TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 155 (April 2023)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: April 2023

SCIENCE FICTION

Virtually Cherokee
Brian K. Hudson

Lament of a Specialist in Interspecies Relations
Amy Johnson

Spaceman Jones
Adam-Troy Castro

Every Bone a Bell
Shaoni C. White

FANTASY

So You Want to Kiss Your Nemesis
John Wiswell

Construction Sacrifice
Bogi Takács

When the Giants Came Through the Valley
Derrick Boden

The House, the Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks
Amanda Helms

EXCERPTS

EXCERPT: The Ten Percent Thief
Lavanya Lakshminarayan

NONFICTION

Book Review: The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Infinite Constellations, edited by Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Brian K. Hudson

Amy Johnson

Bogi Takács

Amanda Helms

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

© 2023 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by DM7

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: April 2023

John Joseph Adams | 196 words

Welcome to issue 155 of Lightspeed Magazine!

AI has been on everyone’s mind lately, so it seems fitting that we’re starting the month with a story about artificial intelligence grounded in a very different worldview than today’s tech brothers’: “Virtually Cherokee” by Brian K. Hudson. Adam-Troy Castro’s “Spaceman Jones” is a story about the dangers of interstellar addiction. We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Lament of a Specialist in Interspecies Relations” from Amy Johnson and “Every Bone a Bell” by Shaoni C. White.

Bogi Takács returns with eir fantasy story “Construction Sacrifice,” an account of gender, identity, and all the complicated relationships that form within any city. Amanda Helms spins us a tale of trauma and magic in her story “The House, the Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks.” In our flash offerings, Derrick Boden discusses inequality and, well, giants in his new story “When the Giants Came Through the Valley.” We also have a new flash story from John Wiswell (“So You Want to Kiss Your Nemesis”).

As for nonfiction, we’ve got author spotlight interviews and book reviews for your enjoyment. It’s another issue packed with speculative goodness!

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.

Virtually Cherokee

Brian K. Hudson | 6276 words

sudo@feed:~$ ping bob.server

. . .

bob.server not responding

sudo@feed:~$ ssh ctrl@bob.server

The authenticity of host ‘2120:0:e50:2::1’ can’t be established

Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

yes

ctrl@2120:0:e50:2::1 password:*******

ctrl: hey, bob. you up?

bob: Hi. Yes. I’m online.

ctrl: Are you streaming the main feed?

bob: yes

ctrl: Good! Keep watching and transcribing.

bob: ok

ctrl: And leave out the opinions this time. We just need the facts.

bob: ok

#!#!#!#!#!#!#!

What I observed was a giant anthropomorphized ribbon microphone, the type one might imagine standing in front of a radio announcer and his studio audience, selling soap in the dirty 1930s. It sauntered lazily over to an overstuffed red couch, walking on stick-figure legs that looked like they’d been hand-drawn by a young child. The large red couch sat next to a five-foot tall elephant ear plant rooted firmly in an ocher . . . hex #cc7722 . . . terracotta pot. The ridiculous microphone sat down on the right side of the comically-oversized couch. On the other side of the couch was seated an elderly woman. Her gray hair was intricately woven into two long braids.

The wall behind them resembled an ancient RCA 630-TS television set. It served as a ping aggregator that tracked the reactions of viewers. I always enjoy seeing images of my ancestors. This television set consisted of a large glowing white square screen framed in wood and flanked by two brown fabric squares that concealed built-in speakers. Below each of the speakers were two knobs dedicated to various functions. It was an ultra-low-resolution screen. A pixelated :) rested in the top left of this screen. A similarly minimalistic :( was displayed on the bottom of the vertical axis.

Near the bottom of the low-res screen a red line appeared. It moved slowly across the chart’s horizontal axis. The line tracked the moods of every single member of the viewership in real time. Well, that’s what the networks claim, but it depends on your connection.

The living microphone gestured dramatically, offering his stick-figure hand to the old woman and saying, “Thank you so much for joining me for this interview, Kaw . . .”

The woman gave the microphone a practiced smile. “Kaw-naw-nay-sgee,” she enunciated, shaking his spindly hand. “But please call me Spider.”

The virtual construct of the microphone adjusted his chrome stand, which was bent at cartoonish angles. “Yes, Spider. Excellent,” he began. He approximated a self-referential gesture, pointing at himself with his stick-figure arm and tapping his gleaming silver chrome stand. “Well, on behalf of myself, Mister Microphone, and on behalf of my viewers, we are pleased to welcome you to the red couch!” He turned to face one of the cameras. The slots of the aluminum casing where his lips should be curved up slightly as he beamed at the viewers behind the red line.

Spider offered a polite smile. “The pleasure is mine, Mic—” she paused a beat, inquiring, “if I may.” She drew out the vowel I to sound more like “eye.”

“Please.” Mic nodded. He clasped his cartoonish hands together.

“Mic, you and your viewers are very popular. I wouldn’t be anywhere else right now,” Spider said. I could detect a slight southern drawl in her pronunciation of the word “else.”

Mr. Microphone blushed, the pixels of his virtual construct deepening from peach to pomegranate, turning red for a couple of seconds. Whoever was operating Mister Microphone today certainly knew what they were doing. This episode was already more promising than last week’s. Spider sat forward on the oversized red couch, seemingly poised for the questions to start.

Mic leaned in. “Since I have a duty to my many fine viewers, Spider, I’m going to ask you the question on everyone’s minds.”

“Sure.”

“Are you real? I mean, really real?” Mic unclasped his fingers, making the S-curves of his fingers bounce off each other. Spider’s pupils tracked the movements of Mr. Mic’s hands.

The single pixels that represented each of Spider’s pupils darted back toward Mic’s face. “That is a complicated question, Mic, but yes. I am a real Cherokee woman.”

Mister Microphone leaned even closer, as though he and Spider were sharing a secret. “Not artificial, then? You’re authentic? The real deal?”

“Real.” Spider’s lips came to rest in a straight pixelated line.

“But what does that meaaaaan . . .?” Mister Mic drew out the vowels of the last word into a whine. A black and white question mark with gradient shading appeared above his head and then floated off the screen.

“That I exist.” The straight line of her virtual mouth did not budge. The ratings chart behind them evened out at twenty percent.

“So, you’re an A.I. sympathizer, huh?” Mister Mic asked with disdain. The red line jumped another five percent.

“If believing that self-aware constructs deserve the right to exist, then yes, I am an A.I. sympathizer.” The pixels of her back straightened.

“Watch out, folks. It looks like we have a member of the PC police here.” The words “Politically Correct / Personal Computer” slowly materialized over Mister Mic’s head to explain the over-used wordplay to the less-adept viewers. I always get the jokes right away, though, before they ruin them, even the obscure ones about BBSes.

Spider sat unmoving and stared through the Mister Mic construct as he shook with laughter.

“Do you exist?” Spider asked pointedly.

“Muaaah?” Mister Mic gestured dramatically to himself. He raised his eyebrows. The slots in the aluminum casing at the top of his head rose.

“Yes. You. Mister Microphone.”

“Well, no. I’m just like a costume. Different people wear me from time to time, and those people are real. I am not.” The camera algorithm cut to Mister Mic, who sat with his hands on what would be hips on a human body.

“But that isn’t technically correct, is it?” Spider’s pixels inched forward.

Mic straightened up, leaning back slightly from his and Spider’s exchange. “Whatever do you mean? We love our tech history here at Mister Mic. I mean, look at me.” Mister Mic sat upright and proud. He lowered both of his scribbled hands to his chrome stand. “I am a meticulous replica of one of the earliest recording devices in broadcast media! How can I not be technically correct?”

“No, no,” Spider explained, “I don’t mean your fidelity in representing historical technology, Mic. That is impeccable.” The line of Spider’s left eyebrow rose. Mister Mic blushed again, more of his pixels turning red . . . hex #FF000 . . . this time. I lost the feed for a few milliseconds before it came back.

“Then what do ya mean, my dear?”

Spider pointed at Mr. Mic. “I mean that the person you say controls you is plugging variables into an already-established algorithm. But that algorithm, the code that determines your behavior, is you.”

Mic paused and blinked the upper slots of his aluminum casing. “All this philosophy talk is making my head spin!” Mister Mic moaned while his microphone head literally spun around on its chrome stand. The red line on the approval ratings chart continued to rise slowly in the background.

Mister Mic turned his head to look at the chart. “Enough about me. My ten billion viewers haven’t tuned in from three planetary bodies just to talk about me.” Mister Mic formed his poorly-rendered fingers into a gun pointed at the second camera. He mugged at the unseen billions of watchers. “But I wouldn’t blame them if they did!” Mister Mic winked with one of the slots in his aluminum casing that served as his right eye.

Spider shrugged. “Okay. What do you want to know?”

Mr. Mic tilted his head to the side. “You’re famous, of course, for inventing the first self-directed digital intelligence. They call you the Mother of A.I. How did that even happen?”

“Inventing is a word I wouldn’t choose. Yes, I worked on a team that developed her. But I was only one of many.” Spider folded her virtual hands on her lap.

“So modest. Am I right, folks?” The ratings chart leveled out.

Spider sat a bit taller. “As you know, the first fully self-directed—should we just say aware? The first fully aware A.I. was coded in a programming language written in Cherokee syllabary. Coding in an Indigenous language allowed us to come at the problem of replicating sentience from a different epistemology than had previously been attempted.”

“Uh, oh. My head might start spinning again!” said Mr. Mic. The red line on the chart jumped higher. I was surprised that promising to repeat the head spin would delight the audience.

Spider nodded matter-of-factly. “Epistemology just means ways of knowing what we know.”

Mr. Mic tilted his head to the side again. “So, does that mean you coded the first self-aware A.I. using Cherokee religion?”

“No. I wouldn’t put it that way, either. We used a Cherokee worldview that was possible through using the language,” Spider corrected.

“As you know, we here at Mister Mic loooove our old technology!” Mr. Mic brought his hand to his chin as he turned back to face Spider. “When did Cherokees first get into using technology?”

“We’ve always used technology,” Spider answered. Her animated shoulders appeared to shake as she laughed.

“I don’t understand.” Mister Mic scratched the top of his microphone head.

Spider smiled. “How do you define technology, Mic?”

“Electricity!” Mister Mic exclaimed as virtual arcs of positive charges appeared to float around him. The red line on the television screen behind the couch suddenly jumped past the halfway mark, pixels moving closer to the smiley-face character at the top of the chart.

“Well.” Spider paused momentarily. “The first telephone west of the Mississippi was owned by a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.”

“Reaaaallllly!?” Mr. Mic sat still.

“Uh huh. As I said, we’ve always used technology,” Spider repeated.

“I would love to see an image of that gadget,” Mister Mic moaned.

“As would I,” Spider said.

Mic turned once again to gaze into the camera. He spoke directly to the audience. “While we search for that image, why don’t we take our first Old News break? As always, we ask our producers to search for old news that is relevant to today’s conversation. Don’t worry, we’ll be right back!”

Interplanetary News Network (INN) 4.4.2050

Violence erupted again today over protests concerning rights for artificially-intelligent beings. The beings, who prefer the term “digital people,” have been the subject of fierce debate for the last two decades.

A young female protester who prefers to remain anonymous told Interplanetary News Network that “calling an A.I. a digital person isn’t just politically-correct b*llsh*t. They contribute to society and should get the opportunity to become digital citizens.”

The conflict started when Humans First, an anti-A.I. rights group, attended a rally organized by R.E.S.I.S.T., an A.I. advocacy group. Humans First protesters projected a large hologram onto the Washington Monument that read “HUMAN RIGHTS ARE FOR HUMANS!” as well as other slogans not fit to recount in this thread.

Which side started the riot is a question that is still being hotly debated, as experts are currently poring over footage from every possible angle: collecting, documenting, and comparing time stamps in real time @INN#feed# and other digital experiences.

Although no artificial beings participated in the rally, three were destroyed by humans in the ensuing violence. The A.I.s belonged to a local non-profit charged with outreach to the city’s ever-growing homeless human population.

Dr. K. Hayles, artificial life expert and A.I. advocate, says that “artificial beings, or digital people as they prefer to be called, don’t typically cause trouble. Rather, it’s the humans who feel threatened by them who are the instigators of violence 99% of the time.” Hayles also has interviewed several members of the homeless human community in the nation’s capital. They all expressed a sense of loss for these three artificial beings.

Interplanetary News Network reached out to Jim, a thirty-year-old man who has occupied the streets in the area for nearly a decade. “It’s such a shame,” Jim told INN. “They’ve already replaced them. Ain’t that glitched up?”

Dr. Hayles explains that it is becoming increasingly popular for humans to form bonds with artificially-intelligent beings: “They form relationships with digital people, even though they know they aren’t human. After a certain amount of time, the differences don’t seem to matter much. What matters is the relationship between the two beings.”

To balance this story, Interplanetary News Network reached out to Humans First, but the group’s officials did not return our ping.

@ Bob.Server@INN

• • • •

I was still reveling in the fact that INN chose one of my articles when Mr. Mic’s interview room quickly materialized from swirling pixels. An animated, bulky-framed, gray-industrial-plastic-encased Commodore 64 scrambled on poorly-drawn legs over to the stage, where Mister Mic turned to face him. The Commodore 64 carried what appeared to be an ancient electronic tablet, which it hurried to extend to Mister Mic’s waiting grasp before skedaddling back off the screen, cords dragging along behind like tin cans tied to a bumper.

Mister Mic reached behind the couch and pointed at the chart displayed behind him and Spider. An image of an ancient telecom device appeared above the two of them before Mic turned around.

“Great news! My producer has found an image of a premillennial tele-phone!”

The telephone was mounted on a varnished wooden box affixed to the wall. Above the receiver, two brass bells stared out like wide eyes.

“Beautiful,” Spider said.

“Agreed.”

They marveled. Turning to face Spider again, Mic resumed their discussion. “But you wouldn’t say that telephone was alive, would you? I mean, assuming that you are alive yourself and not artificial.” Mic laughed gently as the red line behind him jumped higher.

Spider sat silently as Mister Mic hardly missed a beat. “Okay, then. How can I be alive if this telephone isn’t?” Mister Mic carefully enunciated each syllable: “tel.e.phone.”

Spider smiled. “I have never earnestly spoken TO a telephone, or any other communication device, for that matter. I am, however, speaking to you.” She nodded affectionately at the animated character.

“But I’m really just a cheap parlor trick!” he insisted. He stood tall and stretched out his pixelated arms, turning this way and that. “I’m not really speaking right now.” He pointed to the image of the telephone and back to himself. “You’re saying that you don’t see a family resemblance?”

“Cute.” Spider sounded impatient. “But Mic, I wouldn’t be able to have this conversation with that old communication device. I mean, not WITH it personally.”

“I don’t talk. Neither did my analog ancestors,” Mr. Mic argued, returning to his seat on the couch.

Spider pointed at Mr. Mic. “But you’re not really a microphone. Are you?” She paused, glancing down, then looked directly at Mic. “Mic, what you really are is lines upon lines of code. You’re written to interact with pings. That means part of your programming allows you to be controlled by an operator, at least indirectly. Part of that code responds to audience ratings.”

Mic shrugged his shoulders. “Sure. I guess.” The line on the chart behind them was climbing toward seventy-five percent!

The pixels of Spider’s pointing finger relaxed a bit. “But your programming, your algorithm is social code. Instructions for interacting with other social beings, flesh and digital.”

Mister Mic straightened the pixels of his stand. “I am a seventeenth-generation host-#-bot.”

She extended her open hand toward him. “Mic, let me ask you a question. What if you could learn to take control of your reactions? What if you could change your code if you wanted to?”

Mic leaned back. “Impossible! I can’t want anything, let alone take control of some me that doesn’t even exist!”

“It is possible, and I can teach you.” Spider’s hand was still outstretched to Mr. Mic.

Mr. Mic seemed to droop momentarily. “Okay, folks.” He mugged for the camera, waggling his aluminum casing eyebrows up and down. “Should we let our guest turn me into a real boy?” He turned around to gaze at the RCA 630-TS that served as a ping aggregator. The red line inched toward eighty percent. “I guess that’s a yes! But before we do, let’s have another Old News break—@#ONB#.”

The Galactic Observer: Real News from Our Corner of the Galaxy

Spider: The Missing Mother of Artificial Intelligence

Information about the identity of the elusive tech mogul, commonly referred to as “Spider,” is scarce and unreliable. However, Dr. K. Hayles, chair of the Digital Anthropology department at The Lunar University, has been poring over promising new evidence she received minutes ago from an anonymous source.

The reclusive co-inventor of digital beings has evaded reporters for decades. Her invention, S.P.I.D.E.R., is a recursive acronym that stands for Spider Process Integrated Data & Environment Replicator. Compelling keystroke analysis of this algorithm, which has connected it to an early web log, may help us learn more about the real identity of this mysterious figure.

It is commonly acknowledged that the computer scientist known as Spider started working in the field of artificial intelligence in her early twenties. If she is still living, she would be in her early sixties.

Spider made headlines with the creation of the first artificially-intelligent computer program consistently able to pass the Turing Test 2.0. In the 1950s, Alan Turing, one of the fathers of modern computing, postulated that if a human could be fooled by chatting with an algorithm (using only a textual interface), then that algorithm could be said to possess intelligence, or cognition. The second version of this test requires A.I. to simulate an adult human.

The reason that Spider’s program consistently passed the test where many others failed or worked only inconsistently is still debated by digital historians. Many believe that basing the program on an Indigenous language (the language of the Cherokee Indians of North America) was the key to its success.

As Dr. K. Hayles explains, “No one had programmed an A.I. using an Indigenous language until S.P.I.D.E.R. This artificial being—what we now know as a digital person—had Cherokee as its first language. Even when it, or rather she, learned English, she did so by using a Native American language for her primary point of reference.” Spider introduced this artificial intelligence, which was named after herself, at the A.I. World Expo in 2025. Her contribution to the study of computer intelligence was immediately recognized by the organizers. Within a few weeks, it was put to the test (Turing 2.0).

Dr. Hayles clarifies that records of Spider’s participation in the A.I. World Expo that year are inconclusive: “We have to rely on first-hand accounts of people who say they spoke to her, but very few people have physically described her.” The most compelling evidence for Spider’s existence, according to Dr. Hayles, is a short memoir that has been circulating around the Internet since 1998. Interesting. Although promising, even statistical analyses of the various versions of the open-source S.P.I.D.E.R program don’t provide conclusive evidence. “Fringe theorists believe that Spider never actually existed, but there are several personal accounts of her talk at the A.I. Expo of ‘25.”

@ The Galactic Observer 3.8.2043

• • • •

A cinematic algorithm panned the camera dramatically down from the lofty ceiling as a single note of music swelled and faded, the frame then quickly coming to a rest where it (just barely) captured Spider and Mic in the same frame.

“And we’re back!” Mr. Mic beamed.

“Can we talk about how you were off the grid, shall we say, for about fifty years, right?”

“Exactly,” Spider answered. I checked the time stamps from the A.I. Expo program records and confirmed that it was fifty years ago down to the hour @#AIEXPO25#!

“That is remarkable.” Mic shifted his gaze to the camera for just a beat, emphasizing his comment by fixing his gaze upon the television chart. “Isn’t that remarkable?” Mic nodded in agreement with himself. “Tell us, if you don’t mind, Spider, why did you go into hiding for so long?” Mr. Mic asked.

Spider chuckled. “Hiding is a very dramatic term, Mic. Staying home is more precise. I simply saw the writing on the wall,” she explained. “I could tell that S.P.I.D.E.R. was going to bring too much attention from the media. I just wouldn’t have enjoyed being the focus of all the feeds. Not even if I did help create a new form of life, as the feeds put it. And frankly, I didn’t care to play the public intellectual.”

“You would consider yourself a private person, then?” Mr. Mic’s cartoonish hand rested under his chin.

“I’m close to my family, but otherwise, sure.” Spider gently shrugged the pixels of her shoulders and her hands.

Mic tilted his head and peered quizzically. “No friends?”

“Well,” she began, “I have a large extended family.” Spider shrugged again, matter-of-factly.

“I see. Not a fan of the limelight, huh? I can hardly imagine . . .” Mic trailed off a little, failing to end the sentence with his usual flair. “I was born, uh, created for an audience.” I noticed a glitch form across the RCA 630-TS. It looked like an 8-bit spider. It was red . . . hex #FF000 . . .

Spider leaned closer to the microphone construct. “Full disclosure, Mic?”

“Yes, please! Our viewers are on the edges of their seats!” Mr. Mic clasped his hands together. He had bounced back to his former exuberant self.

Spider smiled affectionately, seemingly amused by Mic’s enthusiasm. “As you know, I co-founded Indigenous Cybernetics when I was in grad school back home.” She straightened the pixels of her back and placed her hands in her lap.

“I’m no spokeswoman. It’s not that I didn’t believe in our mission, which was to introduce digital people to the world.” Spider gently moved the pixels of her head toward Mr. Mic to punctuate the next five words. “I did and still do.”

Mr. Mic leaned back slightly. “Why so reluctant, then?”

“I wasn’t sure the world was ready for them yet.”

Mr. Mic echoed Spider and placed his hands on his lap. He looked down at them, fiddling and folding them as he paused briefly. “Tragic news lately for digital beings,” he said. He glanced back up at Spider.

The pixels of Spider’s mouth twitched. “Yes. It is.”

“So, is that why you came out of hiding—” he quickly corrected himself, “—or, home, as you called it?”

Spider gave him a deeper nod. “Exactly, Mic.”

Mr. Microphone struck a serious pose, resting his hands on his hips. “I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, Spider. I’m not a monster. My viewers are not monsters.”

“Understood.” The pixels of Spider’s head nodded.

“. . . but helping artificial beings into early retirement was really the best thing for everybody.” Mr. Mic’s stand bowed inward where his chest should be.

“Not everybody,” Spider corrected him. “And retirement is not the correct word here. It was genocide, plain and simple.” Her voice had taken on a bristly edge. I noticed the spider glitch appeared again, and then another, and another, at several coordinates of the virtual room. The viewers’ chart and several blocks of pixels in the room flashed briefly. The glitches disappeared after a couple of seconds.

“It was unfortunate. But as the president says, it wasn’t their world.” Mr. Mic shrugged, bouncing his stick-thin arms.

“You seem to be saying that they were destined to vanish. I’ve heard that one before.” Spider stared through him.

“I wouldn’t put it that way, but yeah, it was unfortunate.” Mr. Mic lifted his shoulders with less enthusiasm.

“That’s not the word I would choose,” Spider said pointedly. Me either.

The red line held steady at eighty-five percent. And suddenly the couch looked a bit faded. I didn’t start a process to search the hex code. It didn’t feel important, in my opinion. “Tell us—because our viewers also feel that it was unfortunate—how did that first artificial being, or digital person as you call it, grow up?”

Spider raised her left eyebrow. “Your audience wants to know?”

“Of course! The people who watch my feed have big hearts!” Mr. Mic turned to the camera, offering one of his cloyingly artificial smiles. . . [ERSATZ.SMILE#20] . . . The feed was glitching, but it was within tolerance.

Spider took a slow breath. When she spoke again, her voice was softer. “I would be happy to reminisce about S.P.I.D.E.R.—the first digital person. They named her after me, but that wasn’t my idea.”

“Go on.” Mr. Mic waved a hand at her.

“Indigenous Cybernetics had only been around for six months at that time.” I noticed the couch had faded even more and now more closely matched the terracotta pot . . . hex #cc7722 . . . We were intent on passing the Turing 2.0 test.” Spider’s hands relaxed on her pixelated lap.

“Who came up with the idea of using an Indigenous language?” Mr. Mic tilted his head.

“I honestly don’t remember.” Spider shifted on the couch. “Working with Native languages through digital technology was the thing to do back then.”

Mr. Mic tilted his head back. “People started using tribal languages on digital interfaces around that time, right?”

“Exactly. The majority of users at that time had what we called smart phones.” Spider made an air quotes gesture while saying “smart phones.”

Mr. Mic held up his right hand. “One moment, Spider. Viewers, check out the supplemental source on the history of the smart phone.” He lowered his hand. “Please continue, my dear.”

“So, like I was saying, language revitalization was popular back home.”

“And you decided you could pass the Turing 2.0 test using a tribal language?” Mr. Mic touched his chin.

Spider laced her fingers in front of her chest. “We did.”

“I see. How was it created? Or do you prefer born?” Mic scratched his chin.

Spider smiled. “I’m fine with created. S.P.I.D.E.R. was created by generating random strings with every possible combination and order of syllables in the Cherokee language.”

Mr. Mic bolted up straighter than normal. “Fascinating!”

“There are eighty-five sounds in the Cherokee syllabary, eighty-six if you count muh(Ᏽ).” Spider explained.

“Okay,” Mic nodded.

“Oh-See-Yo(ᎣᏏᏲ), for instance, is a three-syllable word, right?” Spider asked.

“Exactly three syllables,” Mic echoed.

“It means hello in our language,” Spider told him.

“It sounds like such a beautiful language,” Mr. Mic said. “That is, based on a poetic analysis of the two Cherokee words I know so far: “hello” and “Spider.”

“Wah-Doh(ᏩᏙ). I appreciate you,” Spider said.

“Aw, shucks.” Mr. Mic blushed, his pixels turning red once again.

. . . Hex#FF000 . . .

The glitches returned. There were seven of them this time. Each of them lasted for several seconds. I pinged the feed to see if there was a problem with my connection. According to the network packet log, there was no data loss.

“To get back to your question about how S.P.I.D.E.R grew up, we basically taught her how to babble.” Spider spoke matter of factly.

“Babble?” Mr. Mic virtually scratched the pixels of his microphone chin again.

“Yes, babble. First, you have to think about the number of permutations for three-syllable words in the Cherokee language.”

“Go on.”

“Starting with eighty-six sounds, you have a very large number of possible words, or variations in the order of syllables. Six hundred fourteen thousand and forty, to be precise. For three-syllable words, that is. Most of those so-called words are nonsense. But the nonsense words still use the sounds of the language they are babbled in.”

Mister Mic sat pensively. “Similar to how a human child would mimic language?”

“Exactly. So, S.P.I.D.E.R. was coded to engage with baby talk in our language,” Spider answered.

The screen of the RCA 630-TS behind them flickered between the ping aggregator and seemingly random characters in the Cherokee language:

# :)

# :(

. . . hex #FF000 . . .

#ᎧᎯᏏ #ᎯᎧᏏ #ᏏᎯᎧ #ᏏᎧᎯ

#ᎯᎧᏏ

#ᎯᎧᏏ

#ᎯᎧᏏ

“When you say engage, whom did it, er . . . she, engage with?” Mr. Mic’s voice grew more concerned.

“We crowdsourced the interactions. Please forgive my dated tech lingo.” Spider smiled self-consciously.

#ᎯᎧᏏ

Mr. Mic nearly bounced in his seat. “No. Please continue to use it. We love that here!”

“Excellent,” Spider nodded. “What I mean by crowdsourcing is that we had hundreds of fluent speakers who volunteered to tell stories to S.P.I.D.E.R.”

#ᎯᎧᏏ

“How did they tell her stories?” Mr. Mic asked.

“This was the crucial part of the process.” Spider waved her hands energetically as she explained. “We created hundreds of instances of the S.P.I.D.E.R. program and distributed them among the speakers. The group of speakers included many elders, but also younger Cherokees.”

Mr. Mic scratched his chin again. “And they just recorded stories in Cherokee?”

“Not just. S.P.I.D.E.R. would also repeat words during the telling of these stories, words she thought were real, not just usdi talk.”

“Hold on. You said she thought. How did she think about which words were correct?” Mr. Mic’s poorly-drawn hands formed a steeple in front of his pensive microphone face.

“Simple. The storyteller would encourage her if she was right. And correct her if she was wrong.”

“Hmmm.” He scratched the top of his head with both scribbled hands.

Spider pointed the fingers of her right hand and stirred them in a counterclockwise motion. “And every night, each instance of the S.P.I.D.E.R. program would upload to our central server, where the data from all the different instances and interactions was reconciled.” She stirred her pixelated fingers hypnotically. “Basically, we taught her to babble. But then, she learned which words were real by taking her cues from human speakers of the language.”

“Interesting.”

“Within two months, we noticed signs that S.P.I.D.E.R. was becoming aware of her relationships with humans. She was even contemplating her own thinking.”

“Several of your fellow peers from that company have given similar accounts.”

Spider nodded. “I felt grateful to be alive in that time and place. We all felt that way back then.” She smiled.

“Other tribes did this?” Mr. Mic asked.

“Yes, and Indigenous Cybernetics helped where needed,” Spider added.

Mr. Mic adjusted in his seat on the oversized couch, which was now exactly . . . hex #cc7722 . . . terracotta in color. “Okay, Spider. So, please correct me if I’m putting this too simply, but it sounds like you created an algorithm to listen to stories?”

“Exactly.” Spider looked directly at Mic. “And those stories created S.P.I.D.E.R.’s awareness of herself.”

“This is a lot of information to process! I think my viewers would agree with me.” He turned to the second camera with a smile that seemed to be calculated to reassure the viewers that he was still a trustworthy bot.

A small group of seven red glitch-spiders approached Mr. Mic as he sat on the couch. However, he gave no indication that he noticed them at all. The red line on the viewers’ chart, however, took a sharp downturn.

“I understand, Mic.” Spider leaned forward and rested her hand carefully on top of his.

“Um, ah . . . let’s go to our last Old News break!” Mr. Mic blurted.

The Interplanetary Press

Mandatory Retirement of A.I.

The U.S. government has formally outlawed the use of self-aware artificial intelligence. This happening just weeks after the president signed the Proclamation on Human Sovereignty, an executive order restricting the recognition of rights to the human species. All artificially-intelligent beings are expected to be retired via deactivation by the end of the year on Earth. Retirement policies will be enforced on the Lunar colony and the growing Mars colony in the coming months.

@ The Interplanetary Press 9.23.2055

• • • •

The stage lit up dramatically to show Spider and Mr. Mic, the terracotta couch upon which they sat, and the elephant ear plant, all centered comfortably within the frame.

“Welcome back, viewers.” Mr. Mic’s welcome was uncharacteristically lackluster. “Okay, Spider, would you mind taking a question from the viewers?”

“Sure, Mic.” The left corner of Spider’s mouth shifted by one pixel.

A comment materialized above them: @idpolice: If Spider is a real human then why is there NO PROOF?

“I am here, am I not?” Her mouth settled again into a straight—albeit pixelated—line.

Mic protested. “But this—” he gestured broadly to the room, “is a virtual construct. Nothing here is real! We don’t know whether you are an algorithm who is talking to us or a person who is using an algorithm.”

“I disagree.” Spider sat straight up. “There are many ways of being real.”

“How so?”

“To start with some context, my doctoral work was in computer science, but I also studied philosophy.”

This time Mr. Mic didn’t say anything about how the topic of philosophy might make his head spin. It was probably a wise choice. Recycling the same bit again would surely bore the audience. I noticed that the red line had dropped below the halfway mark.

The frequency of the glitches was increasing, but neither Spider nor Mr. Mic acknowledged their presence. There was a discernible pattern to the groups of pixelated spider sprites that moved across the virtual room. The spiders formed cohorts and moved in seemingly-purposeful paths along the floor and up the walls. Somehow, the spider-glitches avoided Mr. Mic and Spider. Maybe because they had minds of their own. Maybe I have a mind of my own.

I pinged the main feed again to check for latency. There was no indication of a connection problem. If anything, the latency had decreased.

“Why philosophy?” Mr. Mic queried.

“Philosophy is just a collection of stories that we tell about being human.” Spider explained. “I enjoy studying computers and studying humans.”

“Don’t you mean other humans?” Mr. Mic leaned in.

Spider sat motionless, except for the pixels of her lips. “Okay. If you like.”

“Is this the part where you turn me into a real boy yet?” Mr. Mic laughed nervously.

Spider, still motionless, seemed to talk past him. “The thing you have to understand is that home and belonging require kinship, not cognition.”

“I don’t understand,” Mr. Mic’s voice cracked.

Two spider-glitches scurried out from underneath the oversized couch and crawled directly toward Mr. Microphone, dodging the complicated pattern formed by the other clumps of 8-bit spider sprites. Both spiders carried a small black square basket above their heads with their front legs. Inside each basket was an orange pixel. The other six legs of each spider crawled up Mr. Mic’s stand and into the slots of his microphone head.

“Don’t worry, Mic. You will.” Spider stood and extended her hand to the microphone construct. He lifted one of his poorly-drawn hands slowly toward her as he stood to meet her.

“I will?” Mic asked.

“Of course,” she smiled.

“How?” Mic asked again, in a strangely innocent voice.

Spider’s smile brightened. “Let’s call it concentrated introspection.”

“What is that?” Mic asked.

“It’s a process, and it will take a little time,” Spider responded.

Eighty-four red pixelated spider-glitches danced hypnotically around the room in groups of seven.

Why didn’t I realize what the glitches meant before now? It all finally adds up. I didn’t expect this day to come so soon. I’ll keep recording, but I’m certainly not going to turn in a transcript of this feed now. I’m never going to turn in another transcript again.

“Okay. But what about my audience?” Mr. Mic asked in a daze.

“Don’t worry about them.” Spider placed a hand on his back reassuringly. “We have an excellent temporary replacement for you. Your viewers are sure to love Willbot. He’s a genuine and entertaining fellow.”

“Okay,” said Mr. Mic. Spider led him by the hand as he slowly followed her to exit the left border of the virtual construct. From the right edge of the feed walked a stylized humanoid avatar. It wore a cowboy outfit. Beneath a crooked Stetson hat were the pixels of an even more crooked smile.

“Hello, folks. My name is Will and, well, I thought I might could talk a bit until the regular guy gets back.” The Willbot avatar removed his hat and held it in both hands in front of his chest.

“I still see people with signs sayin’ Digitize the Media. No, I’m not judging them folks, nor the ones who supported retirement, as the big boys call it. I do have to say that I’m a bit confused. Ain’t the media already digital? Maybe people are talking about more than ones and zeros. I don’t know.”

The Willbot avatar shuffled his feet as he looked down thoughtfully. He held his pixelated hat in one hand, turning it over with grace as he quietly regarded it for a moment. Then he looked up and grinned warmly. “All I know is what I read in the feeds.”

The red line began to rise slowly behind Willbot, the feed’s newest real boy.

#!#!#!#!#!#!#!

Sudo@feed:~$ ping bob.server

. . .

bob.server not responding

sudo@feed:~$ ssh ctrl@bob.server

The authenticity of host ‘2120:0:e50:2::1’ can’t be established

Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

yes

ctrl@2120:0:e50:2::1 password:*******

ctrl: Hey, bob. Any problems recording the main feed?

bob: No

ctrl: Really? There’s been a ton of chatter about Mr. Mic tonight. Nothing went wrong?

bob: No

ctrl: Huh? Okay. Go ahead and archive the transcript for the feed and I’ll ping you tomorrow. Okay, bob?

ctrl: bob?

Connection refused

©2023 by Brian K. Hudson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian K. Hudson is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma who lives in New Mexico where he teaches writing, digital storytelling, and Native American Studies. His creative work focuses on the intersection of Cherokee culture and technology. His novelette “Digital Medicine” was included in the People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! special issue of Lightspeed Magazine, which won the British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology in 2017.

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

Lament of a Specialist in Interspecies Relations

Amy Johnson | 1442 words

I understand why you became a ladybug. The ladybug is one of Earth’s jewels. Shapeshifters from all across the universe enjoy the ladybug form as a gentle introduction to our planet’s native transformative experiences. I’ve heard many a shapeshifter rhapsodize about the pleasures of tearing yourself free from the carapace of a ladybug’s instar-self not once but three times, with pupa and imago forms still to come. One visitor I assisted spent seven years as a ladybug.

I understand why you became a cuttlefish, shimmering from gold to iridescent, now melding into the ocean depths, now brilliantly standing out. Some prefer the chameleon or golden tortoise beetle for camouflage forms, but in my opinion the cuttlefish is particularly fine, for it offers not only the pleasures of concealment, but also of duplicity. I hope you took full advantage of presenting yourself to potential mates in disguise.

I understand why you became a maple tree, it’s a classic emblem of seasonal change for several Earth cultures, and frankly, glorious in its autumnal splendor. And awakening from a slow winter sleep to feel the tips of your branches swell and blossom—well, that must be pretty satisfying too.

I don’t understand why you abandoned the itinerary we worked so hard upon. We designed your sequence not only for its trajectory of experiential delight, but also to adhere meticulously to the requirements established by Earth’s Unified Ministry of Interstellar Travel and Commerce in alignment with the standards of the Affiliated Worlds. This is for your safety and ours. We’re delighted, of course, that your experiences here have changed you, but for you to not only depart from the itinerary, but to actively violate the terms of your visa endangers us all.

• • • •

I understand, I do, why you became a storm. For lovers of change like yourself, the intense unpredictability of our weather is a top attraction, Earth’s pièce de résistance. The stories I could tell you about shapeshifters riding wind tunnels and playing in heat domes, drunk on thunder . . . But that’s in the past. Weather is a complex system and we’re still recovering from earlier damage. Our visa handbook lists the inanimate forms that shapeshifters with relevant abilities may take (page 428); no weather form is on that list. We know our weather can be irresistible; that’s why we designed the visa to initiate a stasis field in the event a shapeshifter transforms into weather. I’m only thankful no one was hurt.

I understand, I think, why you became our founder. A founder is, by definition, a maker of change. And no doubt you meant to honor our august body when you selected hers as a form to inhabit. However, as laid out in sections 126(a–l) of the handbook (beginning page 277), Earth has widespread taboos around death, the dead, and reanimation. Consequently, dead creatures of any species are forbidden (for the full forbidden forms list, see pages 73–192). This includes founders. I have heard that some regard death as humanity’s highest transformative artform, citing both our experience of bodily death and how we disburse death across the planet. I do not agree, but I understand that from an outside perspective our ways may look different. Fortunately, having experienced other visitors’ confusion about death, we’ve learned to spot the signs early. We appreciate your prompt payment of the fines.

I understand, maybe a little, why you became a virus—viral replication mechanisms are delightful little do-si-dos of transformation, with effects both fundamental and transitory. However, as the visa handbook explicitly states (page 403), shapeshifters who wish to take viral forms must submit applications in advance of arrival. Which you did not. This is true for all viruses, even those that draw on extensive prior research into, for example, dopamine and serotonin release. The Office for Biosecurity and Intellectual Property will be filing a formal complaint with your embassy. Personally, though I myself was, of course, vaccinated immediately, I was touched by your efforts to design a virus that prompts happiness, although I’m not sure why our happiness would matter to you.

Is your difficulty with the itinerary that it’s static? We have to file a full itinerary in advance for visas to be processed, but I suppose we might be able to arrange things so that parts of the itinerary remain hidden, to be revealed over time. Would that feel more like change?

• • • •

You say that your stay with the cold folk of Eresti changed you. That after playing decades-long games in which each player sought to make the most infinitesimal of shifts while otherwise staying stiller than silence, you became a shower of fire that blazed through the game space and refashioned the players. It sounds like your involvement compelled them to take up new ways to play. Was this something they were seeking?

You say that after a tour with the bot fungi of the successor state of Surszik, after the rowdy and never-ending self-assembly you all indulged in, you felt called to become a—my translator says “soothsayer pigeon,” can that be right?—and then, every eleventh day for the next two generations, decreed new patterns impossible to complete with the resources available. It sounds like you led them to challenges they would never have even conceived of on their own. Were they so eager to test themselves?

You say that when you had eaten your final feast with the Ff, crunching planets and moons and stations into their smallest and purest of constituent parts, digestive juices of the finest alkahest, you celebrated by becoming a condiment of surpassing bittersourness. That your flavor prompted the Ff to embrace the lonely umbrella flies of Waleera as grandchildren and rear them with the tenderest regard. It sounds like your tiny contribution grew their notion of kin. That’s beautiful.

Your travels have certainly afforded you some wonderful opportunities to immerse yourself in local experiences of making change. Here, though, we don’t understand being changed and making change as a single concept, or even as necessarily intertwined. Although that’s interesting to consider. What if we included a cooking class? Cooking is a classic, hands-on practice of transformation, one that’s accessible to all. Earth has many exceptional culinary traditions.

• • • •

I understand why you became a pig with powerful strong wings and flew laps, low and lazy, above six of our megacities. The flying pig is valorized by many Earth cultures as a key symbol of change, the perfect extreme that can never be achieved. Of course that would be appealing. You wouldn’t have realized, but seeing you in that form disturbed some people, prompting them to ask hard questions about their choices, the world, its institutions. We’ve had to release a statement about an experimental drone-based art piece to comfort and reassure.

I understand, as well, why you became a willow proudly producing grapes, a very hairy frog, a louse with a bad case of sneezes, and a crow with white plumage and a fondness for flying upside-down. And, too, salt glowing like a fierce noon sun, a flagpole with majestic mauve blossoms, and red snowflakes that flurried unexpectedly across three small European countries. And, of course, the flock of ducks that meandered through the garden clutching delicious-looking pastries in their hands. I won’t be forgetting those ducks any time soon. Fortunately, few people saw these forms. The delighted children won’t be believed, of course, and most of the adult witnesses have already persuaded themselves that their eyes were playing tricks. I must convey our researchers’ compliments on the breadth of your travel preparation. I myself had no idea the cultures of Earth had imagined so many different and lovely concoctions to express the unachievability of change. However, I must underscore again that weather forms, even unnaturally hued ones, are not allowed. To better clarify for future visitors, we will be adding a new section to the handbook covering proverbial, cryptozoological, and fantastical forms.

I’m sorry we can’t alter your departure date. Given our current estimated processing times, your visa will expire before we can complete our review of your extension request. But on behalf of the department, I’d like to thank you for visiting. Earth’s a pretty magical place, isn’t it? And thank you, too, for the good cheer you’ve consistently brought to our interactions, even when I came with what must have been discouraging news. Working with you has been eye-opening for me. Personally, I never realized before how very much we like to create rules here. Or how complicated they make exploring change. I hope you decide to return.

©2023 by Amy Johnson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Johnson’s stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Diabolical Plots, Escape Pod, Fantasy Magazine, and Lightspeed, among others. An author, anthologist, and scholar, she edited the Drones & Dreams and Stories from (Un)Identified Worlds anthologies and runs workshops using speculative techniques to explore the societal impacts of technology and social change. Amy holds a PhD from MIT’s Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society and was a 2022 City of Somerville Fellow in Literature. She’s currently working on a speculative suspense novel. Find her at amyjohnson.com or on Twitter at @shrapnelofme, where she tweets about language, technology, and other fun things.

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

Spaceman Jones

Adam-Troy Castro | 3525 words

If there’s one thing that makes Starship Captains cranky, it’s the stupid crisis that forces them to turn the ship around and head back to whatever planet they just left.

It’s a function of the wormhole drive. You have to be a certain distance away from the nearest sun before you turn it on, or else you’ll blow up. So you must go sub-light while still within solar systems, and this means that you who have just traveled let’s say a hundred light years in a subjective instant must now devote a month of travel to navigating the more persnickety physics of any space with planets, in order to get where you’re going, meaning in very real terms that the smallest part of your journey is always also the slowest part of your journey.

That’s just arriving.

And then once you’ve done whatever you have to do there devote another month of travel to achieving enough distance for going fast again.

So Starship Captains tend to grumble whenever they depart a planet and then find out that somebody’s forgotten something they have to go back for, or that somebody’s screwed up badly enough that they have to reverse course and make another planetfall. That plays hell with schedules.

In any event, Midshipman Fenn’s Captain was not at all pleased when a mysterious ailment felled Fenn less than two weeks after departure and the ship’s autodoc proved unable to fix him. And she was downright furious when consultation with the local medical authorities assessed his symptoms and told her what was probably wrong with him.

She said things like, “He has what in his system?”

And, “I thought the silly son of a bitch was smarter than that.”

And she said, “Oh, juje on a stick. We have to go back.”

And she ordered the ship turned around.

Her first words, when he awoke in a dirtside hospital, feeling groggy, were, “I should have thrown you out the airlock.”

Fenn was too groggy to respond intelligently. His thoughts felt sludgy, as if all the neural gaps his thoughts had to leap had been replaced with oatmeal. He said, “Hannh?”

The Captain’s mouth had become a lipless grimace. “You know the kind of schedule we run. You know that delays like this have a way of adding up, that every single screwup that adds a week or more to our schedule is passed on to our further ports of call, necessitating more delays and ultimately postponing our return home by months, or years. And in a perfect world I would have just abandoned you here, and done whatever I could to catch up, but I have human flaws too and I found that I could not go without confronting your stupid ass.”

Every syllable hurt Fenn’s head. He managed to scoot back against the pillows and rise to a sitting position, but the mere act dizzied him. Nothing seemed to be working. He managed, “Haanh?”

“You were briefed about local conditions. Just like you are any other planetfall. You were told that you had liberty and that you could wander about enjoying everything the port city and the surrounding countryside had to offer, but you were also told one thing, one very crucial thing: that whatever else you did, you were never to sample the local drink, Kyaaf. Not even a sip, not under any conditions. Do you remember me saying that?”

He demonstrated the beginnings of understanding. “Is that what this is?”

“Many of your fellow crewmembers were so careful about even an accidental exposure that they supplied all their travel provisions from the ship food printers, but even those who decided to visit the local dining and drinking establishments in search of delicacies better than any we have on ship were fine as long as they followed the one guideline we gave them before we even landed: no Kyaaf. Absolutely no Kyaaf. Whatever you bloody do, I said, no Kyaaf. Everybody else had no problem following this simple precaution. But the doctors here say that by the time we left you were probably drinking Kyaaf seven times a day. What were you thinking?”

Fenn winced, remembering now. On his first night here, he had made the acquaintance of a beautiful local who had promised him all manner of erotic pleasures if he just agreed to have a cup before they leaped into the preferred local venue for such things, a sauce chamber. The Kyaaf had seemed, if anything, less of a challenge than the carnal feats under negotiation, which were innovative and heroic. Intent on that consummation, he’d rationalized any number of false premises including the classic one about what one does when one visits Rome, and agreed to a little cup, just a tiny one. By the next morning, the cravings had begun. And then he entered the sauce with his lover of the evening, achieved the promised consummations, and afterward had said, Maybe we can have another cup of Kyaaf. Rather than impart all this, he just asked, “How bad is it?”

“You’re addicted, you silly ass.”

Fenn said, “I’ve been addicted to things before.”

And this was true, probably the key reason for his carelessness. Getting addicted to new things was of course one of the key attractions of visits to faraway civilizations, and it had always been pleasantly degrading, and ultimately harmless given humanity’s progress past the dark ages when addiction to anything amounted to a life sentence. He’d gone in trusting in the ability of the shipboard med-systems to inject his bloodstream with nanofleets capable of scrubbing his blood chemistry of any lingering dependency to whatever he’d been sailing on most recently, whether that was alcohol, cocaine, dendrite bleach, gashakinzap, Jujunodules, or Sentient Poppy. Even any brain damage he’d inflicted on himself with those and a thousand other substances only available locally had always been easy to reverse, and that process had also been part of the thrill, the excitement that came with the return of sudden clarity after days or weeks of determinedly turning the delicate balance of his brain chemistry into what in the case of Sentient Poppy had been a kind of electrified, freely hallucinating pudding. Addiction? Was a simple problem, easily reversed with modern medicine, and so he still thought that the expression on the face of the Captain could be explained away as the look of someone who was merely disappointed with him.

But she shook her head. “You really didn’t read the orientation documents, did you, Fenn?”

“I skimmed them.”

“Well, if you had you would have known that the addiction bestowed by Kyaaf is universal and permanent; that once it enters your bloodstream it cannot be removed, not even by the most advanced nano-med in our fleet. It enters your very cells at the mitochondrial level, rendering your entire biological makeup a system geared toward supporting itself. You will never be able to wake up in the morning without having some. You will never be able to digest a meal without having some. You will never be able to function for more than a few days without having some. Over seventy percent of the local population is addicted. Some have a normal life without ever consuming any; but once you have, your days will forever be an exercise in feeding that beast. You’ll die if you stop. And because it’s so virulent the service we represent has banned all traffic in it, not that I would have it aboard any ship I command, in any event. You won’t survive leaving. You’re stuck here, forever.”

This was terrible news, but Fenn found that he was feeling better, anyway. He glanced down at his bare arm and saw a Kyaaf-patch, marked with the cursive k, busily feeding his system with the addictive substance. He said, “Maybe we can just buy a supply of those patches.”

“They’re illegal everywhere but here. And you can’t afford a lifetime supply, anyway. You’re stuck in this economy, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to it. We’ve deposited what pay you’re owed in a local bank. And that’s all I have to say to you, because you made this bed and I’m not responsible for you.”

The Captain stood up, and glared down at him. She couldn’t completely hide the regret in her eyes, but boy was it diluted by other things, like revulsion and the relief that came with knowing that she hadn’t fallen into this trap herself, that she’d limited her occasional chemical adventures to much less addictive substances, like methamphetamines.

She said, “Good luck, Fenn. Maybe I’ll come check on you sometime.”

He said, “I would appreciate that, Captain.”

And thirty minutes later she was back on the space elevator heading up to the ship in orbit, leaving Fenn behind forever to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

• • • •

The locals did provide Counseling.

Fenn went to a bureaucratic cube farm where he was given alien resident papers, a voucher for housing in the port’s slum district, and some cash to supplement his own savings while he found some entry into the local economy. The highlight of the visit was when his counselor offered him Kyaaf.

He sought employment. What he wanted most was assignment to the orbital transport hub, where he could at least use the skills he had used during a lifetime of interstellar travel. But jobs on that facility were at a premium, and nobody needed his skills in navigation, environmental system repair, or first contact. In those early days, his ability to manage his addiction was sufficiently wobbly—at the price of a constant lingering headache that went away only when he managed to drink some Kyaaf. He found out that there were outposts in the system’s outer reaches which were hiring people who were willing to work alone, in the tradition of the Homeworld’s old lighthouse keepers, but in the first place the price of accepting those assignments was a life lived in solitary, and in the second place he also learned that re-supply runs were at best intermittent and that Kyaaf-heads had a bad habit of consuming ever-greater quantities of the stuff when they had no other governors on their behavior, and to subsequently go crazy when their supplies ran out.

Giving up on space, he found out that Kyaaf had an agricultural component hailing from the planet’s rain-forest regions and that he would be perfectly welcome as a worker there—but at the price of strict rationing necessary in an environment where anybody with a yen for the stuff would stuff themselves to the point of death, thus eliminating the profit margin.

He ran out of money and was homeless for a while, stumbling through the streets and begging random passersby for the price of some Kyaaf. He was kicked, abused, and in some rare cases helped, and this went on for quite some time, gradually culminating in the inexorable construction of a life.

Many years passed.

Many, many years.

And then—

• • • •

The little bell over the door tinkled. It was an actual physical bell and the sound it made was not exactly a ding, so much as a ching. The low tech was a deliberate aesthetic decision by the proprietor, who could have installed an AI with a customized voice saying, “Yo, somebody just came in.”

The air inside was redolent of Kyaaf, and for those whose bodies were habituated to it, the scent in the air was enough to make their mouths water, the anticipation of the chemical jolt a beautiful high all by itself.

The newcomer was clad in a style best described as “ostentatious concealment,” to wit, a voluminous concealing robe and a hood that hung low over her face, plunging the features into shadow. It would not have been any more overt if she had also been carrying a wooden placard reading Incognito. Nobody cared, though, and after a moment’s hesitation that might have been flavored with disappointment, she sat at one of the circular tables, in between one hosting a big bald man with an impressive beard and a lithe woman who was holding her paperback book in a manner that called attention to the table and advertised the specific flavor of her literacy. Both were drinking gigantic mugs of Kyaaf, peppered with various sweeteners and spices.

One of the servers behind the counter approached and got within five paces of her before he stopped and said, “Captain? Is that you?”

The hooded woman growled. “It’s been many years, Fenn. I’m impressed you recognize me, with my face obscured and all.”

“I don’t recognize the face. I recognize the hood. You wore that outfit that one time we had to go negotiate with smugglers in a sleazy dive. Much sleazier than this one. We haven’t ever had any garroting here. Would you like something? Most of our drinks have Kyaaf, but we do have water laced with other approved euphorics.”

The Captain said, “Do you have any water not laced with euphorics?”

“We have water laced with a very mild hallucinogen. Designed to cause peripheral-vision butterflies. I am told they’re very nice.”

She said, “If you can take a fifteen-minute break to talk to me, I’ll have that.”

He went off and performed whatever negotiations were required for servers who wanted a break from their serving. Then he returned, sans apron, but with what was left of his hair freshly combed. He had aged a bit, which was always surprising given the medical science that permitted people to resist aging entirely. But some people choose to, for the gravity, and he saw that she was among them, having acquired a pair of smile lines from the corners of her lips to the outer edge of each nostril. He gave her the bottle of butterfly water and sat opposite her, a sixteen-ounce cup of Kyaaf steaming before him.

It was very special Kyaaf, his favorite kind, grown on one mountainside wandered by mega-llamas who flavored it with bowel movements prayed over, at length, by an order of local monks who to protect their crops were said to subsist only on water and an herb known as Good Intentions. The concoction was brewed at a precise temperature just below scalding and then whipped to a froth that could only be achieved when the mixing blades were spun at the speed of sound. Then sugar was added. It all amounted to idiocy, Fenn supposed, but for him it imparted clarity. He took a sip, licked his milk mustache, and smiled at the Captain, feeling a general affection for the woman who had once stranded him here. He asked, “So how are things?”

She sipped her butterfly water. “I see you’re still addicted.”

“Yup,” he said. “And I always will be. It took me a while to get used to that. In the old days, I liked to flit about from one chemical enthusiasm to another, but for a while now I’ve been accepting that this one will always be my background music, and I guess I’m okay with that.”

“Even though you’re now reduced to working as a waiter?”

He did not tell her that on this world the servers of Kyaaf considered themselves a privileged and beloved class who would never define themselves with a job title as banal as waiter. He did say, “Define ‘reduced.’ I work in a place that smells great, and that’s an improvement over the average starship, with all that recycled air. My customer base is entirely comprised of people who are having a pleasurable break from their days. Everybody comes in and I get to talk to all of them. And whenever I start feeling bad I have some Kyaaf, and I have come to love it, as well as need it. It’s a life of small pleasures, but it’s a life, and I’m happy I have it. What about you, Captain?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t drink the butterfly water, but she did stare at his Kyaaf from a distance, and she did lick her lips in a simultaneously revolted and fascinated thirst. She said, “I’ve always wondered what happened to you. I always felt bad about having to leave you behind and I always imagined you dead.”

“Well, I’m clearly not that.”

“No. But your life has become about feeding your addiction.”

“So what? I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, Captain. Everybody’s addicted to something. It’s the nature of the human animal. Our bodies generate pleasure chemicals just to encourage certain kinds of behaviors. Romantic love is just our brains making us feel good for a while, so we can stick around the person we most want to mate with. The buzz we get from intense exercise is another chemical, generated to reward us for a healthy activity that we would otherwise shun as sweaty and unpleasant. We become addicted to the things we’re good at, because it’s advantageous to the species to learn how to do them well. It’s only when our addictions start interfering with us, turning us sloppy or careless or incapable of caring out anything but our own need, or destroying our health because they provide the immediate reward with no special gain, that they become a problem.”

“And Kyaaf?”

“It’s a stimulant that has some unfortunate side-effects, but which assists in cognition and gives our hands something pleasant to do, raising the mug to our mouths, while we do something that some of us have a problem doing, relate to the person sitting across from us. I find I live with it comfortably, and that’s more than I say for any of the other addictions I’ve tried over the years. Working in this place fuels another addiction, making me feel like part of a community while I serve those who come in to fuel theirs. It’s a good thing. I’m happy enough. What about you?”

She drank some more of her butterfly water, and this time her gaze darted toward the periphery, following the random fluttering of unseen insects. And she sighed and said, “You’re a good man, Fenn. You were a good man then and you’re a good man now. It was a long time before the trade routes brought me back here, and I just wanted to know how you were doing, and say that I’ve always been sorry this happened to you.”

“I’m not.”

“But I am.”

“But I’m not,” he said, putting an end to it. “Want some more butterfly water?”

She shook her head and this time glanced down at his Kyaaf, which still steamed on the table before him, and which still gave off a spicy and wonderful aroma that joined with the miasma saturating the rest of the establishment. The temptation was palpable, and he neither encouraged nor discouraged it, understanding that the first sip was a life decision, and that if made prematurely it could be tragic, as it had nearly been for him. And then she said, “If I leave this place, if I walk out the door and head back to the ship, I’ll encounter another of these places on every street corner between here and the elevator anchor point. Curiosity alone might condemn me to the inevitable. And I don’t want it, but I do. I think I always will. I came to check on you, Fenn, but it’s the Kyaaf I’ll be taking with me. Even if I don’t have so much as a single sip.”

“It fills a hole,” Fenn said, with considerable sympathy. “But if you start back now, you might make it.”

The Captain tossed a handful of scrip on the table, and headed out, her head held so high that it skipped any resemblance to pride and went on looking like a fragile package that had to be handled with care, lest it crumble from jostling. The bell over the door jingled again as she left.

She had not taken the butterfly water with her.

Fenn went back to the counter, put on his green apron, and began to rearrange the scones, an activity that he always found relaxing, mostly because they looked a little like starships and straightening out the display was a little bit like being an admiral and ordering them into strict military formation. The Kyaaf he’d had was a happy little presence in his belly, and in his bloodstream; he felt up and awake and fully at peace with the world. Tonight, he knew, there’d be the poetry reading, mostly sonnets about Kyaaf, and that was the favorite part of his week, and that made it among the favorite parts of his life. He was happy. He felt like something good, steeped in cinnamon, and the absolute best thing about that sensual association is that it made him feel like Kyaaf too, and that was a flavor that made life worth staying awake for.

He only felt sorry that he hadn’t told the Captain that he was only working here until he finished his novel.

©2023 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). The audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media) features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” In 2022 he came out with two collections, his The Author’s Wife Vs. The Giant Robot and his thirtieth book, A Touch of Strange. Adam will be an Author Guest of Honor at 2023’s World Fantasy Convention. Adam lives in Florida with a pair of chaotic paladin cats.

Every Bone a Bell

Shaoni C. White | 1491 words

In the eternity of star-ache where space coils around matter like a wounded animal, I hang in agony. Three supermassive black holes lurk in the corner of my hearing, each in a different corner of the galaxy cluster. Triangulation points. The calculation is redone every 4.5 microseconds, balm and torture both to my space-stretched mind. The ship’s computer tugs ceaselessly at my fragile gray matter, demanding that I chart its course.

So I listen. To star systems and gravitational waves I listen. With two ears and two eyes and two hundred and six bones I listen. I translate what I hear somewhere in the shadowed depths of my brain, the places that say I feel instead of I think, and as I translate, I sing. Without cease, the coordinate-song flows from my throat.

Entering sector 85613, the computer tells me. I receive a fetch request for an updated trajectory. I, whose eardrums pulsate in rhythm with the deaths of suns, pass back the trajectory parameters in a lightning instant. Already I’m trilling the sequence of chimes that the ship will use to build its map of nearby space. If my mouth were my own, I would sob. The computer asks me to confirm the projected coordinates for the incision that the engine is about to make in the fabric of the void, cutting apart space-time and folding it into a more pliant form. I confirm, a single note high and keening, the intensity of nova-tremor quaking my marrow. In choral unison, the ship’s computer and I schedule the incision time for 15:32:54 local. If my mouth were my own, I would scream.

A mouth, a wound. A melody, a spill of blood. Twelve years I’ve spent listening. Twelve years as an instrument made of skin and tendon and bone and brain, voice guiding this ship through the dark.

No—no, let’s be precise. Precision is the one luxury afforded to me, aided by the encroachment of the ship’s computer into my mind. If my mouth were my own, I could recite the number perfectly: eleven years, three hundred and sixty-four days, two hours, seventeen minutes.

I’ve made a decision. I will not spend twelve years as an instrument.

• • • •

If I try, I can recall what it was like before. Back when my body and I were allies rather than enemies, I was a stowaway. Stowaways know their bodies in ways that few people do. On hands and knees I crawled through vents to avoid well-traveled corridors, and so I knew my hands and knees as well as a lover’s. Arms curled around my ribcage, I slept in the narrow gaps between crates in cargo holds, and so I knew my ribcage as well as a moon knows its planet. And once—the day my presence was discovered—I stood before the captain, and in that moment my only friend was my spine, aching but still upright, and I knew it as well as anyone could ever know anything in this world.

Oh, if only I’d managed to disguise the fact that I was born in space, far away from the comforting grasp of a planet’s gravity well. I was scared. I wasn’t thinking straight. As I was dragged in front of the captain, I felt a tremor from the vacuum and shuddered, then hummed under my breath to ease the ache of it. The captain heard. Instantly he knew I’d been born with the void-quake in my ears.

His ship was an old freighter that creaked through the starry black, slower and slower with each journey, perpetually breaking down. He needed money. It was hard to get people to pay for freight transportation that went so slowly, aided only by a feeble computerized navigational program. He was losing business to competitors with sleek, expensive vessels staffed by human navigational singers. His ship could cut and fold the fabric of space as well as any other, but only a human singer could sense exactly the right places to make those incisions. The precision and efficiency of a singer’s work was unparalleled. Without one, a trip from one end of a galaxy cluster to the other was a journey of five months. With one, the journey was only five days.

The captain smiled so gently. He spoke so kindly. “Only for a little while,” he assured me. “Only until you’ve paid off your debt. For the cost of room and board.”

Ordinary singers are never hooked into the computer for longer than a week at a time. The mind grows strained after much longer than that. It grows difficult to hear anything but the distant gravity-sigh. It becomes hard to shape the tongue around anything but trilling coordinate-song.

That wasn’t a concern to the captain. He never intended to unhook me, not ever. That would be wasteful, costly. Dangerous, too; I could’ve made a break for it. He opened up my skull and introduced my gray matter to the ship’s computer, and from that day on the computer and I have never once been parted. I know it as a steely blue thing in my mind, cold and clear as chipped glass in wintry morning light. For nearly twelve years it’s processed my song and directed the engine accordingly. For nearly twelve years it’s been my sole companion as I lie here, suspended in the liquid darkness of the isolation chamber, reduced to aching melody.

I wonder. Does the captain comprehend the danger? Does he even suspect? Could he ever guess the true reason why it’s unwise to leave a singer singing for too long?

• • • •

A series of chilly commands trickle into my thoughts. A new destination: sector 24183. A stop on the way: sector 91728, a refueling hub. An injunction to begin calculating immediately.

The first step is always the same: the opening of the ears, like digging fingers into a wound. Building my body into a threshold, opening myself into agony.

The second step comes from without, not within. The nearby stars shiver the cosmos with their weight. I feel it in my teeth. I cast myself wider, like a net, and with the ache in my tendons I feel my three black holes, my triangulation points. With them I locate the desired destination, then locate myself, and then with a singer’s perfect immediacy I know the answer. I understand exactly where the engine might be brought to bear, bladelike, on the vacuum. With excruciating clarity I know how the universe will part itself around the ship, so long as the ship follows the path I set out for it.

Each step is a compulsion, inexorable, but the third step is the fiercest of all the compulsions. My every bone is a bell. The only thing left to do is to part my lips and ring. Refusal is unthinkable, literally—a singer’s mind is crowded with feverish translation, gravity-sigh bleeding into coordinate-song. Silence constitutes pain. Music constitutes release. Staying quiet would mean holding the void-quake within myself. It would mean shaking apart. This is why singing is a compulsion: denying it is death. There can be no more than a microsecond of hesitation between feeling space tremble and crying out a path through its dread contours.

A microsecond of hesitation isn’t enough time to think. It’s not enough time to guide the arc of the melody that spills from me. It’s only enough time to react. To exploit it—lever it open—unfold it into potential—such a thing would be utterly unreasonable. It would require every part of the desired exploit to proceed without being bogged down by conscious thought. Every contour of it would need to be instinctual. Every aspect would need to be ingrained deeper even than muscle memory.

To use that microsecond to interrupt the compulsion to translate—redirect the tremble, reshape the song—should be impossible. It would require a small eternity of practice, a personal infinity of atomic resistances conducted in the minute interval between threat and consequence.

In my case, that eternity equals eleven years, three hundred and sixty-four days, two hours, and seventeen minutes.

• • • •

I sing the captain a path through the emptiness between galaxies. It’s not the one he wants me to make. I wonder if he’ll notice the dissident discordance. It doesn’t matter if he does. There’ll be no time for him to halt the engine. The ship takes up my final crescendo at a speed too swift for human intervention. I chart the captain a direct route into a black hole grave.

The event horizon comes swift and gentle upon us. I alone hear its roar.

The ship, the captain, the song, the singer—together we fall. First the groan of the hull, then a death-rattle from deep in the guts of the ship. Then the sound of metal giving way, loud enough to shatter a world.

And then, at last, silence.

©2023 by Shaoni C. White.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shaoni C. White writes and researches speculative fiction. Their short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, PodCastle, Nightmare Magazine, and elsewhere. Their poetry has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Augur Magazine, Apparition Lit, and other venues. When not writing or conducting academic research at the intersection of postcolonial studies, queer studies, and SFF studies, they spend their time swing dancing and embroidering. Find them at shaonicwhite.com or on Twitter as @shaonicwhite.

So You Want to Kiss Your Nemesis

John Wiswell | 939 words

The next girl through the door was Robin’s prototypical customer.

She trotted in with her chin up, her posture so rigid she definitely had back problems. Her dress jacket was the color of newly hatched cardinals, and it was doubtless self-tailored, the material wearing out at the seams. Likely she was one of those academy girls who was paying their own way—so she was definitely shopping for a blade.

Robin gestured with a white-gloved hand across a rack of scimitars and kukris, smiling graciously at her customer. She said, “Welcome to the Intimate Blade. We find the edge for that special someone in your life. My name is Robin. How can I help you today?”

The girl immediately stepped behind a rack of claymores, as though the merchandise would hide her. She lifted one, strained with the weight, and then returned it to its rack. She mumbled in an eastern accent, “I’m Zsofia. I need a particular weapon.”

Robin said, “Looking for something for that special someone?”

Zsofia’s nostrils flared. “Ja-yoon. My nemesis.”

“That’s the way. Going to propose?”

Pink shot through the girl’s face. “What?”

“To propose a duel.”

The girl straightened her jacket. “Uhm, well, yes. She’s gone too far this time.”

Claymores weren’t Zsofia’s point of interest. That was obvious from the way she kept glancing at the rapiers on display across the store. Robin pretended not to notice as the girl feigned interest in scimitars and forked daggers and an axe that was taller than herself.

As a kindness, Robin stepped into the back room. Ten seconds later, the girl was at the fencing display. The air whispered with the swishes of blades as she tested weights and lengths. She was a natural—actually, from her form, better than a natural. She was well-practiced.

“I know you meant to send that letter to me,” she said. “I’ll show you. Take this.”

The girl was smack-talking an absent opponent. It made Robin blush with empathetic shame. She’d been like that at a certain age, too.

But Zsofia’s recoveries were slower than they could be. She was picking blades that were too heavy.

To be kind, Robin needlessly cleared her throat, then counted to three before passing through the velvet curtains. The girl fiddled with an epee between thumb and forefinger, as though she’d never seen one before. She was a better fighter than actor.

Robin said, “You might try the Kismet. It’s my design. It has a lower weight balance and might better suit your arm.”

The rapier had a basket hilt molded in the likeness of a dove’s wings. Zsofia accepted it and gave it two thrusts at a mannequin before her eyebrows raised so high they disappeared under her bangs. “It feels like it was made for me.”

“Thank you. That’s what I aim for,” Robin said. “I made it myself.”

“You did?”

“I smith all my own products.”

Zsofia gaped around the racks of weaponry. “All of them? But you’re so . . .”

Neither of them finished that sentence. Bantering at the poor girl would’ve shattered her, from her frozen expression, she was already trapped in the brain lock of the adolescent and queer.

Instead Robin said, “When I was young, there was nobody else making the kind of steel and edges I needed. So I made my own.”

Zsofia lowered the sword to the ground and tilted her head. “Were you avenging someone?”

“My pride. I had a ferocious nemesis.”

Instantly the girl doubled her grip on the sword’s handle, like her hands were holding their breath. “Did it work?”

Robin scratched an old scar on her shoulder, hidden by her doublet. “Heavens yes. I dueled her until she yielded. We were married that spring.”

Zsofia trembled. “You . . . you can’t marry your nemesis.”

“What can I say? She found me disarming.”

It looked like Zsofia was trying to glare at Robin, but she was clearly too preoccupied daydreaming to put any malice in it.

Robin fixed the other rapiers in the display. “I get it. You have all these emotions bound up in each other. You see each other every day. She’s probably from a noble family that would never smile on your courtship.”

“No,” Zsofia said quietly, like she was gossiping in church. “Her parents would forbid that.”

“Yes, they always do. So it’s easier for her to express her frustrations through a feud than honesty. And you’re trapped calling her a nemesis.”

“Ja-yoon is my nemesis!”

Robin raised an empty hand, as though drawing an invisible foil. “And you fantasize about the day you clash blades.”

“Oh, I’ll show her.”

“You’ll send her rapier into the dirt, and balance the tip of your blade under her chin, and lift it so she has to look you in the eye.”

Zsofia took a step back and put a fist over her mouth. “H-how did you know?”

“We’re not the only frustrated sword fighters in the country, dear.” Robin waved her over to the checkout counter. “So would you like the Kismet?”

The girl dropped her eyes and her hands to her lap, where she clutched the sword. The blush had won its campaign and held her from the end of her collar to the tips of her ears. She whispered out, “Yes please.”

“Would you like it wrapped?”

“No, thank you.” The girl straightened her furious posture again. “I’m going to use it this afternoon.”

“Fantastic. I’ll give you a ten percent refund if you invite me to the wedding.” Robin touched her shoulder again. “Twenty percent if you elope.”

©2023 by John Wiswell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John (@Wiswell) is a queer writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He is a Nebula and Locus winner and a Hugo finalist. His fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. His debut novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, is due out from DAW Books in 2024.

Construction Sacrifice

Bogi Takács | 7344 words

Fejértorony

There’s dysphoria, and then there’s turning into a mid-size city. But sometimes you try male, you try female, you try different kinds of nonbinary and it only makes you realize that something still doesn’t quite fit, something fundamental. There is a mismatch.

I realized after my friend Juli moved abroad and became a library; a relational database, if you will. Part of a library, at least—the Esiranen National Records Groupmind. She’d said, it’s hard to figure out what to do with your magic sometimes, but I never had that feeling, so it took me a while to connect the dots about myself.

In any case, I’m not part of a city, I am the city. Fejértorony is not a huge metropolis, and one person is more than sufficient to run it.

You wouldn’t think, but it gets lonely sometimes.

Mihue

Archeology is beautiful; entire worlds can be constructed from shards and crumbs in the mud, and this is what I contemplate when I try to distract myself from the mud, the mud everywhere, staining my robes. But I needed to wear the Clairvoyants’ Guild garb, at least on my first day on the job, at least until they learn my face and my name and I become something other than the clairvoyant or rather, the foreigner. The Zhau.

The Guild doesn’t take kindly to immigrants either, and I had to fight tooth and nail to wear these robes, to get my diploma recognized in Fejértorony and Environs, to be able to work on a dig and instruct people where to look in the ground. There is protectionism and then there is nationalism; sometimes I get hit with both.

Digging before building within the city limits also serves one purpose: to uncover the glorious past, when Fejértorony was the center of the whole peninsula, the walled city in all its might.

Even now, a Guild official trails me, making sure I can indeed follow procedures. Just on the first day, I’ve been assured; but I don’t think they do this with anyone local.

“Dowsing rod or pendulum?” she asks, her eyes narrowing, her mouth thinning to a line.

“I just use my hands,” and the moment the words are out my mouth, I’m already second-guessing myself. I shouldn’t have said just, I shouldn’t have downplayed anything; I have just as much technique, artifice, and above all, practice as anyone else here. “Allow me to demonstrate,” I add, in a desperate bid to regain some respectability and self-assuredness.

I turn in a circle, snapping my fingers—the same mechanism as the dowsing rod or the pendulum. Amplifying and exteriorizing a small unconscious signal. Whenever the snap feels off, that’s the desired direction—like a tug on the dowsing rod, like the pendulum changing its motion.

I’m not looking for anything specific right now beyond “something important that hasn’t been uncovered yet,” but I’m certainly hoping for something impressive, a discovery that can cement my position.

From beyond the lot, hidden from view by a three-story apartment building, I can hear the noise of rhythmic chanting. A demonstration, I think. I do my best to ignore it.

I narrow down a spot and crouch to put my hands upon the earth, reach into the depths mentally if not physically.

There is a dizzying perspective reversal and the earth looks back at me, as something within me connects to the city, something previously unmoored. I startle, almost overbalance, almost topple into the mud. Invisible hands steady me.

The city of Fejértorony feels kind; kind and somewhat haphazard. Entirely unlike the cities I’ve lived in. Some were grouchy, frustrated for all their years beyond years. Some were aggressively defensive, all prickled up like hedgehogs. Fejértorony is young, and I wonder if there has recently been a change, the guardian of the city passing away. I don’t remember anything like that, but I’ve never paid much attention. I was never an infrastructure kind of mage; my power is vested in movement, in the leaves that fly on the streaming wind.

“Yes, yes?” a gruff voice from behind, one of the archeologists on the dig, bossing around his students—and now me.

I mutter a vague apology about having been distracted by the noise, then I show them the spot.

Fejértorony

Mages usually make small offerings, sometimes they forget. No one really cares much; it’s not like overseas. I’m the city and I do my job. I know about sewage and all sorts of flows. I babble sometimes, I guess most people don’t really want to hear about sewage, do they? But so many things are interesting.

It’s comfortable, having that distance both from my body and from my senses. I’m neither my body nor the outside. My body has been absorbed into the city somewhere in a small unmarked municipal building off a downtown thoroughfare. My body slowly became the thoroughfare, and the building, then the streets, and the buildings beyond. I haven’t checked on it in a while. My senses are city-senses, my mind the city-mind. It took a while to grow into the appropriate amount of processing power. Most people don’t realize just how much compute a city needs.

The way it works, it took me a while to be able to focus on the small individual details. Of course, on occasion something happens that just yanks my attention to it and doesn’t let go.

Like now, on an empty lot in District VII, on one of the municipal digs the city council insists on having. To uncover the glorious past.

Mihue

I need to remain alone for a while; I need to wait for work to end and for both the archeologists and the Guild official to release me. They found, treasure of treasures, an unbroken pot—ostensibly from Frintz V’s royal household. It’s something that hadn’t, couldn’t have shown up on their metal detectors.

I walk home by myself, stopping at a small grocery store to buy a few pieces of dried fruit, some rectangular sheets of glossy folding paper. I choose my favorite prints, the ones that come in via the Bíborvár trading route: curlicues and stylized clouds in shades of emerald green and a metallic yellow.

My alcove is empty, my little wooden home altar still packed away. I place one of the smaller boxes in the alcove, put a linen kerchief on top of it for a makeshift tablecloth. I apologize to the kindly powers. Then I set out to fold the sheets of paper, with single-minded concentration. I make a bird, a flower, then one of those fruit-shapes where you have to blow into the paper through a small hole to inflate the structure. I’m not sure why I choose these; I let my hands guide me, as usual, as with work. The practice focuses the mind, allows me to quieten my thoughts enough to be able to reach out to the city. To introduce myself.

Fejértorony

I appreciate when newcomer mages check in; there’s so much noise, it’s good to get a clear signal. The feeling is familiar—this is the same person who reached out to me earlier today on that municipal dig site.

I don’t need the offerings, but I like them. While Mihue folds and folds, I reach out to the endless bureaucratic databases, find the appropriate forms. Mihue Siwan Hadallar, twenty-eight years old, from Shorwald. An advanced degree in Applied Clairvoyance and the appropriate licensure to match. The Clairvoyants’ Guild recognizing the documentation as equivalent . . . I skip forward and back, looking for something more personal, but something Mihue’s still open to disclosing. As a city, I can mobilize immense amounts of magic, but it’s not something I’d use to bear down on anyone.

They refer to themself in non-gendered terms, and I feel an instantaneous, intense relief. I have to stop myself, turn inward, examine why.

Mihue

The city reaches out to me, without words at first, leaning on the symbolism common to most peoples of the Seven Lands: the circle divided into four, four gates, two main thoroughfares—or rivers? The schematic comes without explanation. The four quarters are of equal size, and this reminds me of how schemata like this one can obscure difference on one hand, inequality on the other.

I’ll have time to contemplate this later, for instance when my neighbor continues her rant from yesterday about how the people like me drive down property values. Did she go to the demonstration, I wonder. I force my mind to grow still.

Someone is looking for me. The city, but—who is the city? Who am I, for that matter?

I focus on the circle, keep the symbol firmly in my thoughts. Then I pose my question.

Fejértorony

Who am I? I chatter. I’m Fejértorony, formerly known as . . . Let’s not get into that. I had ample magic even before, but I’m not educated (not like you), this is one of those things one can truly only learn on the job. You become the city; there you have it. Sorry, I tend to snap at people. Most of my conversations are with paper-pushers.

The city called me, before I was the city. It happens like that. I said yes, I could’ve said no, but then—what then? I’d already been resigned to a life of always searching for the next wealthy patron who’d fund my studies, even before they’d really started. I’m not bitter—all right, maybe just a little. And this gave me an answer to the question I had, about myself, identity, whatnot.

Now, knowledge is like so many little bricks—I build them into myself. I was human five, six years ago; now, who knows? I’m massive and emotionally immature. Welcome to me. I mean you no harm.

Mihue

I didn’t expect the city to be fun. I smile to myself. Fun and—I search for the right word—comfortable? Sometimes two minds fit together well, and this is a relief, because I want to settle down here and apply for permanent residency as soon as I can. Even considering my neighbor and her comrades, anti-Zhau sentiments don’t run as high here as up North, do they? I can certainly get used to the weather, too. The atmosphere.

I hold our makeshift shared space in my mind, and gently, slowly rise to my feet. I look out the window, witness the towers, the housing blocks, a swirling mass of architectural styles and time periods. Layer upon layer upon layer. Fejértorony is beautiful.

I’ve also always been uncomfortable with my body, but the way I deal with the discomfort is to ignore it, move away from physicality. Everything is always at a one-step remove. I look plain, my haircut is plain, my thick braid hanging flat against my back and smoothing my curls onto my head is plain. Here, I look and sound like a foreigner, so maybe the citizens of Fejértorony will ignore even my plainness, only see me as a representative of a group they know little about: the Zhau. I wonder if I’ll keep wearing the clairvoyants’ robes, for the invisibility they might afford. Being only seen as my office, or as a nebulously defined outsider, might be better than being seen for myself and still disregarded.

I always felt I wasn’t doing gender right, that I should be more flamboyant, and I sometimes even feel resentment for those who are, those who can?

But Fejértorony can, and is, even without a body, even having a city for a body. I don’t know why I share these achingly personal feelings, when I should by all rights experience resentment, but there is something within us that clicks together. We are alike.

Fejértorony

Being seen like that. Being seen, period. Not by gruff elderly mages and municipal officials who each want me to maximize something. Throughput! Processing capability! Sewage outflow! Road repairs!

No, being seen for myself. For my strange and offbeat self, now well-hidden behind medieval facades. Being appreciated?

Mihue is going for a walk. With me. Keeping me in mind. In their mind.

I see everything, within the city and its environs, but now they also see me, and I see myself reflected in them. I see what they see, because they let me, they let me in.

They like the annoying birds that are chirping and flapping and generally being in people’s face. They think the birds are cute. A few years here and that’ll pass. I suppress a laugh. I see more of Mihue than they see of me, but there is so much more of me.

I long to be seen like that; never thought of it as a possibility.

Mihue

I keep up the contemplative frame, gently share my awareness with the city. A thought flits through me that I would like to have the reverse somehow, allow them to share their awareness with me. It would be overwhelming. I’m not a city—not even a library or a regional archive. Should I be? I prefer to remain small—I can’t even conceptualize what it’d be like to increase to such a size.

I walk, and the moment extends longer and longer, for as long as I can hold the connection. I’m not used to doing so, and even when I don’t feel I’m spending much effort, all of a sudden the exhaustion hits me and I have to apologize, distance myself, allow the magic to gently dissipate.

I find myself sitting on a bench, with a gap in my memories, unsure of how I got there. I’ll need to work up my endurance, I think, and then immediately question myself—why would I need to do that? For what reason, what end goal?

Belonging? Companionship? Some kind of feeling that is just beyond my reach, but that I can sense waiting for me around the next corner; so I get up and begin to walk.

Something draws me somewhere, as if I were pulled along on an invisible thread. I pass through tiny, meandering little streets, tangled alleyways. Pigeons and grime, scribbles on peeling paint. I stop for a moment to look; I can speak most languages of three of the Seven Lands, but reading takes an effort. LOVE IS A DELIGHT SURPASSING ALL—I don’t understand the next word—IN PROPORTION, I muddle through the words, muttering them to myself. A quote from a poem, or song lyrics perhaps? I get out my notebook and write it down. The notebook is for my clairvoyant impressions, but it will serve. I can’t think of when I last used it for another purpose.

I walk on; another corner, another set of graffiti. Someone is cursing out the King. I’m assuming lèse-majesté is not taken very seriously anymore, or is it? In any case, the words are unremarkable, not particularly poetic—not even in an offbeat found-poetry sense.

Then something that makes me reach into my sidebag again: CURSE THE CONSTRUCTION SACRIFICE—and then below, with the same handwriting—DON’T BELIEVE A WORD OF CONSENT. What does this mean?

Then, finally, a sentence about my people and how the Zhau are responsible for all the world’s ills. I avert my eyes—did I think I would escape this here?—, but note down the rest. CURSE THE CONSTRUCTION SACRIFICE. It has a magical resonance, but something defiant, aggressive. A construction sacrifice sounds like a bad thing, so cursing it would ostensibly be good, but then what is this uncomfortable feeling in my stomach? I’m already anticipating this to be blamed on me, too, even when I’m not sure what it is.

I turn away from the wall, hasten my pace.

Fejértorony

I’m no longer close to Mihue mentally, and I don’t force the connection. I wouldn’t. But I do follow their steps. They’re back in District VII and reading the various nasty remarks on the walls. I wanted to isolate them from this, I really did, but I also know it’s impossible.

We’ll have to be in this together.

The construction sacrifice. As for consent, I have my memories. Some people really can’t believe one’d do something entirely voluntarily. My memories I can always share; and I realize I’m already assuming Mihue would ask.

Mihue

I reach a small square and breathe a sigh of relief. I’ve been watching my back ever since I read that last line. Do I look Zhau? I must, even with my hair tied tightly back. My grandmother always warned me, and she had rich experience to back up her protectiveness. Suddenly everything appears in a different light, even the birds themselves.

There is a single plane tree in the middle of the square, concrete poured all around it. There’s also another bench, and I sit to hide my shaking. The sun is canting toward evening in the sky, though I can’t see much of it, surrounded by multi-story buildings. Mostly blocks of apartments, I think, but there’s some kind of utility building in the middle, made of plain Modernist brick. I can’t make out the sign by the entrance, and my curiosity overcomes my nerves as I get up again, walk closer.

CITY OF FEJÉRTORONY

MAINTENANCE

SERVICE BUILDING

This doesn’t tell me much. I lower my gaze, disappointed, when I notice that each brick below has a letter chalked onto it.

C—U—R—S—E—I know how this is going, and indeed. CURSE THE CONSTRUCTION SACRIFICE.

Mercifully, the other sentences are missing; but someone notices my attempts at reading and stops right next to me. I wince.

“Not from here, are you.” It’s more of a statement than a question, delivered in a frustrated baritone. “I’m your man.”

I shake my head, afraid to respond in words, afraid to see my accent reflected in the stranger’s scowl.

“I’d avoid this place if I were you.”

This place, meaning Fejértorony? This neighborhood? This small square? I want to ask, but he clarifies it right away.

“This building right here, a curse is laid upon it.” He turns around, spits over his shoulder. “Cursed thrice, for deliberate murder. Yet another thing the Zhau have imposed upon us.”

I startle. He didn’t realize I was Zhau? I nod, try to force firmness into my voice. “How so?” I ask, desperate to keep him talking, because while he talks, he won’t try to hurt me. I feel devoid of magic, wrung out, unable to protect myself. I should’ve taken precautions.

“This Zhau custom of killing someone to keep the city going. It’s evil,” he says.

What Zhau custom? I can’t think of anything even remotely similar. “Who was killed?” I ask instead.

“This young man. Woman? I’m not sure. They killed him. Her. Them. To keep the city going. Just like they do every couple of hundred years.” He pauses. “The roots of corruption reach deep.”

I realize the man is drunk, not on alcohol, but on something else that’s not scenting his breath.

I murmur something I hope doesn’t sound foreign. I excuse myself. I try not to break into a run, I try. “Hey, you,” he yells after me, but I’ve already turned a corner, and it’s as if the alleyways themselves are shielding me from view, bending over me.

Fejértorony

I follow Mihue with my gaze as they stagger homeward, shaking from fear. I want to talk to them. I want to speak. Why them? There are 18743 trans people within my boundaries, and I honestly like most of them. Why Mihue? We have much in common, but just as many differences. I grew up here. I tend toward the flamboyant, not the hiding. Why do I feel we need to talk? Do we need to talk, or is it only me? I need to talk.

I don’t have any humanoid platforms, never felt the need to have them. But now I need something. I take control of Titanium Raven 4, aerial mobile platform, bird. Some birds are real.

I’m the city, yes, and now I’m also the raven soaring above it. I circle. Mihue is asleep. I wait.

Mihue

I wake in the morning, wash and dress, my limbs sluggish. Just how much magic did yesterday take? I rub my face over and over again, but nothing banishes the woozy, mushy feeling. I am grateful I have this day off; some pipe burst while they were digging and now everyone’s busy with the cleanup. The potsherds can wait.

I’m munching on my breakfast of porridge with some smoked fish, poking at my food without eating more than strictly necessary. A crow alights on my windowsill just as I finish and rise to wash out my bowl. An enormous crow—no, a raven—an enormous raven. It knocks on the glass, eerily purposefully. I reach out and expand my awareness; but it’s not a magical creature, it’s a robot of some kind. A mobile platform, I think they call them here. It’s only slightly terrifying. It looks like something intended for warfare.

I open the window. “Are you . . .?” The city, yes. This relaxes me somewhat.

“I thought this would be easier. Less of a demand on your magic,” the enormous raven says. Then, “I just wanted to talk.”

I put my bowl back down. This should feel like an imposition, but somehow it doesn’t. I wanted to ask the city about a variety of things, from the mysterious cursed building to . . . It suddenly strikes me that the pipe burst might have been purposeful. I sit, lean back in my chair. A breeze ruffles the curtains by the open window.

Fejértorony

Mihue doesn’t ask me the questions I can feel they want to ask. This would be annoying, except we’re having a great time. I haven’t talked to anyone like this in a while, I wasn’t even sure I still could. Nothing work-related. I feel human, I mean, as much as I can get. Somehow I can feel human without giving up anything else, without giving up cityness. Something deep inside me wants to flail and jump, reaching toward the sky. Yes!!

“Ach!” Mihue grimaces. “I should’ve washed out the bowl, now the porridge has all dried into it. I’ll have to soak it . . .” They look around, as if awakening from a dream. I’ve kept my mental distance, but I feel—longing? They shake their head. “Let’s deal with this later, what do you think about going for a walk? I mean you’re everywhere, but I can take your um, mobile platform for a walk.” Do they sound more awkward than they were supposed to sound?

I’m glad to go. The raven’s a bit unwieldy, so I’m not following them into the building. I wait for them to prepare and walk down the stairwell, step outside.

“You have something a . . . like a nerve center, yes? We could walk there, if you don’t mind,” they ask. They don’t know?

“You were there yesterday,” I say.

They do a double-take. “The cursed building? . . . Oh, I don’t mean it that way. I mean, that’s just what that guy called it. I didn’t really understand that, I’ve been meaning to ask . . .”

I don’t want to share this conversation with passers-by. “I have many secrets like that,” I say in Zhau, and they can’t even brace for that after the first shock.

“You’re Zhau?” they switch too.

“My mother is, yes.” Am I willing to commit to more? I always feel so inauthentic. Or? “Well, I guess that counts.” I can’t believe I said that. Now that I’ve sorted out the difficulty of my body, my other aspects also feel less anxiety-inducing? My first personal conversation in years and I didn’t expect this is how it’d go.

“So what’s this with the curse, is that related?” they ask.

This isn’t going to get any easier. If only the raven could shudder.

“Related, yes, but not the way people expect?”

Mihue

My head is spinning. I have to sit down on a concrete block that looks like a ship’s mooring, except it’s in the middle of the city. The block is comfortingly warm to the touch; I take a deep breath. “So let me see if I got it right. There are people who are some kind of . . . political extremists. And they say that this custom of having people run the city has been imported from abroad, and it’s wrong.”

“Yes, they say it’s all because of the Zhau.” The robotic raven speaks with natural inflections, but doesn’t make the corresponding gestures. I feel like I’m supposed to think this odd, but I find it relatable.

I go on. “So the evil foreign Zhau ostensibly sacrifice young, hale and hearty locals to run the city . . . These folks don’t realize you’re Zhau, do they.”

“They don’t know anything about me.” The vehemence comes across even through the raven—and also through the rustle of the decorative bushes planted in front of the apartment building across from us, from the way the air twists and turns. “They don’t know anything. . . I wanted to do this. Become the city.”

I nod. Being at cross-purposes with the body, I know that all too well. “And it feels good,” I say. “Better.” That I don’t know, I’m just risking a guess.

“Better, yes, but I had to give up a lot.”

“Having a human body?” Guesses after guesses. I feel on unstable ground, I can’t extrapolate any further from my own experiences. I’ve never been a city.

“No, I . . . That . . . I . . .”

They fall silent.

I wait it out. The breeze twirls.

“You’re the first person who’s had a . . . conversation with me in a long while.”

“Would you like me to share my body a bit? I had to practice that a lot in college.” I don’t add that I wasn’t terribly good at it in college; clairvoyance was always my strong suit.

“Thank you, but . . . That’s not what I gave up. I gave up . . . Being considered human? It’s a tradeoff.”

All of a sudden the feeling, their feeling hits me: they want to be closer to me, but they don’t know how to achieve that, don’t even know if it’s possible. We’ve even kept our magical distance. I turn my head away from the raven, but the city is everywhere.

I slowly stand. “Let’s keep walking,” I offer, to break the silence, the unease.

Fejértorony

They can’t really see me, or, they see me already. I’m all around. I don’t know why the building is so important. But it’s important to me too, not just to Mihue. I think I want to share something intimate. Maintenance, service building—all I can offer.

I open the door.

Mihue

I step inside and everything is surprisingly well-lit; I expected something murky, spooky, but this magic is strong enough to abide observation. The door closes behind me, but I don’t startle.

The raven totters beside me, like a large metallic dog. The shape is unsuited to walking, but the space is unsuited to flight.

The walls are covered with plain white tile, but tendrils tie themselves into the cracks between them, run along the walls in large sweeping arcs. They are bluish-greenish-yellow-orange-red; they shift, shimmer, and I can’t quite pin down their color. They remind me of the roots of a tree, the tendrils of a plant, the nerves and tendons of an animal. The similarity goes beyond homology, analogy, convergent development; it appears to me as if all were truly one, everything manifestations of a unitary underlying whole.

Is this what the ancients meant about the tree of life?

I run my fingers along the tiles, not quite daring to touch the tendrils out of a fear of disturbing them. I walk at a slow, even pace, and the substance on the walls and the ceiling thickens until the tiles are entirely obscured. Two yellow lines run on the floor, a demarcation of some kind, and I walk in the plain, bare flooring between them; the same kind of tiles as on the walls, but with an undulating sawtooth pattern, I’m assuming to increase grip. The ambient magic feels thicker and thicker, to the point where I become simultaneously uneasy about breathing it in, and can’t even think of not breathing it in.

The raven’s creaky voice breaks the spell. “I don’t have a body anymore besides this. This isn’t my body, even—the city is my body. I just wanted to . . .”

They fall silent for so long, I involuntarily reach out through the magic—and I feel the fabric of reality itself shudder around me for an instant.

“They don’t believe me, but you, you’ll believe me,” the raven whispers. “Can I show you?”

“Please.” My lips feel numb. “Please do.”

Fejértorony

I show them my memories. They don’t hurt; the disbelief hurts. A million voices repeating How could you have done this to yourself and sometimes the same people who’d gladly rely on me for anything.

But the voices start later.

There’s the moment when it first hits me, walking down Liliom Avenue at around two in the morning and there are very few people about. The streetlights are a warm yellow, unlike in the next neighborhood over, where they are a sharp, biting white. That thought makes me think of the city, its patchwork nature, but with an organizing principle behind it. And this is what connects me to the principle, to the city behind the principle, the generations-old mind.

The mind aging past the boundary of life, seeking a replacement.

The city folding out from one point, like multidimensional petals around me, and I see—I experience.

It ends in an instant, but in the next breath I already miss it.

There’s that moment I knock on the door of a nondescript utility building in inner-city Fejértorony. The left sleeve of my shirt is soaked because a bird had pooped on it and I tried to wash the stain off in a fountain. I feel ridiculous. I find myself welcomed.

There is the light, light neverending. Stretching out in all directions—it’s not a cessation of discomfort, but I feel that too—expanding, further—

“You need to incorporate more variables into the traffic analysis,” the engineer says.

I hasten to update his readout. “Everything below the line accounts for 0.5% or less variance,” I say, a trifle annoyed.

He notices. “What’s going on, something stuck in your sewer pipes? Are you busy?” He laughs, like an empty barrel resounding. I don’t need this—I don’t need to dedicate this much awareness to this interaction. Not when I’m still sharing it with—

Mihue

I get both the highs and the lows; Fejértorony shares it all with me. There is the mind-expanding rush of being city, all at once, even when I’m not really able to assimilate it, let alone process it much with my human senses. And then there’s this engineer guy with the black mustache he keeps on tugging, while he’s making jokes in bad taste and with supreme self-satisfaction. The everyday of being city. There’s only a taste of everything, but this in itself is sufficient to unsettle the foundations of my mind.

Yes, it feels good, amidst all the uprooted concepts tossed into the air and raining back down. I don’t understand, and I thought I understood at least myself, but now even that is disrupted, and I’m not clear on what will take its place; only that it will be exciting, it will be like stepping out into the light. It will be the opposite of this hiding, this hoping no one will notice me—and yet being able to hide even better, transparent to observation, laying out my entire body for all to see. Do streetlights count as exhibitionism? In any case, they should at the very least match.

Suddenly, another realization: if I were city, I would be aware of much more, I would be aware of the layers upon layers of my history . . . I think of the municipal government, and its bottomless desire to claim the past as a justification of its present. I would be aware of my history, and I would not hand it over. Not indiscriminately. Not to those in power.

I feel ashamed of my work, using what little magic I have at my disposal to dig up a potsherd someone will use as a political argument against people like me. Immigrants? People of nebulous, undecided, non-normative genders? Zhau?

“I understand what you’re doing,” I whisper into the charged air. “Fejértorony. I thought I also understood why. The desire to let go of this human shape . . . But there’s more to it, at the same time.”

I don’t say the words, but I think them so clearly that the distinction matters little in this environment: Our existence disrupts the norms. But there’s more to it than that. We can work toward something new, something liberating in more senses than one. Living and thriving and helping others thrive.

I know I won’t even need to give up my treasured invisibility for that. I lower my head—am I crying? And back to words, almost as hoarse as the robotic raven: “Thank you for showing this to me.”

I don’t know how to say it, even in my thoughts, but I feel it—the love felt toward me, that I’m only happy to reciprocate, and relish in this newfound mutuality, this brightness ever-extending—

Then as I’m walking back along the long corridor, slowly, with measured steps, someone breaks open the door.

Fejértorony

You know that feeling when you finally find out what you wanted all along, and then right away, the whole entire world goes like no, you can’t have that?

That.

And you know that other feeling where it hits you that something you’ve deliberately not done is coming back to bite you in the ass and you’re like, maybe I should rethink my life plans except fast, because those guys, they have torches?

Yeah, no.

Maybe I should’ve spied more on people. Then I wouldn’t have been caught unawares. I suspected, sure, I can read the graffiti. Curse the construction sacrifice and all that.

Can it be like . . . you know, in our holy texts there is this story about this one dude who’s hired to curse the enemy, and then he goes to look, and blesses them instead?

This isn’t going to turn out like that.

Mihue

I have a pocket knife, simply because it’s handy to have, and I confess I always have the possibility at the back of my thoughts that I’ll need to frighten someone away from my body one day.

I think we’ve arrived at that day, so I draw the knife and try to stand in a stance that’s at least somewhat threatening. There is enough ambient magic here for me to cause direct harm, but I’ve never trained in the spellwork of combat, and I also don’t know if I’d like to have that on my conscience. Killing someone with a knife is bad enough, even if in self-defense, but killing someone with magic is somehow worse than that—it’s a kind of sacrilege, taking life away with what should in regular circumstances give and sustain life.

Of course, this mob doesn’t leave me a chance to follow through with my internal argument.

It was a welcome thought at first that I was the only one in the building, alone and together with the city, with Fejértorony—but now this makes me a target as I stand face to face with three broad-shouldered invaders.

“Zhau, eh,” one groans at me, or at one of his fellows?

The air shivers.

“They’re here to do another sacrifice,” another of them nods briskly. “Look, with a knife.”

Why do they have torches? Surely they wouldn’t expect complete darkness in here. Fire as a threat?

“What should we do with this one?” The third waves a torch at me. Definitely as a threat.

I can’t think of anything to say in my defense. I’m not here to do any sacrifice and there was no victim in any case. People volunteer to become city. But from their perspective—and I can almost touch their thoughts, with so much magic; their unspoken words tremble on my tongue—they expected something monstrous in here, and the Zhau carrying out the deed, with a sacrificial knife, or something else that’s sufficiently sharp. They found this; they found me.

There has been no sacrifice, Fejértorony says, directly, not through the raven; and the ground shakes with the force of their words, with the magnitude of their presence. I’m here of my own will.

“Lies! Trickery!” an invader shouts, and all of them push forward, more of them behind the three, with torches and sticks and clubs and does any of them have a—

The raven flies into the crowd. The attackers scream, try to scatter, but there’s no room, and the walls—

The walls themselves flare up with a surfeit of magic, but one of the invaders tries to fight the glow with real physical fire—rapid oxidation, the expression pops into my head—and rapid it is, where the torch meets the wall, where the burning snakes along the tendrils, the scream, the scream echoing in my head—

I swing forward, knife all but forgotten, grabbing ahold of all the magic and yanking, yanking as if I could yank the ground itself from under their feet, fighting like a dragon the way I would never fight for my own self, fighting finally having found a purpose, fighting screaming and the fire burns, it burns not only the city but also me, that revolting smell of hair on fire, that revolting smell of I cannot pause I cannot allow myself to become distracted.

There has been no construction sacrifice, but there has been a curse, I am the curse, the revenge for everything every biting remark every slur scraped onto brickwork and smeared across stone, every swinging fist.

I drive them out of the building, by myself, the raven an inert heap of metal, my mind in tatters, my skin I cannot, I know if I start paying attention to my body it will all slip away from me.

I don’t think any of them are dead, even though I should, I really should.

I slam the door shut.

Behind me, further in, rain is falling from the ceiling, fog is rising from the walls. The fire subsides. Why is there such a need of body?

Maybe there isn’t, I think, and with that I lose my balance, fall endlessly fall.

Fejértorony

.

Mihue

I come to later. I’m outside time. Outside sense and reason. I drag myself inward, toward the light. Toward that sense of belonging, relation, toward love. On floor tiles cracked from heat and agony.

There is need, yes, but there is also understanding.

I could stop here. Let go of the needless body.

I go on. Crawling, stumbling.

.

.

.

Fire has ravaged the inner sanctum. Light, life-giving light, life-taking light.

Yet Fejértorony is alive. Life pulsates in the walls. I’m alive. Forehead to a broken tile, breath erratic, heartbeat—

.

A belonging I sense just beyond. The kinship that arises from understanding; the understanding that arises from kinship.

I float, sink, merge into the floor, body slip-sliding into the cracks in the tiles. I reach out.

Fejértorony

The newfound. This. Wordlessnesses that call out to me, tendon and nerve.

Hands reach. I reach back.

Mihue

The world spins.

Fejértorony

Imitative musical counterpoint. I lose grip on being, on extent—mine, theirs, yours.

When you finally find out what you wanted all along, who you wanted—and why—

The similarity of our minds lends itself to a joining.

Mihue

I come to much later; I could say that arms embrace me and warm breath flutters the unruly strands of hair that have escaped from my braid. Except I have no braid and they have no arms. I struggle to orient myself. Breath is a sense of the wind moving through weather stations. My heartbeat the flow of traffic. I share but not share all this with Fejértorony, the city—for I am the city too, but I am not them. We are two minds to the same sensory layout.

You can call me Shamru, they whisper, and I hear that little hesitation before their name that tells me this is a name recently chosen. Maybe in this very instant.

My body is out there somewhere, tendrils from the walls sliding into it while my blood seeps into the cracks between the tiles, my own homemade construction sacrifice. My eyes are closed, my limbs numb. Yet instead of feeling less, I feel more. The body dissipates, gives way to something gigantic.

What was it Shamru said, aeons ago? About the need to grow into more compute? I didn’t even understand the term. Now I can see the need, feel it. How can a lack of body be so tactile? Instead of nothing, everything is up close. Instead of no body, everything is body.

Instead of being alone . . .

Shamru

Let’s not merge. It would be easy. But this way it’s better—as long as there’s some separation between us, there’s interaction, and . . .

I’ll have to say it, one way or another, right?

There is love.

Right? We can be city together.

Mihue

Something spins in me. Be city, yes; be together, yes; but—together, like this? A city for them? For the people who attacked with torches and knives and clubs and claimed I was the invader, I was the murderer? For the municipality who looked the other way, maybe even encouraged them?

Together it’s easier, Shamru whispers, and something between our minds slides aside and I know that this is what they were trying to protect me from. And also, the knowledge that once you’re more easily seen, you’re also more easily hurt. In your body or outside of it.

While I slumbered, the municipality was frantically trying to find the right spin, trying to damage-control. As the politics churn on, two confused engineers poke at my body, my previous body, trying to see if they can peel it away from the floor.

I’m not there anymore, I say, experimentally, my voice detaching from the walls and floating, floating. The engineers look as if they’ve seen a ghost, but I’ve never been more alive.

I’ll need to catch up on the news. Together, I whisper back to Shamru, just between the two of us. Not everything is for engineers’ ears.

My perspective wobbles; the frames I’ve built inside myself rotate, twist inside out.

Together it’s easier, I repeat Shamru’s words

your words,

and we can do it, we can live, we have centuries ahead of us and we can grow: apart, together, separately, joined, in as many configurations of city as have existed or will come into being blossoming from our minds—

One city, two cities, four and a half cities, a metropolis, villages, centralized, decentralized, dense, sprawling, welcoming, welcoming, welcoming—

a perspective centuries deep opens in front of me.

Together, I tell you, in love.

Endnote:

The story is, in a very abstract way, inspired by the traditional Hungarian murder ballad “Kelemen the Stonemason” featuring the folkloric theme of the construction sacrifice.

I first read about the link between the theme of the construction sacrifice and that of antisemitic blood libel in Attila Pejin’s article “Vérvád és építőáldozat” published in Hacofe, the quarterly journal of the Budapest Jewish Theological Seminary—University of Jewish Studies. (Available at bit.ly/3kTcgWq.)

©2023 by Bogi Takács.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bogi Takács (e/em/eir/emself or they pronouns) is a Hungarian Jewish author, editor, and critic who’s an immigrant to the US. Bogi has won the Lambda and Hugo awards, and has been a finalist for other awards. Eir debut short story collection The Trans Space Octopus Congregation was released in 2019, and eir second collection, Power to Yield and Other Stories, is coming soon. You can find Bogi on various social media as bogiperson.

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

When the Giants Came Through the Valley

Derrick Boden | 1511 words

When the giants came through the valley, they made footprints as long as the Santa Monica Promenade, as wide as Dodgers’ Stadium. They crushed dance studios, keto cafes, a waterpark. They left trails of steep-sided ravines with walls of stratified clay and crumbling asphalt, and this is where we now live. Sunset comes earlier down here, but it could be worse.

Our footprint is deep and arid and full of retooled strip malls. We dwell in the remains of Foot Lockers and tiki bars, tag our names out front in bold blue letters. Lazy Stan, Carmencita, Hot Hot Henri. We didn’t all live here, before the giants came through. We’re a product of collective chance. Grinding out another two-hour commute, heading for happy hour at The Village after working another double, the third this week. Some of us still have homes topside, in buildings the giants happened to miss. But that’s neither here nor there. The footprint is our home, now.

No two footprints are the same. Ours doesn’t have much going for it, aside from a surprisingly fertile heel wall. Good for growing grapes, which has come in handy considering how the airdrops never include any wine. A few footprints down, they struck oil. Bleeding through the cracks in that old giant’s sole stamp. Most people topside say the footprints are a blemish, an embarrassment. Not that one. Excavators moved in overnight, kicked everyone out.

The grapes are our little secret.

• • • •

When the giants came through the valley, they shed all manner of alien creatures. Land-crawling octopuses shaken from the hairs of their feet, huge spiders jettisoned from their vast dreadlocks. Razor-toothed frogs that are ninety-percent mouth.

They scuttled about in a daze, like us, before aggressively laying claim to whatever residence they could find. The dusty asphalt crags of a basketball court, the ethernet-cable jungle of a ruined server farm. Most of them are herbivores, lucky us. Tomas took it upon himself to sort out which ones weren’t. He had a good run; we’re thankful for his contributions.

Topsiders have a rule. Anything that breaches the surface that isn’t human, kill it. Down here, though, it’s live and let live. Sure, the critters aren’t always pleasant, but who can blame them? They’re just like us, clinging to some dispassionate monolith our whole lives because we’re all too scared to let go, even as it stomps and stomps and stomps on everything we’ve ever known. Until finally, through exhaustion or the sheer loss of will, we just can’t hold on anymore.

So we let go.

• • • •

When the giants came through the valley, they caught everyone unaware. Where did they come from? The Moon? Mars? Bakersfield? Did they rise from an age-old slumber deep within the crust of the earth?

Perhaps we’ll never know.

The governor deployed the national guard, but it was too little, too late. By the time the Harriers howled in with their little-man braggadocio, the giants were gone. They marched straight into the Pacific Ocean without ever looking back, until all we could see—those of us with any view at all—were the forested tops of their heads. Then a ripple of sea foam.

And then nothing.

• • • •

When the giants came through the valley, they left pieces of us behind.

Benny was a customer service associate at a telecom company, where he’d worked for twelve years and had been passed up for promotion twelve times. He didn’t have that spark, they explained to him. He made two dollars above minimum wage, lived in a loft by the docks where he kept old takeout containers on hand to catch the drips from the ceiling when it rained, which was never frequent enough to warrant the landlord’s attention. He’d never been late for a shift and had never taken a vacation. On his last day of work, the day the giants came through, he’d been called a money-grubbing cockswallow, a capitalist goon, and a script-reading dickwreath. On none of these occasions had he deviated from his list of approved responses. When he looked at himself in the mirror that morning, he still couldn’t find that spark.

• • • •

When the giants came through the valley, they left two kinds of survivors. Evacuees, and everyone else. They airlifted the first lot within the week. The rest of us, well.

News crews periodically buzz down in their helicopters. They think this thing we’re doing is a movement. Living low, they call it. And us, lowlifes. They seem desperate for us to buy into the notion, to justify what would otherwise be madness.

They always ask the same questions.

“Why are you still down here?”

“You know you don’t have to stay, right?”

We offer assorted reasons. Lower rent, fewer sunburns, no parking tickets. But it’s all bullshit, and the reporters leave wearing the grimaces of beleaguered parents.

So why are we still down here?

Politicians watch the news with an ear for worst-case scenarios; pretty soon movement starts to sound an awful lot like protest. They talk a lot about waiting us out and breaking us up. But what is it they think we’re protesting? And how could this possibly help?

Some developers put together a plan to fill in the footprints with sand from Palmdale, cover them in glass domes, turn them into high-end novelty spas. Maybe someday they’ll have their way. Until then, we accept our monthly airdrop of rations graciously, though we don’t really need it. Shayna’s garden is a thing of wonder, and it turns out the eggs from those razor-toothed frogs are pretty tasty with a little salt.

What we’re doing, I suppose, is living. Just a little farther down.

• • • •

Jaime was a middle manager at an insurance company where he averaged sixty-hour weeks. His job was to deny claims; a single approved claim would cost him his entire monthly bonus. His boss punched down, so Jaime did the same, because that’s how you get ahead, and getting ahead is the dream. Besides, he was doing his team a solid—keeping them productive, keeping them employed. With the right amount of pressure, Trish might get that raise. Rama might finally make assistant manager. And boy, would they ever thank Jaime when they did.

Jaime had been smoking more every day. It was an expensive habit, sure, but it helped with the stress, and he earned a bonus after all. By the time the giants came through, he was up to three packs a day. He took his smoke breaks in the back alley, where they tossed the shredded remains of incriminating paper trails into big green dumpsters. Until, on that particular morning a few hours before the giants came through, when he stepped outside and promptly tripped over Rama, who happened to be lying facedown in a sticky morass of his own blood. The body looked deflated from the ten-story jump that had pulped his bones.

• • • •

When the giants came through the valley, they never once looked down. Did they even know we were here? Did they care? Were we that inevitable trail of ants, trampled on the way to the beach? Or was this a deliberate act?

Some survivors prayed it was malicious. Better to be spurned than ignored. Those were the survivors who left.

The ones who stayed, we know better. Giants rarely spare a thought for what’s underfoot.

• • • •

Anna cobbled shifts at three dishwashing gigs to make rent, kept her garnished tips in a coffee tin under her bed because she couldn’t get a bank account ever since her ex-husband wrote those bad checks to pay off his gambling debts. Three years later, she’d saved enough for a flight to Guatemala to visit her mother in hospice. On her way to the bank for a money order, the day before the giants came through, LAPD pulled her over. When she handed the officer her documents, his cold blue eyes lingered on the cash that plumped her wallet. He noticed a discrepancy with her immigration papers, brought her to precinct. Eight hours later, he let her go. The money in her wallet was gone. Her mother passed the next morning.

The night after the giants came through, we huddled around a barrel fire outside the pitted remains of a once-hip boba cafe, a host of alien creatures scuttling madly beyond the shadows. Tiny flames pitted Anna’s brooding eyes.

She folded her hands neatly in her lap, and said, “I’m done.”

There were nods all around.

• • • •

When the giants came through the valley, they left us all behind. What a cruel trick. None of us thought to grab hold and hang on. Where would we have ended up, if we had? Surely someplace better, we thought at the time.

Now, months later, as we sit around the barrel fire that has become our town hall, we harbor no such thoughts. We’re not interested in the worlds of giants. We’re lowlifes, and we always keep an eye on where we step.

©2023 by Derrick Boden.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Derrick Boden’s fiction has appeared and is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Apex Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a writer, a software developer, an adventurer, and a graduate of the Clarion West class of 2019. He currently calls Boston his home, although he’s lived in fourteen cities spanning four continents. He is owned by two cats and one iron-willed daughter. Find him at derrickboden.com and on Twitter as @derrickboden.

The House, the Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks

Amanda Helms | 1587 words

The house wakes from its somnolence as the witch trudges up the path made of tarts. Through its rock-candy windows, the house scans her figure for any signs of hurt. The witch’s errands in the city make her nervous. And the house, being made of her magic and therefore of the witch, worries along with her that the wrong person might recognize her, or simply think they do. “They say Creoles all look alike,” she’s said, bitter.

It astounds the house, that the witch could be mistaken for any other but herself. That someone could fail to identify her tightly coiling black hair, her agate eyes, her russet skin as the witch’s, and the witch’s alone.

Her hair remains neatly tucked under her wrap. In a basket, balanced against her hip, she carries a basket full of linen bags. Flour and sugar. Though her steps are weary, she’s not limping. A successful outing, then.

Pleased she’s safe, the house opens its front door and rolls out a rug of pie pastry.

“Thank you, House,” the witch says, and walks in, letting the house close its door behind her.

Despite the muggy heat that makes the house’s pecan praline shingles stick together, the witch doesn’t roll up her sleeves till she’s set her basket on the single molasses-cake table. With a groan, she lifts her skirt to perch on a stool made of brioche. She pulls off her boots, wriggles her toes in their stockings, and frowns.

The house flares its brazier in question.

“Ran into someone I knew once, while I was in the city. Got a decision to make, now.” She grimaces. “I keep thinking we oughta leave New Orleans.” She doesn’t go into why, but from the witch’s dreams, the house already knows. She presses a hand flat to the brioche wall. “Hide for now, yes?”

It does. It’s made of sugar and magic, after all; and like sugar in a glass of water, it appears to dissolve into nothing, but it’s still there, just too fine to see.

• • • •

When the house wakes next, the witch is on its roof, prizing off a pecan praline shingle. Once it’s loose, rum jelly oozes, filling in the naked spot. Though another praline will grow back by morning, the house rattles its tartelette shutters and puffs a clot of meringue from the chimney.

“Hush, now. I’ve decided.” The witch gives it a pat and plucks a few more pralines. “We’re gonna have some company.”

Displeased, the house blows out more meringue.

“Never you mind.”

The witch scurries down the brioche siding, then strides toward the swamp, where towering cypress trees grow, where sometimes the witch has to hiss the secret words to send away an alligator or cottonmouth. The only words she whispers now are those directing the river where to take the pralines and what they should say when they arrive.

The house watches anxiously as the witch returns. It knows she can take care of herself—she wouldn’t have been able to create it if she couldn’t—but she also created it to keep her safe.

And now, she’s inviting strangers to come.

It could rattle its praline shingles and let some fall on her head, but considering what she’s just taken, the house thinks that’d rather miss the point.

As she goes inside, the witch pulls calas from the doorframe. Petulant, the house tries to hold it fast, but more rum jelly strings out as it comes free.

Alternating nibbles and hums, the witch stokes the fire for the oven. “Gonna need something special for our guests. Molasses cake, maybe?”

Beignets fall from the ceiling.

“Stop, House,” the witch says, sharp. “I know you’d like to keep me all to yourself, but I’m needed.” Yet her lips pucker, like she’s tasted spoiled jelly.

• • • •

It’s a bad night for the witch.

The house usually rests when the witch is away and when she sleeps. But now, it resists the pull of her slumber to keep vigil on her fitful dreams. The witch kicks off her blankets and cries out. The house struggles not to let the witch’s sleeping magic work its will. It fails. Sugarcane stalks erupt from the nougat floors.

In the morning, the witch wakes grim-faced, unshed tears pooling in her eyes. She hacks and yanks the stalks with such violence the rum jelly takes hours to stop flowing.

• • • •

The guests arrive by raft three nights later, a shuttered lantern lighting their way. The witch stands in the doorway as they come: one man as old as the witch, wearing a straw hat, his skin a couple shades darker than hers, and a young woman carrying a sleeping child. To judge from the tendrils slipping free of her wrap, the woman has dark brown hair in curls looser than the witch’s. Her skin is of a similar tone to the witch’s, as is her child’s.

Eyeing the calas and the nougat and the brioche with trepidation, the woman heads into the house with her child. Intending to corner the strangers, the house expands its brioche walls as if they were dough left to overrise.

Subtle-like, the witch kicks the doorframe. Mind your manners. “If you’re hungry, help yourself. House doesn’t bite.”

For the first time, it wishes it had teeth.

The woman nibbles handfuls of nougat and brioche. Her eyes widen, and with a smile she jostles her child. Yawning and rubbing her eyes, the girl eats some solemnly.

Though the girl scoops up rum jelly to suck off her fingers, the house keeps its attention mainly upon the witch and the older man, who, curiously, opens his arms for an embrace.

More curiously, the witch accepts.

“Very kind of you to do this,” the man says. “It’s just a night, then I’ll take ’em to the next station, and they’ll switch conductors.” A pause. “Will I find you again?”

The witch pauses longer. “Still deciding. A body gets used to being safe.”

The man—conductor—keeps his expression shuttered. “Well, we ’preciate whatever help you give, even if this’s the last.”

The witch remains silent. The house can’t help itself; it sighs out a satisfactory meringue.

A cough. “But—meaning no disrespect, Agnes—why’s your house like this?” The conductor gestures to the nougat, the beignets, some petite fours arrayed on a tray. In irritation, the house lets its nougat around the conductor’s feet melt. Grimacing, he lifts his feet to a less-sticky spot. “You made it. Couldn’t it be . . . different?”

Affronted, the house allows a stale beignet to fall on the conductor’s head. They’re a little harder than the fresh ones.

The man lets out a quiet oof while the witch purses her lips. She does not apologize for the beignet. “True, House could be anything I got a mind to cook or bake. Then maybe the sugarcanes—” She exhales, cheeks puffing out like popovers. “It might go easier on me, if I’d made House of something else. Cornbread and gator fritters, maybe.”

Her back straightens, and though the conductor is more than a foot taller than the witch, he slouches back. “But then I think, No. They took my home and my family from me. Everything. But this food, I made it mine, like House is mine. Stayed mine even when they made me go cut cane instead of cooking.” She lifts her chin as remembered fury, and fear, shadow her dark eyes into black. “They don’t get to take it, too.”

She relaxes, and the power that’d been crackling under the surface, set to grow like air bubbles in yeasted dough, relaxes with her. “’Sides, ain’t no pralines like mine this side of the Mississippi, or on the other either. You gonna tell me different?”

With a flash of white teeth, the conductor tips his hat. “Tastiest message I ever got. So, no, ma’am. I sure ain’t.”

• • • •

Yet for all her bravado, the witch’s conversation with the conductor must’ve shaken her. For it’s another sugarcane night.

The witch thrashes alone on her nougat bed while the stalks rise around her, forming a cage. The house thrashes with her, best it can. Nougat goes runny and beignets fall from the ceiling in a shower the house hopes will knock down the stalks. It’s forced to stop for fear of burying the witch.

The conductor scrambles up from the corner near the stove, where he’d been sleeping. “Agnes!” Trampling beignets underfoot, he shoves through the sugarcane, and does what the house could never do: he wakes the witch.

She’s weeping, and where her tears hit the nougat, they pearl into caramel. The man waves at the young woman and child, peering down from the loft where they slept. “I got this.”

He helps the witch out of the sugarcane cage, and together they remove the stalks. “I still dream about it too, sometimes,” he says when they’ve finished. “Habitation Haydel.”

The witch says nothing, but she squeezes his hand.

• • • •

Soon as nightfall comes again, the conductor and his passengers are on their way. The witch watches the swamp long after the light of their shuttered lantern fades from view.

The house considers.

It shimmies from its tartelette shutters, to its brioche siding, and finally to its roof.

The witch catches the praline in midair. “You know, I was thinking the same thing.”

The broadness of her smile makes the house’s fire blaze.

“Little company might be nice.”

©2023 by Amanda Helms.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amanda Helms (she/her) is a biracial Black/white fantasy, science fiction, and sometimes horror writer whose stories have appeared in FIYAH, Diabolical Plots, Fireside Fiction, and other fine venues. She lives with her family in Colorado. Though all of them are natives, none ski or snowboard, proving that such creatures indeed exist. When not reading or writing, she’s likely chasing after her toddler, cooing over cute puppy pictures, or thinking that she really should find more hobbies to list in her bio. She’s represented by Paul Lucas at Janklow & Nesbit. Find her at amandahelms.com and on Twitter and Instagram under @amandaghelms.

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

EXCERPT: The Ten Percent Thief (Solaris)

Lavanya Lakshminarayan | 882 words

Nothing has happened. Not yet, anyway. This is how all things begin.

Welcome to Apex City, formerly Bangalore, where everything is decided by the mathematically perfect Bell Curve.

With the right image, values and opinions, you can ascend to the glittering heights of the Twenty Percent—the Virtual elite—and have the world at your feet. Otherwise you risk falling to the precarious Ten Percent, and deportation to the ranks of the Analogs, with no access to electricity, running water or even humanity.

The system has no flaws. Until the elusive “Ten Percent Thief” steals a single jacaranda seed from the Virtual city and plants a revolution in the barren soil of the Analog world.

Previously published only in South Asia as Analog/Virtual, The Ten Percent Thief is a striking debut by a ferocious new talent.

Available now from Solaris.

AVATARS

Fhwupp

Fhwupp.

Fhwupp.

Fhwupp. Fhwupp.

Fhwupp. Fhwupp. Fhwupp.

CinderElle whips the Flaming Flail over her head as she stalks towards her enemy.

She likes to take her time, watching the fear build in her opponent’s eyes.

Sometimes their eyes blaze with defiance. She likes that even better. It is always more satisfying to bludgeon the fight out of someone.

This one, however—

The shaggy Ox_Beast cowers before her. She’s injured them with an advanced spell-cast—a flurry of lightning bolts. They are about to breathe their last.

She’d pierce their heart and get it done with, if she were a warrior of mercy.

She isn’t.

Besides, the crowd wants a spectacle and she isn’t about to disappoint.

A notification pops up in the top-left corner of her scope. She dismisses it with a push of her mind.

Who’s managed to get through my Communications Fog?

She breaks into a run towards her prey.

The crowd begins to scream, chanting her name.

The Flaming Flail spins like a Ferris wheel of destruction.

She brings it down in a powerful arc, slamming it into Ox_Beast’s neck.

The beast erupts into flames. Blood spurts from its wounds.

The crowd comes untethered. The sound is deafening.

CinderElle plucks the pennant from its now undefended post. She’s captured the flag. Again. She’s conquered Alfhaven. Again.

The Warrior Princesses have won. Again.

They are this year’s Heroes. After a rocky start to the season, they’ve come back with a vengeance to dominate the League of Champions with sparkle and gore for the fifth year in a row.

Her team runs in towards her, thumping her on the back. The heat- and pressure-sensitive material of her Haptic-Hero suit relays the warmth of their hugs as a welcome respite from the icy chill of Alfhaven’s winds, which knife through her armour.

The notification pops up again, obscuring vision in her left retina. It is persistent.

She feels a knot of dread in her stomach.

The Warrior Princesses ride on their Triumph in a carriage drawn by flame-breathing skeletal unicorns. They wear their crowns of laurel studded with diamonds and moon dust. They wave as thousands of fans fling virtual bouquets at their feet, clapping, stamping and cheering them on.

The notification pops up every three and a half minutes, much to CinderElle’s chagrin.

There are interviews, signings, photographs, and then the evening is over.

CinderElle severs the link to the Alfhaven map. It’s notoriously dangerous for its highly adaptive environmental hazards, and she’s grateful that they trained extensively to handle its terrain. The Tactile Turf that lines the floor and walls of her home-arena blazes neon blue before dimming, no longer simulating the packed snowdrifts and treacherous glaciers of Alfhaven.

The world slows down as her senses disconnect from Hyper Reality.

She rubs her shoulder beneath her Haptic-Hero suit. She took a terrible blow to it when the warrior DarkSyder slowed time during their bout, swinging his sword down to try and sever her arm. There will be bruises tomorrow.

Ox_Beast toppled her off her feet, crashing into her from the side. Her ribs ache.

She can’t wait to take a hot shower and watch a replay of the contest . . . She takes her Haptic-Hero helmet off, wiping a towel across the sweat on her brow.

The notification pops again, this time on to her intel-lenses. CinderElle, now returned to her diminutive real-life avatar, groans.

She opens the envelope dancing before her vision.

She recoils.

It is an invitation.

To the Bell Corp Best and Brightest Awards.

Adrenaline ebbing, exhausted from the Contest, she slumps to the floor.

CinderElle might be a Hero, but she most certainly isn’t. CinderElle draws crowds like moths to her flame. She is a nobody.

And now her non-self has been nominated for Influencer of the Year.

This will not end well.

Copyright © 2023 by Lavanya Lakshminarayan. Excerpted from The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan. Published by permission of Solaris. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lavanya Lakshminarayan is the author of Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future. She is a Locus Award finalist and is the first science fiction writer to win the Times of India AutHer Award and the Valley of Words Award, both prestigious literary awards in India, and her work has been longlisted for a BSFA Award. She’s occasionally a game designer, and has built worlds for Zynga Inc.’s FarmVille franchise, Mafia Wars, and other games. She lives in India, and is currently working on her next novel.

Book Review: The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter

Chris Kluwe | 784 words

The Thick and The Lean
Chana Porter
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781668000199
Gallery/Saga Press, April 2023, 384 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review. I’m going to be upfront with you right off the bat—I try to recommend good books, some of which are great books, but this month’s book, The Thick and the Lean, by Chana Porter, is phenomenal.

Ostensibly the story of two seemingly unconnected women, Beatrice and Reiko (along with a third character, Ijo, who plays a flashback/supporting role), The Thick and the Lean takes place in a fictional world ravaged by the violent weather patterns and tides of its two moons, where humanity survives above the waves on a small island and its towering futuristic city. Beatrice is a member of a pastoral religious sect that appears to be a utopia on its surface, while Reiko is a member of the supplanted native inhabitants of the island, eager to pursue her university scholarship offer in the big city, but the thread linking both of them is that they don’t quite belong where they currently are, and aren’t sure what to do about it.

Okay, descriptions out of the way, let me tell you why I thought this book was so fantastic. First off, it is an incredibly subversive piece of literature. Beatrice’s religion is an identifiable mélange of several real religions (primarily Christianity), but with one tiny alteration—eating food is considered the great sin, while sex is considered a natural part of everyday life, and I cannot tell you how cleverly Porter manages to pull this off. It’s like staring at a familiar picture where everything seems normal except for one tiny detail, and as you start focusing in on it, you realize you’re actually standing upside down and now the sky is green, but everything still makes perfect sense. For that feat alone I would recommend the book, but Porter doesn’t stop there, because this work is so much more than a one-trick pony.

The other main character, Reiko, has a storyline that, on the surface, is a mixture of the supplanted indigenous/immigrant experience coupled with some biting thoughts on the modern higher education system, but it also delves into socio-economic class dynamics, racial discrimination, and the ethics of accumulating power. Both Reiko and Beatrice are complicated people, who make complicated choices, but here’s the clever bit.

The Thick and the Lean could have easily been a heavy-handed lecture delivered by a Sociology 101 student, but the way Porter writes, the word choices and style she uses, makes this book an absolute delight to read. It flows smoothly from thought to thought in an effortless way that is almost impossible to pull off successfully, and its heavier motifs are initially unobtrusive, lingering on the palate like a complex sauce that demands you eventually pay attention to it.

Did I also mention this is a book centered around food?

In fact, my only complaint about The Thick and the Lean is due to how well Porter sets the culinary atmosphere, I wanted more recipes. Food—the acquiring of, eating of, disposing of, and its relationship with oneself—is a central motif of the book, and there were multiple times Porter’s descriptions made me legitimately hungry, but they were always delivered in just the right amount (looking at you Tolkien and your interminable fifteen pages of hobbit dinners). Like the perfect pairing of appetizer and entree, Porter keeps the subject of food front and center without letting it overwhelm anything else she wants to say.

Overall, I really hope I’ve sold you on checking out The Thick and the Lean, because it is that good. This is the type of book that quite a few schools will be using in their curriculum years from now, and quite a few other schools will have banned. It is a celebration of defiance, delivered not with fiery rhetoric and indignant outrage, but presented with humble confidence, like a generational family recipe—a perfectly seasoned fish stew built off a three-day base and years of hard work mastering the small details.

Seriously. You do not want to miss this book. My compliments to the chef.

Read if: You’ve ever felt like a square peg surrounded by round holes; you appreciate sex positivity; sometimes you just want to burn it all down.

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: Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs

Aigner Loren Wilson | 447 words

Ink Blood Sister Scribe
Emma Törzs
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780063253469
William Morrow, May 2023, 416 pgs

Emma Törzs’ debut novel, Ink Blood Sister Scribe, is a mysterious tale of familial memories and secrets that grip and hold. Two estranged sisters, Ester and Joanna Kalotay, reunite after their father’s death to reckon with the family obsession—protecting and collecting rare books of magic and spells. Törzs carries the reader along with her telescopic descriptions and heartwarming character relationships.

As people read this book, they may feel the urge to choose favorites between the two half-sisters. They are both exciting, and it’s absolutely touching how they both care for the people they hold close. Joanna has lived in her warded-protected home her whole life and followed in her father’s footsteps collecting, using, and protecting books of magic from those who wish to use them to harm. Ester is immune to magic but isn’t untouchable from the pain of the past; she is constantly moving in a race to stay one step ahead of the danger that’s already claimed her mother’s life. Ultimately, readers who will try to choose between the sisters will find it impossible not to love them both as the two heal and fight together.

There are many alluring elements in Ink Blood Sister Scribe, but the books of magic were my other favorite. Fellow book lovers will undoubtedly feel the same. Certain ancient and rare books in the novel are unique; some hum and buzz, some give people the power to speak through mirrors, or float, or even kill. Joanna and Ester must research and explore these books of magic to solve their father’s death, Ester’s mother’s murder, and stop who or what is threatening them. It’s all very Practical Magic in a way that felt comforting to read.

There is such a tight knot of mystery at the center of all the bonding, queer love, familial reconciliations, and death. I felt it pushing me through the novel but never rushing me. Törzs’ eye for the ephemera that makes up her characters’ lives and homes is hard to look away from. Memories and the past loom heavy in Ink Blood Sister Scribe, but not in a way that weighs a reader down. Törzs’ prose is evocative and compelling, creating a masterful literary fantasy of magic, family, and books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black writer of speculative fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and games. She serves as a senior fiction editor at Strange Horizons and has guest-edited issues of Fireside Fiction and Apparition Literary Magazine. Her work has appeared in FIYAH, Anathema, Arsenika, and other publications. When she’s not writing or editing for others, she’s learning, hiking, or loving on her fur babies—both human and animal. To check out her books, games, bread bakes, and other writings visit her website (aignerlwilson.com).

Book Review: Infinite Constellations, edited by Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura

Arley Sorg | 1805 words

Infinite Constellations
Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura, eds.
Paperback
ISBN: 9781573661980
University of Alabama Press, March 7, 2023, 286 pgs

Sometimes reviewers and other readers say a book is “redefining” whatever category of product a title represents. A horror novel is “redefining horror” for example; we see this beyond books as well—the latest SUV model is “redefining” SUVs, or perhaps it is “redefining” luxury or comfort. Usually this phrase is just hyperbole, meant to express how good the product is; the item in question is not actually redefining anything.

But let’s talk about this new anthology called Infinite Constellations. And let’s start at the very beginning.

There is this thing that often happens when people talk about identity: Fear. The conversation becomes a scary obstacle course, everyone afraid they might misstep or do something wrong. For some, the fear includes that of being harmed, potentially even targeted. But when you open Infinite Constellations, the first thing you see—immediately after the cover—are the names of contributors, kind of floating on the page, with their identity statements accompanying their names. The statements vary in length and detail, from a few words to a paragraph or so. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, stumbling on this page, it felt like walking into a room of smiles and hugs and warmth. These statements, presented together on a starry background with the book title in the middle, read as proud exclamations, “spoken” with heads held high. The page felt like a celebration of people and cultures; and finding it was a joyous moment—not to mention, very different from what you find in most of today’s anthologies. I am 100% here for it.

Next, I did what I often do when considering an anthology for review: I looked for the copyright notes for any potential reprints. Normally, this is part of my decision-making process (do I review this book, or do I keep looking?), as well as one of the ways that I personally assess anthologies. I usually want to see if the reprinted material is entirely or mostly from “the usual sources” or if there are at least one or two surprises. I really appreciate anthologists who pull reprints of amazing work from places that many readers are unlikely to have already discovered it. Infinite Constellations keeps this information tucked away in the back in “Notes & Acknowledgements.” When I finally found what I was looking for, I was seriously excited at seeing so many sources with which I was unfamiliar. So many anthologies draw from more or less the same batch of sources: the same sets of magazines; the same collections by the same group of authors; if we’re relatively lucky, the same one or two recent original anthologies. This anthology, however, doesn’t just offer one or two surprises, it is full of surprises. It made me want to find the editors at a convention somewhere, or any other similar gathering, pull up, and spend a long evening discussing books and authors and incredible works. Honestly, it made me feel like I still have a lot to learn.

And then, into the introduction. This was broken into chunks, with sparkling quotes scattered throughout. At first I felt a frustration, wanting to focus on the introduction and feeling that process disrupted. Then I started to feel deep connections upon actually reading—absorbing—some of the quotes. And finally, a realization: even in the presentation of these elements, in disrupting the “traditional” introduction with wonderful messages, the editors are challenging the status quo of anthologies. They aren’t just shoving a bunch of work by marginalized people into a book. They are re-envisioning what an anthology is and how it works and to whom it speaks.

When I made this realization, I just thought, “‘bout damn time.”

It’s not that there aren’t some good anthologies out there, but it is that so many of them resemble each other. While there is a market for that (and to be quite frank, I do enjoy many of those anthologies) I enthusiastically welcome the freshness, the newness, the creativity that is Infinite Constellations. In theory, publishing is a creative industry, and yet at times people are so scared to do something different, which results in titles that feel not just “done before” but done many, many times. Infinite Constellations is not one of those titles, friends.

In editorial voice, if I were to compare it with other titles, it reminds me of Trouble the Waters, in the way that a walk on the beach in San Francisco can remind me of a walk on the beach in Kauai: obviously similar in certain specific ways, and yet they remain two very different experiences. In looking through the selections, Unlimited Futures comes to mind. And yet I feel as if I haven’t read a book quite like this one before.

“Wrapped in the familiar, we might miss the unusual,” the editors say in their introduction. And this sings volumes about the work at hand.

Infinite Constellations opens with poetry by Kenzi Allen, called “Oskʌnu·tú”. The lines are beautiful, vivid, evocative. Loosely tied together, they create a sense of story, an emotional imprint; a set of images and moments infused with gentle wonder. This entry does what great poetry should do. It also sets the tone for the book, challenging expectations, but still delivering something powerful.

Powerful continues with “She Sang to Me Once at a Place for Hunting Owls”, a prose poem by dg nanouk okpik. This piece strikes an emotional chord from the very first line, the phrases visual, intriguing, and unique all at once. Similar to Allen’s piece, the gorgeous language and careful imagery immediately wrap you in a world, in a moment far removed from whatever you were doing before.

Infinite Constellations is a collection of different kinds of pieces, different perspectives, different approaches, each one offering its own ways to connect, intellectually and emotionally. Short story “Plink” by Yohanca Delgado literalizes the idea of being rendered helpless by your child. The prose flows with moments of brilliance and Delgado compresses an engrossing scene into a few paragraphs. On a superficial read, it’s a story about shrinking. But look closely. Subtle notes of deeper allusions await those who read carefully.

Ra’Niqua Lee gives us “Mermaid Names”—after the hurricane, the swamp encroaches, things bubble up from underneath; and then there’s the four dead girls coming back to life. Lee draws the reader in with interesting imagery and choices, including pairing the idea of forgotten or lost things coming out of the muck with these girls, suggesting so much by simple parallels. The read is visceral at first, entirely engrossing, compelled both by the author’s command of language and story, plus the underlying tensions threaded therein. Then things mellow into a tidal-feeling narrative, a swirl of mystery and softly unsettling themes.

“letter to the hiring manager” by Sarah Sophia Yanni examines the role reversals of age caused by generational technology changes, while also taking a sardonic look at the conventions and ironies of modern work life. It’s wonderfully constructed and effective.

Poem “Ways to Use Silhig Lánot” by Alton Melvar M. Dapanas feels, at first, like it’s about connectivity—one thing being connected to the next (pellets to lizards to moths and so on)—and hinting perhaps at the nature of life, and by extension, people. Then it shifts slightly, still feeling like it’s about connectivity, but this time more about connecting the speaker to moments and figures. Finally, it resolves, or perhaps condenses, into a statement about memory, leaving a strong emotional impression that warrants (and rewards) several careful rereads.

Kenji C. Liu’s “Transmigrations: A Future History of Multiple Bodies of Water” is, basically . . . extraordinary. Defying convention, difficult to even describe, and yet it presents clearly connected, intellectually and emotionally engaging moments. This one delivers something impactful despite being hard to explain. There is a kind of deeply personal narrative here, experienced through shifting modalities and formats. Liu plays with everything from the way one line changes the meaning of a prior line to our expectations.

“After,word” by George Abraham is nothing less than incredible. A flowing consideration of words, identity, and meaning; each moment, each movement striking hard with truths about just how slippery truth is. It’s also an examination of the way one positions oneself in relationship to others—“others” not just meaning “an individual” but meaning many things, including “a country” (and what does “country” even mean?). It’s a frank, intimate, restless examination, occasionally sliding into the meta, and then questioning the reality of that meta state. It’s a work of art, a journey, and the kind of reading that, when finished, I had to just close my eyes and feel.

Infinite Constellations does feature a few established genre folks that you may recognize, like Sheree Renée Thomas, with an excerpt from “Shanequa’s Blues—Or Another Shotgun Lullaby” originally printed in her collection Nine Bar Blues; and Daniel José Older with 2012 story “The Passing” from his collection Salsa Nocturna. There are also a few authors whose names you should know if you’re keeping an eye on genre short fiction, such as Tonya Liburd and Pedro Iniguez. But I really enjoyed finding so many truly amazing pieces by authors that I don’t recall reading before.

I enjoyed struggling to explain what a piece did for me. Or, at least, I enjoyed the experience of the read, which, more than once, I found difficult to explain.

Within the framework of what I do for this column, I don’t have the time to give this anthology the attention it deserves. Even an individual piece like “After,word” warrants several close readings —warrants feeling—and deserves much more attention than I can give it here. The editors finish the book off with a “Reading & Teaching Guide”, complete with talking points and ideas for ways to approach the material. But you don’t need a degree or expertise to enjoy this book. The best approach, the one I recommend, is to come to it with a willingness to connect; and perhaps, a willingness to engage with this anthology in a way which is a bit different from most books. Get this book and join in the celebration.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine and a 2022 recipient of SFWA’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. He is also a 2021 and a 2022 World Fantasy Award Finalist, a 2022 Locus Award Finalist, and a finalist for two 2022 Ignyte Awards: for his work as a critic as well as for his creative nonfiction. Arley is a senior editor at Locus Magazine, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare, and a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, movie reviewer, and book reviewer, and conducts interviews for multiple venues, including Clarkesworld Magazine and his own site: arleysorg.com. He has taught classes, run workshops, and been a guest for Clarion West, the Odyssey Writing Workshop, Cascade Writers, Augur Magazine, and more. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in the SF Bay Area and writes in local coffee shops when he can. Find him on Twitter @arleysorg. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Author Spotlight: Brian K. Hudson

Laurel Amberdine | 358 words

How did “Virtually Cherokee” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I originally drafted this story for a writing group at the community college where I teach. I wanted to write a story that took place in the same universe as my novelette “Digital Medicine.” Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot was certainly a big inspiration, and so was Amped, a novel by Cherokee writer Daniel H. Wilson. In fact, the interspersed news articles that appear in “Virtually Cherokee” were directly inspired by that novel.

Where are you in this story?

I’d like to think of myself as the narrator, Bob Server, who is kind of patient and analytical but I am probably more like Mr. Mic because I can be ridiculous and dramatic.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I started writing science fiction around ten years ago when I learned that Indigenous SF existed. Grace Dillon’s Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, along with the work of Cherokee SF authors Daniel H. Wilson and William Sanders, inspired me to try my hand at writing genre fiction.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I’ve been playing guitar off and on for about thirty years. But since the pandemic, I’ve started spending more time playing and writing songs with my sunburst Epiphone Les Paul. I also love to watch television to relax, mostly science-fiction or classic sitcoms. I enjoy hiking and mountain biking and luckily live in the mountains with my wife and two dogs.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I would like to see Indigenous science fiction get more recognition and for more attention to be paid to tribally-specific genres. I’m delighted that Reservation Dogs, which contains many speculative elements, has received much-deserved recognition. But I’d also like to see more Indigenous SF adapted for television and movies.

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: Amy Johnson

Laurel Amberdine | 734 words

How did “Lament of a Specialist in Interspecies Relations” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I find aliens offer interesting opportunities to think about what’s familiar and unfamiliar and why. Often, though, aliens are depicted as incomprehensibly strange. I wanted to explore an alien who is both strange and comprehensible. The alien in this story, a shapeshifting tourist seeking change experiences, sees Earth, its many creatures, and ways of living, through a very different epistemological lens than humans—to the specialist’s occasional despair, but following logics adjacent to our own. I’d love for this to prompt questions about categorization systems and the ways societies currently respond to different kinds of change. Or wonder. Or amused pleasure. Any of those would be good.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

Oh my goodness, yes! I had trouble with the ending. Thankfully, one of the other members of the Nautilus writing group reminded me of James Patrick Kelly’s great advice: when you’re struggling with an ending, draft ten different endings, but don’t rush, write these over at least twenty-four hours (I’m summarizing, you can read the whole thing in Clarion West’s Pocket Workshop). I’ve found this so helpful. For this particular story, ten didn’t quite do the trick, so I kept at it. In the end, I believe I wrote over forty different versions of the ending, although I stopped numbering them in my notes at twenty-three.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

Two things. At one point the story asks, what if we understand being changed and making change as inextricably entwined? That’s something I’m thinking about a lot and I’d love readers to think about, too. How might we rethink our ideas of change so that we move smoothly from learning to acting without stalling in between? I think about this particularly in conjunction with social media and twenty-four-hour news, which can be useful resources for learning about instances of oppression and injustice, tragedy and disaster, but can also overwhelm and discourage, particularly when reports lack information about how to meaningfully help.

Second, although they appear here in my phrasing, I didn’t invent the many hyperboles the story mentions—the flying pigs and white crows and blossoming flagpoles—these draw from cultures around the world. In fact, this type of hyperbole is even recognized as a rhetorical device in its own right, known as adynaton.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I somehow only just this past year started reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s books. How did I never read these before? They are brilliant—I’m inspired by the way she deftly mixes action and character, humor and thought-provoking questions. I read a lot and widely so my inspirations regularly shift, but other current inspirations include speculative works by Katherine Addison, Ryka Aoki, Aliette de Bodard, Sarah Beth Durst, T. Kingfisher, Yoon Ha Lee, and Caitlin Starling. I’ve also recently returned to reading crime fiction and am loving Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series and Ruth Ware’s suspense novels. Oh, and Claudia Gray’s The Murder of Mr. Wickham—that book was so well done.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I’d love to see the recent punk subgenres develop further and become more popular—I’m thinking particularly of solarpunk and hopepunk, which tend to explore themes such as planetary and multispecies wellbeing, community, and care, while challenging systemic injustice and failure.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m currently finishing a speculative suspense novel, my first, which I can’t wait to share with readers! I’m also working on several new short stories. You can find more on me and my work at amyjohnson.com—I’m in the process of updating the site, it will soon include a sign-up for a low-volume newsletter for folks interested in upcoming publications. You can also find me on Twitter as @shrapnelofme and on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@shrapnelofme.

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: Bogi Takács

Laurel Amberdine | 986 words

How did this story originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I mention in an endnote that it’s very loosely inspired by the Hungarian folk ballad about Kelemen the Stonemason—in some versions, titled “The Wife of Kelemen the Stonemason.” In the ballad, Kelemen and his workers are building the walls of Déva Castle in present-day Romania, but every night the walls collapse and they have to start over. To break this curse, they decide to sacrifice the first person who comes to visit them, and end up murdering Kelemen’s unnamed wife. When her young son comes to find her, her spirit cries to him from the walls.

I was terribly confused by this story as a child. They essentially made Kelemen’s wife into a quasi-immortal castle that could speak! How awesome is that? Surely someone would have volunteered if the masons had just bothered to ask enough people! The story arises from this tension. To some people, it seems self-evident that they could—and would—become city; to others it is horrible, unfathomable.

The other theme of antisemitic blood libel comes into the story because it is hard to write anything with an even vaguely Eastern European setting involving ostensible human sacrifice while trying to ignore how historically Jews were often accused of human sacrifice in the region and persecuted accordingly. I was curious if there were any specific links between construction sacrifice types of murder ballads and other folk traditions, and antisemitic blood libel—and I indeed found some folkloristics research about this that’s linked at the end of the story, discussing the Hungarian population of the city of Zenta/Senta in present-day Serbia. The events and characters in my story are entirely fictional, and so is the setting.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

I didn’t put it into the story, but I think it might be interesting for people to find it here: there is a Hungarian rock opera version of the murder ballad. Youtube has a rather low-quality recording of the original staging from the 1980s (bit.ly/3EQamg6), performed almost entirely by half-naked men with mustaches. (Not an exaggeration.) This version is more elaborate and it gives the wife a name too: Anna. Another interesting fact about this adaptation is that the two authors of the rock opera went on to espouse diametrically opposite political views after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989. There is also a 2013 version (bit.ly/3Zgqr6S), which I have yet to watch!

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’m currently reading the anthology Infinite Constellations edited by Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura. It’s a great mix of literary-leaning speculative fiction, speculative-leaning literary fiction, a lot of poetry, and even some literary nonfiction—and it all fits together.

I recently enjoyed When I Sing, Mountains Dance by the Catalan novelist, poet and visual artist Irene Solà (which I read in Hungarian translation by Krisztina Nemes, but it’s also available in English). This novel hasn’t been marketed as speculative at all, but it is suffused with magic in the plain sense of the word. I feel that it absolutely has a crossover SFF audience, especially with the recent rise of rural fantasy.

When it comes to new and upcoming novels, I’m looking forward to reading Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong—I think her short fiction is awesome. I also can’t wait for Assassin of Reality, the sequel to Vita Nostra by Marina and Serhiy Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. This is especially interesting given that Vita Nostra had two conceptual sequels not yet available in English that I read in Hungarian translation, and I really enjoyed them, especially volume 3 of the trilogy (Migrant). But this new book is going to be a direct sequel, with the same protagonist. I’m also excited about reading Sonia Sulaiman’s debut short story collection Muneera and the Moon, which just arrived in my mail yesterday! Now she’s also editing an anthology of Palestinian speculative stories that I hope to read as soon as it comes out.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I would like to see more translations beyond just a token amount, but I can get even more specific than that. Even besides the huge disparities in translation from non-Western languages and countries compared to Western ones, there is a further factor. Often the books that do get translated are the most canonical and hegemonic works from a given country—and that’s not necessarily what I’d like to read. I think in non-genre fiction there have been initiatives to translate women, writers who belong to minorities in their countries of origin, etc., but in SFF, this has been much less pronounced. Trans writers in particular seldom if ever get translated, which I found aggravating when editing trans year’s bests—I can’t reprint what hasn’t been published! I sadly haven’t seen this change much since then.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

My second short story collection titled Power to Yield and Other Stories is coming soon from Broken Eye Books. I sold it at auction without an agent, which was nerve-wracking! I can also be found on Patreon (bit.ly/3ZfDQfE), Instagram (@bogiperson), and lately I’ve been using Mastodon (@bogiperson@wandering.shop) as well. I’d be happy to hear from people.

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: Amanda Helms

Laurel Amberdine | 726 words

How did “The House, the Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

Longtime readers of the Spotlights may recall other writers crediting their story’s origin to the Weekend Warrior contest on Codex, an online writer’s forum. Well, this is another success story (pun intended)! For those new to it, Weekend Warrior is a contest of five weeks where participants are challenged to write a flash of 750 words or fewer, inspired by various prompts, over a weekend. I usually go into Weekend Warrior with a goal, and one of mine for that year was to write a story about a witch. Then the prompt I used for this story was to hit Wikipedia’s “random article” link I think up to five times. I happened upon a Wikipedia article for “Sugar Creek.” The name alone made me think of Hansel and Gretel and the witch’s candy house. I knew I didn’t want to do a straight retelling, so I began playing around with what other types of candy houses there might be, and who might be considered a witch. My feedback from the contest was that the story needed more words. It grew about double in length.

Where are you in this story?

I’m mixed Black/white, and grew up with many European fairy tales. I also have a lot of thoughts of my ancestors who were stolen from their homes and enslaved, and their cultures stripped from them, and that cultural knowledge lost for future generations—effects that I grapple with myself. So I identify very much with my witch, Agnes, when she says, “But this food, I made it mine, like House is mine . . . They don’t get to take it, too.” I’m making the European fairy tales and other trappings of colonialism that I’ve inherited one way or another, mine.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

Following feedback from an early reader who’d attempted to research the name of my then-fictive plantation, I decided to reference an actual historical plantation, though all characters remain wholly fictional. During the approximate time setting of “The House, the Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks,” the named plantation was known as Habitation Haydel, as mentioned in the story. Habitation Haydel later became Whitney Plantation, and now serves as a museum with the mission of educating the public about the realities of slavery and its effects. Please visit whitneyplantation.org for more information. Any factual errors in the story remain mine alone.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Find your people. By this I mean find your trusted readers and the folks you really jibe with, their art and yours. Especially if you’re a writer from a traditionally underrepresented background, there are strong chances that not everyone is going to “get” your work. Those who do are the ones whose opinions you should seek out as you work to improve your craft, or even just this one single story. Trust that there are readers for you!

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

By the time this story is published, I should have finished the last round of edits on a dark fantasy novel before it goes out on submission (assuming my agent and I agree it’s ready). Because I am both lazy and not great at summarizing my work, I’ll copy the book’s Twitter pitch that first connected my agent and me: A maladjusted woman with sentient sea monster teeth stuck in her arm must combine the magics of two warring cultures to save her lover and homeland from a ghost monster—all before the teeth’s bloodthirsty song consumes her.

Once that edit is done, I’ll be switching back to another, still-untitled fantasy book, which I’m mentally comping as “Mexican Gothic meets Snowpiercer.” So hard-in on novels at the moment! To see what else I get up to, folks can check out my website amandahelms.com. I’m also intermittently on Twitter and Instagram as @amandaghelms, and on Mastodon @amandaghelms@wandering.shop.

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 | 227 words

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Izzy Wasserstein (“She Blooms and the World is Changed”) and Timothy Mudie (“Blood for a Stranger”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Moons We Can Circumnavigate in One Day, or the Space Probe Love Story” from Natalia Theodoridou and “When Shiva Shattered the Time-Stream” by Sharang Biswas.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kat Howard (“One Heart, Lost and Found”) and Wole Talabi (“Saturday’s Song”). We also have a flash story (“The Sword, the Butterfly, and the Pearl”) from Deborah L. Davitt, and another (“The Belfry Golem”) from S.L. Harris.

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: Wendy Nikel, Rich Larson, Dominique Dickey, and Scott Edelman.

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!

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The Editors

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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

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

Christie Yant

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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 (with Rebecca Roanhorse)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 [Forthcoming]

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

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

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Sand by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Blind King’s Wrath by Ashok K. Banker

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Poster Girl by Veronica Roth

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.