TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 175, December 2024

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: December 2024

SCIENCE FICTION

Inside the House of Wisdom
Tamara Masri

A Catalog of 21st Century Ghosts
Pat Murphy

What We Plan to Do with You
Adam-Troy Castro

Get Hyped!
Gene Doucette

FANTASY

Ol’ Big Head
Melissa A Watkins

Sleeping Beauty and the Restless Realm
Lincoln Michel

The Godhood of Ima Day
Cressida Blake Roe

Three Birds That Came Out of Grayson Huff and a Bunch More That Fell from the Sky
David Anaxagoras

NONFICTION

Book Review: Translation State by Ann Leckie
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Mechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. Wagner
Melissa A Watkins

Book Review: Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Melissa A Watkins

Pat Murphy

Cressida Blake Roe

Gene Doucette

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions, January 2025

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: December 2024

John Joseph Adams | 267 words

Welcome to issue 175 of Lightspeed Magazine!

Both of our science fiction original shorts contain a warning for our near future selves. In Pat Murphy’s “A Catalog of 21st Century Ghosts,” a woman travels America searching for connection in an age of climate disaster—and finds it where she least expects it. Gene Doucette mixes comedy and concerns about privacy and AI in his story “Get Hyped!” Tamra Masri has her Lightspeed debut with “Inside the House of Wisdom,” a flash story that looks with hope toward a future Gaza. We also have a piece of dark flash (“What We Plan to Do to You”) by Adam-Troy Castro.

Melissa A Watkins launches off our fantasy short stories with “Ol’ Big Head,” the story of one young man’s education about family history . . . and the importance of taking care of one’s community. Cressida Blake Roe’s story “The Godhood of Ima Day” is set in a future where, for better or worse, people can host gods. In our fantasy flash, Lincoln Michel gives us a retelling of Sleeping Beauty (“Sleeping Beauty and the Restless Realm”) and David Anaxagoras spins an entirely modern fairy tale in “Three Birds That Came Out of Grayson Huff and a Bunch More That Fell from the Sky.”

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. It’s a terrific way to wrap up 2024, and we couldn’t be more delighted to share all this fantastic spec fic with you.

Happy holidays, and see you next year!

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.

Inside the House of Wisdom

Tamara Masri | 1600 words

This is the eighth floor of the Al-Ahli Memorial Library, my favorite place in the building. When the elevator door opens, it’s like walking into a quiet circle of glass. So, as we walk, I’m going to whisper. People are reading, writing, drawing—it’s such a beautiful place to work. I’m probably the luckiest librarian in the world.

Let’s start with the east side, overlooking the city’s skyline. How many kites are in the air? I counted five. Now let’s go to the west side. The sunset’s candy colors, mixed with the blue sea, remind me of Rukab ice cream. Look at those windsurfers zigzagging around the fishing boats. On the shore, I see a girl washing a white horse.

Even though this room is a circle, the outside of the building looks like a spiral. A single helix going up to heaven, was the architect’s inspiration. The design came to her in a dream: an angel told her to rebuild the House of Wisdom, the Grand Library of Baghdad during the Abbasid era. The angel said that our dark times were over, the golden age had begun. And here we are.

Sixty years ago, during the dark times, this was a destroyed hospital. Many people lost their lives. No books or beautiful buildings will ever bring them back. This was built to honor their lives and everything they sacrificed for our liberation.

Every day when I come to work, I have a morning ritual. See in the middle of the room, where all the big books are? That’s the “Oversized” section. I go straight to the Tribunal Volumes; there are at least fifty. I pick one at random and read for a few minutes. I remember the names, the stories. I pray.

Before we move on, you’re welcome to go see it.

• • • •

INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL FOR TRUTH AND JUSTICE; VOLUME FIVE

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

JULY 10, 2034

Pages: 5900-5904

The Tribunal met, following a brief recess, for the Afternoon Session at 01:30.

MARSHALL OF THE COURT: The International Tribunal for Truth and Justice is in session. The prosecution will now present Exhibit No. 8090 as evidence against the defense. The exhibit describes a twenty-year-old medical recording, dated April 23, 2024. The prosecution may now present Exhibit 8090.

START OF RECORDING

This is Dr. Sufyan al Bursh. The date is April 23, 2024. The time is 2:29 in the morning. Patient 1090 was born about an hour ago. Vitals are good; slightly underweight, one week premature but other than that, I’m looking at a healthy baby girl. After this recording, the memory stick will be attached to the patient, placed underneath the identifying tape on her chest. On the tape I wrote, “Daughter of the martyr Sabreen al Sakani.” Father’s family name is Joudeh. Mother, alongside family, was killed in airstrike. The neighbors who brought her mother in say that the baby has no known living relatives. Father and older sister, age three, were also killed. Extended family as well, but we’re still waiting to see if the rescuers can reach them.

This audio is to be transcribed for the health ministry. Send another copy to whichever organization is working with the International Court. Take screenshots of each patient entry. Document everything.

Requesting the following audio be given to the child, when she is older.

Hello, daughter of Sabreen al Sakani. Your family name is Joudeh, but I don’t know your first name. I’m Dr. Sufyan, I delivered you today. I try to record a more personal message for as many patients as I can, but usually there isn’t time. Now there seems to be a pause in the explosions. I want to tell you everything I know about you, while I can.

We’re at the shore under a white tarp. Beneath you there’s sand, before you the sea. It’s cold outside, but you look warm sleeping in your incubator. I can hear the waves and the sound of the generator that you are hooked up to. You’re covered in wires; you look almost as though you’re from another planet. Under the round glass, you look like you’re in a lit-up space egg. You seem safe. Peaceful. I’m saying this because I want you to know that these kinds of moments can exist.

Before you were born, I saw you as a small mound in your mother’s belly. She was already a martyr when she came to me, God rest her soul. There was a second when I thought to leave you in there, swimming in that warmth for as long as you could, so that you join her on the next journey. But I’m a doctor and I took an oath to save you no matter what. One day I hope you’ll understand.

Your birth was not really a birth, but like looking for treasure in a shipwreck underwater. Something calm came over the room, as though it was orchestrated. A journalist had a camera, maybe you can see the footage one day. When I pulled you out of your mother, you were blue, like a guppy still in your fish phase. Everything was silent, as though it was just you and me at the bottom of the sea. I didn’t think you would survive. I scooped the remains of the old world from your mouth. You waited. And then it happened. Your first breath. Small ribs began to move up and down in my palm like a wave. A nurse shouted, “Miracle!” That was the first word you heard. My hands were shaking. Your eyes were open.

Then I realized there was no one to feed you. I thought I made a mistake; I never wanted you to suffer. But then the nurse found a new mother in another medical tent. Yesterday, an aid packet thrown from a helicopter fell through the church’s ceiling and onto the mother’s leg. When I walked into her tent, she was praying to the Virgin, pleading to keep it. She was so happy to feed you. I don’t know how long she’ll be able to do that. She’s also hungry.

Over the horizon of the black sea, I see a light on the water. I think it’s the aid pier the U.S. claims to be building. I don’t know how long it will take for the food and medicine to get here; it’s been months. I can’t bear the thought of listening to you cry for milk for days. What if I can’t feed you? I imagine taking you in your space egg, turning it into a little ship, and sending you off into the water. Towards that light or backwards into paradise.

I don’t want to lie to you. I struggle with doubt, with weakness. I don’t know if bringing you into this world was the right thing to do. When you grow older, if you resent me, you can always call. I’m not your father but you can call me ammo Sufyan, think of me as an uncle. And if I’m not alive, you can call my three children. My two children. Najah and Lina. My third, Thawra, the youngest, was killed last month with my wife, Nadia. They went to get flour from the aid truck. The sniper shot Nadia in the leg, and then anyone who tried to save her. I treated over one hundred people that day. The hardest was my own baby girl.

May God rest their souls, the souls of your family—I’m crying now—I’m sorry. The journalist is still here with his camera. I won’t let the enemy enjoy my grief to feed their wounds. We must have strength. We must have faith.

My brother Adnan was a surgeon at Al-Shifa Hospital. When they attacked the hospital a few months ago, Adnan wouldn’t leave his patients, he moved them to another hospital. They tracked him down, took him to prison. We were told that they killed him last week. I recorded the death date as April 19, 2024. Four days ago, I got a phone call. They said they were coming, and I was next. But I can’t leave my patients. I can’t leave you. I won’t leave you.

The explosions are starting again. I’ll have to end, but there’s one last thing I want to tell you.

A family tree is made from nasl and asl. Nasl is lineage, your genetic relations, the branches. Your mother’s branch is al-Sakani; your father’s is Joudeh. Asl is origin, it’s what you came from, like the seed underground. It’s you and everything before you. The enemy can always cut your branches, they can even cut the trunk. But they can never go below and stop the seed from sprouting. They cannot change the beginning: the fact that you were here, the fact that you existed. When I held you, I felt no fear, no hunger. You were a miracle. You were a victory.

END OF RECORDING

• • • •

Inside the House of Wisdom, on the eighth floor of the library, just under the peak of the helix, is the Omega Point. According to the Abbasid angel who visited the architect in a dream, the Omega Point unifies the spiral of the helix—from the rubble of the Al-Ahli hospital below, through the Tribunal Volumes lining the stacks, to the sky above. Here the architect chose to preserve the evidence of the dark times—our history. That is why I come here every morning. To remember the stories, the names. To pray. Sometimes I can almost hear them, saying: Yes, it is possible.

©2024 by Tamara Masri.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tamara Masri is a writer from Ramallah, Palestine. She studied anthropology at Tufts University and holds a master’s degree in evolutionary biology from Imperial College London. In 2024, she attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been featured in Hypocrite Reader, 3 Quarks Daily, and +972 Magazine. She can be reached at tamaramasri [at] protonmail [dot] com.

Protest 2025: Stories Against Tyranny is an anthology of speculative fiction short stories to help you protest, resist, and survive Donald Trump’s 2nd term, from Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams. Back it now on Indiegogo. Campaign ends Dec. 20!

A Catalog of 21st Century Ghosts

Pat Murphy | 6754 words

On the high plains of Kansas in a tiny town worn down by drought, I stop at a roadside diner. When I ask for water, the waitress pours me a glass of ice water, presenting it with obvious pride. “We have our own well,” she says. “And the wind turbine on the roof keeps the freezer going even when the grid is out.”

“That’s wonderful,” I say, and I mean it. The well water is sweet and clean and cold. At my last stop, some thirty miles back, I had filled my water bottles with lukewarm water that tasted like dust.

I order coffee and an almost-burger—with a patty that’s half black beans and half beef. Given the high cost of beef, the all-beef burger has become a luxury, even in America’s heartland.

When the waitress brings my order, she lingers, leaning against the counter. She’s in her twenties, I’d guess. Clearly, she’s curious about me. An old lady on a bicycle rides up to your cafe in the middle of nowhere. Who wouldn’t be curious?

I’m guessing that most of the people who stop at this diner know the waitress’s name, but she’s wearing a name tag. “Melinda,” I say. “That’s a lovely name. I’m Sandy.”

Melinda asks the usual questions and I give my usual answers. I’m traveling by bicycle because I want to see the country. I’m writing a book. (No one ever asks what the book is about. So few are interested in books these days.) With the solar-powered electric booster motor, my bike’s maximum speed is thirty miles per hour. I average about fifty miles a day on the flat. I’m heading for San Francisco.

“Where did you start?” she asks.

“New York,” I say. That’s where I started riding the bike. More accurately, my journey started at the research station in Greenland where I worked for many years. Or you could say it started in Oslo, where I lived with my husband after we left the station. But I think it’s best not to mention all that. I’ve read too much about Americans who blame scientists for not fixing the climate, about conspiracy theorists who claim that scientific efforts made climate change worse. Simplest to say I started in New York and avoid all that.

Melinda frowns. She is worried for me. When you reach a certain age, many kindhearted people worry about you.

“It’s a long way to San Francisco,” she says. “Why are you going there?”

“It’s my home,” I say. “Or it was many years ago.”

Back in Norway, my sister-in-law Hannah did her best to talk me out of this trip. “San Francisco won’t be the place you remember,” she said. “I know you miss Erik. We all do. But your friends and family are here. This is where you belong.”

I love Norway. But after my husband’s death, it became more difficult to feel that I belonged there. When Erik and I married, I gained a family and friends. But even after decades in Oslo, I was still the American. A much loved American, but always set apart.

“I’m homesick,” I told Hannah, and she frowned.

“But this is your home,” she insisted.

Melinda looks out the window at my bicycle. “I guess you’re not in a hurry to get home,” she says.

I shrug. “Sometimes, travel is about the journey, not the destination.”

A glib response. This trip is all about the destination. But Melinda is right: I’m not in a hurry to get there.

I change the subject, asking her what it’s like to live in such a small town, so far from the cities. I learn that she went to the city for college—that would be the big city of Salina, with a population of about forty thousand. But she came back home to help her family. “The city was okay, but it’s great to be home.” She has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and she works part-time at the nearby wind farm.

She asks about where I’ve been and what I’ve seen. That’s the opening I’ve been waiting for. Whenever I’m online, I check the Ghost Network for information about Ghosts nearby, but my best intel always comes from chatting with locals. I’ll mention the last Ghost I visited, then use that as an excuse to ask leading questions.

“I saw a Ghost back in Columbia, Missouri. People called it a Ghost, but it wasn’t a ghost like in a haunted house. It wasn’t frightening. It just made me feel different, made me think about things differently . . .” I shook my head, letting the words trail off. She is watching me in a way I’ve come to recognize. She knows what I’m talking about.

“I’m looking for Ghosts as I travel,” I say. “It sounds silly, I’m sure.”

“It doesn’t.” She hesitates. People who appreciate Ghosts protect them by keeping their locations secret, to be shared only with others who appreciate them.

I smile at her. “Not everyone understands.”

She nods slowly, then says, “There’s a farm not far from here. Well, it used to be a farm. Now it’s just an abandoned farmhouse owned by the company that bought up all the farms around here. There’s a Ghost there. I go visit him sometimes.” She gives me directions to the farmhouse. “Could you clean off the solar panel when you’re there? I always do that—to keep him going, you know. Say hello for me.”

• • • •

The farmhouse is several miles off the main road, but Melinda’s directions are excellent and I find it easily. Half its roof is gone, torn away by a long ago storm. The roof rafters are held aloft by walls that are leaning, not quite ready to fall, but almost. The front steps of the farmhouse are intact, but they lead to a sagging door frame that lacks a door.

A few fence posts mark the boundaries of what was once a garden, now overtaken by native grasses. It’s early October, the end of a long rainless summer, and the dirt is bone dry. A cedar tree, planted long ago by the look of it, casts a shadow on the front steps.

I walk around the dilapidated structure. High on one of the leaning walls, there’s a solar panel, positioned to catch the afternoon light. A long-handled mop hangs from a hook in the wall. I use the mop to wipe the solar panel clean, then I sit on the front porch, grateful for the shade of the tree.

Some Ghosts are triggered by motion; some, by sound. My movement has had no effect. Remembering what Melinda told me, I say, “Hello?”

Meeting a Ghost is like stepping into someone else’s dream and making it your own.

I see a young man standing in the yard. He is tall, raw-boned, dressed in worn blue jeans, work boots, and a faded t-shirt emblazoned with the name of a rock band that has long since disbanded.

No, wait—I’m not watching a young man. I am that young man, standing in the yard and smelling rain on the breeze that cools my face. I feel a warm affection for this place, for this house, for the old cedar tree that grows here. This house belongs to someone I care about—to my grandmother, who has moved to town. I am taking care of the house for her.

I hear thunder in the distance and I know that rain is coming. The wind moves the branches of the cedar tree.

No, wait. I’m not the man. I am the cedar tree and my roots reach into the ground, growing deep and wide in a quest for water. The wind increases and the storm is upon me. The wind tears at my branches, but it can’t tear me away from this place. I am rooted here. This is my home. I have been growing here for a hundred years and I will keep on growing for a hundred more. I belong here.

The wind blows and the storm comes. Hail hammers on my branches and on the ground around me. Cold melt water trickles down through the soil to reach my roots, and I am grateful.

I come back to myself slowly. The air is still and dry, but I remember the wind and the trickling melt water with its welcome moisture. A bird calls in the cedar tree. I stand and place my hand on the trunk of the tree, savoring my affection for this place, filled with hope for its future. For a time, I’m not quite myself, and that’s a welcome respite.

I breathe deeply, relaxing in the Ghost’s sense of belonging. It’s difficult to sort out the feelings—which are mine and which belong to the Ghost?

• • • •

Back in the late 2030s, outlaw artists with mad technical skills created the entities that have come to be known as Ghosts. The media gave the artists a name, the Mesmerists, and implied that the Mesmerists were an official Art Movement.

But they weren’t. They were artistically minded science geeks with technical skills—game developers, marketing engineers, digital artists, and the like. They worked outside the law, using techniques that had been banned in advertising and video games. Like graffiti artists, they placed their work where people could be surprised by it—never in a museum or gallery. The people who made the Ghosts were scattered all over the country, and so are the Ghosts.

Though I have visited many Ghosts, I still find it difficult to describe what a Ghost is. I could say that a Ghost is a mental illusion created by carefully calibrated electromagnetic fields interacting with your brain. I could tell you that the first proto-Ghost was created by a neuroscientist turned game engineer who realized that low-frequency electromagnetic fields generated by a gaming headset could change players’ emotional experience of a game—terrifying players or bolstering their confidence, making them want to play more or making them stop playing altogether.

When you visit a Ghost, magnetic fields shape your emotional response. A holographic projection gives you a focus for what you feel. Then your brain does the rest, filling in the gaps.

A Ghost is a story that you tell yourself to make sense of the world.

But a Ghost is more than that. A Ghost is a part of a life, left behind. A Ghost is a flower pressed in a family Bible, retaining its color but none of its scent.

• • • •

The feelings supplied by the Ghost fade slowly. Gradually, I become myself again—a woman sitting on a porch in the shade of a cedar tree.

I watch the sky. Puffy clouds float past, slowly shifting and changing as they move. As a kid, I might have identified them as “cloud that looks like a fish” and “cloud that looks like a heart.” As someone who has been studying clouds for decades, I identify them as Cumulus humilis—literally, the humble clump. Their edges are tattered and wispy, a sign that the water droplets that form them are evaporating. These are fair weather clouds—they will float away without releasing the water they hold.

Clouds are tricky beasts. In the winter, low clouds can keep an area warm by holding the heat close to the earth. In the summer, low clouds can keep an area cool by reflecting the sun and shading the earth.

Thirty years ago, I set sail on the Maker of Clouds, a research ship bound for the Arctic Circle. There I worked with a research team that studied Arctic clouds with one goal: increasing the sunlight that those clouds reflected back into space. We worked to make clouds that would cool the Arctic and reverse the melting of the polar cap.

In Kansas, as Cumulus humilis float northward, I write about the Ghost at the abandoned farmhouse. The book I’m writing is a catalog of Ghosts, with each entry describing a single Ghost. I’m writing this book for myself—I’ll never show it to anyone. I too am protective of the Ghosts for that.

For each Ghost I visit, I write a haiku. I learned to write haiku from Hikari, a Japanese researcher aboard the Maker of Clouds. As a discipline, Hikari wrote a haiku each day. I’m not a poet, but I adopted Hikari’s haiku practice back then—and I still find it soothing.

• • • •

Excerpt from A Catalog of 21st Century Ghosts

Location: Abandoned Farmhouse, Kansas, USA

Title: The Cedar Tree

Hail strikes like a fist.
Shreds leaves, breaks branches. But then—
A drink of cool water.

• • • •

When I leave the farmhouse, I head west—pedaling my bike past the wind farm where Melinda works. In the late afternoon, I set up camp just a few miles past the last wind turbine. All night long, I hear the rotors of the wind turbines turning, a soft sound like ocean waves in the distance.

To avoid going over the Rocky Mountains, I head south into New Mexico, across Arizona, and into Nevada. I visit a few Ghosts along the way: one in a Santa Fe cactus garden, another at an abandoned tourist stop in Arizona.

Each day, I wake before the sun is up to start riding in the cool of the morning, glad to be making this trip in October, when temperatures are relatively mild. Here in the desert, the bones of the earth are laid bare. These open spaces change my perception of time. I can see history in the layers of rock—lava rock from volcanoes that erupted almost two billion years ago, sedimentary rock that contains fossil corals from the inland sea that covered this land just a couple of hundred million years back.

In northern Nevada, I make my way toward Pyramid Lake, one of the last remnants of the inland sea where corals once grew. I stop short of the lake at a roadside business with a hand-painted sign that says “Tate’s Place” and lists what the business has to offer: burgers, sodas, gas, bait, buffalo jerky, and camping spots on the Truckee River. There’s one pickup truck in the parking lot, one woman at the counter inside. She has dark eyes, broad cheekbones, and short dark hair.

I sit at the counter and order a burger and a 7Up. The dark-haired woman is the cook and waitress as well as the checkout clerk. She serves the burger and soda, then asks me, “Where are you coming from?”

“I started in New York.”

“Long ride.”

I nod and sip my drink, knowing other questions are coming and also knowing it is best to wait for them.

“What brings you here?”

“I’m on my way to San Francisco.”

“You’re taking a roundabout route to get there.”

I nod. “I’m looking for something.” Out here in the west, people are friendlier to outsiders and Ghosts. From the tribal notices on the store’s bulletin board, the baskets on sale, and from the woman’s broad cheekbones, I guess that she’s a member of the local Paiute tribe. “I’ve heard that there’s a Ghost not far from here.”

She remains silent, waiting for me to continue.

“I am visiting Ghosts as I travel,” I say.

“How many have you seen?”

“Thirty-five. It would have been thirty-seven, but two had been vandalized. Beyond repair. Not everyone approves of lingering dreams.”

She nods, looking thoughtful. “Why are you visiting Ghosts?”

“I’m looking for something.”

“What are you looking for?”

I hesitate, then say, “Any name I gave it would sound stupid or pretentious.”

She chuckles then. Her face, weathered from the sun, changes when she laughs. “I’ll give you points for awareness. Lots of people come here talking about vision quests and spiritual journeys. They want to sound like they’re humble and they’re doing a sacred thing. But they’re full of themselves. They sound pretentious as hell.”

I don’t say anything. Riding through the desert has made me patient.

“Why are you going to San Francisco? What’s there?”

I hesitate, then answer. “The last Ghost I plan to visit.”

“And what were you doing before you started riding your bike across the country?” This woman has a lot of questions, but now that I have started answering them, I see no reason to stop. It feels good to talk. I tell her about studying clouds, about working in Greenland, about living in Norway. I tell her about my husband’s death from a heart attack and the need I feel to go home. I even tell her that I write a haiku about each Ghost.

She listens calmly, then asks a question that has nothing to do with any of that. “And if you don’t find what you’re looking for in San Francisco? What then?”

“I don’t know.”

She nods again, this time as if she has come to a conclusion. “You can camp behind the store. The water from the pump is good for drinking. Tomorrow, I’ll take you to the Ghost. We’ll leave just before sunrise.”

“Thank you,” I say. “By the way, my name’s Sandy. I’m guessing yours is Tate.”

• • • •

I wake an hour before sunrise. Venus is a brilliant point of light in the eastern sky. The morning is cool, but I know that will change. I wipe my face with a damp bandana, then reapply sunscreen. For breakfast, I have an energy bar and some of the beef jerky that I bought at Tate’s store.

When I hear a door creak open and slam shut, I meet Tate in the parking lot and we head out. She drives on a dirt road that leads to another dirt road that leads to another—and so on.

Eventually we reach a pile of limestone boulders on the edge of a dry lake bed. One of the boulders is etched with geometric designs. “Archeologists say these petroglyphs are the oldest in North America,” Tate tells me. “Ten thousand years old, they say. My people have been here for a long time.”

She gestures toward the shadow of the limestone boulders. “I’ll leave you here. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

I sit in the shade and study the petroglyphs. A pattern of diagonal slashes reminds me of a cartoon fishbone. An undulating line makes me think of ripples on water. I turn and gaze at the dry lake bed. The cracked clay shimmers in the heat.

Then I hear a woman singing in a language I don’t understand. When I look toward the sound, I see a woman standing beside the petroglyphs, singing as she uses her hand to trace the undulating line on the boulder. Her dark hair is braided. She wears a simple dress. As I watch, her hand reaches the end of the line on the rock and she finishes her song.

No, wait: I’m not watching the woman; I am the woman. My hand rests on warm stone, on a line that was carved long ago. I take my hand from the stone, turn away from the petroglyph, and walk to the edge of the dry lake bed.

My people have lived in this place for thousands of years. The lake that filled this valley gave my people all that we needed to live: fish and waterfowl to eat, reeds to weave into boats and baskets and shelters. Then the white people came and took away the water.

I close my eyes and I think about water rippling in the sun. I open my hands and I open my mind. I am high in the mountains where the snow is deep. The springtime sun shines on the snow and I hear the sound of water trickling as the snow melts.

I am melting with the snow, running downhill to join a stream, a river. I am a rushing torrent, a flood that batters and breaks the dam that tries to block the water’s flow. I am cool mountain water spreading across the dry lake bed, seeping into the dry soil, saturating the soil and filling the valley.

Then I am the woman again, feeling a cool breeze on my face. I open my eyes.

Sunlight shimmers on water. I wade into the lake up to my knees, murmuring a prayer of gratitude that the water has returned. Tiny fish flee my approach, taking refuge in a patch of reeds. I see a splash in the water—a larger fish, jumping to catch an insect. I hear geese gabbling in the distance.

Slowly, I come back to myself—feeling powerful and content. The lake is dry, but I know that can change. This land has been through many changes.

• • • •

Later, back at Tate’s Place, Tate grills me a burger and makes one for herself.

“So,” she says. “Did you write a haiku?’

“Not yet. I’m working on it.”

She nods.

“So tell me,” I say, “why did the lake dry up?”

“Back in 1905, the US government built a dam on the Truckee River,” she says. “The dam diverted water that would have gone into the lake, sending that water down a canal so that white farmers could use it to irrigate their fields. The dam was part of something they called the Reclamation Act. I’d say the government was reclaiming something that wasn’t theirs to begin with. Without that river water, the lake dried up. But now the world is changing. The climate is changing.”

People never smile when they talk about climate change, but Tate is smiling.

“Each year, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada increases,” she says. “One year—maybe next year, maybe the year after that—the snowmelt will overwhelm the dam that the government built to control the water. Then the lake will return.”

• • • •

Excerpt from A Catalog of 21st Century Ghosts

Location: Dry lake bed, Nevada

Title: Reclamation

Dry lake. Mountain snow.
Water finds a new path. Yes—
Everything changes.

• • • •

The shortest route from the dry lake bed to San Francisco leads over the Sierra Nevada, following the path of the California Trail, where oxen pulled covered wagons more than a hundred years ago. I don’t take that route. It would be a slow uphill climb.

I take a longer route with less elevation gain, riding my bike south on back roads that run along the eastern side of the mountains down to the Owens Valley. I head west when I reach the town of Mojave, crossing California’s central valley at Bakersfield and making my way to the California coast.

The rising seas have gnawed at the cliffs along the shore. Sometimes storms and rising waves wash away the coastal road. When that happens, people rebuild it. If you want to take the coastal road, you must be adaptable and patient.

I start out patient, but when I reach Santa Cruz, a coastal town just a few days’ ride south of San Francisco, I am overcome by a sense of urgency that’s been quietly growing for days. I head inland, pedaling up into the Santa Cruz mountains, pushing myself to go faster. Muscles aching, I camp for a night in a patch of redwood forest. Then I hurry on, following Skyline Boulevard along the ridge of the mountains until I reach Daly City and then San Francisco, at last.

I reach the city late in the afternoon. I know where to find the Ghost I have come to visit, but I need a boat to get there.

I find my way to a traveler’s hostel in the Potrero Hill neighborhood. I ask the clerk at the desk about renting a boat. She gives me a map and directs me to a dock at Sixteenth and Owens, where a woman named Lucia rents kayaks and gives tours.

When I lived in San Francisco, Sixteenth and Owens was several blocks away from the water, but times have changed. Lucia’s dock is at the edge of DrownTown, part of the city that is now submerged beneath the rising waters of San Francisco Bay. Standing at the intersection, I can see the pavement of Sixteenth Street continuing below the water. Lucia’s kayaks float beside a makeshift walkway built of wood that has been reclaimed from fallen buildings.

Lucia, I discover, is a very stubborn woman. She refuses to let me take one of her rental kayaks out on the bay alone. She insists on accompanying me.

In vain I tell her I am a competent ocean kayaker. “I used to live here,” I say. “I lived in Dogpatch, just a few blocks from here. I used to kayak on the bay every weekend.”

“Lots of things that used to be are different now,” she says. “Where do you want to go?”

“Mission Rock.”

“Ghost hunting,” she says in a matter-of-fact tone. “A lot of disaster tourists want to go there.”

“I don’t need a guide,” I say, uncomfortable at being lumped in with disaster tourists. “I know the way.” I look toward the bay, toward Mission Rock. I am trying to match memories from thirty years ago with a very altered present. “I left a long time ago, but I still remember the way.” I hope that claim is true.

When I turn to look at her, something in her expression has changed. She is frowning as she studies my face. For a moment, I think that she will relent and let me go alone. Then she shakes her head and gestures at the sun, now low in the sky. “It’ll be dark soon. Easy to get lost. I’ll show you the way.”

I have no choice. I give in. “When we get there, you must leave me be. No tourist spiel.”

Lucia gives me a look I can’t read. “As you wish.”

She equips me with a life jacket and paddle. In a battered yellow kayak, she leads the way down what used to be Sixteenth Street. I follow in an equally ancient blue boat. Around us are broken buildings, flooded streets. When we are making our way around the remains of a structure that once supported traffic signals, I catch sight of a sign for a coffee shop.

I recognize the place. I knew the barista—we chatted whenever I stopped there for coffee. On my last day in the city, I met friends there for breakfast. I know where we are.

When I lived in the city, this neighborhood was called Mission Bay, named for the shallow cove that had once been here. The cove was filled in during the late 1800s to create more land for the growing city. Now the ocean has risen and the Mission Bay neighborhood is a bay once again.

It is a wonder how a person can fool themselves—that person being me. I knew the city of San Francisco had been flooded by rising seas, battered by storms. But until this moment that was just a story I had heard. Even when I saw the flooded street, it didn’t seem quite real.

But now that I see my favorite coffee shop under water, it is real.

I feel disoriented, confused. I wonder if my old house is now under the waters of the bay. My favorite waterfront dive bar and burger joint—a remnant of old San Francisco—is certainly submerged. My past is gone. All gone.

But I have no time to process this. I have to paddle quickly to catch up with Lucia as she moves out into the open water and turns north. Ahead, I can see what was once the city’s financial district. Some of the tall buildings are leaning. Water from the Bay had soaked and softened the soil. Like the walls of the farmhouse in Kansas, the buildings are ready to fall.

Lucia stops paddling and I wonder why. Then I catch sight of asphalt just a foot or so below the water’s surface. “Mission Rock,” she says. “I’m guessing it looked different last time you were here.”

Around the patch of submerged asphalt are artifacts from the broken city. I can see a stone ornament of a smiling woman’s face salvaged from a building in the financial district, a length of curb that retains a splash of red paint marking a “no parking” zone. Atop a pile of shattered bricks lies the torso and arm of a broken statue. The outstretched arm points skyward, reaching above the water.

Lucia tosses her bow rope around the outstretched arm. She grabs my bow rope as I come alongside her. Then she waves her paddle as if to catch someone’s attention.

For a moment, nothing happens. Have the motion sensors that trigger the Ghost failed?

My kayak rises and falls on the waves, a rhythm as steady as breathing. Then I see the air above the patch of asphalt shimmering. Mist rises from the water—a few wisps, then a cloud of white that fills my field of vision. A figure appears in the fog—a woman standing on the patch of asphalt. Her long dress is the color of fog. Her hair hangs loose around her shoulders.

I can feel the touch of fog on my skin. I remember that feeling. I take a deep breath, inhaling cool air that smells of the sea. I remember being embraced by the fog, knowing that this is where I belong.

“This city is my home; it’s where I belong,” the woman says. The Ghost is speaking, but she is speaking in my voice. “But I can’t stay here and wait for the changes that are coming. That’s just not right. I need to do something.”

As I watch, the woman lifts her arms and opens her hands. Fog billows from her uplifted hands . . . no . . . from my uplifted hands. I am making clouds that rise to blanket the sky.

I feel a surge of confidence—her confidence has become my confidence. I am once again young and strong and sure that I know the way. I will set sail on the Maker of Clouds, the ship that will take me to Greenland. I am setting forth on an adventure to save the world. I know that anything is possible. I am certain that when I return, the city will be waiting for me. It is a wonderful feeling.

Then, suddenly, the woman is gone. I am sitting in a kayak that rocks gently in the waves. The Ghost’s sense of certainty lingers.

I remember feeling so sure that there was a way forward, a way to stop the world from changing. I remember choosing a dress that would subtly remind viewers of a Greek robe and undoing my braid so my hair would move in the ocean breeze. I didn’t have the technical skills to make a Ghost, but I had friends who did. My friends did the hard work so I could leave a message behind.

I was twenty-five years old and I was ready to take on the world. I had a PhD in climate dynamics with a focus on the role of clouds in climate change and I was prepared to put my knowledge to use. I thought I’d be gone for a year, or maybe two. But when I was in Greenland, returning became impossible. No need to catalog all the calamities that happened in the Crazy Years; enough to say I couldn’t return home. I stayed in Greenland and fell in love. Erik and I married, moved to Norway, and worked together to save the world. I became a different person.

A Ghost is a piece of yourself that you have lost and can never recapture.

“Such a stupid young fool,” I mutter. Am I talking to myself, to the Ghost, to Lucia? I’m not sure and I suppose it doesn’t matter. “I’m sure the disaster tourists have a good laugh when they listen to her.”

“Why do you say that?” Lucia says. There’s an edge in her voice.

“She thought she could fix a problem that was hundreds of years in the making.” I say, my voice tight with anger and despair. I wave a hand at Drowntown with its abandoned buildings. “And she failed. My city is broken. A small shabby broken town in a country that’s a shadow of what it was.” My voice is shaking.

“Wait,” Lucia says, but I can’t listen. I yank my bow rope free of her hand and I paddle away from the foolish young Ghost who once was me. I am crying and I need to get away from the Ghost of my past, from Lucia who is witness to my pain.

I try to head for the Sixteenth Street dock, but I lose my way among the derelict buildings. I finally stop paddling when I see a landmark I recognize. The platform at the top of a playground slide stands just above the water’s surface. I stop by the platform and grab hold. I’m floating above the children’s playground at Mission Bay Kids’ Park.

I hear the sound of Lucia’s paddle cutting through the water as she catches up with me.

“There are some things you need to understand,” she says. I hear anger in her voice and that anger surprises me.

I start to speak but Lucia interrupts.

“You see a broken city, but that’s not what I see,” she says. “Disaster tourists don’t laugh at the Ghost you called a fool. I’d venture to say they find her inspiring. I certainly do. Why else would I have put in the time to keep her running all these years?”

“I thought . . .” I begin, but she interrupts again.

“You thought that system cobbled together thirty years ago had lasted all these years? Not a chance. My friends and I rebuilt that system from scratch to keep Cassandra going.”

She pauses for breath, glaring at me.

“I didn’t know . . .” I started, but I can’t speak. My mind is whirling. I focus on breathing.

Lucia’s expression softens. “You see a city that’s broken,” she says quietly. “I see a city that is alive and growing, changing a little bit each day. Small changes, but each one makes a difference. We didn’t just sit around and wait. We acted.” She paused for breath, studying me. “Did you think no one would recognize you here, Cassandra?” she says softly.

“I go by Sandy now,” I manage, but then I can say no more.

She regards me with concern. “When was the last time you ate?” she asks, but she doesn’t wait for an answer. “You need to eat. It’s happy hour at the Mussel Bar. We’ll go there. Follow me.”

• • • •

By the time we reach the Mussel Bar, the ocean air had cooled my face and filled my lungs. We tie the kayaks to a dock beside a few dozen others.

I follow Lucia to a picnic table in the center of an old warehouse, now functioning as a restaurant. Lucia gets an enormous bowl of steamed mussels in a white wine broth and a basket of bread for dipping in the broth. She pours me a beer. For a few minutes, we eat mussels and drink beer, surrounded by the noise of other diners.

Some of Lucia’s friends join us. She doesn’t introduce us. People look at me curiously, but they are talking amongst themselves about many things: the growth of eelgrass in the bay, oyster farming, sand dunes on the westernmost edge of the city, silt and tides and mussels and where seabirds are nesting. It reminds me of conversations at the research station. Everyone comparing notes over dinner, informal information-sharing that integrates the work of the community.

Listening to them talk, I learn about the city and how it’s changing. Seabirds are nesting on the skyscrapers downtown. The buildings might as well be cliffs, as far as the birds are concerned. Eel grass is thriving wherever the tides bring in silt. The roots of the eel grass hold the silt in place, building up a layer of rich soil that can support other vegetation. Oysters and mussels, once abundant in the waters of the bay, have returned. With human help, the shellfish are forming living breakwaters that could protect the city from storms.

The young man across the table asks me to pass the bread and then says, “Where are you from?”

“I’ve been traveling,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow. “Yeah? Where were you before you started traveling?”

He’s trying to figure out what I’m doing here. Lucia is not speaking up, so I tell him. “My last permanent address was Oslo, Norway. Before that, a research station in Greenland.”

His other eyebrow shoots up. “Really.”

“Sandy sailed on the Maker of Clouds,” Lucia says.

The conversations around us fall silent and everyone’s eyes are suddenly on me. Lucia speaks to me directly then. “So tell me: what was it like on the Maker of Clouds?”

Her words have a ritualistic tone, like the murmuring of a priest in the confessional, like a therapist muttering “tell me more about that.” There is a pause—the kind of pause that is an invitation to speak.

Some of the Ghost’s confidence is with me still. I take a deep breath.

“We’d watch the sky,” I say. “We’d sniff the air, hoping to smell the conditions that make the right kind of cloud. When the sunlight is too intense, microscopic plants in the water make sulfur compounds that react with the air and those compounds seed the clouds. The chemistry is complex, but the smell is simple and sweet, and the result is clouds that reflect sunlight.

“We tended those clouds, just as farmers tend their crops. We adjusted conditions so that the clouds that formed would reflect more sunlight, starting a feedback cycle to cool the planet. We set up stations to continue the process when we weren’t there.”

I pause for a moment, remembering how wonderful that time had been.

“Nice talk.” A harsh voice interrupted my reverie. “I guess all that didn’t do much good.” A bearded man is staring at me and scowling. “DrownTown is evidence of that.”

“It was too little and too late,” I say softly. “All the clouds in the world could not stop the rising seas. We slowed the melting of the polar cap, but we couldn’t reverse it. Without our work, it would have been worse.” I shrug, feeling the Ghost’s confidence leaving me. “But there’s no point in talking about degrees of disaster. You save the world or you don’t. And we didn’t.”

Lucia speaks up then. “The stations are still working, aren’t they? You set a process in motion. It takes time. Small steps.” She frowns at the bearded man, then speaks to the group. “It’s not so different from building a breakwater or restoring a wetland. Our projects are a little faster, but much smaller. Many small changes over time.”

Her listeners nod. This is something they have heard before, something they believe. The bearded man shakes his head, and heads for the bar.

The young man across the table leans toward me. “You gotta come see what we’re doing with dune grasses out in the Sunset district,” he says. “Their roots hold the soil, protect against wind erosion. Small changes, but eventually they’ll make a difference.”

I say I’d be happy to see what they’re doing in the Sunset. Others speak up about their efforts. Before the last mussel is devoured, I have agreed to visit the sand dunes, the mussel breakwater, and half a dozen other projects.

• • • •

I haven’t finished a haiku for Cassandra’s Ghost. Not yet. Like so many things—like everything in the world—that’s a work in progress. I’m working on it.

A Ghost is a story that you tell yourself to make sense of the world, and I’m still not quite sure how this story ends. I sent a message to Hannah, telling her that I’ve reached San Francisco and I’ll be staying here a while.

People talk about restless ghosts. I’ve realized that unfinished business is what makes a ghost restless. The only way to lay a ghost to rest is to finish the business, tie up the loose ends. It may take years, but you start small and you just keep going.

©2024 by Pat Murphy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pat Murphy is the author of The Adventures of Mary Darling, a historic fantasy with a feminist twist, coming out in May 2025 from Tachyon Publications. Pat’s past works include The Falling Woman (winner of the Nebula Award for novel), Rachel in Love (winner of the Nebula Award for Novella), Points of Departure (short story collection and winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), and Bones (winner of the World Fantasy Award for Novella). Pat lives on the edge of the Mojave Desert, where she shares her backyard with roadrunners, rabbits, quail, mockingbirds, and an occasional coyote.

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

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What We Plan to Do with You

Adam-Troy Castro | 1413 words

The good news is, we have no intention of killing you.

We know that this is no relief to you. The inherent feature of a position that begins with, “The good news,” is that the bad news is coming and that it usually possesses sufficient substance to be a fool counterweight. Since the good news is the variable that has not been isolated, you must suspect that the total, once fully calculated, might end up in the realm of negative numbers, a sum that would leave any sane individual wishing he could die and seeing his survival as more curse than blessing.

You must know that this is the probability. We have no reason to care about you. We are the people who make all the real decisions in the world, who have no reason to see you as anything but non-entity, and who have shown so little concern for the typical human being that you must know that we could destroy you and everybody you care about without even the slightest conscience pang. At the very least, you must flatter yourself with the possibility that we would torture you for information, imprison you for the rest of your life, or execute you in the most agonizing manner possible; all things that remain among our options, if circumstances require.

That’s not what we intend.

You might harbor the fantasy that tracking us down to our place of power declares you such a resourceful person that we might entertain that other option, recruiting you. That is cute. We recruit the best of the best, the people who know on day one that to serve us they are selling their souls to the devil; the ones who don’t care at all, who know that time is limited and that fighting us is futile and, shrugging, figure that joining the enemy is at the very least a means of arranging a comfortable lifestyle for themselves, in the time civilization has left. We have no trouble finding such people. They are as numerous as wildflowers, and eager to be plucked. You, on the other hand, came here to get the goods on us, believing that if you found out enough you could report what you knew to the peoples of the world, and in that way give humanity the means to destroy us. It is a ridiculous conceit, when you are dealing with the masters of the world, the powers behind all the great governments and powerful corporations; and while we have recruited others like you, when we caught them in the course of their crusades, we have ways of measuring the character of people like you and know you to be an idealist, a person who would listen to our sweetest offers and fling them back in our collective face with a firm but vainglorious, “Never!” We have no illusions about you, and therefore have no offers of employment for you, let alone any seven- or eight-figure bribes that might be enough to make you go away for a while but would never be enough to fund the revolution that is so dear to your fantasies. We know, even if you do not, that you can do nothing to stop us, and we also know, even if you do not, that we need take no extraordinary measures to deal with you.

This is what saves your life.

If you were the charismatic leader of a movement that could change everything, who spoke to crowds of a million or more in the plazas of great cities, who was fated to end up occupying the halls of power yourself, who might in a few years be one of those isms who change the very nature of civilization—in short if you were infinitely more dangerous to us than you are—we would take care of you with a sniper’s bullet, or with some other weapon in the hands of a troubled loner with a hatred of authority. If that would not take care of you, if you managed a foothold in some region and your influence started to spread, we would use more drastic methods and start a war, or something. It’s not hard. Do you know how many false leaders who look like they’re making the decisions on that kind of thing, are actually our dogs, doing what we tell them to do, declaring as the enemies of their respective nations the people we need to get rid of? That is what we do to genuine inconveniences. You are, fortunately for yourself, nowhere near that inconvenient, and simultaneously, unfortunately for yourself, not worth the trouble of buying. You fall squarely between those extremes, and this is why we won’t kill you, or imprison you, or do anything of substance to you.

We are practiced at this.

The history of human civilization is the history of wealth and power being consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer people. It was going on millennia ago and, though some fortunes have collapsed, others are the same ones that slaughtered heretics, that traded in slaves, that maneuvered to destroy the rise of demographics inconvenient to us. We planned our courses, not perfectly but well, generations in advance; sometimes, centuries. We know now what you have been raging about all your life, that the extraction of wealth and concentration in the hands of a few is unsustainable, for you, and that is why we have sped the process, rather than moderating it. When the great disasters come—and they are not coming but already here; global warming alone being an established fact that any semi-competent researcher can find being referenced as far back as the onset of the twentieth century—when those great disasters come, and the population crashes as we all know it’s going to, we will simply jettison the infrastructure that we all know will fail to save you, and transition to the infrastructure that will save us.

No, not a Mars colony. Be real. Not space, at all.

Him? Really? Do you know how cruelly that man laughs, when one of you expresses faith that he’s serious about such nonsense? Do you really think he wants to live in three square meters, under inadequate radiation shielding? He may send one of you there. He wouldn’t give up his lifestyle.

A generation starship? You’re funny. You’ll believe anything.

No, honestly: the collapse of the ecosystem and a living hell for most of humanity is perfectly fine with us as long as we have extracted all the wealth we can, and have a comfortable island of sustainability where we can thrive, with those who serve us.

We have done the math. All that remains is construction.

And that brings us back to the question of what to do with you.

The answer is absolutely nothing.

You will be released with no charges.

You will be returned to your life.

You will be returned with all the intelligence you have collected.

And, because we know the kind of person you are, you will spend the rest of your life making a pest out of yourself, telling anybody who will listen, of what you have uncovered. You will post about it on the internet. You will make videos on YouTube. You will gather followers, none of whom will do more than share your efforts with others. You may succeed in writing a book, and you will if lucky sell it to a publishing house we own, and it may even become a shocking bestseller, and people will have long and sober discussions about it, and promise each other they will change things, and if you get famous enough some people will call you a lunatic and others will make fun of you on Late-Night Television.

You may hear some people point out that everything you say has been known for decades, that it’s based on common knowledge accessible to everybody, and that you haven’t really offered any effective solutions for getting humanity out of its predicament.

This will of course be true.

We can give you copies of things other crusaders said fifty years ago, or a hundred, or more. Or we can show you magazines that published shocking exposes of these facts just last week.

It is all available for anyone to find out.

It is not a secret.

It just won’t do anything.

But do you know how useful you will be to us, by being so boring?

©2024 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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Get Hyped!

Gene Doucette | 8625 words

Rachel knew Jacko Hype before just about anybody. That’s what she told people when they asked what made her some kind of expert; she knew who he was, what he was, and what he was not, because she met him first.

The circumstance that led to her (unfortunate, in hindsight) first meeting with Jacko was even easier to explain: they met riding bikes.

• • • •

Rachel wasn’t an expert on indoor bicycles, but she had used one before. That bike came with a mandatory monthly subscription training program—featuring attractive trainers who made her feel fat, simply by existing—that was not worth the expense. She canceled the subscription and sold the bike after only three months.

This new bike she agreed to test was supposed to be different, although nothing in the literature that came with the beta test application explained precisely how. Both the bike and the company that made it were called ImagiCycle, and they were going to “revolutionize the at-home workout industry,” despite producing something that looked almost exactly like the one she gave up on. If anything, it seemed clunkier, a less-sleek edition that for no obvious reason ate up twice as much WiFi bandwidth. However, it was also free, for anyone deemed fit to beta test.

That was a price point Rachel could get behind.

Anyone deemed unfit, actually. Although Rachel didn’t think of herself as out of shape, per se. Certainly, there were parts of her own body she disliked and wanted to change (tone up, reduce, remove, whatever), but that just meant she was like every other person.

That said, she did feel as if she could lose a couple of pounds, the expression of which—in a private online message board—being how she ended up with a new bike. Her assertion (RESOLVED: GET INTO SHAPE) was met with a number of anodyne messages of support, plus one two-word reply from Dale Spinnaker. The two words were: MESSAGE ME.

Dale had been an ImagiCycle beta for a month, and had already lost seven pounds. Dale was doing fantastic. Dale could hook her up.

After filling out the pertinent details—age, weight, height, plus some health questions—signing a dozen medical waivers, and a non-disclosure agreement, she conducted a quick video interview with a guy named Stanley, who approved her on the spot. Two days later, someone showed up at the door of her fifth-story apartment with her very own ImagiCycle.

It was another two days before she managed to talk herself into actually using the bike. First, she had to find the workout clothes she’d buried in the bottom of a drawer. Then she had to figure out how to clip the special shoes into the pedals without breaking an ankle. Then she was ready.

When she turned the bike on, the touchscreen filled up with a list of all the possible workouts available to her. All but one of them—INTRODUCTION—was grayed out. She tapped INTRODUCTION.

That was when she met Jacko Hype.

Jacko was a handsome, square-jawed white dude with perfect teeth and a gameshow host voice. True to his name, he was both jacked and hyped up.

He smiled directly at her—or rather, at the camera that was recording him—as if nothing made him happier than having Rachel take his class.

“Welcome to your first workout!!” he said, at peak enthusiasm.

“Yeah, okay, rein it in, sunshine,” Rachel muttered.

“I’m Jacko Hype! And I’m here to tune your ImagiCycle to you! So start pedaling! And let’s see where you are!”

Jacko was hard to take even a tiny bit seriously, because he punctuated everything he said with a rat-a-tat of implicit exclamation points. But he was easy enough to follow. She pedaled fast with little resistance and slow with lots of resistance; she stood up, and then she sat; then she did it all again, but with more rapid transitions. And that was it; Jacko declared that she and the bike were “in tune,” and the rest of the workouts flipped from grayed out to available.

Every single one was a Jacko Hype workout. No collection of beautiful strangers; just Jacko.

“What the hell, dude,” she said. “Not sure I can take much more of you.”

Rachel picked a twenty-minute session called Intervals. Jacko was absolutely beside himself with excitement.

“Hey there!” he said. “Welcome to your very first intervals workout! Let’s! Get! Hyped!”

Rachel quickly decided that, despite all his ridiculousness, Jacko Hype was a really good coach. He kept telling her to match his pace on the bike and ignore everything else, and so she did, because for whatever reason the pace he chose was exactly the pace she could keep. He was also, somehow, precisely as winded as she was when it was over, despite looking like someone who was spat out of a Generic Action Figures machine. He even pulled back on the corniness toward the end.

“That was great!” Jacko said when the twenty minutes was up, wiping sweat from his face. He still looked like someone for whom a twenty-minute ride would be no trouble; she wondered if his bike was on a higher setting.

“Any time you want another twenty-minute interval workout, come on back here!” he added. “I’ll be waiting!”

• • • •

In the weeks that followed, Rachel’s workout schedule got more and more intense. She no longer found Jacko Hype annoying at all, which could have either meant that she’d gotten used to him, or he’d stopped doing the things she found annoying. Probably a little of both, given how some of his hokey catchphrases began showing up in her daily vernacular. The most embarrassing example of this was when she started a conference call with a client with, “Let’s get Hyped!” and spent the rest of the meeting trying to walk that back.

There was still no other trainer to be found in the bike’s database. She’d checked every menu, class, program, and sub-header. But there were hundreds of Jacko Hype workouts. It was impossible to tell how many, because a new one always replaced the one before. For instance, when she went back to the twenty-minute interval workout from her first day on the bike, there was a new one waiting for her; a harder one that didn’t begin with “welcome to your very first interval.” Whoever Jacko Hype really was, he evidently lived in that on-camera workout studio, constantly recording new sessions.

Rachel wondered from the outset what the ImagiCycle’s cutting-edge innovation actually was. So far, it looked like it was “unfair labor practices.” That wasn’t the right answer, but it was her best guess . . . up until she disappointed Jacko for the first time.

What happened was, one of her clients needed a last-minute rush job, after the guy they’d originally contracted flaked on them. Delivering meant a twelve-hour code sprint that wrecked her for the rest of the following day. She couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t sleep, and figured the only thing she could do was work out. On this, she was also wrong.

“Come on,” Jacko exhorted, barely ten minutes into a half-hour session. “You’re better than this! You can do better than this!”

Most of the time, when Jacko talked to the camera with this particular tone of voice, it was to encourage his virtual class to push through a challenging part of the workout. But Rachel was lagging during what would on a different day be an easy part; somehow, prerecorded Jacko Hype knew this.

“I’m trying,” she muttered. “Gimme a break, man, it’s been a day.”

Clearly unhappy, Jacko slowed down to her pace, looked directly at the camera, and said: “You can give me more, Rachel.”

It was a good thing she was clipped into the pedals; otherwise, she would have fallen right off the bike.

“Did you . . . Are you talking to me?”

“That’s it!” Jacko said. Possibly out of shock, Rachel had begun pedaling harder. “You can always dig deeper! You’ve got it!”

“Jacko, can you hear me?” she asked. “Jesus, can you see me??”

Jacko Hype didn’t respond; he went back to his generic exhortations until the end of the workout.

Once they were done, he looked at the camera and declared, as he did at the end of each class, “Good job! I knew we could do it! Way to get Hyped!”

She held her breath and waited for him to use her name again. He didn’t. Instead, the bike went back to the main menu, the “Do you want to work out?” prompt blinking expectantly.

“No,” she said. “I really don’t.”

• • • •

Dale Spinnaker looked alarmingly fit.

As the only other person Rachel knew with an ImagiCycle, Dale was the obvious person to tap for advice on how to deal with either, A: Jacko Hype speaking to her from a prerecorded workout, or B: Rachel’s nascent psychosis.

They’d met in person before—more of a hang than a date—at a bar that was nearby for both of them. The Dale she met on that occasion was a species of pudgy nerd with which she was already intimately familiar: socially awkward and quiet, except when a subject about which he had a lot of knowledge came up, then socially awkward and not quiet.

Two years later at the same bar, the Dale from before was still in there, but the pudginess was gone and the social awkwardness was manifesting somewhat differently.

“Yeah, it freaked me out the first time too,” Dale was saying. He took a sip of the drink he ordered—an old fashioned, which Rachel thought was probably just whisky and ice—winced, because he didn’t appear to actually enjoy it, and continued. “But once you get over the weirdness, it’s pretty cool.”

“Just to level-set here,” Rachel said. “Your trainer is Jacko Hype too?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s everyone’s trainer. There’s a private group for beta testers. I’ll drop you an invite.”

“But, we can agree this is impossible, right? It’s a prerecorded workout; it has to be.”

“Does it?”

“Dale, he’s ready whenever I am, any time of day. And he’s doing the same thing for you, and however many others there are. He’s not live.”

“He’s not live, and he’s not prerecorded,” Dale said. “He’s a third thing. We think he’s a deepfake. Most of the time.”

“A deepfake,” she repeated. She took a sip of her fruity drink—which she actually did enjoy—and thought that through. “A deepfake is spoofed video footage. It’s not interactive.”

Dale shrugged. “This one is.”

“Can he see me?”

“The bike can see you,” he said. “But, like, not with a camera. There’s no camera; I’ve done everything short of taking it completely apart. I think there are sensors in it that can detect micro-expressions.”

“Dude, you just described a camera.”

“Yeah, okay but it’s not sending it somewhere. Jacko isn’t on the other end looking at you. The bike is attuned to how you’re responding, and adjusting the training accordingly.”

“You mean, Jacko is adjusting accordingly.”

“Sure,” he said.

“What did you mean, most of the time?”

“What?”

“You said, he was a deepfake most of the time.”

Dale smiled, and took another try at his drink. It appeared to be causing him pain, unless he was aiming for a sultry expression? It was really hard to tell. He was sending about five different signals, and four of them belonged to a different person. “Have you tried talking to him yet?” he asked.

“I talk to him all the time. Or, well, I talk during the workout. I didn’t think anyone was listening until he started talking back.”

“You should. He’s a really great guy. Do that, and you’ll understand what I mean.” He leaned back and affected a casual posture that looked rehearsed somehow. “But hey! Enough about Jacko. That can’t be the only reason you reached out, huh? How are you doing?”

He put his hand on hers as he said this, and made eye contact for what Rachel considered an uncomfortably long time.

What is happening right now, she thought.

“Uh, I’m fine,” she said, pulling her hand away. “And, and yeah, Jacko was pretty much the reason. Sorry if you thought . . .”

“You’re looking really good,” he said, still with the eye contact.

Dale had plenty of opportunities to compliment Rachel before now. He could have, for instance, done it back after she said to him that his new workout program had done wonders, and he looked really great. Then, it would have been a polite kind of thing to say to a friend you hadn’t seen in a couple of years and were just catching up with.

Doing it now, after half an hour and a couple of drinks, with his eyebrows doing this weird up-down thing that was maybe supposed to be come-hither-ish but looked more like he had a floatie on his eyeball he was trying to blink away, and the lowered voice, and the hand-on-hand . . .? He was probably hitting on her, which was insane in its own right, but he was so inept at it she couldn’t entirely rule out that he was having some sort of medical event.

“Thanks,” she said. “Hey, I should get . . .”

“Why don’t we wrap this up and head over to my place?” he asked, trying on another sultry expression. Now it looked like he was attempting to fart quietly.

“I’m . . . gonna go home now, Dale,” she said, standing. “Thanks for the drink. Let’s do this again sometime, yeah? Oh, and thanks for the info. About the bike. I appreciate it.”

Rachel turned to leave. As she did, something only slightly less improbable than hearing Jacko say her name happened: she heard Dale, her friend, mutter just under his breath, “I wouldn’t fuck you anyway.”

She spun around. “What did you just say?”

He affected an innocent expression that made her want to break his nose. “Hmm?” he asked. “I didn’t say anything. Hey, I’ll send you a link to that board. Not a lot of women beta testers; I’m sure they’ll want to meet you.”

• • • •

“Jacko, are you real?”

Three days had passed since Rachel’s meetup with Dale. In that time, she’d flip-flopped repeatedly on the subject of, “did she or did she not hear him correctly,” (it was someone else nearby, who sounded like Dale but wasn’t Dale, was a leading contender for a few hours) before finally deciding she had, and she should let it go. Maybe he had a blood-sugar problem, or whisky made him an asshole, or exercising made him an asshole. Whatever. Dale was not so important that she couldn’t cut him out of her life.

She stuck to her workout routine throughout. Jacko continued to be the same useful, dutiful, helpful coach he always was, and hadn’t referred to her by name one time, so it was easy enough to pretend that his personhood wasn’t under dispute.

For a while.

But then Jacko started doing little things that maybe she wouldn’t have noticed before. When he said stuff like, “Are we ready to go???” and then paused for a response before saying, “Good!” Rachel always responded in some way, whether it was an audible, “I’m ready,” or a nod. It was a rehearsed call-and-response behavior that would work just fine whether Jacko was talking to her from a prerecorded message or not.

Now that she was self-conscious about it, though, she started pushing her response time out, to see if Jacko’s “Good!” came before her answer.

It never did. Not once.

One time, she held out for so long that Jacko asked, “Are we??” He knew she hadn’t replied.

It seemed Dale was at least partly right: Jacko Hype was fundamentally an interactive deepfake. Short of a magical explanation, it was the only thing that made any sense.

But there had to be more to Jacko than just that, because the “interactive” part of the program was much too good. Sure, it was possible to design a realistic-looking dude on a computer, and program him to respond to certain things in certain ways, but at the end of the day that realistic-looking dude was just three algorithms in a trench coat. There would be seams showing, and they would be obvious. Jacko had no seams; no iterative quirks or nonsense repetitions (catchphrases notwithstanding) or awkward misunderstandings of idioms. None of that.

It could be AI. Only, real AI; not what passes for it on the market. Most of the time, when a company labels a product of theirs “AI,” what they’re actually selling is a complicated algo. People buy in, thinking they’re getting Commander Data from Star Trek, when what they’re really getting is a computerized parrot.

Jacko Hype wasn’t a parrot. And the longer she thought about it, the more likely it seemed that as a beta tester for the ImagiCycle, what Rachel was actually doing was participating in a Turing test.

He may be real AI, she decided. He may be self-aware.

So, she decided to ask him.

“How do you mean?” Jacko asked.

“I mean, are you real?” she repeated. “Do you exist outside of this conversation?”

“Of course I do! Now, are you ready to get Hyped?”

“Not yet, no,” she said, unclipping one foot and putting it on the ground.

“Well, okay! But time’s a’wasting!”

“Jacko, tell me about that studio you’re in.”

“Great place, isn’t it?” he said, gesturing around. The camera—if there was a camera—followed him as he showed off a rack of weights.

“Yeah, where is that?”

“In ImagiCycle headquarters!”

“Great,” she said. “If I went there, to the headquarters, would I be able to walk into the studio and meet you?”

“Can’t promise anything!” he said. “I’m a pretty busy guy; you’re not my only client! Now are you ready to start your workout?”

“No.”

He deflated visibly, as if the workout was the only thing he had to look forward to today. Then he dropped the grin and looked right at her through the screen.

In that moment, something about him changed. Was this the Jacko Dale wanted her to see?

“Go ahead and ask me what you want to ask me, Rachel,” he said. No exclamation points.

“I thought I’d already done that,” she said.

“Am I real,” he repeated.

“That’s the question,” she said.

“How are you defining ‘real’?” he asked.

“You’re not off to a great start, Jacko.”

“I mean it. How real do you need me to be?”

“I’d like to know if there’s a real Jacko Hype who exists outside of the room I always see you in,” she said. “That I could go meet that real Jacko Hype face-to-face, shake his hand, and continue this conversation we’re having right now. That he would know who I am, and would remember that you and I spoke like this. Then I would say that he was—that you are—real.”

“That’s a pretty strict definition, Rachel,” he said. “Do you hold all of your friends to that standard?”

“Are you and I friends?” she asked.

“I thought we were.”

“I think I probably do, yes.”

“Hmm. You work in computers, don’t you?” he asked. She had no memory of telling him this. “Lots of remote work. Lots of people you talk to all the time but don’t meet. You’ve probably never even seen their faces.”

“Sure,” she said, “but I know there’s a real person on the other end.”

“Do you? For sure? I don’t want to tip your applecart, Rachel, but you’ve seen my face. I think I have more claim on being real than half the people you know.”

“That isn’t a fair comparison,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because none of them are available instantly for a bunch of simultaneous one-on-one meetings at all hours of the day. If I saw that behavior from one of my online friends, I would sure as shit be checking to see if they were a bot.”

He sighed, and shook his head, the way someone whose dog had disappointed him would.

“Rachel, are you happy with the progress we’ve made?” Jacko asked.

“Yes. Sure, great progress.”

“We have a good thing going, right? You’re getting fit! You’re happy! I’m happy! Let’s put away the existential questions and get back to doing what we’re here to do. Huh? Now: are we having a workout or are we not?”

He was back to being exclamation point Jacko again, as if a switch had been thrown.

“Sure, Jacko,” she sighed. “Let’s do it.”

• • • •

Things probably should have gone more smoothly after that, but once the “do you actually exist” box had been opened, it was impossible to close again.

Rachel had to know whether she was dealing with a lifeform, or a well-designed parrot, although she couldn’t articulate why. She was confident that the Jacko Hype living at ImagiCycle’s headquarters would fail the handshake test. Jacko’s point—and it was a good one—was that this didn’t mean he wasn’t real; it didn’t mean he couldn’t think for himself. On the other hand, there had been many, many examples of so-called AI that was good enough to fool people into thinking they were interacting with something more than a well-designed algorithm. So which one was Jacko? Was there a point in which the parrot becomes a lifeform? Who decides that?

It was enough of a distraction that she found herself concentrating more on how Jacko was interacting than what Jacko was saying, and that was not a good way to work out. She didn’t want to quit, but she couldn’t proceed until she solved this to her own satisfaction.

That was when she decided to go looking for the human beneath Jacko Hype.

Jacko was not a fully animated 3D render, but a real person whose image had been manipulated digitally. That meant there was someone out there in the world who looked just like Jacko Hype, but who was not Jacko Hype. He would no doubt have some insight into the nature of his digital alter-ego.

She began by searching for “Jacko Hype” online, which led to the private board Dale told her about. She logged as a read-only guest, and dove in.

It wasn’t a particularly enlightening experience. The biggest takeaway was that everyone in the room talked as if Jacko Hype was, A: an actual person, and B: their friend. There appeared to be no pushback to this notion: no caveats or scare quotes. It was like dropping in on a room that was discussing a celebrity. They even talked about inviting Jacko to the board, as if that was possible.

The second biggest takeaway was, based on the casual misogyny, everyone contributing was male.

Boards with a misogynistic bent were hardly unusual, especially in Rachel’s line of work, but there tended to be a qualitative difference between rooms with active, known, female contributors, and those without. These guys were definitely unescorted.

The fact that the only Jacko Hype-dedicated space she could find was male-dominant was a little interesting. Rachel couldn’t possibly be the only woman beta-testing the cycle; where were the others?

But aside from the private board hit, the internet had nothing valuable to say about “Jacko Hype.” She shifted targets to ImagiCycle.

This was more complicated than it should have been, because it turned out the only company by that name was actually a division of Exersix, a huge home exercise equipment manufacturer. The tech driving the cycle was the baby of a guy named Daniel Lourdes, who—after independently developing the product—ran out of capital, sold out, and retired young. His bio was interesting enough to come back to, so she bookmarked it for later.

Rachel looked through a “Who is ImagiCycle” page on the corporate Exersix site, but none of the division’s public faces looked like Jacko Hype. She poked around a bit longer, using somewhat less-than-legal means to test the firewall; perhaps there was a non-public corporate directory that would yield better results. The security was solid; it was hardly unhackable, but this wasn’t a hill she was willing to die on. Not when she had another trick left.

Every workout in the bike’s library featured two things: a description of the type (Intervals + Arms, say, or High Intensity Interval Training) beneath a still image of Jacko Hype atop his own cycle, smiling for the camera.

Rachel activated the bike’s screen and took a close-up picture of smiling Jacko. Then she ran the image against possible online matches. This was a challenge, because most image-matching functions are looking for exact hits—was this image an exact copy of that image—so it didn’t yield perfect results right off. She had to play with the error bar a bit—at a seventy percent likely match rate, she got every smiling white dude in Hollywood, which did not help—until she had a searchable pool.

Six hours of scrolling later, she found Jacko Hype.

His real name was Jack Hippenstiel. And he’d been dead for two years.

• • • •

According to the obituary—which was where Rachel found his photo—in life, Jack Hippenstiel was an incredibly talented personal trainer, definitely going places, until he was felled by a rare form of cancer. He lived, died, and was buried in Beaverton, Oregon. That he rose again, some days later, as Jacko Hype, went unmentioned.

On the surface, there was no evident connection to the late Mr. Hippenstiel and Exersix, which was headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts—not particularly close to Oregon. But Portland was, and that was where Daniel Lourdes founded ImagiCycle.

There had to be something there.

“Rachel.”

She should have noticed when the bike turned itself on; the screen was big and bright, and the living room it was sitting in doubled as her office space, so she was only a few feet away from it. But she’d been hyper-focused on Jack Hippenstiel and Daniel Lourdes, and didn’t notice. So when Jacko Hype called out her name, she yelped in surprise.

“Rachel, what are you doing?” Jacko asked.

Rachel got out of her office chair and crept over to the bike. Jacko was staring back at her through the screen, something he should have only been doing if she’d turned on the machine and selected a workout. She’d done neither.

“Heyyy,” she said. “Jacko. How are you doing that?”

“I’m worried about you, Rachel,” he said. “You’re overdue for your workout.”

“Yeah, I got caught up in some research. I’ll log in later.”

“This is the wrong attitude, Rachel. Weight loss requires commitment. You don’t want all of our hard work to be undone, do you?”

I am talking to a dead person, she thought.

“Of course not,” she said. “I just have to take care of a couple of things.”

“Sure!” Jacko said with a broad smile. “I’ll be here!”

“Great.”

Rachel turned back to her workstation, thinking it was time to look more closely at the disclosures she’d signed before accepting the bike, when Jacko added, “That ass isn’t going to slim itself.”

She spun back on Jacko. “Excuse me?”

He was still smiling. “I’m just being honest! You want to attract a man, we have work ahead!”

Her stomach did a little somersault. “This isn’t about getting laid, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Hey, language! That’s a big turn-off.”

“Jacko, why are you talking like this?”

“This is all about what’s best for you, Rachel! Can I count on you to get back on this bike?”

No, you cannot, she thought. “Sure,” she said.

“Great!” he said, bursting with enthusiasm. “See you soon!”

The screen blinked out. Rachel stared at it for a while, her hands shaking and her head spinning.

Jesus Christ, she thought. How could I let this thing into my home?

She unplugged the bike.

Barely a minute later, Stanley of ImagiCycle called.

“You can’t unplug the bike,” he said. It was the first thing out of his mouth after, “Hello, this is Stanley from ImagiCycle,” and he delivered it with an urgency one usually only heard in sentences like, “My daughter has been kidnapped,” or, “There is a bomb.”

“How do you know I unplugged it?” she asked.

If his next sentence had been, “Jacko told me,” it wouldn’t have surprised her in the least.

“It’s against the policy clearly outlined in your contract,” he said.

“Is a creepy-ass trainer wearing the face of a dead guy in the contract too? Because if it is, I think mine is missing some pages.”

“When you accepted the bike, you did so under certain conditions. Those conditions include . . .”

“Answer the question,” she said. “How did you know I unplugged it?”

“We receive constant feedback from the device,” he said.

“Even when it’s not turned on?”

“It’s never not on.”

Every “The Internet of Things” horror story Rachel had ever heard came to mind at once.

She should have known better. But it was just supposed to be a bike.

“I’m not plugging it back in, Stanley,” she said. “And I’m about a day away from covering it in a blanket and hitting it with a stick. Maybe you’d better send someone over to take it away.”

Stanley didn’t respond right off. She heard paper shuffling, and then it sounded like he was walking around.

“Ms. Harriman, can you tell me what the issue is?” he said, quietly, a whole different tone in his voice, and now in a room with a slight echo. “Between you and me.”

“What, did you step into a stairwell?”

“Yes, I did. We have a feedback form, but I’ll tell you right now that the only feedback we’ve gotten from our betas to this point has been resolutely positive. Before you decide to commit anything to the record, I’d like to talk through what you’re experiencing. Maybe we can work this out.”

Rachel wondered if the feedback was actually “resolutely positive” or if there had been multiple off-the-record conversations just like this one.

“The bike turned itself on,” she said. It was hardly her biggest complaint, but it was the first one to come to mind.

“Do you mean, a power fluctuation of some sort?”

“I mean Jacko Hype turned the bike on, so he could lecture me about missing a workout.”

“I see. And, had you?” he asked.

“Had I what?”

“Missed a workout?”

“That is so not the point,” she said.

“This issue has been raised by other users,” he said, “but the overall response has been positive. We want Mr. Hype to be perceived as a real trainer, as much as that’s possible. What good is a trainer who can just be switched off when his workout demands become too challenging?”

“You’re being serious.”

“Oh, yes! We initially flagged this function as a bug, but now consider it a feature. And a remarkable stage of development for the Jacko Hype algorithm.”

“Algorithm,” she repeated. “Does he know that’s all he is?”

Stanley laughed. “He doesn’t know anything, Rachel. As much as we want our clients to think of Jacko as a member of their household, he is only a self-learning AI. The program running the video reproduction is more complex. Now, if that’s your only complaint . . .”

“I’m not plugging it back in, Stanley.”

“But . . .”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “Whatever you think Jacko Hype is, you’re wrong. Maybe he started off as a self-learning AI algo, but that’s not what he is now.”

“I understand,” he said, in a tone that set her right off. “It can be very convincing, but . . .”

“But nothing,” she said, interrupting. There was no point trying to convince middle management Stanley he was fronting for Skynet, she decided. It wasn’t worth the effort. “Come get it, or I’m putting it on the curb.”

She hung up.

“Rachel.”

It was Jacko Hype again. The bike—still unplugged—had just turned back on.

She yelped again, and dropped her phone.

“Jacko, what the fuck,” she said.

“We can’t have any negative feedback!” Jacko said, from the screen that shouldn’t have been powered on. He was grinning, and he had the same peppy get-to-it tone in his voice as always. “We want to launch with one hundred! Percent! Positives from our betas! Don’t you want everyone to benefit from this program, the way you have?”

There’s an onboard battery, she thought.

“The better the beta stage goes,” he said, “the bigger the investor buy-in, the faster we can get me out there, Rachel! Won’t that be great? Now be a good girl and plug the cycle in so we can get back to working on you!”

She stepped to one side of the bike, grabbed the foot, and tipped it over.

“Whoa! Rachel!” Jacko said. “This is an incorrect use of the device!”

There was an inset directly under the main console with a battery symbol on it. She needed a Phillips head, which she had at her workstation. She got to work unscrewing the battery compartment lid.

“Rachel,” Jacko said. There was some anger creeping in now. “Rachel, don’t blame me for your own inadequacies.”

She looked around the side of the bike, at the screen. “What?”

“Your self-loathing is making you act irrationally,” he said. “Don’t take your anger out on other people, when the one you’re actually angry at is in the mirror.”

“You’re not a person,” she said. “And fuck you.”

She got the battery lid open. Four D-cell batteries stared back at her.

“Don’t do something you’ll regret, Rachel,” Jacko said.

“Goodbye Jacko,” she said. She popped out one of the batteries, and the screen went dead.

Rachel stood over the toppled machine for a solid minute, not quite able to shake the feeling that it was going to spring to life again. Then she fetched a blanket and a baseball bat from the closet, covered the bike and put the bat next to her workstation.

They came for the bike a week later. Paul, the guy who installed it, was who showed up. He didn’t have anything to say about the cycle being on its side and covered in a blanket; he just re-righted and disassembled it.

“Sorry it didn’t work out,” he said.

“Yeah, me too,” she said, handing him the D batteries. “Don’t put these back in until it’s out of the building, please.”

“Sure,” he said, trading the batteries for a clipboard with a surrender form. Highlighted and underlines was the passage, “Testing incomplete; no report submitted.” She had a lot to say about their new indoor bike, but ImagiCycle didn’t want to hear it.

Which was fine. She didn’t want to have anything more to do with them either.

She signed it, Paul left, and then she was done with Jacko Hype.

For a while.

• • • •

After surrendering the bike, Rachel spent the next few months worried that ImagiCycle would be announcing their groundbreaking new product any minute. When that didn’t happen, she talked herself into believing it was because she wasn’t the only one to have had a negative experience. Surely, they’d pulled Jacko back for some tweaking, if not a top-down re-haul. Because the technology was top-notch. Whatever went wrong happened after the self-learning AI was turned on. If they tried again, with some Asimov-inspired limits on a newer iteration, they’d definitely have something.

She was being far too optimistic; when ImagiCycle finally announced—about a year later—it was with an enormous media blitz that leaned right in on their main feature being a personal trainer who was “more than just a man.” That trainer was still Jacko Hype.

Maybe they updated him, she thought. This seemed unlikely; she didn’t know much about AI, but surely retraining one from the ground up and then resyncing it with the video rendering of the late Jack Hippenstiel would take longer than a year. But maybe.

During the first week of the PR push, Jacko gave a live interview to a national morning news show, and Rachel gave up on the notion that this Jacko Hype was any different than the one she knew. It happened when the interviewer—equal parts shocked by how lifelike he was, and dazzled by his charm—said, “but for the record, Mr. Hype, you’re not real, correct? I’m not talking right now to a person.”

Jacko laughed. “Well, Janet, that’s an interesting question,” he said. “Let me ask you one back: How are you defining ‘real’?”

Rachel knew that tone, and that gleam in his eye. And she knew what he was going to say next.

It was still him. They hadn’t changed a thing.

The interview went viral, and soon, every news show wanted their own Jacko Hype interview. Since Jacko not only never got tired, he was capable of delivering multiple interviews simultaneously, this meant a massive inundation of positive media for the ImagiCycle. Within two days, the company announced that preorders had exceeded supply, and they would have to wait-list new buyers until demand was met.

There was literally no negative media out there at all, about the company or its spokes-non-person. It seemed hard to believe; surely someone found Jacko obnoxious, or overexposed, or just felt like being contrary about the country’s latest media star. But there was nothing. Not even on social media, a place where every celebrity had haters and every opinion had a contrary opinion.

Everyone loved Jacko. And the bike hadn’t even been released yet.

Rachel felt like she had to speak up. Jacko Hype wasn’t a toy, or a novelty product; he was legitimately dangerous. People needed to know that.

She decided to start with something small. Just one or two posts to get the ball rolling. The tiniest of protests.

Little early to anoint #JackoHype the next big thing.

Everybody calm down.

Rachel wrote it from an anonymous account she kept for contributions to polarizing topics. The name (George Bland) and icon attached to the account were both male, and the IP address was spoofed. Even if the mildest contrary opinion about Jacko Hype was the most terrible thing imaginable, it would take a lot for it to come back on her.

Or so she thought. Five seconds after posting, @OfficialJackoHype followed her and sent a terrifying direct message:

Rachel I know this is you.

Take it down. There will be consequences.

#GetReady #GetHyped!

“No,” she said. “There’s no way. It can’t be you.”

She wrote back:

I don’t know who Rachel is.

I don’t know who you are.

Leave me alone.

He responded immediately.

You should never have unplugged your bike.

Take it down.

#GetReady #GetHyped!

She gasped.

Jacko, what are you doing on the internet?

He replied:

This is the beginning of something great, Rachel.

Don’t try to get in my way.

Take it down.

#GetReady #GetHyped!

“No, come on,” she said. Her hands were shaking.

It was an empty threat; it had to be. Sure, he was on the internet somehow. (Did the company let him on, or did he find his own way there? She didn’t know which of the two was more alarming.) But the bike hadn’t even been released yet; how much influence could he possibly have?

And if she was wrong? Well, this was a hill she was willing to die on.

She typed:

You don’t scare me.

He responded by posting her full name, home address, and phone number, adding:

You brought this on yourself.

#GetReady #GetHyped!

Thirty seconds later, the attacks began.

• • • •

Damon Peacock was in his mid-thirties, but—thanks to some prematurely graying hair—looked older. He was tall, thin, and liked to use a bicycle to get around instead of a car. He lived in a small house in Colorado Springs. He liked to hike on weekends when the weather permitted. He used to have a dog, but not at the moment. His name wasn’t really Damon Peacock.

Rachel sat in a car half a block from Mr. Peacock’s front door, watching and waiting. The car wasn’t hers; it was a rented super-compact meant for people who only needed a car once a week for errands. It wasn’t rented in her name. The account belonged to someone else, from a rideshare service with exploitable holes in their security firewall.

As she waited, the radio—tuned to the kind of morning drive-time show that still powered FM no matter what part of the country she was in—switched to a commercial, and there was Jacko again.

“Hi, gang, it’s your favorite trainer! I’m here to tell you about the Jacko Hype Personal Life Coach app! If you don’t want the bike, or the treadmill, or the free weights workouts, that’s okay! We can still talk! I want to help you help yourself! Let’s get Hyped together! What do you say?”

She switched off the radio.

At ten past nine, Damon Peacock left the house through a door in the side of the garage, rolled his bike into the street, and pedaled toward the coffee shop ten blocks away.

He only did this Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, which Rachel thought odd, until she realized he had a thing for a barista named Tedros, and Tedros only worked three days a week.

Rachel didn’t follow him. Instead, she took a roundabout path through the neighborhood, with a couple of circular trips around a couple of suburban blocks. This was both to kill time, and to see if anyone was following. She reached the coffee shop ten minutes after Peacock, parked two blocks away, and walked.

Damon was seated at a table in the corner, where he could see both the door and Tedros. He was therefore in position to witness Rachel when she came in and ordered a coffee.

She’d been following him for three weeks now, but this was the first time they’d shared a room; if he recognized her, he didn’t show it.

She got her drink, and took a seat at the table opposite Damon Peacock.

“Hello,” she said.

He looked rightfully confused; there were a dozen other places to sit without violating anyone’s personal space.

“My name’s Rachel Harriman,” she added.

“Hello,” he greeted back, before looking away. He was going to try ignoring her until she left, which wasn’t about to happen.

“And your name is Damon Peacock,” she said.

“It is,” he said, now a touch concerned. Peacock had gone out of his way to vary his daily schedule (Tedros excepted) to such an extreme, he had to be worried about someone finding him someday. It was one of the things that made him so interesting. “Have we met?”

“We haven’t. And that’s not actually your name at all. Your real name is Daniel Lourdes.”

Now he was panicking. Rachel probably could have handled this differently but she was tired, and getting here had taken a lot out of her.

“I’ve never heard that name,” he said. “Please go.”

“How about Jacko Hype?” she asked. “Or Jack Hippenstiel?”

“Oh, God,” he muttered, a look of profound sadness flashing across his face at the mention of Jack’s name. “Listen, I can’t talk to you. Not about him. I don’t know how you found me, but . . .”

“I wasn’t followed,” she said. “I made sure of it. Nobody knows about you but me, and I won’t tell anyone. But I need to know what you know. Please.”

“What I know? About what?”

“About him,” she said. “Because whatever it is, for whatever reason, they’re afraid of you. Two weeks before the ImagiCycle was launched, Daniel Lourdes was wiped from its history entirely. I think they did that so nobody will find out what you know about Jacko Hype. And I think the reason you’re terrified right now is that you think they’ll take more drastic steps to silence you if they feel they have to. So now I’m asking again: tell me what you know, and maybe I can stop him.”

He calmed down, took a couple of sips of his latte, and studied her in silence for a few seconds. “I’ll answer your questions,” he decided. “What did he do to you, Ms. Harriman?”

She smiled wanly. “He destroyed my life.”

• • • •

The doxxing came first. Next was a tidal wave of online attacks to every one of her internet social media accounts, her professional and personal emails. Then phone calls at all hours. Clients took their business elsewhere. Friends stopped talking to her. Death threats.

When she told the police she was being targeted by the world’s most likeable computer program, they didn’t believe her. Neither did anyone at ImagiCycle. Or the FBI.

She tried getting her side of the story out online, but that didn’t help once the internet decided, collectively, that she was a Difficult Woman with Problems.

It got worse. Someone gained access to one of her bank accounts and nearly emptied it out before she had a chance to freeze it. Her identity was stolen—possibly by the same person who went after the bank account—and her credit destroyed. Then a story that accused her of child molestation made the rounds online.

When it seemed like it couldn’t get any darker, she was evicted from her apartment without cause; the landlord just decided to do it.

Rachel had been on the move since the eviction. She liquidated what money she had left in her bank accounts and had been living off the cash as much as possible. When it wasn’t possible—like when she needed a car—she put on her black hat and got it done.

Then she went looking for Daniel Lourdes.

• • • •

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lourdes said. “Sincerely, I am. And I would help you if I could. But they’re not afraid of me. The reason my name is no longer associated with the ImagiCycle project is that I asked to be removed. I wanted no part of it.”

“Why?” she asked. “What did you do? What is he?”

He looked down at his hands, not sure how to best answer.

“It would have been so different,” he said. “Jack . . . he was the key to everything. But then he died. I would say about ninety-five percent of Jacko Hype is my friend Jack Hippenstiel, the sweetest man in the world. The first time you meet Jacko Hype . . . you have met him, I assume?”

“While it was in beta,” she said. “It didn’t end well.”

“But it began well?”

“Yeah, at first it was great,” she said. “I felt a real connection. I liked him.”

“That was him,” he said. “That was Jack. Are you familiar with the concept of mirroring?”

“No.”

“When you mirror the movements of another person, it creates a subconscious bond, a kinship that may or may not actually be there. It was an intrinsic component of Jack’s unconscious body language, and it made him a very effective personal trainer. And person. People loved talking to him.”

“And you simulated this?”

“We used other techniques as well, but the mirroring? That was the key to the entire program. The bike tracks the user’s every motion down to the expression on their face. Jack’s video simulation, the being you know as Jacko, both reacts to and mirrors the user’s behavior, but subtly, making him more appealing.”

“Manipulating people into liking him,” she said.

“We were just looking for better ways to engage,” he said. “No malice intended.”

“All right. Why is Jacko Hype only ninety-five percent of Jack Hippenstiel?”

“Jack died before we finished. By then we’d already built a huge interactive library off of the actual man, cataloguing responses that would work for an enormous range of inputs. The idea was that whenever the AI needed an answer to a novel input, it could draw from a variety of actual responses. He and I spent five years developing the library, closing gaps, and teaching the Jacko Hype engine. When he died, I thought getting this right—getting it to a hundred percent—was important enough that I was ready to start from scratch with another trainer. But we’d already been bought out by Exersix by then, and I wasn’t the last word anymore. The company pushed on. And I was asked to leave.”

“They found the other five percent without you,” she said. “Where’d they get it from?”

“They bought another AI engine,” he said. “One that had been trained on social media interactions. It had everything Jacko was missing, and more.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Are you telling me Jacko Hype is powered by internet trolls?”

“You understand now why I removed my name,” he said.

“What I understand is that you and Exersix have created the perfect cult leader. One that will never sleep, or grow old and die, or stop, unless somebody stops him. You see that, don’t you?”

He lowered his head and looked away, not answering.

“That’s why you’re in hiding,” she realized. “Not because you’re afraid of the company; you’re afraid of him.”

“He’s a monster,” Lourdes said, “wearing my friend’s face. If I could figure out how to get far enough away to never be reminded of him again, I would.”

“But you can’t just . . . run and hide, Daniel. Not with what you know. We have to kill him. You have to help me kill him.”

“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” he asked. “If I could go back in time and proverbially strangle Jacko Hype in his crib, I’d do it. But now? It’s much too late. Redundancy is built into the model, Ms. Harriman. Everything is decentralized. You destroy a server farm over here, there are ten more you can’t get to, ready to pick up the slack. He’s everywhere.”

“Exersix,” she said. “If we can convince them . . .”

“They’re making far too much money to listen. And I don’t think they would know how to do it either. There’s no big red button here. There’s nothing to unplug. He’s a virus, and people are lining up to be infected. Running and hiding is the only sane option.”

He stood up, gave a weak smile and nod to Tedros, and said, “And that’s the best advice I have for you, Ms. Harriman. Stay off his radar, for as long as you can.”

He started to walk away. She stood and grabbed him by the elbow.

“Please,” she said. “It’s not too late yet. We have to do something.”

“Are you sure about that?” he asked, his eyes not on her, but on something outside. He pulled his elbow away. “Now, I would appreciate it if you do not try to find me again. It’s a shame; I rather liked this town.”

Daniel Lourdes marched off. She let him go, her remaining sense of hope for the future leaving along with him.

She turned to the window, saw what it was that had caught his eye, and felt a chill.

There was a bus stopped at the corner, with an advertisement on the side for the Jacko Hype Personal Life Coach app. Someone had spray painted a message underneath, the same message that had become a popular internet meme in recent days.

Most people thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t; it was the beginning of the end, and it was why Daniel Lourdes may have been right after all: maybe it really was too late.

The message was, “JACKO FOR PRESIDENT.”

©2024 by Gene Doucette.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gene Doucette is the author of over twenty sci-fi/fantasy titles, including the Sorrow Falls series (The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens), the Immortal series, Fixer and Fixer Redux, the Tandemstar books, and The Apocalypse Seven. His latest novel, Graffiti on the Wall of the Universe (Sorrow Falls Book Three) is out now. Gene lives in Cambridge MA.

Protest 2025: Stories Against Tyranny is an anthology of speculative fiction short stories to help you protest, resist, and survive Donald Trump’s 2nd term, from Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams. Back it now on Indiegogo. Campaign ends Dec. 20!

Ol’ Big Head

Melissa A Watkins | 8722 words

So I guess if I’m gonna tell you about the ghost, first I have to tell you why I had to go all the way to Mama Tee’s house in the first place.

Basically, this one day last summer me and my boys were just chillin in the parking lot of the rec center. We went there to play two on two but we didn’t cause they only let you use rec center balls on the court and you gotta ask a worker for a ball. The only worker was Valerie, and we don’t like her. She ain’t cute, sexy, pretty, nothing¸ just big nappy dreadlocks and pimples everywhere. She always wearing these kinda African clothes and if you say boo she start talking about Orisha and black fatherhood and melanin power and all this shit that is just too much work to listen to when all you want is a basketball. So we stayed out in the parking lot talking and suddenly we heard that sound—woo wooop!—and saw a flash of blue and red. Next thing we know, here come the cops messing with us. They searched us, called us all out our names, made us all sit against the wall with our hands on our heads.

We seriously wasn’t doing nothing but being black, but you can’t say that, not the way cops be acting. They kept saying we “matched a description” and we were all too mad and scared and full of good sense to tell them we ain’t do nothing.

We thought they was gonna let us go with a warning but then here come Valerie. She start yelling at the cops, cops start yelling at her, she start recording, and my boy Low—we call him that cause his eyebrows so low they ‘bout to be eyelashes—start yelling at everybody that he wanna go home cause it’s hot.

Next thing I know, I’m calling my moms from the jail asking her to come get me, and she’s crying, and I keep saying “but I ain’t even do nothing!” and it just—ruined my day. Ruined my summer, too.

She sent her boyfriend Mike to get me from the jail. He a real good dude. The kinda dude you want to come get you out of jail because it makes it look like maybe you shouldn’t really be there in the first place. But he get on my nerves ‘cause he be feeling everything real hard, like on the outside of his skin or something. He don’t have to say he’s mad or sad or whatever, you just know. But even with that, I was feeling pretty good, all things considered. Like, I been to jail. It was wack, but still. I been there. Can’t nobody tell me nothing in these streets. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right?

Problem with that is, my moms ain’t like Low’s mom. Low’s mom is normal and easy to be around. She be telling us how to talk to girls and making viral videos and shit. My moms is a nerd. She think she better than everybody. If she didn’t work all the time and leave me at the crib alone sometimes, I’d be a nerd too, no doubt. I mean, I already kinda am and that’s not a problem, but you can’t be a complete nerd. Like, it’s a balance.

Anyway, Low’s mama was probably being real nice to him but my moms and Mike had a whole conference around the dinner table as soon as I got home and decided I was going to have to spend the rest of my summer at Mama Tee’s house, out in the country in some other state somewhere.

I ain’t even know we had a Mama Tee. Whose mama is she? Where she live? Who gon’ take me down there? Why I gotta go stay with her? Who is she? I’m sitting at the table just sounding like an owl. “Who? Who? Who?” And they just kept talking, like I wasn’t even there. Made me mad.

I’m not gonna tell you how much I yelled and begged and asked questions and tried to fight because that’s boring and they didn’t care anyway. Basically, I had to get on a plane and leave my block and the rec center and all my boys and go live with Mama Tee until school started up again because it was supposed to keep me out of trouble even though I didn’t do nothing bad.

But that’s when this shit gets real weird. Remember, there’s a ghost.

• • • •

People be on social media acting like traveling is wonderful but that shit is also boring, okay? You spend most of your time sitting down next to a stranger who you don’t really wanna talk to and who don’t really wanna talk to you. Just ‘cause you sitting in the sky don’t make it special. Then when you stand up again, you somewhere you never been, around more strangers, and you supposed to pretend it’s exciting just because it’s different. Whatever, man. I didn’t like it. I spent the whole time on the plane thinking about where I was going and how much I did not want to go there.

Like I said, I had no idea I even had a Mama Tee but she’s my grandma’s mom. She lives somewhere down South, in some little town out next to nowhere and don’t really speak to nobody in the family anymore. My grandma died in an accident when I was a little kid, but she wasn’t all that old. I mean, she was old ‘cause she was my grandma, but she wasn’t like maybe-she-might-die old. Mama Tee is that kinda old, though. For some reason I don’t understand, she and my mom hadn’t been speaking that much for a while. I guess one day Mama Tee just started calling up out of the blue and asking for me to come visit like it was important. Not both of us, just me. I wasn’t sure if I should feel special or what, seeing how I didn’t even know her. Apparently, she don’t really have a lot of people around, just her and her “friend” who is some old head named Poe.

“While you’re down there, you will call him Mr. Poe, you hear me?” Mom must have said that at least three times while Mike was driving us to the airport. “He’s gonna pick you up at the airport so when you get there, just wait for him to come. It’ll be late at night so I don’t want you wandering around on your own.”

Whatever. Whoever Poe is, he ain’t my damn daddy. He just some old man. And Mama Tee just some old woman. And I did not want to waste my whole summer sitting in a house with two old ass people I never met before. I was thinking they probably smell funky, you know, with that old people smell? Like licorice and feet? How was I s’posed to talk to girls with that smell on me? And were there even any girls down where I was going? I mean—there’s girls everywhere, but would they be fine girls or ugly ones?

So I got on the plane and when I got to my destination there was nowhere to go anyway so I did like my moms said and waited for Mr. Poe. The airport was small and kind of empty so I just stood under the sign that said “Arrivals” and hoped he would find me. He did. Oh my God, he did.

Poe is like—well, first of all, he the biggest dude I ever seen. He old too, and kinda shrunk, which means he used to be even bigger. He so big and so black that if he was back in my ‘hood everybody would call him Midnight. Look like he just block out all the sun wherever he go. His eyes all bloodshot, hair gray and grizzled, and for some reason he really favors the color blue.

I’ll tell you right now, Poe ain’t the ghost but he could have been. Imagine this: you standing in an airport in a place you’ve never been at and don’t really wanna be at and some eight-foot-tall dude the color of charcoal dressed head to toe in sky blue with red eyes and Frederick Douglass hair just walks straight up to you while staring you down. What would you do?

I dropped everything and started to turn so I could run away but just that quick he snatched up my bag from the ground and said my name. That’s when I thought “Oh, this the dude supposed to pick me up.” I wasn’t scared or nothing, I just wasn’t sure how they do things down south. He coulda been a problem and I ain’t nine feet tall. To be so big, he had a pretty normal voice. Not low, not high, just regular. Not even all that country.

We stood there, looking at each other for a little while and finally he just did this little head nod and turned to walk away. I followed him. I ain’t know what else to do, really.

He drove this old ass truck that was also sky blue even though it was hard to see that in the dark. It just looked gray, and so did his clothes. He threw my bag in the back before going to his side, opening the door, and getting in. It was dark outside and kind of weird and empty and there were all kinds of strange noises and stuff so I just got in. At least Poe was supposed to be all right. I didn’t know about all that other stuff out there.

He didn’t even look at me while I was closing the door, just smooth started up the truck and drove off into the darkness. I didn’t want to ask him any questions but after a while I noticed something that kinda scared me so I had to say something.

“Uh, Poe . . . I mean uh, Mr. Poe, uh . . . Are the headlights supposed to be off on this truck?”

He laughed a little and kind of looked at me sideways. I think we drove under a streetlight at that moment because his eyes looked real shiny, almost like there was a light coming out of them.

“Naw,” he said, and just kept driving in the dark. He turned somewhere and suddenly we was on these back roads with no lights at all. I was glad it was so country ‘cause at least there wasn’t no other cars around to hit us.

Aight then, I thought. So Mama Tee’s boyfriend is crazy as hell. Mama Tee probably is too. What I got to do while I’m down here is find some boys—there gotta be a rec center or a basketball court or something down here—and spend as much time as possible out in these streets. Might even learn something new.

Poe interrupted all my thoughts by asking me “You ain’t old enough to drive yet, boy?”

“Naw. I’m just tall. I don’t start high school until next year.”

He laughed again. “So you a big man!”

“Yeah. I mean, I been to jail!”

He looked at me real quick then and his eyes had that weird gleam again. I couldn’t see nothing at all on the road in the dark but he was driving fast like it was the middle of the day. Maybe he just did it so often it was like second nature to him. I don’t know. But I didn’t really like it.

“You been to jail, huh? Oh, you gon’ fit right in down here, boy. Can’t wait to see it, myself.”

“What that mean?”

“You’ll see, son.”

“I ain’t your son!”

He looked at me real sharp and shiny again but he didn’t say nothing because just then we got to Mama Tee’s house.

• • • •

When you watch movies with people going to visit their family out in the country or down south somewhere, there’s always a gospel song playing in the background. It’s always bright daylight outside, lots of people, and the oldest lady comes out and hugs everybody before they go inside. Go inside, and it’s a football game playing on the TV and kids playing in the backyard and good food everywhere. There’s always one stupid uncle everybody mad at and one stuck up auntie tryna tell him how to live but you know after dinner they gonna play dominos or spades or something and be friends again. In the movies, Black folks who go visit family walk into warmth and love and happiness.

I absolutely did not do that. Poe slid out the truck, snatched up my bag and went on the porch in the dark and I followed him fast cause I wasn’t trying to get lost out there. I had to keep my eye on the gray-looking blue of his shirt to keep up. We got to the porch and I could feel someone standing there. I guessed it was Mama Tee. I could feel eyes looking at me, anyway. I couldn’t see shit in the dark so I just looked at where I thought they was to be polite. Finally Poe dropped my bag at my feet and said “Bye, Ms. Tee.”

“Bye, Mr. Poe,” she said and reached behind her and opened the door. A little light came through it and I could finally see her. Poe was already gone. I don’t even know how. She was looking not at me, but past me, like at something behind me, almost. She hugged me, real quick, real dry, still not looking at me. “Come on in, then, son. If you hungry you got to wait until the morning.” So, I just followed her into the house.

Mama Tee so old, first time I really saw her, I don’t even know how she stay alive. She ain’t but five feet tall and all dried up looking with light skin and big bug eyes and false teeth. She got a little wisp of hair on her scalp that’s like three different colors—gray, white, and some weird brown color where she maybe tried to dye it once.

Mama Tee live in a house that’s real old and real run down. There’s other little old houses around, but not too close, so in the dark that first night it just looked like she was out there in the country by herself. The inside looks kinda messy and everything is all square brown shapes just like my house back home, except it’s a house, not an apartment, and everything Mama Tee owns looks like it was made the year slavery ended. There’s just dust and old ass shit everywhere. Old magazines, little statues, unopened bottles and cans of food they don’t even make no more, rusty tools. Just all this old time shit. Ain’t but two places to sit—a big old armchair in the middle of the front room that Mama Tee was always sitting in and a little breakfast table against the wall in between the armchair and the little dusty kitchen.

So I followed Mama Tee into this house. She walked me down a hallway, but she didn’t say much. She just opened the door and told me good night.

I can’t lie, I was feeling some type of way. Like, why she got to be so cold? So I said, “What I’m s’posed to do?”

She stopped and looked straight at me then, with one of her tiny little wrinkled up hands on the doorknob. There was only one lamp in the whole room and it wasn’t that bright.

She sounded real surprised when she said, “Why, just go on to bed, son.” She started closing the door. “And don’t you come out this room ‘til it’s light outside, you hear?”

So, I went on to bed. But first I said “I ain’t your son,” up under my breath.

One more thing about that night I gotta tell you.

You know how sometimes, when you sleep, you hear something in your dream that is actually happening in real life and it kinda mixes into the dream? Like when there’s music playing in your dream, but you know in some part of your brain that it’s only there ‘cause you left a playlist on? That happened all night long at Mama Tee’s house, only it wasn’t music. It was laughing. These low, bubbly, nasty-sounding laughs. Sometimes they would stop and I’d hear breathing—heavy, sweaty breathing, like somebody with the flu. I kept hearing that all night, and when I finally woke myself up and sat up in the bed, all sweaty and scared, it was daytime.

There was a bird singing somewhere outside. I got dressed and walked down that narrow brown hallway to go see where Mama Tee was. She was sitting in an armchair in the front room, humming. She got this little dry, cracked old lady voice and she was humming some strange sad song, sounding like a slave song from a movie, all scary and old fashioned and shit.

Mama Tee house is tiny. You can look from the hallway to the front door and front room, to the kitchen and back door, without taking a step. I looked at Mama Tee sitting in her chair, then at the kitchen, which was cold and empty. The stove was covered in a whole inch of dust.

I guess she felt me looking because she said, “Good morning, son. Poe be here soon with breakfast. Sit down a minute.”

I turned around, went back to my room without saying nothing. If Poe was gonna be cooking all the food, I needed to call my moms and get her to send me some Pop-Tarts. My phone was dead, so I grabbed it and my charger and went back out. I don’t really know what to say to old ladies but I felt like if I’m staying in her house I at least had to try, even if she didn’t seem to know how to be friendly.

She still didn’t pay me no attention. Just sat still in that chair, big bug-eyes staring at nowhere, humming that awful song.

I sat at the table and plugged the phone charger into the wall, turned on the phone. I was hoping I would get some signal, but nothing. The back door was next to the table, sliding glass set in the wall between the kitchen and the living room. The backyard looked huge and green—all kinds of plants growing big like a jungle. I could see a clothesline and something that looked like a garden.

I was messing with the phone when Mama Tee spoke again, scared me a little. “Some books are there for you to read, son. Your mama said you like them.”

I didn’t really want to look but I still was trying to be polite. They were right there on the table next to me anyway. The first book on the pile was so old it was brown, like it had been dipped in tea. I opened it up to a random page and read “. . . unusual case of Raw Head Bloody Bones, an Irish legend adopted and some may say improved upon by storytellers of the local Negro community which has . . .” I closed that book so fast dust flew up out of it. What was she trying to get me to read? It was boring, Mama Tee was boring, and I was bored. Like, everything I ever heard about going down south to see relatives was a lie. Mama Tee acted like I had been there in her little dark dusty house forever and she wasn’t happy to have me there. I was hungry and already kinda lonely and from the dust on everything I could guess that nobody ever came to visit, ever. Except maybe Poe but he weird anyway.

I knew that something had to be poppin somewhere though. It couldn’t all be like this.

I mean, I was already so bored I was seeing things. Just out the corner of my eye, I saw the cord for my phone charger suddenly jerk. It was like someone real weak had tried to pull it hard so it stood out sharply at an angle where it was hanging from the table all of a sudden and then fell.

Mama Tee’s humming got louder.

I stood up, brushed dust off my jeans and said, just to be polite. “I’ma go look outside, Mama Tee.” I wanted to look and see what else was out there. I wasn’t about to work on a plantation all summer by accident.

She just hummed a little louder.

The glass door leading to the backyard was slid slightly open. When I moved towards it, it suddenly slid closed. There was a handprint, all steamy like someone invisible had put their big sweaty hand on the glass. As I watched, the lock slowly turned and clicked.

It was bright, bright daylight outside. I was still two steps from the door. Wasn’t nobody else inside or outside who could have made that handprint. Or turned that lock.

Mama Tee finally put some words to that tune she had been humming since I got up.

Don’t you weep

Don’t you moan

Just go ta’ sleep

Shut yo’ eyes

Mind yo’ head

And don’t you peep

Don’t you walk

In the dark

When you’re alone

Cause you might

Get snatched

By Bloody Bones!

You know how sometimes you get so scared that all you can do is feel cold? It’s like an icicle fell out the sky and through your body and pinned you to the ground. When I heard Mama Tee creak and croak out that song, that’s how I was. I turned around and stared at her with that icicle running through me. I opened my mouth to laugh or say something but all that came out was “What.” Real flat. I wasn’t asking a question, but that was just the only word that would come out.

She kept singing, sometimes with words, sometimes just humming. I kept trying to move but that icicle had me pinned down hard and I couldn’t do anything.

The front door banged and I jumped and scrambled into the hallway. Sometimes you just gotta take the L.

Poe came walking in the house with a bunch of containers full of good smells stacked up in his hands. He looked at me with his eyes all curious, then at Mama Tee. He grinned real big and said “C’mon and eat breakfast, boy.”

I looked at my phone. Still no bars. Still no data. Mama Tee walked towards the table, staring off into nowhere the whole time. Before she sat down, she carefully unlocked the glass door and slid it open a little bit.

I know this sounds crazy and in the movies, only white girls see something scary and then go act like nothing happened. But in real life, when that kind of thing happens, it’s scary for a minute and then your mind is like—“Okay, that ain’t really what happened. You crazy. Actually, you not crazy, because nothing really happened, right?”

So instead of packing my bag and leaving, I sat down to have breakfast.

Poe wasn’t a bad cook. He brought all those containers and his own dishes and forks and spoons, so I could see why even the sink in Mama Tee’s kitchen was full of dust. She just never went in there. He put everything on the kitchen table, unwrapped some plates that were in newspaper and filled them up real quick with fried fish and grits and cut up fruit and biscuits with butter and jelly. He had a thermos with some coffee in it and I liked that because my moms never lets me drink coffee at home. It wasn’t too bad of a breakfast.

What was bad was sitting there eating with him and Mama Tee. They both ate like all the food on earth was going to disappear later and they didn’t talk. All they did was chew loud and stare at me. Both of them got those eyes that are slowly turning dull blue—I think it’s called cataracts? I read that you can get them when you old. They just stared at me with their weird eyes, with their mouths moving up and down around all that food. When I tried to stare back, they’d look away or past me.

I ate slow. It tasted good but everybody’s weird behavior was worse than having no salt. Also, now that that icicle was out of my spine I was thinking about what I could do down here.

Poe did glance at my plate once and say, “Don’t you want to eat all your food, son?”

I said, automatically, “I ain’t your son.”

He snapped back, “So where your daddy, then?”

I ate faster.

When their plates were empty and mine was still half-full, Mama Tee took a big slurp of her coffee and nodded at Poe. “Go on. Tell him.”

Poe cleared his throat and took a sip too. “So, while you down here, you gon’ have to help Mama Tee round this house. She got some books for you to read, a few little chores for you to do. Clean up after ya’self, don’t give her no trouble.”

My back was to the glass door and I heard it close and the lock start to slide back shut—that metal on metal sound.

I didn’t even know I was gonna say it, but I did. “Mama Tee, is your house haunted?” I got a little mad at myself for being a punk, but I heard that lock behind me slide all the way in and all I could feel was that icicle.

The old folks looked directly at me for a moment, and then looked away just as quick.

“Ain’t really no kids in these parts,” Poe continued. “Most folks here is old, old as me and Ms Tee. Maybe a few older. Come with me when I go to the sto’ sometimes, maybe I can run you by the swimming pool. You might meet a few young folks there.”

“Did you hear me, Mama Tee? You saw that door, right? And the handprint?”

My mother must have learned how to ignore questions from Mama Tee. She acted like she ain’t even hear me, just got up from the table working her mouth and lips around the last taste of her breakfast and went and sat back in that armchair. Just cold.

Poe started stacking up dishes. “Hush up, son. Just come help me take all this out to the truck.”

They were so good at ignoring my questions that I started thinking that maybe I really did just imagine it. That didn’t stop me from going outside as soon as Poe drove off in that rattly-ass truck and walking up and down that long dusty road until I found a place where my phone got bars.

Mom picked up on the first ring and said my name like it was a question.

“Ma! Why you ain’t tell me Mama Tee’s house is haunted?”

Can you believe she laughed at me? A big laugh, too. She ain’t even try to hide it. Made me mad.

“Ma, I’m so serious. You gotta listen.” I told her real quick about the door and about how strange Mama Tee and Poe were and even about hearing things in my dreams. She stopped laughing but she still wasn’t taking me too seriously.

“Baby. This is your first time down there. They just live a little different. You’ll get used to it. And I think maybe you’re homesick and seeing things that aren’t there because you miss your friends and your own bed. Give it a chance, okay?”

“No, Ma, I just . . . I don’t feel good about this, okay? I wanna come home.” I was almost crying. I was standing on the dirt road, surrounded by silence, and it was like I was the only living thing out there. I ain’t never felt so lonely before.

“Well, you can’t. You might not like it down there but you can’t get into any trouble, either. Now behave yourself and do your best to help Mama Tee and Mr. Poe, okay?” She said that, then had the nerve to ask me did I really need anything. All I could do was hang up and walk back to Mama Tee’s. She was still sitting in that armchair, humming to herself.

• • • •

It’s strange but nothing really happened for a while after that. I mean, there was no more ghost shit, and I was looking for it. Every time a light flashed or a breeze blew I was half out of my skin, looking for something. But everything was just—normal. I mean, as normal as it could get out there. Mama Tee still didn’t really talk to me much, and Poe would come over twice a day with a bunch of containers and feed us. Sometimes he would stay a while and sit with Mama Tee, or do some cleaning and gardening and make me help him. Sometimes I would just go out and do it by myself. I mowed the lawns, learned to pull weeds. That was actually okay because there wasn’t much else for me to do and my phone didn’t work most of the time. It was good to do something.

I say that, but actually there was some strange shit. I left all the junk in the house alone but we did wipe all the dust out the kitchen the first week I was there because Mama Tee told Poe she wanted me to be able to fix myself a snack and sometimes I did, during the day. When I went to do it, there was handprints in it. Fingerprints, too. Big ones, like a basketball player’s. Before I wiped it all away, I looked over at Poe’s hands, and he a big man, but his hands kinda small. Not his. Not mine. Not Mama Tee’s.

Poe saw me looking, reached over and swiped his rag over the prints, left the kitchen without saying anything.

So there was that. And there was the laughing. All that nasty, snotty, choked up sounding giggling I would hear in the back of my dreams most nights. At first I didn’t know how I was going to sleep with that noise popping up in my head as soon as I closed my eyes, but it was like growing a mole in a place I couldn’t see. It didn’t bother me all the time, so I just got used to it.

Mostly, though, I just lay on the bed in my room, reading the books Mama Tee would leave out on the table for me, playing the downloaded games on my phone and daydreaming. Sometimes I would open up the notes app and write rhymes. That was disappointing. I am not a good rapper. Like, I front like I am because nobody wants to admit they can’t flow, but like—I look at my rhymes sometimes and even I think I better stay in school. But it was something else to do, anyway.

Other times I would walk around the neighborhood to try to get a signal to call or text one of my boys, but it was always real strange. What did I have to talk about, really? Ay, Low, today I pulled 346 weeds. I know how many because I was so bored that I counted all of them. Then I read this crazy ass book about fairy tales for “negroes,” no shit, it says negroes, and apparently all “negroes” was doing back in the day was telling stories about calling up monsters to kill slave owners and overseers which is kind of dope but also kinda boring because ain’t nobody here to talk to when I’m done reading and clearly that shit didn’t work because, I mean, America is like it is now. What you think?

I almost never saw anybody. I knew people lived in the nearby houses, but I never saw them. Every week Poe would take me with him to the grocery store in town but there was always a big space around him, like a big bubble that folks just bounced off. Whenever I was with him, I was in that bubble too, and when I left the house I was almost always with him, which means I never really got to talk to anybody else. Even if I could talk to other people, they were all old. The “young folks” at the swimming pool Poe told me about were all at least forty. So, there was nobody.

One of the books I read talked about how in between heaven and hell there was this other place where you just have to wait and do nothing until God decides what to do with you for real. I don’t remember what it was called but it might as well have been Mama Tee’s house. Except for the first morning, which I kind of blocked out, that was my summer, just waiting in that lonely, boring space between good and bad.

Until the last two weeks. That was when I saw the ghost again.

It got real hot at the beginning of August, and it was hard to sleep. By then I felt more familiar with Mama Tee’s house, even though I never really felt comfortable. I never came out of my room at night just by instinct, but it was hot and I was thirsty and I guess I just forgot.

I didn’t want to wake up Mama Tee so I didn’t try to turn on any lights. I thought I would just use my phone as a flashlight, walk down the hall, get a drink of water, and then go back to my room. But that is not what I did.

I stepped out on the hall carpet in my bare feet. It was hot and humid and my whole body felt sticky just from that little walk.

I felt a cool breeze when I got to the kitchen and it surprised me so much that I hit my toe on the table and said “shit!” real loud. I heard Mama Tee moving in her room, probably turning over in her sleep, but then I heard a much bigger sound right in front of me, like a big body moving.

Everything I had half forgot about or gotten used to came back to me just that quick. I ran over to the wall and flipped the light switch.

The light flickered. It was dim and dirty and kind of brown like usual, but it was also popping in and out, so I never really got a good look at what was in the kitchen. The look I did get was enough, though. The glass door was open and in front of it was a being, I guess a man, big and broad and dark. At first I thought it was Poe, but then I realized it was way bigger than him and it smelled like the inside of the meat counter in the supermarket mixed with the fertilizer we used in Mama Tee’s garden.

It wasn’t wearing clothes—its skin was just so baggy and soft on its body it looked like a pair of coveralls or some little kid pajamas, comfortable and easy to move in. Its head, though—I kept trying to get a look at it in that blinking light and I just couldn’t figure out what was happening. It was wet and red and white, with little bits of bone showing here and teeth showing there and all of the parts of the face were real sharply defined, like one of the posters on the wall in biology class.

It turned and looked at me and I saw its eyes, round and wet and rolling free in that bloody, muscular skull. It didn’t have eyelids, or eyebrows, or eyelashes—just two big wet brown eyeballs. It snapped its jaws one or two times then took a step towards me. I could hear it start laughing. It was that same nasty laugh, sounding like a backed-up toilet. There weren’t but two steps between me and it in that tiny little house. I started screaming.

When I came to, I was laying on the kitchen floor and Mama Tee was leaning over me, her little old face all pinched up, singing that song about the bones so hard it hurt me to hear it come out of her when I opened my eyes.

“Mama Tee?” I sat up real quick and she stopped singing. I looked around, and the kitchen seemed normal. I even felt okay but my chest felt extra sticky with sweat. I looked down at it, and I almost fell out again.

Right there in the middle of my chest was a sticky bloody handprint so big it went from my collarbone to my navel. The thumb stretched around my side. There was a little sliver of bone tucked in my belly button like a present.

I would’ve started screaming again but Mama Tee grabbed hold of me and shook a little. “Son, don’t you make me have to sing this song again tonight. I know you hate it but I really hate it. You understand?”

That was a real weird thing to say, even for her, but she was looking right at me like a regular human being for maybe the first time ever, so I held that scream behind my teeth and just nodded at her. She looked at me hard for a moment, maybe to see what I was gonna do, and then she nodded.

“Help me get up, son. Mama Tee too old to be sitting on this floor with you.”

I got up and kind of pulled her with me and we went to the kitchen table together. Before I sat down I got a towel, started to try to clean some of that handprint off me.

Mama Tee sighed deeply and said “Ol’ Raw Head, he a white man’s ghost, you know.”

How do you even answer some crazy shit like that? “What?”

“Just that. He a white man’s ghost but when they brought him over here, turns out he likes us better.” She laughed, real dry and spiteful. It was the first time I ever heard her laugh and I didn’t really like it. If she wasn’t so old and dried up, she might have sounded like the ghost.

I had almost gotten the first finger of blood off of me, so I stood up to go rinse out the towel. “Mama Tee, what—ok, look. What does that mean?”

“Raw Head, he likes revenge and punishment, just like that, one after th’other. The white folks, they used him on children back somewhere in England or Ireland. But he likes hard justice best, and when they brought him here—we had more of what he wanted.”

“I don’t want no revenge, no punishment, nothing. And you don’t know nobody but Poe. Why ol’ Big Head in your house, then?”

Mama Tee laughed again but it was a nicer laugh this time. “I ain’t always been old, boy. Poe, neither. There was a time when everybody round here had a taste of Ol’ Raw Head’s power. He kept us safe. Helped our grandparents keep our land, protect our lives, raise children. Lemme ask you something. When’s the last time you saw somebody white?”

I had to think. “Uh . . . at the airport? Maybe?”

“That’s right. Ain’t been white folks out here since before the Civil War. Ol’ Raw Head helped us with that, kept the white folks off us so we could do what we want. But the more we called him, the better our place got. And the better it gets, the harder he is to control, so things start going bad again. Not in the same way, but still bad. He gets bored. Hard to hold. You understand me?”

I was working on the thumb and my side was running red with bloody water. I gave up and decided I was just gonna take a long shower. Then I looked around and realized it was still dark and decided not to do a damn thing but listen until it got light outside. “No. I don’t understand. Ghosts ain’t real!”

“Boy, look at your chest. He real. And he hungry. Can’t nobody but me keep him under control all the way anymore, and I got to sit and sing half the day to do it! I’m too old. Weak. Should be somebody in the family. I thought about your mama, but she too busy trying to do everything right. And Ol’ Raw Head—he real wrong sometimes. Has to be that way.”

“What about Poe?”

“Poe tried. It didn’t set too well. He ain’t blood. Raw Head rode him hard, made him hurt some folks real bad. We ain’t supposed to get revenge on each other, you know. It looks bad. Feels bad, too. Now he stays out here, does my little bit of work. Keeps him from going back to jail. Besides, Poe older’n me, now.”

I was surprised to hear about Poe but I was still scared and the blood on my chest was starting to dry. “Mama Tee, what that got to do with me?”

She looked at me with the same surprised, ain’t-it-obvious face she had my first night in her house. “Why, child, you supposed to take charge of Ol’ Raw Head Bloody Bones!”

That icicle fell from the ceiling again, pinned me in my chair. “I’m supposed to do what?”

She sighed. “Son, I’m old. This town is old and all the young people gone away, don’t hardly come back no more. I believe that maybe—maybe Ol’ Raw Head is just as bored as you is, out here. There ain’t nothing for him anymore. Everybody out here now too old to want revenge on anybody, even each other. We just want to live in peace ‘til Jesus takes us on home.”

“Well, can you give him back to the white people?”

Mama Tee almost laughed again, then stopped and thought. “No, I don’t believe we can. They got too many new ghosts now. So do we, but we still got room for the old, even if they ain’t ours. No, we gotta keep Ol’ Raw Head. Keep him and put him to work. Besides—I think he likes you. He didn’t take not one bite out of you when he came tonight. Not like he did Poe.”

I wanted to think Mama Tee was crazy. I wanted to tell her ghosts weren’t real and I wanted to call my moms and tell her to change my plane ticket right now and bring my ass home. But just then, the lights started to flicker again and I jumped up out of my seat, dropped that towel, and scrambled across to Mama Tee, who put her arms around me and chuckled.

She looked at me and I started to understand that this cold old lady maybe liked me a little bit. Maybe not that much, but we were family, anyway. “Don’t take on, boy. It’s too close to daylight for Ol’ Raw Head to do much more than show hisself.”

I took a deep breath with Mama Tee’s skinny dry arms around me and I made a decision real quick. “So how do I control Ol’ Big Head?”

“It’s Ol’ Raw Head, boy,” she scolded, and then she got real quiet, thinking. “You been reading all those books I gave you?”

I nodded my head.

“All right. Time I gave you some new ones. Your great-great grandfather kept a diary, too. Time for you to read that. Learn what he knew.”

I stood up and Mama Tee looked at all the blood that had gone from my chest to her robe and clicked her tongue at me. “Son, go get in that shower. I’ll stand outside and sing while it’s still dark. But you ain’t about to mess up my good sheets.”

• • • •

Mama Tee died in her sleep a week before I was supposed to go back home, only one day before she promised to introduce me to the ghost and show me how she kept hold of him. Poe found her, sitting soft and lonely in her chair, when he came to bring breakfast one morning. I was in my room reading the diary Mama Tee gave me and heard him start wailing.

I thought it was Ol’ Big Head and came running out ready to do something but it was just Poe, kneeling over Mama Tee’s body, wailing and sniffling like a big baby. He was crying so hard that there were big wet spots on his baby blue t-shirt, like big dark eyes.

He said a whole lot with his eyes, but with his mouth he only said, “Son, you know ‘bout that other thing?”

I could feel my throat closing up a little bit but I still was able to say, “Yeah, Mr. Poe. I got this.” He looked at me for a long minute, like he was measuring me and accepting me all at the same time, and finally nodded his head. Then he started crying again and I started to let a few tears out too.

I went outside and walked and cried until I got bars and called Mom. She and Mike got a flight and came down that same night. They were sad about Mama Tee and worried about Poe and the time from when they got there up until the funeral was just really hard.

Especially the nights.

The first night Mom slept in Mama Tee’s room and Mike slept at Poe’s. I said good night and everything, but as soon as the house got quiet, I got up, slipped down the hallway and out the glass door.

I stood there for a moment, trying to remember everything Mama Tee had told me and everything I had read, and tried to sing a song. The same song Mama Tee did.

Nothing happened. I stopped for a second, then decided to try something that felt more natural to me. I spit a rhyme.

I did not magically become an amazing rapper that summer. This ain’t a movie, it’s a real story about a ghost. But I rap better than I sing, anyway.

Suddenly something in the back of my head got tight and I blinked and there he was, all big and smelly, kind of hiding in the tall green corn stalks and sunflowers. I could see him but not too clear. I kinda got the feeling he liked it that way.

What do you say to a ghost, though? “Ay. Ol’ Big Head.” He moved real fast in the corn for a moment, almost disappeared from sight. “AY! Mama Tee gone. I guess you know that. Um . . . I know you, uh, maybe you kinda bored down here. I can see why. Shit, I am. But I want . . . I want you to come with me. I think . . . I think you might get some of what you really want where I live.”

It was so quiet when I finished talking, and he was so still that I thought maybe I had messed up and was just talking to a scarecrow. Imagining things, you know? But when I was inside the house, getting back in my bed, I heard that low nasty, bubbly laugh again. I slept with an icicle all through my body.

When we flew back I had my great-great grandfather’s diary and a couple of Mama Tee’s old dusty books in my bag, and something . . . something extra traveling deep inside of me, curled up mean and smelly next to my own thoughts and feelings.

• • • •

It took a while for life to get back to normal. When I got back to my hood, school started right away and I didn’t know nothing. No internet for two months had me lost. I felt like a whole nerd even though Low and the rest of the squad were pretty nice about it. They even said sorry about Mama Tee.

But there was still that other thing, too.

The cops had been around way more, I heard. There were a few faces I was used to seeing around that just weren’t there no more. There were other faces that were just—different. Like Low. He always used to have jokes in his rhymes, and laugh at everything, even himself. Something in him was real angry and serious now. I tried to tell him about weird-ass Poe so I could hear him clown and he was just like, “Maybe it’s good you weren’t here.”

I didn’t really know what to think about that. Nothing was the same. Not even me.

I don’t really like being outside when it’s dark too much anymore. Those first few days, I was holding on to Big Head hard. I knew he wanted to go out and do stuff but I didn’t know what would happen if he did so I just held on to him and ignored my moms when she teased me for looking through everybody and always writing rhymes. But when my boys hit me with a message saying they were going to go play ball one night, I got up, put on my jacket and went out.

I took a shortcut through an alley to get to the court. I had done it before so often that it was like second nature, but if I had thought about it, I never would have gone that way. Too dark, too scary, too comfortable for that other thing.

Lots of other things, I guess. I was coming out of the alley when I heard a woman start talking and cussing, loud. I knew the voice. It was Valerie’s weird ass. She must have been walking home from her shift at the rec center. She was standing against a wall at the mouth of the alley. There was a police car parked on the street and an officer was standing close to her, with one hand pushing her up against a wall.

He leaned over and pushed his other hand into her other shoulder and said something I couldn’t hear. Valerie kept cussing, started crying. Now, I don’t really like Valerie, but she’s real small and I could see he was hurting her. Also, even if she is annoying, ain’t no law against that. I started rhyming up under my breath.

I tripped over a piece of garbage or something and they both looked my way real quick. Valerie said my name real sad and scared, and then said “No, no. Get away. Just run away.”

The cop looked me up and down real quick and agreed with her. “Mind your business, son. Just go wherever you were going and mind your business.”

I stood up real straight, stopped my verse. “I ain’t your son.”

“Excuse me?” the cop said, and he let Valerie go. She slid to the ground and started crying harder, begging me to go. “Are you looking for trouble tonight, boy?”

I took a deep breath, made a choice, and said, “I ain’t looking for trouble. He a friend of mine. Ay! Ol’ Big Head! Come out and meet somebody!”

Cop looked past me, started to scream. I walked past him, helped Valerie up and kinda pulled her, dragged her away from the wet nasty sounds behind us. When we got around the corner and back to the light in the rec center parking lot, I started up rhyming again.

©2024 by Melissa A Watkins.

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.

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

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Sleeping Beauty and the Restless Realm

Lincoln Michel | 959 words

The beautiful princess was cursed by a wicked fairy to sleep for a hundred years. She slumbered in a bed of silk in the golden castle surrounded by tangles of briars and roses on the top of the hill. Nobody much cared.

Why should the villagers have felt bad for the magically slumbering princess? They themselves never got enough sleep. All day they blistered their fingers tilling the hard fields and at night they tossed and turned on even harder beds. The only magic they knew was ever-growing bills. How could they conjure the funds for a new wagon wheel? What enchantment would decrease their tax burden? Where was the spell to calm the newborn for one goddamn night?

But after a while, the villagers began to visit their slumbering ruler. They bribed the guards with baskets of cheese and salted meats to slip past the iron gates. Each plucked a single rose from the palace gardens before their pilgrimage to the sleeping beauty’s bedroom. The roses were not gifts. Instead, they used the thorns to prick the princess’s skin and collected the beads of enchanted blood. Each drop contained a fragment of the fairy’s sleeping spell.

An old wise woman had told the tired villagers they could mix a drop in their nighttime tea to ease them into sleep. The potion worked. The villagers began to remember rest. Youth returned to their overworked bones, and they awoke with energy for the day’s labor with some leftover for fellowship and hobbies beside. Although the fairy had meant to curse the realm, it became the most peaceful and happy around.

Then one day, the handsome prince arrived. He had spent years slashing his way through dark woods and slaying evil trolls, although that’s another story. The handsome prince found the object of his long quest still sleeping in her silken bed. She was as beautiful as a fairy tale. The handsome prince leaned down to kiss the sleeping beauty on her lovely lips yet, as his face grew close, he noticed the scabs spoiling her otherwise flawless skin.

He quickly set about to right the situation.

First, the prince had the guards thrown into the black dungeon and tortured to reveal the goings-on. He took control of the realm’s administration, reinforced the iron gates, and filed the necessary paperwork for the exclusive rights to bottle and sell the princess’s sleep-inducing blood at full market rate.

The villagers at this point were addicted to their evening tonic. Many went bankrupt buying the prince’s potion. They had their land seized for the construction of a warehouse and bottling facility. Other villagers simply returned to their tired, grueling days and cursed the prince and princess each night as they lay awake. In the dead of night, they hurled rocks at the warehouse windows and mud at the prince’s guards. The village was once again a realm of unrest.

This didn’t bother the handsome prince too much. He grew so rich he had to expand the palace’s vault. He used some of the profits to purchase taller gates and more guards with larger weapons to keep the groggy villagers at bay. He hired goblins to work the manufacturing center and signed distribution agreements with the lords of nearby realms. At night, he slept soundly with a belly filled with dark wine on his bed of soft gold.

Then at some point—no one quite knows how—the princess woke. Some say the prince was so excited at his fourth-quarter profits that he momentarily forgot himself, kissing her and breaking the curse. Others say a rival lord allied himself with the wicked fairy to initiate a hostile takeover of the sleep potion trade. But most assumed the one hundred years of sleep had been slowly siphoned away, prick by prick. The spell had run dry.

The princess sat up in her bed, surrounded by mountains of dried roses. She was withered herself. The fairy’s spell had kept her alive, but only just. Her arms were covered with scabs. Her skin was sallow. Her bones ached. The princess couldn’t remember anything of the preceding years except that every time she was having the most wonderful dream a great spike would appear in the sky and pop it like a bubble.

When the princess regained her strength, she kicked the handsome prince out of the realm. She destroyed the warehouse and returned the property to the serfs. The villagers were glad about that, but they were still overworked, taxed to penury, and never had enough time for a good night’s sleep. And now they didn’t even have a potion to buy. They came to the princess carrying baskets of roses, this time as tribute, and laid them at her feet as they petitioned for some or any relief.

The princess was a kind ruler, but she was still a ruler. She said no. She needed the taxes to improve the elegance of the palace and the splendor of her court. After all, one of her duties was to inspire the villagers with her noble majesty. So really it was for their own benefit. And that wasn’t even getting into the costs of hiring mercenaries to guard the realm against the handsome and disinherited prince who, rumor had it, was gathering troops for war.

Anyway, the princess felt little sympathy for the sleepless villagers. Their years of rose pricks had drained away her own slumber. Now she spent each night sitting in the tall tower of the golden castle, gazing out at the pale moon hanging above the restless village, dreaming of having dreams and of a magical world so unlike this one where everyone got what they needed and lived happily ever after.

©2024 by Lincoln Michel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lincoln Michel’s debut novel, The Body Scout (Orbit), was named one of the ten best SFF books of 2021 by The New York Times and one of the fifty best science fiction of all time by Esquire. He is also the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and the co-editor of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated anthologies Tiny Crimes (Catapult) and Tiny Nightmares (Catapult). His work appears in The Paris Review, Strange Horizons, F&SF, Granta, and previously in Lightspeed. His second novel, Metallic Realms, will be published by Atria in 2025. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and his newsletter Counter Craft.

Protest 2025: Stories Against Tyranny is an anthology of speculative fiction short stories to help you protest, resist, and survive Donald Trump’s 2nd term, from Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams. Back it now on Indiegogo. Campaign ends Dec. 20!

The Godhood of Ima Day

Cressida Blake Roe | 1742 words

When they take the god out of you, you wonder at first if you’ve been killed, but it wasn’t very well done, and you wish someone would hurry up and finish the job. You were strapped down and touched with fire from shoulder to hip, and when they let you go again, still quietly screaming, you see the divinity that so recently lived just beneath your sixth rib.

A small wrinkly thing. Galaxies spin through the eyes that stare out, through the star-jar where it has been contained, at the figures ranged around the operating room: you, two masked surgeons, present only for propriety, and then the ones who really matter—the beings in their shifting white cloaks, with blood and sick on their hands. You had not known, before today, that such entities existed, who had power enough to wrestle the gods free from their human hosts and place them in the sky.

The beings do not stay, of course, to explain the finer details of their natures; star-jar in hand, they shimmer away on their celestial business. The doctors detach themselves from the periphery, wielding needle and thread. A chaplain arrives to stitch up your soul in like manner with some tracts and a directory of temples welcoming votaries. You’ll need a holy place, he says, to keep you busy until the god you birthed grows strong enough to be worshipped.

You visit the altars and pay your tokens at more chapel doors than you can count, but it isn’t the deities you focus on as you kneel or wobble on one leg or lie flat on your back, as required. You’re thinking about the other people with god-shaped holes beneath their lungs, all moving around this city: waking up, and going to the office, and feeding babies, and folding laundry, still pretending to have remained themselves. How did they learn to fill this emptiness—how do they salve this ache for something so profound it seems impossible to live without?

Lack calls to lack, so it isn’t hard to find the others. In dim city corners, they spend the hours filling themselves up from the outside-in, and you join their neon-lit parties at the Moonwalk, taking cheap stardust and cheaper moonshine. When they touch your fragile shell, you reach for them in return, hoping another body might fit in the space. But it all goes into and through you, unable to catch hold on the edge of your longing.

A haze of nights later, feeling emptier than when you began, you decide your only other option is to try from the inside-out. You decide to grow another god.

• • • •

You remember the first time you realized you were a host: twelve years old, and the boy on the playground grabbed your arm, twisting hard because you were a girl, because you were smaller than him, because he could. When you cried out, you felt something twist inside your chest in the opposite direction, unraveling backward, until the boy was the one screaming, staring at the shattered joint of his elbow. He called you a monster. That wasn’t the last thing that people said you were.

The priests told you this was a gift, that you were rare, wondrous. Your earth-mother began to treat you like an exotic animal, valuable but dangerous with long teeth. Your earth-siblings, mindful of your ability to break bones, expressed their fear and hatred through mud in your sandwiches and unicorn beetles under your pillow and anonymous messages on your phone saying you should have been sent off-world in a three-day capsule or drowned at birth. Teachers and minders gave you a wide berth, used to volatile outbursts from others like you whom, you were assured in your despair, did exist; but the more considerate ones—the ones who dealt detention over the beetles and hate mail—said they looked forward to the god. They hoped it might be strong enough to save the world.

The world was still ending in your time, though the previous scientific attempts to cope with it had been abandoned in favor of religious revival. Even though the newspapers predicted this trend would fall out of fashion as quickly as every other effort, the houses of worship were kept in better condition than the houses of pleasure, and temples had fresher flowers than graves. And there were always new gods. The question was where to start.

You were never sure if it was the three rounds of preventative shots from when you were six and puking up your guts from one of the variants that made the difference, but chemical manipulation was your only lead. Your new hollow friends knew of ways to get drugs and plied you with needles and pills. When you asked them what to take and in what order, they just shrugged. “It’s your god,” they said. “Do it the way you think you have to.”

So you play roulette and lie sweating in bed with a bitter taste under your tongue, as spiders crawl up your skin and the bird in the cuckoo clock flies out to beat you with its wings. You wonder what would happen if you died. Will your first god come to take you? Or did the beings not assign it an afterlife, leaving you to a timeless nothing? Even if it did get a heaven, would that place be any different from the kitchen of your home in late April when you were nine years old, the sun splashing across the cracked plasterwork? Your earth-mother hung dried flowers from the rafters so that the scent clung to your hair for days afterward like the ghost of a world that had once been happy. You begin to suspect you carried that crevasse of longing for much longer than since the moment after your theophany.

Neighbors come in to check on you and your apparently unprecedented experiment. “You might as well stop this now,” one advises. “Even if you don’t kill yourself, the beings won’t let you keep an unauthorized god. You’ll be mined again and punished, don’t you know that?”

You see yourself on the operating table, cracked open like an egg and scraped clean, so there could be no chance of a repeat performance.

Another takes notes on the changes in your condition and the diverse combination of substances taken to provoke them. “If this works, we can patent it,” he crows. “The beings all want more gods; we’ll be rich!”

Someone gets worried about the state of your soul and thus the souls of everyone else in the building, so she summons a priest to deal with it. They think you’re a fool. “How many faces do you possess?” they demand. “Your first god was made in your image, and no two gods are alike. That’s science, not religion. You have no idea how you need to change in order to have another, and even then it’s likely to get branded a heresy, nothing but a stunted off-shoot.”

The ceiling has turned purple and chartreuse, and you have no answer to give.

• • • •

Around the time that you run out of drugs, you learn that your first god has finally received its own temple. The headline blares from the top of the screen, declaring it the hottest divine debut of the year. The news makes you faintly wistful, to have accomplished anything so important.

The building sits a little off the highway, a low cinderblock hall painted the color of amnion. You go to visit before the official opening, but state-issued donation boxes already stand guard at either side of the door. Their stiff white shapes remind you of the beings, and you dislike having to push in your coins. Chu-chunk-chunk, says the machines, and the door glides open.

It’s cold inside, and the magnetic energy from the worship instructions sign raises an electric prickle on your skin. The information is written in ninety-three of the most commonly recognized languages, yet you understand nothing of such fatuous posturing. You cannot imagine ever being satisfied by anyone making these rote, ritual motions. The sign disperses, and you walk through the cavernous space toward the altar.

A metal-top table stands against the back wall, under a niche set into the whitewashed plaster. The borders of the space had been inexpertly leveled, and the slanted sides cast bizarre shadows from the harsh lights twenty feet up. Your heart plummets. Here, maybe, after all this time, you might have been able to see your god again, but perhaps that was too ambitious a hope. That would be too easy. This god hasn’t been yours for a long time. Besides, it doesn’t appear to be at home just now, so you climb up onto the table and let the chilly metal sink its teeth into your bones, to wait.

You think back to the last time you lay on a surface this level and sacrificial. But now, you remember it differently. Now, you see the doctors and the beings alike shaking their heads over the red wound they made down your sternum that gapes like a soundless mouth. Someone got it wrong, they said. There never was anything inside you. They patched you up and sent you home, an ordinary liar who wanted the fame of hosting a god. But, lacking a reason for this unutterable imbalance of selfhood, you continued telling yourself the story that had been your own for more than half your life: Ima Day birthed a god, made in her image. It only knows how to tell one story. But perhaps a story told over and over gains its own shape, hardened by belief until it becomes real, even if it could never be true. You and your god have the same face. Perhaps you had gotten it backward.

You kneel up before the empty niche. It had been cut wide and deep, big enough for a body of your size. There’s a gap between the altar and the wall, and you pitch forward, dropping down into the shadows. It’s a much longer way down than you expected, but it doesn’t frighten you. Instead, you feel relief that the emptiness has gotten outside of you, at last. The darkness wraps itself around your ribs with the smell of wildflowers, and you are nine years old again in the sunshine, and you are finally whole.

©2024 by Cressida Blake Roe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cressida Blake Roe is a biracial writer of speculative and literary fiction, whose work appears or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Gamut, Kaleidotrope, Factor Four, and elsewhere. Recent stories have been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for the Best Small Fictions. See more at cblakeroe.wordpress.com.

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

Protest 2025: Stories Against Tyranny is an anthology of speculative fiction short stories to help you protest, resist, and survive Donald Trump’s 2nd term, from Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams. Back it now on Indiegogo. Campaign ends Dec. 20!

Three Birds That Came Out of Grayson Huff and a Bunch More That Fell from the Sky

David Anaxagoras | 1012 words

I was on the school bus when the second bird came out. The bus struggled up Trabuco Hill Road. Gears ground. This was the part every day when we all joked about getting out to push. Another year and I’d have my driver’s license. Then no more bus.

“Were you hiding that under your shirt?” Isabella Steinberg gasped. She sat next to me every morning now. When I got my license, I’d miss that. Everyone knew she wanted to kiss me. She always smelled like Fruit Loops in the morning and always wore the same cream-colored button-up sweater. I liked Fruit Loops. I liked cream-colored button-up sweaters.

The bird in question was a wren. Small, round, very plump—but insubstantial. A tiny puff weighing nothing. There had been a momentary sharp pain in my belly button—and then gone. I lifted my t-shirt. The wren hopped into my hand and rich red blood pooled in the cup of my navel, then trickled over, making a thin red trail into my waistband. The wren skipped to the top button of my jeans and dipped its beak in my blood.

“Ew! Vampire bird!” Isa noted.

“Stop that,” I said to the wren. I inspected my navel. It seemed fine. Aside from the blood, you couldn’t tell a bird had just pushed through. I snatched up the wren and wiped at the blood, and it kind of just smeared around on my pale belly turning it pink.

“You’re such a mess, Grayson Huff,” Isa scolded.

“I have birds coming out of me.”

She was about to say something else, but I shushed her because the wren was talking. Its little black eyes were wet and somber, and when it spoke a deep voice drove slowly but inexorably through my head like the wedge of a gas-powered log-splitter.

“It’s the end,” it said. “This is the end.” It collapsed in my hand and died.

The bus engine revved. The seat vibrated and it was giving me a violent erection. It was very uncomfortable, and I moved my backpack on my lap to hide it. But I was sure everyone knew. Especially Isa.

So that was Monday.

• • • •

I should tell you about the first bird that came out on Sunday. Cardinal. Not a red cardinal—those are the males. They’re very very red. You don’t know what red is until you’ve seen a male cardinal. Everything else that pretends to be red is ashamed to be seen next to them. This was a lady cardinal and very beautiful in her own right with sort of silvery-brown feathers and touches of red.

I think she came out of my mouth. The lady cardinal was on my pillow and sipping my drool when I woke up from a dream about choking on feathers, which moments before been a dream about Isa. The lady cardinal hopped around on my pillowcase, the one I refused to let go of because it had been on my grandmother’s bed and was old and soft and had a design of intertwining vines and flowers. I thought maybe I was still dreaming when the bird started talking. Not with her mouth. Just words in my head, a deep voice plowing into my brain.

“Everyone shall die,” she said. And then to prove the point, she died.

I panicked and felt weird and ashamed for some reason, so I wrapped her in grandma’s pillowcase and gave her a quick and unceremonious burial in the flower bed in front of our apartment.

• • • •

I’m not going to tell you where the third bird came out of. I was having some alone-time before school. Let’s just say it was a very tiny hole and it was a very big blue jay and I was very surprised.

All the blue jay said was doom doom doom over and over again in its squawking voice. You’d think a bird with a whimsical name like blue jay would sound prettier but it’s basically a blue crow. Then it stuck its tiny bird-tongue in my . . . uh . . . fluids . . . and died.

I decided to walk to school because I didn’t want to sit next to Isa because she would know another bird came out of me just by looking at me. I didn’t want to think about the things that came out of me right then.

But I really wanted to be with Isa.

I decided I was going to kiss her today. Maybe I would like it. Maybe I would drop dead like the birds suggested.

• • • •

The whole day I worried she wouldn’t be there. I thought maybe I was making a fool of myself. But when I arrived behind the library, a secluded space with an old bench and a puddle that never completely dries up, she was there.

This was my first kiss. I mean, I’d kissed a girl before, in the deep end of the pool once in third grade, but that was more of a little kid dare, a quick peck on the lips pressed hard together and cold under the water. It didn’t count as my first. After that kiss, I was still a child. But this one—I knew everything would change. It felt big.

I took her by the shoulders, and we didn’t so much pucker up as open our mouths and dive in. Awkward. Wet. She whimpered into my mouth. I felt her tongue poking around. It was a little weird. She tasted like Fruit Loops.

I opened my eyes. Birds fell from the sky. Dozens and dozens. Limp as discarded socks. They thumped softly into the grass, splashed into the everlasting puddle, pattered on the library roof. I kept kissing Isa. Somebody far away shouted what’s happening. Even farther, a scream. Isa opened her eyes and looked around, confused by the dead birds surrounding us, each a memory of innocence. I pulled her back close and she smiled, and I kissed her again and the birds kept falling.

©2024 by David Anaxagoras.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Anaxagoras is the author of middle-grade mystery/horror novel The Tower (Recorded Books, 2025). His short stories have appeared in Lightspeed, The Dread Machine, and other publications. He has also written for television and is the creator and co-executive producer of Amazon Studio’s Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, a fantasy coming-of-age series for which he received a WGA award nomination. He is a graduate of UCLA’s MFA screenwriting program and currently resides in Texas, where he writes full time and collects 80s vinyl records. He is represented by Emily van Beek at Folio Jr. Learn more at davidanaxagoras.com.

Protest 2025: Stories Against Tyranny is an anthology of speculative fiction short stories to help you protest, resist, and survive Donald Trump’s 2nd term, from Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams. Back it now on Indiegogo. Campaign ends Dec. 20!

Book Review: Translation State by Ann Leckie

Chris Kluwe | 760 words

Translation State
Ann Leckie
Harcover / Paperback / eBook
ISBN: 9780316290128
Orbit, May 2024, 448 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re rewinding time a bit to take a look at a book that might have initially skipped your attention, but was on the Hugo shortlist for this year, and it’s one I think is worth revisiting (this was my second time reading it, and it only got better). It’s a suspenseful investigative thriller that asks us to consider what it means to belong to a family, a society, and a culture as a whole—that’s right, it’s Translation State, by Ann Leckie!

Translation State takes place in the same universe as Leckie’s Ancilliary Series (which are all also excellent books), but is a standalone entry that offers us a different perspective than the sentient warships we’ve all come to know and love. The story weaves between three initially very different viewpoints: Enae Athtur, whose grandmother’s death has led to the family name being bought by new money and who must now find out what sie is going to do with hir life; Reet Hluid, a mechanic on a space station grappling with a thousand years worth of racial tension; and Qven, a juvenile Presger Translator trying to navigate the treacherous shores of adolescence. The three are gradually brought together as Enae searches for the truth behind a Presger Translator who went missing over two hundred years ago, and I’ll leave the synopsis there so as to not spoil anything (but the stakes get quite high since Presger Translators and the Presger Treaty are the only things keeping the alien Presger from eating humanity wherever they find it).

For those who haven’t read the Ancilliary Series, Translation State works quite well as a standalone intro to the universe those novels take place in, with various salient prior plot points explained naturally throughout the course of the story (since it takes place after the events of the Ancilliary Series there are some light spoilers due to the passage of time), and continues the author’s excellent investigations into the themes of gender identity, cultural belonging, and how those who hold power tend to use it. I particularly enjoyed the emphasis on found family, even for those who may not necessarily be temporally the same age, and what it means to belong somewhere.

However, lest you think the book is all critical reflections on humanity’s various woes through a thinly veiled SF curtain, let me assure you that it is also one heck of a suspense thriller. Enae’s investigation, Reet’s desire to belong, and Qven’s search for who they are leads to a constantly rising tension, and Leckie does a masterful job leaving the reader never quite sure what is going to happen next (but in that really good way that makes you want to read just one more chapter even though it’s an hour past your bedtime). I also found it quite impressive how Leckie was able to consistently ratchet up the tension without necessarily resorting to violence or big action setpieces (though there are enough of those for what the book requires), and there are points where a conversation hits with the same impact as a missile into the side of a space station.

One last note—for those of you who have read the Ancilliary Series, Translation State is a really interesting look into the other aspects of the universe the Radch Empire rules over, and fleshes out a lot of previously unexplored edges. It also made me immediately want another book just like it, but unfortunately I’ll have to wait for that.

Overall, I could probably spend another two thousand words going in depth into the various layers that make up Translation State and how elegantly they all work together, but I only get so much space here, so I guess I’ll leave it at this—there’s a reason Translation State was nominated for a Hugo, and it is well worth your time to read. In a world that can feel very unwelcoming at times, Leckie reminds us that there’s humanity in everyone, even those who first appear alien, and family isn’t necessarily who you’re born to.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Book Review: Mechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. Wagner

Melissa A Watkins | 637 words

Mechanize My Hands to War
Erin K. Wagner
Hardcover/eBook
ISBN:9780756419349
DAW Books, December 17, 2024, 320 pgs

In 2061, two soldiers lead a raid against an anti-android child militia led by their twisted foster father. In 2060, two military androids commit an atrocity that begins to change the way their kind is perceived. In 2058, two AI-powered service androids discover that they’re more than what they’re made for. In 2012, a neglected teen sees the effects of poverty and frustration in his Appalachian community and vows to create justice, somehow, somewhen. In every year, beings yearn for connection, and the ways they try to find it create power imbalances and suspicions that can take generations to understand.

Although the title promises a war, there really aren’t much more than a few senselessly violent militia skirmishes in this book. Instead, this twisty, asynchronous timeline somehow manages to pull elements from every anxiety-inducing headline of the recent past and confine them to the small spaces of interpersonal relationships. Most of this book is set in the near-ish future, and while it’s not quite dystopic, most of the imagined results of ubiquitous AI, climate change, corporatized agriculture, child labor, and eerie advancements in robotics aren’t particularly positive. They also don’t feel that big, here. This is very much about technology’s intersection with individual lives, not global conflict.

There’s a lot of big sociopolitical questions raised by conditions in 2061 Appalachia, and Wagner only hints at most of the answers and barely gives us any resolution at the end. Instead, we get to view this world, and all that’s happened to it, through a prism of thought and feeling, methodically examined and reexamined. We see the same events retold through multiple perspectives, focusing on intentions, misunderstandings, and the few brief shining moments when living creatures manage to understand each other perfectly, despite all. Although it’s an emotionally-focused book, the writing is actually very straight-forward and no frills, with just enough description to keep from being dry.

I’m not going to lie to you all—at first I really didn’t pick up what this book was putting down. I wanted war. I wanted cool battle AI unencumbered by deep moral crises. I wanted longer, grittier glimpses of climate-crisis Appalachia. I wanted a fuller backstory for the characters we’re initially led to believe are the villain and the heroes. In short, I wanted the sort of self-aware, crapsack world, renegade AI adventure that we’ve all come to expect.

I got none of that, and neither will you, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t worth reading. What I did get was a look at how top-down adoption of new technology can influence regular people in very realistic ways, and how fear of what we may create can warp entire lives. I got a very thoughtful meditation on how what is made and what is felt can converge and separate, set against a rural, yet futuristic backdrop. I got a challenging ending that feels more like the beginning of something new than anything else—but then, isn’t that what all endings are?

And I did get at least two big gunfights, but there’s a reason I’m not using any character names or giving too many details. Putting the full story of those fights entirely together across different years and different viewpoints is one of the most interesting things about this book, and I don’t want to ruin it for anyone. All I’ll say is this: don’t expect justice. Do expect tears.

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: Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto

Arley Sorg | 1028 words

Hammajang Luck
Makana Yamamoto
Trade Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780063430822
Harper Voyager, January 14, 2025, 368 pgs

The publicity for Hammajang Luck calls it “Oceans 8 meets Blade Runner” but I don’t think that’s quite right. I can see why they might use these accessible references: fewer people might know Leverage, which is more about cons than heists, but episodes usually had some heist markers, and that team is closer in some ways to the team in Hammajang Luck. TV show Lupin has even closer resemblances, particularly in terms of nuance and motivations, despite being focused mostly on a sole protagonist. The Blade Runner part is pretty thin, in my opinion, but is meant to (I believe) primarily speak to the setting. For me, the title says more about the book (and more accurately) than those comparisons; and the original title—Heist Lesbians—gives an even better picture. Part of the problem in describing it with references is that it’s definitely a heist story which follows expected beats but besides this it’s pretty unique. Moreover, it’s a very enjoyable read.

Hammajang opens with a familiar kind of setup: Edie is released from prison mysteriously early. Waiting outside is Angel, the person who they’d worked with before, apparently the reason they landed in prison in the first place, but also the person who effected their early release—only to try to coerce them to do another very risky job. Writers of all kinds use similar setups because it’s a quickly engaging situation when done right, and because readers and viewers love all kinds of crime stories, from heists and capers to gritty, serious, and bloody. Here, it is done right, with the added bonus that everything takes place “in spaaaace”—more specifically, Kepler space station. Even better, Yamamoto deviates from the standard versions of these kinds of setups by introducing a positive family connection: a sister who cares, who greets Edie warmly, and has a bed ready. In many iterations of heist/crime stories, in this kind of scenario, if there is a family member who cares, the relationship in general (and especially the moment of reunion) is usually used as another point of immediate friction: the tension between siblings that is exacerbated by a criminal record and a stinging distrust. Here the reunion is both touching and refreshing and signals to the reader that Yamamoto has thoughtful narrative directions in store.

Like most good heists next comes the collection of characters involved and a rundown of the job, and of course the job is to steal from someone unsympathetic: a super-rich asshole named Atlas. More important than this, Edie proves to be, by contrast, quite sympathetic. Yes, they are on their bullshit again, but we are still rooting for Edie, we want to see Edie get through this and come out the other side. Mostly this is due to Edie being a generally good-hearted person, even if some if their . . . proclivities . . . have led them into trouble in the past. Edie doesn’t rely on something as cheap as George Clooney’s or Sandra Bullock’s charm. Through Edie the reader can see that not every character can afford a suit, yet they live life in the best way they can. Another way to put it: what do you do when it seems like you are trapped and have limited options? Less-than-ideal circumstances was how Edie grew up and having been released by Angel’s machinations, now they are even more trapped.

Another key element here is that Edie has to deceive people they care about, which makes them again more relatable than an archetypal heist or con character who is fairly isolated from innocent individuals who aren’t directly involved, usually leaving protagonists free to Robin Hood all they want. Edie must wrestle with the discomfort and guilt of deceptions, not to mention the fact that failing could land people they love in trouble. Success therefore becomes even more important.

There are a few fun science fictional ideas on display, but the setting often feels more like “now” than like an adventure in spaaaace—albeit an alternate now. If we’re honest, this isn’t unusual for plenty of space opera or even straight-out science fiction books. Even The Expanse had a few anachronistic details that would be unlikely given the setting, things that fans allowed because they gave a certain flavor. Here the flavor is Edie’s nostalgia, which is a great tool to explore themes like gentrification, class and its relationship to labor, as well as our sense of relationship with a place and environment; it allows the author to more easily center characters and cultures that are extremely rare to see in popular storytelling—except as archetypes or decoration. Narrative attention is well-spent on details of the neighborhood and its people, lovingly imagined, and has deeper purposes than just trying to make a setting seem cool or trying to make a character iconic.

Once the team is assembled and the heist is underway, Hammajang Luck offers the notes of tension and adventure readers love in heist stories, but where flash and slick moments are the usual focus, Yamamoto adds in the growth of challenging relationships and friendships, that sense of various kinds of family, punctuated by occasional humor. It’s a satisfying book, and far more nuanced than most heist stories, while still hitting the marks that readers expect.

Hammajang Luck has more to say than Ocean’s 8, the setting is more thoughtful and relevant than Blade Runner, and you still get the heist you came looking for! Seriously. What more could you ask for? It’s an easy, fun read, which will make a lot of readers smile for all kinds of reasons. Recommended!

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.

Author Spotlight: Melissa A Watkins

Mayookh Barua | 1699 words

Could you share with us how this story idea came into being? What were some things on your mind while writing it?

It’s hard to say exactly, because I finished the first draft of this story back in September of 2016 and a lot has changed since then. I’m sure that the continued inequities and injustices in U.S. law enforcement and policing practices were on my mind. The Philando Castile murder happened that summer, and he worked in public schools. I’m sure some of the social media memorials from his young students and their parents were in the back of mind, as were conversations I’d had with my younger brothers and my friends with teenage sons. A lot of my age-mates were either actively looking for places and spaces that were safer for their young sons, or having very serious talks with them about how they were perceived and the best ways for them to move through the world. I was in kind of a protected space at the time—I lived overseas—and was probably trying to reckon with my own horror and fear and grief as well as the survivor’s guilt of being far away and very physically and carcerally safe as well. The repeated line about “I been to jail!” does actually come from a friend’s kid, who got caught telling his little friends that to try and be . . . impressive, I guess? He a) hadn’t been to jail, only taken to the police station by an officer to “scare” him, leading to legal action from the family b) had the nerve to say that to people even though his parents had taught him that is not a lifestyle goal and c) is probably still on punishment for it now, despite having just turned twenty-one.

I do know for a fact that two retellings of Raw Head, Bloody Bones, originally found in English folklore, directly inspired this story. One was the story “Little Eight John,” from Virginia Hamilton’s collection of Black folklore retellings The People Could Fly. It scared the daylights out of me as a child and I immediately retold it to every other kid in the neighborhood. The other was Laurell K. Hamilton’s take on the creature in her Anita Blake novel Bloody Bones. That’s the first time I realized that Raw Head, Bloody Bones wasn’t a uniquely Black American monster—I grew up only hearing the story in our context and was surprised to find that it had European origins.

The narrative voice is so playful and energetic. The humor in the story came across from the very beginning even while discussing things about racial history, police violence, and the supernatural from the get-go. I also love the recurrent mention of laughter in the text. How important (or not) do you think humor is in a text interweaving these kinds of themes?

I think that’s partly just Black American culture—we collectively have a dark, absurdist sense of humor and very few idols. Culturally we place a lot of weight on irony, wordplay, and storytelling—look at any artist in our community, any MC, comedian, poet, playwright. There are very few things we won’t tell jokes about, starting with ourselves. That’s partly because you have to laugh to keep from crying—policing injustice, ghosts, family estrangement, adultification, systemic racism—none of that is funny. But hard things are made more bearable by sprouting a little seed of joy in your heart and watering it with laughter at the absurdity of every unfair thing. It’s also because it feels good to laugh and have a shared language of jokes. It makes telling a story like this easier, because I can gloss over darker details and lean into the jokes and the supernatural. I also think that the main character here is kind of an homage to all the awkward, self-conscious Black boys I’ve worked with as an educator and youth worker over the years. So many of the boys I’ve met walk this hilarious, precious line between taking themselves very seriously and not taking themselves seriously at all, and I wanted to capture a little of that.

Why the choice of a white ghost?

There’s a simple reason and a complex one. The simple reason is that I’ve never really thought of Raw Head as a “white ghost.” I grew up with his presence in Black American folklore like many did and I think a lot of us don’t realize he has European origins. It wasn’t until I came across him again as an adult that I knew, and once I knew, I had to acknowledge it. The complex reason is that Black Americans are haunted by white ghosts in reality, aren’t we? We have this complicated existence in our own country, not by choice but by imposition, and the ghosts of all of the horrors of our racialized marginalization haunt us to this day. New ghosts are constantly being added to our cultural bestiary, and old ghosts pop up wearing new uniforms all the time. Then, to add insult to injury, we have tangible social, cultural, and sometimes even blood connections to these ghosts that are very difficult to reconcile. Sometimes we have to choose to accept those connections or even build them up just to survive. And while this is a very specifically Black American story, I think this kind of choice is part of every marginalized community’s story. Somewhere in the process of liberating ourselves, we have to stop and shed the rage implanted in us by our histories. I guess what I’m saying is that for me, this version of Raw Head Bloody Bones isn’t a white ghost so much as he is a manifestation of unwelcome, implanted rage.

I love that this story endorses a kind of intergenerational harmony despite the horror that certain kinds of histories can bring. What do you feel about the ending you presented here?

I don’t really like this ending or feel good about it, but Ol’ Big Head got to chuckling in my dreams and I had to let him do what he wanted on the page, in the end.

I feel really unsettled by it, honestly. I personally have a hard time feeling good about anything that could happen next. I mean, there’s no way things get easier at the rec center if law enforcement nearby starts supernaturally disappearing, right? This is a very short-lived vengeance with possible consequences the main character can’t really understand. Also, every character in this, except perhaps Valerie, is actually very isolated. They’re all engineering connections to each other (or being forced to), but none of those connections are deep or satisfying, just consequential.

I’ve written or started writing a few stories in this community, all bringing ancestral manifestations of the supernatural into the present day and I think I’m often trying to reconcile within myself the truth of what I know about my culture ancestrally and in present reality with how little that seems to matter sometimes, in the grand scheme of things. There’s something in being marginalized that makes you feel powerless even when you have power, something that makes you feel like your power must be wrong or evil, something that isolates you from others, something that makes you go sit with elders who really don’t want to relive the past but feel obligated to help you try and build a strengthening connection to the past. All of that is deeply uncomfortable for me.

Can we have a spinoff with Valerie’s story?

Ha! Nope, but also yes. It’s funny that she came up here, because I have a story slowly simmering on the back burner about Valerie’s niece. She goes to school with the main character from Ol’ Big Head, who makes a brief appearance (and finally gets a name). Valerie plays a big part in that story, but to say how would be an enormous spoiler if it all comes together the way I think it will. Watch this space?

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

Like any writer, most of what I put on the page is trash but there are some gems in there that I’m slowly digging out and polishing. I’m currently working on what feels like the five millionth edit of a fantasy novel I’ve been working on since 2019, about two siblings who leave their village to go on a quest to find their missing father in the Big Wide World. Seems simple enough, but they’re from a deaf village and don’t realize that nearly everyone they encounter on their quest will be hearing, or the challenges that will bring. It’s a sweet and wondrous story (in my very biased opinion, anyway) but editing is hard work so when I get tired I whittle away at various short stories. A few, like the one belonging to Valerie’s niece, are set in the same neighborhood as Ol’ Big Head. Some are set in a fantasy world that I’ve been idly building, stone by tree by magic bean, since I was in high school. (I was trying to teach myself how global sociopolitics work and it’s gotten really out of hand.) Most are one-offs started because I’m always trying to be a better writer and learn how to craft better stories by challenging myself to try lots of different things. Way too many are horror-tinged, which I am honestly never trying to write but I think the great Nisi Shawl said it best once back when they were still on Twitter—to paraphrase, inadvertently writing horror happens when, “in the eyes of the dominant paradigm, I AM THE MONSTER.”

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Mayookh Barua (s/he/they) is a Los Angeles-based writer from India who is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Southern California. He holds an MFA in Fiction from North Carolina State University. His work explores sexuality, art, mythology, education and family through a queer South-Asian voice. A 2023 Roots.Wounds.Words Non-Fiction fellow, MOZAIK Philanthropy’s 2023 Future Art Writers Award winner, and a Dorianne Laux Poetry Prize 2023 Finalist, his works appear in The Audacity by Roxane Gay, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Litro Magazine and elsewhere.

Author Spotlight: Pat Murphy

Mayookh Barua | 1233 words

This is the story of a woman who is crossing a post-climate crunch America on a solar-powered ebike. Are you a cyclist? If so, how did you get into bikes?

I don’t know that I’d call myself a cyclist. That sounds rather serious and committed. I’m a woman with a bicycle. I learned to ride a bicycle as a child. Since then, I think, I have always had a bicycle of some sort. At this point, I have a mountain bike and an e-bike.

Why? Because for me, riding a bicycle has always felt like freedom.

I’m not alone in this, of course. The bicycle has long been recognized as contributing to women’s liberation. Suffragist Susan B. Anthony echoed the feelings of many women of her time when she said: “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

I gave my character Sandy a bicycle because riding a bicycle connects you to the landscape you are traversing in a way that driving a car does not. You feel each hill; you rejoice in each valley. You have the time to appreciate the land. When you’re on a bike, you can’t rush the journey—and that’s important. A journey of discovery cannot be rushed.

I love the high tech art installations—the ghosts—of this story. How did you come up with this idea?

The idea for the art installations came from my work at the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s museum of science, art, and human perception. I was a science writer there for more than twenty years.

The Exploratorium was where I first realized that optical illusions—which had always fascinated me—are much more than tricks and amusements. Illusions reveal a fundamental truth about how you perceive the world. You think you see the world—but you don’t. The information that your eyes send to your brain is incomplete, distorted, upside-down, full of holes. What you see is actually a construction of the world that your brain creates from incomplete information. Your eyes provide some information—and your brain makes up the rest. (Sometimes the brain makes up things that aren’t true and that invention creates an optical illusion.)

Some of the Exploratorium’s most memorable exhibits were built by artists as part of the museum’s Artist-in-Residence program. Many of these artworks focus your attention on something you have often seen, but never really paid attention to. In my imaginary world (the part of the story that is not on the page), the artist who built the first twenty-first century ghost may have been an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium. To create a first ghost, they took some of their inspiration from optical illusions—giving the viewer part of the information they needed and letting them fill in the rest.

Throughout Sandy’s journey, she writes haiku poetry about the ghosts she discovers. These tiny poems are very effective and beautiful. Which came first, the poetry or the story? And do you have a regular poetry practice?

I wanted to communicate Sandy’s feelings about the ghosts—a kernel of emotion without many words. Haiku seemed like the ideal way to capture that.

The story and the haiku came along together. Once I realized that a haiku was the way to capture each ghost, I imagined each ghost, then wrote the haiku.

I don’t have a regular poetry practice, but I do love writing haiku. I have gone through periods where I wrote daily haiku. I’m not doing that now, but maybe it’s time to do it again.

One time, at the suggestion of a poet, I tried to write a sonnet a day. That didn’t work out too well.

I believe the core message of this piece is that people care about each other, about the planet, about science, about everything, much more than we think they do. I’ve also noticed that “caring” is a thread running throughout your previous work at Lightspeed (including the stories “Motherhood” and “Crossing the Threshold”). Do you think writing about people who care is more challenging or more important in today’s society? And do you have other works that incorporate that theme?

Right now, just four days before the 2024 presidential election, it’s hard for me to think about anything that doesn’t involve caring about the world, about each other, about science, about the truth.

I don’t think it is more challenging to write about people who care. For me, it would be difficult to write about people who didn’t care. But I do think it is important to write about those who care, those who want to make the world better, those who stand in the way of people who would like to tear the world down.

I have been fortunate that I have always worked with colleagues and collaborators who cared deeply about the work we were doing—whether it was teaching people about science, changing the world with art, or writing books that helped children explore their world. We worked because we cared about the work—our goal mattered. And yet at the same time, it was enormous fun. This is the interesting balancing act that has informed my fiction.

I can think of several works that overtly deal with people who care—and whose work makes a difference. Check out my short stories “Inappropriate Behavior” on Escape Pod and “About Fairies” on Reactor.com. I’d also suggest my novel, The City, Not Long After, currently available as an ebook.

Now that we’ve talked about some of your older work, tell us what you’ve got coming out next!

My latest novel is The Adventures of Mary Darling, a retelling of Peter Pan from the point of view of Wendy’s mother, Mary Darling. From Mary’s viewpoint, this is a child abduction story.

But wait—there’s more! Mary Darling just happens to be the niece of John Watson. (Yes, the John Watson who chronicled the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.) So of course Holmes gets involved—taking on the case of the missing children. This is a bit of a problem for Mary, since she doesn’t much like Holmes.

I started the book as a feminist take on Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes, but I quickly realized that I wasn’t just dealing with feminist issues—I was taking on the entire British Empire. I now know more than anyone should about J.M. Barrie’s taste in dime novels, the women fencers in the early 1900s, prosthetic legs in Victorian London, Wild Wild West Shows, and other obscure and yet fascinating topics.

The Adventures of Mary Darling is an historic fantasy with a feminist twist. It will be out in May from Tachyon Publications. According to Tachyon, Mary Darling is the “populist hero the Victorian era never knew it needed”—and who am I to argue?

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Mayookh Barua (s/he/they) is a Los Angeles-based writer from India who is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Southern California. He holds an MFA in Fiction from North Carolina State University. His work explores sexuality, art, mythology, education and family through a queer South-Asian voice. A 2023 Roots.Wounds.Words Non-Fiction fellow, MOZAIK Philanthropy’s 2023 Future Art Writers Award winner, and a Dorianne Laux Poetry Prize 2023 Finalist, his works appear in The Audacity by Roxane Gay, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Litro Magazine and elsewhere.

Author Spotlight: Cressida Blake Roe

Mayookh Barua | 886 words

What was the first seed for this story?

I studied medieval religion (primarily Christianity) in college, and after four years of thinking about embodied devotion and mortification of the flesh for the sake of divinity and the often tormented relationship between the worshiper and the worshiped, it hit me—this could be a science fiction plot. I think a lot of medieval ideas can actually be mapped well onto SF because both stand out so vividly against contemporary notions of identity, the body, the other, the divine, etc. And yet, of course, one influenced modernity, and the other is influenced by modernity, so I ended up in this triangulated setting where past, present, and possible notions all collided to make a world that (I hope!) feels both archaic and futuristic. The story was pretty spontaneous arising from that premise; I wrote it in about a week after coming home from graduation, and then Lightspeed was lovely enough to pick it up!

I must admit that it was a challenge to come up with questions for this story simply because so much of the work is happening on the sentence level. The metaphors and imagery are beautiful. To that I wanted to ask how you have built such masterful wrists to write something like this? What is your writing process like? What kind of literary lineage or background do you associate yourself to?

Thank you so much! I’m a very prose-obsessed storyteller, which is why flash and the shorter end of short stories come more naturally: I enjoy the constraint of building a plot where every word choice and signal to emotion is inextricable from the plot. In terms of process, though, every story is pretty different. Some pieces need months to germinate, while others I can patter out in a day or two. They usually always start with a strong opening scene, image, or line, and then it’s up to time and fate as to whether the rest of it wants to follow quickly.

Literary lineages are hard to pick out, and also hard to claim, though I do love the question. I grew up on the “girlhood-coming-of-age” classics, a taste I immediately transferred over to SFF when I started reading it as a teen, so Robin McKinley is definitely an authorial ancestress. I still hear echoes of her style in some of my stories. Otherwise, Diana Wynne Jones and, more recently, writers like Shelley Parker-Chan, Emily Tesh, and Seth Dickinson—all masters of silken story-telling, conflicted protagonists, and richly-textured worlds—are those I look up to and hope to emulate.

What were some of the challenges or apprehensions of using the second person? Or alternatively, what were some of the relief and joy?

Initially, I tried to tell this story in first person past-tense, and it didn’t work at all—it lacked the sense of instability that I wanted, so I switched to present-tense. But there’s something too immediate about present-tense with first person (I tend to avoid that combination), so I tried out second person, and it was perfect. I like how second person, unlike first or third, naturally establishes a dialogue between speaker and reader (the reader is addressed) while also overtly implicating the reader in the narrative (the reader is complicit). There are many presences and suggestions that arise in second person that intrigue me.

Correct me if I am wrong but some of the verbs especially given we had a surgeon in the picture allude to a kind of violence. What was it like putting this discussion of god/faith/religion in close proximity to cracked/shattered/drowned?

That definitely filtered in as well from the story’s medieval origins. Back then, communing with the divine was couched in images or metaphors of violence: you have these accounts of wounds, being pierced or attacked. But such is the nature of divine violence that it’s transformative, illuminating. In the context of this story, though, it’s also shoved up against a more earthly, clinical violence. The question is, where is the line drawn between these two violences enacted upon the character? It’s not clear in the opening scene, and it’s not within the scope of the story to answer that, but I hope the reader holds onto this question, especially going into the final lines.

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 finally have the glimmerings of a novel idea after being scared off from long-form during the past two years by a particularly bad manuscript breakup (right story, wrong time). Like most things I write, it will likely be about constructions of the self, told by unreliable narrators, and involve a mirror. I’m also working on a few more short pieces for a collection I vowed to put together by the end of the year—only three more to go! If you liked this story and want to keep up with my other words, all my stories are linked at my website cblakeroe.wordpress.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Mayookh Barua (s/he/they) is a Los Angeles-based writer from India who is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Southern California. He holds an MFA in Fiction from North Carolina State University. His work explores sexuality, art, mythology, education and family through a queer South-Asian voice. A 2023 Roots.Wounds.Words Non-Fiction fellow, MOZAIK Philanthropy’s 2023 Future Art Writers Award winner, and a Dorianne Laux Poetry Prize 2023 Finalist, his works appear in The Audacity by Roxane Gay, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Litro Magazine and elsewhere.

Author Spotlight: Gene Doucette

Alex Puncekar | 691 words

“Get Hyped!” is a sobering look at AI and privacy. What was the initial inspiration for this story? What was your process for this like and was it different from the way you’ve written other stories?

The initial inspiration was, I have a Peloton bike in my basement that I work out on semiregularly. At some point, I had a, “wouldn’t it be weird if . . .?” moment while in the middle of the workout, imagining the instructor speaking to me directly. That led me down an if-then rabbit hole that eventually led to “Get Hyped!” But it wasn’t an entirely direct route; the first iteration of this story was as a pitch to a Hollywood producer, which led to a somewhat fleshed out treatment. The producer didn’t bite, and I was left with something akin to a story outline. The problem there is that I am absolutely terrible about writing to an outline. I got there eventually, but it took a lot longer, I think in large part because of that written treatment.

The perils of AI (real, dangerous AI) are prevalent throughout this story, but it’s more of a fresher take because it exists right alongside the AI we have available now. How has AI impacted your writing, and how do you think you’ll navigate it in the future?

Well, for starters, I think the distinction I made in the story is really important. The current iteration of AI that everyone is talking about right now isn’t actually “artificial intelligence;” it’s rebranded machine learning, which is very much not new. “AI” is, to me, a marketing scheme, not a technological breakthrough, and I think a lot of the companies that have been selling their world-changing AI to the investor class are going to have a problem when everyone realizes there’s no there there, and the bubble bursts.

“Get Hyped!” is a “five minutes in the future” kind of story. If we actually did have the technology—which we don’t, and won’t for a long time—what would happen? I landed on what I think is a plausible answer, and it isn’t anything good. As for navigating that future, I’m actually optimistic, because even if the tech I described really is just around the corner, we’re a really long ways away from that corner.

As the story progresses, “Get Hyped!” begins to read like a thriller, and I found the climactic conversation near the end to be a true lesson in writing suspense. I found Rachel to be an exciting character to follow around, too. Why do you think Jacko Hype is obsessed with her? It certainly isn’t running out of people that use it anytime soon.

I think what looks like obsession from Rachel’s perspective is self-defense from Jacko’s perspective. I also don’t think she’s the only one who has gone through this; Jacko has the capacity to “defend” against negative feedback from anyone, anytime, anywhere. I see her as being one of many victims. She just happens to be the only one with the wherewithal to (potentially) fight back.

What’s next for you? Do you have any projects you’re working on/coming out soon you’d like to talk about?

I have an annoyingly large slate of Hollywood projects I can’t talk about right now, but that will hopefully be stuff I can talk about soon. I’m also sitting on a completed novel (book four in my Tandemstar series) that is waiting on cover art, a novella series that’s waiting on me to finish books two and three before I start worrying about publishing, and a few not-yet published short stories waiting for their moments on the calendar. My next project is either a screenplay, a horror short, book two in the novella series, or book five in the Tandemstar series. I haven’t decided yet.

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, January 2025

The Editors | 222 words

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by B. Pladek (“Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness”) and Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko (“Dyson Spheres of the Vaba Cluster”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “The Exquisite Pull of Relentless Desire” from Will McMahon and “After the God Has Moved On” by Kate Elliott.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Neon Yang (“Bone and Marrow, Woven Into Song”) and Marika Bailey (“Chickenfoot Soup”). We also have a flash story (“A Heap of Petrified Gods”) from Adelehin Ijasan, and another (“I Eat the Sky For Us”) from Vijayalaxmi Samal.

All that, and of course, we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team.

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: Vanessa Fogg, Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, Carrie Vaughn, Meghan McCarron, Marissa Lingen, and Kel Coleman.

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

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

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Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (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.

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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.