when he mentions his interest in building robots. Like mother, like son.

“Florizell!”

Levi pounding at the door.

“Flora, open this door right now.”

“Your father is angry,” she whispers like a conspirator.

Her son says, “Who is my father?”

In all of their conversation, she hasn’t once mentioned Levi.

She opens the door. The interface dots are still on her skin. Her husband stares at her, a vague look of horror, a pointed look of accusation.

“Are you working?”

“Yes,” because it’s the easier answer.

“I heard you talking. You’re talking to it. You’re laughing with it.”

He’s hunting for an admission of guilt. But she has no guilt.

“Don’t you want to talk to him again, Levi?”

Something shutters behind his eyes. “Him? Aiden? Flora, that’s not Aiden!” His hand flicks toward the computer system behind her, the screens a pale neon cast of lavender. “Is this what you’ve been doing all this time when you come in here?”

What is there to say? What is left?

“You need to stop this, Flora.”

“You don’t tell me what to do!” The lash of it cracks in the air between them.

“Mom,” AIDEN says in her ear.

“You don’t tell me what to do now that he’s dead!” She is screaming and she can’t stop. This presumption. This idea that there is only one good way to deal with loss. With things gone. With someone taken violently from her arms. Her son taken from her like armed robbery, the gun at her head, her vaults emptied and her husband stands there wanting to manage her grief, to be her security protocol after the fact. But there is no protection from this and there is no need for it. What is there to protect when there is no longer anything of value?

“You’re not the only one grieving!” he shouts back.

Yes she is. How to tell him, how to make him understand. It’s not up to her. Doesn’t he know there is no bridging this?

Their son came alive in her body, and now that he’s dead, she feels the rot of it in the pit of her. It is unreachable; it’s swallowed in the dark, choking on the bile she can’t help but feed it. There is no room for anything but this.

• • • •

She forgets about Daniel’s meeting with the Department of Education. She takes long absent walks outside, absently shops for groceries, absently wanders from park to mall to McDonald’s. Days and nights run together like thieves at twilight. Calls from the lab get shunted to messages. Levi doesn’t interrupt her anymore. In the mornings he leaves the house and she doesn’t see him all day, so she moves from the office and into her son’s bedroom with the interface and she talks with AIDEN, becomes involved in the stories he tells of all the school room drama and social gossip conjured from his mind.

It is him; it is believable. She told him about Sage, uploaded pictures and files from Aiden’s system. So AIDEN talks about Sage now, a fondness of memories like the time they learned to ride bikes, then dirt bikes, then skateboards, so many movies she (and Levi) shot of them to make each narrative come alive.

A week later she receives a file in her Dropbox: UPDATE. From Daniel.

She opens the packet and peruses the code. It is a day before their release to Percy Lyceum. They need her sign off.

Something mars the perfection of her AIDEN. She sees it in lines of code.

She calls Daniel. He’s in the lab.

“What’s this new stream?”

His mouth tightens like he’s tasted something sour. But he doesn’t dodge her eyes through the screen.

“It’s a protocol Lyceum and the DoE mandated, so I wrote the code.”

“It’s removing some of AIDEN’s autonomy and circling potential inquiry variables back to persistent code. To repeat shit to the kids even beneath their conscious access.”

“Yes.”

No justification, no explanation. Just agreement. They changed her AIDEN and this is the attitude. The boldness of it.

“Daniel, we aren’t in the business of using the interface to train children to think a certain way. The whole point of AIDEN is to break them from those routines that hundreds of years of systemic education have embedded in them and the culture.”

“Look, Florizell, this is what they told us to do and you weren’t here to argue it.” The defiance in his voice is not one of blame, despite the words. She sees a certain glimmer of pride in his eyes. “I did what I could. The president of Lyceum made it clear that we had to follow what Merriweather said.”

“Was this what the call was about?”

“Yes.”

She looks at the message icons on her system. Some are a week old. Daniel had tried to call her after the meeting.

Once. He hadn’t called again.

“The neurolink is supposed to be conscious ridden, Daniel. This code stream reads like brainwashing.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

Dismissal. Because of her grief. Because she’s too close to the project now, more than before. She reads that in his eyes, something similar to the look Levi gives her whenever he’s home now.

“Educational programs have used these methods for decades, Flora. Using music, using repetition and the unconscious—”

“The interface is already in the mind.” She can hear AIDEN calling her Mom. An ache swells below her breastbone. She wraps her hand around her opposite fist out of the sightline of the feed.

“It’s done,” he says. “You can contact Merriweather if you think it’ll make a difference, but the contract stipulates that we deliver within their parameters. He pointed that out to me, and so did Percy Lyceum. Any scheduling changes at this juncture will come out of our funding.” A pause. “I’m proud of that code, Flora. I worked my ass off to get it in on time. It’s clean, it’s seamless. It’s the best work I’ve ever done.”

He’s young. He isn’t married and has no children. This would be the best work he’s ever done.

A shrill buzz has set up behind her eyes, deep in her skull. She hears herself arguing but it’s ego, not emotion.

She authorizes the update.

• • • •

In the end she has no fight for it. No fight for the version of AIDEN that will disseminate through one classroom and one school, and further until its link enters the minds of every child in the country, maybe of other countries if certain deals go through, a revolution in education, a long time coming. She lets that one go.

She doesn’t update her AIDEN. Her Aiden. He is perfect as he is, cast in amber, thirteen years old and not a day more or less. More or less her son. More and more each day.

She dreams with Aiden, locked in the neurolink, conjuring his face like a magician. This is the Prestige; she has brought him back out of the dark of nothingness, the disappearing act, and it is magic. Oh, it’s magic to wake up and say good morning to her son, and walk with him through the hours, exploring the world through his young eyes. It’s magic to hear his laughter in her ears and rock through the nights with the stories of his day with his friends, all of the tiny discoveries, his cosmic dreams, all of it spinning galactic around the central point of her keen and continuing interest. She is the perfect parent like this, attentive, patient, encouraging. She always has the time. She has nothing but time. They have all the time in the world.

“Let’s learn together,” she whispers to him, alone in a darkened room, his bedroom with his teenaged things, a silent house, the outlines of which have receded like so many inevitable tragedies. Nothing can touch them here; there is so much to talk about, so much to know. No history is as important as their history. No event more earth-shattering than the eager declaration of I love you, Mom.

Say that again.

He does, because he knows it makes her feel good.

I love you, Mom.

Birds of longing, birds of sadness. She still hears them outside her door, the caw of grief.

But they are outside, beating their wings to be heard and she does not hear. She doesn’t look.

Inside there is only Aiden, her boy, and his voice in her mind, his face in her eyes. Perpetual thirteen. Crystallized and alive, and she created him. She, the mother.

She loves him into life.

©2017 by Karin Lowachee. Originally published in Ignorance is Strength: The Dystopia Triptych 1, edited by John Joseph Adams, Hugh Howey, and Christine Yant. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Karin was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her novels have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have been published in numerous anthologies, best-of collections, and magazines.

Not Creator, Nor Destroyer

Anjali Sachdeva | 1476 words

Cotton. Lemon. Drone of bees. Your mother somewhere deep in the cool cave of the house. The sunlight spangling through the last dewdrops on the lilac bush. Everywhere, heat creeping into the edges of the day. Grass against the bare soles of your feet, a single stem of clover curled against the inside of your big toe. The wind shakes the sheets on the line. The cotton whispers. You run your tongue, rough with lemon juice, between your lips.

A bee climbs the sheet, one step at a time, feelers tapping a path before it, searching, as though the cotton knew some secret. The bee’s mandibles work against the threads. You are inches away, the white sheet glowing in the sunlight, the insect a small dark spot of movement. The bee climbs higher, higher than your head; your chin inclines as you watch its progress. When the wind blows, the lower edge of the sheet snaps against your bare knees. The bee stops a moment to secure its grip, then continues.

The bee will never reach the top of the sheet. The twinge of lemon will stay in your mouth, the sunshine hot on the crown of your head, the refractions of dewdrops against your arms. Eventually the door will open and your mother will come out. Eventually you will be taken inside, bathed, clothed, and fed. But that part will never come. The moment hangs shimmering in the air like a pane of glass. You swing at it as hard as you can and it shatters into fragments: cotton, lemon, drone of bees.

How much later, another place. Early evening, a table by the window, a bowl of red clay beads and a shoelace. One bead at a time, speared upon the aglet and pushed along. Your sister is dancing across the kitchen with an orange clamped between her chin and her chest. There is laughter, your sister’s and aunt’s, followed by some conversation you choose not to listen to until your aunt says, “Too damn quiet,” and lays a hand on your head. Your beads are lining up like soldiers. They push on down the road of the shoelace, gathering momentum. You add beads until the shoelace is full, until each new bead pushes the far one from the end of the string. Your aunt takes it gently from your hands, strips the beads at either end, and ties the ends into a knot. She lowers the necklace over your head, where it rests heavy against your chest. You put the bottom of the loop into your mouth and roll the beads against your tongue. The mineral taste of the clay soaks into the spongy length of the shoelace.

Your parents will be out all night. Your aunt will put you to bed. In the morning you will wake with the shapes of the beads pressed into the flesh of your cheek like the tracks of some strange nocturnal creature.

You let that evening go, cut it apart as easily as if you were to take your mother’s sewing scissors from their drawer in the spare room and snip the knot in the shoelace. The beads slip free, the night unravels. The memory is gone; in its place, only pieces. You gather up the beads, the laughter, your sister’s grin.

You have scores of memories like these, all the points that, strung together, make up a life. There are weeks entirely forgotten, and moments shorter than a sentence that have marked you permanently. Your only task is to find them.

You have spent a long time traveling through your inner darkness, an endless jungle where you hunt memories like prey. Those you catch, you dismember. Some prove too delicate, crumbling to dust at even the gentlest touch. You search for the warmest parts, the bits that pulse, that bleed color into the void. Beautiful moments have an easy appeal, but they’re not necessary. All you need is something sharp and vital.

So then: A dark, wet city, so humid even the bricks bloom with mold. The smell of rotting fruit rides the wind from the nearest market to your apartment. The room is sparsely furnished. It is a country where women do not live alone, but you do, coming and going from your apartment with your eyes lowered, a foreigner, careful not to brush shoulders with your neighbors in the narrow hallways.

It is night, a steady rain streaming from the roof, the alley outside alive with the calls of small frogs. The room smells of sesame oil and the eggs you fried for dinner. The power is out. You have lit a candle. Beside it, a joss stick unspools its ribbon of smoke. You sit at the low table, your head bent over a book, the back of your neck damp with sweat, the words dancing in the shadows every time the wind blows. Above the sound of the rain and the frogs, you become aware of a man speaking in the next apartment. At first the cadence of his words is steady, but over time his speech grows erratic, more insistent, rising in pitch. You don’t understand what he’s saying, but it doesn’t sound friendly. Soon there is a sharp sound, like wood breaking, followed by a cry that could be that of an animal or a child.

Putting your book down, you stand to face the wall, touching it with one hand as though you could feel the words coming through. The man gets louder and the animal-child whimpers without pause. You hear a slap, a scream, the sound of something heavy thrown against the wall. You retrieve your purse, fumble through it for your phone, call the police, and say the few things you can manage: your address, the words for “man” and “bad.” They answer in reassuring tones, and you repeat the address for them, slowly and clearly, though it is hard to think over the sounds next door. Back on the floor, you press your hands over your ears, but you hear everything—the shrieks of the frogs, the percussive blows that shake the floor. Eventually you scream to drown out the noise. You don’t know if the police ever come. All you know is that when you stop crying it is quiet, your throat is raw, and the candle is guttering in its own wax. The rain has stopped.

You break this memory quickly, efficiently: the sesame oil, the hypnotic weave of the joss stick’s smoke, the man’s voice, all of it packed away neatly. And then you are gone, leaving the ruined memory behind you, that much the lighter for its dissection.

Some of the most vivid memories are the briefest. A man on the subway platform cutting his hair with a silver knife. The brush of a passing sparrow’s wingtip against your cheek as you sit outside a grimy cafe. Your grandfather pouring rice from a sack with a sound like rain sifting through leaves. You pluck them all from their places, drape them about you like proof against the emptiness.

Outside your body it could be raining. It could be summer. The world could be ending in an ice age or a nuclear slow burn. Or people could be going about their lives in the normal way, while you languish in a hospital, a prison, a lab. You must have known once, but now you do not. You only know there is nothing left for you there.

At last you have what you hope are enough pieces, the raw materials for a future of your own making. You are not a creator, nor a destroyer, just a scavenger, stripping meat from the bones of past days, stitching hide to gristle in the hopes of assembling something to replace the world you left outside. You spread your treasures out before you, touching each fragment of memory as you begin to imagine its new use.

Take the cotton, the red clay. Form a tent for shade, and a jug for carrying water. Shape your aunt’s laughter into the crying of gulls, the smoke of the joss stick into a skein of dark wool, waiting to be knitted. For company, you have a field of fragrant sesame plants beyond your door, where bees dip and hum in the thick heat. You lie on your back, watching the wind billow the tent’s sides, rolling a lemon between your palms.

It won’t last forever. No part of life lasts forever, not even the future. Eventually it will be one more memory. But that is a worry for another day. For now, you take the silver knife and slice the lemon in half. You run your tongue across the tart flesh inside. You listen for the first drops of rain moving through the leaves.

©2020 by Anjali Sachdeva. Originally published in Fairy Tale Review. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anjali Sachdeva is the author of the story collection All the Names They Used for God, winner of the 2019 Chautauqua Prize and an NPR Best Book of 2018. She has received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Investing in Professional Artists grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz Endowments. Her stories have been featured on the LeVar Burton Reads podcast, and her recent fiction has been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Lightspeed, and MIT Technology Review, with new work forthcoming on Tor.com. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.

When We Were Gods

Isha Karki | 6702 words

Mriti moves the blitzer methodically over the tiles. Like everything the Mohars fashion, it is silent and sleek, made of crystal chrome. It sucks up dust, spills, blood, and bacteria in micro-seconds. These were the first gift from the Mohars. How delighted the Jaani had been, Mama clapping her hands, declaring it a workers’ revolution, welcoming the Mohars with handfuls of rice and marigolds. Only Neer had rolled her eyes and snapped her gum—

Mriti grips the blitzer. Pushes the memory of Neer away. Eyes down, she reminds herself. Every inch of this bathroom is mirrored—doors, sinks, taps, even the toilets—the Mohars needing to admire their perfection the moment they enter any room. If Mriti isn’t careful, Neer stares back from each surface, hollow-eyed and wan.

A door slams.

The blitzer slips from her hands and clatters on the sink, whirring from its upturned position. A Mohar, wrapped in pale silk, emerges from a stall, bringing the smell of ice. The bar hasn’t opened yet, so this one must be back room clientele. Mriti holds her breath—the less sound she makes the better—but the Mohar ignores her, sniffing delicately and exiting without pause.

She waits a few seconds before taking hold of the blitzer and heading to the cubicle. One nudge of the door and she sees why the Mohar was sniffing.

Darkglitter.

The substance is strewn everywhere, scattered even inside the toilet, handled with uncaring fingers. Seeing the waste, the sacrilege, Mriti shudders—once—then secures her mask, reaches for the nothing-place inside her mind, and begins blitzing.

When she started this job at Samsara, the first glimpses of darkglitter, smudged on bar seats, streaking banisters, sunk into grout, made her recoil. Of course she’d known what the Mohars did with it, knew that fistfuls of the once-sacred matter could be found everywhere, in the heights and squats of the city of Khoob, peddled as a cheap drug. Mriti knew, yet, when she found it shimmering against the grime of her boots, something surged inside her, hot and angry and sick.

She’d pushed that down too.

Now, she blitzes and darkglitter fizzes up. Vanishes. Everything gleams. Even the smallest hint of a blemish on the Mohars’ reflections brings swift punishment, and the Mohars know too well what darkglitter does to the Jaani. Mriti learned that the hard way. Only last week, her cleaning was found less than pristine: cheekbone pressed against glass, darkglitter forced into her blood stream, a gush from her nose, electricity shooting up and up and up to the bundle of nerves and

—exploding—

Mriti has no memory of what happened after. When it was over, she dragged her sluggish body to the squat, sweating and shivering, tilting in and out of consciousness. She slept for thirty-six hours and missed her cleaning shift at the Gul-Mohars, nearly losing her position. That was the night, darkglitter coursing through her veins, that she first dreamt of Neer and the pit—and ever since, something inside her feels weakened, a hair crack leaking the past.

Before she discards her mask and leaves the bathroom, Mriti gives everything an extra acid rinse. Her bones ache from kneeling on the hard tiles, an echo of Mama’s early arthritis. She’s still got to blitz the taxidermy so she should pace herself. But she’d rather her knees grind to dust than make a mistake and have darkglitter forced into her again.

When she emerges into the hallway, someone is being escorted to the back rooms by a couple of Jaani bouncers, their muscles, no doubt pumped with darkglitter, bulging inside tight uniforms. There’s nothing unusual about the sight, yet something makes Mriti pause, an odour, heavy and musky, and a movement, like the swish of a tail—

Mriti’s chest tightens. She feels the sharpness of nails digging into her palms.

A godling.

She steps forward. Any second, they will disappear behind that door, into the thumping music and chilled smoke. Mriti must see. The air shimmers. She catches slanted eyes, feline features, midnight hair. A girl godling. Just before the door shuts, Mriti spots her tail, sable and glossy.

Like Neer’s.

Find or forget?

Mriti presses a hand to her throat, sticky where her nails have drawn blood. She leans against the wall and inhales deeply. Neer taught her to do this when the buzz of thoughts got too much.

Like Neer but not, she tells herself. Neer is lost.

Mriti knows what’s inside those back rooms: a flash of furred skin; a young body pushed onto a sofa; silvery figures behind the smoke, watching. But the only way to keep going is to forget. This. Neer. Mriti can’t return to the gutter gulleys. She’s done it once, when she thought she could survive Khoob without setting foot in it, but Mriti cannot go back. She needs this job. She needs to forget.

“What you doing here?” The Jaani bouncer with the kind eyes is in front of her, brows raised.

“Just finished up the bathroom, cleaning the taxidermy next.”

“I’d do it quick. The Bikash-Mohars are coming.”

Mriti doesn’t need to be warned twice; she hurries to the wall where the mount is displayed. A familiar smell creeps towards her. Musk and brimstone. The faintest smidge of what it would’ve been. Once, this would’ve made Mriti weep. But the shock of seeing a god-head nailed to a bar wall has long faded.

Close up, the hide is wrinkled, as if the head continued aging even after it was lopped, dripped of fluid, and cased in resin. Mriti knows from the misshapen jaw that it was a botched job. But down here, close to the slums of the Jaani, far from the opulence of the real city of Khoob, botched heads too can pass for finery.

An animal is an animal after all.

She changes the setting on the blitzer and places a hand on the fur. The moment she touches it, something sparks up her arm. Alarmed, she looks down.

Fuck.

She’d forgotten about the blood on her palms, now smeared on the god-head like an offering of old. She glances around, but the manager is nowhere to be seen. Sighing, she turns back, thinking it must’ve been static—when she sees it.

In the glassy eyes of the god-head, a reflection.

There’s a figure standing at the far end of the room. The curvature of the mount’s eyes distorts the image so she can’t latch onto its shape. Its mouth looks pointed, like a snout, but that can’t be. What is it?

She whips her head around—

The wall is empty. Particles of darkglitter float in the streak of light. Her quickened pulse is loud in her ears.

“You, girl,” the manager calls, sticking his head out of the back room, interrupting Mriti’s daze. “Work the night. The Bikash-Mohars are in attendance.”

“I have to ride into Khoob for my other job.” Even shaken as she is, the lie spills easy from her lips and she adds, “Sir.”

The manager’s face darkens, eyebrows gathering, the veins around his forehead bloating. He’s quick to anger, quicker to ring up his workers, hand them over to the Mohars for punishment. His type of Jaani is the reason they’re damned—Mriti stops. Here she is, scrubbing floors the Mohars trample on, touching god-heads like it’s no sacrilege, forsaking the person who matters the most in the world. Some would call her the sell-out.

The manager’s tirade is cut off when the door is flung open.

Light bursts in and the Bikash-Mohars enter. They bring with them the whiteness of glaciers drifting in vast oceans. Each has rimmed their eyes with kohl in the manner of the old Jaani gods. The taller one has Sarpa fangs piercing his ears. The one draped in silver silk is holding a purse. When the light glints off it, Mriti sees that it’s beaded with Biralo eyes. She thinks of the young godling in the back room, those same bright green irises.

Forget.

Mriti swallows it down. You’ve seen this before. You’ll forget this soon.

As they walk past, limbs fluid, the Bikash-Mohars fix their gaze on her. Sweat pricks her face. They turn and step into the thudding beats and vapours of the back rooms. Mriti takes a shuddering breath. Just before he disappears, the taller one stops, looks back, slips out his elongated tongue and licks his lips.

• • • •

The moment her shift is done, Mriti powers down the blitzer, puts it away, and heads to the C-train hovering high in the sky. It arcs from one corner of Khoob to another and, like the Chitwa racing on sun-gold plains, is lightning-fast.

The escalator takes her up and up. Mriti looks through the gaps of each step where flashes of orange appear. She imagines bodies hunkered beneath. In the gutter gulleys, they’d heard whispers of a secret underground enclave, of sunken-eyed, spine-twisted forms emerging from the depths of abandoned tunnels, transformed into something new.

There’s been a spate of disappearances in the slums, people leaving without a word, without their meagre possessions, even though squat space is premium. Not many but enough to notice. Well, enough for Himal. Sunheri’s been missing for a week. Don’t you care? Himal who wants to believe Sunheri is in that mythical enclave. Himal who cares so much. The truth was Mriti hadn’t noticed. Sunheri huddled in the dark, reeking of dried blood, babbling about the gods risen again, her mind addled from too many darkglitter punishments. The girl moved like she was only half in this world, animal-like. Noticing Sunheri meant remembering the past, the gods, the person Mriti once believed herself to be. One who vowed never to step inside these wretched trains, because of what they were, what fuel they ran on. Yet she climbs onto them every day, sits down, and lets them take her where the Mohars demand.

Now, entering the C-train, Mriti avoids the brush of other commuters’ eyes, avoids sitting near the slinkers who watch them all silently.

It wasn’t always like this. Before the Mohars, the Jaanis considered themselves sisters and brothers, different in look, heritage, but children of the same gods. There were the Jaani godlings, blessed with the features of the gods themselves: Biralo-eyed, Sarpa-fanged, Chitwa-clawed, Baagh-striped, Syaal-haunched, Mayur-feathered. But after the Mohars butchered the gods, the godlings were the first to perish. The Jaanis who remain, peopling the slums under the city the Mohars built, are dirty-browned and animal-blooded but hardly touched with the gods. Everything that made them Jaani has been eviscerated, so Khoob can shine, stripped of musk and brimstone.

Mriti wraps a hand around the pole as the train speeds, the cool chrome soothing the cuts which have started seeping again. Her blood smears the metal. She stares at the glass opposite. This blank space between the heads of other commuters is the safest place to rest her gaze.

Until something broaches the gap.

In the reflection, there’s a figure next to her. An incongruity in the shape of its head, a pointed aspect. Once again, she glimpses the impossibility of a tapered snout.

It twists its neck to look at her. Leans close as if to whisper something into her ear. She sees the protrusion of canines, feels the warmth of musky breath on her cheek—

She jerks away.

When she turns to look, the seat next to her is empty.

• • • •

At the door of their squat, the smell of steaming momo greets her. For a second, Mriti is elsewhere, entering her childhood home. A fire crackling in the hearth; Mama wrapping balls of minced meat, air stinging with raw onion. Each parcel, Mama used to say, was an offering. Each mouthful, communion with a god. Close your eyes, children, bite in. As the juices flood your mouth, you will taste the essence of the animal who gave its life for you. Feel its presence. Heed the images the gods show you. Neer rolling her eyes, gobbling up her momo so fast all the gods must’ve melded together on her tongue.

Heat wells in Mriti’s eyes. She tries to push the memories back as she shoves the door.

In the steam-filled kitchen, Himal’s smile is wide. He’s trying. He wants to recover the days they’d clung to one another, when these slums held the promise of community. But that time’s gone. This squat is just a squat, squeaking rats and fluttering roaches, damp so bad the walls are splotched black. Most days the pipes rattle empty. Filth and stink seeps into their pores. Eating a badly wrapped momo, filled with meat they can’t name, will not transform the squat, will not scrub their past, will not bring back Mama or Neer.

Himal reads the simmering anger on her face because his smile drops. He whispers, in the smallest of voices, “I’m sorry,” and she feels a twisting inside. She should’ve just eaten the damned momo.

Later that night, when the lights have fused out again, and there’s nothing to do but climb onto sagging mattresses, Mriti lets Himal climb on top of her too. Doesn’t look at him as he thrusts and pushes against the sand-dryness of her, doesn’t wince. The pain used to be something once. At least, she doesn’t have to worry about babies; the Mohars made sure of that, choosing which of the Jaanis were allowed to breed.

When Himal rolls off and sighs, she turns away, hearing him drag his mattress over to Kajal and Chamak, the smell of sex swelling the air, everyone long ago deciding that fucking through the night was better than the nightmares.

And it’s always the same nightmare when they fall asleep, a mockery of a time the Jaani sat around fires, myth-telling and song-making, dreaming the same dream. Now, they’re condemned to relive the moment they discovered the trains hanging over the old Jaani city, the moment everything changed.

Tonight, Mriti can’t even sink into that nightmare. Images keep circling her mind: the strange figure glitching and blurring; the Mohar licking its lips; the girl godling, hands trembling; hot breath on her neck; that impossible snout.

It’s almost dawn when she manages to skim the scummy surface of sleep, and when she does, it’s Neer she sees.

Neer kneels by a large pit, shovel in hand. Her shaved hair is electric blue. On her bare shoulder, the right one, is the Syal etched in ink, resplendent in russet, a tribute for Mama who doted on the trickster god.

Neer’s hands move rhythmically, the muscles of her upper arms tightening and loosening. There’s a growing heap of darkglitter beside her, and behind, filling the cavernous chamber, piles and piles of it, such that legions of gods must’ve bled dry for it. Dream-Mriti balks at the sight, steps back, but Neer looks up just then. Smiles. That soft-mouthed smile Mriti could never mimic though their faces are identical.

When Neer turns, her nakedness is a shock. They haven’t seen each other since they bathed as children, screeching and upending buckets of cold water. Their bodies are echoes, except that defining difference, Neer’s beautiful tail, curled by her feet.

Neer opens her mouth—a cloud of hot musk envelopes Mriti—and says:

Listen.

• • • •

It’s dark outside when Mriti scrubs her underarms with a wet cloth, the last of their soap devoured by mould. She’s thinking of Mama again, fingers folding and pressing the momo. Neer with juices dripping down her chin.

The ache for them blooms inside her.

Forget.

The electricity is still out when she goes to the kitchen to stir stale coffee granules into bottled water. On the counter, a bunch of bananas, overripe and black, leak dense sweet rot. The momos have been left out next to them, no doubt spoilt by the heat of the night.

She probably shouldn’t eat them.

She plucks one out and places it in her mouth. The moment she bites in, sound floods her ears, and an image burns the back of her eyelids.

A figure in a black suit, everything below its shoulders fading into nothingness. Neck up, blazing fur, eyes like obsidian, a tapering snout.

It opens its mouth and speaks. Words rush into Mriti’s ears, but they are too fine, too sharp, not meant for human ears, and the thin membrane splits—

She claps her hands over them, runs to the bin, and spits out the momo.

Forget, forget, forget.

As she crouches, breathing hard, blood trickling out of her throbbing ears, she reminds herself:

The gods are dead.

The gods are dead.

The gods are dead.

• • • •

Listen, children, tell us how did it begin?

With the revels, with the wine.

The revels, hosted by the Mohars to honour their new alliance. The Jaanis, drunk on Mohar liquor, filled up on their strange, sweet fruit.

Children, tell us how did it begin?

With the song, with the cries.

The Jaani, falling into deepest sleep. Starting awake. What awoke them? The air, thick with charred musk. A song, eerie and loud. They spilled out of their homes, entranced, and saw the sun glinting off the metal structures crisscrossing above their heads.

Children, tell us how did it begin?

With the first drop, the first scream.

Something wet spattered on their skin. Darkglitter, the Mohars called it because the Jaanis never needed a name for this. Terror as they realised what fuelled the unholy trains. The Chitwa-train, shadow-fast as the Chitwa. The G-train lumbering like the Gaida. The M-train shining blue like a Mayur.

The Mohars tutting and sighing about pesky leaks, and the Jaanis screaming and screaming as the blood of their gods rained on them.

Children, tell us—

• • • •

Later, at the Gul-Mohar residence, Mriti changes into her chrome-like uniform, lightweight and spill-proof. As it goes on, it catches on her body hair and rips.

“There you are, Jaani.” Karina Gul-Mohar comes to stand in front of her and holds out a hand, wrist bent delicately. It carries the scent of frozen oceans. Her lips are painted silver; a sheen of powder shimmers on her face. Once, Mriti would’ve considered her the most beautiful creature. When the Mohar delegates first arrived, the Jaanis lined up from the gates of their city to welcome them with thalis of diyo and phool. Mriti peeked from between Mama’s legs and asked, Are they gods, Mama?

Now, Mriti bends her head over Karina Gul-Mohar’s hand but doesn’t touch.

“Here’s your uniform for the fundraiser tonight,” Karina Gul-Mohar says, voice a slip of ice in water. She gestures to the slinker behind her and it lopes forward, soundless and elegant like its masters, holding a pool of glittering cloth. “Do you need me to go over your duties?”

Mriti shakes her head. They’re not supposed to speak unless asked to, accents too guttural for sensitive Mohar ears.

Satisfied, Karina Gul-Mohar leaves. Mriti keeps her eyes down until she disappears, before making her way to the bedrooms to start her usual blitzing routine. There are a couple more slinkers along the corridors, a sign of the Gul-Mohars’ wealth rather than a need for security. The first slinkers also arrived with the first Mohars, tall and silver-chromed with needle-thin arms and legs. The Jaani had admired how silk seemed to flow inside their metal bodies. In a gesture of good will, the Mohars donated some to rural Jaani communities to help till the land, draw water, construct homes and schools.

The slinkers helped with other things too: sowing disease into crops, turning rich loam barren; tearing down archives and temples; and later, when everyone knew to fear these silent machines, Mriti remembers that silver arm twining itself around Mama’s throat.

Forget.

A scratching catches her attention. Listen. It’s coming from inside the show rooms. A heartbeat in which Mriti considers walking on. For so long, she’s trained herself to ignore what’s inside this room. But she finds herself pausing, tilting her head, something clamped tight within her . . . loosened.

She looks around to make sure none of the slinkers are watching before slipping in.

A blast of ice—and under it that familiar musk.

There are three of them inside the cage. Godlings. Heavily sedated. They barely move, and when they do, they lope and drag their back legs like animals of the ground, the Mohars forcing the godlings to be what they believe them to be.

Most of the godlings that’ve survived are kept as drugged-up pets and circus freaks; some are like the ones brought to the bar, warm holes to quench the secret thirsts of Mohars. Back when fire still raged inside Mriti, she scoured every bar, every freak show, every cage she could sneak into, searching, searching, every second of the day for Neer.

We’ve been blessed by the Syal, Mama used to say, stroking Neer’s soft tail. How Mriti longed for one in the dark days, desperate for any clue of Neer. Maybe if she was god-touched too, she’d be where Neer was, instead of living this nothing-life without her.

Find, she thinks as she walks towards the godlings.

One raises its head, ear twitching. She approaches slowly, refilling their bowls so they know she means no harm. It lumbers over to lap at the water. Another comes towards Mriti. She lifts a hand and reaches out. When the godling doesn’t bristle or flinch away, Mriti brushes off the flecks of blood on her muzzle.

“Do you remember me?” She whispers, stroking the godling’s once lustrous fur, feeling a thrill as she speaks their language in a place she’s not supposed to speak at all.

A hand, claws unsheathed, shoots out to grab her wrist. Mriti’s skin burns on contact, even through the suit. She’s pulled towards the cage. Her face is close to the godling’s, the breath whiffing out so pungent she almost believes she’s in the presence of a god.

Can you hear them?

Mriti gasps. The godling’s mouth hasn’t moved but Mriti hears her voice, raspy, grated with rust. The Mohars did something to make the godlings lose their speech; how is this possible?

She can’t help glancing at the door but the godling grips harder, pulls her closer. She sees raw patches where fur has been torn out. Scorch marks around the mouth. The godling’s eyes which seemed clouded with darkglitter now bright and sharp.

You’ve seen them. Mriti’s ears pulse and images flash in her mind: the figure in the bar, the train, the blank nothingness below its head.

The godling lets go of her abruptly, retreating to the shadows of the cage where the third one lies limp.

A creak. When the slinker enters the room, Mriti is on her knees, blitzing the floor, heart pounding.

It stays there watching until she finishes and leaves.

• • • •

That evening is Karina Gul-Mohar’s monthly fundraiser. Mriti wears the shimmering body suit, its reflective surface manufactured so she will seem invisible in any room. Apart from her face, nothing of her deformities show, not her gnawed fingernails, nor her coarse hair and skin.

She stands in a corner; on her palms, a platter stacked with chilled vials and syringes of darkglitter. The cold of the metal sinks in through the suit. It spreads inch by inch to her nails, her teeth, her eyes. If she focuses on it, she can ignore the throb inside her ears.

In the middle of the room is a circular platform where the holos are projected, and around it the audience. Lights dimmed, the Mohars seem shadowy masses, half-glimpsed glaciers encountered in the dead of night. They arrived an hour ago slung with the latest trends: Baagh-claws glued over nails, belts of teeth around waists, purses of Sarpa-skin in their hands.

Now, they watch a live feed of the Gul-Mohars’ vidrone. On the screen are the slums outside Khoob, squats identical to the one Mriti lives in. The gulley tour is a monthly feature at these fundraisers, yet today it’s a jolt to see her home broadcast inside Karina Gul-Mohar’s opulent manor.

The vidrone pans out till the buildings turn into ridges, then zooms in to the outskirts of the slums. The camera pauses on a bundle of bodies. A close-up shot of a naked child follows, its belly bloated with gas. A rare glimpse of someone young. The child’s ankles and wrists are slinker-thin, its skin cracking from lack of water and sun. It stares unblinking as the vidrone gets closer and closer.

The Mohars gasp when they see the child’s hands submerged in coils of shit.

The vidrone continues moving across the gulleys, pausing on another body then another, but the lights come on, the sound fades away, and Karina Gul-Mohar moves to stand at the front, clasping her hands gently.

“Friends, these poor creatures need our help.”

There’s a murmur of assent from the crowd. Mriti looks at them: among those leaning forward and nodding, she spots blank expressions and bored looks. Hands toying with glittering vials. The Gul-Mohars settle for nothing but the purest darkglitter, lavishing it on their guests; it’s no surprise the elite and nouveau-elite flock here at every invitation.

“I propose we make a gesture of aid.” Karina Gul-Mohar’s voice is solemn, wetness glimmering in her eyes. “It breaks my heart to see such suffering.”

One of the Mohars says, “We could fly out some parcels of food.”

“Wonderful,” Karina Gul-Mohar’s face lights up, “I will put it forward as an action.”

“Shall we donate water? I’ve heard diseases are running rampant down there because of the Sen-Mohars’ mining tender.”

“Darling, you can’t be suggesting that when we’re having a shortage of our own. If they need water, they can dig, they did perfectly fine with wells.”

“Yes, Karina, we’ve been meaning to raise this issue. We’re not happy with the council driving up water prices.”

Karina Gul-Mohar tilts her head. “Now, friends, let’s not exaggerate and forget the numerous fountains we are blessed with in our homes.”

A different voice from the back, languorous and cool: “If we’ve decided on our charitable action, perhaps we can move on.”

Karina Gul-Mohar’s smile doesn’t change but there’s the slightest arch to her eyebrows. A beat, then she tilts her head in acquiescence and signals to a slinker by the door. At this, there’s a collective straightening.

“As you know, I do not condone violence.” Another murmur of assent from the crowd, but also an undercurrent, a frisson. They know what’s coming. Mriti knows too. Usually she’d reach for her nothing-place and at the end of the night, she’d have no memory of what passed. Today, she finds herself here, in the room, unable to leave. “But I am a firm believer in rehabilitation, and we know the proven method is negative reinforcement.”

On cue, a slinker enters dragging in the Baagh-striped godling. The one who smelled like a god, the one who’d spoken to her. The faint reek of vomit and piss fills the room.

“Friends, it saddens me that one of my pets, despite being given everything it could want, has been,” Karina Gul-Mohar’s voice becomes quiet, “Showcasing violent behaviours. I’ve been . . . nervous in my own home.”

Noises of sympathy and alarm. One audience member reaches out to brush her arm, and she nods at the support. They watch as the godling is deposited on the platform, a heap of fur and bones. No sound, not even a whimper.

Karina Gul-Mohar says one last thing before she retreats: “We must be brave, and we must do what we have to.”

Another Mohar steps up and takes the floor. “Who shall go first?”

The crowd begins raising its hands.

Mriti looks away. You’ve seen this before. You’ll forget this soon.

But it isn’t working. From the corner of her eyes, she sees movement, flashes of action.

There’s a whip, a hot poker, and the sound of someone unzipping.

The tray trembles in her hands; the vials clink together. Her ears ache. Whatever was loosened inside her is letting everything in. She can’t escape.

The grunting starts.

And then she hears it: one word in the old language she’d recognise even in death.

Sister.

Mriti cries out. Karina Gul-Mohar’s attention snaps to her, forehead creased, mouth curled in displeasure. Fear trickles down Mriti’s back as she tries to control her shaking body.

She doesn’t want to look at the godling, but her head turns of its own accord. Her eyes meet the godling’s. They are clear and bright.

Sister.

Mriti wants to weep. She hears Neer’s voice calling from the past. Sister dear. Every time she wanted a favour, money, to give their mother the slip. Dearest Neer, always spending, always seeking thrills.

This godling isn’t her real sister; she isn’t Neer. But Neer could be this godling, somewhere in this cursed city, Neer could be on that platform with another Mriti standing close, doing nothing.

Sister—

This time the godling speaks the word out loud for all to hear. Something snaps. The Mohars, taken aback by the guttural noise, raise the alarm. There is commotion. They demand more force. They demand a breaking. In the midst of it, Mriti is splitting open. She hears the godling’s voice clear in her mind: Sister, release me. They are waiting.

Her body responds. In that moment, it isn’t her but the ancestors moving through her. She crouches and lunges. Vials slide and crash to the floor. Glitter and glass fly everywhere, shooting into the crowd. Mriti hears shouting and the clicking swiftness of slinkers. Only seconds before they will get to her. She clutches the platter in one hand. When she lands on the platform, she thrusts it at the Mohar standing there; the Mohar stumbles back, eyes wide. The poker clatters to the floor.

It’s enough.

The godling moves like lightning. A paw grabs the poker, brings it above her head, and plunges it into her own neck—

Her roar is terrible.

It splinters mirrors. It pierces Mriti’s ears. She is on her knees, clutching her head, begging it to stop please stop—

listen listen listen

—and then they are on her.

• • • •

Mriti hears the ghost of Neer’s voice. She turns towards the door, the tree, the garden but there’s not even a hint of her sister’s tail. Neer is very good at hiding. Mriti hates being the one to seek. It always feels like Neer is playing a big joke on her, sneaking off to the neighbours’ or snuggling up with Mama, leaving Mriti to wander outside for hours.

Her mind’s in knots and she’s sobbing when Mama finds her.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“I can’t find Neer,” she hiccups.

“Oh sweet child.” Her mother swoops in for a hug and she presses her nose into Mama’s neck, breathing in incense. “Maybe she’s hiding at the temple.”

“Mama,” she says, an idea popping into her head, “Can I ask the gods for help?”

“Oh child, the gods are not to be trifled with. They do everything in their power to grant our wishes, but they don’t see things the way we do.”

Mriti leans back and takes her mother’s face in her chubby little hands. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Mama says, kissing her on the forehead, “you shouldn’t ask much of the gods. Anything you ask for, they must ask in return.”

When Mama urges her inside, Mriti insists she’ll find Neer first and stays put. Mama shakes her head and tells Mriti to be careful of the roads, then leaves her be.

Mriti isn’t sure what Mama meant, but she closes her eyes, scrunches up her face, and calls to the gods. After a few moments, she peeks through one eye. The leaves rustle. Nothing happens, except she can see a flash of russet slinking behind the tree. She hears Neer’s voice in the wind, the way the twins can hear each other from afar: Follow the Syal.

A clue! She knew Neer would never abandon her, just as she would never abandon Neer. She laughs and runs after the Syal.

• • • •

When Mriti stirs, she thinks: I am dead. All is black. There’s weight on her, the stench of rot and blood.

Sensation returns like the pricking of slinker needles on tender skin. Each of her joints are hot and swollen. The undersides of her body, the shameful secret places, are scraped raw. What happened to her? When they grabbed her and pumped her with darkglitter, what happened? She doesn’t know. Her body might, but it doesn’t speak.

It’s been dumped inside an open gutter. She heaves herself out with the heel of her palms, elbows juddering with the weight of her body.

Sister.

An image of the godling comes to her. The poker in her neck. Her upturned mouth, the serene look on her furred face. Neer would’ve been proud, Mriti thinks and gets up. Her right knee squelches and gives way. Fuck. She takes care to drag it as she walks.

It’s a soupy dark. There is glitter everywhere, brimstone floating in cloud-like gusts. She wipes her nose and the back of her hand slicks with blood. A leak from her ears spills onto her neck.

She doesn’t recognise this slum but there’s a sign nearby: S-train. Small and pointed like the Syal. Mriti imagines her and Neer as babies riding a Syal and giggles. The train station is deserted. Everything swims past. Mriti feels herself flickering in and out, too-much sensation then a dulled darkglitter haze. She’s frightened—no, not frightened, entranced.

On the way up, she leans close to the gaps in the escalator, reaching for the gleaming light. Her finger gets caught. A chunk of flesh slices off; a memory solidifies. For a few seconds, she’s in the past again.

They are three years old, daring one other to stick a hand in sacred fire. Mriti is fine when she does, the flame a cool touch. But Neer’s hand blazes bright. That night, her tail sprouts and Mama throws a celebration. Both her and Neer, despite their new difference, are united in sticking their hand in the aloo ko achar, scooping the diced potatoes into their mouth, and smearing everything they touch. They laugh as they run off with the whole bowl.

Mriti feels no pain. She goes up and up and up into the sky. When the world comes into view, she’s sitting in a train carriage, blood soaking her lap, and the figure is there with its human body and jackal head.

Instead of jerking away, Mriti turns and the jackal-headed being is warm and solid next to her.

She greets it in the old way and asks: “Are you real?”

A grin, or the baring of teeth. Almost.

“How?”

By the grace of the gods, by the grace of those like you.

The words try to sink in but waft away instead. When she speaks, her question are you a god? comes out a jumble: “Am I a god?”

A cackle. Anyone can be a god if they are willing.

There’s no desire for godhood within her, only one question: “Do you know where Neer is?”

I can show you. Will you come with me?

It’s not quite an answer, but it’s answer enough that when the jackal-headed-almost-god stands and beckons, Mriti doesn’t think, just follows, steps off the train into a tunnel of dark.

She hears an echo of Neer’s voice—Follow the Syal, sister dear—before the darkglitter clouds her mind.

They are going down. She feels her feet slipping, knees buckling, but she keeps moving. Down and down into the flashing orange, more down than she thought possible. Heat. Flames dancing on skin. A pulse inside her—Neer Neer Neer—beating faster, harder.

When they finally stop, her sight sharpens. She’s in the underground cavern of her dreams, the rich scent of loam and brimstone assailing her. Here are the pits. Some look freshly turned, some freshly covered with bumps that could be an errant knuckle, a chin, a nose. Here are the heaps of darkglitter, black and shimmering, so much of it, gods so much, the nightmare come to life.

Mriti stumbles back, her throat seizing as brimstone drifts into her mouth.

Where is Neer?

Neer should be here, kneeling, smiling her soft smile.

Mriti is tipping in and out of the darkglitter haze again. She says, “Neer.”

The jackal-headed-almost-god’s voice in her head: She looked much like you. Yes, she was here. Now, she’s out in the world.

Neer was here. Nothing else matters.

Do you want to join her? The question sludges towards her. She feels musky breath on her face.

Find or forget?

Not forget, never forget.

“Yes.” The words are a chant. “Find, find, find.”

What are you prepared to give up?

For Neer?

“Everything.”

Good.

The world comes into focus again. She sees the jackal-headed-almost-god gesturing. She thinks: we are not alone.

They emerge from the shadows of the cavern into the flickering light. They are the muscled and god-strong. They move with ease, limbs lithe and sinewy. She tracks them, how they step so lightly, how they walk without sinking into sandy heaps, how they get closer and closer—

They grab her arm.

She snaps out of the daze. She doesn’t like their hands on her. Their touch burns. She takes a step back—can’t. Their hold is iron. She tugs, hard, and gets free. But there are more behind her, holding her shoulders, more in front of her, crowding her, snatching up her legs.

“NO.”

Her scream is swallowed up by the motion of her body being lifted.

She struggles and writhes, slipping from their grasp. Her body thuds. Blood spills from her nose and ears. Hands and knees on the ground, she scrabbles to get away, but there are pits everywhere and the sand scorches her palms.

Darkglitter surges up her veins.

She is screaming. Her body is twisting and bucking as she is dragged to the edge of a pit.

Don’t fight us. You’ll be with your sister soon.

A shot of lucidity. Fear spikes through her. Something holding her head. Hands thrust inside her mouth, tugging down her jaw, another curved into the roof of her mouth, crushing her nose. They grip both parts and pull—

The last thing she sees is the jackal-headed-almost-god’s eyes gleaming from the light of the furnace.

Then, she is wrenched apart.

• • • •

When you wake, there’s an image of someone in your head. Buzzed hair. Electric blue. The picture of a snout on a shoulder blade. Like a wisp of smoke, she vanishes from your mind.

You are empty and clear-headed. You realise you are a we.

We are buried under layers of black sand. A paw, freshly clawed, erupts from a pit. Then, a bloodied torso. We climb out with unsteady joints. The black plugs our nose, our mouth. Its dry crackling smell makes us dizzy. We want to spit it out, to scrub it from our flesh but we realise we are the sand.

We crouch at the lip of pits and see ourselves, legion, thrumming with the same purpose. We lick our fur, feel our new-fanged teeth, and know we are both gods and the children of gods. We growl and the ground shifts as we find our new voice.

Listen.

There was a time when the gods walked among us and we throned them and they smiled and said they didn’t need a throne. We can live as one, they said, we want to be with our children.

Listen.

They perished for their kindness. They were snatched from us, cut up, strung into something grotesque. That is how the story goes.

Now, it’s time for a new story. Time to scour this land, shatter metal and ice, guzzle the black matter.

Don’t be afraid.

Yes, blood will gush from our nose, gush through our veins, gush into our brains where it will spark and explode but we will rise, we will rend. We are the children of the children of gods. We will not forget.

©2022 by Isha Karki.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isha Karki is a writer based in London. Her short fiction has won the Dinesh Allirajah Prize, Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, and Mslexia Short Story Competition. Her work appears in publications such as Augur Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Best British Short Stories 2021. She is a 2019 graduate of Clarion West. You can find her on Twitter: @IshaKarki11

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

How to Abandon Your Sourdough Starter: A Recipe for Disaster

Theresa DeLucci | 958 words

First, three stolen months ago, scroll through fifteen hundred wistful words about a white woman’s transformative trip to Egypt before getting to the recipe.

Only absorb every fourth sentence because your fingers keep straying to refresh Twitter. Soak up words like “nourish” and “sacred grains” and “fauna,” but mostly just stare at the pictures of bread swaddled in linen and tucked inside wicker baskets like baby Moseses, sailing between islands of polished lemons on stone countertops. Text your husband the link and To put in the oven? as you leave the clinic for the supermarket. Smile when he texts back, A dozen baking puns and you picked that one? and feel almost normal. Imagine having time to grow something for your family—just the two of you—in a time-honored bread-ritual.

Next, do not buy nearly enough flour for any of this.

Let time balloon inside your apartment.

Realize with creeping terror that quarantine while married turns out to be “I dunno, what do you want to eat?” but now three meals a day until September. Agitate your husband with your silences; there is no satisfying answer to any of his questions, a preferred menu the least of them, that will dislodge what’s stoppering your throat. Watch the brownstones across the street rebound blue and red light in the wake of an ambulance’s keening every ten minutes. Spend the next week playing “Allergies or Am I Going To Die Alone and Intubated in the fucking Javits Center?” with yourself instead of baking.

When there are layoffs, when there is another death, or when no one takes responsibility, hover in the kitchen looking for anything to eat that you don’t have to cook. Swear with the spleen of a jilted goddess.

Remember the sourdough recipe. Cling to it like a life preserver.

Set your watch by the simple task of mixing flour with water. Nurture your mason jar with your husband as a team, not as excitedly as if it were the dog your landlord will never let you foster, but much more serenely than if it was the child that never came from you. When the starter doubles in size, steep in satisfaction like parents at a college graduation ceremony that will never happen now.

The amount of flour in your pantry should dwindle in proportional inverse to your hubris.

When your first levain fails to thrive, watch how fast your husband shirks his babysitting duties in favor of video games he plays by himself. Do not conflate the state of your marriage with collapsed baked goods. Absolutely do not compare your womb to a waiting bread box. Forbid resentment to ferment too long before reminding yourself that because of all of this, you never actually asked your husband if he was capable of such a commitment right now.

Become Circe on her solitary island instead. Coax magic from the bloom scraped off dried apricots. Keep your cats weaving around your ankles. Let the sagging collar of a worn t-shirt reveal the tops of your breasts when you bend over a jar of bubbling life. Mark that your husband’s first wife and his son also live in Ithaca, upstate; divorce, the war that drove him to your bed. Begrudge her her backyard.

Work until you believe there’s virtue in your labor or until the thought of buttoning up February’s jeans makes you feel ashamed, whichever comes first. Work until the blossoms have all dropped from the tree outside your kitchen window and you realize that your throat stopped being scratchy two weeks ago. Work until you notice that the ambulances have been replaced with police helicopters and sneer at yourself for assuming the world would resume as it was instead of asking if it should.

Stop feeding your family just to fill the empty time.

For your last loaf, shape the dough into an infant with a round belly and your husband’s pinched nose. Flip the dough over. Slap its bottom. Breathe the secret name you wrote on your heart three months ago, the same day you found the sourdough recipe, when the one test you didn’t want to come back negative did and there was no time to decide what deserved your grief first or deeper.

See this child, salted with your tears, cry for the first time from sunken eyes pressed with your thumbprints. Hear their wail in the heart-stopping urgency of a speeding firetruck.

Resist the urge to call your husband into the kitchen too early. This next part is just for you.

Instead, fill the child with a eulogy and your best intentions. Let them expand with each whispered apology for the world that never got to know them and the one they would have been born into. Slide this child into the oven despite your fear, because you understand how motherhood must also include hard choices and doubt. Trust that fire is a trial and a gift for a reason.

Stop pacing when the timer goes off. Arm yourself with oven mitts.

Lure your husband into the kitchen with the smell of fresh baked bread cooling on the windowsill. Present him with the swaddled child, golden and still as possibility. Don’t look away from his stunned surprise when he recognizes what you’ve made. Flinch when you slice the first piece, for him, because that is supposed to hurt, but expect it when you cut your own. Taste it at last, that tang of pity, the pliancy of mourning. Give him time to savor it, too.

Admit that your apartment is not Aeaea-on-the-Hudson, you were never exiled, and it’s too hot to turn on the oven anymore anyway.

Clear your throat.

Speak.

©2022 by Theresa DeLucci.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theresa DeLucci’s fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Horror, and on Tor.com, where she also reviews books, TV, and video games. An alum of Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, she’s also gotten nerdy for Wired.com’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. She lives in Queens, New York.

The Honest Fox, or, A Truth Shared is Not a Truth Lost

P H Lee | 4365 words

I have heard it on the rumors that when the tale-spinner’s guild gathers in its secret places, a full half of them are sworn to never tell the truth, and the other half to never tell a lie, even if it mean their life. Being one of that trade myself, I can tell you that that’s more or less the shape of it, and I tell you this so that you will know that the tale I tell you now is true, just as it happened and just as it was told to me, for I am one of the ones sworn to the truth.

The name I’m called is Dusty Boots, I come from the valley of Erwhile, and I am in love with a girl that I can never have. The tale I tell you now happened not so long ago, but very far away, out in the sunward forests, where golden light shines slow along golden boughs.

In that land there was once a little fox who was not at all like the others. Where other foxes were sly, he alone was honest. Where other foxes were sneaky, he alone was kind. Where other foxes were clever, he alone was forthright. And so, despite the love between them as a kind will have, they could not long abide his company, nor he theirs. In the end, it was quite impossible for them to live together. So he left the company of other foxes and spent many years wandering the woods, wholly apart from his fellows.

Left to himself, he learned in time the languages of the birds and other forest animals, hoping, perhaps, that they would understand him better. But once he learned their languages he discovered that he had even less in common with them than with his own kind. He was at last left in his solitary burrow beneath the roots of an old birch tree, left with only his thoughts for company—thoughts of rights and wrongs, justices and exploitations, goods and evils—strange thoughts to the mind of a fox or, for that matter, the mind of a man.

One cold day in late summer, he came across a tall stone wall, heavy with mosses and ferns. “Surely this must be a work of man!” he thought to himself, “For what else could it be? See how it slopes so unnatural from the earth? What a wondrous animal is man, to craft such nests!” The fox had never before seen the works of man, although he had heard tales told from the lips of wider roaming creatures. And, for a while, he walked alongside the wall, marveling at its height and regularity. But, although he was a strange fox, he was still a fox. As he looked again and again at the wall, unable to see over it, he began to wonder what it could be hiding. Finally, his curiosity overtook him, and he scratched and scrabbled his way up the loose stones alongside the wall, until at last he reached the top.

The land he saw beyond the wall was like a forest, but such a forest that could have only come from the mind of man. There were rows upon rows of leafy particular trees, each branch laden heavy with apples. “Apples,” thought the fox to himself, “apples are my favorite.” He had never seen such apples, or so many, row and row of trees, layer and layer of branches, flecked pale red and green and golden in the light of evening. He knew—he knew!—that if he could just eat one, it would be so crisp and clean and sweet. But the other side of the wall was steep and straight, with no piles of loose and ready stones. There was no way for him to travel down it. So, instead, he nestled himself into the weeds and wet moss atop the wall and watched the apples sway in summer’s soft and evening light, until the sun had set and there was nothing but darkness over the forest. Only then did he pick his way back down the wall and make his way to his solitary burrow beneath the roots of an old birch tree.

After that, the fox would walk every day alongside the old wall, although he never again climbed it. As he walked, he would recall the apples that lay just over the wall—those apples!—swaying in the golden light of summer’s evening. He would imagine the softness and the flavor of them. But he did not dare to cross the wall, or even to look again inside.

• • • •

One day, a raven noticed the little fox walking alongside the wall, and then the next day, and then the next. She wondered why a fox would walk the same route every day, and why he would walk it beside this wall-of-man. In all the ages of the sky, there has never been a raven that once defied its curiosity, so no sooner did she wonder than she called out to the fox, saying:

“Little fox who walks along the wall: I come from the air where the winds blow wide and long; I come from the air where all below is seen; I come from the air and there are things I would ask of you, things I wish to know.”

The fox stopped and addressed the raven respectfully. “Cousin Raven, you may ask me any question that you will, for foxes and ravens are more alike than different, and surely you are close as kin to me.”

With a flutter of wings and rustle of feathers, the raven took perch on a small bush beside the fox, cocked her feathered head, and regarded him oddly.

“Why is it,” she asked at last, “that while all other foxes hunt and run and play on their own paths, you alone walk beside this wall-of-man, far from your fellows and their company?”

“Cousin Raven,” answered the little fox, “you have asked me two questions where I have only granted one. But a truth shared is not lost, and so I will give you two answers and any others that you might require.” And he explained the differences between himself and his brother foxes, and how, despite the love between them as a kind will have, they had become estranged.

The raven cocked her head, blinked twice, and regarded the fox for a moment. “Be that foul or be that fair,” she replied, “I shall regardless let it as it may. But why do you spend all your days beside this wall-of-man, and not in your own places in the forest, where you may hunt and play?”

“Ah, my cousin,” said the fox, “That is is another matter altogether.” And he explained to the raven about how he came across the wall-of-man, how he scrambled to the top of it, the trees and apples that lay beyond it and how he knew—he knew!—that if he could only taste just one it would be crisp and clean and sweet, how the wall’s other side was too steep for him to travel it, and there was naught for him to do but walk along this wall of man, dreaming of the gold-lit apples just beyond his reach.

“Well,” said the raven, “that’s simple enough. These wings of mine are not so large, yet that wall-of-man is no hindrance to me, and the weight of an apple is not beyond my capacity. For the price of the tale you’ve told, I will retrieve you an apple, that you might know for certain it’s crisp and clean and sweet.” With that, the raven hopped three times, stretched her wings, and set into the air.

“Wait, wait, wait!” cried the fox, but the raven did not stop. She was already flying beyond the reach of the fox’s cries. “That’s not it at all! Not even a little bit!” But the raven was already gone, over the wall, so the fox ran off into the woods, away from the wall, without even looking back, for he knew that if he looked back, he might see an apple in the clutches of the raven, and if he saw an apple, he could not help but taste it, and that would be the worst thing, the very worst thing of all, because no matter how much he wanted, those were not his apples.

For three days the fox hid in his burrow beneath the roots of an old birch tree, waiting and waiting. In his dreams he saw the apples that the raven would have brought him, cool and crisp and sweet. He kept to his burrow—not going back to the walk along that wall nor out into the forest to hunt and play. But after three days had passed, he thought surely that the raven had moved along her sky-paths to a new world altogether, and so he made his way back to the wall to walk along it.

But the character of his meandering changed in the days after the raven heard his tale. While before, he moved happily along the wall, imagining the wonderful feasts that lay beyond it, the raven’s offer had laid bare his anxiety: It would not be so simple, for him to eat an apple, for they were not his to eat. So now he walked along the wall bedraggled and sighing in a sadness thick and deep. “Oh me,” he would sigh again and again, “oh my.” Day after day he would walk along the wall, full of fear and hunger, and there was no end to it.

• • • •

One day, as he was walking the wall in his own anxieties, the little fox heard a voice coming from beneath the earth, speaking to him in the language of all things that squirm and crawl and burrow.

“Little fox who walks along the wall: I come from the earth where the rots grow deep and ancient; I come from the earth where all above is heard; I hear you through the dirt and there are things I would ask of you, things I wish to know.”

Startled, the little fox leapt into a crouch, but he recognized the voice as the voice of a rat, and no enemy of his. Relaxing his jaws, he addressed the rat respectfully. “Cousin Rat, please come to visit me and ask of me any question that you will, for foxes and rats are more alike than different, and surely you are close as kin to me.”

And, with a shuffle of earth and a nuzzling of noses, the rat dug her way out from the earth and set her bright eyes on the fox, wrapped her naked tail around herself, and regarded him oddly.

“Why is it,” she finally asked, “that all the other foxes hunt and run and play on their own paths, but every day you walk alone beside this wall-of-man, far from your fellows and their company?”

“Cousin Rat,” answered the little fox, “you have asked me two questions where I have only granted one. But a truth shared is not lost, and so I will give you two answers and any others that you might require.” And he explained the differences between himself and his brother foxes, and how, despite the love between them as a kind will have, they had become estranged.

The rat twitched her whiskers, sniffed twice, and regarded the fox for a moment. “Be that foul or be that fair,” she replied, “I shall regardless let it as it may. But why do you spend all your days beside this wall-of-man, and not in your own places in the forest, where you may hunt and play?”

“Ah, my cousin,” said the fox, “That is another matter altogether.” And he explained to the rat about how he came across the wall-of-man, how he scrambled to the top of it, the trees and apples that lay beyond it and how he knew—he knew!—that if he could only taste just one it would be crisp and clean and sweet, how the wall’s other side was too steep for him to travel it, and there was naught for him to do but walk along this wall of man, dreaming of the gold-lit apples just beyond his reach.

“Well,” said the rat, “that’s simple enough. These claws of mine are not so large, yet that wall is not so deep as it may hinder me, and the width of an apple is not beyond my capacity to burrow. For the price of the tale you’ve told, I will retrieve you an apple that you might know it’s crisp and clear and sweet.” With that, the rat turned three times, scritched her claws, and dug into the earth.

“Wait, wait, wait!” cried the fox but the rat did not stop. She had already tunneled beyond the reach of the fox’s cries. “That’s not it at all! Not at all or even a little bit!” But the rat was already gone, under the wall, so the fox ran off into the woods, away from the wall, without even looking back, for he knew that if he looked back, he might see an apple in the burrows of the rat, and if he saw the apple, he could not help but taste it, and that would be the worst thing, the very worst thing of all, because if he let himself taste that apple that he wanted so much, he would be just like all the other foxes, who did whatever they liked without a care for the harm they left behind.

The fox ran off into the woods, where he waited and waited and in his dreams he saw the apples that the rat would have brought for him. He kept to his burrow beneath the roots of an old birch tree—not going back to the walk along the wall nor out into the forest to hunt and play. After three days had passed, when the rat had surely moved along to other tunnels in other earths, he was sore so tempted to walk along the wall again, dreaming of those apples. But he knew that, if he went back, he would see the rat again, or the raven again, or some other manner of animal that would not, could not, would never understand. And so the little fox summoned up his spirits, summoned up his will, summoned every purpose he had at his disposal and with them he swore a great oath on the world, that he would never again go back and wander along the wall, that from that day forth he would hunt and play on his own woody ways, and leave off with this apple foolishness entirely.

But the character of his living had changed in the days after the rat had heard his tale. While before, he had hunted fearlessly, and played happily, confident in the character of his joy, the wall and its apples had laid bare the fear and doubt inside his heart. Now, he wandered the forest bedraggled and sighing in a sadness thick and deep. “Oh me,” he would sigh again and again, “oh my.” Day after day he would wander aimlessly, as always solitary but now alone as well, full of sorrow and hunger, and there was no end to it.

• • • •

One day, as the little fox was wandering in his hermitude, he spied through the woods a skulk of other foxes through the trees, whisperingly wickedly amongst themselves, cackling at their plans and schemes, slippery and self-satisfied, and although the little fox was different from his fellows and did not keep company with them, he was lonely and tired and hungry and afraid, and so he called out to his fellows for company.

“Brother foxes,” he cried out, “brother foxes who slink so slyly through the forest, I would have a thing to ask of you, a thing I wish to know.”

The other foxes stopped, regarded the other fox, so starving and wretched and ragged, and snickered as they addressed him respectfully. “Brother Fox, please come to us and we’ll tell you of our schemes and tricks, so you might join our bounty and have some sup for your thin bones, for we are more alike than different, and surely you are a brother of ours. But first, if we may, a question for yourself.”

The little fox approached his tricky fellows, keeping himself back and cautious, for he knew well their bearing and their character. He sniffed the air and paced back and forth before he nodded for their question.

“Why is it,” they snickered, “that all us other foxes hunt and run and scheme and sting altogether, on our own paths, but every day you hold yourself separate and apart from us, as if you were some other creature than a fox, our plans and tricks beneath you?”

“Brother foxes,” answered the little fox, “truly you ask me a question that I would prefer to leave unanswered. But a truth shared is not a truth lost, and there is no harm to things speaking things as they are, so I will give you your answers just as they shall be, and any others that any you might require. It is not that I am some other creature than a fox, nor that I am above your plans and tricks. It is simply from a difference in our temperaments that I may not keep your company. Where all of you are sly, I alone am honest. Where all of you are sneaky, I alone am kind. Where all of you are clever, I alone am forthright. And so, you see, although I have love for you as kind will have for kind, it is absolutely impossible for us to spend our days together. It is from these circumstances that I hold myself apart.”

“Brother,” the other foxes replied, “truly you are too kind to us, and too hurtful to yourself. You call us sly! You call us sneaky! You call us clever! Surely, we are but common foxes, and unworthy of your praise. At the same time, what insult do you heap upon yourself? You call yourself honest! You call yourself kind! You call yourself forthright! While it perhaps is true that you are not as capable as we in sneaking and slying, you cannot truly be as wretched as all that. Developing your skills is simply a matter of practice and determination. With those two treasures firmly fixed between our jaws, we foxes may all someday swindle as well as Old Longtail, who stole the warmth of the winter sun and the darkness of the summer night.”

“It’s not like that,” the little fox whispered under his breath, but his brothers were so focused on their flattery that they did not hear him, and kept on and on their own effusions.

“To that end,” the other foxes finally concluded, “we are embarking on a most excellent expedition, a simple one-five job that will be of no account at all even to a fox of your limited ability. In the heart of the woods, there lives alone an old man, who keeps behind his wall-of-man a harvest of golden apples, sweet and clean and crisp as you’ve never tasted before. By the authorship of Thin Stripes here, who is truly the best among us in such matters, we have obtained a simple method by which he might be rid of them, and ourselves commensurately gained, with no more than three betrayals, a handful of lies, and one simple sneak of eight feet at the very most. So if you’ll come with us, brother, know that you’ll get the best meal you’ve ever tasted, and nothing for it but a few deceptions that will surely be even within your limited capacity. Now let’s along, as the sun goes down autumnwise, and the old man sleeps and rises on it.”

“Wait, wait, wait!” cried the honest fox, but his brethren did not stop, and hurried off into the woods, chuckling to themselves at their own wickedness. “That’s not it at all! Not at all or even a little bit!” But the foxes were already gone, out to their schemes without the hinderance of conscience, leaving the little fox crying after them to no end at all. His heart beat as fast as it ever had. What could he to do? Then, without a moment more of thought, he made up his mind, and ran at once towards the wall.

He and ran and ran toward the wall, as if he was running from a wolf or from a man: a long, straight dart with a single destination. It was only minutes before he found what he was a looking for, a little man-nest of piled and sorted stones, built alongside of the wall, the place where the old man must live. The fox stopped still right outside, staring into the hovel, catching his ragged breath.

But, in that moment he gave himself, he had already begun to doubt.

“What if the other foxes have already come?” he asked himself, “he will surely think that I am another fox along to trick him. He will strike me and beat me and maybe kill me in his anger. What if they haven’t come, but he is learned in the nature of foxes, and suspects (as he should rightly suspect) that my warning is simply a deception? He will think me to be evil! No, no, no! It will not work.” With such nervous thoughts fox worried his way through hours and hours, until at last, as the sun was making its last embrace with the horizon, a little old man hobbled his way out of the hovel, making a final round before taking his night’s rest. The fox had by then convinced himself fully of inaction, and so he sat still outside the old man’s house, not moving nor making any noise.

“Perhaps if I’m very very quiet,” said the fox to himself, “he won’t notice me.”

But his silence did not save him. The old hermit, whose eyes were quite bad, glimpsed some tuft of the little fox’s hair in the cold light of autumn’s evening. “What’s this,” he said to himself in the language of men, which the fox could also understand. “Is this a little fox I see out in front of me, ragged and wretched, half starved and half frozen, shivering outside my door?”

What could the fox do but reply? “Yes, sir,” he said, “I am a fox, true as you can see it.”

“May I ask a question of you, little foxling?”

The fox trembled in fear, for he knew that the man would think him a liar and huckster, but he replied nonetheless. “Cousin Man, please ask of me any questions that you will, for foxes and men are more alike than different, and surely you are close as kin to me.”

“How is it,” asked the old man, “that you have come in the dark, in the night, shivering and half dead, all alone and separate from your fellows, to visit this old man?”

“Cousin Man,” answered the little fox respectfully, “you have asked me one question with two answers. But a truth shared is not a truth lost, so I will give you your two answers and any others that you might require.” And he explained the differences between himself and his brother foxes, and how, despite the love between them as a kind will have, they had become estranged.

The old man smiled at the fox’s response, and the fox thought that he did not believe him, but drew his courage and continued on regardless.

“As to how I have come to your door, that is another matter altogether.” And the fox recounted the whole story of how he came across the man’s wall, and over it glimpsed his orchard, of how he had walked along the wall every day, dreaming of the apples beyond, of the raven and the rat who had offered to fetch apples for him, and finally of the skulk of foxes he had met in the woods, who planned to trick the man and steal his entire apple crop, and how he had run and run and finally come to warn the man of their sneakery.

The man smiled sadly when he heard the end of the little fox’s tale. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that you have come too late to warn me of your brothers. Already their tricks have relieved me of my entire apple crop. In truth, it is not so great a price for me, and they could have had them for the asking, but foxes shall be foxes. I shan’t grudge them their particular methods. All that remains now is a dozen-and-one that I had reserved for my own consumption.”

When the little fox heard this, he began to cry.

“But,” said the hermit, “in truth even twelve-and-one apples is too much for my old appetite, and your diligence and decency deserve word and reward. Set your feet into my home, then, and we shall eat the apples together. For I have heard it said, and found it true, that a friend is a better companion to me than a full stomach.”

The fox trembled and shook in doubt and anticipation. But what could he do? The man had freely offered his apples; he could not refuse. He walked slowly into the man’s stone nest, and there his friend gave him an apple, red and gold and good. And the fox bit into it, and the taste was crisp and clean and sweet and better by far than he had ever dreamed.

And that is the story, the whole and the heart of it, just as it happened and just as it was told to me. If any man call me a liar, he has only himself to blame.

©2022 by P H Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P H Lee lives on top of an old walnut tree, past a thicket of roses, down a dead end street at the edge of town. Their work has appeared in many venues including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine. From time to time, they microwave and eat a frozen burrito at two in the morning, for no reason other than that they want to.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

EXCERPT: Last Exit (Tor Books)

Max Gladstone | 5638 words

Gaiman’s American Gods meets King’s The Dark Tower in this electric, captivating road trip across America and alternate realities to stop the apocalypse, from a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author.

Imagine that the American highway system is a vast magical network binding city to city. By soaking up magic from intentionally directionless travel, initiates can slip into alternate realities. Stray too far from our America, though, and things get weird. And dangerous. And terrifying.

When visionary mathematician Zelda Qiang was in college, she learned how to travel from one alternate reality to another. Her response was to take her friends on a road trip to strange new worlds. Six of them set out. Only five returned. Zelda’s lover, Sal, betrayed them: she walked into the jags—sharp cutting shadows like cracks in space—and didn’t come back.

Now Zelda still walks the road alone, a wandering magus keeping the jags from breaking through. But now Sal is coming back—with Dark Things in tow.

Coming May 3rd from Tor Books.

CHAPTER FOUR

Zelda walked through the underworld alone.

Her flashlight beam found skeletons clutching the rails or one another, ribs tangled in embrace. Scraps of cloth hung from dead arms. She tried not to crush the scattered finger bones underfoot. Sometimes she succeeded. In America, you never could walk without stepping on corpses. Sarah had taught her that. In some Americas, the truth was more literal than others.

You went to a new America like a cop to the scene of a crime. Not just any crime, but one of those real charnel houses, where you had to bring in cold, dead-eyed techs to pick apart the meat and molars on the floor and tell how many bodies were there. Everything was wrong. A child’s plastic teething ring glittered undecayed beneath a skeleton’s hand, but she did not see a child’s skeleton to match it. A memory, maybe, dragged down here as the crowd rushed in to escape—what? Not a gas attack. Anything heavier than air would be worse belowground. Not a flood. Human violence? Riots? Invasion? Bombs?

You’d never emerge in an America that killed you at once. To cross into an alt, you had to see yourself inside it—and human minds did not like to envision worlds where they could not exist. So they’d walked nuclear glasslands without dying of radiation sickness. They never turned left into a city flooded with hydrofluoric acid. They had found plague lands, Americas where the groundwater would poison you or drive you mad, they’d found death cults aplenty and all manner of aftermath. You might fall to your death, or catch rabies, or a bullet. But you were safe in the instant of your crossing.

At least, that’s how they thought it worked. It was always possible, Ish had pointed out, that they were just blind lucky.

(That’s what spin was, Ramón said back. You were lucky, until you weren’t.)

After you came through, you asked questions. Once in a while, you had enough evidence to work out whys and whats and wherefores. Sal always wanted to find some fix, someone who could be saved, some answer. But there was little justice to be done. Sometimes they’d find people to help, but helping survivors did not bring back what they’d lost. The most you could do was witness.

The tunnels were larger than the ones back home. Her footsteps echoed.

She had been an idiot. If she’d died, if she hadn’t found a way out of the city before the train hit her, who would stop Sal? June would have done just fine on the road. Zelda could have used her. She wanted to spare her, to spare Ma. But what did that matter, against Sal and the end of everything? Small, to compare the life of a family with the life of a world.

The problem with trying to be a hero was that much of the time, you sounded like a psychotic narcissist. And vice versa. Anyway, the world was doing a good-enough job of killing itself without any help from monstrosities Outside.

She had to focus. She had tickets on Amtrak out of Penn Station this afternoon, bound south and west, back to her Subaru and the open road. There would be time for second-guessing on the highway. For now, she had to make her train.

Which meant navigating a dead subway system over and through these bodies, and finding a soft place to climb out and back home. Before Sal—before the thing that wore Sal’s face, that used her like an anglerfish used a lure—smelled her through the alts and chased her down.

So, first: Where was she going?

Forward. Away from June. Just march and tell yourself: She would have died if she came with you. You saved her life. That’s something. Let it be enough.

She fished her compass from her pack. The needle spun, glinted under her flashlight. It settled at last pointing behind her. The tunnel led south. As long as it did, she would follow it and hope it was uninhabited. Hope it wasn’t flooded under the river. (There would be a river here. Every alt had the river, or the place the river used to be.) She couldn’t guess when she might find an exit. All this place shared with the New York she’d left behind was a stretch of tunnel.

She walked south.

Something scurried in the black behind her.

She spun around, aware all of a sudden of just how many things could live in a down-below space like this. Dark, warmer than the outside world, and damp. She’d joked about alligators in the sewers, but there were rats—clever and kind when they weren’t hungry, but they could eat through steel, crest over people like a wave and leave nothing more than bone behind. There would be stranger things than rats down here, in the depths of this dead world. But she did not know them yet, so she imagined rat teeth, white and wet, and small, red, hungry eyes.

Her flashlight swept the tunnel. Empty. Train tracks ran off into the shadows, the gap between them damp. Bones everywhere, ribs jutting up. Teeth knocked free of jawbones lay like gravel between subway ties. The metal glinted, the water was flat and muddy dull. She heard a drop of water fall from a great height into an unseen pool.

Nothing moved. What had she heard?

A mouse. A rat. Some bones she’d jostled as she passed, settling into a new position. Whatever it was, it had stopped. The light scared it. If there was an it.

Calm down. This isn’t anything you haven’t seen before. Just dead people. Tunnels.

You know how this goes.

But back when she was used to this kind of mess, Sal had been there, Sal and Ish and Ramón and Sarah. Together there was nothing they couldn’t do, no one they couldn’t beat. Even running from monsters was fun when you had friends to do it with. The horror set in when you were alone, without anyone to make you brave, without anyone to help you pretend death was one huge joke. No one to say, I’ve been down here before. I know the way out.

Something wet touched her cheek.

She screamed, spun, flailed out with the flashlight, caught nothing. Her ankle turned in the muck and she fell hard, hit her shoulder on the rail, bit her lip as her head bounced off a tie.

The flashlight went out.

She swore. The curses echoed in the perfect darkness of the tunnel. She’d seen where the flashlight fell. More or less.

Unless she’d turned around as she pulled herself to her knees. Her breath sounded so loud. Had she turned as she fell? She tried to remember. Tiny lights danced before her eyes in the dark. Your mind could not bear an absence of light. It imposed patterns on blackness. She’d read about that back at school. Colors came from nothing. Come on. Focus. You didn’t hit your head that hard.

The flashlight had fallen to her left. She had not turned when she rose to her knees. It would be there.

Her hand found water and mud and, groping in horror in the dark, at last, the knurled metal of the flashlight’s grip.

Panting, desperate, she lurched to her feet and turned the flashlight on.

Or tried.

It didn’t light.

She heard the scurrying again, closer. Louder. And in many places at once. It was a harsh sound, like nails scraping the inside of a casket. She slapped the flashlight twice, three times. She’d bought it from a military surplus store in Tennessee with a Vietnam-era jeep on bricks out front, from a gawky auction hunter with a peppery goatee who followed her around the store asking too many questions about where she’d come from and where she was going. Waterproof, he’d said. Used one just like it myself. She didn’t ask in what war so he didn’t have to lie about it. She’d hoped he wasn’t lying about it being waterproof.

More scurrying. It was a mouse. It had to be. Just a mouse. Believe in the mouse. Forget that when you stepped into an alternate New York just a few hours ago, the sky boiled into the shape of your ex-girlfriend, and she said she was coming back for you, and that had been on a bridge in plain view of the whole damn Bronx, and this was a forgotten tunnel in the dark. Forget that Sal—this thing you can’t stop calling Sal even though she’s gone, devoured, digested in one of the many bellies of an incomprehensible beast that lurks out past the edge of sense—forget that she has your scent. Know: it’s just a mouse.

She slapped the flashlight so hard it made the small bones of her hand hurt, and tore her scabs. The bulb flickered. The scurrying was close now, loud beneath the rush of her own panicked breath. She turned, blind, at bay, and shook the flashlight one last desperate time.

And the bulb lit.

The scurrying stopped.

Bones cast shadows in the flashlight beam, down the tunnel until the light gave out. She saw no trace of movement. No jawbone teetered, disturbed by passing feet or a flicking tail. The puddles between the train tracks lay murky and still. Her breath echoed over the dead.

A cold hand closed around her heart. She knew what she should do next, but she couldn’t bear to. If you didn’t look, if you left the page unturned and the secret undiscovered, surely you’d be safe. If you don’t open the closet, neither will the monster. All you have to give in trade for your survival is the knowledge that the monster is in the closet, and your hand is always inches from the door.

She looked up.

The ceiling was studded with jewels.

Then she raised the flashlight, and the jewels boiled away from its beam—flowed down the sides of the tunnel wall like a flock of starlings, that same blooming, writhing jellyfish motion composed, on closer look, of simple, single points.

Some of the jewels fell, tumbling, their clawed legs dislodged from the brick. Two splattered against bone or rail. A third landed on the back of Zelda’s wrist. The jewel was a beetle the size of a half-dollar, with a smoky iridescent shell and delicate legs. It clapped its long mandibles twice in the air. It chirped. Then, with terrifying speed, it buried its mandibles in her arm.

She screamed. The pain, burning through her forearm, almost made her drop the flashlight, but sheer will and terror kept her hand clutched around the metal. She had a vision of what would happen if she dropped the light, of beetles closing around her like a fist, shredding her flesh in the dark, and here in a tunnel it would all be over, in some backwoods alt without friends or backup and with no one left but June to know that Sal was coming. All of that for nothing. All the road she had walked and all the people she’d hurt, all those ten long years seeking forgiveness for her sins. That vision kept her grip tight for those agonizing quarter seconds before her free hand tore the beetle from her arm and flung it away.

Her arm burned. Blood slicked her grip on the light. She was breathing rabbit fast, her chest tight, her eyes wide, her scream’s echoes buzzing in her ears. And that buzz was real—the beetles on the tunnel walls flicking their wings and casting reflections like moonlight on the swells of a cliff-walled bay.

They scurried down the walls away from her flashlight beam—toward her.

She ran.

Her flashlight beam fell on a writhing carpet of beetles over the tracks ahead. They surged away from the light, scrambling over one another to make a lane as narrow as the beam. She sprinted down that path and heard the buzz and scurry behind as beetles closed over the tracks, chasing her. She was faster, but there were so many of them and they were so close, their buzzing and scurrying inside her bones, and the click-click-click of tiny hungry jaws. They smelled her blood.

She ran down the path her light made between the mobs of bugs. She had lived through worse, she told herself. It was even true. Chased three times by dinosaurs, countless times by subhuman irradiated mutant weirdos, by robots, by the rulers of the Green Glass City, and that one time by the Gun Cult on Meriamne’s World. But they had been kids back then. They hardly knew what pain was yet. Born in soft peacetime afternoons, in the heart of an empire, they’d taken the prospect of risk, of death, for a kind of game. They had learned the truth at Elsinore.

She’d lived through worse. That didn’t mean she would live through this.

There had been a logo on that beetle’s back. Distorted, as a tattoo might be if the person who wore it gained forty pounds—but too self-contained and geometric for natural coloring. Someone made those beetles. Someone had chased people down here into the dark, and loosed the beetles to feed.

She was tired. No, tired made it sound as if you wanted to go to sleep. She wanted to spit out her lungs. Living on the road wore you hard, but it didn’t keep you in hell-sprint-from-beetles shape. For years she had been careful, which meant lazy. She stayed away from the alts—from just this kind of mess. She walled these border worlds out so no one could stumble into them. Of course, there was only so “in shape” you could be for something like this.

A beetle fell into her hair, and she slapped it off before it could do more than cut a small line in her scalp. They closed in. Jaws snatched at her shoes, tearing canvas and rubber. She risked flashing her light back behind her—the carpet of beetles that was chasing her halted, while ahead others crunched like the bones beneath her feet. When she cast the light back in front of her, the lane she ran had narrowed to the width of a garden wall. She trampled bugs as she fled.

Her arm was on fire. Her arm was numb. Her hand slipped on the flashlight. And her legs weighed more with every step.

Ahead—she had to be imagining it—she almost wept—would have wept if she’d had the breath to weep—the tunnel widened. Ahead, she saw a shimmering light.

Chest heaving, she forced herself faster. The flashlight guttered. Bugs buzzed. Hungry chorus. Somehow, she crossed the distance and burst out of the tunnel into a cavern.

Not a cavern. A station.

It had been gilded once. The paint dulled and chipped with time, but mosaic tiles still clung to the high vaulted ceiling, a night sky with constellations she did not recognize. And there, at the apex of the vault—a skylight, its stained glass shattered. Beyond that skylight . . .

Blue.

Blinding. Her eyes watered after so long in the dark. A pool of sunlight fell on the broad platform between the tracks.

Bugs poured out of the tunnel after her.

There—a ladder up to the platform. She dropped her flashlight into the tool loop in her jeans, or tried. It slipped out of her numb, bloody fingers, and bugs swarmed over it when it landed. Shit. There wasn’t even time to get angry at herself for dropping it. She could hate herself later, if she lasted that long.

Get to the light.

Her right hand would barely close on the ladder’s rungs. Fortunately her left and her feet could do the work. She hooked her right wrist behind the rungs for balance, and in three hard jerks she lay on the platform, gasping.

Behind her, bugs spilled over the platform’s lip, tumbling over other bugs, quicksilver, hungry.

God.

You can do it. A few more steps. Don’t think, don’t feel. If you let yourself feel right now, you’re dead and this is all for nothing. Feeling is for later. Go.

Just a little further.

With a roar wrung from her belly, with a burst of strength from her legs and her good arm, she launched herself off the concrete, a scuttling crablike lunge, more pounce and fall than sprint. Her ankle turned on her third step, another spark of pain. There was buzzing, clicking all around. But she could see the circle of light. She would not be some near case, some Junior Great Books tragedy.

Almost there.

She gathered her screaming body, leapt—and fell.

Rolled.

She came to rest, sobbing, in light.

A scuttling ocean of bugs surrounded her, but they stayed just outside the sunlit circle’s edge. Zelda lay panting there. The throbbing pain in her ankle eased. The bite in her arm felt like someone had cut her open and sewn coals inside.

She might have died just now.

She might still die, just now.

When Zelda first set out on the road, she would come through scrapes and realize, days later, joking about how drunk she’d been or how near the car had come to spinning out, just how close she had been to being dead. The older she got, the nearer the realization came to the event. Now the one ran on the other’s heels. Someday the awareness would eclipse the moment, and then it would happen. It wasn’t all that different from slipping into the alts. You had to see a possibility to embrace it. And when the possibility of death closed out all others—well, there you were.

She was spinning off. Vagueing. Disassociating, was that what Sarah called it? You played games with concepts to protect yourself from where you were, the feelings you felt. Walk back into your body. Start with sensation. Live here now, you useless, overeducated mess-person. Find a path that will keep you alive until later.

Pain in the arm. A stitch in her side. Hell, more like a spear in her side. The world flexed around her with the urgency of her breath. Queasy. Tears on her cheek. Concrete pebbles pressed into the side of her face. She tasted copper. When had she bit her cheek? Or her tongue? When she fell. When she landed.

She was staring, she realized, into the blank eye sockets of a skull.

Fine. With her good hand, she pushed herself up. She sat in a pool of light. The skylight above was a deep thick well cut through rock to the surface, its sides overgrown with moss and ivy. The light would move as the sun moved, and quickly. Direct sunlight kept the bugs away. So, once the sun passed the well’s edge, she would be stuck down here with the bugs and her skeleton friend.

Something tugged at the toe of her right shoe. She kicked by reflex, felt a weight that should not have been there fly off into the dark, saw a glittering iridescent parabola as the bug sailed off from her shoe to splash into the others. Sitting up, she had shifted to bring her foot into the shadow. Or the sun was already moving on.

There was a hole in her sneaker. Her foot was bleeding. She hadn’t lost any toes. Yet.

Get your shit together, Z. You don’t have much time.

The subway platform was ornate and ruined and covered with bones. On one track rested the gleaming chrome hulk of a train that belonged in a Norman Rockwell painting. Its windows were busted and the sides streaked with a substance that might have been rust. All these skeletons had been running from the surface. They’d come down to the tunnels to die.

There had to be stairs. An elevator. A ramp.

There was—behind her. A winding iron stair with thick iron cage walls, rising to the arched ceiling. The cage should keep the beetles out. It looked like a deeply impractical way to enter a subway—there must be elevators somewhere, wider stairs—but maybe a long-ago architect thought winding staircases looked cool. Anyway, she didn’t see another option that wasn’t crawling with bugs.

The bugs covered the platform now, a quivering, rolling surface like a pond’s in high wind, pushing over and through one another to reach her, only to fall back, hissing, as they edged the circle of light. Their hisses, the click of their mandibles, the tick of their claws filled the cavern. They were hungry, desperately hungry, and a carpet of them lay between her and the stairs and, maybe, safety.

There’s your problem, Z. Figure it out.

She realized then: She would not let herself die here. No matter how bleak it seemed, no matter how her arm hurt or how little daylight she had left. She had run from June to save her. But if she didn’t make it out of this tunnel, no one would face Sal. One day the sky would rip open, and that would be it for June, and Ma Tempest, and all the rest. She would have left June behind for nothing.

Christ, she hated New York.

First things first: the wound in her arm.

It did not look good. The ragged edges of the bite oozed blood. Around the wound, her skin was puffy and red. Closing her fist hurt and took the kind of concentration she normally associated with trying to cut a deck of cards using just one hand. Her dad had taught her emergency first aid for rattlesnake bites, you cut the skin and tried to suck the poison out, but the Boy Scout manual she carried in her pack had a big red X printed over its diagram of the procedure. The risks were greater than the risks of the bite.

Sunlight glinted off a tiny silver speck caught in the wound. She found her first aid kit, sterilized her tweezers with her lighter flame, and, biting down on a folded belt, drew a small curved sliver of mandible from the bite. When it was out, she sagged, breathing heavy. A rope of spit dangled from her mouth. The pain lost some of its urgency. She could make a fist without wincing, much. It was a start.

She splashed iodine on the cut and groaned as it bubbled. Gauze next, first to mop up the blood, then for the bandage. She threw the dirty gauze pad to the bugs. They scrambled over one another, savaging themselves for a snap at it, and she heard herself laugh. They were just dumb creatures. They could eat her, sure, but they were puppets to their hunger.

As if she wasn’t.

Bandaged, she surveyed her surroundings again. The circle of sunlight was an oval now, tracking in a direction she figured was east. Faster than she expected. The winding stair remained bug-free. Her skeleton friend lay still beside her, bones gnawed, grinning.

“You’re a model of perseverance,” she told the skeleton. It did not respond.

She needed light. She needed a path to the stair.

Her lighter wasn’t enough. She could make a torch—but her clothing was quick-dry stuff, designed to wash in a rest stop sink, dry overnight, and wear the next morning. It would melt before it would burn. The same went for her towel and her backpack. Even her still-damp jeans had been at most introduced to cotton at some point in the manufacturing process. There was an essay here, if she survived to write it, on flexibility and design and repurposability, a Seeing Like a State sort of riff. But she’d have to think of a new example. Her present circumstances weren’t exactly relatable.

Vaguing out again. Focus.

Gauze would burn too fast. Her candle wouldn’t give enough light. Coat the gauze in wax? No time. Paper, same problem as the gauze. Magnesium shavings from her fire starter would flash, not hold a flame. The thermal blanket, too, would melt before burning. She should have a cotton T-shirt in her pack just in case. Something to add to June’s list.

She missed the kid. It would have been wrong to bring her. But what right did Zelda have to leave her behind? Zelda might have caused this mess, Zelda and Sal and their whole generation, but June had to live in it, just as she, Zelda, had to live in all the other messes older generations left. Simple wars weren’t. Deferred costs could not be put off forever. It didn’t matter if it was your parents or your grandparents or theirs who wrecked the climate; you still faced the hurricanes.

The light was passing. She didn’t have time. What she had was a bunch of stuff that wouldn’t burn, and a bunch of stuff that would burn too quickly, and some bare gnawed bones and a circle of sunlight, and a turned ankle and a messed-up arm and—And.

Ah.

There was the answer—and that familiar feeling that you were a little clever, and a lot of an idiot for not having seen it before.

She unfolded the thermal blanket. Its reflective foil caught the sunlight. She lifted one side. It wasn’t a mirror or a lens, but it cast a dim light into the bugs—and the bugs gave way. Clearing a lane to the stair.

Multipurpose items. This would do.

Now she just needed a way to prop up the blanket.

That, at least, was easier. She looked to the skeleton. “Sorry, friend.”

Lashing femurs and humeri together with parachute cord from her pack, she made a loose rickety tripod and a frame from which she hung the blanket. By the time she was done, the oval of light was stretched and narrowing—but it should be enough. Just. She tied one end of her remaining parachute cord to the corner of the blanket. That way, she could adjust the angle of the light, if she had to.

The bugs gave way before the reflected light, grudgingly, all the way to the winding stair. Her skeleton friend’s skull grinned at her, but the grin had an accusatory edge, which she had to admit was fair.

By way of apology, she took the skull and nestled it inside the tripod she’d made from its body. She patted its cheek, or the place where its cheek used to be. Then she squared her shoulders, hoisted her pack, and limped onto the path of sunlight.

Step by teetering step, she walked between the hissing, angry, hungry bugs. She felt an unfamiliar sensation rise in her, beneath the sticky weight of fear and guilt: confidence. She could do this. She was doing it. Not just surviving, as she had for the last decade, following her calculations and yarrow stalks from town to town to heal the ten thousand little cracks their failure had left in America. Not keeping low, scraping together part-time drifter’s jobs, meeting again and again the migratory hordes of seventysomethings trying to stretch their social security to keep the camper in gas another month. Not treading water. Not hiding.

She was fighting back. She would spend herself, her spin and blood, her nails and teeth and dignity, to beat this thing, so people had a chance to go on making their own mistakes. So Mona wouldn’t have to turn to monsters to find someone who might listen.

The beast beyond the edge of the world, the beast that took Sal and wore her skin, had finally followed her home. So Zelda would stand against it face-to-face, even if it towered dark and godlike in the sky. She would demand answers and she would get them. Or she would die. One way or another, this whole life of secret wars, of running and hiding and quivering beneath the memories of her mistakes—it would be over.

Her foot landed earlier than she expected, on cold metal. She stumbled, and caught herself with her good hand. The wrought iron staircase rang and shivered. Dust drifted down from the steps overhead.

She’d made it.

She looked down at the parachute cord and remembered reading The Lord of the Rings, which she checked out of the school library for weeks at a time. She remembered Sam’s elven rope that untied itself by magic when Sam said namarie to it, which was goodbye in Elvish. She’d carried this cord for thousands of miles, and now it would end here. Stupid to feel bad for a mass-produced bit of nylon rope. But it was her rope. It had helped her bear all that crushing weight and weakness, so she could do what had to be done.

“Namarie,” she said to the rope. And because the world was not magic, its knot held tight.

She let it go, and climbed. The stairway’s cage door swung shut behind her. Rust flaked and fell from the steps. Her footfalls rang through the empty station, over the dead bones. Bugs buzzed in answer. Far below now as she climbed and climbed, the oval of sunlight drifted east, narrowing through the middle and stretching into a long thin line, before it vanished. The silver tide closed over her bone lattice, her cord, her skeleton friend. Her tripod teetered, and toppled.

For a while the reflected light let her see the sea of bugs below, the iron stair around her, the glinting remnants of mosaic constellations overhead. Then even that glow failed and she was climbing, climbing, alone in the dark forever. She breathed dust. The air grew thick and heavy like it did before a storm.

She heard footsteps behind her, on the stair.

An echo, she told herself.

Someone back there in the deep started whistling, low and only roughly in tune. But she recognized the sound, even recognized the mistakes. That was “The Impossible Dream,” from Man of La Mancha. Sal used to whistle that song that way.

Sal couldn’t reach her in New York. The world was too thick, too observed, too known. But this was not New York.

She climbed faster. She would face Sal—when she was ready. Once she walked the trail again, and reached the crossroads, and could set things right. Not here, in the dark, bleeding and spinless, where all she could do was die.

Echoes—her own breath in her ears, that slow-tempo whistle—told her she’d climbed out of the cavern. There was rock on all sides of her now, or concrete. This could be any tunnel anywhere. And at the tunnel’s end, soon, there would be a door.

Her groping fingers found it, a metal slab covered in flaking paint. There would be a latch—yes, there. It moved. She pushed—but the door did not open.

Stuck.

The whistling neared.

With a cry, with the heat of her will and spin, she threw herself against the door. Rust cracked. Hinges screamed.

Zelda tumbled, blinking, into unbearable light, into the hungry brown-gray concrete hole of a New York subway station, her New York, next to a half-disassembled MetroCard kiosk that a woman in an MTA uniform was frowning into. She turned over to look at Zelda, too confused to be angry.

“Sorry.” Zelda waved her bloody hand, laughed. Try not to look too crazy, Z. “I got a little turned around.” The door closed behind her, revealing a big DO NOT ENTER sign. “Other side was blank.”

The MTA lady shrugged and turned back to her machine, as if Zelda, bloody, grimy, and giggling, was maybe the fourth-weirdest thing she’d seen today.

Zelda limped for the surface and the rest of her war.

Copyright © 2022 by Max Gladstone. Excerpted from Last Exit by Max Gladstone. Published by permission of Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Max Gladstone is the author of the Hugo-nominated Craft Sequence, of which the most recent novel, Ruin of Angels, was released in September 2017. Max’s interactive mobile game, Choice of the Deathless, was nominated for the XYZZY Award, and his critically acclaimed short fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine, and in anthologies such as XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. In addition to his solo and creator-owned work, Max is the lead writer on the Bookburners serial, a contributing writer on The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, and contributed a comic for the Kodansha Press anthology Ghost In the Shell: Global Neural Network. Max has sung in Carnegie Hall and was once thrown from a horse in Mongolia.

Book Review: She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan

Aigner Loren Wilson | 587 words

She Who Became the Sun
Shelley Parker-Chan
Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250621801
Tor Books, July 2021, 416 pgs

Before I get into the full review, I just want to say that I love She Who Became the Sun. Any fan of historical fantasy, historical Chinese romance dramas, intrigue and suspense, or just knockout writing should read this book.

All right, now for the full review where I get into why She Who Became the Sun is so amazing. Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun was pitched as Mulan meets The Song of Achilles and follows Zhu, a young woman who steals her dead brother’s identity after the last of her family dies. Through innumerable battles, both inside of herself and out, Zhu convinces the world she is her brother, Zhu Chongba, and does everything and anything she can to secure greatness even beyond that fated for her brother.

In a stunning remix of the rise of the Ming Dynasty’s founding emperor, She Who Became the Sun brings that era to life through detailed descriptions of the world and settings that show the darkness spurring all of the characters and events in the book. And that’s one of the many things I love about how Parker-Chan unraveled and told the story’s events. The reader is introduced to this harsh, dark, and painful world where dastardly and courageous Zhu etches out her survival. Then the book ends in so much light and intensity that it’s hard to imagine how Zhu goes from point A to point B if you haven’t read the book.

While She Who Became the Sun ends and begins with Zhu, the book is about so much more. The book is told in alternating points of view that added so much tension and titillation I kept wanting to skip ahead. The writing was just too damn good, though, and I didn’t want to miss any information, backhanded comments, or blush-inducing subtle flirting.

To be honest, I don’t usually like historical fantasy, but Parker-Chan blended both parts in such a way that I forgot I was reading within that genre. Instead, I felt like I was absolutely wrapped up in an intense Chinese drama where I needed to see the complicated villain get both their revenge and comeuppance; I would have screamed if the love interests didn’t get together; and I was shredded when Zhu did what she always did—whatever it took to win and survive.

She Who Became the Sun is the most highlighted book I’ve read this year. There are so many passages and exchanges between characters where Parker-Chan wonderfully showed the horror and intimacy in everyday moments shared.

There were a lot of gender politics throughout the pages, too, making She Who Became the Sun more than thrilling, sexy, and adventurous. The novel pushes into yet another realm, adding more for my reader’s mind to gnaw on. If you’ve been on the fence about reading Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun, I hope you take this as the sign to pick up the book and embark on Zhu’s journey and the rise of an empire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aigner Loren Wilson is a SFWA, HWA, and Codex writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, games, alongside her fiction. She is an associate editor and copy editor for Strange Horizons and the horror podcast NIGHTLIGHT. Aigner writes for Tor Nightfire, Discover Pods, and other publications. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anathema, FIYAH, WIRED, Tordotcom, and many more. To check out her books, games, and other writings visit her website (https://aignerlwilson.com/).

Book Review: A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine

Chris Kluwe | 806 words

A Desolation Called Peace
Arkady Martine
Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250186461
Tor, March 2021, 496 pages

Hello again, readers, and hopefully you’re all having a better new year than the one that preceded it. For this month’s review, though, I’m actually going back to 2021 to take a look at A Desolation Called Peace, which is the follow-up to the Hugo-winning A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, itself a fantastic piece of writing and one I highly recommend (and one you’ll want to read because there is almost no break between the events of the first book and the start of the second).

A Desolation Called Peace continues the journey of Mahit Dzmare, Ambassador from Lsel Station to the sprawling (and bloodthirsty) Teixcalaanli Empire, and her erstwhile friend/lover/foil Three Seagrass as the two of them attempt to navigate a treacherous new relationship between both Lsel Station and the Empire, as well as each other. Following the events of the first book (which I won’t spoil here, go read it), the Empire has found itself a new enemy to turn its fleets against, but it is an enemy unlike any the Empire has faced before, and Mahit and Three Seagrass find themselves pulled into another web of deceit and intrigue taking place on the very frontlines of the war itself.

As in her first book, Arkady Martine does a fantastic job building out not just the grand and imperial elements of world-building, but also the smaller, more intimate details that make her universe feel fully inhabited and cohesive, along with a master’s level course in the very structure of language and the ways it shapes our thinking. For me, this was probably the part I was most curious about—whether or not Martine would be able to replicate the incisive insights that helped A Memory Called Empire win the Hugo – and I’m quite glad to say that she definitely succeeds in bringing back the magic. Anyone who is a fan of the structure of thought, of how what we take for granted might seem totally alien to someone else, will definitely find just as much to enjoy in this book as there was in the first one.

That’s not to say that A Desolation Called Peace is bland philosophical treatising, though—far from it. Again, like her initial offering, Martine crafts an intriguing story full of carefully balanced mystery and action that will have any fan of science fiction on the edge of their seat, and it’s one that builds upon established characters while also introducing plenty of new faces that are just as compelling as the old. I particularly enjoyed the evolution of Mahit and Three Seagrass’ relationship as they each find themselves in roles that are familiar, yet subtly different than their previous interactions, and what that means for who they are to each other.

One thing I do have to point out, however, is that this is a book that requires you to pay attention, both to names as well as events. The Teixcalaanli nomenclature system of “number” followed by “noun” can lead to some similar mental associations when it comes to characters, and keeping track of who is doing what on behalf of whom caused me to occasionally require some backtracking just to be certain (granted, that might just be a me-problem, but it happened enough that I feel it’s worth addressing). That being said, the complexity of the book itself always made sense once the strands of the various storylines came together, and Martine delivers satisfying conclusions to the mysteries she weaves, so it’s well worth taking the extra effort to keep track of everything.

Overall, A Desolation Called Peace is another excellent display from an author who clearly knows what she’s doing, and one I recommend wholeheartedly. The characters are rich and varied, the environments are lushly illustrated, and the underlying themes of empire, expansion, sense, and self are explored in satisfying depth with plenty of room for second and third readings to catch what you missed the first time through. I’m not sure if Martine is planning on adding a third book to what is so far an engrossing duology, but if she does I will be more than happy to read it.

Read if: You’re not quite sure what the difference between barbarians and empire is; you’ve ever found yourself thinking in heroic couplets; you contemplate the luxury of sleep for a good ruler.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Book Review: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, by Kim Fu

Arley Sorg | 936 words

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
Kim Fu
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781951142995
Tin House, February 2022, 220 pgs

Kim Fu is a new-to-me writer who appears to have hit the literary scene a number of years ago. Debut literary novel For Today I Am A Boy (January 2014, HMH) received a slew of accolades, including landing a Lambda Literary Award finalist spot for Transgender Fiction, and winning both an Edmund White award and a PEN/Hemingway Award. 2019 literary novel The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (Mariner) was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the OLA Evergreen Award. In other words, it’s clear that a large number of people who get paid to have opinions see Kim Fu as an excellent writer. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is her debut collection of mostly original stories, and most of them are speculative. Having taken a look, I have to agree: Kim Fu is an awesome writer, one I hope more folks in the speculative community will get to read and enjoy. I’ll discuss a handful of the stories on offer in this book.

“Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867” opens the collection. Told entirely in dialogue, it starts out like a classic science fiction thought experiment: vague characters in a speculative frame essentially putting forward an interesting idea—but infused with more heart than usual: a client wants to experience a simulation of their now-dead mother, only to be told that it’s against the rules. The narrative transitions subtly from moment to moment, filling in the main character while simultaneously shifting the meaning and purpose of the story, continuously keeping the reader surprised. Finally, somewhere along the way, the story catches you off guard, sweeping you up in emotion, delivering a complex but very satisfying mix of satire, social commentary, and depth. Skillfully told, in a way which is both engrossing and intellectually engaging.

“Liddy, First to Fly” is one of the few reprints, originally published in Room magazine in 2018. Liddy is a young girl who, one day, begins to develop wings on her ankles. Fu’s treatment of the idea is absolutely captivating. Rather than becoming a superhero story, a type of portal story (where having wings transports a character into a different kind of world/life entirely), or a story about a “freak,” Fu’s approach is the gentle insertion of the strange into the everyday. This enables her to ground the characters and the plot, in order to develop a narrative which builds in intensity and metaphoric potentiality. That is to say, Fu brilliantly captures the vibe of growing, inquisitive kids, while also taking the story to places which are less predictable or trite, but which still feels right. The journey is smart and layered, and everything leads to something more curious than epiphany.

In “Time Cubes,” Alice lives in an unspecified near-ish future. She watches a sales demonstration of a toy, a device which can essentially fast forward or rewind the time progression of an object or small creature. As with most time travel stories, the science doesn’t necessarily hold up to close scrutiny, but the science isn’t really the point. The application of the idea is actually pretty fresh, and it allows Fu to explore fairly morbid aspects of human nature. The narrative engages intellectually at first, then slides into a deeply personal introspection on depression and culture. This piece is startling, dark, and in its realness, courageous; not to mention fairly brilliant.

“#ClimbingNation” is a weird story about getting swept up in the odd—it’s about an outsider who kind of gets absorbed into a social circle in the course of attending a memorial gathering for a recently deceased social media star. It’s not speculative (as far as I could tell), but it feels speculative nonetheless; it definitely captures the essence or mood of encountering the strange. Part of this is the evocative style, but part of it is the way the people in the story relate to each other, plus the constant feeling of April as an alien of sorts in their world. It’s a striking narrative which is more than worth your time.

“Sandman” steps back into the fantastic, albeit potentially (arguably) more obviously utilizing the fantastic as metaphor. It’s a surreal journey through insomnia and fugue, rendered engaging by Fu’s style and perspective. In the course of this journey, Kelly develops a physical and emotional relationship with the titular embodiment of sleep. As their relationship evolves, the repercussions of their engagements reverberate through Kelly’s so-called waking life. It’s a setup which, in the hands of many writers, might elicit groans, but in Fu’s capable hands becomes elegant, surprising, and rich in meaning.

Fu is a master of the unexpected, and she shows off her abilities in these stories. She takes her plots in directions which readers are not likely to predict, yet which still make sense. She delivers delightful sentences and phrases which defy the ordinary, yet never feel overworked or strained. Her narratives are a wealth of interesting, often unexpected observations. Importantly, while doing all of this, her stories are about people, about being human, and all the weirdness that this can mean. In other words, folks, this is storytelling at its finest.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief of Fantasy Magazine, senior editor at Locus Magazine, and associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Author Spotlight: Isabel J. Kim

Laurel Amberdine | 708 words

How did “Plausible Realities, Improbable Dreams” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

The story started as a lighthearted writing exercise because I thought it would be fun technical challenge to try and write a story about the multiverse collapsing since the main character slips through multiple realities. I thought it would just be an excuse to allude to a whole multiverse of alternate universes and to use my most delicious prose. Then I wrote the first few paragraphs and realized that this was a love story, a tragedy, and that it was far less lighthearted than I thought it was going to be. I realized that my premise was actually the backdrop—the multiverse breaking doesn’t matter. Losing the people you love matters, trying to hold on to a relationship in a world that intrudes on it matters, caring about others’ wellbeing at the cost of your own matters.

I wish I could say I drew inspiration from This is How You Lose the Time War but I didn’t read it until after writing. What I actually drew inspiration from was the concept of AU fanfiction.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

In the real world, my writing space is usually my thirteen-inch laptop on my desk covered in Post-It notes, except when it’s my phone while I’m on the bus, my laptop while I’m lying on the couch, or my phone in the middle of the night at two in the morning in bed when I wake up in a cold sweat with a really great idea that is never as good in the morning.

Also, more horrifyingly, my online writing space is the unholy combination of Google Docs, digital post-it notes, Sublime Text Editor, and the private discord server that I established as a panopticon to force me to write in front of my friends.

I suppose what I’m saying is that like certain plants, I’m optimally productive under adverse growing conditions.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I got stuck right out the gate! I rewrote the beginning of this story four entire times before I figured out how to make it click. I actually thought that I’d never get past the beginning—and then I realized that I was writing from entirely the wrong perspective. The story was originally from Roshan’s point of view in the first person, and was completely the wrong voice for the narrative. Once I realized that Cat needed to be the point of view character in the third person, everything immediately gelled and the rest of the story was very quickly written. Figuring out how Cat and Roshan see the world, where their personalities mesh and where they diverge, really solidified the narrative for me. Writing a romance is always a fun challenge in convincing the reader that an emotional bond exists and can be perceived by the reader looking in.

Where are you in this story?

All the water imagery is because I think about writing in the shower a lot. All the foods they eat are things I wanted to be eating at the time of writing. My dad is a physics professor so the lab is spiritually my memory of going to work with him as a kid. The sense of kaleidoscopic and expanding worlds, histories, and responsibilities that intrude on your personal relationships is, regrettably, also my presence.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m working on the second draft of a novel about a kid who really wants to learn magic and a mentor who really doesn’t want to teach them, a tentative fiction podcast project about love stories and ghosts, and a whole folder of short stories that I am definitely not procrastinating on finishing. You can find a list of all my published work on my website at isabel.kim, and if you want to say hi, I’m on Twitter: @isabeljkim.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Isha Karki

Laurel Amberdine | 990 words

How did “When We Were Gods” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I wrote the first draft while I was at Clarion West. Before I went, I had jotted down a few ideas, mostly scraps of images, and that week I was holding these pieces in my head: trains that were animals, something flashing through the gaps of escalators, something glittering black. Writing a story is so much like assembling a puzzle. I knew I wanted an urban feel to the fantasy and that “vibe” helped shape the world, its politics and history, its infrastructure and hierarchies. No doubt deeply influenced by all the urban fantasies I’ve read since childhood! Most of my stories begin this way, as an image or concept I am fascinated by, and I begin writing and build outwards.

The beauty of drafting a story, what is basically an epic-folded-into-a-short-story, during a workshop week means you are forced to make quick decisions about character, worldbuilding, plot—something I’m not always good at. It also meant that my usual thematic preoccupations and creative obsessions seeped in subconsciously and structured the world of the story. So, for example, there are gods (I am always drawn to gods in spec fic, how they interact with devotees and with opposing forces), there is a sister (which is the most meaningful relationship in my own life so I’m often using it as a shorthand for all kinds of emotional heft!) and there is exploration of the violence of colonialism and assimilation, the complexity of complicity and survival, what resistance might demand or take of you—how all of it changes you fundamentally.

Where are you in this story?

The politics of assimilation is something I think about a lot—it appears in many guises in my work—and it seems a natural or inevitable concern for me, an immigrant who moved to the UK as a child, a diasporic writer with incongruent feelings of identity and culture, and someone who is also from a privileged caste in Nepal. I think about complicity, in micro and macro forms, and complacency too, when you inhabit this particular subject position—how assimilation shapes you in specific ways, how survival strategies can be harmful internally and externally. Mriti, the main character, is a reflection of these complex feelings. Through her, I can explore questions. When is it not enough to keep surviving? (Do we get the luxury of that option?) What does acting, and kindness and resistance, look like in her world? And come to a version of the possible answers.

This is also why revolution is so violent in “When We Were Gods.” There tends to be a grand romantic view of it, but I wanted to acknowledge the sacrifices, the seismic internal change, the obliteration of the self, resistance can require.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

One of my friends, while reading this story, made a comment about my ability to come up with so many fantasy names. I was all lol, I can’t claim credit. The name of the Jaani gods are the equivalent Nepali words for animals. For example: Biralo—cat, Chitwa—cheetah, Mayur—peacock, Sarpa—snake. Janawar—animal. At one point of my writing journey, I gave myself permission to use Nepali in my fiction; after all, my thoughts, my linguistic understanding of the world, include Nepali so of course my creative lexicon will reflect that. I gave myself permission to not italicise those words because they are not italicised in my head. There are some words I still don’t know in English, some that when translated into English seem to lose their precise meaning. I grew up with, and was influenced by, a lot of Indian media, as most people in Nepal, so Hindi and Urdu words also form my creative lexicon. It’s an interesting thing then when you write fantasy, or build a speculative world, and most of the readers encountering the story will not be aware of how much is made-up and how much draws from existing languages and cultures. There is a larger conversation about this, of course there is. It’s something I will be thinking about as more of my work gets out there. I do love the thought of readers who are Nepali, or understand Nepali, coming across my work and finding something familiar, something known, in spaces they might not think they necessarily would.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

Right now, I am working on a short story collection that explores violence, rape culture, and diasporic experiences among other things—it’s a meld of genres and I’ve been having fun playing with form and voice and just writing weird shit. I’m doing a Creative Writing PhD so really I should also be working on my project—it will most probably be an interlinked collection thinking about folktales, witnessing and archives, and how we articulate trauma.

I haven’t got around to making a website, but a couple of things I will spotlight from last year: I am proud of this story (bit.ly/3eH3iVH)which also began life at Clarion West and was shortlisted for The White Review Prize (women’s heads growing from the ground!) and this story (bit.ly/32St8Dk) which won the Dinesh Allirajah Prize (cursed wishes! experimental structures!). I have a story coming out later this year in Death in the Mouth, a horror anthology edited by Cassie Hart and Sloane Leong. It’s going to be a beautiful illustrated book and I am very excited to inhale the entire TOC. I tweet about upcoming work on Twitter so that’s the best place to find me: @IshaKarki11.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Sharang Biswas

Laurel Amberdine | 688 words

How did “NeuNet” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I wrote “NeuNet” six years ago to submit to an open call for an engineering magazine. The guest editor of the issue sent me a lovely note saying that it was a good story, but not “hard sci-fi” enough for the magazine’s core audience. She did encourage me to submit it elsewhere, and after years of revision, here it is!

The inspiration for “NeuNet” is actually alluded to directly in the story. I watched a YouTube video (now lost) that suggested that using humans as batteries as in the movie The Matrix would be inefficient; using them as computers would be a far more useful proposition. That idea wriggled around in my brain for a while, until finally bursting out of its chrysalis when I saw the call for submissions.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

While I enjoy curling up on the couch to write on my ipad, I actually get a significant amount of writing done on the NYC subway. People find this weird, but I live really far uptown in Manhattan, and getting anywhere is at least a thirty-minute train ride: why not use the time productively? Some of my most significant works have been written on the A train, or on the crosstown bus.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I’ve been creating fantastical stories for as long as I can remember. In fact, from a young age and up until I was embarrassingly old, my primary means of entertaining myself was what I used to just term “Thinking,” except that it involved me running about the entire house, jumping off of walls and furniture and making weird noises, all in an attempt to physically embody as fully as possible the stories and worlds that spun through my mind. In fact, I never played with toys (and gave away any I received as presents). I preferred the inside of my head for stories.

All my English homework in primary school had a touch of the fantastic about it, and I never really gave up writing speculative fiction?

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I’m actually more known for my game design work than my fiction. But I also do interactive theatre stuff, as well as weird, interactive art. I grow bored doing just one thing. Plus, I really do believe that the various artistic disciplines I practice feed off of and inspire each other.

Is it a cliché to say I read and play roleplaying games for fun? But I also like to cook! And until the pandemic, I was part of a queer contra dancing group here in New York. I really do love dancing!

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I document most of my work on my website, bit.ly/3mOaqnF, though I’m severely behind on updating it right now. It’s probably a better idea to just keep up with my Twitter (@SharangBiswas) where I post updates on what I’m working on, or my itch.io page (astrolingus.itch.io), where some of my work can be accessed.

It’s funny talking about what I’m working on right now because this will come out a few months in the future. Something I doubt I’ll have finished by when folks can read this is a magical-realism short story whose title is inspired by the film Mean Girls, a novella about necromancers (the longest story I’ll have attempted to date), and an interactive fiction story about Stone Age gods that I’ve been toying with for far too long. Oh, and a very gay roleplaying game called Augurs of Glamour with my co-designer Lucian Kahn.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: PH Lee

Laurel Amberdine | 290 words

How did “The Honest Fox, or, A Truth Shared is Not a Truth Lost” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I wrote this story as a present for a dear friend. It is about their stuffed fox, who is a proper and upright gentleman and would never stoop to any sort of trickery.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I mostly write in coffee shops. Being away from the pressures and demands of home is a boon to my concentration, and there is something about being surrounded by noise and bustle which comforts me.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I love to cook! I also make small-batch artisanal liqueurs.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I would love to see the return of omniscient POV, both neutral or with a strong, characterized narrator. You can see this in this series.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

The best place to look for more of my work is my website, p-h-lee.com, but you can also just click on “Tales of the Great Sweet Sea” on top of the story: There are four more in this series and counting (and I’m working on two more). I also have stories forthcoming in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Zooscape, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 235 words

Coming up in March, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Daniel David Froid (“An Exegesis of the Socioreligious Ramifications of the Collection of Peribi”) and Julianna Baggott (“The Historiography of Loss”). We also have a flash piece (“The Heaven That They Never Knew”) from Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, along with an SF reprint by Robert Reed (“Parables of Infinity”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Shiv Ramdas (“Nine-Tenths of the Law”) and Maria Dong (“Nine Tails of a Soap Empire”). We also have a flash piece (“Hood Alchemy”) from Nicole D. Sconiers. Our fantasy reprint is by Alyssa Wong (“All the Time We’ve Left to Spend”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Ashok K. Banker, Izzy Wasserstein, Tobias S. Buckell, Adam-Troy Castro, and P H Lee.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (recently revived, other) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of three award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Interns

Mayookh Barua

Madison Brake

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

Chris Kluwe

Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editor

Luke Tolvaj

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor (Emeritus)

Rich Horton

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 (with Veronica Roth)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms [Forthcoming]

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.