TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 174, November 2024

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: November 2024

SCIENCE FICTION

Antyesti For a Dead Ganesa, Part 1
Ashok K. Banker

The Oracular Manifestation of Human Consciousness Offers Three Provocative Verbs Separated by Commas
Aimee Ogden

Antyesti For a Dead Ganesa, Part 2
Ashok K. Banker

Ancestor Code Error
Ai Jiang

FANTASY

Babywings
Isabel Cañas

We Will Bring Siege to the Bastion of Sin That Cries Out in Your Prayer
Hammond Diehl

The Last Word
Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

The Ones Who Come At Last
P H Lee

NONFICTION

Book Review: Countess by Suzan Palumbo
Melissa A Watkins

Book Review: Faeries Never Lie, edited by Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker
Arley Sorg

Book Review: And the Sky Bled by S. Hati
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Ashok K. Banker

Isabel Cañas

Hammond Diehl

Ai Jiang

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions, December 2024

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

© 2024 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Tithi Luadthong (aka Grandfailure)

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: November 2024

John Joseph Adams | 252 words

Welcome to issue 174 of Lightspeed Magazine! It’s hard to believe it’s November already, but we’re hoping to give you some speculative fiction that will brighten up your autumn.

This month we’ve got a serialized SF noir novella wrestling with AI, evil corporations, and weird clones. No, it’s not Blade Runner! It’s “Antyesti for a Dead Ganesa,” the newest work from Lightspeed alum Ashok K. Banker. We think you’ll love accompanying Ashok on this gritty trip to a noir, cyberpunk future India. Ebook readers can read it in one gulp; those reading online will have to check it out in two parts spread across two Thursdays. Our SF flash includes “The Oracular Manifestation of Human Consciousness Offers Three Provocative Verbs, Separated by Commas” from Aimee Ogden and “Ancestor Code Error” by Ai Jiang.

Our first original fantasy short is “We Will Bring Siege to the Bastion of Sin that Cries Out in Your Prayer” by Hammond Diehl, a story of saints and bones. P H Lee wrestles with the moral complexities of Omelas in their story “The Ones Who Come at Last.” We have two great fantasy flash stories, too. Isabel Cañas returns to our pages with “Babywings” and Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe brings us “The Last Word.”

Of course we have spotlight interviews with our writers and book reviews from our review team. It’s another terrific issue—and we’re so grateful for all the readers sharing it with us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and the New York Times bestselling editor of more than forty anthologies, such as Wastelands, A People’s Future of the United States, and Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele). He is also editor (and publisher) of the Hugo Award-winning magazine Lightspeed and is publisher of its sister-magazines Nightmare and Fantasy. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award, a winner of the Stoker,  Locus, and ENNIE awards, and a ten-time World Fantasy Award finalist. In addition to his short fiction work, he’s the co-creator of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, and for five years he was the editor of the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lately, he’s been working as an editor on various TTRPG projects for Kobold Press and Monte Cook Games and as a contributing game designer on books such as Kobold Press’s Tome of Heroes. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com.

Antyesti For a Dead Ganesa, Part 1

Ashok K. Banker | 8821 words

Two hours out of deadsleep is too soon to be staring at the butchered corpse of a dead god.

Neel looks down as the kalipeeli begins its descent to Chowpatty Beach and feels his stomach flip.

Even from a mile up, he can see it. His retinacam zooms, focuses and enlarges a portion of the beach below. He has no say in the matter, all his senses are controlled by the overriding AI. He can fight it but right now he has no fight left in him. Being dead will do that to a person. So he is forced to stare at the slaughtered god on the beach below.

The dead Ganesa lies spreadeagled at the edge of the water, the incoming tide lapping at its extremities. It resembles the body of a corpulent young boy from the neck down. Above the shoulders, an elephant’s head sprouts, big flappy ears and all. Its tusks are intact, seaweed and trash tangled in their curved white lengths. The tip of one tusk is chipped. Its overall hue is slate grey, not blue, which tells him that it’s not one of the fleshprint models printed out by some kid for a school project using cheap recycled DNA. Those cheaply printed models are always blue skinned, like the pop culture depictions, and they only hold integrity a few hours before going into meltdown. This one has the solid, fleshy look of raw meat, like an actual clone. The skin is a dirty, grainy grey which Neel knows is the color of the real god Ganesa’s complexion, now contrasted starkly against the dirty yellow sand beach on which it lies. The body has been split open right down the middle, trunk to groin. Thanks to the cams, Neel can see the split skin, parted flesh and exposed internal organs in all their ruddy, high resolution glory. He pulls his head back, the cams zooming out in response, and from this height, it now resembles the dead frog he and his lab partner had to dissect in biology class back in high school, an eon ago.

He tries to look away but even when he shuts his eyes, the crisp, clear, abattoir detail is imprinted on his vision like the ghost of a memory.

An oily churn begins below his ribs. Even though he thought he’d voided every last ounce of deadsleep fluids on resurrection, evacuation threatens.

The floating resi towers lining the oceanside lunge up at him like neon teeth in a gigantic mouth, the expensive dentures of a fund-flushed city grinning out at the Arabian Sea and the sponsored sky above the beachfront: Prime space for rent! This last solicitation blinks in the many gaps left between the subliminal billboards over the sea, flashing across his retina and worsening his vertigo.

He clutches the sides of the cab which of course, being accustomed to retinacam tourists, has gone nose down into the famous descent, its interior flipped to scenic mode. This has the effect of turning the entire cab invisible to his enhanced vision, creating the illusion that Neel himself is suspended almost two thousand metres up in the air and plummeting as rapidly as a dead bird.

“Bhaiya,” he calls out in a reflux-choked voice to the off-site cabbie, whom he can only hope is watching the screens of his various cabs from somewhere in that vast warren below, “Please make screens opaque. Opaque!” he repeats to underline his request.

The kalipeeli continues to fall at an alarming rate, while his stomach and its contents, such as they are, climb up his gorge. Any second now he will hurl, painting that famous view with expressionistic stomach acids.

Almost at the point of no return, the walls and floor of the cab turn opaque, restoring his view of the interior of the flaky, battered fiberplast cab that is badly in need of refurbishing or better yet, recycling, and the vertiginous view is dispelled. The cab slows its descent, straightening out to an upright position. It floats down at a more genial, kinder rate.

Neel releases a held breath, shutting his eyes to try to stop his head from spinning. The miasma of deadsleep lurks, whispering the promise of deep, dark, blessed erasure. Having known death, who would voluntarily choose life again? Not he.

“Sirji, aap?” says a vaguely familiar Punjabi accented voice.

A bearded and turbaned face has appeared before him, the face more lined and the hair and beard whiter than he remembers, but still recognizable as Daljit Singh, Jr. “Kyon, sirji? Aap ab badey seth ban gaye, offworld chale gaye, toh Mumbaikar nahi rahein kya?”

Neel manages a weak smile, easing his grip on the sides of the cab and forcing himself to relax. “Who are you calling a big seth, paaji? I’m still the same old awara bechara, struggling along somehow. Still very much a Mumbaikar.”

The Sikh laughs and slaps his thigh—or so Neel assumes, since he can only see the taxi driver’s face and shoulders. Age has not dimmed the cabbie’s full-blooded Punjabi speech and mannerisms. “What you are saying, sirji? Still here in our city? I haven’t seen you in one of my cabs in such long, long time! Did you get your own?” Daljit Singh, Jr, mimes steering an old-style manual drive vehicle and hums the tune of an early twentieth-century Hindi film song. Unsolicited, the AI scrolls the lyrics: Manubhai motor chali pom pom pom . . .

Neel shakes his head, a grin surprising his face; the song has charmed him. “Where would the likes of me be able to afford my own car, paaji. No. I just don’t get out much anymore. Housebound.”

He can hardly admit the truth to this cabbie whom he only knows from their casual chats during years-ago commutes that Neel has been in deadsleep for the past several years. He’s not supposed to talk about that or about the offense that earned him the penalty, the NDA being a mandatory condition of his parole. To make sure he complies, all his sensory outputs are being monitored. He is a puppet on a very short string.

As the kalipeeli comes to a standstill, the Sikh cabdriver—or should he say, cab owner, since the man clearly operates several vehicles now, judging from the way his eyes flick left and right, up and down, to monitor the progress of other kalipeelis on other trips—glances at the destination and says, “Sirji? Aap bahar jaa rahein hain? Outside? For real? You know outside is toxic air, water, viruses? Not safe, sirji! Bahut khatraa hain!”

Neel shrugs and raises his hands. “Kya karein, paaji. It’s my job. I have to go where the bodies are. Chalo, duty calls. Sasriyakal, Sardarji.”

Daljit Singh, Jr, shakes his head in disbelief, his expression reflecting his amazement at the courage—or stupidity—of the person he still regards as a fellow Mumbaikar and belatedly calls out, “Sasriyakaal sirji. Best of luck!” as the gull wing door swings shut.

Neel feels gritty sand crunch underfoot as he steps on solid, organic ground for the first time in he doesn’t know how long. Then he reflexively squeezes his eyes shut as the cab shoots up and away at an alarming, express elevator velocity, merging and blending a second later into the ant highway in the sky that is Mumbai rush hour traffic.

When he opens his eyes again, he sees a roundish face with boyish features beneath a balding scalp perched on a disproportionally smaller torso and chicken legs. This boy-man hybrid is dressed in a yellow, silver and green outfit that somehow manages to combine the style flourishes of a 1970s safari suit and a 2090s zipsuit in a manner that offers stiff sartorial competition to the late 2040s Mithunda Clone Disco Dancer fashion trend.

Neel’s AI informs him of the man’s name, designation and status rank. A Basu. Of course his on-scene liaison would be a Basu. The powers that be have to make sure that a non-citizen like Neel remains on a tight leash, and that means being overseen by a status ranked colleague, even a junior one.

In the chaos of the post-Contact years, Caste distinctions were declared illegal by the government and the traditional caste hierarchy that had structured Indian society for millennia was replaced by status ranks. Those lower castes and outcastes who were willing to erase their marginalised caste identities and deny their history of oppression by the upper castes were permitted to be reassimilated into society after passing a series of gatekeeping tests. Those who resisted the erasure of their entire history and heritage were exiled and forced to live Earthbound on the polluted, toxic surface, permanently denied the privilege of being included in the miraculous new floating cities made possible by Sanskriti technology.

And then there were special cases like Neel Kant Koli, among the lowest of low castes, with a family history of resistance to caste and class oppression, a descendent of self-declared “freedom fighters” who fought to achieve equity and parity for all Indian citizens, as well as reparations for millennia of abuse, exploitation and oppression. When arrested, tried and found guilty of sedition for taking part in a peaceful protest against the new Sanskriti-supported government’s onerous and discriminatory policies, Neel and his family were all declared enemies of the state and sentenced summarily to death. It was a Basu who performed the chemical executions of Neel, his wife, and their unborn child.

By sending a Basu now to act as his liaison on this case, the powers that be are sending him a potent, intimidating message. Message received, Neel thinks, even as he mentally raises a defiant finger. The gesture can’t be seen by anyone, since even his AI can’t capture his thoughts unless he expresses them through the speech centers of his brain, but it gives him some small measure of satisfaction. Dead he is, but the memory of his life before death lives on, and so does the endless pain of loss.

“These new vehicles don’t raise dust,” the Basu says, glancing up at the departing taxi. He gestures. “They have the latest antigrav engines. The old kalipeelis used to raise dust storms like mad. Now all are phased out since five years past. Soon after you were put down, na?”

Neel nods, daubing self-consciously at the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand. Did he throw up in the kalipeeli? He can’t remember now. His circuits are still adjusting to alive state. He decides to stick to formality, the best armor in awkward social situations.

“CBI Immortal Crimes Unit, Detective Neel Kant,” he says. “I’m here to examine the crime scene.”

The Basu gestures dismissively. “Hanh, hanh, I am aware, baba. Myself your liason, Chief Constable Shirish Bandopadhyay, Status Rank Basu, here to offer assistance on behalf of Mumbai Police Department. I was keeping crime scene secure pending your arrival.”

Chief Constable Bandopadhyay is eating something out of a pod made of what can’t possibly be but looks exactly like actual paper pages torn from an old twentieth century magazine. He picks up what looks like a piece of sev puri with his fingers and pops it into his mouth, crunching audibly. A few flecks of yellow sev have stuck to his cheek and move when he chews. He sees Neel looking at the pod and holds it out, offering.

“You want try? Bhaalu aachhey.”

“Is that what it looks like?” Neel asks.

Bandophadhyay gestures. “Authentic Mumbai chaat.”

Neel looks in the direction indicated and is stunned.

Arrayed on the dirty once-yellow sandy slope of Chowpatty Beach are some two dozen chaat stalls, painted on all sides with their names and bill of fares in English, Hindi and Marathi, the three major languages of Mumbai of the early twenty-first century. Perched on platforms in the center of each stall, surrounded by receptacles bearing the various foods, ingredients and condiments on offer, are the chaatwallahs. Dhoti clad, moustached, full-throated. Barkers standing near each stall gesture vigorously and clamor to Neel and the Basu, inviting them to sample the delicious, mouthwatering, very affordable tasty treats. Pani puri, bhel puri, dahi puri, paan, tambaku, lassi, dahi chaat, papdi chaat, kulfi, ice cream . . . the litanies overlap.

It is exactly as it used to be, long, long ago. So long ago that Neel can hardly remember exactly when. Definitely before the toxic scares, the dead sharks, the poison waves, which were all . . . when? In the 2030s? ‘40s? Five or six decades ago, but still this century, right? Or was it the previous one? Deadsleep fucks up organic memory, and he knows better than to trust his implants. Every nanogram of data they feed him is curated, a fancy word for censored.

A memory surfaces like a bubble rising to the surface of a scummy sink filled with dishwater. An image, no, a motile, moving pictures with sound and sensory accompaniment, engrams of emotion clinging to the grainy replay like specks of old blood: himself, much younger, accompanying a young woman, a little boy and a girl, clad in third quarter twentieth century urban Indian garb, walking along this same stretch of beach, laughing, talking, the children racing around their parents (me? A father? I was a parent? A husband?) as they all move towards the rows of chaat stalls, exactly as they appear now to Neel. A break in the memory, a jumble of image fragments and a potpourri of sounds, then when it resumes they are all standing by one of the chaat stalls, eating chaat together, the little girl (my daughter? I had a daughter?) pushes her last cube of melting kulfi around on the small saucer, the icy sweet slips over the edge and falls on the sand, breading itself in silica. She looks bereft. I pick her up, laughing, and feed her the remaining kulfi from my own saucer, she laughs happily, mouth smeared pista green, brown eyes shining with happiness and reflected love in the bright Broadway style bulb arrays of the chaat stall. He/I remember a surge of such pure happiness and love, overwhelming and unbearable.

Was this me? Is this me? Am I him? What about the . . . beedi cheroot baked fish Maruti van sidewalk beggar busker BEST bus Churchgate Station . . . a jumble of sounds, sensations, gibberish.

Neel reaches out to the nearest stall, trying to grab onto something before he falls.

The bastards, he thinks. The bastards put me in a body that also happened to be a married man with a wife and little children.

His hand passes through the stall’s corner, the image hiccupping, the barker standing near him with a saucer of chaat samples held out beneath Neel’s nose blipping as well, and the realisation centers him.

He passes his hand to and fro, watching the holo blip and burp.

Behind him, the Chief Constable chuckles. “You people!”

Neel turns and sees Bandopadhyay, chaat plate still in hand, several layers of chin wobbling as he laughs at Neel’s expression. “You thought it was real, kya? Abhi bhujla tumhee? It is holo! All holo. What you expect, Detective? That is why it is called Past. Because we are past it. History is behind our bums now!”

The Chief Constable slaps his own butt to emphasize the metaphor and laughs again.

• • • •

Neel gathers himself and walks through Bandopadhyay, the holo burping around him.

“How rude!” the man calls out, ignored by Neel.

He walks over to the Ganesa corpse by the shoreline and bends over examining it. After a moment or two, he realises why something seems off about it: the filters in his nostrils are filtering the air he breathes in and in the process, blocking his sense of smell. He pulls out the two soft, filmy plugs and hold them in his closed fist as he squats for a closer examination.

The stench hits him like a body blow.

The first thing that strikes is the stench of the rotting body itself. The usual reek of dead flesh plus the added bonus odors of intestinal and fecal contents. These smells are interleaved with the familiar odors of sea, salt and fish, but overlaying them is the pungent, chemical odor of the sullied ocean and air, an indefinable melange that is infinitely worse than the polluted Bombay air he grew up breathing yet still recognizable as its descendent. Despite the AI warnings flashing all over the inside of his retina and the subvocal voice warning him that he is being exposed to toxic elements and infectious viruses, he is surprised to find that he can still breathe enough to function.

He inhales deeply, past caring what the AI, or the Basu or anyone else thinks. The Arabian Sea smells like an old friend, encountered after too long, older, dirtier, sicker, but still recognizable. You and me, both, Sagara old friend, you and me both.

Neel still has a job to do and he intends to do it.

A god clone has been murdered and he means to investigate it.

“Very rude,” the Chief Constable repeats from beside him. The man has discarded the plate of chaat, but the crumbs of sev still remain on his jowls.

“I need a complete lab workup of the remains,” Neel says, regaining his feet, “and an autopsy, naturally.”

“Autopsy is already performed,” Bandopadhyay says, grinning as he indicates the splayed corpse, “naturally!”

Neel stares at the Basu, who is unfazed. “An autopsy and full forensic analysis.”

Bandopadhyay gestures dismissively, leaving it unclear whether he intends to comply with the instruction or ignore it.

“Who discovered the body?” Neel asks in a tone that makes it clear he will keep asking until he gets an answer.

“What does it matter?” Bandopadhyay asks indifferently. “Koi phorok podo? It is obviously a clone. Someone want to have Ganesa at home, maybe for worship, maybe for fun, and when they finish, they immerse it in ocean. It is correct disposal, is it not? After worship, Ganesa are supposed to immerse in water!”

He laughs at his macabre joke.

The reference is to the tradition of keeping a Ganesa idol at home for anywhere from one to ten days, then taking it in a procession to the oceanside, the worshippers dancing to music as they proceed through the streets, and immersing the idol in the ocean.

The difference is, those were clay idols.

This Ganesa is a living thing. Clone or no clone, this creature was alive, sentient, with emotions, feelings, sensations. Someone bought it off the black market where it had been manufactured, smuggled and sold in violation of any number of anti-cloning and resurrection laws, kept it at home for who knew what purpose, did unknown things to it—no, Neel corrects—to him, then disposed of the victim in a particularly brutal and inhumane manner. The fact that they immersed the corpse in the ocean in keeping with tradition in no way ameliorates the crime itself. A murder has been committed here, a heinous, brutal murder, and Neel intends to track down and bring the culprits to justice.

Neel lifts his gaze from the Ganesa and looks at the Basu directly, making eye contact. The Chief Constable’s black pupils slide away.

“Who discovered the body?” Neel asks again.

Bandopadhyay shoots him a look. “You people,” he spits, “coming here and giving us orders.”

But he scans his memebank, selects an item, and flings it at Neel dismissively.

Neel intercepts it with his palm and spreads his thumb and forefinger, opening the file.

There is only a single item inside: a retinacam playback file.

As far as Neel can tell, there are no identifying tags or markers. It’s been stripped for anonymity.

He doesn’t bother asking the Chief Constable if it’s been forensically examined by Tech. He knows they have ways to find orphaned bytes that can provide clues to the file’s organic signature, and by tracing the chain of transfer through the datastream, it may sometimes be possible to locate the actual, physical individual in whose eyes the retinacams were embedded at the time of the recording.

He already knows that has not happened because if it had, the file would have borne the appropriate tag indicating that it was being examined by Tech.

He plays the file.

It is a jerky POV view of the grubby interior of a personal resi. The recorder is passing from a dimly lit space into a brightly lit space.

The recorder stops in the new space, leaning on something, a horizontal support of some kind, and looks out at a view of this same beach seen from a different vantage point. A raised platform of some kind? A rooftop?

Subliminal neon hoardings flash, blink, dance and pirouette in the distance, over a dark surging mass that glistens on its surface.

The sea.

Closer, dazzlingly bright, are the lower extremities of the resi towers, pillars of light and glass, like shards risen from the earth to scrape the sky.

The recorder is smoking something. They lift one hand, bringing a glowing object to their face, insert it into their mouth, then release a thin trail of smoke. The smoke hangs thickly in the air, obscuring the recorder’s vision briefly. They wave it away with their other hand.

When the smoke clears, the recorder is looking in the direction of this section of the beach.

They glimpse something unusual, a foreign object out of place in the setting.

Their retinacams zoom in for a closer look, settle on the corpse of a large, fat, naked boylike figure laying on its back on the shore, legs pointing towards the beach, head towards the incoming waves that lap against its head.

The head is the head of a small pachyderm, trunk and both tusks intact.

Neel taps the air, pausing the recording.

He glances down at the corpse at his feet, comparing.

It is the same dead Ganesa seen in the recording.

He taps the recording again, resuming playback.

The recorder registers the dead Ganesa lying on the beach, takes a second or two to process what they are seeing.

Softly, “Deva!”

The recording ends.

Neel stares at the file hanging in his field of vision, visible only to himself. He turns and looks up at the beachfront, at the feet of the gigantic resi towers looming a kilometre high, at the deserted street of what was once Bombay, then Mumbai, and now is a city as alien to him as the world of the living to one who has been dead for the better part of half a century.

He starts walking up the beach.

“Oy! Oy! Where are you going?” Bandopadhyay shouts after him.

“The witness was over there somewhere,” Neel says, pointing. “I’m going to question him. He may have seen or heard more than what he shared on that recording. He is the primary witness, our only witness and that is where I must start my investigation.”

The Chief Constable speaks subvocally to someone not visible to Neel as he tries to keep up with Neel who is climbing the steep slope of the beach now. “You are mad, bugger?” Bandopadhyay asks, his outrage burning through his breathlessness. “You cannot go there! That is city!”

“Yes,” Neel agrees. “Mumbai City. This is where the crime took place. Where the witness is located. Where the body was found. This is where the investigation takes me. This is where I have to go now.”

He doesn’t add that he, Neel Kant, was born and raised here, long before these mile high towers, the flying kalipeelis, the invention of deadsleep, the construction of the first space elevator, the establishing of offworld colonies and the start of intersolar system travel, long before Bandopadhyay was even born. This is his city and regardless of the toxic air and water and feral inhabitants, he would rather be here than in those glittering interlinked towers and structures that make up Bandopadhyay’s 2090s Mumbai, a city state of almost a billion other privileged individuals who have never breathed anything but processed air, eaten only processed foods, thought only processed thoughts, spoken and enacted processed words and actions, and lived processed lives.

Bandopadhyay is looking at him with a disgust reserved for the criminally insane and unsalvageable. “Arrey, bondhu! Nobody goes in city! We are police. We stay in bases, use recordings and comms and forensic analysis to investigate the crimes. Why you think I am here in holo form only? Already, you are fool to expose yourself but it is only short time exposure, can be recover. If you go into city, you are goner. Bhujla?”

“I understand,” Neel says. “You can take the body away for forensic analysis. I expect a full report within the hour.”

He steps off the beach and starts across the street.

• • • •

The orange sodium vapor streetlights he remembers from his life here—at least, he thinks it was his own life, his own memories, but who knows for sure—are gone but there is plenty of illumination. Too much. If not for his AI filtering the quantum of lumens entering his irises, Neel would be blinded. The glittering towers and neon holo hoardings above the city flash and cycle and blaze with enough light to damage any unassisted eye. Yet, he doesn’t feel grateful for the tech that protects him; he resents the fact that it’s needed in the first place. He’d rather be looking at this with his own, naked eyeballs.

The once historic Chowpatty Seaface Road has fallen into woeful disrepair. Neel has to jump over yawning pits which might have been potholes once upon a time, all of which teem with weeds and insects, and the street becomes an obstacle course. He glimpses something large with a leathery tail slither at the edge of his vision, and furry creatures with long limbs swing and leap from a rusted, creeper-encircled lamp post to a banyan tree too quickly to follow, but chooses to ignore this evidence of mutated local fauna. His goal is the decrepit wreck of a structure on the corner across the street.

Just as he reaches the far side, Neel’s ear tingles with the unwelcome vibration of an incoming call. In the old days of skin phones, he would have simply swiped the call away, but now his body is no longer his to control, and the AI pipes the call through. The familiar voice speaks directly into his head.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Deputy Police Commissioner Karthik Srinivasan asks without preamble.

“The job I was given,” Neel replies.

He examines the exterior of the building while he talks, walking the length of its frontage to check for any signs of life. The structure looks like it’s been through multiple disasters. Its once-whatever-color facade is blackened by almost two centuries of pollution and veined with the corrosive effects of decades of acid rain. It squats like the decaying corpse of a gigantic bullfrog on the corner of one of the four roads after which the area was originally named Chau-pati, or Four Paths, later Anglicized to Chowpatty by the British. The building, his AI informs him, was inspired by the architectural style of the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, England and is a part of old Bombay’s historic heritage. He brushes the tour guide away impatiently. Looking up at the filthy, crumbling structure that appears ready to collapse at any moment.

But all that doesn’t matter. Right now, it’s only a rat hole in which he must go to seek out a rat who may or may not be of some use to his investigation.

Srinivasan’s voice speaks into his head: “You can do your job using the forensic evidence collated by the department. Entering the city was not approved.”

“The witness is in the city. I need to speak with them,” Neel replies, trying to decide on the best point of ingress. He can barely make out which is the main entrance. Not the front, because most old Bombay buildings were built with side entrances to allow horse carriages to stop and park without interrupting the main traffic flow, but which side? Then he sees a small marble plaque set into a pillar, almost completely overgrown with moss and lichens. He uses his palm to try to clear away the engraved name: Hari Griha. Green House. Though of course, the word Hari in the Sanskrit means so much more than just green.

“You have the recording. What could the witness possibly add?”

“That’s just it, isn’t it? I won’t know unless I ask them.”

Neel reaches a decision. He moves through the rusting, twisted remains of what was once a wrought iron gate and enters the compound.

“Neel,” Srinivasan says in a placatory tone, “I thought we had an understanding. When I brought you out of deadsleep, I explained how things stand. I gave you a precise briefing on what you’re supposed to do here.”

“With all due respect, sir, you explained, you briefed, I listened and agreed to do the job. And that’s exactly what I’m doing right now.”

“Why can’t you just perform your duties using tech?” Srinivasan says, sounding piqued. Like every other goddamn cop does in this day and age, he doesn’t need to add because it’s implicit.

“Call me old school. Now why don’t you let me do my job?”

Neel pauses. He has found the way into the building, the entrance almost completely overgrown with vines and leaves, and is standing at the foot of the stairwells.

After a moment, Srinivasan says, “Okay, but remember. I can only cover your ass so far. They’re watching. They’re always watching.”

I know, Neel thinks as he enters the dark, overgrown mouth of the ruin.

• • • •

The wall of creepers shivers at his touch as he tries to push through, transferring the vibrations caused by smaller creatures hanging to the curtain of green growth. Chittering, lipid sounds and clicks come from somewhere to his left, by the rear of the building. He feels resistance, exerts more force with his arms and legs, and tries to break through the wall of foliage. At the point when he is pushing forward with all his strength, it yields suddenly, and he stumbles forward into darkness. A green darkness, the shade of neem leaves. A fragment rises to the top of the scummy pond of his memory, something to do with his grandmother grinding herbs in her silbutta, the little mortar and pestle she used to make paste remedies, and then, as suddenly as it appears, it is gone, drowned in the swamp of his own faltering mind, or by the AI. Neel can’t tell which.

His retinacam adjusts to the near-darkness, revealing a stairwell that has been taken over by the wanton tropical growth. Out there on the exterior of the building, it was a featureless green veil. In here, it is the very texture of the place. The skin of the structure. Overlaying the brick and stone of the original building is this layer of variegated green-based hues, undulating and pulsating in a random, arhythmic pattern.

Moisture suffuses the air, clinging to Neel’s skin like a warm film. A smell of crushed leaves, bleeding chlorophyll, some intangible melange of wood and flower enters his unfiltered nostrils, awakening parts of his brain that date back to the primordial ur-memory, the part that perceives more shades of green than any other color. This thing that occupies—that is the building—is alive and sentient. He hears it breathing, feels it respond to his intrusion; it is not a benevolent being. A curling vine slaps his cheek, a cupola descends within a millimetre of his head, opening its maw and vibrating with tremulous outrage, a hot gust of breath carries pollen that coats his skin, searing the cilia of his neck, shoulders and arms. A musky, floral effusion fills his lungs, intoxicating as well as suffocating.

This being, whatever it is, resents his presence and intends now to incapacitate him, rendering him immobile then digesting him alive in its own sweet time. Days. Weeks. Until he is fully absorbed into its hyphae. It informs him of this as vines and creepers entwine his limbs and torso, strangle his neck and bind his head as coarsely as jute ropes. He feels himself lifted several yards high, held up by the mycorrhizal network. Needle sharp probes tremble at the mouths of all his orifices, preparing to invade his person.

Then a voice makes itself heard above the rustling, green silence:

Bring him to me

The probing antennae, vines, creepers, thorns, are momentarily stilled.

The voice is soundless, yet Neel hears it clearly. It ripples through Green House, as he has begun to think of it. He feels it in his marrow.

• • • •

Neel climbs the mossy stairs under his own strength, such as it is. Darkness hangs above and all around, bristling with unseen growths. There are fauna here too: slithering, scampering, scurrying, climbing, creeping, crawling on many limbs. He sees none of these except the vanishing tip of a glistening, horned tail.

He reaches a landing, capacious and illuminated only by the faint luminescence that he now realises has been guiding his steps.

He follows the faint gleam down a long corridor where the overgrowth is a lush peepul-leaf green. The floor he walks on carefully is carpeted with ropy vines, some pulsing and near-transparent, moving obscure fluids through their length, like dark veins and arteries supplying the great body. Everywhere, the whispering and chittering of unseen creatures, small and large. Always, the impenetrable darkness at the edge of his vision where things lie in wait, infinitely patient. The humidity is denser here, the air as tangible as a soft, warm curtain. Scents of tamarind and jackfruit, chikoo and papaya.

A large open space with something or someone at the far end, facing him. A sense of a human face and torso, in a chair. No, a wheelchair. An invalid or a disabled person. A man? Woman? Elderly. Weak of body but not of spirit. Robust of mind. Keen, strong eyes examine Neel, assess him, seem to find him wanting, lacking, poor food.

“Detective Neel Kant, CBI Immortal Crimes Unit. I am investigating the death of the corpse found on the beach,” Neel says into the wet silence, the space around him filled with a thousand green whispers that are inaudible to his ears but which he still senses.

“The dead Ganesa,” replies a woman’s voice. The words seem to have been spoken through a liquid filter.

Neel’s retinacams try to penetrate the dimness, but the more they zoom and artificially light up the gloom, the grainier and coarser the image gets, like blowing up an old black and white photograph printed with the use of tone screens in an early twentieth century newspaper. He wishes he could rip the cams out the way he removed his nostril filters, so he can see with his own, naked vision. He is certain he would see more detail, more clearly. The AI feels like an interference, an unnecessary filter blocking his senses.

That is easily arranged, said the woman’s voice, but inside Neel’s head this time, not aloud.

Neel feels a peculiar sensation in his brain, a very faint tickling as if he is developing an itch inside that mass of gray matter. Then something happens to his vision, a blurring that leaves him visionless. A soft succession of sounds in his ears. Pop. Crackle. Hiss. Blackness then visual noise bleeding in.

He reopens his eyes, blinks, staggers then regains his center.

It is like the scales have fallen from his eyes, as if he was viewing the world through a series of filters that rendered it something other than what it was. Now he sees it for what it is. No longer a performance of the world staged for maximum social impact, but the world itself as she is, raw, shorn of artifice and biased gaze, honest to a fault, painfully real.

He looks around, marveling.

An immense space. An arboreum. High ceilings. The floor, the tiny slivers visible through the network of vines and creepers that carpet it from end to end, might once upon a time have been sheela, Indian marble. The entire space is overgrown with the living tissue of Green House, the verdant arteries and veins and assorted organs of the living structure that it is now become. They stir and creep and pulse and throb with anima. Fresh, delicious, oxygenated air fills his lungs, the scents of chlorophyll and its cousins.

Green House is no longer the terrifying, monstrous overgrowth that he viewed through the retinacam filters, processed and interpreted by the overriding AI that was controlling his senses and brain. That sense of terror, that feeling of Lovecraftian wrongness, of deformation, of grotesqueness, vanished with the AI interface and the social filters. All Neel sees now is the primordial forest resurrected. Nisarga. Self-originated Nature in her purest form. And that form is splendor.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, turning a full circle and part of another, staring up, around, down, and everywhere. “You. You are beautiful.”

“Thank you,” says the person, no longer in a glotall, liquid voice but in a natural tenor. Except, they are not a single person, not just a woman, but a multitude.

As if in response to this thought, they approach him now, rising from the sides, emerging from behind the pillars, lowering themselves from the ceiling, rising up from the floor, approaching on swaying vines, surrounding him with their verdant yet still recognizably human faces. They are all genders, all ages, children and infants and matriarchs among them.

“You are . . . no longer beautiful as you once were,” they say in response.

Then: “What have they done to you?”

“Where is your body?”

“How could you let them do this?”

Neel laughs, the sound strange to his unfiltered hearing. It is not his laugh.

“This is not my body,” he says, gesturing to the flesh suit he is wearing. “It’s just something they threw on to me for the purpose of this . . . this visit.”

For that is all it is, really. A visit to the world of which he was once a part, where he once belonged. But that was a very long time ago. Before.

He inhales deeply. The air is rich with chlorophyll and animal musks. The scents of nitrogenised earth and freshly brewed oxygen. He feels it within his own cells, the moisture in the earth beneath Green House being oxidized, stripped of its electrons, transformed into oxygen. The carbon dioxide in the air being reduced, electrons added, converted into glucose molecules. He feels connected once more, as he once was, back in his own body, before deadsleep, in that now distant former life. His real life. The rush of wonder threatens to overwhelm his weak, insufficient human brain, this rattly cage of flesh and bone to which he has been consigned, entrapped within. It feels wonderful. It feels glorious. It feels real.

One of the residents of Green House rises from the floor, a green feminine face with flowering ears and petalled eyes. Offers him a large leaf with clear fluid upon it. He notices the infant nursing at the green breast of the server, also watching him with one curious eye. Neel sips from the leaf, relishing the pure, osmotised water. It tastes like nectar to his abused tastebuds, nourishing his deprived cells.

“Amrit,” he says, intending it as a compliment rather than a literal description. He knows this is not the Amrit, the Nectar of the Gods, the source of their immortality and the seed of the First Conflict, the first war between humans. But in this polluted world, it might as well be. It tastes so good, so pure, so right.

The first person who had spoken, the one Neel thought was an old woman in a wheelchair, approaches him now. Moving through the air, borne aloft by a network of muscular tendrils, stopping before Neel at eye-height, on exactly his level.

You seek the witness.

The voice seems to vibrate within Neel’s chest rather than his aural organs.

“Yes,” Neel replies, “I viewed the recording they made. It has been edited. The manipulation is not perceptible to their devices and systems, but it was done.”

The old one considers this, their face and naked body forest green, black eyes glittering with motes of light, the crown of what might once have been wispy silver hair now turned a bright, fluorescent green that connects them to the network of tendrils, other meatier vines emerging from the once-flesh of their backs and sides to disappear into the thicket of interconnected growth of the chamber, the House itself, and comes to a conclusion.

Well spotted, Blue Throat. I told them they were being too clever for their own good, that even you would not be able to spot the tampering, not in your present weakened state. I confess now. I was wrong.

The old one regards Neel’s decaying human shell, this corpse into which his consciousness has been forced, like a healthy child forced to wear another’s diseased, soiled garment, their vines and creepers touching, entwining, testing, and finally dismissing it with contempt.

To see what they have done to you, in contrast to what you once were . . . are . . . is painful. Yet, you spotted the first breadcrumb that led you into the woods. If I show you the next, you will be on the trail. Where might it lead then, Blue Throat? Where will this path through the dark woods take you? To the forbidden place where pain manifests? To your further degradation? Why do you serve them like a sickly dog, doing their bidding even after all they have done to you?

“What would you have me do then, Old One?” Neel says, using the term as a sign of respect rather than a literal one. “Resist? Rebel? I have tried that before, remember? It led only to my further incarceration and torture. You do not know what I have suffered, what I have lost.”

We have all lost something and someone, replied the Old One. There is none here who can claim to be painless and free of grief. Yet we remain. We resist.

Neel shakes his head. Already, his crumbling cells, disintegrating body, are protesting the absence of the overriding AI and its devices. The tech overshadowed the decrepitude of his physical shell, enabled him to ride it like a dying horse being flogged into service, and might have lasted him until the completion of this assignment. Now, it might not last him another hour. He feels himself losing capacity, functionality. The trembling in his legs, the stutter of his breath.

“I don’t have time for this, Old One. This body isn’t meant to last. Tell me what I need to know so I can be on my way. The longer I spend here, the more you put yourself and your family at risk. Already, their dronas may be en route. If they get here while I am still inside, still out of communication with my handler, they will do what they are designed for. They will burn down your house and every last one of you in it. I have no power to stop them. Is that what you wish?

The Old One’s obsidian eyes gleam at him, glittering like angry jewels. Tendrils flutter and shiver in agitation, sensing the matriarch’s mounting emotion. In a breath’s space, they could pierce, bore, rip into Neel’s artificially revived body shell, tear it to shreds, leaving only pools of mushy organs, turning him into nitrogen-rich fertiliser.

There comes a time for even the proud and the shining when the destruction of everything one holds dear becomes preferable to shackled humiliation. Remember that, Blue Throat.

Neel lowers his head, shutting his eyes and acknowledging the message.

The one you seek is on the roof of this house. He is expecting you. But you might not be expecting him. Go then, Blue Throat, serve your insolent lords. Take your shattered body and go!

• • • •

He climbs the broad stairs, the House no longer resisting or challenging his progress but the overgrowth becoming more unruly as he climbs floors. By the time he is at the third storey, it has rampaged. Carnivorous flowers snap at each other—and at him, in passing—for scraps of flesh from the half-rotted carcass of some dead rodent-like creature. Spiked vines bristle underfoot, making every step a potential wound. Large, overarching fronds, their undersides studded with viscous red bubbles that attempt to drip on him—he sidesteps hurriedly—and fall onto the floor vines instead, causing them to writhe, smoke, wither. The whispering that has surrounded him since entering Green House is now a chaotic roar, the noise of a sports stadium filled with angry fans ripe for brawling.

The way to the rooftop is barred by what might have once been a metal or wooden door. It is now a green curtain of hanging aerial roots, knitted into a mesh as solid as chainmail. He tries to push through impatiently at first, foolishly using force, feels insurmountable resistance, then whispers contritely, “Grandmother . . .”

The mesh unweaves itself to iris open an aperture large enough for him to bend and slip through. He murmurs thanks as he emerges into the chemically stained Bombay night air.

He has a brief impression of a squashed orange yolk on the horizon, pressed down into a dirty brown sea, the murky cerulean-saffron slashes of imminent sunset, then he is overwhelmed.

The dazzling light of the towers, the neon ads, the refracted reflections of rush hour traffic from a mile above, the popping flashes from construction work on the Station, the orbital burns of returning and departing shuttles and the distant post-orbital fission of ships creating garish rainbows that stab the Earth over and over, overpower his decrepit optic nerves, his decomposing brain. He feels stabbing pain in his visual cortex, the whingeing sense of his tech struggling to reboot itself. He raises a hand to shield himself from the physical assault of the sheer quantum of lumens at varying wavelengths across the spectrum, his eye irising in a vain attempt to reduce the millijoules clamoring to be let in, the brain unable to gatekeep. Up here, exposed to the elements, the blazing glare of the dying twenty-first century, Neel is aware of his vulnerability, the warnings he received, the reason why no sane detective—no living sane detective—would venture here in the physical city, that which was once Bombay, then Mumbai, and is now a discarded old rug still teeming with the last fleas of humanity.

“Detective Neel Kant,” says a voice. It is a mechanical voice, and even without tech, even abused and disoriented and still sick from deadsleep, he knows that it is not human. A pratikriti. A pattern forgery, to translate the Sanskrit term literally. An android, to use the outdated western term.

Neel raises his hands, cupping both around his eyes, trying to shield himself as best as he can from the worst of the visual assault. Kiloweights have been hooked to his eyelids; he must raise them with an effort. Blurrily, he views a small child-sized shape silhouetted against the blessedly dull, haze-weakened sun, its limbs, head, eyes all telescoping, turning, adjusting constantly even as it addresses him. He has the impression of a herbivore scanning for predators, like a rabbit in an open field swiveling its neck, twitching whiskers, flipping its ears in anticipation of the inevitable carnivorous threat. The nervous artificial is smoking as it scans the sky, applying a nanovape pen to its oral organ, exhaling spumes of lilac smoke that mask its quasi-human features.

“That was very good, what you did, deducing that there was evidence missing from the witness statement,” says the pratikriti. “Was it your AI that detected the discrepancy?”

Neel’s lower face twitches. “A lucky guess. The recording was made some time before the body was tampered with, but after it had been dumped. That would suggest you might have tampered with it yourself or you knew more than you were telling in your statement.”

An eye swivels and telescopes to view him more intently. “Well done, then, Detective. You were incorrect in one respect, accurate in the other.”

Neel senses his borrowed body’s onboard AI struggle to restart once again; he feels like a horse being whipped to pull a load too heavy. He fights it again, invoking even more pain just to delay the inevitable.

“Cut to the chase, pratikriti,” he says. “I don’t have time to spare here, as you can see.”

The artificial studies him. “This is accurate. Your host body has entered advanced entropy. Irreversible. It is interesting that they chose to resurrect you in a different corpse body, not your own. Clearly intended as humiliation.”

Neel grits his teeth against the pain. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

The head telescopes up, swivels 270 degrees, examines an off-planet flare. Neel still has both hands raised as he squats, crouching low on the blackened, filthy roof of Green House.

“A Sanskriti vessel, en route to the Druhyu Sector,” the pratikriti says almost meditatively. It has developed the habit of talking to itself as most pratikriti do when left to function without human interaction for an extended period of time. Like basset hounds, Neel thinks. Those droopy eyed long eared hush puppies are incapable of staying alone, become desolate, inconsolable without human company, grow near-psychotic with anxiety. Did he own a basset hound once? A female, named Ashwarya, with beautiful broody brown eyes? Was that he, Neel Kant, or an errant memory from this entropic brain that he is currently borrowing?

“What was missing from the body?” the pratikriti asks.

Neel squints, trying to will his pupils to reduce to the tiniest fraction possible. “Besides the chipped off piece of the tusk?”

The pratikriti clicks and clucks. “That was just the breadcrumb I left so you would know that the video had been edited. What else?”

Neel tries to think through the pain and retina-searing brightness, to force his necrotic brain to process. Yes, of course, the unbroken tusk in the recording was only a clue left to lead him here, to the witness, or, as he now thinks of it, the informant. Unlike the recycled imitations, the cloned Ganesas always have both tusks intact, since cloned cells can hardly be expected to replicate life injuries. Neel knew that the instant he saw the witness recording. But what else?

“Autopsy,” he manages to say through gritted teeth. “Need autopsy to tell me more.”

The pratikriti makes the tongue-clicking sound again. Tch tch tch tch. Four times, in the age-old manner of desi aunties. “Do better, detective. I overheard you saying to your superior officer that you were old school. Humans have been solving crimes for thousands of years using only their brains. Back in the fourth and third centuries BCE, our own Kautilya single-handedly wrote the world’s first handbook of criminal investigation, set down an equitable penal code and a manual of jurisprudence, all based on careful observation, social justice, and intellectual analysis without requiring technology or forensic evidence. A detective’s most important tool is his mind. Trust your instincts, your skills.”

“I can’t think—” Neel says, crouched on the floor of the roof now, curled up in a foetal comma with his head touching the ground. “The lights . . . pain.”

“I can help with that,” it says.

Through the blinding, deafening agony, Neel senses the pratikriti’s approach. He flinches as something touches the back of one hand.

“A nanosthetic. It will numb the pain and forcibly contract the pupils to an extent greater than possible through conscious effort.”

Neel realises that the pratikriti is offering him the same nanovape tube that he saw it smoking. He doesn’t need further prompting: it had him at “numb the pain.” He fumbles, brings the tube to his lips, sucks tentatively at first, then, feeling the delicious comfort of easing pain, draws greedily on the device, inhaling like a college freshman smoking his first joint. The effect is miraculous; almost instantaneously, the onslaught of light reduces to a still-blinding bright but almost-tolerable level; the pain recedes. In moments, he’s able to sit up cautiously, amazed to find himself able to open his eyes at least partially and look around.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2]

©2024 by Ashok Banker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok Banker is the author of the Burnt Empire Trilogy (HarperCollins Voyager), among other books. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Weird Tales, Best New Fantasy, and is forthcoming in F&SF, among other places.

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

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! is John Joseph Adams’ new newsletter, which will bring you updates about Lightspeed and Nightmare, as well as John’s anthologies and his other projects. Plus, you’ll get John’s thoughts about books, short stories, TV and film, roleplaying games, and related subjects. Subscribers will receive Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! Stories: Volume One as a free reward for subscribing. The newsletter launches January 2025!

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! launches January 2025.

Visit johnjosephadams.com/newsletter today to sign up for free.

The Oracular Manifestation of Human Consciousness Offers Three Provocative Verbs Separated by Commas

Aimee Ogden | 808 words

Reduce,

We’ll start with the easy one. We’re good at reducing! We’ve cut back so much already. Air quality. Polar ice caps. The winters where no one’s grandma freezes to death. What if we try reducing working hours? Preventable illness? How about stress, strife, human suffering?

Or we can start smaller. The blaring, rectangular eye in your pocket, the one that stares back into you if you stare too long into the raging assholes and targeted advertisements and machine-generated morass it offers. Imagine tucking it to sleep, nestled in its charging cradle; imagine the backlit, bloodshot eye drifting closed. Imagine, further, not missing its company. Because you’re otherwise occupied, with everything else that’s blossomed into that newly diminished space. Reading a book, perhaps. Peering at a painting. Sleeping, dancing, fucking, eating sliced cucumbers.

Then again, you could keep shining that eye out over the swamp, fishing for unfindable answers and unwinnable fights. Just remember: you’re the bait.

Hey. It’s okay to start small, when the alternative is not starting at all.

Reuse,

Now, look: we’ll never figure out a way to not need anything. But it’s apparent that many of us would need a lot less if a few didn’t have the absolute most.

You can take a moment to check the math on that one.

We don’t have to literally eat the ultra-rich. There aren’t that many of them; it’s not like the calories would get us far. But there’s more than one way to crack a nest egg.

The first thing we’ll gobble up? The extra extra in-case-of-emergency backup tablets; the unloved e-readers wedged under tasteful ecru couch cushions; the smart TVs, smart blenders, smart training potties; the GPS in that personal submersible. Rare earth metals don’t grow on trees.

First dibs on devices go to kids who used to be banished into the lightless mines where such rarities got excavated. (Kids in mines should’ve been, minimally, on the top ten list of things to reduce.)

Reusing the mines would be nice, too. But since they’re already there, some of the billionaires might need someplace new to live.

(No one should feel obligated to actually eat the rich.)

(Some of us are vegetarians.)

Alternatively? Leave the kids in the mines and the billionaires in the submersibles. The system is working as intended. Besides, you wouldn’t want to miss a call from your boss while you’re busy ripping the CPU out of a smart pet dryer.

Recycle,

A plastic Ronald Reagan action figure lies at the bottom of a dusty cardboard box waiting to be collected and chemically pulverized back into its component polyvinyl chloride #3 parts. Statistically speaking, twelve PVC molecules from Ronnie’s meticulously sculpted hair are embedded, along with several billion more bits of microplastics, in the current President’s body.

Can we just leave the damn doll there? Please? This particular cycle has already had too much re in it.

. . . Fine. Fine! Obligation requires that you be presented with the equivalent future, the one where we take the shitty doll out of the bin and press the button on its necktie, and make it say in a grandfatherly voice: supply-side economics or welfare queens or the nine most terrifying words in the English language are—oh, fuck me, no. I can’t do it.

In case of emergency, break cycle.

Revolutionize.

Because a revolution is coming. But you need to decide what sort. Either it’s the kind where we go full-on dropkicking heads into baskets . . . but for disability justice and transportation policy and the military-industrial complex and urban sprawl?

. . . Yeah, sure. “Metaphorically.”

Otherwise, it’s the kind where we simply crank out yet another trip around the sun, under which there is nothing new; the kind where the big wheel keeps on turning and you and everyone you care about and a whole bunch of people you don’t all get ground into a fine gooey paste on the road underneath.

It might be overwhelming. It often is. But remember—it’s okay to start small. Join a union. Amend a tax code. Chain yourself to an inconvenient microphone. Get to know your neighbors. Small steps still get you somewhere. And since the alternative is here? Well. Let’s get moving before we—

Oh. Sounds like your assholes-and-advertisements box is vibrating. No, no, it’s fine. You don’t have to decide right this second.

Well. You do. You’re constantly making choices. And not deciding is the easiest decision of all.

We’ll reuse the same words next time around, once you’ve scraped yourself out from under the tire-treads of this life. The thing is, though? Each time through means the number of possibilities is also reduced.

Someone’s going to have to decide, first, what’s worth saving.

Are you?

©2024 by Aimee Ogden.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella “Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters” was a 2021 Nebula Award finalist, and her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons. Her next novella, “Starstruck”, is forthcoming from Psychopomp in 2025.

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! is John Joseph Adams’ new newsletter, which will bring you updates about Lightspeed and Nightmare, as well as John’s anthologies and his other projects. Plus, you’ll get John’s thoughts about books, short stories, TV and film, roleplaying games, and related subjects. Subscribers will receive Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! Stories: Volume One as a free reward for subscribing. The newsletter launches January 2025!

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! launches January 2025.

Visit johnjosephadams.com/newsletter today to sign up for free.

Antyesti For a Dead Ganesa, Part 2

Ashok K. Banker | 13106 words

[Continued from Part 1]

The pratikriti squats beside him on the terrace. Now that he is able to see again through his borrowed eyes, Neel is surprised at how obviously inhuman it looks. Then he remembers a briefing from a long time ago: the AI implants filter the appearance of artificials to erase the uncanny valley effect and deceive the human brain into perceiving them as quasi-human. With his AI still offline, his brain sees it for what it actually is: a child-sized artificial being designed to appear cute, friendly, and unthreatening. The design has echoes of Disney animated characters with their large eyes, as well as shades of Japanese anime and virtual toys, but without the filters, it’s little more than a mechanical Pinocchio trying too hard to be lifelike.

“Perhaps now you can answer, detective. What was missing from the body?” the pratikriti asks.

Neel thinks. Unbidden, the sight of the dead Ganesa on the beach resurfaces in his decaying mind.

The split-open elephant head. Deep within the fluted curves and shell-like whorls, at the stem of the blackened purplish jelly-like mass of the brain, the signs of minor irrigation. Like the tracks made by a metal implement scraping away gooey fluids and flesh to expose a tiny area just beneath the base of the brain.

“The q-gland,” he says aloud, marvelling at how obvious it seems now.

He looks at the pratikriti, working it out.

“These weren’t just rich kids playing around, or some sick bastard who gets his rocks off cutting open living god clones. This was someone who was after one specific thing and was willing to do whatever it took to get it. The q-gland.”

The pratikriti dips its head. “Very good, detective.”

It extends a limb.

Neel is unsure what it wants until he remembers the nanovape in his hand. He hands it back reluctantly.

The pratikriti takes the tube, applies it again to its oral organ, and imbibes the nanosthetic, puffing out mauve smoke, then offers it back to Neel.

He takes it with relief.

“I am known as Sawant, by the way,” the pratikriti says.

Neel nods. He has never met a pratikriti that has a name before. Then again, he has rarely encountered any artificials before: before he was put into deadsleep, they were regarded as expensive playthings, affordable only by the uber rich. Apart from brief encounters with artificials that opened doors, ushered him into meetings, or operated vehicles, he has never had an actual face-to-face conversation with one; yet he supposes that sharing a smoke qualifies as a kind of friendship.

“Hello Sawant,” Neel says.

“It is a pun, of course. Sawant, because—”

“Because it sounds almost like savant, yes, I thought as much.”

“Of course. You are a detective. A very good one. What do you know about q-glands, Detective Neel Kant?”

“Not much,” Neel admits. “Only what I learned in school. I know that nobody else knew what a q-gland was or was aware of their existence until we made first contact with the Sanskriti.”

“Yes,” the pratikriti agrees, “After first contact, the Sanskriti gifted us the Smriti Codex, as a sign of friendship and trust. You would have been taught the significance of the Codex in school as well.”

“A key that enabled us to decode the factual, scientific meaning of ancient Vedic lore,” Neel says, feeling like a middle grader reciting an answer in class again. “When applied to the mantras in the ancient puranas, the Vedas, and other ancient Sanskrit text, it made it possible to interpret the scientific equivalents and in some cases, apply it to technological advancements.”

He gestures at the city above them, the source of retina-blasting illumination. “It changed the world.”

“And what is the role of the q-gland in all that?”

“The Smriti Codex also helped us analyse the puranas, the ancient texts that purport to be histories of the lives of the Devas, the ancient Gods of the Vedic pantheon, and determine that their godlike powers, immortality and superiority all stemmed from a gland only they possessed.”

“A quantum gland,” Sawant says.

“Yes. A biological organ that secretes a hormone that enables quantum entanglement of biological molecules,” Neel says.

“That is an oversimplification, but yes, basically it means that all beings who possess a q-gland are connected at a quantum level. It is what enabled the Devas to travel through dimensions, across time and space, change shape and form, manipulate reality, create—or destroy—entire universes at will, and achieve fantastical, inconceivable feats beyond human imagining.” Sawant pauses. “Our awareness of the q-gland is only one of many such discoveries we made after applying the Codex. But progress has slowed in the past decade. Interpreting and applying the Codex is a complex, complicated matter, and the potential consequences of misinterpretation are devastating. Furthermore, the Sanskriti have restricted most of the Codex from humanity as a whole, giving only a few select individuals access to certain sections. And of those individuals, only one has been graced with direct access to the Sanskrit themselves. No other human being on the planet has ever been afforded the privilege of contact.”

The pratikriti raises a limb to point, while projecting a holo of a view of the cityscape a mile or more above them. This is for Neel’s benefit, being temporarily deprived of his AI and use of his cams. Most of it is traffic, endless rows and stacks of vehicles rushing people home to their destinations in the kilometres high towers and blocks which is Mumbai in the year 2094, a far cry from the city by the sea it once was.

But there is more to it than just traffic and towers. There is, for instance, the under-construction, near-complete space elevator called Dwara.

A burnished, gold-hued, translucent, nanotube cylinder built from a superpolycarbon, its Earthbound section is already completed and looms, towering thousands of miles high into orbit, within reach now of the enormous way station that is also almost complete.

The name literally means Doorway or Gateway and like all gates, access to it is restricted by gatekeepers. For the fortunate upper castes who are approved for travel eventually, Dwara will be mankind’s gateway to the galaxy. While the majority of humans would continue to develop and occupy the solar system, stripping it of its natural resources, the stars are the real, intended destination. Those who are wealthy and powerful enough—and have earned the approval of the Sanskriti—will be transported in unimaginably vast ships across equally unimaginable distances to colonise new worlds, new systems, even new galaxies.

Above the traffic ceiling, an invisible height limit imposed upon all vehicles by AI, is the block that houses the Mumbai Police Department. And above it, shaped like a diamond, is the single largest residence on the planet.

It is Himalayan in mass, Mahabharatan in size, diamantine in shape. It takes up slightly more than half of Mumbai’s area, or sky footage as it’s now called in real estate terms, and is immense enough to house all of the city’s twenty-seven million population.

But in fact, it only houses one person.

One person and his family, of course, but it’s not a large family by Indian late twenty-first century standards. Barely five people, all told.

Five people serviced by a staff of reputedly several hundred, not counting some thousands of pratikritis for its maintenance and security.

It’s the single largest residence on the planet.

And also the most heavily guarded structure.

Its tented peak, glittering like the multi-faceted diamond it’s meant to resemble, is twice as tall as Mount Everest, the uppermost miles kept free of frost and ice by a heated surface. The actual living areas are all in the center, barely a few square kilometres, shielded on all sides by a vast array of technology, human servants, and protective defenses. It was still under construction when Neel was put into deadsleep and this is his first view of the completed “house.”

It is unspeakably gaudy, ostentatious, over-the-top, decadent.

It is also unspeakably beautiful.

It is the domicile of Indrakant Devaratna.

The richest, most powerful man in the world.

The only Indian who has had direct contact with the Sanskriti since their arrival; in fact, humankind’s first contact with an alien species, since the Sanskriti are alien beings even if they are, theoretically at least, of Indian origin, was with a single human: Indrakant Devaratna.

The man responsible for the termination of Neel’s life, and his enslavement after death, for that is what being put into deadsleep really means, isn’t it? Dead, but sustained biologically for such time as when your services might be required again. To be resurrected at that time and given an assignment. And once that assignment is completed, to be returned to deadsleep. And so on, for as long as the man who put him there deems it.

No, not a man.

Indrakant Devaratna might have been born a man once, forty or fifty or however many years ago when he emerged from his mother’s womb as a human infant.

But now he is far, far more than that.

Indrakant Devaratna is a spokesperson for the gods in today’s world.

The only human on the planet granted the highest access to the Sanskriti and all their incredible gifts.

The Chosen One, so to speak, if Intergalactic Super Capitalism can be said to have a Chosen One.

Yes, that is the only fitting word to describe Devratna’s power and influence.

Indrakant Devaratna is a god.

And Detective Neel Kant serves at his whim.

For now, Neel thinks, battling the emotions that war within him. For now, but not forever.

As if sensing his true, unspoken thoughts and feelings, Sawant closes the holo.

Neel closes his eyes, taking in another suck of numbing smoke. “What does all this have to do with the q-gland and my case?”

Sawant rises and prowls the terrace as it continues speaking. Its eyes extend on antennae, scanning the sky. It has the watchful, alert attitude of someone sensing imminent threat. It is waiting for something, or someone, who is not a friend.

“As you have already pointed out earlier, detective, the genuine clones of the Devas, the ones that are built out of the actual, undegraded DNA of the real Hindu gods themselves, are each born with a q-gland. Like other biological glands, the q-gland only becomes active later in life. In the lifespan of the Devas, that means after the elapse of one thousand and eight years.”

“A whole millennium,” Neel agrees.

“They’re Devas,” Sawant says, “immortals. A thousand years to them is like a few weeks, maybe even a few days or hours to humans. Once activated, the q-gland releases the unknown hormone that makes quantum entanglement possible, investing the body with unimaginable abilities. The power to fold space-time, to wield impossible power, to manipulate matter at an epic scale. In sum, it’s the basis of the godlike powers of the Devas that you grew up reading and hearing about in the ancient Indian puranas, myths and legends.”

“The Power of the Gods,” Neel says, “all from a tiny gland smaller than a poppy seed.”

“Yes, but that is the power vested in the body of the Deva itself. To date, no human has reported seeing an actual Deva yet. Even the Sanskriti admit they have had no contact with the Devas for tens of thousands of years, and are unaware of their actual whereabouts. They have suggested that perhaps the Devas are extinct, though they do not deign to explain how a race of immortals could die out.”

“Or so they claim,” Neel says.

Sawant pauses, absorbing this.

“Or so they claim,” it agrees.

Then continues. “A clone derived from actual Deva DNA, if that were even possible, would have to be kept alive for at least a thousand and eight years, until the q-gland activates. The Sanskriti have been in contact with humans, well, with one human anyway, for just three decades. Even the Smriti Codex only provides us with fragments related to them: from those fragments, we’ve been able to craft and print mimics of the gods, using artificially grown DNA or recycled, mutated human DNA. That’s how all the fake Ganesas and other Devas are grown, and even they barely last a day before decomposing.”

Like I’m decomposing now, Neel thinks but doesn’t say aloud.

“To acquire an actual q-gland, someone would have to clone a Deva using actual god DNA. Where would they get that? How would they get that? From the Sanskriti? How does that work exactly?” the pratikriti asks.

“But if it were possible,” Neel says, following the line of the argument to its logical conclusion.

Sawant lowers its antenna and head block in a gesture of acknowledgment. “If it were possible . . .”

Neel continues. “Then perhaps the person or persons who cloned that Ganesa on the beach needn’t wait a thousand years until activated. All they would have to do is extract the q-gland and study it, analyse it using knowledge gained from the Smriti Codex.”

Neel rises, walking to the end of the terrace, to the view of the beach and the black, invisible, soughing body of the Arabian Sea, chaffing restlessly against its earthbound chains. “That would explain the corpse on the beach. But then what do they do with the q-gland?”

Sawant is silent now, gliding noiselessly to hover beside Neel without interrupting his flow of thought.

Neel nods to himself as well as to the pratikriti. “Maybe they believe that by studying it, they can figure out the composition of the hormone, recreate it artificially? Find a way to acquire quantum abilities without needing to wait a thousand and eight years? Or maybe just sell it on the black market, to someone else who wants it.”

“Wants it for what?” he then asks aloud, then waves the question away, laughing at himself. “Forget I asked. They want it for the same reason that rich people in Mumbai used to want to buy tiger’s claws, or ostrich eggs, or any of a hundred endangered species, now all extinct, because of some superstitious belief that if they ate it, or drank it, or powdered it and applied it on their sexual organs, or their chest or wherever, they would acquire some of that animal’s abilities. It’s not really that different from the illegal animal organ trade of a hundred years ago, is it?”

Sawant makes a sound of approval. “Basically, the same thing, black marketing of illegally harvested organs, but with bigger stakes, more money. And as you are aware, detective, there is a great deal more wealth around now than ever before.”

Neel snaps his fingers. “And it doesn’t have to be a buyer in Mumbai or even in India. There are still billionaires and even a handful of trillionaires around the world who’ve benefitted from the arrival of the Sanskriti. Anyone could be willing to pay a fortune for a q-gland if it was even remotely possible to use it to somehow acquire the abilities of a Deva.”

Neel tosses the possibilities around for another minute or two, using the artificial as a sounding board for the hypothesis. The pratikriti seems distracted, engaged in its surveilling mode again.

“Time to re-engage yourself in the perennial struggle, detective. Time to rejoin your own race. This has been a fine talk. I wish you godspeed in your endeavors.”

Neel frowns. The words have a sense of finality. Before he can speak, he feels the familiar, unpleasant sensation of his AI and its systems coming back online. He cringes and winces. For a brief time, he got to experience what it was like to be human, not quite alive, but dead-alive, which is the closest he has been in a long time. It frustrates him. He wants to ask the pratikriti more questions, debate the possibilities further. But the AI overwhelms everything. He knows better than to fight it. He surrenders.

This time when the AI aggressively reboots, he can only lie back on the filthy roof and let the tech restarting in his head and body cycle through its usual processes. At least it will help shield him from the light. As his retinacams whirr and the system races through a series of sensory and neurological tests, administering doses of drugs to push the corpse shell into a few more hours of artificially induced activity, he regains his feet, rejuvenated by the drugs, the AI overriding the obduracy of the corpse flesh, and stares at the pratikriti. Once again, he sees it as a quasi-human, the uncanny valley effect erased by the AI.

The pratikriti extends two antennae that curve and bend like feelers then fix themselves in one direction as if tracking something approaching. Neel feels it now, and is aware of the sound he has been hearing the past several seconds, from the instant his AI powered up. The growl of approaching motors in the sky.

“Welcome back, Detective Neel Kant,” the pratikriti says, “Accept this parting gift from your kawariya.”

Neel barely has a chance to register the incoming digital message before a single searing red line descends from a forty-five-degree angle, ending at the pratikriti’s head and reducing it to a heap of smoldering pile of metal trash that collapses into a mercurial smear on the sooty roof. The police drona that fired the implosive shot hovers above the roof, turning its searchlight upon Neel himself next, its weapons bristling. Two others hover at the periphery of his vision, tracking him while scanning for other hostiles. SOP.

“Detective Neel Kant, report immediately to your supervisor,” says the mechanical voice of the drona, then repeats the command in Marathi, Hindi, and several other languages.

• • • •

The Headquarters of the Mumbai Police Department is much the same since Neel was last woken from deadsleep. From the van which is transporting him, approaching at a height of a kilometre above ground, it appears as it has for the past half-century, a large greenish-gray block of solid lohiton suspended in the air. The lohiton, allegedly capable of withstanding anything short of a nuke, as well as the antigrav platform on which the structure rests, were both provided by the Sanskriti, of course. One of their many gifts to humanity, their distant cousins. And because humanity chose not to look the gift horse in the mouth, all the tech that powers the Mumbai PD, like all other administrative and government functioning, is also provided by the Sanskriti.

On closer approach, as the van passes through the slot that has opened to receive them, Neel notes the motto engraved at the entrance is the same as it has been for a century and a half: Sadraksanaya Khalanigrahanaya. Ever vigilant and ready to protect against evil the department might well be, but what about the evil within?

Srinivasan is waiting in the docking area, his worry overlayered by a skein of anger. Four human cops are on duty: Two constables, a sub-inspector and an inspector. They look on indifferently, simply getting through their shift, but when the van door slides open and the dronas assist Neel out, they register recognition and something else: Hostility? Disgust? The inspector shoots a quick glance in Neel’s direction, and he senses something more than mere curiosity in her gaze but isn’t sure what. At his look, her eyes snap away, face resets, and perhaps he only imagined it.

He has no illusions: the country had already been in the thrall of majoritarian sentiment for almost a whole century when first contact with the Sanskriti occurred; in these past thirty years, that sentiment has hardened into dogma, prejudice solidified as a core value. Even before Neel was found guilty of sedition and put down, he was already inured to the bigotry of his colleagues in the department as one of the last surviving “lowborn.” After the charges, his file was classified, his actual offense, such as it was, kept concealed from public (and departmental) view, allowing prejudice-free rein to ascribe any number of anti-national offenses to him. These young cops’ faces reflect their contempt for a person they believe doesn’t qualify as human, let alone deserve to be in charge of an investigation.

“I’ll take him from here,” Srinivasan says to the dronas.

They bristle, each floating torso reacting with machine reflex, weapons armed. At once, the attitude of the human police officers changes.

“Deputy Commissioner Srinivasan, our orders are to bring the suspect to the interrogation rooms for questioning by the Commissioner,” says a drona in its clipped, mechanical voice.

“Then follow behind us, while I walk with the Detective,” Srini says curtly, then repeats the word, “Detective Neel Kant is under my command. We are taking him in for a debriefing.”

The drona is silent for a beat as everyone stays still, the possibility of violence imminent. Its white pupils spin like the eyes of the possessed in an exorcism as it verifies Srinivasan’s claim and current status, then light up again. “Proceed.”

They board a tray, the silver square levitating in an AI-controlled vector across the open center of the structure. Several other trays rise and fall silently, diagonally, moving along their own invisible vectors as they transport other persons under arrest, some to scheduled court hearings, the convicted ones to holding cells where they will await transport to the asteroid prison colonies. The khaki-uniformed officers on each one glance in passing at Neel. Though none linger, he feels their gazes as keenly as a hundred laser pointers aimed at him, boring in. He feels the silent chatter as a growing bubble pressing in from all sides, othering him. That fellow. Dead but still a troublemaker.

Something in his right lower side is dysfunctional. The corpse’s liver? Kidney? This whole body is breaking down, but this particular spot is extra tender. When Srinivasan’s elbow brushes against it accidentally, pain sparkles brightly, searing. Neel’s knees long to buckle; his brain balks. He maintains his bipedal uprightness, imitating a show of human dignity as best as he can: for as long as he can. The good news is he’s already dead. By reviving him, they have already done the worst that they could do; returning to the sweet, dreamless void of deadsleep will be a blessed relief.

• • • •

The interrogation room is cold, intended to make suspects, more often than not malnourished malcontents riddled with disease and mental health issues, wretchedly uncomfortable. It has the opposite effect on Neel. The cold feels welcome, a relief from the tropical heat of the place from which he has come. He is, after all, a walking corpse. Cold is where his body lives; a corpsicle loves the freezer.

Srini goes through the ritual of formality in matter-of-fact fashion, but his eyes tell Neel a different story. He’s trying to communicate something between the formal declarations of name, rank, etc., something only Neel is meant to understand. He gets it. Srini has a fine, dangerous line to walk: he must maintain the outward appearance of a superior officer debriefing a junior while carefully avoiding any reveals of their true relationship and purpose here, and is subtly cautioning Neel to do the same. Neel holds eye contact and nods once. They are being monitored in every way possible: visually, aurally, biometrically, their blood, DNA, brains mapped and scanned. This is a treacherous minefield; yet, walking across the minefield is the only way across to where they are headed. The only way out is through.

“Detective Neel Kant, your assignment was to examine the crime scene and then return to Headquarters to pursue your investigation using our resources,” Srinivasan says, playing his part.

“That is correct, sir,” Neel responds. “In the course of my examination, I observed someone watching me from a nearby structure. Since the witness recording that first alerted us to the crime appeared to have been taken from that same structure, there was a high possibility of the watcher being the witness. It was incumbent upon me to investigate further at once.”

“Why not simply call in a drona team?” Srinivasan asks, settling in, looking less anxious now that Neel is playing along so amiably. “That is the SOP.”

“Sir, there was a likelihood of the witness fleeing the scene before the dronas could arrive on scene. Moreover, the presence of the dronas could well have provoked an aggressive response. Had violence broken out, key evidence and witnesses could have been lost. I felt it expedient to make a preliminary assessment before calling them in.”

Proceeding in this procedural manner, they build a credible scenario of the events in Green House. Neel makes no mention of Grandmother or her children, of course, and shrugs away the lack of data received by his AI as a probable tech malfunction. The I’m-just-a-cop-what-do-I-know-about-tech is credible enough to be convincing, he hopes. Srini helps by phrasing his questions carefully, steering Neel away from anything that might lead to sensitive areas, or open pitfalls which he might struggle to answer. It’s a classic game of “ask only the right questions to get only the answers you want heard” and they play it well together, even though this is their first rodeo since Neel’s return from deadsleep. Certainly the first with such high stakes.

When they come to the rooftop and Neel’s brief but pungent conversation with the pratikriti, they are on more dangerous ground. Because of the proximity of the dronas as well as the rebooting of Neel’s AI at the time, even Srini can’t brush over or ignore the final communication sent by the artificial person before its head was imploded.

Srini calls it up on the space between them over the interrogation table.

C₁₆H₁₅NO₂ [a]²⁷D+7.89° (c 0.20, CHCl₃) hangs in mid air, printed on invisible electrons.

“Explain,” Srini says.

Neel shrugs and lies: “I have no idea what it means.”

Srini exhibits the first true frown, his forehead creasing in two overlapping chevron-shaped curves. “It appears to be a chemical formula,” he says.

Another shrug. “If you say so, sir. Chemistry was never my best subject.”

This is factually correct. The body that Neel is in currently belongs to a person who flunked Chemistry back in high school and had to take a re-exam to secure the minimum passing mark of thirty-five required to graduate.

Srini tilts his head, consulting his AI. “Aeglemarmelosine. A compound.”

“The pratikriti was clearly malfunctional,” Neel says, affecting indifference, “Probably another decommissioned artificial illegally resold before it could be destroyed by the garbage disposal department, refurbished for illicit personal use. Who knows what mods had been made to its systems, how it had been tampered with, what criminal uses it had served. It could have been spouting subversive blasphemy. Or just gibberish. In any case, it’s been destroyed, so what does it matter?”

This is the perineum of the interrogation, the thin membrane between withholding information and committing treasonous blasphemy, which would be an automatic death sentence for Srinivasan, his rank and status notwithstanding and for Neel, a swift return to deadsleep. It doesn’t bother Neel much; deadsleep would be better than this, anything would be better than this half-existence, not-life. But Srinivasan would be missed, less by Neel than by Srini’s wife, his children—Neel’s sister, nephew and niece. For Srini’s sake, he hopes the lie will fly.

Srini leans forward, face hard, voice stern. The threat and gravel in his voice are real. He knows what’s at stake too, and he needs Neel to sell this. It’s as close as he can come to begging, Help me out here, Neel.

“Detective, if you’re lying to me, there will be consequences.”

“Why would I lie? You brought me out of deadsleep, assigned this case to me. I’ve only been here a few hours, you’ve monitored my every move. Besides, what possible reason would I have to lie?” Neel asks, feigning incredulity.

Srini shakes his head. “I’m not going to waste time speculating. Just tell me what the pratikriti meant.”

“Sir, that is what I wish to do as well. Find out what that formula meant. Let me talk to the Police Lab and find out.”

Srini’s waving his palm in a negative gesture before Neel can finish. “Before that. Before it sent you the formula and was destroyed by the dronas. Before your AI rebooted and resumed recording. You were having a conversation about something else. That’s what I’m asking about.”

And so they come to the rub.

Neel spreads his hands, palms up. “I was questioning the pratikriti for information on what it witnessed, but wasn’t getting anywhere. It was talking gibberish, as I said.”

Srini slams his fist down on the table, rising to his feet. The two cups of water jump, Neel’s full one falling over and spilling. The fluid forms a paramecium shape.

“Stop wasting my time!” he shouts, looming over Neel, face engorged. “My techs are probing your AI to find out why and how it malfunctioned. They have ways to retrieve the missing period of time from your organic memories directly! If what you’re telling me here fails to correspond with their findings, deadsleep will be the least of your problems! Do you understand?”

In other words: the Police tech is doing their damnedest to find out what actually happened down there in Green House. If they’re able to retrieve anything that contradicts what Neel is telling him here on the record, they will both be in deep shit.

Yeah, right. Extracting coherent data directly from organic brain matter is tricky at best even when the person being probed is of sound mental and neurological health. Pulling information out of a dead corpse’s head which is already in advanced entropy is laughable. It’s an idle threat, a show for the powers that be who are watching or will be watching this recording. But Srini is doing more than just covering his ass; he’s giving Neel an opportunity to lay on the record anything that might come back to bite them both in the ass later. And also: he’s begging Neel to give them something, anything, that will justify his letting Neel stay on the case and Srini assigning him to it in the first place. He was right when he said this wasn’t about Neel; it’s about him too, about Neel’s sister and niece and nephew, and also, ultimately, about getting justice in an unjust society, although the powers that be don’t know that last part of course. If they did, both Srini and Neel would already be done.

Neel lowers his head in a resigned gesture.

“Very well, sir,” he says, trying to sound contrite, “I have a working theory. But I need more information before I know whether it has any merit. It could be completely worthless, for all I know. Like I said, I’ve only been on the case a few hours.”

Srini shakes his head, looking grim. “Don’t play games with me, Detective. We’re on the cusp of the twenty-second Century. We’re empowered with Sanskriti technology. Hyper advanced alien technology light years beyond anything we’d developed ourselves. The stuff of dreams and miracles. The majority of our cases are resolved within hours, some within minutes, almost always without needing physical intervention. The days of wearing out shoe leather and beating in heads are long gone. Forensic analysis, online data, and chemical interrogations give us everything we need, sitting in this building and working with our AIs. Whatever you have, theory or bullshit, it can be verified and tested instantly. Your job is to observe and oversee, to direct the course of the investigation. That is what a Detective does these days. I very much doubt you, a mere human detective, could come up with something that even our Sanskriti tech can’t uncover. But let’s say for the purposes of this discussion that I’m willing to play along with your self-delusion. If you genuinely have something, now’s the time to spill it.”

Srini’s face conveys the ultimatum with a final plea in his black pupils. Now, Neel. Give them something.

Neel does. “Q-glands.”

The double chevron reappear on Srini’s forehead. “What about q-glands?”

Neel shifts in his seat to feign reluctance for the watchers, as if he’s giving up a half-baked theory he’s embarrassed to have thought up, his eyes evasive, body language uncomfortable. “I don’t think this is just another case of people printing out Ganesas for religious rituals or kids recycling cheap DNA for their own entertainment. It’s about q-glands. Someone, or several someones, are searching for q-glands.”

The frown stays on Srini’s face, but he retakes his seat, thoughtful. “So you think that the Ganesa on the beach was killed by someone hoping to find their q-gland? That would imply that it was a clone of . . .” he pauses, “of an actual Ganesa. No. Of the actual Ganesa. The original god.”

Neel shrugs. “Like I said, it’s just a thought. A theory in progress.”

Srini is silent for a moment, considering. “And the pratikriti confirmed this theory?”

Neel shakes his head. “He neither confirmed nor denied it. I told you already, he was talking nonsense. Meaningless stuff. Like that formula. I would bet you that has nothing to do with this case at all, it was just some meaningless thing that floated up from his corrupted archive. The recording of the body on the beach was the only thing useful he provided us. The rest is just my hypothesis.”

Srini nods once, giving Neel a look that says, this is good, this will play well.

Then he’s about to say something else, ask another question, when one of the two dronas present in the interrogation room whirs to life and speaks aloud.

“Deputy Commissioner Srinivasan, Detective Neel Kant, you are both ordered to report to Commissioner Pawar’s office immediately. This debriefing is concluded. Follow me.”

• • • •

Mumbai Police Commissioner Atharva Pawar is standing at the far wall of his office, looking out at the view.

The capacious office, the masculine stance and the spectacular backdrop are intended to underline his power and influence, and perhaps they might awe and intimidate his juniors, but they fail to have the desired effect on Neel.

He and Srini wait.

After he deems that sufficient time has elapsed to demonstrate his status, the Commissioner speaks without turning.

“There was once a time when sea views fetched premium rates. People would pay fortunes to buy a flat with unobstructed sea view. Did you know? There used to be laws, something called CRZ, which prevented people from building highrises along the seafacing roads of Mumbai? It was considered bad for the environment to destroy the mangroves, to dump waste in the sea. We had to keep the planet clean, the coastline pure, the view pristine! Back then, a flat with a view of the sea would fetch as much as any condominium in New York or Tokyo. All that changed when the Sanskriti came. Our priorities changed. They made us see the truth.”

Pawar turns to them, his handsome features glowing with the clean-cut charm that makes him appear so magnetic on the newscasts. As a poster boy and spokesperson, he’s perfect. Even though there are no cams on him right now, he walks and talks as if he’s hosting a live documentary on the solarnet.

“The Sanskriti showed us that this planet was just one among many, like a flat or a kholi in a tenement chawl that we happened to have been born in. It was small, cramped, crowded, dirty, and getting used up. But it didn’t have to be our permanent home. They gave us technology that makes it possible to travel to the stars, showed us other inhabitable planets, many of which they themselves had terraformed. They opened our minds to the universe of opportunities. Now, we see this planet for what it truly is. A shithole. A slum! That ocean out there that our forefathers admired so much? It’s a toilet! Forget global warming! We don’t need to bother about nonsense like pollution and greenhouse gases, and polar ice caps. Let them melt! Let climate change happen! We have other homes to move to now. Other planets to settle. It’s time to move on. The Earth’s time is done, our time is just beginning.”

He walks across to Srini, who salutes him crisply. Pawar acknowledges the salute, then looks at Neel.

“Detective Neel Kant. When Srinivasan here proposed that we bring you out of deadsleep to investigate this case, do you know what my first thought was?”

A half dozen retorts flit through Neel’s dying brain. He squashes them like roaches. “No, sir,” he says aloud.

“How fitting to send a dead man to investigate a dead-end crime in a dying city!”

Pawar laughs at his own joke, Srini joining in. Neel puts on his most macabre, thanks-for-making-fun-of-my-condition, teeth-baring grin and makes a sound that hopefully sounds enough like a dead man laughing.

Pawar watches him closely, as if anticipating—maybe even hoping for—any sign of rebellion, of the risible, backtalk attitude that Neel was notorious for back in the day. Before he was executed chemically and put into deadsleep. That was another, Pawar’s predecessor, Gokhle, who has since moved on to take over as Mayor of the Sanskriti Solar Federation. Neel suppresses the urge to pander to Pawar’s expectations, maybe dole out a little fan service, then reminds himself what’s at stake here: his sister, niece, nephew, his brother-in-law Srini’s career.

“You do see the humor in that, don’t you, Detective?” Pawar asks Neel, moving into his personal space deliberately, placing his smiling, ivory toothed smile only inches from Neel’s rotting flesh.

“Yes, sir,” Neel says, thinking, This is nothing. I could do this all day. If this is Commissioner Pawar’s idea of provocation then maybe he’s not half as bad as his reputation. Even his ideas about the planet come off as the usual Sanskriti propaganda. This is all stuff Neel is inured to, standard rightwing gobbledygook. Or as it was called in Mumbai, bakwas.

“Good!” he says, slapping Neel hard on my shoulder. “Good!” he adds, slapping him a second time, probably for the satisfaction of watching Neel wince again. Whatever gunk the AI injected into him back on the rooftop of Green House isn’t of much use now; he feels like a zombie about to fall to pieces at any minute. If Pawar slaps me one more time, he thinks, my arm might just fall off.

Mercifully, Pawar seems to decide that he’s meted out sufficient male domination behavior for the moment.

“So,” he says, walking around the enormous desk and the leather-upholstered chair that are the only pieces of furniture in this vast space. As top dog, no one who’s summoned here needs a place to sit while they get their ears chewed off or pumped with new orders. Anyone above the PC wouldn’t lower his status by visiting a junior; Pawar would be summoned to their offices. Neel wonders if they have chairs in their offices, and if Pawar is forced to stand when he goes to get his ears chewed off or filled. Probably. Abuse, like all other manifestations of power, is usually a trickle down phenomenon.

Pawar seats himself at his desk.

“Let’s talk about q-glands,” he says.

• • • •

The first thing Srini does when they’re in the men’s restroom is turn to Neel, take hold of his shoulders—gently, because unlike Pawar, Srini is conscious of Neel’s condition—and hug him. “Nice,” he says, patting Neel on the back lightly, “nice.” The single word conveys everything he dare not say aloud to Neel: thank you, brother-in-law, you handled that very well, they bought it hook, line and sinker, and that buys us some valuable time, so thank you on behalf of myself, Lata, Kishore and Rafi, you got us out of what could have become a very sticky situation.

He releases Neel, stepping away, as the door of the restroom opens and two sub-inspectors come in. They barely glance at Neel but salute the DCP before going to the urinals. Srini glances at Neel’s reflection in the mirror and mimes putting a finger to his lips while his eyes flick diagonally left upward then right upward like a Kathakali dancer. Neel already knows to be wary: he assumes their every word, every move is being recorded, monitored, analysed, either by the station AI or perhaps even by Mukhya itself on its own distant orbital asteroid, heavily armed and protected.

He doesn’t actually need to use the restroom, one of the very few advantages of being dead, but takes the opportunity to go into a stall, locks it, and sits on the closed toilet seat. He rests his throbbing head on his palms, elbows on thighs, leaning forward. The chemicals in him mimic the sensation of blood coursing through his veins. He doesn’t know which hurts more: being dead and decaying or remembering what it was like to be alive.

He takes his time in the stall, knowing that Srini will understand. Neel needs a minute and this is probably the last he’ll be getting until he finishes this case.

Or until this case finishes me, he thinks.

He’s trying to summon up the strength to stand when something moves below him. He sees that the person from the neighboring stall has pushed something under the dividing partition.

Neel picks it up cautiously, unsure what to expect.

It’s a small strip of barcoding.

He stares at it uncomprehendingly for a moment and feels a peculiar sensation in his head and eyes. Suddenly, the AI-controlled filters on his retinas flicker and go crazy, starting a rush of subliminal images that flicker in quick succession, too fast to see, like an old celluloid film running on an out-of-control projector. A maddening buzz in his ears and the scent of something plastic burning accompanies these delightfully unpleasant, not-quite-relaxing sensations.

Over the buzzing—or under it, perhaps, it sounds almost subvocal—he hears a voice speaking in his ear: not through tech, this is a real, live human voice, a woman’s voice, speaking too quietly to be heard outside the stall.

She tells him that the barcoding will confuse his AI for about thirty seconds, keep it from recording or reporting back anything he says, hears or sees, so she has to be quick. Listen, don’t speak. She gives him instructions, a name, a location, reminds him not to talk about this to anyone, not even Srinivasan.

“Wait,” he starts to say, wanting to ask a question, but he hears the toilet flush in the neighboring stall, then the door lock snapping open. Just then, his AI comes back online with a sigh and a thud. His nostrils feel as if he’s been inhaling hot cinders, making him sneeze violently. He unlocks his own stall door and exits, just in time to see a woman constable at the washbasins. It’s the same one who was there to receive him, along with Srini and the two other male officers. He starts towards her, intending to join her at the next washbasin and maybe make eye contact briefly, just enough to confirm that it was she who just spoke to him, he’ll be careful not to give anything away. There’s no sign of Srini.

Before he can reach the basins, someone grabs hold of him from the side and slams him against the tiled wall. His head makes contact with a resounding crack and his shoulder crunches hard against the wall.

Two strong, muscular pairs of hands have taken hold of him, wrenching, twisting, gripping angrily. He sees the two cops who were in here earlier when he came in with Srini, the ones who barely glanced at him. Their faces are contorted with the old incomprehensible fury of men like them that he has witnessed since he was a child. The fear of anyone different from them, deviant from the norm, a fear transmuted over generations through cultural reinforcement into deep-rooted prejudice, bigotry, genocidal caste-based rage.

“You people,” one of them says, driving his fist into Neel’s abdomen. He hits close enough to the tender spot on the right side to make Neel’s pain centers explode with a supernova of agony. The other one keeps his forearm jammed up against Neel’s throat to hold him in place, crushing Neel’s adam’s apple and cutting off his air supply.

“Hey,” says a female voice. “That’s enough.”

Neel can’t see her—his head is shoved sideways, left eye almost in contact with the wall—but he’s sure it’s her, the female sergeant. She must be the one who gave him the message in the stall. Go away, he wants to tell her, get the hell out of here. Don’t risk yourself to exposure by coming to my rescue. But he’s the damsel in distress, she the knight in armor here, and she knows what she’s doing.

“You a fan of these lowborn?” demands the cop who broke Neel’s liver. At least, that’s what it feels like. “You want to see them brought back to the department again? To see them become part of society? You like the low castes?”

Neel hears her answer in a cold, tight tone: “I don’t give a shit about them. I just thought I’d point out that DCP Srinivasan is right outside that door. If he catches you beating up this bastard, you’ll both be suspended. As your squad sergeant, I need every available officer, that is my only concern.”

A beat of silence follows this.

Neel feels the man pressing him against the wall yank back his forearm.

“Screw this,” he hears him say, “I’m not going to lose my job for the likes of this lowborn bastard.”

“Yeah,” says the one who slugged Neel, “they aren’t worth it. Vaise bhi, this madarchodh’s deadmeat anyway. Probably won’t last the day!”

Neel sees them step around the woman and exit the bathroom. She grabs the door behind them to hold it open, glances at Neel without expression, then leaves as well.

Neel puts out a hand to grab the side of a washbasin to keep himself from sliding down to the floor. He does a stumbling half-twirl to grip the basin with both hands, waits until his forearms stop trembling, then runs the faucet and splashes water on his face until he stops shaking. The water is cold, but to his skin, it feels unpleasantly warm. He stays like that, water dripping off his face into the basin.

He’s been dead, and he’s been alive.

Dead beats alive any day of the week.

• • • •

The drona makes a keening sound to rouse him from the involuntary doze he’s fallen into while downsiding.

“You have arrived at your destination,” it says, “be aware that you are entering a restricted zone. You will be exposed to toxic substances, viruses—”

He stumbles out and tries to slam the van door shut on the mechanical litany. The AI controlling the door resists his weak effort, continuing to slide the door shut at its own mechanical pace.

He keeps his head down and eyes closed to avoid the dust storm raised by the van lifting off, waits another minute, then looks around at his surroundings.

He’s in one of the few open areas in old Mumbai, or as the Upperborn derisively call it, the City. He was expecting to find it barren, a bald patch on the otherwise hirsutely endowed scalp of the northernmost of the seven islands. The last time he was extracted from deadsleep, on an earlier case, he had looked down while the vehicle transporting him rose up, and saw nothing but a patch of burnt sienna on a colorful mosaic dhurrie, dead as skin scorched by a cigarette burn. This was where the dronas that had rescued him had intervened by deploying an implosion device. The blast cleared a heavily populated area of roughly four square miles. In a place where human beings were forced to live packed together like sardines in a tin can, the death toll below had been in the tens of thousands, but the subsequent department report, which Neel scans now, not a single resident of the towers above, or the occupant of the Kohinoor, had been affected in the slightest; as a result, the department had termed this “an acceptable outcome.”

But in the short interval of about three years, the blasted zone has revived somehow. Instead of a bald patch of earth, Neel is standing in what he can only describe as a jungle clearing. It is a grassy area surrounded by a mad profusion of growth. Neel has never seen trees or plants, flowers and insects like these before. Neither, apparently, has his AI which keep flashing the message “Unidentified flora, approach with caution” for almost everything he sees.

Then, as if throwing up its metaphorical hands and giving up, his AI malfunctions again, going on the fritz in a manner similar to Neel’s experience on Green House. A moment or two later, it’s down and he blinks as he sees the lushness of the myriad greens, yellows, reds, ochres and all the lavish tropical colors with his own eyes.

From the deepest, richest greens, a pattern emerges. Not a physical face this time, but a grouping of flower petals, leaves, branches, vines, creepers, moss, fungi, and even insects and little slithering and flying animals, all fitting together in a living biological jigsaw puzzle that forms an enormous face. The old woman features of the owner of Green House is recognizable and even manages the semblance of a smile.

Welcome back, Blue Throat.

Neel bows his head respectfully. “Thank you, Old One. I’m glad to be rid of that thing.”

Without it, your body will not survive more than an hour or two. Even with it, it would not have lasted the night.

“Works for me,” Neel says, “I didn’t ask to be revived. I was perfectly content being dead. They’re the ones who keep bringing me back. Flogging the dead horse.”

It is good you retain your sense of humor despite your travails. The ability to mock one’s misfortunes indicates a resilient attitude. A useful survival trait.

Neel nods. “That’s me. I have no gun, but I can spit. Except that I find myself spitting against the wind most days.”

Fear not, Blue Throat. Your fortunes will change. It is a certainty.

“Is that from a Panda Express fortune cookie?”

I know you have little reason to believe this, given your recent history, but nevertheless it is true. Your time is coming, Neel Kant Koli. I feel it in the wind.

Neel sighs. “So much for small talk. Now, can you tell me why you asked me to come here, to this specific set of coordinates? And I don’t know how you did it but that was a smart move, getting the message to me while I was in the can.”

It is a historical fact that the ones who benefit the most from the suffering of the majority tend to be in the smallest minority. Privilege is exclusively reserved for a select few. Otherwise, it would not be privilege.

“I’m not sure what that means, although it sounds impressive.”

Those above are few, Blue Throat, while those below are many.

Neel nods. “That, I can empathize with.”

You seek those who traffic in q-glands. Your superiors have permitted you this second excursion into the city below because they regard you as a dog on a scent. Even now as we speak, even without your own personal AI, they are watching your every move. They intend to track you as you track down the perpetrators. Once you have led them to their goal, you will have outlived your usefulness.

“Yes, I know that too.”

The Old One is silent then, silent if Neel ignored the susurration of the jungle around him, speaking in a thousand green tongues.

Finally, it said, “Go then, Neel Kant Koli. Go perform your task for your masters.”

Neel takes that as his cue.

• • • •

The dense cloud of pollution that hangs over the city below protects his and its resident’s eyes from the impossible brightness of the lights of the city above. The rooftop of Green House, and the Chowpatty beachfront, in contrast, had no such cover, the sea breeze too volatile to let the pollution settle. This layer, however, is too dense and permanent to have moved in half a century.

The city he was born in almost forty years ago, although the past five of those years were spent in deadsleep, is the slum capital of the world. Even a century ago, over half the residents of Bombay, as she was then called in the early 1990s, resided in slums. From that ocean of shanties had risen the concrete towers of the middle class and the rich. Now, in 2094, those towers have mostly crumbled into decaying ruins, while the ocean has expanded far beyond the seven islands of the original city to encompass a substantial portion of the mainland as well. In fact, Mumbai Below, as she is now known, is contiguous with the other metropolitan cities of the subcontinent, sprawling across the southern base of the Eurasian continent to form a continuous mass of earthbound slums, a slum nation in all but name. In this downbelow land reside over 2.6 billion souls. Suspended over them by the magic of Sanskriti technology float the crystalline, jewel-like structures that house the 300 million Upperborn. Most of the citizens of the richest, most populous, most powerful nation of the late twenty-first century live in shanties without governance, policing, oversight or participation in the nation’s new, Sanskriti-driven economy. This is the India of Neel’s generation. On the plus side, nobody has to pay taxes anymore.

Neel pauses at the border between the new jungle and the old slums.

Then he walks across the patch of no-man’s land where optimistic slum dwellers have planted rows of spinach, beetroot, okra, and other assorted vegetables, trying to avoid squashing the produce struggling to grow in the contaminated soil. He steps onto solid poured concrete, and is engulfed by humanity at once. It’s like it was in his childhood years, surrounded by such a profusion of life, a mass of humanity, that there seems barely room left for air or sunshine. People everywhere, all ages, genders, shapes. Men, women and children sitting on the floors of their huts engaged in various tasks: picking out the canker stones from rice, rolling dough into rotis, weaving baskets from cane, bags from jute, cobbling shoes. Teenagers repairing mobile phones, the old-fashioned kind that people once used in the early decades of the century, the kind that required signals bounced off cellular towers. Fixing ancient silver laptops with fruit logos, the kind that required you to type on a keyboard. This is the graveyard of obsolete technology, a zone where everything discarded, no longer of use to those above, is recycled, repaired, refurbished, remade into something useful to those below.

He sees money changing hands, actual paper-printed rupees with the picture of Gandhi on them. People chewing tambaku, the crude raw tobacco plugs that were traditionally favored by Mumbaikars, and spitting out red juice that leaves stains that will last for decades. People smoking, eating, laughing, talking, not through their AIs or even through skin phones, but directly, to one another, in person. He sees a young boy and girl holding hands. Little children playing with a stick and a pile of stones: gili danda, if he remembers correctly.

Some older boys on the rooftops of more permanent, concrete-or-brick two-floor structures, flying bright, colorful kites. The colored string glitters in the light from above as well as in the light of countless electric bulbs and tubelights, the kind that one had to actually screw into holders and needed wired electrical connections to draw power. The glittering colored string is manja, he recalls, twine-like string reinforced by rubbing powdered glass and clay across it by hand. The goal is to maneuver your kite to cross the string of your rival’s, then use your skill and the glass-reinforced manja to cut your rival’s string. Last kite flying wins the day.

The smells of the old city are everywhere. Food: pav bhaji being mashed and remashed on a large steaming tava, pani puri, bhel puri, dahi puri being dished out on tiny leaf-plates to customers who eat them with their bare hands, the spicy waters dripping. Kulfi, jalebis, malpuas, halwa being consumed in stainless steel plates, prepared hot and aromatic right there on the street. He sees a helper washing dirty dishes with water poured from a stainless steel jug, the soiled water allowed to fall into the gutter and drains.

He moves through endless alleyways, the narrow pathways left between miles-long rows of shanties, searching for people, asking questions in English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, the smattering of local languages that he, like any Mumbaikar, picked up some use of in his growing years and which is invaluable down here on the streets where people still talk to one another, where nobody has an AI. He makes his way through the bowels of the City Below, first seeking out someone who deals with biologicals.

His appearance and general condition make his cover story of seeking an urgent organ transplant completely credible and more than one person, with the natural loquacious curiosity of the native Mumbaikar, asks which organ he needs replaced and what happened. To the first, he answers with a self-deprecating laugh, “All of them!” To the second, he says, “Everything that could happen, happened.”

It takes him the better part of an hour to get to someone named Salimbhai, a self-described “agent” who deals in harvested organs for transplants.

Salimbhai is a moustached and bearded, middle-aged, reedy thin man with a pot belly that breaks the otherwise vertical line of his silhouette. He stands with legs spread apart, smoking Tees Chhap beedis non-stop, under the corrugated overhang of a hut from which water drips in a steady, rising flow. A light shower has begun to fall in the past several minutes, and Neel is already soaked through.

Despite the humidity and the warm air, Neel shivers slightly.

Salimbhai seems not to notice, but says, “Drug addicts don’t tolerate new organs,” in English.

“I’m not an addict,” Neel says, “I’m . . . dying, that’s all.”

Close enough to the truth.

Two beedis later, Salimbhai asks, “You have money.” The question mark is not spoken but is implicit.

“I have access to funds,” Neel says. Only a fool would go into the bowels of the black market biologicals area with a pocketful of cash.

Another beedi passes. The smoke is starting to make Neel nauseous. The food smells have awoken something in him. Some memory of hunger. Even though he inhabits a corpse, the corpse remembers being alive, remembers hunger, food. It feels the stir of a craving. An absurd memory of himself as a teenager eating bheja masala and pav at a streetside stall during Ramadan surfaces: again, he can’t tell if it was he, Neel Kant, or the corpse brain’s neurons firing. The thought strikes him as particularly absurd: a dead man craving spiced goat brains and leavened bread. How apt. Zombie wants brains.

“Why smiling, gentleman?” Salimbhai asks as he lights a new beedi. “Dying is joke to you?”

Neel shakes his head. “Life is a joke. Death is a punchline.”

Salimbhai stares off into the shadows across the alleyway. Somewhere, a pack of stray dogs is squabbling, barking madly as they chase down some quarry—or are chased down themselves, who can tell which. A child cries. The sound of a television set playing a Hindi soap blares with heart tugging violins. A man guffaws and says something lewd in Telegu; a woman’s laughter joins him.

“It will cost you this much,” Salimbhai says, showing him three fingers. He adds a fourth finger, stained a permanent yellow from the beedis, “Plus one for me. Terms, full cash. Full advance.”

Neel has no idea if he means forty thousand, four hundred thousand—lakhs, or four million rupees. Does it matter? He’s not the one paying.

“Half advance, half on delivery,” Neel bargains, because if on the streets you always bargain.

Salimbhai smokes his beedi, drops it to join a small battlefield of dead beedis, then offers his hand to Neel.

Momentarily confused, Neel takes the hand and shakes it. To his surprise, Salimbhai pulls him in for a half-hug, pats him on the back and says with unexpected tenderness, “Don’t worry, you will be good as new. My maal is always guaranteed fresh.”

Neel nods, surprised at the personal touch. He has forgotten how different things are down here on the streets, in the real Mumbai, where everyone shares a sense of solidarity, a united front against those above. He realises that Salimbhai has mistaken him for a downbelow Mumbaikar. It makes him feel good, if a bit ashamed of his deception. He is, or was, a downbelow Mumbaikar. Although right now, he’s hard pressed to know what he is.

A detective, he reminds himself.

A detective with a case to solve.

And very little time left to solve it.

He hands Salimbhai the debit card in a paper sleeve that Srinivasan gave him back at the station. The pin code is written on the back of the sleeve. Salimbhai leads him to an ATM machine nearby, followed by Salimbhai’s two associates. Neel watches as Salimbhai works the card in the machine with routine familiarity.

Neel himself is fascinated by the ancient machinery and the fact that it actually works. He’s surprised that anything down here works, and yet, it’s not that different from the Mumbai he remembers, or even the Mumbai he’s seen in old Bollywood movies. More polluted, more toxic air and contaminated water, more viruses, more filth and acid rain and radiation deformities, death and illness and poverty and misery, but still the same old pageant of color and light and food and laughter in the face of it all. Still Mumbai. These people may have been exiled to what the Upperborn now think of as hell, but to them, this is the only world, such as it is, warts and all. They accept her as she is, their city.

Neel sees that the account balance on the screen shows almost ten times the sum asked for by Salimbhai. He knows that if the organ dealer wants, he can now withdraw it all, put Neel out of his misery, and simply walk off with the money. Salimbhai doesn’t know there are eyes in the sky watching, that he’s only a pawn in a larger game. But the man only draws the four hundred thousand he asked for, ejects the card, puts it back in its little paper sleeve carefully, and hands it back to Neel. He takes another minute to put the cash into a leather satchel one of his associates hands to him.

“Come,” he says.

Another journey through the slums, deeper into the heart of brightness. They pass through a zone that apparently houses medically related businesses. Human as well as animal. There are shelters with dogs, cats, and other animals in cages and kennels, hundreds and hundreds of them, all whining and mewling and meowing for attention as the four men pass by. There are veterinary clinics with open doors through which Neel can see doctors examining their animal patients, performing surgery. The sickly smell of bodily fluids and waste, blood in the gutters, a stray dog in the doorway of a hut coughing with a sound that Neel hears as a bitter laugh.

Finally, they come to a large, well lighted hut, almost completely bare except for pallets on the ground at the far end. Two people, one old, one a child, lie on two of the pallets. Both are covered with white sheets and lie very still. The child is either already dead, or fast asleep. The old woman stirs and stares across the room at Neel with rheumy eyes. She says something in Marathi that he doesn’t catch.

“Wait here,” Salimbhai says, and disappears through a door, leaving his two associates with Neel.

He returns with a young woman in surgical scrubs, a mask hanging below her chin, dark circles under her eyes. She looks at Neel closely, frowning, then shakes her head and says to Salimbhai in American-accented English, “Are you kidding? He doesn’t need a transplant. He needs a miracle. Tell him to pray to the Sanskriti.”

She turns to go but Neel says, “Doctor. Please. A moment.”

She turns back reluctantly.

“I know my condition can’t be helped by a normal transplant.”

She makes a hollow laughing sound, agreeing.

“What I’m actually looking for, and willing to pay very, very well for, is something special.”

He leans close to her and whispers. When he says the words “q-gland,” she stiffens, stares at him, then turns and leaves the room at once.

Salimbhai looks at him, uncertain about what to do next. He has not heard the last, whispered exchange. He shakes his head, seeming troubled.

“Bhaijaan,” he says, “I will refund your advance fee. My half fee of fifty thousand I will keep because I brought you to my contact. And for my time and effort. Is this acceptable? It is fair, no?”

Neel waves the offer away. “Keep the whole advance. Two lakhs. Consider it an introduction fee. I can deal with this from here, you can go. I’ll handle the rest myself. Thank you, Salimbhai.” Neel is glad to see him go. Between his seventh and eighth beedis, Salimbhai mentioned to him that he has seven children and three wives. Even the children of organ dealers don’t deserve to lose their father.

The doctor doesn’t return, but someone else comes in her place, drawn by the magic words. A short man with a North Indian accent and gun. He takes Neel on another long walk through another zone. More people, more smells, more voices, more sights and sounds and memories.

He feels, as he has ever since that first encounter with Daljit Singh, Jr, the owner of the kalipeeli that brought him to the crime scene on the beach, that he is being shepherded along a preset route. That everything that has happened to him since then is part of a prefabricated pattern. The sense of being a rat wandering through a preprogrammed route in a tunnel maze is very persistent now, overwhelming even the harsh breathing, the almost blinding pain and the clumsy responses of his failing limbs and organs. He can barely walk or breathe by the time he finally arrives at his destination, a pukka cement-concrete shed with its own attached toilet and air conditioning.

The elderly lady named Mithilaben sitting with her feet up on the mattress, surrounded by three Pomeranians on satin cushions, stares at him as he stumbles in.

“Yeh?” she asks the man who has escorted him from the organ transplant clinic. “This bondhu?”

After a coughing fit in which he almost expects his lungs to fall out, Neel manages to say, “I have . . . money.” He hands over the debit card. It is taken by the escort who leaves the room and returns several minutes later, which seems like hours to Neel. He doesn’t have long now, he knows. It occurs to him that he might have miscalculated the capacity of this corpse body to cooperate with the demands of a detective’s duties.

The escort returns, nods at the elderly woman on the mattress. She says something to him sharply, and he leaves again. This time, he returns quickly, carrying a small white box, the size of a small tin box of mints. Neel looks down at it. It is in fact a tin of Altoids Arctic Strawberry. He opens it with an effort; only two fingers and one thumb still work. Inside, he sees a small dryfreeze container, ice cold to the touch. He doesn’t bother to try to open it.

“Okay,” he says.

Neel raises a hand, shoving the two functional fingers to the back of his mouth as the woman watches suspiciously. He twists off the cap of the last molar at the back of his jaw, exposing the tiny device implanted in the hollow, and bites down on it. The device simply breaks, filling his mouth with an unpleasant chemical taste and grinding bits of glassy plastic. He spits it all out onto the pristine white mattress, spattering blood and spittle and bits and pieces of the device.

The Pomeranians burst out barking, outraged. The woman gapes, then yells to her men, all of whom pull out guns. One draws out a sword that looks like it belongs in a museum; there are rust stains on the blade. They surround Neel, shouting at him in UP-accented Hindi. The dogs jump around him, nipping at his face, his hair, his shoulders.

Neel finds that he is now facedown on the mattress, slumped forward. Someone is kicking him in the thighs and hip. One of the dogs takes a bite out of his cheek, drawing thick, purplish blood. The dog chokes. The woman screams and snatches up the dog, cradling it. Neel is barely conscious but he’s aware that she’s telling her men to shoot him.

The roof of the shed is blasted away, exposing the interior to blinding white searchlights and the familiar mechanical tones of multiple dronas.

Mithilaben screams something at Neel, her last words before a drona shoots her from above.

In the gunfight that follows, Neel is shot several times, his body tossed this way then that like a straw figure in a storm. When it’s over, he is aware of himself being lifted by a drona by its metal tentacles, then carried away high up. He dangles brokenly from its steel embrace, head dangling backwards, staring at the earth upside down. He sees the lights of the city fall below.

• • • •

“Thank you,” Srini says to him.

Neel becomes aware that he’s lying on the floor of the receiving area of the station, where the dronas have deposited him. Apparently, he no longer requires the armed supervision of a drona escort. He has outlived his usefulness, although he won’t outlive it for long. He feels barely a trickle of life left, just the thinnest thread of consciousness.

“Shalini,” he manages to say, “Vidur. Neema.”

Srini squeezes his hand. “They are well. You did it. Thank you, Neel.”

Speech is hard. Thought is almost as hard.

He listens as Srini sums up. The recovery of the q-gland from Mithilaben, and her subsequent interrogation led the department to the entire network. Several hundred people have been “dealt with.” Neel understands. As lowerborn, there’s no need to bother with arrests and due process; they’ve simply been interrogated, and disposed of. Even the interrogations can be done after disposal, by keeping their brains alive and torturing them for information. The q-gland network has been shut down permanently. And no one in the lower city will dare try to start it up again, Srini says. This last part, Neel isn’t that sure of. After all, Mumbai itself was shut down permanently almost thirty years ago, when the Uppers realised they no longer needed the cheap labor and taxes from the marginalised masses to sustain their need and greed, and yet, nevertheless, she persists.

His job is done, for now at least. Until the next time that he is recalled from deadsleep, in another decomposing body, for another assignment as dirty and undesirable as this one, a case no Upperborn cop wants to touch.

Now, Srini assures him, he will be returned to deadsleep in his own chemically preserved body. Left to sleep the sleep of the dead.

That sounds so good right now. To sink back into the non-existence of deadsleep, to literally sleep the sleep of the dead. No fear that with the case over, his mind will return to thoughts of Vicki, Karon, and Misha, the family he was once a part of and lost, that was taken from him, worrying at the memories, obsessing over them the way even a sore tongue returns to an abscess. Yes, the oblivion of deadsleep is the closest to peace he can possibly get.

But first, he has one more thing to do.

“Srini,” he says, “Before I do that, I want something.”

Srini sits back and looks at him warily. “Neel,” he says.

Neel shakes his head. “They owe me. I busted up that gang of q-gland smugglers. I was their pointer dog, following the scent trail they laid down for me so conveniently, doing everything according to plan, even playing into their hands by seeming to go renegade and walk into the city—which was exactly what they wanted all along. I know it was all a set-up. I know I was just someone they needed to use, someone who wasn’t affiliated with any faction, so there would be no blowback or fallout. An independent, rogue agent who would go places, ask questions that nobody else would or could. I did their dirty work. They got what they wanted. Now, I need something.”

Srini is shaking his head slowly.

Neel leans forward, putting the last of his limited strength into his voice, his eyes. “You owe me!”

Those are the magic words. Srini stares at him, angry at being asked for this additional thing but also accepting, knowing.

“Let me see what I can do,” he says at last.

• • • •

Several hours later, Neel is out of the refurbishing pod, the decrepit body repaired and patched up as best as is possible, given the inherent limitations of human flesh. He doesn’t feel whole. That isn’t possible. He probably wouldn’t feel whole even in his own body at this point, but he feels less of a zombie than he did a few hours ago. The magic of Sanskriti tech has restored his body’s functions sufficiently for him to function for the duration at least; that’s all he needs.

He’s in a kalipeeli again, the same one in which he arrived at Chowpatty Beach at the start of the case.

As he sinks into the final moments of his existence in this body, Neel remembers the last words of Mithilaben, screamed at him in outraged fury just before the drona shot her from above, shutting her up.

“You think I am the last link in the chain, maderchodh? You think I can do business in such a product without the blessing of someone higher up? You are looking in the wrong place! If you want to know who’s responsible, look up at the sky. At the one who sits on top of us all!”

Interesting. And revealing.

After all, Neel knows that he was spoonfed and guided along a programmed track on this case, his every move planned and nudged along. He was only a drone remotely controlled, a convenient body to use by those who didn’t want to get their own hands dirty. Just as the upperborn have been using lowerborn to do all their dirty work for tens of thousands of years in India. Everything from the pretense of shock from Chief Constable Bandhopadhyay when Neel said he was going into the city, to Srini’s own disapproval, to the encounter with the pratikriti, who so conveniently fed him all the info he required to solve the case and track down the illegal q-gland network, it was all a carefully staged drama.

Staged by whom?

By the department? By Police Commissioner Pawar?

No, because even Pawar answers to higher authorities.

To people rich and powerful who run the country, but also secretly resent the one person who sits highest up the ranks, way up there in the sky, enjoying his bounty as the sole contact of the Sanskriti, the most powerful man on the planet.

Perhaps they are the ones who somehow figured out a way to clone the Devas to try and extract q-glands and study them. Using lowerborn to do it for them so their own hands would stay clean.

Or perhaps it’s Indrakant Devaratna himself, making it seem as if they were the ones doing it. Whereas he is actually the one who seeks to decode the mystery of the q-gland and the godlike abilities it confers. Because even though he has gained so much from his contact with the Sanskriti, he desires even more: the ultimate power. To be a Deva in the flesh.

Neel’s time is almost done now. He lacks the mental and physical capacity to solve that mystery, even assuming they would let him solve it in the first place. Whomever the hand pulling the puppet strings of the q-gland network, of Mithilaben and her people, it will have to wait until his next resurrection from deadsleep to be discovered. Although, when that happens—if that happens—Neel’s next case may not concern itself with q-glands at all, and he may not even remember any of tonight’s events. This entire case might well be nothing more than a lost memory trapped in a dead brain.

It doesn’t matter.

None of that matters.

He has done his job, his duty.

He solved their case to their satisfaction.

His sister, his niece and nephew, his brother-in-law, are all safe.

The last remnants of his family are secure.

What happens to Neel himself now doesn’t matter.

He can go into the blessed darkness peacefully.

As consciousness fades, as the last chemical impulses flicker weakly between his dying neurons, Neel thinks back to the brief hour or two he spent in the city below. He remembers the sights, the smells, the sounds, the life.

He wishes he had had time to eat while down there.

Perhaps next time. If there is a next time.

For now, he expends his last breaths by muttering the words, barely remembered, of the antyesti.

The Vedic litany for the dead.

The Hindu equivalent of kadish.

A requiem for the dead Ganesa he found on the beach.

And perhaps also, for himself.

Then he gives himself to the darkness and sleeps the sleep of the dead.

©2024 by Ashok Banker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok Banker is the author of the Burnt Empire Trilogy (HarperCollins Voyager), among other books. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Weird Tales, Best New Fantasy, and is forthcoming in F&SF, among other places.

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

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! is John Joseph Adams’ new newsletter, which will bring you updates about Lightspeed and Nightmare, as well as John’s anthologies and his other projects. Plus, you’ll get John’s thoughts about books, short stories, TV and film, roleplaying games, and related subjects. Subscribers will receive Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! Stories: Volume One as a free reward for subscribing. The newsletter launches January 2025!

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Ancestor Code Error

Ai Jiang | 631 words

It is 3024, and there are no longer shrines. They long since washed away by nature’s fury in the form of quakes that split across continents, countries, cities, down schools, fields, homes neatly in two.

You are to receive the memories of a late mother, a late father, and the memories of all those who came before them, who now rest beneath the surface of the earth as a part of the soil, sediments, layers of history ground down and packed together—evolution and extinction pressed into sheets upon sheets upon sheets.

They say there are populations of extinct humans who look to their ancestors for guidance. If this is true, why have their ancestors guided them towards their own destruction? If this is true, why do their ancestral spirits not continue to wander the earth?

You rebuild a shrine among broken stones, the flattest plane you could find within walking distance, and balance a dented vessel you discovered hidden beneath broken pipes tangled, rusted, molded. You use the vessel as an incense holder and scatter what remains of a stranger’s family in the form of objects burnt into ashes—ripped photos, torn clothing, a pair of glasses missing its frame, a bracelet without its charm—because their bones have been eaten when the world decided to wake, yawn, and swallow her unexpecting inhabitants, saying enough is enough. When she got sick of breathing in smog instead of untainted atmosphere, drinking pollution and acid instead of fresh and naturally salted waters, eating discarded humanity rather than fresh fruit born, ripened, fallen.

But there are no joss sticks, nothing for you to light, and in your palm is a single nanochip, its dull blue glinting like veins, like pulsing nerves, even though it is almost as far from alive as you are, but it’s the only colour standing out in the rubbled landscape of a city that once was and now isn’t.

From a port at the back of your neck, you insert the Ancestor Code. Generations held within encrypted lines of letters and numbers and symbols, collected, then passed on, the same way humans make descendants to carry their blood, name, legacy that is eventually forgotten if not written down. You are a corpse of their existence, a vessel of their religion, a carcass of their rise and fall, a skeleton of their history, and what you expect to see once the Ancestor Code populates your system are the wars, the battles, the deaths, the destruction, the scars with which they had left the earth with as a species.

You do not expect to bear the weight of their memories instead—the guilt of their killing, the pain of their loss, the light waning from young eyes unseeing, from old bones unfeeling, of life being birthed through torn tissues and the spill of blood, the way entire civilizations fall simply because a single being was allowed to continue to breathe and had used each of their breaths to take the gasps of another.

You see the faces lost and found, engraved into the Earth’s mountains, grooves, troughs like fingerprints, a reminder of how humanity has terraformed the Earth not just with their footprints but with their minds, and names, and ideas.

But, just as you are about to reach where it all began, to the memory of the very first human, before they were human, before they had even spoken their first word, took their first step, made their first mistake, grasp their first victory, before the existence of language and technology, the Ancestor Code short circuits, fizzles at the base of your neck, and what scrolls in front of your eyes before colour returns to the grey landscape of the world like a volcano un-erupting is ERROR.

©2024 by Ai Jiang.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora, and BFSA Award finalist from Changle, Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. Her work can be found in F&SF, The Dark, The Masters Review, among others. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop’s 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of Linghun and I AM AI. The first book of her novella duology, A Palace Near the Wind, is forthcoming 2025 with Titan Books. Find her on X (@AiJiang_), Instagram (@ai.jian.g), and online (aijiang.ca).

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

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! is John Joseph Adams’ new newsletter, which will bring you updates about Lightspeed and Nightmare, as well as John’s anthologies and his other projects. Plus, you’ll get John’s thoughts about books, short stories, TV and film, roleplaying games, and related subjects. Subscribers will receive Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! Stories: Volume One as a free reward for subscribing. The newsletter launches January 2025!

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Babywings

Isabel Cañas | 813 words

As children, we circled the crow chick that fell from its nest. Its wings were splayed heavenward like a saint’s, its brains streaked like veins of quartz across asphalt. Its neck arched back at a fossil-like, impossible angle.

That was when I learned how fragile birds’ bones are, hollow and light as breath. Shattered by even a careless touch.

• • • •

They are tiny things, wet and bent, as black and as slick with the wet of birth as her hair. Monitors and nurses’ murmurs fade as I cup her to me. I do not touch them, even though my hands shake so hard that IV needles tug against my sore veins.

After she eats, she sleeps on my chest, curled like a snail.

Instead of stroking her back, my thumbs trace gentle arcs around crow-dark down, still waxy and plastered to her skin. Her wings are tucked tight, each feather as perfectly shaped as the buds of her fingernails.

They need to weigh and measure her.

“Don’t put her on her back!” I cry.

They place her on the scale with her elbows and knees tucked into her chest, as if she were still inside me.

I don’t let them swaddle her.

For months I had scrolled and clicked, building the registry with swaddles and organic cotton sleep sacks patterned with tiny ducklings. Breathability doesn’t matter anymore.

All I see are the crow chick’s wings, shattered by its fall.

I am unhooked and unpierced and placed in a wheelchair. She is still on my chest when they abandon us to the recovery room and night nurse choreography. Vitals, ibuprofen, Tylenol, have you had a bowel movement? My husband answers for me. He is there, I think. She is still on my chest.

At night, time dies.

I watch her open her eyes in the glow of the nurse’s monitor, the slow black blinks. I watch her puckered pink mouth part, her scant wakefulness swallowed by sleep. I draw a blanket over her diaper and legs, curving it up over her bent arms, avoiding her wings.

• • • •

“I love how she’s always skin-to-skin,” the nurse chirps, bright with the beginning of a shift. “Good job, mama.”

White light. Throbbing skull. Mother’s milk tea is wet dead grass. Ibuprofen, vitals. Use the ice pack in your underwear. The bleeding is normal.

They won’t let us leave until we complete a tedious curriculum. Breastfeeding diagrams blur. Something about the number of diapers per day.

Do not fall asleep with them in the bed. Do not fall asleep with them on the couch. Do not, under any circumstances, let them sleep on their stomachs. They sleep too deeply. They forget to breathe.

Her down has dried. Thousands of gray-black feathers flutter with each of my quickening heartbeats.

• • • •

At home, no clothes or swaddles touch her wings. She stays in my arms, nursing, or curled beneath my collarbones.

She must sleep on her back or she will die, but she cannot lay on her wings. Weight would thread the delicate bones with a thousand veins, a thousand fractures reaching and spreading and splintering.

On my chest, she is safe.

Sleep scratches across my eyes. I dream of a bassinet, gilded by late afternoon, its mattress speckled with shattered eggshells and scattered down.

I yank myself upright from the couch cushions, arms tightening around her. Her mouth breaks with sharp and fearful mews.

• • • •

I don’t allow anyone to touch her. At first, my husband stays awake with me, but he fades. His pallor takes on the pattern of the comforter—paisley, pale blue. First his limbs vanish, then his chest. He becomes a figment of the corner of the eye; I alone face the nights that watch me like crows on a fence, gleaming and ever watchful.

Invisible hands try to take her and smother her in sheets. I jerk upright, pawing the rumbled blankets, but she is here, slipping from my chest. Falling away, away, away . . .

I catch her before she shatters. I clutch her to me, her cheek sweaty against the hollow of my throat.

She sleeps on, undisturbed by the thundering of my pulse.

• • • •

Dawn comes buttery and flush with birdsong from the open window.

Her yawn begins with mouth and wizened face, then ripples through her back. To her wings.

They spread. Stretch; reach their apex with a tremble; relax.

I imagine a beat of her wings, and another, and another. I imagine her lifting from my chest, flying to the window and out and vanishing, my arms—impotent, exhausted, leaden—too heavy to act. Too late. Gone.

But instead: the weight of her skull tilts her head back, her face turns upward.

Her eyes open, oil-slick dark and unfocused. In their wetness, the gleam of a world unborn.

They find me.

And I am not alone.

©2024 by Isabel Cañas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isabel Cañas is a Mexican American speculative fiction writer. After having lived in Mexico, Scotland, Egypt, Turkey, and New York City, among other places, she has settled in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and writes fiction inspired by her research and her heritage. Her novel The Hacienda was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award and Vampires of El Norte is a USA Today bestseller and Locus Award finalist.

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

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! is John Joseph Adams’ new newsletter, which will bring you updates about Lightspeed and Nightmare, as well as John’s anthologies and his other projects. Plus, you’ll get John’s thoughts about books, short stories, TV and film, roleplaying games, and related subjects. Subscribers will receive Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! Stories: Volume One as a free reward for subscribing. The newsletter launches January 2025!

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We Will Bring Siege to the Bastion of Sin That Cries Out in Your Prayer

Hammond Diehl | 1968 words

You revere your patron saints. Your Marys. Your Joans. Your Catherines. You should fear them.

If one ever heeds your prayer, and she arrives stripped of skin, of fingernails, of every organ and every last fuck to give, her halo a boiling crown of furious yellow flames, demanding you bolster up her body with the bones of the burned, the gutted, the girls: Be ready.

You summoned her. You must be ready to deal with the consequences.

You’ll lie to yourself, that you were only begging for guidance, for strength. You’ll lie to the media afterward. You’ll lie to the doctors and nurses as you squirm in your hospital bed, blind—temporarily, you hope—as they pump you full of substances that feel like grace in your veins.

Not this.

Not.

This.

This isn’t what you wanted at all.

You may believe the lie. They may believe the lie.

But she knew the truth the moment she heard your invocation. And if you’re smart, you’ll accept it.

You’ll have a better likelihood of surviving the war.

The one you prayed for.

• • • •

She introduced herself with the two good teeth she still had left in her skull. Ground them right into my left forearm. Later she’d say that she’d tried to shake me first. I’m not sure I believe her.

It was hard to miss her, even in the early-morning gloom of my bedroom. Her crown of fire must’ve burned a foot high. That’s what halos really are, in case you have catechism next Sunday and want to dazzle someone with the truth. I wouldn’t recommend looking directly into one. Certainly not once it reaches its full potential.

Girl, she said. You called me.

She was speaking directly into my head. Which was good. My parents do not sleep soundly.

No, I responded wordlessly. Or was this the first lie I told myself? I’d just had a dream, a vision. The good saint . . . who was it, again? Panic robbed me of language.

You showed me the rampart of sin, she said. Built of the flesh of man. I will bring siege to it as you asked. You will fetch me a shirt of chain, and a flail of thorns, and a destrier hardy enough to lead a charge through a thousand screaming pikemen.

I’d risen by now, eyes never leaving her, bare feet inching away toward the bedroom door, away from her—it, a four-foot-tall skeleton, standing impossibly upright, between me and the second-floor window that she’d inexplicably breached.

I don’t have any armor, I managed. Then I ran to my bedroom wastebasket and vomited. The sun was just starting to peek through the curtains.

She stared at me through black sockets.

How many matins in a row, now?

You see inside my body as well as my mind.

A holy light shows all.

So you . . . see my situation.

I see what you need. Now, my armor. My weapon. My horse. Bring them to me.

I didn’t ask why, like a sane person would. I said what I did have, which was $10, a very used truck, and just enough scholarship money to put me through a single year at the diploma mill down the turnpike.

Resolved, the saint said. I shall wear no armor but the mantle of God.

But, I say from my head, all I need is some gas money. They shot the doctor at the clinic down the road, so I just need enough juice to get to the next one. It’s the next state over, but the ride’s not too bad.

Show me this clinic “down the road.” In thy mind.

I closed my eyes and concentrated, wondering, around the edges, what language this saint had spoken in life.

The medica has indeed gone to God.

I sat on my bed.

Yup, I thought to the bones.

Projectiles.

Mmm hmmm.

The saint clacked up to me on timeworn toes. She bid me to get dressed, to pack lightly. I followed her orders. Then she climbed onto my back, and we crept downstairs, through a living room with couches mummified in plastic coverings and walls choked with novenas. Christ hung on a foot-high cross over the mantle. He looked exhausted.

We snuck outside, bundled my things into the truck. She inspected it like a general.

We will find the bastion of sin that cries out in your prayer, she said. And we will bring siege to it.

What bastion of sin? I thought to her.

She ignored me.

But first, I will need more bones.

• • • •

Penitents make pilgrimages to see their saints. They plot their routes in neat lines, so as not to disturb that godly sense of order that makes the angels smile.

Saints make their own pilgrimages. Those routes, we can’t see. My saint’s path made sense only to her.

She rode shotgun, wagging her antique-white fingers toward this highway exit or that. In Ohio, we snuck into the Maria Stein Shrine of the Holy Relics and borrowed a femur from a St. Victoria, tortured to death in a North African prison. In Louisiana, we liberated a crowbar from a junkyard. The dogs there lowered their eyes at our approach.

Be this a sword? my saint said.

I couldn’t help it. I chuckled.

A matching sound seeped out of her, from the spaces between the disks at the nape of her neck. It made my condescending laugh sound like a croak.

Next day, my saint brandished the crowbar as we burst into the Church of St. Joseph. A certain St. Valerie awaited us under a canopy of glass and gilded copper. Valerie lent us a spare arm—all that was left of her after her beating at the hands of Roman soldiers.

Where did you come from? I asked my saint somewhere along the Floribama line. By then we’d picked up a passenger, a twelve-year-old girl whose father had thrown beer cans at us as she scurried into the back seat and begged us to go, just go.

A catacomb, she said. A lump of ash. A rotting rope swinging from a tree. It matters not. Let the thought pass.

With every leg bone, my saint grew taller; with every shoulder and hip bone, broader. Her face creaked as she wrenched out a mandible to make room for more hyoids. Ulnas and radii separated with eerie, hollow pops, dangling impossibly from my saint’s shoulders as more bones joined them. Soon her arms undulated like kite strings whenever she cracked a window to feel the breeze.

My legs must be more robust, my saint said.

Like, trees? I asked.

Like barbican walls.

I hadn’t known my radio was on. As we crossed a county line, a local talk station blasted awake.

Beware, the radio said. Beware the many trying to destroy everything pure and good. Who would put condoms in every school, and child-killing pills there too.

My guilt, which was riding in the back seat, woke up from its hourly nap and leaned toward the front.

I said, at catechism, they say everyone has a right to be born into the arms of our lord.

I, the saint said, was born into the arms of our lord.

We sourced additional femurs from a St. Frances in New York. A church in Kentucky yielded supplementary tibias from a St. Bonosa, martyred at age four on the main stage of the Colosseum.

My saint’s shanks swelled into a pair of siege towers, groaning with age and fury.

My car broke down a few days later, but by then she’d outgrown it. She loomed over the St. Martin of Tours Church in Louisville, threw shadows over a Ferris wheel that hung precariously between Galveston and the Gulf of Mexico.

She took strides the length of a city block.

She bore us up, supporting us with the ankle bones of burned girls, the hip sockets of disemboweled virgins. Her ribs wound round and round her torso like a bandolier. In that high, protective cradle, we slept.

Sometimes we spotted a police car pacing us, cherry lights dim. The media didn’t know what to make of us.

We crossed into Mississippi a second time. I assumed it was at the invitation of another saint with a bone to spare.

We are here, the saint said.

We were looking at a flat, one-story building with a steel fence and razor wire around it.

It’s another clinic, I said. It looks open. But . . .

Dozens and dozens of people were lined up against some kind of automatic gate, bodies pressed against it, faces red from screaming, bare arms and shoulders slick with rage sweat. Their eyes glared up at us blackly beneath baseball caps festooned with beer logos and crosses and brims artificially frayed in factories very far from here. They were blocking the entrance.

The rampart of sin, I thought. A wall of human flesh.

I was sitting on a clavicle, close to the warmth of her halo. I looked around. My saint had amassed stacks of patellas on either shoulder, reminding me of cannon fodder. The twelve-year-old girl huddled in my saint’s rib cage.

The saint loped toward the fence separating the angry crowd from the clinic. She lifted a foot. She meant to escort us inside.

A crack rang out from the ground below. I looked down into the ribcage. The twelve-year-old was staring at the palm of her left hand. There was a hole in it.

Another crack. A bullet grazed the shinbone of tiny St. Maria Goretti—Maria Goretti, stabbed to death at age eleven, but not before forgiving her would-be rapist as she bled out.

For a second, I felt like I was forgetting to breathe. I looked up at the top of my saint’s head. The fire of her halo had stretched into the sky, an impossible tower that seemed to touch the clouds. Seeds of flame rained down from it, a relentless hellfire of bombs, each too small to do much damage on their own.

A fire was spreading through me, too, a seething heat I had feared, had denied.

Had nurtured.

For weeks.

My saint steadied me on her shoulder. On the shoulder of St. Agatha, age fifteen, who died in prison after refusing to marry a local governor.

I found one of the patella bones and felt the heft of it in my hands. I aimed at a man in camoprint coveralls and threw.

My saint swung around, arms pivoting like trebuchets, elongated fingers positioned to crush.

I’d missed. Several of the men below hadn’t. My saint’s body rumbled with dozens of impacts.

She had many, many bones.

But no shield.

The twelve-year-old screamed.

Crawling, creeping, slipping, whispering a prayer that I would later absolutely deny as anything other than panicked gibbering, I crept along the saint’s clavicle, grabbed onto her patchwork jaw. Pulled.

She knew.

She opened her mouth, and I crawled in.

If I die here, I said, make my bones your aegis.

The words blasted out of her like a horn of Gabriel. There was not a person manning that hell gate who did not hear me.

Another man had joined the first below. He saw me through my saint’s left eye socket. He bore a semi-automatic weapon so chunky and modified it looked like a handheld tank.

I met his eyes, I leaned out, and I smiled.

I had to twist my neck to do what came next. A disk popped somewhere behind my molars, and I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Then I searched once again for the halo atop my saint.

The light bore into the backs of my eyes, and I saw, at last, the glory.

©2024 by Hammond Diehl.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hamm’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope, Diabolical Plots, and more. Hamm lives in Los Angeles and writes under the protective blankie of a pseudonym. Hamm can be found on Bluesky @hammonddiehl.bsky.social.

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

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! is John Joseph Adams’ new newsletter, which will bring you updates about Lightspeed and Nightmare, as well as John’s anthologies and his other projects. Plus, you’ll get John’s thoughts about books, short stories, TV and film, roleplaying games, and related subjects. Subscribers will receive Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! Stories: Volume One as a free reward for subscribing. The newsletter launches January 2025!

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! launches January 2025.

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The Last Word

Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe | 1214 words

I am running out of Words.

I stumble down the temple steps, clutching my wounded side. I had been too slow to use my fourth Word and the prison guard’s spear had drawn blood before he choked to death under the weight of my suffocation spell. Now I am in a race against time, trying not to die within the confines of the city.

I distantly register that the setting sun bathes everything around me in a bloodred hue, from the skies to the stone steps I’m running on. I hope that this is not an omen that my blood will be shed soon.

I reach the last step and run for the gate but someone steps out of the shadows, blocking my way. I halt and brace myself. I recognize the wicked smile and the gaunt figure dressed in the tattered garments of a scourge priest. It is Rathan H’liẹ́, high priest of the death god and my jailer for the past three years.

Seeing his evil face almost weakens my resolve. I suddenly remember everything he has done to me. I remember the moment I was captured, when he walked up to me with a ritual dagger and cut out my tongue because he was afraid of my Words. I remember several nights in my dank cell under the temple when he tortured me for hours, invading my mind with his magic to find out the secrets of my people. Like every human I had met, he was both repulsed by me and fascinated with my power.

“It seems your former masters weren’t entirely truthful about your abilities,” he says.

I grin at him.

“Why do you smile, demon? You know you cannot escape. Not as long as—”

I raise my right hand, showing him what I’d retrieved from the altar in the temple. A black fist-sized gem, shattered in the middle. The gem that made it possible for him to capture me, a stone forged by his evil goddess for capturing my kind. I watch in silent triumph as his eyes widen with realization and he scrambles backwards, a portal appearing behind him.

He cannot escape me.

I say a single Word. The high priest catches fire like dry kindling and falls to the ground. I run past him and out of the temple gates, ignoring his pitiful screams.

I have two Words left. I must use them well.

The city of Nitsha spreads out before me, prosperous and wicked, the home of humans who attack and destroy the things they fear. They had destroyed my home, the city of mages in the south, and taken me prisoner. I had been a prisoner in the city of mages also but they treated me well. Spirits like me cannot live free in the world of men due to several restrictions from the gods but while I lived with the mages, I was treated like a human.

I touch my face, wishing I can see my reflection again. I had been given a human skin by the mages and my body is that of a young human girl. From memory, I know that my skin is a dark shade of brown and my eyes are golden. As I look upon the city, a gentle breeze blows against my face and I smile.

It feels good to be free, but I don’t have much time left. The guard’s spear had been coated with dust from the mysterious black gem, so the wound in my side only worsens as time passes. The only way to heal myself is to use a Word to remove the impurities from my body.

The Nitsha empire had raided the city of mages in search of artifacts of power they could use to increase their power and conquer other lands. They killed all the mages and captured me. I used my second Word that day, killing half of the invaders in an earthquake but the high priest appeared with the gem and bound me when I was too weak to resist. Using the Words requires a lot of energy and it is difficult to use more than one in one day. But right now, I am fueled by my anger and determination. I cannot feel the exhaustion that should come with using my fourth and fifth Words within a few minutes.

I toss the gem to the floor. I have rendered it useless. I cannot be bound, not anymore. It had been difficult to concentrate, locked up in the temple with wards around me to prevent escape, but after a long time, I finally remembered how to use the Words.

I used my third Word to give myself a new tongue. The third Word is silent and spoken in the mind, which made my tongue’s restoration possible. It is a Word of healing and transformation, similar to the sixth Word, which I now utter.

My human form dissolves. My body stretches until I am much taller and my skin becomes like molten silver. Though I cannot see myself, I know I look majestic and terrible, a sight not meant for the eyes of lesser beings. Three pairs of fiery wings unfurl from my back and lift me up to the sky. I laugh, feeling the wind in my face. I feel alive for the first time since I reached this world. I feel free.

I am an Eleda, an angel of creation. As a member of the younger generation among my kind, I can only speak seven Words in my lifetime, unlike humans who speak several words every day. My Words carry power because every time I speak, the power of the cosmos follows my words and makes them reality.

The first Word I uttered created new worlds. My last Word will end worlds.

This is why the mages bound me, I know. They were scared that I was going to use my last Word to wipe out all of humanity. I never intended to do that. Using the last Word means I will also cease to exist. I didn’t want to die in this strange world of humans. I wanted to pass away among my kind, dissolving into stardust while my brothers and sisters sing hymns to accompany my soul into oblivion.

But now, I let my wings take me higher till I can see most of the kingdoms below. I see wars brewing, innocents getting slaughtered and humans destroying their own world out of greed. I see the good part of humanity too, but it is greatly overshadowed by the darkness. Soon, the rot at the heart of mankind will spread until there’s nothing left.

There is only one thing I can do for the few good people left on this earth. Perhaps I am a little selfish, since I am about to die anyway. Even now, in this exalted form, the wound in my side is draining my life force. But death doesn’t scare me anymore and I know better than anyone that every end is just a different kind of beginning.

This world needs to be rebuilt. This world needs to be saved. And I am the only one who can do it.

I close my eyes and whisper the last Word.

©2024 by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe is writer of the dark and fantastical, a poet, and a reluctant mathematician. He has poetry and fiction published or forthcoming from Podcastle, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Baffling Magazine, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. When he’s not writing about malfunctioning robots or crazed gods, he can be found doing whatever people do on Twitter at @OluwaSigma. He writes from a room with broken windowpanes in Lagos, Nigeria.

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! is John Joseph Adams’ new newsletter, which will bring you updates about Lightspeed and Nightmare, as well as John’s anthologies and his other projects. Plus, you’ll get John’s thoughts about books, short stories, TV and film, roleplaying games, and related subjects. Subscribers will receive Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! Stories: Volume One as a free reward for subscribing. The newsletter launches January 2025!

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! launches January 2025.

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The Ones Who Come At Last

P H Lee | 2740 words

They come on trains; they come on buses; they come on planes to our municipal airport. A handful even arrive on foot, having walked the whole distance to our City with what scant possessions they could carry on their backs—only a few, to be sure. But more than have ever walked away.

Sometimes it is just a young woman, just a young man alone. Other times they come as families, whole or broken, huddled together on the train and whispering in languages that our City has never heard before. Sometimes it is only a single old man, sitting solitary, staring into space, an old man who has lost everything and everyone.

Some of them cry, when at last they set their eyes upon our City—its towers and its boulevards and its swallows soaring by the sea. Some of them stop, and stare. Some of them even kiss the ground, which is of course embarrassing to see, but who could fault them for it? For all they know, all the peace and joy and pleasure of the City—our City—comes from the ground itself.

They don’t know. Not yet. How could they?

They come from all nations, from all peoples. They wear all manners of clothes, speak all manner of languages, for there are no places in this entire world untouched by war.

(Except for one.)

All of them are welcome. No one in the city would fault them for their differences, none of us is jealous of our splendor or our plenty—our parades and our farmer’s market and our clamors of bells and our remarkably good television—as much as all of it is ours, then it is ours to share.

Do you believe it? That this City, our City of towers and bells and festivals, welcomes all who come to us at last? The world being what it is, I would not blame you if you didn’t. But it is true. We welcome them. Of course we welcome them! What would our City be, if it did not welcome the poor, the immigrant, the widow and the orphan? Not our City, not the City, whose beauty and whose brilliance is known the whole world over.

Once, I am told, each arrival of refugees was greeted with a peal of the great bells, a proper sort of peal which set the swallows soaring, just the sort that still begins our Festival of Summer. But there are so many refugees, these days, with the world being what it is. And they arrive at all manner of times, in all manner of ways. If we rang the bells every time a refugee arrived, they would never stop ringing, and then where would the swallows nest?

So, instead, if you will believe it, we have brought them into our parades. For each month, for each particular Festival, there are amidst the processioners, behind the elders (robed, in mauve and gray), between the master craftsmen (stern-faced) and the young mothers (happy, laughing), there are the newly-arrived refugees, looking this way and that, their faces masks of innocent joy and wonder at the beauty of our City, at the simplicity of the procession, at the cheers that go up from the crowd as they proceed by.

What no one tells them—not because it is a secret, not exactly—is that when we look upon their faces, we can see for a moment our own childhoods, before we knew about the basement. We can see their wonder at the brilliance of our City and all its customs, untainted by the knowledge of their price.

They do not know. No one has told them. Even though there are no secrets in the City, not exactly—but to tell them would mean remembering that one awful day, that one terrible field trip you took when you were barely still a child. And what kind of City would we have, if we spent all our days remembering the worst of them? No, it is better not to think of it. Better to let them have their joy.

Life is not all parades and processions, of course. There are also the everyday necessities of life that matter just as much or more. There are, in our city, any number of clubs and churches and benevolent societies, not to mention all those elders who are disposed to be neighborly (whether clad in mauve and gray or in more casual attire). We are not a large City, nor are we a wealthy one, but we find places for them regardless. We open our houses, our spare rooms, our little cottages out back. These days, when there are more of them arriving every day, we have even built a few apartments—not the dreary gray assemblages that you’re envisioning, either, but comfortable places with joy and light and communal gardens and no more than five stories to walk up. Apartments big enough that, if they have come as families, every child that wants to can have their own room.

What kind of place would this City be, if every child here could not have their own room?

We even find jobs for them, at least the ones that want to work. They don’t have to work, of course. No one in the city has to work. Even our stern-faced master craftsmen labor by their own will and no one else’s. But the refugees, the immigrants—they do not come from cities like our City. Sometimes it makes them feel better, to have a job. And so we find halls for them to clean or gardens for them to weed or doors for them to open. No one needs to do it—but they do it all the same.

It isn’t simply habit, I think, that drives them to take jobs. It is gratitude, to us and to our City. For all our splendor and peace that they do not know the cost of.

It is not their fault, after all. No one has told them yet.

Some of them—many of them, even—do not stay long. They come for a few months, for a year, for two until, by some miracle, their homeland finds its way to peace. (Peace is always a miracle, of course. Even here, where we are accustomed to it.) Or, if not to peace, then at least to some stillness, perhaps a ceasefire, at least a moment of reprieve, and that is enough for them to pack all their things, to say their goodbyes to the neighbors, to the processions, to the farmer’s market and the train station and the sea and to the clamors of the bells that set the swallows soaring. We see them off, of course: We gather and hug (if they want to be hugged) and cry (although not to excess, lest they feel guilty for the leaving that they are well-entitled to.) Then they depart for home, carrying with them their memories of our City and all its joy and pleasantries, never knowing the price of it, so much the better for them.

Many of them leave. But, of course, many of them stay. Perhaps their homelands have never found their way to peace, or perhaps that peace—found at last, at last—has no place left for them. Perhaps there is no one left of their people in all the world, except in our City and some neighborhood of Minneapolis.

Is that too much for you to believe, that a whole people could be wiped out, except for those who fled to our City and some neighborhood of Minneapolis? I know that you do not want to think about it. But it is true. It happens every day.

After a few years, or even a few years more, when they have at last given up all hope of returning home—or, let us not be so dreary about it, let us say instead: When they have chosen us, when they have chosen our City, when they choose to live here for the rest of their lives, when they choose to raise their children with our children, to love and hope and proceed in every festival, not as immigrants, but as young mothers (laughing, happy) or as master craftsmen (stern-faced) or even as naked youths (riding wild horses with ribbons braided in their hair), when they have chosen, at last, to join to make our City into their City, then no matter how much we might wish that it was not necessary, no matter how much we might wish to delay for another day, another year, another decade, when they decide at last to stay then it is time for them to know.

There are no forms to fill out, no papers to file. It is not that our City has no laws, but we have singularly few of them, and there are none concerning immigration. For us, citizenship has never been a matter of a passport or an examination or a loyalty pledge. In our City, all are welcome! In our City, there are no costs to pay, except the one.

We take them in groups. Once upon a time, it was something that a friend would do for a friend, taking them to the basement to see and learn and know. But there are so many of them now, and it was too much altogether for our people, for our happy lives. We should not have to see that basement except for once. So now, if you will believe me, we take them in big groups, just as if they were us as schoolchildren, accompanied by a single volunteer.

It is better this way. At least, it is easier.

She leads them down the stairs, into the basement. They see there, just as we saw there once, a child, locked in its own room, that child, filthy and maltreated, simple-minded and scared of a mop and begging, pleading, promising to be good. The woman who leads them down is middle-aged, and kind-eyed, and every time she sees the child she blinks back tears. But she does not help the child. She does not utter a word of kindness, she does not even for a moment come to its aid. Because she knows, as we all know, that without that child, without its suffering, there would be no City. There would be no processions of citizens, no farmers markets, no clamors of bells that set the swallows soaring, no last place in our entire world yet untouched by war.

She knows that without the child, there is nothing. So she shows them, all the immigrants, and she blinks back her tears, and she does nothing else besides.

When they see the child, the immigrants understand at once the price that they have paid. They are not stupid. They must have noticed the quiet looks, the gestures, the hushed whispers. They must have known that this City held a secret or, if not exactly a secret, then at least as good as one.

They do not cry, when they see the child, not even when it begs and mewls. They watch, serious, their faces set. One of them, perhaps an older woman, perhaps who once had children of her own, goes over to their volunteer and brushes away her tears, maybe even hugs her. The rest merely watch. Perhaps an old man nods, at last understanding the course of things.

No, if you will believe me, they do not cry. But they do not laugh, either, even though they might. Even though no one would blame them. The children they have seen! Children weak with hunger, children not yet dead and crawling with maggots, girls burning with napalm, babies bayonetted in their cribs, boys with guns taller than themselves, boys who have killed and killed and will kill again. Or even, if you do not believe that they could have seen such things, even with the world being what it is, then at least they have seen a child beaten, a child crying, a child without supper, a child afraid to set foot in their own home.

It does not matter if you believe it or not. There is not one among them who has not seen a child hurt.

One of them, a young woman, a mother, remembers the child she held at her breast, with all her family pressed around her beneath the floorboards, the wet and rotten earth pressing against them, while above them the soldiers ransacked the house, the soldiers that screamed and laughed of the murder and rape that would be their due. She remembers—of course she remembers, how could she forget?—how the baby, not even her baby, her sister’s daughter, began to fuss, and how she held her hand against its mouth. If it cried, if it even fussed, the soldiers might hear and then—and how she held her hand against its mouth until she felt that baby twitch, until she felt its breath grow soft and then still. She remembers afterwards, two days later when the soldiers at last gave them up for dead, when her sister held her daughter’s tiny corpse and would not even cry.

She remembers that, as she looks at this child. She looks, and thinks that she might cry, but she will not. Not here, in this foreign land where one child in a basement with enough to eat is an atrocity. Not here and not her, when her sister refused to shed a tear.

None of them cry, except the volunteer. None of them laugh, either. They understand, I think, how solemn this matter is for us. After enough time has passed—ten minutes? half an hour? no more than an hour, surely—they file out of the basement and make their way back to their houses, their apartments, their gardens and their children and their jobs. If they have thoughts, they do not share them. At least not with us who were born here—for now they are just as much citizens as we are; now our City is their City, as fully as it can ever be; now they know the cost of it—for even though we do not forget, we prefer our customary silence.

That is, at least, a mercy that they give to us. We have all paid prices, for our City. Compared to the prices they have already paid, this price of silence is no price at all.

None of them walk away, although they have every right to. Where would they even go?

And so, they stay. And so, they live. But a few of them, just a few, have certain ways. There is a middle-aged man—he came alone, whatever family he had is left long behind—who walks now at the head of each procession, singing songs of his old country. No one stops him, even if by right the elders (mauve, gray) should go first. There are a handful of doctors—some who learned in their own countries, some who studied here—who labor each day on vaccines and broken knees, working far harder than anyone should in our fair City. There is an old woman who takes the train out to that one house, just beyond the City limits, carrying a bag of frozen burritos in case someone gets hungry in the middle of the night.

We have our ways, those of us who did not leave the City. And as for those who came to us at last, they have their own.

Some nights, when the moon is clear, there is a woman who crosses in darkness down to the center of the City. She walks into that particular building, she takes the stairs into the basement without turning on a light. There is no one guarding the room; she could turn on the light and no one would take notice of her. But she knows the way without it.

Down in the basement, she sits on the floor by the glass, behind which the child is sleeping fitfully, with nightmares of mops. She sets her hands on the glass, first the left one, then the right. And then, quietly, softly, so that only she and it can hear, she begins to sing: her own song, a lullaby in a language that her children do not know.

©2024 by P H Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! is John Joseph Adams’ new newsletter, which will bring you updates about Lightspeed and Nightmare, as well as John’s anthologies and his other projects. Plus, you’ll get John’s thoughts about books, short stories, TV and film, roleplaying games, and related subjects. Subscribers will receive Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! Stories: Volume One as a free reward for subscribing. The newsletter launches January 2025!

Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! launches January 2025.

Visit johnjosephadams.com/newsletter today to sign up for free.

Book Review: Countess by Suzan Palumbo

Melissa A Watkins | 625 words

Countess
Suzan Palumbo
Paperback/ eBook/ Audio
ISBN: 9781770417571
ECW Press, September 10, 2024 , 160 pgs

I didn’t really have a Caribbean futurist queer feminine space opera retelling of the Alexandre Dumas adventure classic The Count of Monte Cristo on my 2024 bingo card. Now that I’ve read it, I certainly feel like I’ve won something. Palumbo’s retelling of the famous revenge story holds on to the broad strokes of the original but has an expansive futuristic setting that contrasts exploration with colonization and triumph with deep, painful injustice.

Instead of French seafarers, Countess follows spacefaring Virika Sameroo, who has just become acting Captain of a military vessel belonging to the Æcerbot Empire. Virika and her parents immigrated to the Euro-coded empire’s capital planet Invicta from the Exterran Antilles, a collection of outer worlds settled by the former denizens of Earth’s Caribbean islands. Instead of a warm welcome and economic salvation, the elder Sameroos found themselves working in mines, living in poverty, and trapped in the perpetual limbo of trying to ascend from derided immigrant to rights-holding citizen, which results in the untimely death of Virika’s father. As a result, she works hard to be worthy of her parent’s sacrifices, taking the straight and narrow path into military service and distancing herself from other Antilleans. It seems to be working—she’s fast-tracked into leadership, supports her aging mother, and captures the heart of the lovely Invictan researcher Alba. Everything is going great until her commanding officer suddenly dies of a mysterious ailment and her rival officer Lyric accuses her of a seditious conspiracy in the name of a revolution she knows little about. Virika is tried, found guilty, and locked away on the purple-skied prison planet Tintaris, where she vows bitter revenge.

The general story sticks to the source, but the details diverge in quite a few places. The prose of this book is viscerally sensual at times, which means that the sensory highs are quite high, but the grittier parts of the story are pretty grim. Placing this story in a whole universe rather than just the Mediterranean makes the stakes of the story feel bigger, and the Caribbean cultural foundations add texture and deeper social meaning. Every plate of food described in this story that isn’t prison rations sounds absolutely delicious and Virika’s eventual reclamation of her roots is brief, but beautiful. Also, any tale of injustice, meaningful rage, and hard-won retribution hits really differently when the scorned hero is a queer immigrant woman of color. Instead of being solely about personal revenge, this is also about fighting against systemic wrongdoing, which increases the emotional stakes and fuels the changes in story and character more than the Caribbean futurist setting does, at times.

Speaking of the foundational material, you don’t really need to be familiar with the original Count to enjoy this. It’s a retelling, but it’s not overly dependent on its source material. It stands on its own as an emotionally resonant space adventure. There are far fewer characters than the Dumas version, and—minor spoiler alert—Virika’s final revenge plays out very differently than not only the original, but many of the other popular retellings. I didn’t expect this to end the way that it does, and while it makes sense, it also turns this into a very different story than its source material. Whether or not that’s a good thing is up to the reader and their own sense of justice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Melissa A Watkins has been a teacher, a singer, an actress, and a very bad translator but now has found her way back to her first artistic love, writing. Her work has previously appeared in khoreo, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Fantasy Magazine. After fifteen years of living in Europe and Asia, she now resides in Boston, where she reads and reviews books at EqualOpportunityReader.com.

Book Review: Faeries Never Lie, edited by Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker

Arley Sorg | 1448 words

Faeries Never Lie
Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker, eds.
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250823847
Feiwel & Friends, September 24, 2024, 336 pgs

Editors Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker have put together a “can’t miss” anthology with Faeries Never Lie. Having reviewed Córdova’s anthology Reclaim the Stars for the December 2021 issue of Lightspeed (VERY favorably), I was excited to get my grubby little hands on this book. In fact, this is book three in the “Untold Legends” anthology series, which began with Vampires Never Get Old in 2020 and continued with Mermaids Never Drown in 2023—both of which, by the way, I found out about too late to review.¹

Some folks will pick this book up automatically based on author recognition: Kwame Mbalia, L.L. McKinney, Dhonielle Clayton, Christine Day, Holly Black, Rory Power, and more. I am often skeptical of anthologies featuring a “usual set” of solicited authors; or for that matter, books that look like the selling point is the glittering names rather than the quality of the stories. I can assure y’all that the quality of the stories is high. These aren’t just a bunch of trunk stories or phoned-in pieces put together by authors who get too many invites. You are in good hands with these storytellers. Córdova and Parker have gathered fourteen pieces altogether. I’ll talk about a few of the tales on offer and leave the rest for your discovery. Honestly, even this hurts a little bit—sometimes a story is even more enjoyable when you don’t know anything about it, and I feel like this is the case with so many of the entries in this book.

Chloe Gong has become, for me, one of those names that will sell an anthology, mainly because I have really enjoyed several of her short stories before. “An Eternal Fire” is her contribution to Faeries Never Lie, and it doesn’t disappoint. Gong has a way of immediately entertaining the reader while also engaging them, painting the picture of a character we want to know with just a few strokes, but doing so with distinctive voice and tone. Within a couple of paragraphs, we are hooked, and we know a bit about Mimi, and her relationship with her family, and her circumstances; enough to be eager to know more. It’s 750 CE in Chang’an and Mimi helps her grandfather with his pottery shop. She is a bit of a misfit; not quite the “ideal daughter”—but she’s smart and wonderfully willful. Of course, Mimi’s grandfather falls ill, and of course, she then has a run-in with a faerie. The energetic storytelling itself makes the read fun, and because you like the characters, the admittedly somewhat expected setup actually feels compelling and new. This is how a skilled writer flexes, y’all, and it’s a joy to read! There’s also a dash of mystery tied to an intriguing family heirloom just to add another layer in. Gong demonstrates expertise in giving the story just enough detail to embrace characters, to feel situated in place and feel comfortable with ideas, but not so much that the narrative is cluttered or slows down, making everything well-paced. A dash of humor rounds things off, as we follow Mimi while she chases and confronts what may be a playful or perhaps obnoxious (depending on your perspective) being. Where the story goes is at least somewhat unexpected, while also being thoughtful and heartwarming. Altogether a great read.

Anna-Marie McLemore is an expert at quickly developing a wonderfully intricate and engaging story, with characters that you want to root for. In “Blue Amber” two attendants are in enemy territory with their princess, on a mission. The secret parts of the mission include assassination and spying. There’s also a bit of troublesome romance, and there may (or may not) be signs of faeries who may (or may not!) be upset that one of the attendees is impersonating them. Despite opening pages which lay out all of this and more, the story feels smooth and character-driven. In the midst of all this Ondina, our attendee protagonist, has an encounter with a faerie, which leads to an unexpected and lovely story resolution. McLemore blends the perfect amount of wonder with story structure and subtext, crafting a well-balanced, striking tale.

“The Night and her Darkness” by Nafiza Azad begins with poetic lines that pull in the reader. But what follows is a brutal and incredible tale of resilience and resistance, wherein Hania must survive an isolated life with violent parents. Hania is a wonderful and doomed character even before the faerie shows up, but the faerie provides another dimension, and in a sense becomes a filter to what could otherwise be an overwhelmingly intense and depressive piece. Aspects of the faerie and the way things work are fresh to me, but what makes this story special is Hania and where it all lands at the end. It’s quite powerful, with unexpected moments that make it even stronger.

One of my favorites in the book—in an anthology bursting with great fiction—is definitely “Ask Twice” by Ryan La Sala. What La Sala does really well here, for me, is to take something so fantastic and ground it in human emotion, making for a truly absorbing story. Saturn ran away from home, feeling more than just out of place. Saturn feels like a monster and is pretty sure that “mother” is just a title, not a blood-tied relationship. Now Saturn is trying to keep that pesky shadow at bay . . . Saturn’s severed shadow has become a monstrous thing, which La Sala uses beautifully to parallel Saturn’s own feelings of self. Meanwhile, Saturn has joined a ballet and must use dancing and the theater to keep that shadow away. La Sala paints a mysterious, intriguing figure of Saturn, while also infusing the character with human vulnerability beyond the already potent tragedies of the setup, making this a character we need to follow. La Sala also does a good job of infusing creepiness into the shadow. As the story progresses, La Sala reveals bits that give a wonderful “oh, shit!” experience, flashing (occasionally bloody) surprises, but not necessarily leaning on the surprise element too much. Just as Saturn is haunted by a detached shadow, the theater itself is haunted, by developers who want to transform it into condos as well as folks who just don’t like gay bars and drag queens. A car has been seen circling the area, raising the tension of the story yet another notch. But ultimately this story is about hope, and family, and belonging, and more. La Sala takes the reader through the tides of the narrative, which includes vibrant imagery and interpersonal complications, then delivers the reader onto the shores of a conclusion that will have you in tears.

Some of the stories in Faeries Never Lie have hallmarks and trappings which many readers will find familiar, like faerie rules and glimpses of the other side. There are even pieces which are inspired by or play on specific faerie stories and tropes. Others treat the faerie concept as essentially a strange power and could potentially be labeled with terms besides specifically “faerie.” Then again, outside of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, who gets to say what the term “faerie” means? The word’s usage is so wide ranging that perhaps it is the right of the author to label their beings as they wish. Transformations tend to be central to these stories, even when those transformations are subtle but important. If you read this book and end up quibbling about how to define the term “faerie” then you are seriously missing out. These stories are layered and nuanced and pack emotional punches. Let these authors take you on the journeys they’ve laid out. You’ll be absolutely enchanted and, hopefully, return with a glimmer of magic in your heart.

¹. Blinks meaningfully at publicists . . . Even this review is coming in “late” but luckily, in this case, the fantastic Chantal Gersch sent a note about the book to Locus, and VOILA! Here comes my review!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is an associate literary agent at kt literary. He is a two-time World Fantasy Award finalist and a two-time Locus Award finalist for his work as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. Arley is also a SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards, for his work as a critic as well as his creative nonfiction. Arley is senior editor at Locus, a reviewer for Lightspeed, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and an interviewer for Clarkesworld. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, movie reviewer, and book reviewer, and ran a series of interviews on his site: arleysorg.com. He has been a guest instructor or speaker at a range of events—and for a variety of audiences—from Worldcons to WisCons, from elementary students to PhD candidates. He was a guest critiquer for the 2023 Odyssey Writing Workshop and the week five instructor for the 2023 Clarion West Workshop. 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. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Book Review: And the Sky Bled by S. Hati

Chris Kluwe | 747 words

And the Sky Bled
S. Hati
Paperback / eBook
ISBN: 9781959411680
Bindery Press, October 15, 2024, 384 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re looking at the tragic intersection of three lives in a world on the brink of destruction, a nation staggering to keep hold of the last dregs of power, and the cost of love and heartbreak—that’s right, it’s And the Sky Bled by S. Hati.

And the Sky Bled is told from the perspective of three different residents of the city of Tejomaya: Zain, a woman trying to escape the shackles of her childhood in the slums; Iravan, one of the leaders of those very same slums who faces nothing but bad choices when it comes to protecting his people; and Anastasia, daughter of the ruling Council leader and caught between two worlds, belonging to neither. All three are tied together by a tragic incident from their past, and brought together once more by the search for a mythic reserve of power—one, that if found, could change the face of Tejomaya forever.

The first thing that leapt off the page to me in And the Sky Bled is the sheer otherness of the world Hati’s characters inhabit, yet how relatable to our own it is (it reminded me a lot of N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, and to a lesser extent some of China Mieville’s work). In Tejomaya, the sky literally does bleed, a remnant of the war between the colonizing Gehennese and the native Janmir, raining down caustic blood that contains the potent energy source calor, a dwindling resource that prompted Gehenna’s invasion in the first place. While I don’t want to say that calor is a one-to-one comparison to fossil fuels, it’s clearly very similar, and the single-minded focus the rulers of Tejomaya (both official and otherwise) put on extracting it while ignoring the dying world around them has some obvious parallels to the current climate change crisis. Hati does an excellent job of both making this a centerpiece of the overall story while also not letting it overshadow the characters.

This brings me to the second area I thought And the Sky Bled excelled at, which is the sheer vitality of the people who make up its world. Hati does phenomenal work balancing the feeling of living through the middle of a disaster, one with seemingly no good solution, with the human urge to survive and take care of those around you, even if it seems impossible to go on. Zain, Iravan, and Anastasia are wonderfully complex and multifaceted characters, who are surrounded by a secondary cast that’s equally fleshed out. And while it would have been easy to let the story devolve into grimdark disaster porn, there is a constant thread of hope and empathy winding all the way through to the ending. This is a book whose characters care about each other, even when it would be easier not to, and it invites you to do the same.

The last thing I want to highlight from And the Sky Bled is how many levels the story operates on. There is the obvious theme of climate change that I touched on earlier, but Hati also includes examinations of colonialism, class warfare, the difficulty of belonging to a culture that doesn’t include you, and some truly sharp observations on how grief can change a person, even years after the act itself. However, the real magic trick is that Hati fits all of these meta concepts naturally into the plot, which hums along at a brisk pace throughout the entire novel, and they all meshed together seamlessly with the world of Tejomaya (and should spark some reflections on our own world).

Overall, this was a book that I really enjoyed for its willingness to explore difficult topics, but more importantly, for its constant dedication to highlighting the human instinct of taking care of each other in an emergency. The world of Tejomaya may be harsh and dying, but as Hati shows over and over, there’s always the chance to do some good and lift someone else up.

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.

Author Spotlight: Ashok K. Banker

Alex Puncekar | 1498 words

What was the first seed for “Antyesti for a Dead Ganesa” and what was your writing process like to figure out the themes?

I first had the idea for this story during my early teens when I was reading every science fiction novel and story I could lay my hands on in Bombay (as it was known back then). I wrote a draft of it when I was fourteen, writing longhand on ledger paper. (They were the longest paper available cheaply and if I wrote in tiny handwriting, I could fit a lot of words onto both sides of one sheet.) It was titled “Embryoglio” back then and it was about this weary detective who investigated a case involving artificially manufactured illegal clones of Indian gods.

It started, as does the current version in Lightspeed, with the detective descending on Chowpatty Beach where the deteriorating embryonic clone of Ganesa has been found. I have no doubt now that it was sparked by the sight of thousands of Ganesa idols washed up by the tide on Chowpatty Beach after the annual Ganeshutsav, which ends with millions of people immersing their idols of the elephant-headed god in the ocean.

I held on to that draft for years, aiming to revise it and send it to Asimov’s, which was edited by George Scithers at the time I wrote the first draft, and later by Gardner Dozois who read a submission by me and encouraged me to send more. Eventually, I lost the ledger paper, along with thousands of other pages covered with most SF and horror stories and novels, and speculative poetry. “Antyesti” is literally that story recreated by me from memory, and it’s as exact a replica as I could write today (or in 2023 when I wrote this draft).

What was it like working with elements of crime fiction and science fiction? Could you also expand on how you struck a balance between thinking about technology and mythology in this story especially how the story speaks about mythological symbolism refracting through technological innovation?

I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of genres. Intertextuality adds such interesting layers, as tropes interact with tropes and the expected path twists in unexpected ways. But as far as the symbolism, balance, and technological aspects go, I’ve no idea what to say about those things since this second draft was literally written as an exercise in memory (and emotion, since I was trying to recreate not just the story but also the emotions I experienced while writing it). Other than that, I hardly know what the story contains as I never read it through after finishing either draft. If you ask me to summarise it, I’d probably provide a very bad, grossly inaccurate summary, like an AI hallucination. The simple truth is, I have no idea. It just poured out of me and the only time I’m going to reread this second first draft is when I have to go over the copy edits which I’ve just received! I’ll leave it to readers to discover its secrets and meaning and am happy to hear what they find.

One theme that strongly emerges for me is the way old systems are given fresh paint instead of looking to change them entirely—for example the way the caste system changes to status ranks in the story. Is a full transformation of society possible according to Neel?

Isn’t all hierarchical structure basically the same thing with different names? Isabel Wilkerson’s brilliant book Caste talks about this quite eloquently. To me, caste, race, class, privilege, identity, are all forms of societal structure designed to divide people into “us” and “not us.” Education, culture, and language have become part of these structures now, along with the weaponization of language, the claiming (and reclaiming) of culture, and the more widespread acquisition of the privilege of higher education. Since I seem to feature at the bottom of the rung of every ladder when it comes to any of these structures—race (BIPOC), caste (low-caste and out caste by birth), privilege (born dirt poor, still relatively poor or lower class at best), education (no college, no degree), culture (a unique hodgepodge of micro-minority and marginalized cultures that makes me the only person of my ilk I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting), identity (NonBinary, Neurodiverse, Genderqueer), you name it—I suppose these things were on my mind when I wrote the first draft at fourteen, and the second first draft last year.

Is a full transformation possible? Nope. The whole point of structure is to divide and diminish, not to improve, transform, or change. Antyesti forms one small part of a very ambitious space opera adventure series in which I guess I’ll find out through the writing.

As a writer from India myself I am always conflicted about how much to explain and how much not to. It is not just about a Western audience but also India being culturally and contextually so different in real-time that makes me wonder. What are some things you keep in mind while writing stories based in India like this one?

Oh, that’s a relatively simple answer for me. I don’t keep an audience in mind when writing. I keep in mind a person with an open mind who loves story, enjoys science fiction, particularly “hard” science fiction, and is intelligent enough to want an SF story that’s exciting and explores an authentically realized fictional world. I think the best SF stories, like all good stories, teach you how to read it as you go along. I don’t know if Antyesti achieves that level of excellence but hopefully it aspires to that level.

I love the relationship between curating, censorship, and cloning, especially how they are closely connected, perhaps even sides of the same pyramid, if I may. What are some of your thoughts about this triangle?

Let’s face it, curating is a form of censorship. The act of editing, as practiced in any field, including traditional book publishing, is very much about bias and prejudice, personal as well as societal, as much as it purports to be about the pursuit of quality. The only real difference between an editorial choice, or curation of any kind in any field, and censorship, bans, and forced retractions, is whether or not we accept the authority of the person or persons making those choices. It’s about power, not choices, really. And at its core, choice itself is a form of power play.

As the title goes, much of the story revolves around death and the return of the dead as a metaphor that is both a blessing and a problem. What about death did the story want to explore?

The protagonist’s own death, since he’s a detective who is literally resurrected from the afterlife each time he’s assigned a case. Since it’s in first-person POV, it’s inevitable that he would be obsessed with it. And of course, the concept of rebirth, resurrection, avatars, the cycle of karma, are all really about death and the return of the dead. Every god is a recycled version of an older god, just as all stories are recycled versions of earlier, dead stories.

One question that I ask all writers, because I struggle with it, is a good ending. I love the ending here, if it is an end, and was wondering (without giving much away) what is the process like for you to arrive at the end of a story? Maybe you can use this story as an example, but it can be general too.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I hardly remember the ending! I know that in the original first draft, I ended with him being sent back to his pod for storage, to be resurrected again for his next case. I assume that’s how this second first draft ends too. To me, it was the most organic ending since I love Asian story structures which are always cyclical—as against Western story structures, which demand transformative change over a three-act progression. Ultimately, matter, like the matter of stories, never truly transforms or changes, it simply appears to change.

Is there a project you are working on currently? And if not are there any themes, objects, or news that might be tickling your fingers?

I write under a lot of pen names, across many genres, but of relevance to this story, I am working on a long, ambitious space opera cycle that I hope to start publishing myself from early 2026 onwards. That was the intent with which I resurrected this story from its stasis pod after all those years.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar writes fantasy, science fiction, and horror. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion Magazine and Jenny Magazine. He is also an interviewer for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and has reviewed for Grimdark Magazine. You can find him alexpuncekar.com.

Author Spotlight: Isabel Cañas

Alex Puncekar | 507 words

I loved reading this. There was so much loving, careful detail put into this story. It feels like you got so much mileage out of so few words. What was the initial inspiration for “Babywings”?

I wrote the first draft of “Babywings” about two days before my daughter was born in spring 2023. I was full of anxiety about the prospect of having a newborn—having children is something that people do all the time, yes, but there were so many things that could go wrong, so many paths my mind could spiral down. I process anxiety by writing, and so write I did.

What was the writing process like? Did you run into any challenges?

I wrote the first draft of “Babywings” after rereading Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” The older I get, the more magical realism hooks its claws deep into me. Coming at the story through this genre, at a sideways angle, has allowed me to grapple with themes that are, for me, more emotionally challenging: birth, death, family dynamics. These are the things in life that for me, as a horror writer, truly inspire terror and awe. My first draft was about 400 words and didn’t have an ending . . . and as I said above, I went into labor, like, 36 hours later and was a little too busy to work on it for a while! Nine months later, when I had a healthy baby napping in the next room, I pulled it out of the proverbial drawer and found that I had so much more perspective on the story. That was when it really came to life.

“Babywings” is such a beautiful, evocative look at the uncanny, especially the beauty in crows. A few weeks back, I watched as a couple of crows played on an empty soccer field. It was beautiful! What is it about crows that you find so fascinating?

To me, birds in general are vehicles for the uncanny—sometimes I look at them and am just astounded at these tiny, feathery dinosaurs hopping around pecking at the dirt. The opening image of the chick is pulled directly from an early childhood memory—I remembered thinking that the way it was positioned on the sidewalk reminded me of a dinosaur fossil. I am particularly fascinated by the intelligence of crows and their rough-hewn beauty. I also find it so fitting that my daughter, now sixteen months old, is obsessed with crows and mimicking their cawing.

What’s next for you? Do you have any projects you’d like to talk about?

My next novel with Berkley will release in 2025! (I would tell you what it’s called, but I have no idea if this interview will go live before we announce it.) I think that readers who loved the spookiness and scares of The Hacienda and the romance of Vampires of El Norte will absolutely love it.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar writes fantasy, science fiction, and horror. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion Magazine and Jenny Magazine. He is also an interviewer for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and has reviewed for Grimdark Magazine. You can find him alexpuncekar.com.

Author Spotlight: Hammond Diehl

Phoebe Barton | 499 words

Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

Two things happened at roughly the same time; I can’t remember the order. The U.S. Supreme Court granted the states the ability to reduce women to second-class citizen status in their own country, and I had a dream. I saw a humanoid-shaped bone construct the height of a skyscraper loping across a horizon. I was standing about a quarter-mile away, on a hilltop, and I thought, I don’t know what side that thing is on, but I hope it’s mine.

At first I read this as a weird buddy comedy, because how else to interpret a story lingering on a road trip about stealing bones for a skeleton saint – but it became something more than that very quickly. How important was this kind juxtaposition to you during the writing process?

All of my favorite genre stories remix familiar elements to spin up an idea in an unexpected or different way.

This story is deeply rooted in Christian iconography, to the extent that it’d collapse without it. What led you to take this route in the creative process?

If I remember correctly, I worked backward from a concept. If I were to introduce a siege machine made of bones, where would I source the parts? Good ol’ grave robbing came up as a possibility, but I didn’t see much of a fun read in that. I had assumed—incorrectly—that Catholic reliquaries, perfect bone sources as they are, were limited to the Old World. When I learned there’s a purported holy ossuary in Pittsburgh, that took the idea of a giant bone saint right over the top for me. That and the fact that Catholicism is nothing if not a study in hypocrisy when it comes to women’s bodies. I think it was just as much luck as anything else, that the religion and the main monster worked so well together.

The original title of your story was “More Bones,” which struck me as unassuming and ordinary, given the extraordinary nature of the story itself. What’s your process for titling stories, and was this an intentional decision to sharpen the contrast?

The crimes that the world heaps upon women, the cycle of violence and beatification—there’s nothing gorgeous or rich or poetic about that. And at first, I thought that was something the title needed to convey. The evil we’re fighting is banal as fuck and let’s not forget it.

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Hey, you like bones? How about a whole house made of ’em? I’m writing my first novel! Somebody be a saint and publish it. I’ll see myself out.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Phoebe Barton is a queer trans science fiction writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, and Kaleidotrope, and her story “The Mathematics of Fairyland” won the Aurora Award for Best Short Story in 2022. She lives with her family, a robot, and multiple typewriters in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Find her online at www.phoebebartonsf.com.

Author Spotlight: Ai Jiang

Alex Puncekar | 552 words

“Ancestor Code” is a philosophical look at the intersection of culture and technology. What was the inspiration behind this story?

Something I have been thinking much about is human evolution and the way technology has essentially become what defines it, but with it comes climate change, comes war and disasters, comes progress—yet even with that progress, it seems we are always taking two steps forward and two steps back, making mistakes and mending the mistakes with more mistakes we like to believe are truly solutions. While some are able to keep up, excel, others are left behind. We gain new skills just to see the loss of other necessary ones. Sometimes I think about the beauty of human creations, and other times I contemplate how these same creations would be seen by those who are non-human—would it be just as vibrant, colourful, magical, or grey, dull, and vehicles of destruction.

What was the writing process like? What was your favorite part when writing it, and/or did you run into any challenges?

Often with flash pieces and poetry, they come to me in a flurry of images, words, emotions that I write down in one sitting, often with halts, and I think that fervent and adrenaline-filled feeling is what I enjoyed most about writing this piece specifically—the moment of philosophical rush that gets placed into a string of words like stream of consciousness from beginning to end.

Your story looks at what we stand to lose if we don’t preserve the past, and what could happen if we rely too much on technology to do so. What do you think we stand to lose or gain if we rely too much on technology to store our history?

I’ve been looking lately into the concepts of post-humanism and transhumanism, and how that will impact our current traditions, values, and beliefs, particularly when it comes to the definition of humanity and what it means to be human, death and the afterlife, as well as religion. Something I wonder about is the increasing unreliability of memory and shortening attention spans, and if this might further diminish the more we rely on technology to remember for us,—and given the intangibility of data and code, what would happen should it all become lost. But I also think about the merits of technology in its ability to create global connection, informing us of international conditions, and yet, with technology comes ease of further manipulation of information and history, reminiscent of 1984, where the citizens simply take the information fed as sound and true even if false.

What’s next for you? Do you have any projects you’d like to talk about?

Something that is ever-present in human history is stories—whether they take the form of small talk, oral folklore, media, books, performances, among others—and my first novel explores the role of stories in our society and its cultural and political development. Hopefully an announcement comes soon, but until then . . .! In the meantime, I have a dark science fantasy novella duology forthcoming with Titan Books in 2025, the first in the Natural Engines series is titled A Palace Near the Wind, now available for preordering.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar writes fantasy, science fiction, and horror. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion Magazine and Jenny Magazine. He is also an interviewer for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and has reviewed for Grimdark Magazine. You can find him alexpuncekar.com.

Coming Attractions, December 2024

The Editors | 240 words

Coming up in December, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Cressida Blake Roe (“The Godhood of Ima Day”) and Gene Doucette (“Get Hyped!”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Inside the House of Wisdom” from Tamara Masri and “What We Plan To Do To You” by Adam-Troy Castro.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Neon Yang (“Bone And Marrow, Woven Into Song”) and Melissa A Watkins (“Ol’ Big Head”). We also have a flash story (“Sleeping Beauty and the Restless Realm”) from Lincoln Michel, and another (“Three Birds That Came Out of Grayson Huff and a Bunch More That Fell from the Sky”) from David Anaxagoras.

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: Marika Bailey, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Oyedotun Damilola Muees, B. Pladek, Lowry Poletti, and Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

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www.lightspeedmagazine.com

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www.johnjosephadams.com/newsletter

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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 (plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $41.92 (30% 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 ($4.99 each), and we also 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.

What About Forever? Does Forever Sound Good? We also have lifetime subscriptions available for $700. With a lifetime subscription, you’ll receive every issue of Lightspeed as soon as it’s available, and you’ll gain access to every back issue as well.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

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 Lightspeed and/or Nightmare, 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 Lightspeed and Nightmare 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 two 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

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Mayookh Barua

Editorial Intern

Madison Brake

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

Chris Kluwe

Melissa A Watkins

Copy Editor

Luke Tolvaj

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher

Christie Yant

Emeritus Staff

Rich Horton (Reprint Editor)

Laurel Amberdine (Assistant Editor)

Aigner Loren Wilson (Book Reviewer)

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 (with R.F. Kuang)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 (with Hugh Howey)

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

The Far Reaches

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

Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele)

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.