Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

The New Mother

by Eugene Fischer

The End of the War

by Django Wexler

From So Complex a Beginning

by Julie Nováková

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to our September 2020 issue!

It seems like we’re all getting a bit of a reality check on that cyberspace future we were all promised. After all the virtual events I’ve attended, I think it lands firmly in “needs improvement,” but with the alternative being catching some deadly plague, I’ll take it. I haven’t attended an in-person convention since last November, so this officially marks the longest gap since my return to con-going in 2000. I feel like with all the reduced travel, I should have more time on my hands, but it just doesn’t seem to work that way. Maybe I should add temporal distortion to 2020’s list of oddities. Can’t decide if that would make time pass faster or slower. Who am I kidding? 2020 has a definite leaning when it comes to good vs bad news.

Definitely getting a bit stir crazy here. Hope you’re fairing a bit better. Maybe some stories will help. Time to escape.

Until next time,

-Neil

The New Mother

Eugene Fischer

The girls were spayed. That is the only word for it. Four sisters, the oldest five and the youngest barely two, with dirt-crusted fingers and baggy t-shirts, huddled next to a police van. They are identical in the way of twins; different sizes but, excepting perhaps some scars and birthmarks, their bodies are the same. The picture of them standing together next to the van is like a textbook illustration of early human development. And hidden under their shirts, carved low across the belly, the one scar they all share.

None of the many news services that reported the story said that the girls had been spayed like bitches. In the articles, they were “subjected to hysterectomies,” or similar overly-clinical distortions. But the video of the police raid on the Charismatic Church of the Redeemer shows the Reverend Kenny Kendall’s eyes wheeling in their sunken sockets as he is led out in handcuffs. While there are no known videos of the sermons he delivered to his followers in their South Texas compound, if they were anything like the screeds on his website then he told his congregation that “a person in whom a seed has not been planted cannot have a soul, and so is not a person true, but an animal grown obscenely person-shaped.” It seems clear that what Reverend Kendall saw growing up and wearing out shoes in his perfect community were not little girls. They were vermin. Only a matter of years away from becoming a pestilence. What he had ordered done was a veterinary procedure.

Interviewed in prison, Reverend Kendall explains. “It took a while to realize what we had, of course. What they were. I’d imagine it takes a while for everyone, you know. And how could we suspect? None of us knew what Candace had done.” Candace Montross, the girls’ mother and former member of Kendall’s congregation. “But once Johnnie had his accident, everyone knew it weren’t his seed showing in Candace. Then the truth came out, as it is wont to do.”

Candace was taken to Camp Kendall (as locals in nearby Wharton call the church compound) by her parents at age eleven. At seventeen she ran away and hitchhiked to Houston, but found herself ill-equipped for independent living and called her parents to beg money. She was tracked down, taken back to the compound, and married to Johnnie Montross. Her oldest daughter was born nine months later. She’s now twenty-three and still legally married to Johnnie, fifteen years her senior and paraplegic since falling off a roof a year and a half ago. She’s also pregnant again, for the second time since Johnnie’s accident.

“She whored herself in Houston, obviously, and caught it and brought it back with her. Couldn’t do anything to her directly with her parents right there in the pews, a man and a woman. But even they eventually came to understand it weren’t an abortion. They were as disgusted as anyone at the idea of Candace bearing more of those monsters. All with their own daughter’s face! What does it mean, I ask you, for the institution of motherhood, for all of us, if we let that sort of thing happen?”

There are certainly monsters in this world. Sometimes they ask valuable questions. What does it mean, indeed?

The light slanting through the windows had dimmed to nothing while Tess typed. A moth landed on the screen of her huge new monitor, now the brightest thing in the room. She had spent years of her life submerged in her recliner, cup of coffee at hand, ancient heavy laptop balanced on her stomach. Judy had long offered to replace the battered machine, but Tess was attached. She liked how solid it was, the familiar heat of it, every well-earned scratch in the plastic. She’d swapped out the keyboard twice and the screen hinges once. No other laptop felt right to her. But when Tess finally started to show, Judy came home with a new TV stand, wireless keyboard, and that 30-inch beast of a monitor.

“Your computer is a fetus panini press,” she said. “You can have it back in five months. Until then, it’s living on the stand.”

Judy had developed a brooding concern for Tess’s physical wellbeing. Judy’s sister had quipped it was “typical Daddy anxiety,” but Tess knew it was also partly guilt over having won the donor argument. Judy’s position that they should use an unknown donor, that it was more important to control for all-too-common legal risks rather than astronomically unlikely medical ones, had eventually won Tess over. But in the aftermath of that victory, she had become overprotective of Tess’s health, solicitously interrogating every groan and sniffle. Tess had told her to knock it off, but it was kind of gratifying.

So now Tess typed her articles on keys that felt fragile under her fingers. And the mug by her side was just milk with a splash of coffee for flavor. Her obstetrician had recommended that she quit coffee entirely. Something about her chronic borderline anemia. The first trimester was supposed to be bad enough all on its own, but she had a private theory that the worst of her troubles, from muscle aches to nausea, had really been due to caffeine withdrawal.

Tess got up to turn on some lights and brush away the moth. The screen was radiating a haze of heat and she flushed with mild resentment. She leaned over the laptop to review her words. Tess guessed that her editor might complain about the “spayed like bitches” line. She moved to change it to something tamer, then stopped herself and left the line intact.

It was her first time working for this editor. She had spent the last four years freelancing for the alternative press, building an audience writing articles for The Hiccup and Bentedge and The Stage Left. An audience that apparently included Lynette Robin, features editor for American Moment, who had contacted her out of the blue with a contract offer for a story on HCP. The police raid on Camp Kendall had gotten a lot of attention, and Lynette wanted to publish an overview article on what had befallen Candace and her daughters while the news was still hot. Tess had been reporting on the issue for long enough and was Texas-local; could she, Lynette had asked, meet an aggressive deadline for a feature story? If she could, the job was hers.

Tess turned on networking, and all the new email alerts popped up in the corner of her screen. There was no sign of the message she was hoping for, the one from Candace Montross’s attorney saying that his client had finally consented to an interview. But right at the top of her inbox was Lynette, writing back about the outline proposal she’d requested Tess send.

Outline looks good. Just a few things: I’m not sure about a whole section on the Chinese one-child policy. Not because it isn’t relevant, but just because American Moment has something of a mandate to focus on contemporary American culture. Maybe we could include a condensed version of that content as a sidebar? Or spin it into a followup article once we’ve built interest? Let me know what you think. Also, you need a section detailing the mechanisms of the disease. I know that sort of thing wasn’t necessary when you were writing for The Hiccup, but for much of our readership your article will be their introduction to this condition. I think it’s worth nailing down the specifics. Other than that, green light all the way. I’ve attached the travel reimbursement form, just fill in the blanks for your expenses. And start sending me copy when you have it. I’m excited about this one. -LR

She was so hands-on. Cheerful about it, but still Tess bristled. She’d never been asked to submit in-progress copy before. The request felt invasive, like she was being asked to spread her closet out on the front lawn. The readership was worth it; an article for American Moment would get ten times as many readers as anything else she’d written. More, even. But the thought of several weeks of back-and-forth made her tired.

Everything made her tired. She slapped her laptop closed, and the monitor spasmed through a handful of test screens before settling sullenly to black.

Upstairs, in the glass and cherrywood cavern of their bedroom, Tess found Judy already in bed. She was propped up on a pile of pillows, reading glasses tight under her eyes, pallid in the wash of light from her bedside lamp and her tablet. When Tess came in, Judy gestured at a suitcase standing in the corner.

“I packed your bag,” she said without looking up from her screen. “We’ll throw it in the car and I can take you straight to the airport from the party. Look through it. See if I forgot anything.”

Tess dragged her fingertips over the rough nylon of the suitcase. She rocked it back on its wheels and pinched the black rubber trim. “Did you forget anything?”

“No.”

Tess abandoned the bag and wandered off toward her nightclothes. “What are you working on?”

“Schools. Still schools. Not sure there’s a preschool in this city that’ll do. Three visits this week, and I’ve come away three different flavors of disappointed. I’m on the verge of deciding to just start my own.”

Tuesday night, and already three more visits. “Do you know anything about how to run a school?” asked Tess, shrugging into her pajamas.

“Nothing. Yet. But somewhere in this city there’s a brilliant educator who’s spent a decade banging her head against incompetent administration. She knows. Probably there’s a dozen of her. I’ll find them all and pick the best one. If I get started in the next six months, by the time Decaf is three we’ll own the best preschool in town.” She clicked off her tablet and dropped it on the charging mat by her bedside. “I think I’d do this one as a non-profit. I’ve been wanting to do a non-profit.”

Tess got into bed and flopped over, buried her face in Judy’s hip. She felt Judy’s fingers comb across her scalp and inhaled an atmosphere of fabric softener and banana body wash. Judy always showered at night. Tess usually showered in the morning. “Suppose this was inevitable,” she mumbled toward the mattress.

Judy had a habit of turning personal obstacles into entrepreneurial opportunities. Inspired by her own turbulent youth, her first company was a child access center, providing supervised exchanges and visitation for the children of violently estranged couples. When the private ambulance company for which her stepsister worked as an EMT collapsed under the weight of an embezzling scandal, Judy bought three of the vans in liquidation and founded a replacement, moving her sister behind a desk to handle the day-to-days. When she built her house, she’d worked with an architect willing to study up on sustainable building practices, then partnered with her on a consulting company for green renovations and remodels. Tess had profiled Judy after that company’s winning bid on a convention center renovation. “I like service industries,” Judy had explained to Tess in their first interview. “Business contexts change, but people are a constant.” The two of them met up later that week in a sushi bar, then again the very next night at a wild game restaurant Judy knew about in a 100-year-old log cabin. Tess moved in to Judy’s house when the lease on her apartment expired eight months later.

“Did the editor write back?” asked Judy.

“Yeah. I’ve got a fancy travel spreadsheet to fill out and everything. It’s all covered. Except for China.”

“Were you planning on going to China?” She slipped her glasses to the tip of her nose and stared down at Tess over the rims. “You’re supposed to tell me before you go to China.”

“Take those off. I was going to write about it. But everything else is a go. Including the interview with the Montross girl that I don’t actually have yet. I think her attorney’s ignoring me now.” Tess rolled over on her left side and felt marginally more comfortable. “I promised I could get her.”

Judy planted a reassuring palm on the round of Tess’s hip. “You’ll get her.”

“What if I can’t?”

“Then you’ll have to rework the article. But you will. You got an interview with the guy in prison, didn’t you?”

Kenny Kendall had talked to Tess against his attorney’s advice. Before the interview, she thought it was because her article was the biggest microphone available to a man in love with his own voice. And maybe that was part of it; he’d struck her as someone who’d been waiting his whole life to paint himself as martyr to a cause. But it wasn’t just that. He’d recognized Tess. Knew her by name. Had leaned back in his orange jumpsuit, pinched at his eyebrows, and said he’d expected someone bigger.

Tess tried to put it out of her mind. Being part of the story, rather than just reporting it, would make talking to Candace even more complicated. Her inability to find Candace at all was enough to worry about for now.

“Are you still using the light?” she asked.

Judy turned the lamp off and the soft LED gloaming of idle electronics filled the room. Tess stole pillows from Judy’s hoard, one for her head and one for between her knees. The comforter flapped against her body and Tess felt Judy’s arm slip under her own and drape across her ribs, warm breath on the back of her neck. Tess moved Judy’s wrist so it wasn’t pressing on her breast.

“How important is it that I go to the party?” Tess asked.

“You have to go to the party. It’s for you.”

“It’s going to be crowded,” she said.

Judy didn’t answer.

“I’m too focused on this trip.”

“You can handle it,” Judy said. “It’s gifts and sitting, you’ll be fine.”

Was there anything more awful than gifts and sitting? Tess curled in her knees. “I wish I could take a pill.”

“No flippers for Decaf.”

“No flippers for Decaf.” It was a phrase worn smooth, a call-and-response begun in the months since Tess learned that she had to quit her anti-anxiety medication for the duration of her pregnancy.

Judy’s breath slowed and evened. Tess shifted, twisted onto her back. Judy stirred but didn’t wake, just tucked her narrow nose into the pillow and pressed pale knuckles to her mouth. Judy’s was an accommodating sleep that came when called. Tess’s sleep, like her ability to enjoy her friends, came usually from a medicine bottle. The pills used to sit out on her nightstand, but were now shut away in the bathroom cabinet. Tess wondered what, if any, meds would be in the bag Judy had packed for her. None of her normal ones. She wouldn’t be surprised to find instead one of the herbal supplements with which Judy decorated their pantry. Valerian or something. Tess had no faith in substances she couldn’t imagine being synthesized in gleaming, sanitary laboratories, surrounded by starched white coats and lasers. Taking one of those grassy capsules was like eating off the floor.

Without her prescription bottles, all she had left were words. Pliant letters on the page. The story was what mattered. Losing the cross-cultural angle would change the balance of the piece. She let the article fill her mind, then experimentally plucked out China. She shut the country away in the cabinet and watched her words twist and flow to fill the hole. Contexts shifted, sentences blossomed, and paragraphs slid over and through each other until, eventually, they began to blur into dreams.

Candace Montross’s condition has yet to be definitively named. It was first called Human Asexual Reproduction Syndrome, or HARS, a term that proved less than fully accurate with the discovery that the disease is sexually transmitted. The name is no longer used within the medical community, though it remains in use online, where reactionary commenters still make references to “HARS whores.” Terms in more common use are Human Communicable Parthenogenesis (HCP) and Gamete Diploidy Syndrome (GDS). HCP is the popular term among the affected; the most widely read news site for this growing culture is titled The Hiccup. But GDS has become the preferred nomenclature in the medical journals, and is the term that will be used in this article.

All of these names are attempts to capture precisely how it is that babies are being made now in a way they have never been made before. Recall the old, familiar recipe: two cells, a sperm from a man and an egg from a woman, fuse into a single cell which grows into a baby. The sperm and the egg can fuse this way because they are, at a genetic level, different from all the other cells in the body. Every cell contains our complete genetic code, split up into 23 chromosomes. Most cells have two copies of each chromosome (one from mom, the other from dad) for a total of 46. This property of having two copies of every chromosome is called “diploidy.” Almost every cell in the human body is diploid. The lone exception are the gametes, the sperm and the egg. Gametes are “haploid”–they only have one copy of each chromosome. Being haploid is what allows two gametes to fuse into a single diploid cell with a new mix of chromosomes that will develop into a genetically distinct person. This is sexual reproduction, the way human beings have made more human beings from the beginning of the species until sometime in the last six years.

Candace Montross’s eggs, like the eggs of a growing number of women around the world, are not haploid. They are diploid. Her eggs are fully capable of implanting in her womb and growing into a baby that shares every one of Candace’s genes, a perfect clone of her only biological parent. They weren’t always that way. Her gametes were altered after she was raped by a man in Houston who also had diploid gametes, and who also wasn’t born that way. They both, now, have GDS. Since diploid sperm are nonviable, Candace’s rapist is a sterile carrier of the disease, which renders all men who contract it sterile. But they can still transmit it to women, whose diploid eggs will put them at risk for pregnancy whenever they ovulate. Their genetically identical children will themselves be carriers, and will similarly begin auto-impregnating when they reach puberty. This is a new form of reproduction which crowds out the old, and only time will tell which method is more robust.

There were giant ants in the Atlanta airport, six feet long at least. They stretched across the ceiling in a curious, seeking line that curled down the wall of baggage claim. One lone ant had been installed on the floor, and Tess ran a hand over its copper and urethane carapace as she walked by on her way to the car rental desks. When she got to her hotel room, she found ants there too. These were alive and more traditionally sized, clumsy brown specks swarming the lid from a pudding cup that had fallen behind the nightstand and been overlooked by the housekeeping staff. The second room she tried stank of cigarettes and sent her, retching, back into the hall. The third was tolerable.

In the morning, Tess found that her lavender blouse didn’t fit right anymore. She wasn’t that much bigger in the chest, but still the fabric gaped between the buttons and pulled tight around her shoulders. Her skirt sat lower than she was used to, also. She tugged and adjusted, but there was no fixing it. At least her jacket still fit, if she wore it open. The sides hung down like a charcoal frame for her belly. It hadn’t made sense to Tess to buy a whole new professional wardrobe for something that would be done with in a few months. And how often did she need to get this dressed up for work anyway? Before the Kendall raid, almost never. The last time she’d talked to Dr. Long-Kamal it’d just been a day of intermittent emails. She’d done the whole thing in sweatpants. Tess gave her hems a final tug in front of the mirror, then looked over her notes until it was time to head to Emory.

Eleanor Long-Kamal. Forty-six, unmarried, no kids. Undergrad at UC Santa Barbara, Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Colorado. Discovered what she called at the time “Human Asexual Reproduction Syndrome” a little under two years ago, while faculty at the University of Texas Health Science Center. “Discovered” in that she was the first scientist to notice the disease; thousands of women, of course, knew about it already. Tess was one of them. But Dr. Long-Kamal’s discovery was the tipping point for the medical community. This would be Tess’s first face-to-face encounter with her, and their first full interview.

Dr. Long-Kamal was out when Tess arrived. “She’s on joint fellowship with Rollins and the CDC,” the department secretary explained. “There’s an off-site lab where she spends a lot of time. Can’t be she’s gone long though, sweetie. I know she’s expecting you.” She led Tess to a break room with a long folding table, assortment of orphaned chairs, and a love seat where a grad student napped with his knees bent over the armrest, blue and gray sneakers dangling. The secretary rousted him and gave the seat to Tess.

“You want some coffee? Or there’s usually some cokes in the fridge.” She yanked open the refrigerator. “There’s no cokes. But can I get you coffee? Or some water?”

“No, it’s all right. I probably shouldn’t drink anything.”

“Oh, I know how it is. I’ve got three myself, two boys and a girl. The bathroom’s out this way, end of the hall on the left. You come and say if you need anything. Or send Derek. He’s not doing much, is he?”

The grad student had dragged three chairs into a row and stretched himself over them, trying to get comfortable enough to go back to sleep. When the secretary left, he shrugged into a seat back and said, “I’ve got two hours left on my protocol before the centrifuge.” Tess nodded, and the grad student closed his eyes.

The walls of the break room were covered in posters and announcements. There were false color micrographs of cells, cutting-edge smears in neon blue and green. There were handwritten signs and notices. “Please rinse out coffee mugs thanks.” “This fridge is for FOOD ONLY!” Taped up on the wall near Tess’s head was a printout of a graph with the words “FUCK YES” written above in marker. The figure, all dots and trend lines, was utterly incomprehensible.

Tess shifted in her seat, chased an itch under the edge of her shoe. She felt a stretching bulge, a brief squirming that she still couldn’t quite convince herself was Decaf moving inside, and not just some intermittent digestive insult. She glanced at the grad student, dozing again with a white-sleeved elbow creased over his eyes. She realized she was holding herself frozen, taking shallow sips of air, like this was his bedroom and she was tiptoeing through. She dug her phone from her purse. In a waiting room at Emory, she texted Judy. Feel like a specimen for dissection. Butterflies and pins.

Her phone buzzed a moment later. You’re the journalist. You’re the one with the scalpel. Did you take a pill?

Judy had packed one of her alternative remedies. Homeopathic, it looked like. Tess had found it the night before in a plastic bag with her soap, shampoo, and the new toothpaste that didn’t make her gag, as the flavor of mint now did. In there too was a brown glass bottle around which Judy had taped a label in her own neat script reading, “Placebos. Take for anxiety.”

Tess texted back, No, but I saw that. Funny.

The effect is real. That’s science, sent Judy.

Why’d I even fly out here? Can get all I need from you.

A woman in a striped polo appeared in the doorway, hands braced across the frame. She had a name badge dangling from her shirt by a shiny metal clip and vibrant red frames resting on the deep cheekbones that Tess recognized from photographs. There was a streak of gray in her tied-back hair, though, that wasn’t in her faculty headshot. “You must be Ms. Mendoza,” she announced. She tumbled forward in to the room and scooped Tess’s hand in warm, strong fingers. “I’m Eleanor Long-Kamal.”

“Tess.”

“It’s a pleasure, Tess. So glad we’re finally doing this. I’m terribly sorry about the delay, I . . . ” she stopped as she noticed the grad student lying across the chairs. She pulled away the one supporting his legs, and Tess started at the sound of his soles slapping the floor. Eleanor said, “Derek, is that a lab coat in the break room?”

The grad student hunched up on his elbows. “It hasn’t been in the lab. It’s an extra. Clean from my office.” He glanced up at the wall and added, “I’ve got two hours left on my protocol.”

Eleanor loomed over him. “Sure, you know it’s clean. Anyone else walking by just sees one of my researchers napping in a lab coat. Do you want the undergrads thinking that’s okay? Or any reporters that should happen by, like our guest here?”

“I only grabbed it ‘cause they keep this place freezing.”

“Bring a jacket. I can’t have the press thinking I don’t care about contamination in my lab.” Eleanor turned back to Tess. “Come on down to my office.”

Once they were out of earshot of the break room, Eleanor said, “Hope I didn’t make you feel on the spot, using you to bludgeon Derek like that.”

“So he’s not supposed to wear a coat outside the lab?”

“God no. The stuff we work with? He should have known better. I’m big on lab safety. When I was in grad school I used to see people eating in lab coats sometimes. Turned my stomach.”

Eleanor’s office was a long, shallow room dominated by an ornate mahogany desk. The desktop was immaculate, but the floor surrounding was a shantytown of papers, journals, and books in teetering piles. Eleanor hefted some binders out of a cracked leather wingback by the wall and dragged the chair over, nudging stacks out of the way with the side of her boot.

“I’m a pretty organized person at home,” she said. “I’ve only been in this office five months. I guess that’s a long time, actually. But you know how things get away from you. Sit, please. So,” she said, lowering herself into her desk chair, “before we begin, if it’s not an indelicate question, can I ask how much of a personal stake you have in this topic?” She gestured with her chin at Tess’s abdomen and leaned back in her seat so the springs creaked.

“I don’t have it, if that’s what you mean,” said Tess, sitting down. The wings of the chair jutted in her peripheral vision like broad palms waiting to squeeze her skull. She felt a press of claustrophobia, swallowed it back, but inched forward in the seat when she leaned to retrieve her voice recorder. “But everyone has a personal stake, I think. Some people just don’t know it yet.”

“It’s so nice to do an interview with someone who gets it,” said Eleanor. “You know, you were the first to look for me. I’m surprised you’re writing for American Moment, though. Their science reporting is usually terrible. No offense. I mean, obviously I still read it.”

“It’s my first time writing for them,” said Tess. “And this won’t be a science article. I’m focusing on the social implications of the disease. The future of motherhood. Things like that.” She put her recorder on the desk between them. “May I?”

“Absolutely. I’m happy to answer any questions I can.”

Tess turned on the recorder. “Okay. So you were the first to discover GDS. Tell me how that happened.”

“I first started looking into it about, oh, twenty months ago. This was back in San Antonio. I was primarily researching Toxo at the time—that’s Toxoplasma gondii—and I read an article in the LA Times about a new psychological condition that was hitting pregnant women and new mothers, where they refused to believe their children really belonged to them. People were calling it ‘maternal dissociative disorder.’ As a Toxo researcher, I was used to thinking about possible infectious causes for psychological changes, so this was pretty interesting.” Eleanor leaned sideways in her chair and plucked something off the floor behind her desk. A plastic ball that expanded when she tugged on the sides. She played with it in her lap, colorful struts thrumping together as she spoke. “Of course, in the end it turned out not to be psychological at all. That initial misconception made people miss it for a long time.”

“That’s my next question. Why did it take so long for the medical community to realize this was something new. Because, as I understand it, we now think that GDS has been spreading for at least six years. Are you saying that the whole time it was just doctors who wouldn’t listen to their patients? It really took six years for someone to believe that women knew what they were talking about when they said there was something strange with their pregnancies?”

“That’s a little unfair,” said Eleanor. “You have to understand that there was nothing about this disease that would show up on the radar of the public health community. Even my initial interest was purely speculative. The only solid evidence for GDS was demographic. A slight bump in the birthrate and more girls being born than boys. No scientist looks at that data and thinks infectious disease. You see that and you look for social and environmental factors. Abstinence-only education and hormones in beef. We’re talking here about an STI whose only visible symptom is sexually active women getting pregnant. It was impossible to figure out what was happening until we started seeing it in infusion patients. Before that, there was no way to tell.”

“You can’t say there was no way to tell,” Tess said. “You could tell by listening to what women were saying. The alternative press started reporting on unexplainable pregnancies four years ago. I know, I wrote some of the stories.”

Eleanor shrugged. “They started being right about it four years ago. Fringe publications have been writing about virgin births a lot longer than that. As a scientist, you don’t start writing a grant proposal until you see it happen five times in the same hospital.”

Tess jotted grant prop in her notebook, a reminder to quote that line. Profit motive. Perverse incentive? She felt flush with uncharitable objectivity. “Okay, then. So now that you do know the condition exists, are you any closer to understanding what causes it?”

“I can’t answer that, actually. I have a paper on the subject under review right now. I can’t discuss results that are pending publication.”

“So you have learned something new about the cause.”

Eleanor gave a thin smile. “I promise, I’m not just being coy. I really can’t talk about that. Come back and ask me again in a few months.”

“All right. So then, officially at least, we still have no idea what’s causing it. Everyone thinks it’s a virus but–I know, you can’t comment on that. But we do know what it does. So what happens now? How do you see this situation developing?”

“That’s a multivariate question,” said Eleanor. She put down her toy, went to a bookcase, and started scanning titles. “It could develop a lot of ways, and will certainly develop differently in different places. For the U.S., the best case scenario is still that GDS turns out to be a curable condition.”

“So things could go back to normal?”

Eleanor laughed, a single sharp breath. “What do you mean by ‘normal’? If normal means how things were before GDS, not a chance. There’s a way for women to reproduce without men now, and thousands of people already have it. That genie isn’t going back in the bottle. Ah, here it is.” Eleanor pulled a thick oversized paperback off the shelf and brought it back to the desk. “But in the U.S., best case, we could have a new normal. One where individual women choose whether or not to be parthenogenetic. This raises a whole host of political questions, though. Should sexual reproduction be considered the default? Should girls born with GDS be compulsorily cured, or allowed to choose for themselves when they reach puberty? If we let them choose, what do we do in cases where girls begin ovulating before the age of informed consent? Put them on birth control? If we don’t, they’ll never experience what we consider a normal childhood, but handing out the pill to children is going to be controversial.” She wheeled her fingers in dismissive circles. “It just goes on. Even if we can cure it, things stay complicated. And that’s for our country. Look at this.”

Eleanor flipped through the book, found a chart, and turned it around for Tess to read. “This is Trends in Maternal Mortality. The World Health Organization publishes it every couple years. For every country they calculate the maternal mortality ratio, the number of maternal deaths per number of live births. In the developed world it’s negligible, but in places like Sub-Saharan Africa, giving birth is one of the most dangerous things a woman can do. If you’re a woman in Chad, your estimated lifetime risk of dying in childbirth, today, is one in fourteen. And that’s with only, on average, six children per woman. Call it . . . ” Eleanor flipped the book back around and looked up something in an appendix. “Call it seven or eight pregnancies total. A girl born with GDS could naturally experience over thirty pregnancies during her reproductive years. At those rates, if you happen to be a woman in Chad, you might as well just expect to die during childbirth.”

Eleanor turned the book toward Tess again and went back to her chair. “Barring both a cure and a revolutionary change in the way we do foreign aid, the best-case scenario is that in thirty years the world’s undeveloped countries overflow with orphans. Picture NGOs setting up quonset huts packed with tiny bunk beds. Soup lines of just little girls. That sort of thing. The famine is going to be on a whole new scale.”

Tess pressed down the glossy page so she could look over the tables. Afghanistan, 1 in 11. Congo, 1 in 24. Haiti, 1 in 93. United States, 1 in 2,100. She copied down numbers and flipped to another page. “What’s the worst case?” she asked.

“In the undeveloped world? Short term, infanticide, maybe genocide of the infected. Long term, extinction of the male population and massive reduction in average life expectancy,” Eleanor said. “You can take that book if you want. They’ll be putting out a new one soon.”

Tess closed the book and put it in her bag. The followup article Lynette had proposed was already taking shape in her mind. “And in the developed world? What’s the worst case scenario here?”

“Ah. I wish I could answer that one. It’s something I think about a lot. But this is where I have to remember to wear my CDC hat,” said Eleanor. “The CDC is a federal agency, and I’ve got three grad students and a post-doc working on money from the NIH. The truth is that for a wealthy nation like us, what constitutes the worst case scenario is a policy question, not a science question. It’s important for me to stay nonpartisan or I could put my funding at risk.” She spread her hands in a mea culpa. “I think I’m more effective as a researcher than I would be as an advocate. I’m sorry. I know that’s an unsatisfying answer.”

“I understand,” said Tess. She scratched another dollar sign in her notebook, out of fidelity to her earlier impulse to cast Eleanor as a kind of disease profiteer. But her heart wasn’t really in it anymore.

“What I can tell you,” said Eleanor, “is that our limiting factor won’t be poverty. It’ll be consensus. We have hospitals and access to hormonal birth control. However things end up, it’s going to be the result of a series of collective decisions about values. So our job–I’m talking yours and mine now–is to try and make sure those decisions are as informed as possible.”

Tess raised her pen and swirled it between her fingertips. “Working on it.”

“And of course, there’s nothing stopping you from advocacy, is there? I’m looking forward to seeing what you write. I promise not to call it terrible.” Eleanor grinned, then shook a large rubber watch down her wrist and checked the time. “Do you have any more questions? I have a meeting, but I can go a few minutes more if you need.”

“I think I’ve got enough here.” Tess stopped the recorder and put it back in her bag. “I can get back in touch with you if I need to?”

“Oh, sure.” They got up, and Eleanor shoved Tess’s chair back against the wall. “Are you parked in the lot off Clifton?” she asked. “My meeting’s across the street. I’ll walk down with you.” Eleanor grabbed a small backpack and slung it over one shoulder. “Who else do you have on your dance card while you’re in town?”

“Tomorrow I sit down with Donald Noyce of AABB,” Tess said. “Then I spend a week in D.C. Talking with people who can go on the record about policy.”

“I know Don a little. He’s a good guy. A good guy with a bit of a talent for rubbing people the wrong way. But he knows his stuff.”

“I’ve heard good things.”

At the end of the hall Eleanor turned toward the stairwell. Tess paused by the elevators. It took a moment for Eleanor to notice.

“Wait, what am I thinking. We’ll take the elevator.” She came back and pressed the button. “Habit. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“So when are you due?” Eleanor asked.

“October twenty-second,” said Tess.

“A little Libra. Unless he shows up late. Do you know what you’re going to name him?”

The elevator chimed and the doors slid open. “My partner and I have been calling it Decaf. We don’t know the sex yet. I’m scheduled to get a sonogram when I get back from this trip.”

“Oh,” said Eleanor. “Sorry. From what you said earlier, I just assumed you already knew.”

“Not yet. Not for a bit. I think I’d be fine with not knowing, but my partner. She couldn’t handle it.”

The elevator counted down the floors with soft beeps. Neither of them said anything more, the first time Eleanor had stopped talking all afternoon. Tess leaned against the wall, letting the steel handrail press comfortingly into her lower back, until the elevator spat them out at ground level.

As they walked outside into the Georgia sunshine, Eleanor asked, “So did you use a known donor?”

Oh. “No. No, it was an unknown donor. It’s much safer. Legally safer, I mean. There’s no risk that years later the guy decides he wants to try being your kid’s father.”

“Right. Of course.” Eleanor nodded. “That makes sense.”

Eleanor visored her hand over her glasses and scanned the sky. Then she caught Tess’s eyes again.

“Okay, this is none of my business, but given what you said before . . . I mean, you’re going to talk to Don about the blood banks, so you’ve probably thought of it already. But you do know there’s a chance the sperm banks are going to be a problem too, right? That’s another thing we might have to deal with.”

Did she know about the sperm banks? Of course she knew. She and Judy had argued for weeks. It was almost certain that the sperm banks were contaminated to some degree. For Tess, at least at first, how great that degree was didn’t matter. Any chance was too much. The amount of time you’ve spent researching this has you paranoid, Judy had countered. Every medical procedure has some risk. We’re in a state hostile to gays. The most important thing is to protect our family. In the end Tess had conceded. Judy was right that, of all the dangers associated with pregnancy, GDS would be the most minor. She was right that their legal risks as same-sex parents dwarfed their medical ones. She was right that they could, if Tess was worried, reduce the chances even further by selecting sperm that had been frozen for several years. And she was so invincibly certain when she said whatever happens, we can handle it, that she was probably right about that too. But still.

“Do you have any statistics?” Tess asked.

“On sperm banks?” said Eleanor.

“Or demographic data. Anything unpublished. If it’s out there, I’d have seen it already. I’ve looked.”

“I can’t discuss unpublished—”

“Off the record. Please.”

Eleanor probed at a pebble of asphalt with the toe of her boot and wiped sweat from the back of her neck. “Census data isn’t granular enough, is the problem. There’s a longitudinal study underway. Where are you from?”

“South Texas. Houston.”

“The birth rate bump in Texas has been slightly higher among Hispanics. Probably that’s attributable to the Catholic distaste for condoms. But to do any meaningful risk analysis, you’d need to account for selection bias. What cross section of men choose to donate, and what, if anything, do the banks disproportionately screen for? I’m not sure we have that data.”

“Yeah,” said Tess, “I didn’t think it was out there.”

“The chances are really low. Honestly, almost all pathogens are taken care of by the sperm washing process. Usually sexually transmitted infections are due to exposure to semen, not sperm. With this one, though . . . ” Eleanor seemed lost for what to do with her hands, and pushed them down into her back pockets. “I just wanted to make sure you were aware.”

Tess sighed. “I think I know about as much as anyone does.”

Eleanor nodded, and paused again. Tess was ready for goodbyes, but then Eleanor said, “‘Off the record’ means you absolutely can’t publish it? Under any circumstances?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry, I won’t write up any of this.”

“It’s not a virus.”

“What?”

“GDS. It isn’t a virus. It’s a massively drug resistant bacterium. An obligate intracellular parasite. Like chlamydia,” said Eleanor.

“Chlamydia?”

“It’s not chlamydia, that’s just another organism with a similar life cycle. Kind of like a bacterium that wants to be a virus. It lives in the cytoplasm of the host cell and reproduces there. So if sperm washing doesn’t work, that’ll be the reason why. That’s all I can say for now, but we’re figuring this thing out. Seriously, come back and talk to me in a few months. I’ll have things to tell you. Ones you can publish.”

Tess reached out for a handshake. “Thanks for sitting down with me,” she said.

“Good luck with your article.” Eleanor lingered a moment. “And on the rest of it. Good luck.” She let go of Tess’s hand and headed off.

Tess went to her car. She thought about her trip to the sperm bank with Judy. The two of them had looked through the database and decided on an unknown Anglo donor. (Anglo so that their child would share an ethnic heritage with both of its parents. Though the scrubs-wearing teenager who handled their paperwork at the clinic had helpfully informed them that “mixed-race sperm” was available, in case Tess wanted her baby to look just like her. Ha.) They’d settled on a five-year-old sample, the oldest the clinic could provide. They’d taken every reasonable precaution. And maybe, in a few months, Eleanor would tell her that it wasn’t a problem anymore. A shot for her, a shot for Decaf. Perhaps a shot for Judy, too, if it was even necessary. There was just no way to be sure.

Tess got out her phone to map the way off the campus and found a text from Judy, a stale response from their earlier conversation: That’s what I always tell you.

She put the phone away.

There was some event going on in the school’s auditorium, and Tess ended up in a long, creeping line of cars, most of them turning one by one into a parking structure. The single-file inching reminded her of the giant worker ants in the airport. She wondered if there was any way to tell, as they swarmed the building in their statue stillness, whether they were supposed to be taking the place apart or putting it together.

Donald Noyce is a 40-year veteran of the blood industry. He has been a phlebotomist, worked for the American Red Cross, and now works for AABB, a non-profit that promotes safety standards for blood-based medicine. He says there are two words being whispered behind closed doors in his field: profiling and speciation.

“The real question we are struggling with is, when are we going to bifurcate the blood banks? I can tell you, we’re going to have to sooner or later.”

The first cases of GDS to get widespread attention from the medical community were the result of blood transfusions. One might expect, then, that donations and transfusions would be primary areas of focus as our healthcare institutions adapt to this new reality. That turns out not to be the case. In the nearly two years that the medical community has been aware of the problem, there have been no changes to national policy on blood collection and distribution.

“We’re all still waiting for an assay,” says Noyce, meaning a blood test that can identify GDS. “Once we know what the bug looks like, things will be a lot easier. But you can’t just put transfusions on hold while the science gets done. And if you can’t screen blood directly, the only ethical choice is profiling. Now that’s a dirty word, right there. But it’s a lesser of two evils thing. It’s more important that you don’t get sick when you need blood than it is that everyone who wants to can donate.”

The profiling Noyce refers to is the practice of barring members of statistically high-risk groups from giving blood. During the early years of the AIDS epidemic, that meant deferring intravenous drug users and homosexual men. Noyce worked for the Red Cross at the time, but was driven to resign by what he saw as the organization’s inability to react in a timeframe necessary to save lives.

The non-profit Red Cross didn’t start deferring homosexuals until several years after the for-profit companies that buy blood and process it into expensive medications. “And then,” says Noyce, “they forgot to ever switch back after we had a blood test, but that’s a whole ‘nother kettle.”

Today the high-risk populations would be women who have given birth to daughters in the last six years and fathers of those daughters. (Girls younger than six would technically be on the list, too, and will have to be added if there still isn’t a blood test when they are old enough to donate.) The more daughters a woman has recently had, the higher risk she is. Companies in compliance with AABB recommendations are now deferring women with three or more daughters under the age of six. There are no mechanisms currently in place to defer potential male carriers.

“It’s not a perfect solution,” Noyce admits, and runs a hand over his bald scalp. “Profiling is just a stopgap, anyway. We’ll get an assay eventually. But when we do, we can’t just throw away the positive blood. There are going to be a lot of these people. Eventually we’re going to have to store their blood just to keep up with the population boom. But we can’t get started on updating our infrastructure because of the [expletive] FDA.”

The Blood Products Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for setting the guidelines that publicly funded collection agencies are required to follow. They commissioned a white paper on GDS, which ended up recommending precisely what Donald Noyce wants to see happen: the establishment of a dedicated infrastructure for collecting and storing GDS-infected blood. The recommendation became controversial, due to what Noyce identifies as an impolitic choice by the paper’s authors.

“The poor bastard who wrote it never realized the trouble he was causing. His heart was in the right place, really. You read the report. The projections in there are sound, the timeframe is perfectly reasonable. It was just the words he used.”

Enter “speciation.” The white paper used this term to describe why it was necessary to double the number of categories in the blood industry, implying that, due to their different reproductive strategy, women with GDS should be considered a different species than men and women without. The debate over the accuracy of that assessment has incapacitated the FDA.

“No one wants to pull the trigger now. They’re all [expletive] terrified of being the person who officially splits the human race down the middle.” Noyce has several unpublishable alternatives for what the letters of the organization stand for. On the subject of speciation, though, he is agnostic. “I’m happy to leave that one to folks who have a better idea of what a species is than me. What I think about is that, whatever they are, they’re people. And there’s bound to be a lot of them. And they’re going to need blood.”

No one disputes that there will be a lot of them, but not everyone agrees that those who have GDS are people. While the FDA is paralyzed by fear of endorsing the idea that those with GDS constitute a different species, in other branches of government there are already attempts underway to enshrine the notion in law.

Tess was daunted by the access afforded her in D.C. as a reporter for American Moment. As she sent her bag through the x-ray machine at the Hart Senate Office Building and spread her arms for the wand-wielding security guard, she felt the familiar, irrational queasiness that all the eyes and sensors would peer through her credentials and spot an impostor. No matter her rituals of reassurance, the anxiety had only mounted during her time in the city, through all the meetings she’d already taken. She’d interviewed three representatives involved in GDS legislation and had an appointment with a fourth. There were lobbyists seeking her out, fighting each other for face time. And now she was about to sit down with Bailey Rogers, senior senator from Texas, who had unexpectedly found a free quarter-hour in her schedule. Members of her own family were harder to get ahold of than the politicians she wanted to see. After years of “could not be reached for comment,” it made Tess feel as though she’d tricked her way into a sudden, fragile celebrity. But just as all the others had, the security guard waved her through without incident.

Tess consulted the building directory, then leaned her face close to the glass of a door so she could smooth down flyaway hair in her reflection. It wasn’t really about her, of course, she thought as she headed for the Senator’s office. It wasn’t even that she was working for American Moment. It was because she was writing a profile on the Montross case, that was what people cared about. Anyone involved in GDS legislation wanted a chance to shape the conversation around the disease, and the infuriatingly absent face of that conversation was Candace Montross. Candace was the celebrity. Tess was, at best, her influential surrogate.

If Tess were actually a celebrity, Bailey might have deigned to touch her. Instead she waved off her assistant and cooed honey-voiced delight at Tess’s presence while standing an arm’s length away, then said, “Forgive me for not shaking your hand. It’s not personal, you understand.” She beckoned Tess to a seat in front of her desk. “My husband says I might as well quit, announce I won’t run again, if I’m not going to kiss babies anymore. I told him, my career’s okay, I can still kiss the ones in blue!” Bailey’s wide hoop earrings jounced when she laughed, a contrast to her pile of silvering hair, which barely moved at all. The wall behind her was covered in framed photos. A campaign victory party in Dallas with Bailey surrounded by her four sons. Bailey in a cranberry pantsuit, shaking hands with the former secretary of state. Bailey sitting on a bipartisan panel at a breast cancer fundraiser.

“One of your staffers shook my hand when I came in,” said Tess, sitting and getting out her things. “Might want to have a chat with him about it.”

Bailey sat too, and laced her fingers together in what looked to Tess like a practiced pose. “We’re all struggling to get used to these changes. That’s why leadership on this issue is going to be so important.”

Tess flipped past her notes on Bailey to a blank page of her book. The notes weren’t extensive; Bailey’s motivations for sitting down with her were transparent. The Senator was a member of the appropriations committee for Health and Human Services, where she was working to keep tax dollars from going to GDS patients. Unfortunately for her, GDS patients had an inconvenient tendency to be pregnant women. Tess believed that Bailey had only agreed to the interview because she was worried about tarnishing the family-first reputation she had spent her career cultivating, and which was so critical to the electoral success of female politicians in Texas. Tess had voted against her two years prior.

“Let’s go on the record now,” she said, and clicked on the recorder. “How long have you been aware of the spread of GDS?”

“It was first brought to my attention three months ago.”

“How did you learn about it?”

“An aide briefed me. I have my staff keep me informed about what our former colleagues in Austin are doing. Can’t lose touch with state-level needs while I’m stuck out here in D.C. It was Texas research that discovered GDS, you know. We’ve been a leader on this issue from the start.”

“I know,” said Tess, scribbling leader!! in her book and adding a wavy underline for absurd emphasis. “You’ve put language into the latest HHS funding bill that would prohibit federal funds from going to any organization that provides prenatal care for women known to have GDS. Can you explain the reasoning behind that for me?”

“Absolutely. This is a measure consistent with the track record I’ve shown my entire career. I have always promoted solid public health policy, with a special focus on women’s health issues. That’s what this new regulation is.”

“How is it in the interest of public health to deny care to pregnant women?”

“You’re looking at it completely backwards,” said Bailey. “The question is, how is it in the public interest for the government to subsidize the spread of a plague? Because that’s what we’ll be doing if we let taxpayer money go to increasing the number of cases of this disease.”

“But you’ve campaigned on child welfare. Surely this is a child welfare issue.”

Bailey nodded. “I agree. It is.”

“Then how can you reconcile that with an amendment that will necessarily mean higher infant mortality.”

“There’s nothing to reconcile, Ms. Mendoza. My voting record is perfectly consistent. I’m protecting the normal, healthy children in those hospitals. We can’t risk the health of the majority of mothers and children by exposing them to a disease we’re just beginning to understand. One which, from all appearances, will warp their entire lives.” Bailey placed manicured fingers gently atop the monitor on her desk. “I could show you dozens of letters from women in Texas distraught that they or their daughters may never have the opportunity to be normal mothers now. I could show you even more from men who fear that they’ll never get to father children at all. Until we know exactly what this disease is, the situation calls for the utmost caution. If we don’t handle this correctly, it could literally be the end of mankind.”

It was nothing Tess hadn’t heard before. The tune was so familiar she could sing along if she wanted. The only difference with Bailey was a little more polish, a better memory for the talking points. It actually made her a less interesting interview than the representatives, who occasionally slipped up in interesting ways. Gale Schoening of North Carolina had distinguished women with GDS from those without by referring to the latter as “real mothers.” Matthew Hock had said outright that his constituency were “the natural-born citizens of Houston.” When Tess observed that in just twelve years the first girls born with GDS would reach voting age, he had said, “We’ll see. A lot can change in twelve years.” But aside from personal quirks, responses were so alike Tess could practically write her notes in advance. GDS is a disease. We have to protect healthy people. Men could become extinct. Think of the at-risk men.

Given Bailey’s facility for staying on message, there was only one interesting question left to ask. “Have you read Governor Buford’s article?”

Bailey’s eyes dipped and she pushed a sigh through her nose. “I have.”

“And do you agree with his interpretation of pro-life politics?”

Cal Buford, former governor of Virginia and now senior partner of a conservative think tank, had just published an op-ed titled “Life Without Conception?” in which he mused that his long opposition to abortion stemmed from his belief that human life began at the moment of fertilization. He concluded that the lack of any such clear moment, combined with the risk that GDS posed to the male population, was enough to constitute an exception to the standard pro-life reasoning. He came out in favor of abortion for GDS daughters, and urged conservative lawmakers to do the same.

Some were already describing Buford’s piece as representative of a split in conservative ideology, but to Tess the response looked more like a scramble. Everyone she’d spoken with had dodged the question. Even Representative Hock had limited himself to saying, “Cal is a smart man, and his opinion deserves weighty consideration of a kind I’ve not yet had time to devote to the issue,” and refused to comment further.

Bailey, though, actually answered. “I’ve always prided myself on voting my conscience. I’ve broken with my party in the past, on occasion. On certain matters of principle. I respect the Governor a great deal, and can only imagine that’s what he thinks he is doing now. But there is no practice more contrary to the wellbeing of children than abortion. I’ve opposed it my entire career, and I continue to oppose it. I find it unfortunate that Governor Buford, intentionally or not, is supporting those who would exploit this disease to roll back the measures to protect children we’ve managed to pass in the last few years.”

Her willingness to take a firm position was a surprise. But then, Tess supposed Bailey had been playing the game longer than anyone else she’d interviewed. In addition to her time in the Texas legislature, Bailey had spent eight years in the House before moving up. She didn’t need to wait for the safety of consensus. She was entrenched, with solid connections, deep-pocketed backers, and a well-trained staff. After the interview concluded, Tess was able to walk out of Bailey’s office without having to pretend to ignore the whispers and sideways glances that had followed her around Capitol Hill.

She was certain she was still being talked about, though. They were just courteous enough to wait until she was out of earshot to start speculating. The reporter from American Moment isn’t just pregnant. She has it. She’s a carrier. That’s why the magazine sent her. Tess felt like people were wiping down the seats the minute she was out the door. Matthew Hock’s office had been the worst, men shuddering inside their suits and gawking as she passed. On the Metro people saw her belly and deferred to her on the platforms, gave up their seats in the cars. It was whiplash, going from being coddled on the trains to being Typhoid Mary on the Hill.

Tess decided she’d had enough of being around people, friendly or fearful, and hailed a taxi to take her back to her hotel. She could expense it. She was meeting with a spokesperson from the American Family Association later, but needed time to recuperate from her morning. In the back of the cab she unwrapped the half-sandwich she’d saved in her purse. She was starving, and carried a taut discomfort under that hollow hunger, like she was an instrument Decaf was learning to play. Tess tucked the seatbelt under her arm and read through email on her phone as she ate.

Lynette had sent back the first round of edits, and a general note that Tess needed to tone down her rhetoric. You’ve been on the story longer than anyone she wrote. It’s only natural for you to be opinionated. And I love your passion, but you have to hide it under a bushel for us. As expected, Tess was losing the “spayed like bitches” line. She also couldn’t talk about “HARS whores,” or use the word “rapist” to describe someone who’d never even been charged with a crime unless she preceded it with “alleged.” And she couldn’t call Kenny Kendall a monster. Lynette had changed that line to a list of charges he’d be found guilty of “if convicted.”

He was going to be convicted. Kendall had pleaded not guilty, but seemingly just as a formality; the man wanted a trial. Outside the courtroom he’d all but admitted to it. To sterilizing preschool-aged girls. Tess sent Judy a furious text. She wondered if she could have gotten away with calling him an alleged monster.

When she’d gone to see him, he had been thrilled to talk to her about GDS. To her, specifically. He’d recognized the name Intessar Mendoza from her articles. Apparently, before his arrest, he used to trawl left-leaning news sites for topics to inveigh against in sermons. “You’re smaller than I imagined you,” he said. “You write big, but you’re just a slip of a thing.”

Eventually, everyone would know. GDS was going to change the world. Children would grow up knowing about it. Would grow up having it. It wouldn’t be a secret for much longer. But Kenny Kendall had learned about it from her. Everything after—the brutalization of Candace and her daughters, the contract from Lynette, the conversations with congressmen—was a result of her articles.

It was almost appropriate, then, that the one person Tess couldn’t get in touch with was Candace herself. In addition to Lynette’s email there were messages from two more lobbyists, a reminder from her OB-GYN’s office about her sonogram appointment, and some mailing list background noise. But still nothing from Candace’s attorney.

There were supposed to be other ways in. If you can’t interview the subject, interview neighbors. Coworkers, teachers, relatives. A real professional is able to find the story. But everyone who had known Candace since she was a little girl was locked away, either behind the high steel fence of a religious compound or in prison. The court records were sealed. Tess had been so confident with Lynette, had told her how the HCP community was tightening, how everyone knew each other. But her normal contacts had been useless. No one had heard from Candace. She, apparently, wasn’t interested in trying to meet other people like herself.

So Tess was left emailing Candace’s attorney over and over again. It was like trying to open a jar with wet hands, but it was all she had. Maybe if, in the next letter, she revealed some information about Matthew Hock’s opinions of her family, Candace would be moved to provide a counterpoint.

Judy texted as Tess was pushing through the revolving door to her hotel lobby. Don’t worry about the edits. Some things speak for themselves. Did you call your mother?

Phone tag, Tess sent back.

Try again. Tell her baby shower gift arrived. Car seat. V. nice.

After her two children were out of the house, Tess’s mother had abandoned the southern California home where she’d raised them and moved to D.C., where she worked in human resources for a polling company. Tess had arranged to extend her travel an extra day to spend time with her. Tess didn’t consider herself close to her mother, but it was still a different class of relationship than she had with her father, who hadn’t been a meaningful part of her life since her parents divorced when she was four. And Judy’s parents–though she had worked hard as an adult to establish functional, if not always amicable, relationships with them–weren’t people Judy or Tess wanted having any influence on their child. So when the two of them decided that it might be important for there to be a grandparent involved in Decaf’s life, Tess’s mother was the default choice.

Ensconced in her room with the blackout curtains drawn, though, that decision seemed very distant. Tess remembered the conversation, that they had agreed readily enough. But now her conviction seemed slippery, diffuse.

Rest first, she decided. She shed her clothes and started a bath running. Rest, and then the lobbyist. She set an alarm on her phone for half an hour before she was supposed to meet with the AFA guy. Sparring with an intractable special-interest ideologue would be a fine warm up for dealing with her mother again.

In the past two months the legislatures of Arizona, Tennessee, Texas, Kansas, and California have all seen bills that would make it a criminal offense to intentionally contract or transmit GDS. Most of these aim to classify it as a form of aggravated assault, but the Arizona bill calls for transmission of GDS to constitute manslaughter, and explicitly references speciation. Thomas Conklin, the bill’s author, argues that GDS makes one nonhuman, therefore it reduces the number of humans, therefore spreading it is something akin to murder. He justifies a provision against intentionally contracting the disease as an extension of the laws against suicide.

In thirteen states there have been efforts to criminalize the sale of GDS-infected biological products. The sponsors of these bills say that it is an obvious, pragmatic public health measure. But these measures, so far, have less political support than the bills based on speciation, as they would effectively shut down the $16 billion private blood industry until a test is developed.

Nine states are in the process of revising their laws on maternity leave. Fifteen have held hearings on what do to about letting GDS children into public schools. None have an answer yet, but they all agree it’s an issue. On the judicial side, the American Civil Liberties Union is pursuing several test cases designed to establish a precedent of equality under the law for GDS infected women and their children.

Even within political parties, opinion is sharply divided. There has been a split within Texas’s Republican-dominated legislature, with the Senate passing GDS exceptions to the state’s tight restrictions on abortion that the House refuses to support. If we are, as a society, moving towards consensus on this issue, it remains a distant target. But while no broad agreements are yet forthcoming, the terms of the debate itself, in Washington at least, are starting to become clear. The battle lines are shaking out as a woman’s right to choose versus a man’s right to exist.

Those whose focus is on protecting the rights of women argue that GDS is not inherently different than the birth control pill, or in-vitro fertilization. It’s just one example of the many ways that human reproduction has changed, fundamentally unrelated to personhood. If those with GDS are to have fewer personal freedoms, the argument goes, then why not also test tube babies, or those conceived with the help of fertility drugs? No one has ever seriously suggested that these individuals are not people, and so neither should personhood be an issue in the case of GDS.

The men’s rights camp argues that the crucial difference is that GDS, left unchecked, will necessarily make the male population dwindle to zero. This side sees GDS as an existential threat which permits no peaceful coexistence.Their fear is markedly similar to Reverend Kendall’s dark vision of a feminine pestilence. Or, as Nancy Forsythe, a lobbyist for the National Organization for Women, explains it, “Feminism isn’t merely a threat to male privilege anymore. Now a woman’s right to biological self-determination is viewed as targeting not just the patriarchy, but the very existence of men.”

Some of the methods these supposedly endangered men (and, as Bailey Rogers would remind us, no small number of women) favor for self-preservation harken back to controversial periods of our history. Colin Langley of the American Family Association has begun making speeches re-imagining the eugenics movement, in which he attempts to knock the stigma off of forced sterilization. He is fond of saying things like, “A sane society will not allow itself to be swallowed whole,” and, “‘All men are created equal’ is an idea worth protecting.” Other proposals take as their spiritual antecedent the Japanese internment camps of World War II, arguing that people with GDS should be rounded up and quarantined. Not forever, of course, but until a cure is found. A more modern twist on what is essentially the same idea would have people diagnosed with GDS fitted with tracking devices, like those locked around the ankles of criminals on probation.

Forsythe views the claims that men face potential extinction as empty fear-mongering. “Even the most virulent of STDs has never infected anywhere near one hundred percent of the population,” she says. “Heterosexual men and women are going to keep on breeding, just as they always have. What men are facing is not extinction, but a demographic shift into minority status. And like any historically powerful majority facing a demographic shift, they’re scared of being marginalized. So they’re over-reacting. These proposed laws are nothing more than an attempt to retain power.”

But not all who advocate legislation to curb the spread of GDS cite the need to protect men. Some of them say that new laws are necessary to protect women, and motherhood itself. Representative Matthew Hock of Texas argues that motherhood draws its virtue from being an unconditional loving relationship with a genetically distinct child. Of women with GDS and the children born to them, he says, ”It’s wrong to call it motherhood. Mothers are women who bring a new person into the world. But these aren’t new people, are they? Just younger versions of people we already have. This disease takes a mother’s love and turns it into the grandest narcissism.”

Hock has sponsored legislation that would require known GDS carriers to register their movements with the government, in a manner similar to the National Sex Offender Registry. Women’s rights groups have already dubbed Hock’s proposal the Asexual Offender Registry, and say that he is attempting to criminalize having a medical condition. Hock counters that GDS carriers have been altered on such a fundamental level that simple prudence demands that they be watched. He notes that his legislation carries no requirements other than that those with GDS be monitored, with specifics of implementation and punishment for noncompliance left up to the states.

Hock’s opinions—that GDS women aren’t real mothers, that people with GDS are fundamentally different than those without—are especially worth noting, as he is the representative for Texas’s 22nd congressional district, covering a significant chunk of the city of Houston. Hock makes plain that he does not consider the GDS community to be among his constituency, but the fact remains that Houston is home to some of his grand narcissists. Candace Montross is one of them. By now she should be used to the leaders of her community claiming that she is not really a mother, nor her children human beings. It certainly is not a first for her.

Ms. Montross has no further statements for the media, and asks that her family’s privacy be respected.

Candace’s attorney had finally written back, and that was the entirety of his message. Tess had read it a half dozen times, hopelessly revisiting it over and over in search of some ambiguity or hidden opening. But there was nothing. The short sentence was a barrier with no chinks or cracks. This was the final denial, an ultimate dead end. Still, she kept pulling it out and parsing it anew.

Tess was looking at it outside the hotel lobby when her mother Layla pulled up. She rolled down the passenger-side window of her teal sedan, propped her sunglasses above her eyebrows, and called, “Is that my daughter I see?” She came around the car. “Look at you.” she gripped Tess’s shoulders and looked her up and down. “Let yourself go, huh?” She gave Tess a kiss on the cheek.

“Yeah, I just keep eating and eating. No reason for it. Can’t help myself, I guess,” said Tess.

“Well hop in, then,” Layla said. “Let’s enable you.”

Tess stuffed her phone away, swung her suitcase up onto the back seat, and got in the car with her mother. They crept along the narrow street near the hotel, then out onto a wider avenue. Layla turned down the radio chatter and said,“So how are you? How’s your woman?”

“I’m fine. Judy’s fine too. Going a little overboard about schools, but she’s always happiest when she’s going overboard about something.”

It was quiet in the car for a moment. “Shopping first or food first?” asked Layla.

“Food.”

“I’m taking you to the new best Lebanese place for lunch. This one’s a hole in the wall, but the best restaurant kafta I’ve had in years. And their mujaddara.”

“Funny how the best one is somewhere different every time I visit.”

“They go through their ups and downs,” her mother said. “Plus, it’s not like you visit that often.”

The row houses slid by like a flip book, whole blocks of fake stone and plaster in a dozen colors, masking the dull uniformity of identical facades that huddled behind perfunctory patches of lawn. There were grungy-looking convenience stores and liquor marts on the corners, and the sidewalks were populated with laconic dog walkers and midday stroller jockeys.

“So,” Layla said, flicking the turn signal and swiveling to check her blind spot, “What are you all worked up about?”

“Excuse me?”

“What’s pissing you off?”

Tess felt an old, familiar empty space open in her chest. “I’m fine, Mom.”

“You’re stiff as a plank and I can hear you grinding your teeth. Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or are we going to spend the day cordial and bored?”

Tess’s mother had always been like this. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in privacy, it was that she didn’t seem to think Tess specifically was entitled to any. Her brother Emilio got a long leash, but her whole childhood her mother had insisted on total access. She offered guidance for each grade school intrigue, opinions on every middle school disaster. By Tess’s teenage years, her mother’s ubiquitous advice had sparked a cold war between them. Or maybe lukewarm. “Cordial and bored” was new, but Layla had no shortage of ways to call her petulant. Her mother’s many disappointed dictums had been swirling in Tess’s head for months, a mental inventory of things to remember not to say when Decaf was older. “Do you think families are built on secrets?” was one she used to like. “I’m just trying to provide perspective,” was another.

When Tess came out at sixteen, her mother’s response was that she was too young for those kinds of labels. That she wouldn’t really know what she liked until she was older. In the face of Tess’s self-righteous fury, she’d invoked it again and again: the perspective of age. The words still rang sharp in Tess’s ears a decade and a half later.

She thought about Judy’s advice, her key to interacting with her own parents: don’t let their presence turn you back into a child. Hold on to the knowledge that the hurts are old, while you’ve become something new. Tess breathed deep and let her jaw fall slack in her mouth.

Her mother wasn’t wrong. She was upset. And it wasn’t because of anything between them. “I just got some bad news,” she said. “Work news. For the GDS story I’m writing.”

“That’s the same one you’ve written about before? The disease that lets women have babies without a man?”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“What?”

“It’s nothing new to have a baby without a man. I’m having a baby without a man.”

“Come on, Tess. Don’t be difficult.”

“It’s the same subject,” said Tess. “But I’m writing for American Moment now. They read my earlier work. I’m making a name for myself in STDs.”

“That’s repulsive,” her mother said, smiling. “What’s the bad news?”

“I’m not going to get to interview someone important. Have you heard about Candace Montross?”

Layla thought, and shook her head. “Not ringing for me.”

It was oddly pleasurable, her mother’s ignorance. A reminder, despite how they had swallowed her life, of how fringe the issues still were. “Well. She’s kind of the heart of the story. But I just heard from her lawyer that I can’t talk to her.”

“You’ve started taking ‘no’ for an answer now?”

“I’ve been at it for a while, Mom. After a certain point, the line between tenacity and harassment starts to blur.” Tess put her forehead against the window, then pulled back, wiped at the face-print with her sleeve. She tucked her head into the hollow of her elbow instead. “I don’t know. It’s getting to me more than it should. I’ll be happy when the hormone flood is over.”

Her mother just laughed.

They went past an old building with a new sign that read Mashawi Lebanese, and Layla announced “Here we are.” She turned up a side street and looked for a spot to parallel park, passing up two that Tess thought were manageable before finding one to her liking. They walked back around the block and up to the flaking green door of the restaurant. Inside the tables were all four-tops with plastic tablecloths and silverware rolls in paper napkins. There were no customers, but there was a man in an apron standing near the door, with half-receded hair and a lined face. He smiled when they came in.

“Back again?” the man said.

“I brought my daughter Intessar with me this time.”

“A pleasure,” the man told Tess. “Your mother is one of our best customers. She comes here all the time.”

“She knows what she likes,” Tess said.

He led them to a table, poured two cups of water, and handed them a pair of laminated menus. Layla gave hers right back without a glance. She ordered kafta and labneh and said that they both wanted bowls of adas bis silq. “And tea for me, and I’ll bet my daughter wants coffee.”

“We only have instant,” the man said.

“That’s okay, Mom,” Tess declined.

“What, it’s good enough for you to hide in your room, but no good now?” her mother said, and turned to the server. “Instant will be fine.”

When Tess was fourteen years old, her burgeoning coffee addiction had been a scandal between them. Her mother thought it some kind of unconscionable toxin, one that would ruin her complexion, her attitude, her entire life. She’d reacted to finding a stash of red canisters under Tess’s bed as though they’d been packed with drugs.

Sitting across a table, watching her mother be so forcefully considerate, Tess wondered how much it was Layla’s disapproval that fueled her earliest affections for the stuff.

“You know we’re calling the baby Decaf, right? I’m not supposed to drink coffee.”

“Aren’t you in the second trimester now?” her mother asked. Tess nodded. “Then you’re out of the danger zone. Don’t let them push you around. Drink what you want.”

Tess recognized the the olive branch hidden in her mother’s thorny insistence. And Judy wasn’t around to judge. She conceded and handed over her menu. “Mother knows best.”

Layla grinned and ordered for them both. The man withdrew to the kitchen and returned with a teapot and teacup for Layla and crazed brown mug of coffee for Tess. She took a sip, and felt every cell in her body pucker to attention, welcoming a long-absent friend. Not just four months absent; it had been years since she’d last had instant coffee. Judy hated the taste of it. At home they had a fancy German coffee robot that ground beans individually for every cup. But to Tess it was the flavor of sneaking out her second-floor window and staying up until sunrise. The flavor of road trips and finals week and late internship nights. It was being alert and capable in a way she always used to feel, but now never did. Even Decaf seemed thrilled, kicking an enthusiastic tattoo as the warmth from the drink suffused her. It was too fast to be a reaction caffeine. Had to just be that when Mommy’s happy, Baby’s happy.

Tess downed the rest in two gulps and handed the mug back for more when the man arrived with their soups. “Well? Still with us?” her mother said.

“Yeah. I think I should have enough time left for a last meal, at least.”

“It’s a good one,” she said, and picked up her spoon.

The soup was all soft lentils and onions glowing against dark green wilted leaves, garnished with a wedge of lemon. Tess squeezed in the lemon juice, stirred, and tasted. It was good beyond all reasonable measure. If the coffee had been an overdue reconciliation, then the soup was an epiphany. Tess thought, not for the first time, that her pregnancy had turned eating into something she felt like she shouldn’t be allowed to do in public.

“It’s impossible to describe how good this is.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be the writer?”

“The words for this don’t exist.”

The kafta and labneh were just as good, and the entrees when they arrived. Over dinner they talked about their work, Tess about her meetings with politicians and Layla about the internal bureaucracies at Samplemetrics. Layla described the software she’d just bought to try to resuscitate her Arabic. Tess catalogued all the new things she’d gotten at her baby shower.

“Oh, Judy told me that a car seat arrived from you. She said it was nice. Thank you.”

“It’s green. I didn’t know if I was buying for a boy or a girl, so I just got one to match your car. You still have the green car?”

“For now. Might need something bigger soon. But green’s still fine. The whole point of having the shower before we learned the sex was so we wouldn’t get gendered gifts.”

“It was the earliest shower I ever heard of.”

“We missed you there, Mom. Why didn’t you come down?” They’d invited her. Judy had even offered to buy her ticket and put her up in a hotel if she liked. But Layla had declined.

“I work, Tess. A regular nine to five. We don’t all get to make our own hours. And not everyone is as comfortable living off generosity as you are.”

Tess’s food went down wrong and she went into a fit of coughing. She had to duck her face into her napkin, then swallowed half her water in one go.

“Are you okay?” her mother asked.

Finally Tess was able to choke out, “What does that mean?”

“What? Just that I don’t need your girlfriend buying me plane tickets.”

“No, the living off Judy thing. I don’t live off her. I work too. That’s the whole reason I’m here.”

“But who bought your plane ticket?”

“American Moment bought my plane ticket. I’m writing for one of the biggest news magazines in the country. I have an expense budget.”

“Well that’s very convenient. But I’m sure she would have flown you out if the magazine had made you pay your own way.”

“Why is that a bad thing, Mom? Judy supports my career. We’ve been together for years. We’re having a baby.”

“You’re having a baby, not her. Why do you think that is?”

“Because she’s ten years older than I am.”

Layla shook her head. “It’s because she holds the purse strings. I’m sure Judy supports your career, but she’s sharp. People don’t get where she is without being smart. She knows what she’s buying with her money.”

Tess’s eyes already burned from the coughing. Now her focus wavered and started to slip. Echoes bounced around the hollow place in her chest, sending tremors through her body.

“Give me the car keys,” she said.

“Oh, come on Tess.”

“Give me the keys!” She held a trembling hand across the table, and her mother sighed, and dropped the keys into her palm.

Tess went outside and walked back around the block to the car. When she was a child, this is when she would have run away entirely. Out the front door or, if that wasn’t possible, through her window. And back then she wouldn’t have been crying, just too furious to speak. The crying was a new thing, one that seemed to draw energy from reflection. Thinking about it made the tears come more strongly, which made her angrier still.

It was several minutes before her mother joined her. Layla slid into the driver’s seat, but didn’t say anything, just listened to Tess’s bitter sniffling and reached behind Tess’s seat for a packet of tissues to offer.

Tess took the package and said, “I’ll reimburse you for the food.”

But her mother didn’t take the bait. Instead, she said, “I cried all the time when I was pregnant with you.”

“Why? Did someone tell you your spouse was a conniving manipulator?”

“No one had to tell me. It was obvious.”

Tess barely remembered the divorce, but knew it hadn’t been amicable.

“Still,” Layla continued, “that’s not why I cried. Not the only reason, anyway. I never cried with your brother, but with you. There’s something awful about carrying a daughter. With a son it’s not so hard to pretend that the world will stand aside and let him through. But with a daughter it’s impossible. Sometimes I would think, what right do I have, when I know what it will be like? So I cried.” She put a hand on Tess’s knee. “I was crying when I picked your name. Strongest one I knew. Your father hated it, but I’d let him name your brother after himself, so it was my turn.”

Tess’s name meant “victory.” Her mother’s meant “dark-haired beauty,” though her hair had gone mostly white. The name had fit her when she was young. And the laugh lines cracking her face suited now. She’d been born with an acid jocularity that finally showed on the surface.

“Judy’s not like you think,” Tess said, blinking her eyes dry against a tissue. “And our daughter wouldn’t need the world to stand aside. She’d knock it out of the way.”

“Maybe. And if you have a son?”

“Shouldn’t make any difference,” Tess said. But she thought of her brother.

Emilio had anxiety issues that far exceeded her own. As a child he reacted so poorly to conflict that in grade school he got permission to stay inside during recess. He always preferred solitude to company; the two of them spent the summer Tess was seven communicating entirely through long letters slipped under bedroom doors, the start of her writing career. These days he worked for the national forestry service, living on a park, checking in with the family a few times a year.

If men really were an endangered species destined for a future in zoos and on preserves, then her brother was ahead of the curve.

“Have you heard from Emilio?” Tess asked.

“He called me. A few weeks ago,” Layla said.

“Did you tell him he’s going to be an uncle?”

“I thought the news should come from you.”

The car was getting stuffy. Tess gave the keys back to her mother, and she started the engine running. Tess said, “Sometimes I think about going to visit him. Maybe when the kid’s old enough we can all go on vacation.”

“It’s a lovely notion,” Layla said. “I can’t honestly say I think he would enjoy it, though. It’s funny. I spent so much time when you were young worried about things that might hurt you. It never occurred to me to worry about how you’d hurt yourselves.”

“You don’t think Emilio’s happy where he is?”

“I think you can be happy and still hurt yourself.”

They sat a while longer watching cyclists and joggers pass on either side. When the thunder of their fight had died away it left a stillness, where cordiality was a comfort rather than a bore. Layla took them to her favorite shops of antiques and vintage knick knacks, where she looked at but didn’t buy a set of wrought iron drawer pulls. She insisted, though, that Tess buy herself some bookends that caught her eye.

After that they went home, back to Layla’s two story townhouse, pink brick with bars over the windows. They folded out and dressed the sofa bed in the living room, then Layla said goodnight and disappeared up the stairs. She’d always been an early to bed, early to rise type, and it had only gotten more severe with age. She said she’d try not to wake Tess up when she rose with the sun, but wouldn’t make any promises.

Tess sat on the bed an looked around. Her mother’s living room was a confetti contrast of artifacts and styles, like an anthropologist’s fever dream. Floral pattern couch. Calligraphy prints on the walls. Lurid santo from New Mexico. Decorative hookah from Morocco. A painted earthenware pot that Tess had given her, and a hand-carved gourd covered in Arabic script from Emilio. Layla had reasonable taste, but she never got rid of anything, and she cared more about individual objects than she did about combinations. Anything colorful, intricate, or recognizably ethnic was sure to catch her eye. The only thing that really looked out of place were the plain white sheets on the mattress.

Tess felt a buzzing alertness that meant the caffeine had hit her bloodstream. And there was a bar running across the middle of the bed frame that pressed up under her weight. Tonight, for once, her trouble sleeping would be due to externalities. She got out her computer and read the email from Candace’s attorney again. It was ridiculous, she decided, that everything should hinge on this one woman. There were so many. They were everywhere. And except for Candace, Tess knew them all.

She started a new email for Lynette.

Lynette,

Candace’s attorney says she is categorically uninterested in talking to the media. Since everything about her life is either locked up in court records or behind the fence at Kamp Kendall, I’m changing the plan for the final section. We can keep the rest the same though; open with Montross family, then general principles, and return to case studies. Just different case studies. Houston is home to plenty of Hock’s grand narcissists. Here are a few I know I could get:

Sophie Bryant—landscaper, caught GDS from her husband who caught it from another sexual partner. (They’re swingers.) Raising their three GDS daughters together, with the son and daughter they already had. She has topiaries of all the kids in the front yard, and lets them do seasonal decorations of themselves.

Kelli Fernandez—lawyer, caught GDS during a kidney transplant. Single, no children (she had a hormonal IUD), but does family law. A lot of custody work. Focuses on GDS cases now, and can speak very knowledgeably about them.

Christina Rickards—teenager who caught GDS from her boyfriend. Her dad beat her up and threw her out of the house after her second pregnancy. She’s on number three now, says she plans to have them all. Moved in with an aunt and graduated high school a year early, now in a pharmacy tech program.

Dorothea Velazquez—comatose after a scooter accident in San Antonio, now in long-term care in Houston. She got GDS from a blood transfusion, has had two babies that she’s never seen. Her family considers them miracles, a way for Dorothea to return to them. Devout Catholics. They are committed to raising the children as long as she keeps having them. Her older brother is a very caring, enthusiastic, and quotable kind of slightly insane.

Chloe Pitt—piano teacher at a conservatory and keyboard player in a succession of post-rock bands. She and her partner Steph, a CPA, decided to contract GDS intentionally. First couple I know who did that. They each had one kid, then opted for surgical birth control.

Intessar Mendoza—Me. I don’t have it probably. But I’m pregnant from an unknown sperm donor. I’ll be having a baby in about five months, and I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl. But I do know that the whole generations-long history of social baggage, the whole framework for how we understand what having a boy means or having a girl means–that’s all irrelevant now. Everyone thought it was settled, but GDS has put what having a kid means up for renegotiation. There’ve always been precious few constants for the world to offer a new person, and now there are even fewer. The non-GDS perspective on parenthood in a GDS world has got to be of general interest. I’m willing to talk about it.

I could go on. That’s just in Houston. You want a humanizing face for GDS, take your pick. It’s the new human condition. We’re spoiled for choice.

– Tess

Tess sent her ideas for the new closing section the next day, emailing Lynette over expense-accounted wifi in the D.C. airport. On the plane she found that someone had pushed chewing gum into the powerpoint by her seat, and her old laptop’s battery gave out before she touched down in Dallas. She searched out a plug in the airport to recharge it during her short layover, then checked her phone. Lynette had already responded.

This isn’t supposed to be an op-ed. The feature standards of American Moment do not admit the kind of authorial self-insertion you suggest. We publish investigative journalism, not meandering autobiographical rumination. Besides, when was the last time you saw a Pulitzer Prize winner that used the personal pronoun?

You got this contract and this deadline because you claimed to be able to write me a feature to capitalize on the attention of the Montross case. I could have gotten any of my normal writers to do general overview. I do not want an alternate case study from you, I want an article that follows your original outline. For that you need access to Ms. Montross. If you can’t get it, then your piece is irreparably broken.

Let me know when you have it. –LR

She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw her phone against a tall airport window and watch one or both of them shatter to rubble. She filtered down the jet bridge and onto her next plane, people in the aisle deferring to her belly. She was in the seat at the back, next to the engine, where the noise and vibration swamped everything save her own futile thoughts.

By the time she landed in Houston, she was disconsolate. She stood puffy-eyed and travel sick on the curb until Judy pulled up.

“How was your trip?” Judy asked as she climbed into the car.

“Apparently a complete waste of time!” She told Judy what had happened, then got out her phone and read Lynette’s response aloud, shouting the words meandering and normal and irreparably.

Judy asked, “Is that line about the Pulitzer supposed to be funny?”

“I don’t know what the fuck she expects me to do,” said Tess. “The court records are sealed, and her lawyer’s stonewalling. There’s no access. I’ve been tearing my heart out on this.”

“I think you should calm down,” said Judy, easing them out of the airport. “It’s going to be okay.”

“No it isn’t. Okay is meeting my deadline. Okay is not having the bottom drop out of everything right at the very end. This is not how we get to okay.”

But Judy was right. When they got home, she said to Tess, “I got you a present.” She went to the tall table by the door that they used for mail and keys, and removed from its small drawer a scrap of green construction paper, which she handed to Tess.

The paper had an address written on it, and above that, Florence Montross.

While Tess was out of town, Judy had continued her hunt for Houston’s greatest early childhood educators. Eventually her search took her to the kindergarten where Candace’s oldest daughter had been placed. Judy had recognized her from Tess’s pictures.

“I asked for some parent references, and the assistant principal just led me into the office and let me watch over her shoulder as she looked through the address book. I could have taken cell phone pictures of the whole thing if I’d wanted,” Judy said. “I wasn’t impressed by the professionalism there overall, frankly. I doubt I’ll hire any of them.”

Tess gaped. “And you were holding out on telling me all this why?”

“I was driving,” said Judy. “I couldn’t look at your face.”

The next day Tess made her way out to a sprawling complex of stucco apartments, some of the buildings five stories high. There were retirees and college students. There were towels hung from balcony railings, incensed dogs barking from behind front doors, and shrieking children jostling for space in a minuscule pool. Heat mirages shimmered off the cars in the vast parking lots.

Candace’s unit was on the third floor of building 22. For all the difficulty she had learning where to look, Candace’s place wasn’t hard to find. The numbers were screwed to the door over a dozen glossy coats of paint, bright and obvious. But there was no answer when Tess knocked.

She sat down next to the door, and felt a small relief that she could stall the meeting for a little while longer.

Ever since Kenny Kendall had said from across a pane of plexiglass, “I know who you are,” Tess had known she would have to confront Candace someday about their connection. But she felt no more ready to do so now than she had in the prison. And her first goal couldn’t be to apologize, anyway. She needed Candace to agree to the profile first. She needed Candace’s story. The other could come later.

Tess’s plan for what she would say when Candace showed up was only two layers deep. The first layer began and ended with “please.” “Please talk to me, even though you’ve been telling me for weeks with your silence that you don’t want to.” “Please let me do a thing that will help me immensely and you perhaps not at all.”

The second layer was basically a guilt trip. “If you tell your story, you’ll be protecting others. Even your own daughters.” Tess wasn’t sure she really believed in layer two, and though it might be effective, she didn’t want to use it.

After that, there was what. Begging? Tess feared that she would be just as easy to dismiss in person as she had been from afar. In that way, too, sitting and waiting was better than forcing the encounter. When she was rebuffed, it would be like falling from a lesser height.

People’s footsteps sounded on the concrete stairs with reverberating thumps. They passed by in both directions, but paid Tess very little mind. It seemed to be the sort of place where people didn’t concern themselves with their neighbors’ business. Maybe that’s why Candace was here. Tess wondered how many people in this complex read American Moment. Would her story upend Candace’s world again? Make her feel more singled out than she already did? What right did she have to do that, really? Only, she supposed, as much right as Candace was willing to give her. Tess continued to wait.

Candace arrived eventually, of course. Up the steps thumped a young woman with wispy blonde hair and doughy cheeks. She was in a loose-fitting dress and immensely pregnant. A plastic grocery sack dangled from the knuckles of one hand, and in the other she held the fingers of a small child. A little girl in pink overalls, with wispy blonde hair and tiny, doughy cheeks. When Candace saw Tess, she stopped.

“Who are you?” said Candace.

“My name is Tess Mendoza,” said Tess. She struggled back onto her feet, knees grown recalcitrant during her wait. “I’m a reporter. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for a while.”

“You’re the one who keeps emailing Randy,” said Candace. “I told him I was done talking to reporters. I think all the others gave up already.”

“Well, I guess before I gave up, I wanted to hear it from you. Directly.”

Candace looked Tess over. Her daughter picked her nose bashfully and practiced standing on one foot. Candace asked, “Are you like me?”

“I’m pregnant,” said Tess. “Probably not like you though. Except sometimes I’m certain that it is. It’s scary. There’s no way to know for sure.”

Candace climbed the rest of the way up the stairs and fished in the grocery sack for her door key. “It’s not that scary. There are lots of scary things, but not that.”

“Maybe you can teach me.”

Candace’s daughter said in a small voice, “Momma, need to wee.”

“Justa second, honey,” Candace answered. She slid her key into the lock and turned back to Tess. “Do you have a car? I could use help picking up the other girls if you have a car.”

“I have a car.”

“Okay. I guess you should come in, then,” said Candace, and opened the door.

For a time after she was rescued from Camp Kendall, Candace lived alone. Her children were initially placed in a shelter, awaiting foster care. It took weeks for the attorneys general to determine that she was in no way complicit in the mutilation of her four daughters. But now the family is back together, living in an apartment on court-supplied housing vouchers.

Her oldest child, Florence (Johnnie Montross’s mother’s name), has started kindergarten. The two middle children, Lauren and Emily, spend their days in nursery school. Amanda, currently the youngest, stays with her mother. Amanda likes lizards and Band-aids, hates wearing socks, and expresses ambivalence about her younger sister, whom she doesn’t yet know, but who will be showing up in less than a month. Candace plans to name her newest daughter Hope, and the explanation she gives for why she chose the name, and what it means to her, is unimpeachably sincere.

“I’ll go on the pill after Hope is born,” she says. “I don’t know if for forever, but I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.”

It’s true. In the evening, as Florence fills a dinosaur coloring book and Lauren and Emily play an imagination game using dish towels and Amanda as props, Candace studies for her GED. She does this every night before she puts her daughters to bed. The family lives in a two bedroom apartment, and all the children sleep together in one of the rooms, on a pair of bunk beds. Candace is going to put a crib in her bedroom when Hope arrives.

Candace doesn’t agree with Representative Hock’s assessment that her daughters are merely younger versions of her. When asked about it, she doesn’t discuss epigenetics, or use the phrase “nature versus nurture.” She says, “No one’s gonna take them to church when they’re eleven and never let them leave. That happened to me, and it’s not gonna to them.” She puts her hand on her pregnant belly. “And there’s stuff happened to them that didn’t happen to me. And they have each other, but I only had myself. So it’s not the same at all.”

Candace doesn’t lose any of her day worrying that her children may fail to develop unique identities. She’s too busy keeping Amanda’s shoes tied, consoling Emily that not every night can be macaroni and cheese night, comforting Lauren when a pen leaks on her favorite shirt, and convincing Florence not to use the profanity she’s learning at school. “They look a lot alike, but not that much, because they’re different ages. I never confuse them. I bet it’s worse with twins.”

During the day, when three of her girls are at school, Candace does all of the same budgeting and cleaning and logistics that get done by single mothers everywhere in the country. And when she’s not doing that, she’s meeting with attorneys and preparing to testify in court. Candace is a witness in two ongoing criminal trials.

She is a witness for the prosecution in the trial against Kenny Kendall, who made the decision to have her previous pregnancy aborted and her children sterilized. Since the surgeon among Kendall’s flock who actually performed the operations took his own life in the police raid on the compound, Kendall is the only one on trial for that crime. He is charged with five felony counts, and under Texas law he will face life in prison if convicted. “It’s what he wanted for me,” says Candace of Kendall’s potential fate. “Life in prison. I’m just trying to return the favor.”

The other trial Candace is involved in is that of her father. In her father’s trial, however, she is a witness for the defense.

“It’s not that I like him,” she explains, “That’s not the point.”

The point is that, of all the horrors Candace has experienced—in many of which her father was, in fact, complicit—the one he is charged with never actually happened.

The police, as a matter of course in a child abuse raid, took DNA samples from the suspects and victims. Candace’s children share her genetic code. As a result, a standard paternity test will identify Candace’s father as her children’s father as well. Remarkably, the district attorney has chosen, on the basis of this evidence, to charge Candace’s father with incest.

The case is ludicrous. It is an attempt to punish the guilty not through accountability, but by using legal precedent to subvert reality. But why is Candace, specifically, coming by choice to her father’s defense?

“It’s part he didn’t do it. There’s enough things that actually happened, why go making up ones that didn’t. But it’s also,” she pauses, looks for the words. “It’s also that he has no claim on them. On my girls. He doesn’t have a claim, and Johnnie doesn’t have a claim, and no one does. No one but me.”

So it is that Candace goes to court, defending a father she hates to protect the children she loves, as a statement to the world that she is their mother, she alone, and no one is ever again allowed to come between them.

“Have you forgotten there’s somewhere we need to be? Let’s go!” said Judy.

“I’m coming,” Tess called down the stairs. “I was still getting ready.”

Tess met Judy in the garage, resigned but bitter.

“What are you wearing?”

Tess had changed clothes a half-dozen times, stripping outfits off as soon as she finished putting them on. There was no pattern to it. When Judy’s forbearance had stretched as far as it could, Tess finally found herself downstairs, wearing a beige cashmere sweater. No particular reason why. She said, “I was cold. This is comfortable.”

“It’s ninety degrees out.”

“Why do you care what I’m wearing? Aren’t you the one in a big hurry to get this done?”

They got in the car and headed towards BioPeek, an ultrasound imaging center in a nearby strip mall. Tess had delayed and delayed her sonogram, and finally cancelled. She claimed she was too focused on writing the article. Then that she was too stressed waiting for the article to run. But it was up now, and Tess had no more excuses, and Judy no more patience. The obstetrician couldn’t see her for another week, so BioPeek it was.

As they rode to the mall, Tess said, “It’s a lie. People will be able to tell it’s a lie.”

“It’s not a lie. Why this again?”

“There were things I left out. Similarities. Lots of them. Those girls finished each other’s sentences, but I didn’t write about that.”

“Of course there were similarities. They’re all twin sisters, sort of. You’d expect there to be similarities. You and your brother have similarities, don’t you? Hell, my stepsister and I have similarities, and we’re not even related.” Judy pounded the horn and swerved lanes. “That part doesn’t matter. What you wrote matters.”

But ever since the article ran, Tess couldn’t stop thinking about what she might have missed. She thought about the uncanny moments when the children would laugh in unison. About how Florence sneezed the same truncated squeak as her mother, just higher pitched. How did she know that was just normal twin stuff? Normal daughter stuff? She’d worked so hard to be authoritative, but what could you tell from a child? How would she even know normal if she saw it?

No one could say for sure how GDS kids were going to grow up. It had never happened before. There could be clear, obvious changes, ones that only manifested with age. Everything she’d written could end up looking quaint. Laughable. Catastrophically wrong.

Tess thought of Candace’s reaction when she finally told her about Kendall. How Kendall had recognized her and why. They were sitting on Candace’s narrow balcony, eating pasta out of blue plastic bowls. Through the sliding glass door Tess could see the little blonde heads of the children, shrieking as they scurried across the thin carpet in their last ecstatic burst before bedtime.

“Just like a herd of puppies,” Candace said. “Way they run over each other.” She ate another forkful of noodles. “There were dogs all over at the camp. Always puppies around.”

The interviews were over. Tess had all she needed to write the article. She put her bowl down and said, “There’s something you need to know.”

“What is it?”

“It’s about Kenny. I’ve been writing about people like you, like the kids, for a long time. I have a lot of stories about it online. And Kenny, he used to get on the computer and go looking for things he didn’t like.” Tess paused, listened to the muffled giggles and declarations from inside the apartment. “He told me that he learned about it from my stories,” Tess told Candace. “He figured out what was happening with you because of me. So, in a certain way . . . I mean. I had a role in what happened. So I’m sorry for that.”

Candace hadn’t thought much of the coincidence. She tucked her hair behind her ear, hugged her belly and said, “If not you, it would have been somebody else. I was different. Kenny didn’t like things different. Something was bound to happen eventually.”

The more Tess thought about it, the more true it was. Candace was the future because the world was full of people who don’t like things to be different. Tess had argued, as forcefully as she knew how to, as forcefully as Lynette would let her, that in every way that mattered they were the same. That there were no real differences.

But what if the truth was actually that there were just no important differences? And what if unimportant but visible was really all it took? How could you know it wasn’t futile to counter novelty with humanity? How could you know that, for all your intentions, you weren’t setting yourself up for a fall?

Under the chilly blast from the car’s air conditioning, Tess was sweating.

When they got to BioPeek and signed in, Judy waved away the clipboard of forms. She produced from her bag a set she’d downloaded, printed, and already filled out. They nurses had Tess in the back and on the exam table in under five minutes.

“This is going to be a bit gooey,” said the ultrasound technician as she squirted gel onto Tess’s skin and spread it around with the end of the wand. Some of the gel got on her sweater, and Tess could feel Judy biting back commentary. Her grip tightened around Judy’s hand. The wand could have been the flat of a blade and Tess didn’t think she would feel any differently.

When Tess was sufficiently slimed, the technician started up the machine. Ghostly shadows resolved on the screen. It looked like nothing in particular, a confusion of internal architecture, until the technician pointed to a part of the haze and said, “There’s the head.” Then suddenly the image resolved into a moving cross-section of a fetus, and it was impossible to see it as anything else. The plane of the scan swept through the baby’s body, forward and back, hands and feet coalescing into view and then dissolving again. The technician pushed some buttons, and a 3-D computer rendering appeared on the screen. It looked like a clay model put under running water. She panned the image to get a view between the legs.

“And there we have it. It’s a girl.”

“Look at that.” Judy’s voice was a rush of astonished delight. “Decaf’s a girl. We have a lumpy little daughter.”

Tess felt the startled-fish flutter of Decaf moving, and simultaneously watched her on the screen twist her hips out of view, as if shy. A motion, Tess realized, she knew. A gesture she’d felt so many times.

“We can burn a movie of this to DVD for you to buy, if you want,” said the technician.

A noise escaped from Tess’s chest. A wracked sound that convulsed her body and scrambled the image on the screen. It happened again, and then again.

“What is it?” said Judy. “Are you okay?”

Tess started to answer, but the words got caught and bubbled in her nose. She clapped her hands to her face in embarrassment. Her cheeks were wet.

“Leave us alone for a minute,” Judy told the technician, who put down the wand and started for the door.

“No,” Tess finally got out. “Come back. It’s fine.” She couldn’t tell if the technician listened or not. Her vision was too watery to see. Under Judy’s hand on her shoulder, her body still shook with sobs.

“It’s all right,” she gasped. “There’s nothing wrong. Nothing is wrong.”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2015.

The End of the War

Django Wexler

Officially, the little short-range clearwaves are forbidden, for obvious security reasons. I don’t think any operator leaves for her second tour without one, though. Sometimes it’s just to hear another voice out in the black, no matter who it belongs to. It can make the difference between finishing the tour and coming back a ghost.

Mine is a junky little affair duct-taped to the side of my main console. I hesitate a bit before hitting the switch, but my spin-up mobs are reporting the hull composition on this piece-of-shit drifter is even worse than I predicted. I’ve adjusted the build profile for a low-rez encounter, but even so I’ve got some time. I click the clearwave on, hoping for a familiar voice. It would be nice to talk to Ledra again, or Molly. Anyone but that bitch Andrin.

“Hello, hello,” I say, my voice coming back tinny where the clearwave is patched into my suit audio. “Anybody out there?”

There’s a long stretch of nothing. I can hear the whirr of the suit fans, the deep rumble of my own mobs chewing into the skin of this ancient hulk. The latter sound isn’t real, of course—no air within a million kilometers to carry it—but the mobcom’s external sensors pick up vibrations in the hull, and the suit translate it into audio so I can make full use of my precious human sensory integration. That is, after all, why I’m here, why it’s worth hauling canned spam like me across the solar system to rendezvous with flying junk. There are some things we still do better than machines.

I know there’s another mobcom on the wreck. I wonder if it is Andrin after all, and she’s refusing to speak to me on principle. Or someone else, a newbie who hasn’t learned the tricks yet, maybe doesn’t even have a clearwave. I could be transmitting into nothing. The first scouts tumble out of the spin-ups, tiny mobs the size of grapes with nothing more energetic aboard than a little compressed gas. I key in a pattern from my library, and they jet off into the dark, changing direction with tiny puffs and caroming off the walls of the dead ship’s corridors. The map on my console, based on old specs, begins to light up and update itself with real-time data.

“Hello,” comes a voice from the clearwave. A man’s voice.

I raise an eyebrow, pointless as that is in my black-helmeted suit, itself wrapped in the spider-like metal skin of the mobcom. There aren’t many male operators. Not the fault of the men, of course, they’re as patriotic as the rest of us, but they’re just made differently. The male psyche doesn’t deal well with the waiting, the confinement, the high-G transits. I’ve spoken to only a couple of men in the black from our side, and never to a Minoan.

Maybe this encounter won’t be as dull as I thought.

“How’s it going?” I keep my voice deliberately casual. No sense in raising the gender issue right away. He might get offended, and it’s not like there’s anyone else to talk to.

“So far, so good,” he says. “You?”

“About the same. What’s your name? I don’t think I know you.”

“It’s Garret. I don’t know anybody yet.”

“I’m Miranda. Call me Myr.”

“You may as well call me Gar, then.”

One of my scouts rounds a corner, about halfway up the ship’s length, and vanishes in a spray of vaporized metal. The mobcom analyzes telemetry, determines it was hit by a big laser, fusion-powered. He hasn’t been here long enough to crank out any really big mobs yet, and there’s not enough extra power in this dump to run them in any case. So that’s his mobcom. I draw a circle around the spot on the map and retarget the scouts, curving them around through the ancient, torn decking to try and get a better view.

A few seconds later, one of the little mobs drifts down through an old ventilation shaft and gives me a few frames of video before he blasts it. He’s in a big old Mark IV, like a hexagonal slab of metal with eight spider-legs on universal joints. Twice the size of my Mark IX, but with half the output. It carries a lot more armor, not that that matters. I can see his spin-ups on the walls around him, worm-like tendrils tipped with the blue-white sparks of plasma drills, digging through the hull of the old ship for the materials they need. One of them is halfway through building a big, spider-legged mob. I recognize the silhouette even before my console flashes up a recognition. An Afterburner III, at a guess, maybe a IV. Not a great choice for this shitty hulk.

“First tour?” I say. My hands fly across the console, adjusting my build profile to something even faster and more aggressive, trading off power for speed. Some operators don’t feel like it’s polite to rush a newbie, but I’ve always been of the opinion that what’s important is to win, and fairness be damned.

“Second,” he says. “Didn’t see a lot of action on my first, though. Three aborts.”

I wince. Everyone hates an abort. It means twice as much time in the gel before you get a break. “Did you get to see any action at all?”

“A couple of encounters out near Coldpoint. Got my ass kicked.”

“Who was it?”

“Arisa and Gemmelia.”

“Ha!” I grin. “Let me guess, Gemmy got you with a big tunnel swarm, right up through the floor.”

“Absolutely.” He doesn’t sound too embarrassed, which is good. It’s important to be able to laugh at your mistakes.

“She loves that trick. Gemmy’s great.” She and I have tumbled a few times, when we were on the same ship. Gemmy fucks the way she fights, in an all-out attempt to batter her partner into submission. It’s good fun, but exhausting.

“She seemed like a fun girl,” Gar says. “Do you go for tunnelers too?”

“Now, you know the rules.” I put a bit of tease into my voice. “No digging for tactical tips.”

“Sorry.”

I’ve got a few small tunnelers in my mix, actually, but more roaches and froggies. A spin-up reports a lucky find—an old emergency battery, with a cache of exotica still inside it. Not enough to build any decent ranged weaponry, but plenty for a batch of Bouncing Bill IVs. One of my favorite mobs, cheap and efficient for quick work. They pour out of the spin-up’s hatch, notched oblong things with a magnetic grapple at one end and a bouncer at the other. Like all froggies, they use these tools to alternate pull themselves towards walls and push away, moving on bouncing, irregular paths. A few roaches are ready, too, scuttling insectoid things that stick to any surface they touch.

“So is this your first round on this tour?” I say, as I marshal my mobs.

“Yeah. Ten days in goo to get here. You?”

“This is day ninety-five. Five encounters so far, four wins.”

“Damn,” he says. “Just my luck to meet someone on a hot streak.”

“Actually, I’m just coming off the loss,” I say. “So I’m in a bad mood.”

“Even worse.”

I send out three groups of mobs, following the paths my scouts relay. The first one is a feint, straight at him, moving slow so he’ll see it in plenty of time. The other two hook wide, one crawling up through a hole in an old service duct, the other out through an impact crater onto the outer hull of the wreck, under the fast spin of the stars, and then back in through a shattered laser lens.

Another scout dies. I get a glimpse of the Afterburner from its last moments—definitely a III, not a IV—crawling down the corridor with its muzzle smoking like an old-fashion slug-thrower. Its headed right for my feint, and I order the mobs to scatter into an ambush formation. My other two groups are worming their way toward Gar’s mobcom, roaches cutting through the decking with their integrators when ancient battle damage doesn’t provide a convenient route.

I send a Bouncing Bill around a corner, straight at the Afterburner. The spider-mob blasts it into a swathe of superheated ions, and the exotica inside escapes its bottle and detonates when it touches vacuum. The explosion isn’t close enough to take out the Afterburner, but it blanks the thing’s sensors, and the roaches move in, hopping off the walls to cling to the larger mob. They’ve only got integrators to fight with, little nano-tech mouths that start stripping off the Afterburner’s armor, but that’s not really the point. I want Gar’s attention fully devoted to his big, stupid mob, as it flails in place and twists its legs to knock the persistent little things away. Another burst vaporizes a pair of roaches, but I’ve already moved on to the main event.

My two flanking groups pounce, roaches in the lead, Bouncing Bills ricocheting in a complex pattern designed for maximum confusion. His mobcom’s lasers stutter, sweeping patterns in the air, and my mobs die one by one, but he’s got nothing but his integral weaponry to work with. It’s not enough to stop them all. One of the Bills dives in among his spin-ups and ejects its exotica, and my display goes white with multiple explosions.

“Ouch.” Gar’s voice is rueful. “Nice shot.”

I flick a scout out of cover to survey the damage. A little bit of exotica isn’t enough to seriously damage a brute like the Mark IV, but Gar’s spin-ups are all blown to hell, and his external weaponry and sensors are probably seriously degraded. If he sticks around, he’ll be at my mercy, since I’ll have time to build some seriously dangerous mobs while he fumbles about trying to restart his harvesting.

“Sorry about that,” I say. No harm in being polite, after the fact. “Are we done here?”

“Yeah, I think so. Nicely done.”

“Try not to let yourself get distracted by the big nasty mobs, especially in a low-rez environment,” I say. The urge to give advice trumps the thought that I’m helping out the enemy. “A nice swarm of little ones can be a lot more effective.”

“I haven’t got the compute power aboard to handle much of a swarm,” he says, a little defensively.

I wince; if his Mark IV’s processors haven’t been upgraded, he’s probably right. That’s a serious disadvantage. “I’m surprised they send you out like that.”

“Needs must. You know the drill.” He sighs. “All right, I’m out. Thanks for the chat, Myr.”

“Likewise. Talk to you soon, maybe.”

My scout watches as his mobcom ignites its torch, blasting the decking underneath it to glowing vapor. In a few seconds, he’s gone, accelerating out through the skin of the wreck and into the black towards a rendezvous with a waiting corvette, and probably a dress-down from whatever passes for a superior officer on the Minoan side of the line.

Victory, as easy as that. I heave a sigh, punch up my long-term build and harvesting profiles, and lean back in my gel-seat to wait.

Twenty hours later, corvette 1121 matches course and speed with the wildly tumbling wreck. In the meantime, my mobs have been busy. Huge ship-killer lasers have blossomed across the derelict, like ugly scabs on the torn skin, each a one-shot exotica-powered weapon capable of blasting an approaching vessel into scrap millions of klicks away. Another factory has been hard at work constructing thrusters, which will fire the harvesters discarded scrap at high enough velocity to change the course of the wreck to something that will come close enough to our fleet to grab.

1121 only began its approach when I notified it that the ship-killers were in place. Functional ships, even corvettes, are too precious to risk the possibility of enemy presence.

The salvage isn’t anything to write home about. It’s a seventh-generation wetship, probably a destroyer. The second- or third-generation ships were profligate with materials—heavy metals, exotica, even organics—and are thus the most valuable targets for harvesting. By the seventh generation, resources were already getting scarce, and there’s less worth digging out of the old hull. Command probably wouldn’t have sent me after it if it hadn’t been on a congenial course, not requiring much energy to make the intercept.

I satisfy myself that all my mobs know what they’re supposed to be doing, then push myself away from the wreck with my own fusion torch. The mobcom bursts free of the tattered metal skin of the old wetship, spinning off into the black. I kill the spin with a motion as reflexive as scratching an itch, and jet toward the corvette.

1121 is a coldship, of course. No biosphere, no humans aboard. The actual working part of the vessel isn’t much bigger than my mobcom, though its packed full of a lot more compute power and weaponry since it doesn’t have to carry all the support systems to haul around a bag of meat. The secondary and much larger part of the corvette is storage, where it keeps all the energy and raw materials it needs to top me off after a fight. I let the mobcom talk to it, working out the details of intercept and material transfer, and check the corvette’s memory for new orders from command.

Sure enough, they’ve got another target for me. Not much of a hop, only six days transit. I run the numbers in my head. That’ll put me at day one hundred two, which means they’ll probably try to squeeze in yet another encounter before my hundred and twenty days of tour are up. It’s a depressing thought. When I started as an operator, a tour longer than sixty days was considered a hardship post. Now they’re doing studies to see if we can handle a hundred and eighty days in the black. Someone at Command is running the equations, figuring out how much combat effectiveness we’d gain versus how many operators would ghost out. I have a nasty feeling I already know what they’re going to come up with.

A few hours later, I’m all tanked up, with fresh spin-ups loaded and a disposable booster strapped to my rear. Drugs flood my system, working their weird magic, and the gel-seat reclines into a couch. The suit floods all my inner cavities with padding. Then the booster ignites, and acceleration rolls onto me like a crushing, familiar blanket.

I lose the next encounter. It’s on a sixth-generation cruiser, big but still low-rez, and my opponent is a woman named Nina. She natters on over the clearwave, all about her partner back on the Minoan Ark and how well they get along. Personally, I think she’s a bit of an idiot, but I leave the transmitter on. Company is company, however inane.

Maybe her casual front lulls me into a false sense of security. She pulls a beautiful trick, giving one of my scouts a look at her early on, with the seeds of a second-tier economy already planted. Then her perimeter firms up, and I can’t get another picture. I figure I’ve got some time, and go for second-tier myself, only to find her swarming me with cheap, fast mobs. She must have switched paths right after I got my pictures, converting from tech to rush. I fight back, improvising frantically. I go down harder than Gar did, but in the I end I go down.

I offer Nina more or less sincere congratulations as my mobcom blasts away, already wondering if I can steal her trick for myself. Without a booster, it’s another three days before I make intercept with a corvette, 1703 this time. It re-equips me and bangs the dings out of my mobcom while I download new orders. As expected, there’s another assignment. I glance at the parameters and swear.

“Seventeen days transit! You motherfuckers.” That would put me well over one hundred twenty days when I have to fight. Very much against regs. “Bastard vacuum-sucking whoredaughters.”

But of course, Command is several hours distant by laser, and there’s no point in shouting at the corvette. Or, indeed, in arguing at all. That’s the thing about being an operator. You can ghost, or you can do as you’re told. And I’m not going ghost anytime soon.

My suit’s ping pulls me from the drug-addled reverie in which I spend most of my acceleration time. Still five days to the target, the booster consuming itself as it slows me down to match velocities. Not much to do—not much I can do, given the Gs I’m pulling, stuffed full of gel like an overfull cargo pod—but the suit tells me another mobcom is coming into range on a tangent trajectory. They’re hard to detect, by design, when they’re not boosting, and so it only warns me a couple of minutes before my colleague comes into laser range.

I check the IDs, it’s Annie. An old friend. We have a window of a few minutes before our diverging paths take us out of easy communication range.

“Annie!” I say, or rather subvocalize, my body pinioned as it is. The suit is smart enough to fill in the audio. “It’s been ages. Have they got us on opposing schedules or something?”

“Heya, Myr.” Annie’s voice is real; she’s in the zero-gravity coasting section of her flight. “Something like that. How’s tricks?”

“Five and two this run. They’ve got me staying out past the end of my tour, but this should be the last one.”

“I’m jetting off to a fresh start!” she says, with mock enthusiasm.

“You sound terribly thrilled.”

“First days of a tour are always the worst. I spent the last week in bed with Micah and Jane, and now I’m back out in the black with nothing but my poor fingers to keep me company.”

I chuckle. Annie is speaking metaphorically, of course. We can’t use our fingers with the suits on, but—like the clearwaves—no operator goes out on her second tour without making a few surreptitious modifications. There’s damn little else to do, blasting through the black with the weight of a mountain on your chest.

“You made it all the way back to the Ark, then?”

“Yeah,” Annie says. “Took up half my leave with transit time, but it was worth it to see a bit of green. And for a week of nonstop sex, of course.”

Annie can be worse than Gemmy. Still, she’s stuck to her partners, which is more than most operators can say. Relationships are hard when you spend two-thirds of your time hopping from derelict to derelict, with only your mobs at your side.

The suit pings. Two minutes.

“So what’s the gossip?” I ask.

“The usual. Long tours and lots of grumbling. You want the good news or the bad news?”

“Since when is there good news?”

Annie sighs. “Two more ghosts came back. Beatrice and Iffie.”

I’m silent for precious seconds. “Shit.”

“I know. I saw it coming, with Beatrice at least. You know what she’s—what she was like.”

“Yeah. Still.”

I pictured a mobcom making an automated rendezvous with a wetship, hatches opening up to reveal . . . what? Either nothing—a cockpit that had been cracked up to the black—or else a limp body, still swathed in its suit. A ghost.

Everyone knew how to do it, if you couldn’t take it anymore. It was easy enough to override the suit’s safeguards, make it give you whatever cocktail of drugs you wanted. Or else to just pull off your helmet and open the hatch and get a look at the stars first-hand. I always thought that was what I would do, if it came down to it. It seems more honest than dreaming my way out.

The mobcom can find its own way home, of course. Operators can be replaced, but nobody’s making fusion bottles anymore.

“Well,” I say, after a few more seconds have slipped away. “Is there good news?”

“Depends if you believe the rumors.”

“Sounds juicy.”

“Maybe.” Annie seems dubious. “Apparently the high muckety-mucks at Command are all in a tizzy. The science types are supposed to have come up with a new weapon. Some kind of tachyon wormhole something something, I don’t really remember. They say it could end the war, blast the Minos out of the system once and for all.”

I snort. “I’ve heard that before.”

“Me too. But there were certainly a lot of uniforms running around.”

“Well, I’m not going to start planning my retirement party just yet.” The suit pings. Thirty seconds.

“Me either. You headed back to the Ark after your tour?”

“Probably not.” There’s nobody waiting for me. Easier to spend my fleeting free time on the closest wetship and not waste most of it in transit.

“Pity. It really is nice to see the plants and such. Micah and Jane would probably have you over for dinner.”

“I’ll think about it.” Five seconds. “End of window. Catch you next time, Annie.”

“Zap some Minos for me.”

The connection cut. I would take a deep breath, if my lungs weren’t full of gel.

End the war, she says. Like that hasn’t been tried before. I remember at least a little bit from school. Dropping rocks on Minoa was supposed to end the war, but they just did the same to us. Each big battle was supposed to end the war, wrecking more and more ships until there weren’t enough left for more battles. Just us, operators in mobcoms blasting through the black, scrabbling in the rubble.

Thinking about it takes me down to a dark place, the kind of place that makes people ghost out. So I don’t think about it. I turn on my suit’s unofficial enhancements, feel a pleasant buzz, and drift back into fantasy. Lying between Annie and Gemmy, trading off kisses, fingers tangled in my hair and running hot across my skin. Trees around us, open sky above, a warm breeze and the smell of salt water.

It’s just a fantasy. It can be as impossible as I want.

“Hello out there.”

“Hello again.” It’s Gar.

“Fancy meeting you here.”

We’re on a big chunk of a sixth-generation cruiser, larger than our previous battlefield but still low-rez. There aren’t many high-rez wrecks still out there, at least not where we can get them, though periodically the unpredictable orbits of the debris-strewn inner system will spit one out in our direction. I load my usual profile into my spin-ups and try to work myself into a fighting frame of mind.

“I thought you would have been off shift by now,” Gar says. “Unless I counted wrong.”

“I ought to be. Command asked me to stretch myself a bit.”

“Ouch. My sympathies.”

“Yeah. Well. I’d appreciate it if you could make this as quick as the last time.”

He laughs. “Double ouch. I mean, if you just want to roll over, I wouldn’t object . . . ”

Every operator has been tempted, at some point. It would certainly be a lot easier if we could just trade off, instead of fighting it out every time. But Command won’t have it, and it’s common knowledge that our mobcoms spy on us, upload out battle records into the big iron back on the Ark. A little unauthorized communication is one thing, but throw a fight and there’d be hell to pay.

My spin-ups report that there are more trace metals in the skin of the hulk than I’d anticipated, and sensors show a few exotica-trap batteries still active. I make the call to go for second tier, devoting half my resources to building a defensive perimeter while the rest go into putting together fancier factories and harvesters, bootstrapping my construction ability beyond the primitive tools I’d brought with me.

“Can I ask you something?” Gar says.

“Sure, unless its tactical.”

He chuckles. “Why’d you become an operator?”

I blink, taken aback. “I . . . you know, I’m not sure I remember? It seemed like a good idea at the time.” It seems like a thousand years ago, though it’s barely a dozen. “I should ask you the same thing. You must have had more options than I did.”

Most women—Circean women, anyway, I have no idea how the Minoans run things—serve somewhere out in the black. There are never enough crews for the wetships, vacuum mechanics, salvage experts, a thousand other specialties, all in dire demand. The men, by and large, stay on the Ark, taking care of the food and running the creches. A few serve on the wetships, where the accelerations are lower and there’s room to move around.

Being an operator means being out at the sharp end. Only a few have the right profile to spend their lives locked inside a tiny mobcom. On the other hand, paradoxically, it’s a lot safer to go into battle in a fusion-powered autonomous factory, surrounded by armor and failsafes, then it is to be a mechanic on a wetship, crawling over rusty metal with only a salvaged suit and a frayed safety line between you and the black. More operators ghost out than die in combat or by accident.

“Not really,” Gar says. “No options at all, actually. My psych test said I had the profile for this. I was as surprised as anyone.”

“Lucky you.”

“It’s not so bad. Though I guess that’s my abnormal psychology talking.” He sighs. “It’s just strange, talking to the other operators. Back on the Ark it’s all ‘Remember Naviento!’ and ‘Death to Baby-Killers!’ and everyone hates the Circeans. Out here . . . ”

I smile in sympathy. We all go through this realization, sooner or later. “Out here it’s just a job,” I finish for him. “I know. That’s the secret of the operators. Weird, isn’t it?”

“I trained for years, but nobody told me that.”

“I’m not sure they know, back on the Arks. Or if they can believe it.” Command has always been excellent at ignoring inconvenient facts. “What about you? Do you hate Circeans?”

“Not particularly. I’ve never been very war-like. Until psych testing I wanted to be a creche-instructor.”

My suit pings. Mobs incoming. Gar and I are playing out the oldest variation in the operators’ book: rush versus tech. He went for a quick swarm, I’m building for a long game. If my perimeter holds him back long enough, my bigger, meaner mobs will crush him. If not, it’ll be a short encounter after all.

Gar learns quick, I have to admit. His tactics have a subtlety he didn’t display the last time we met, curving his mobs to probe my defenses from multiple angles. I hold chokepoints in the corridors with laserbugs, little turrets that burrow into the fabric of the walls to protect themselves. He swarms them with roaches, bright flashing beams carving his mobs apart until they close to use their integrators. I fall back to a second line, leaving behind exotica bombs that vaporize the leading edge of his forces.

His equipment still isn’t up to snuff. The Mark IVs limited compute power can only push the swarms in a straight line, not deploy them in writing formations to maximize sensor confusion. We’ve passed the point of no return, and I’m not sure he even knows it. My tier-two factories are online, hulking, efficient matrices that crank out larger mobs.

I assemble a squad of Stalker Vs, big caniform brutes with power claws and reactive armor. They bound out on magnetic pads, loping through the ongoing skirmish, scattering the roaches. When the smaller mobs try to grab on, the Stalker’s armor pulses hot and spiky, and ruined roaches fall away.

“Oh, shit,” Gar says, laughing. “That can’t be good.”

The Stalkers fight their way to his mobcom, tearing apart whatever he throws in their way. When they reach him, one of them staggers under the impact of the mobcom’s lasers, but doesn’t fall. The others tear into his spinups, wrecking his ability to produce mobs, and circle around the mobcom itself.

“Done?”

“Done,” he says. “One more question, before I go?”

I give an exaggerated sigh. “If you must.”

“Have you ever killed anybody?”

I pause again. I’m not sure I want to answer the question.

We’re supposed to, of course. More accurately, we’re supposed to take every opportunity destroy irreplaceable enemy mobcoms. The death of the operator is a strictly secondary concern. But precisely because the mobcoms are so valuable, chances to destroy them don’t come along very often. If I unleashed the Stalkers on the Mark IV, they could certainly take it to pieces eventually, but it takes only a flick of a torch to blast away from a wreck at a speed no mob could hope to match.

“Not recently,” I say. “You need a high-rez battlefield to even give you a shot at it.”

“But you have?” he says.

“Twice.” It’s something I think about to this day, when I’m out in the black, for all that it was my patriotic duty.

Gar is quiet for a while. Then he says, “Okay. Thanks.”

His torch ignites, and I’m alone on the wreck with my mobs. I wonder what he wanted. We all get a little philosophical sometimes, it’s one of the hazards of the profession, but too much of it puts you at risk of ghosting out.

I find myself hoping that’s not where Gar is heading. It’d be nice to get the chance to talk to him again.

When I make the rendezvous with the corvette, it informs me that my tour is over—at last—and asks if I want to take my leave on the Ark (current transit time, thirty-five days) or on the nearest wetship, a little more than two days away. I opt for the latter, and it makes me a small booster, just enough to make the intercept with the cruiser.

Like all wetships, it’s enormous, a fat-bellied behemoth of scarred metal and ceramic that dwarfs my spidery little mobcom. Even the corvette would look like a minnow beside it. Once my booster uses itself up and ejects, the cruiser takes me in its grip, pulling me gently but firmly into its maw with invisible lines of force. It’s hard to escape the sensation of being eaten alive.

Getting out of the mobcom, on the other hand, is a little bit like being born. First the suit has to retract all the wriggly adaptors it has plugged into every orifice; its surprisingly easy to forget that they’re there, out in the black, and the sudden reminder is disconcerting. Next I get out of my gel-seat, moving my legs for the first time in a hundred and twenty days. Drugs and artificial stimulation keep the medical effects of prolonged immobility at bay, but it still feels like rediscovering a limb I didn’t know I had. Then the main hatch opens, and I pull off my helmet and take an actual, oxygenated breath.

Procedures for dealing with returning operators are clear. There is no one waiting for me, just an empty room with a storage locker. It smells like mold and failing air recyclers, but the very fact of smell is another revelation. The suit pulls away from my skin with the wet sucking sound of breaking seals, and I leave it in a rubbery pile on the floor. A band of black, skin-tight stuff remains, tight around my wrist; that’s the pharmacopeia, which will keep supplying the drugs I can no longer live without.

One corner of the room is equipped with a shower-head and a drain, and I stumble underneath it and turn the water on full blast. The screaming, stinging sensation on my skin makes me want to curl into a ball, but I force myself to stay upright, tears filling my eyes. They have to fall the normal way, instead of being wicked aside by hair-thin suit fibers.

After a long, long time, I turn the water off and open the storage locker. I dry myself with the fluffy towel inside, then remove the uniform they’ve fabricated for me. It’s just in my size, of course, but it takes me a while to remember how clothes are supposed to work. The thing has buttons. Honestly.

Once I’ve got it sorted out to my satisfaction, I open the outer door and step into the cruiser’s hold. It’s full of all kind of junk, broken machines, wrecked equipment, a few other freshly fabricated structures. Two officers, a man and a woman, are waiting for me, wearing the same black-and-gold uniform as I am. They bring their hands up in salute, and long-dulled training makes me return it. I can’t stop staring at them—the little folds of their skin, the flickers of their eyes, the slight movements of their faces. I remember vaguely that this is rude, but I can’t bring myself to care.

“Welcome back, Lieutenant Commander Miranda,” the man says. “I hope you had a successful trip.”

I should say something, shouldn’t I? The physicality of the conversation, without the intervention of suit and clearwave, is distracting. “Thank you.” That’s usually safe.

Nothing happens for a while. That may have been the wrong thing to say after all. Then the man coughs.

“Lieutenant Goshawk will take you to your quarters.”

“Follow me, sir,” the woman says. I trail behind her, moving like a recently reanimated corpse.

I rate a room with a bed and a table, my own toilet, and a companion. Mine is a boy named Varn, wearing a private’s uniform and an expression of unshakable determination. He bustles around me, offering me food and water like he was a personal servant, but we both know what he’s there for and before long I’m eager to get down to business.

I wonder if there’s a creche-school back on the Ark where they train these boys, or if it’s just part of the standard military program. It seems like it would be a lesson worth sitting in on. I can’t help but imagine a grizzled drill-sergeant coaching his pupils in the finer points of the use of fingers, tongue, and cock. However he was instructed, Varn clearly was near the top of his class, and he leaves me sweaty and aching pleasantly. When we’re finished, he dresses quietly and slips out. He’ll be at my disposal for the duration of my stay; rank hath its privileges, I suppose.

Later, I sleep. I must sleep while I’m out on tour, but it happens during the drugged reveries of transit, so I’m never aware of drifting off or waking up. If I dream, I don’t remember afterward.

This time, though, I dream. I blame Gar.

I remember my first kill-shot, almost an accident, back on my second tour. I was still half-green, and up against a veteran named Lily, but she’d arrived at the wreck nearly five minutes after me, and she was struggling to overcome the handicap. That’s unusual. The big iron on the Ark plays the great chess game of dispatching mobcoms against its Minoan counterpart, and since all the pieces are public—hard to hide it when a fusion drive lights up—encounters are usually evenly matched or they’re not fought at all. Lily probably should have cut her losses and run, but she told me she was on a bad streak and didn’t want another failure on her record. She waited too long. I latched a crawler pregnant with exotica on to the underside of her mob, set it off, and the blast cracked her fusion bottle. Nothing left but vapor.

I never dream about the second time. There are places even my subconscious doesn’t want to go.

Over the next few days, I wander the cruiser, exploring. Like all wetships, it’s an ancient amalgamation of designs and repairs, full of unpredictable passages and detours. Everything has been fixed or replaced a hundred times over, and nothing works quite the way it should. Most of its bulk is devoted to the maintenance of a livable biosphere for the thirty or so crew members, who spend almost all of their time tending the machinery that keeps them alive and breathing. That’s the problem with canned spam in the black—it takes so much effort to keep us going there’s no time left for anything else.

As I shake myself out of my daze, I become ravenous for human contact. That’s half the reason companions are provided—otherwise operators would be forever dragging crew members into dark alleys when they have duties to attend to. I alternate between fucking to exhaustion and grilling him about what’s been going on back on the Ark, less because I want the news and more for the simple pleasure of conversation. Much of what he has to say is banal, but he repeats what Annie told me, about Command’s obsession with some kind of new toy.

On the tenth day of my leave, another mobcom arrives. I can hardly contain myself when I see that it’s Gemmy, and I’m already making plans for the two of us to seriously test the limits of poor Varn’s stamina. She docks, but she doesn’t open her mobcom, and for a minute a sudden fear grips me. Maybe Gemmy’s not in there at all. Maybe it’s just a ghost.

Fortunately, it’s not long before I get a call on my room’s data system—so strange to have to go to particular place to interface with it, instead of having it all around you—and hear her familiar, cheery voice.

“Myr! Is that seriously you up there?”

“Are you hiding from me?” I tell her, teasing. “Scared to come out?”

“Please. You have no idea how much I would like to wriggle out of this thing.”

“What’s stopping you?”

She sighs. “Orders. I got a packet from my corvette. You’re not going to like them.”

“I’m not going to like them?” A sudden, awful feeling wells up from my stomach. “What do your orders have to do with me?”

But the orders are already scrolling across my screen.

On arrival at cruiser 17, do not disembark. Another operator will be on leave there. Transmit these orders at once . . .

I blink back sudden tears, catching only snatches of the rest.

 . . .proceed immediately together . . .

 . . .utmost importance . . .

“Yeah,” Gemmy says. “Sorry it was you, Myr.”

I’m surprised at the strength of my reaction. It’s not so much the thought of getting back into the mobcom—I was going to do that again, sooner or later—as it is the sense of betrayal. Command has pulled some awful shit on me before, but nothing like this. So there’ll be no delightful tumble with Gemmy, no more time to relax and enjoy Varn’s attentions, nothing but a hustle to get back out in the black.

I could refuse. For once, I have the option. I’m not in my mobcom, with its secret recorders and remote overrides. If I lock the door to my room, what can they really do? Break it down and arrest me? So what?

They can shoot me in the head and feed me to the recycler, is what they can do. I know that, obviously. Refusing a direct order is treason. But the impulse still remains.

“It’s not all bad,” Gemmy says. “Take a look at the bottom.”

I glance down.

Upon the successful completion of this mission, you and the other operator will be eligible for an extended leave of not less than three hundred sixty (360) days.

“Shit.” The thought leaves me a little breathless. To have three tours worth of leave—I could go back to Ark, walk in the gardens, spend some of the ration allocations the pile up uselessly in my account. “They aren’t kidding, are they?”

“Nope,” Gemmy says. “So I’m also glad it was you waiting for me. You’re the best operator I know, and we have got to win this one.

Back into the mobcom, back into the tiny universe of suit and control board, systems flickering to life and running through their bootstrap sequences. Getting in isn’t nearly as bad as getting out. The suit is polite enough to grow its interfaces slowly. I settle back in the gel-seat and snap my helmet in place. The suit overrides my autonomic reflexes, and I stop breathing, tiny fibers snaking through my skin to oxygenate my blood directly.

The cruiser has already built me a booster, a terrifyingly large one. I can see Gemmy’s mobcom, similarly equipped, and I bring up the laser link.

“Ready?” she says.

“Just about.”

The cruiser pushes us free. Once we reach safe distance, the boosters’ programming takes over. Once again, I’m packed full of acceleration gel. Fibers snake around my eyes, tweaking the vitreous humors so they don’t pop like grapes.

The torches ignite.

“Whee!” Gemmy says, her voice computer-generated now.

Transit time, thirty-six days.

I spend some of my more lucid moments reviewing information about the target. It’s a big one, a third-generation battleship. The General Randolph, from back when ships had names. Until recently, it was locked in a complicated, eccentric orbit in the ruins of the inner system, but a recent close pass by still-molten Minoa slingshot it out in our direction. According to preliminary scans, it’s almost ridiculous rich in resources—high grade metals, bottled exotica, even a ton of ancient tech, still intact. The ultimate high-rez environment. I marvel at the profligacy of the early days of the war, when such a wreck would simply be left to spin in the black.

The mission profile is odd, too. Normally I skip that part of my orders, because it’s always the same. Suppress any enemy presence, construct anti-ship defenses and thrusters, wait for contact. This time, though, we’re to concentrate on securing a particular sector of the ship, without damaging it more than necessary, and then deliver a particular payload. Some kind of sensor and comm relay, as best I can tell, from the very old days. We’re to hold that sector at all costs, even if it means giving up an advantage in the fight overall.

“Weird,” I tell Gemmy.

“Very weird,” she agrees. “But this whole thing is weird. You ever done a tandem before?”

“No. We talked about it a little in training, but we’re spread so thin these days.”

“Me either. Think there’ll be two of them?”

“Have to be.” Command wouldn’t send us in to a mismatch, I hope. The same goes for the Minoans. “Who are you hoping for?”

“Someone new and incompetent,” Gemmy says, with a computer-mediated laugh. “Normally I’m up for a good fight, but with three tours of leave at stake, I just want to get this over and done with.”

“Likewise.” I wonder if Gar will be there.

The second time I made a kill-shot, the time I had a choice, is the one I try hard not to think about. This time I was the veteran, on my sixth tour, and my opponent was a girl just out of her training. Her first encounter, still uncomfortable in the second skin of the suit and mobcom. Someone had given her a clearwave, though, and she introduced herself, hesitantly, as Emily.

I was near the end of my tour. Tired, eager to be home. We were on a medium-rez cruiser, with enough exotica lying around to build some really dangerous weapons. I was pushing her back, corridors filling with blasted mobs and bolts of coherent energy, but it was taking forever. I built a Diamond II, a crystalline mob with an exotica core and focusing lenses to generate a laser from the energy flood. A suicidal charge by a squad of my other mobs carried the thing deep into her defenses, within sensor range of her mobcom.

I had originally intended to use it on her factories, blast her economy to ruins, but I can’t get near enough to detect them through the jammers she’s set up. Her mobcom stood out, though, fusion bottle humming. The Diamond was stuck in the center of a disintegrating pack of mobs, seconds from getting blasted, and I had a choice.

She should have put up more shielding. An amateur mistake, but easy to make, if all you’re used to is low-rez battles with roaches.

I took the shot. The exotica blast destroyed the struggling mobs around it, and pumped its laser far past the range my mobcom could have managed. The beam slashed through the decks and walls like they were made of mist, hit Emily’s old Mark III, and punched right through.

It was supposed to end quickly, in a bright flash of fusion. But the Mark III had enough time to eject its bottle, which detonated outside the wreck, and I could hear Emily screaming. The laser had slashed her nearly in half, blood and gore bubbling and freezing as the vacuum rushed into her shattered mobcom and through her ruined suit. It was several seconds before the clearwave cut out, but it didn’t seem to matter. I could still hear her shriek of pain and terror ringing in my ears.

Command gave me a commendation, and an extra thirty days leave.

We finish our deceleration burn, using up the last of the boosters, and make impact with the General Randolph. I try to put us as close to the objective sector as I can, but the ancient ship is tumbling, and it’s hard to match up my old maps to its scarred and pitted hull. Gemmy and I end up boring into the maze of room and corridors separated by several hundred meters, and a considerable distance from the sector we’ve been instructed to take.

There isn’t time to relocate, either. Two more mobcoms hit the wreck only seconds after we do; as usual, Minoan Command is as astute as ours. I eject my spin-ups, which immediately begin to report the rich concentrations of trace minerals and accessible exotica. Punching up the high-rez build profile gives me an unexpected feeling of nostalgia. It’s been a decade since I got to fight in a wreck so replete with material, and watching the plans for high-end mobs slide across my vision sends me back to my days as a recruit, barely out of training.

I shake my head and concentrate on the task at hand. Gemmy and I had talked strategy while in transit. It’s the first time either of us has ever had an objective other than flat-out victory, and we agreed it means at least one of us should take a more defensive approach. Given Gemmy’s tendency to go straight for the throat, that means me. After my usual burst of scouts—ready in a few seconds, given all the material at my disposal—I start pushing hard for tier-two, plowing every gram of resource I can extract in building bigger, faster harvesters and factories. In theory, pure tech will give you an exponentially increasing power curve, as long as the resources hold out.

And as long as your enemies let you do it. Gemmy sticks to quick and cheap mobs, blasting out swarms of roaches, froggies, and the low-end spinners and spiders. Her horde bounces and scuttles through the derelict’s corridors, cutting through doors where an ancient failsafes tried to contain the hull breech that ultimately killed the General Randolf. They secure the target sector early and push on, towards where the two Minoan mobcoms made entry.

I thumb the clearwave, out of habit. “Hello?”

“Hello, hello, hello!” Gemmy croons, already in the frantically excited state that battle brings out in her. “Anybody out there?”

“I’m here.” It’s Gar, again. I wonder if Command is sending me against him deliberately, because I keep winning. “My colleague is Vivian. This is her first tour, and she hasn’t got herself a clearwave yet.”

“Aw,” Gemmy says. “Poor little girl.”

“Hey, Gar,” I say.

“Hi, Myr. What are you doing back out so soon?”

“Orders.” I heave a sigh, which Gemmy and Gar immediately echo.

“At least we’ll get to have some fun for once,” Gemmy says. “Plenty to work with. Keep your heads down, kids!”

Not bad advice. The chance of someone getting killed is much higher in a high-rez environment, where the mobs can get large and dangerous quickly. My suit feeds me digests from Gemmy’s network, showing her mobs engaging the enemy. Vivian seems to be handling the initial defense, which means Gar is probably following my fast-tech strategy.

They don’t seem to be making any special push for the comm station, the critical sector from our orders. I wonder if the Minoans know about whatever’s so special, or if they’re just here after a rich prize. That leaves me a tactical choice—pretend that sector isn’t important, and hope they ignore it, or plant my main defense there?

I decide to rely on brute force instead of misdirection. My tier-twos are online, and I build myself an armada of rolling harvesters and constructor mobs. Then it’s time for a very rare maneuver, physically relocating myself. In an ordinary mission, there’s rarely a reason to move the mobcom around—it’s deadly slow compared to the mobs, and once place is usually as good as another to set up defenses. Today, though, if I’m going to be building my bastion around this comm station, I damn well want to be inside it when we start throwing high-end mobs around.

It takes a few minutes for my mobcom to get there, clanking ponderously on its spider-like legs and burning through hull material with its lasers when it can’t fit. The mobs beat me there, and I plant them in a rough semi-circle, facing Gar and Vivian and outside the sector we were instructed not to damage. The harvesters get to work, looting the hull material for metal and exotica, and I direct the constructors to start putting together tier-three factories. The exponential curve ticks up another notch.

In the comm station itself, I send a roach to upload the package Command gave us, a dense wad of ancient byte-code. To my astonishment, the archaic machinery hums to life. The comm station still works, near-miraculously preserved and powered by a huge exotica battery that must be one of the ship’s primary reserves. Suddenly my orders make a lot more sense—we’re not just here to salvage an old machine, but to do something. Possibilities start to run through my mind, but I ruthlessly shunt them away. Whatever it is, it’s not my problem.

My problem is the Minoans, whose swarms are getting nastier by the minute. Their early mobs have been joined by larger tier-two models, armed with lasers and plasma cutters instead of paltry, short-ranged integrators. Gemmy is falling back, frantically upgrading her own plant and picking off her larger opponents by sheer weight of numbers, but it’s time I joined the fight. My own tier-two factories are still waiting where I came in, and I set them to crank out a continuous stream of heavy mobs and report to Gemmy. She takes command of a squad of Stalker V’s and sends me a squeal of gratitude, and moments later battle is joined in earnest in the dead corridors of the ancient battleship. Big mobs tear one another to pieces, vaporize one another with lasers, and explode in bursts of released exotica.

The comms machinery is doing something, humming away to itself as it executes Command’s program. My attention is on the defensive line I’m building. I reforge the metal of General Randolf’s corridor walls into diamond-hard composites, stretch them into barricades bristling with laser turrets. In front of them my constructors lay traps, exotica bombs and clusters of tiny integrators that can reduce a big mob to gray goo. Behind, waiting in front of the comm station, is my reserve of tier-three mobs. They’re Behemoth IIs, huge things nearly the size of my mobcom, with force shields and multiple adaptive weapon systems. When they move, my suit feeds me echoing clanks as the walls vibrates.

“Yee-haw!” Gemmy shouts, launching a frantic assault aimed right at Vivian’s mobcom. It’s not a tactically sound maneuver, but it catches the Minoans off guard, and for a few minutes all their resources are devoted to encircling and destroying her assault force. In the meantime, Gemmy pulls back, shifting her mobcom so my new barriers will be between her and the enemy. Her new factories are ready, and she starts putting together flying squads of Stalkers and sending them on wide hooks, skirting the main battlefield.

“I like the Behemoths,” she says to me, on a private channel. “You’ve got your tier-three up and running?”

“Full blast. I’m still building out factories.” This is beyond even high-rez—my harvesters are sucking in raw material at a furious rate, but the General Randolph is a treasure store that I could only dream about in an ordinary encounter.

“There’s a trick I want you to try. Build yourself a squad of Diamonds and toss them out through a hole in the outer hull, see if we can get around behind them. The beams are powerful enough to cut in and do some damage.”

I blink. It’s a good idea. But . . .

“I’m on it.” I shake my head again. Not the time for second thoughts.

Gar and Vivian’s horde, reinforced and reorganized, goes on the offensive again. They run into my defensive line and the front ranks just evaporate, blasted to vapor by traps and turrets. My fire tears the complicated grid of corridors to shreds, leaving a zone of free-floating debris.

“Ouch,” Gar says. “That was like sticking my hand on a stove.”

“Is that the best you’ve got?” I grin inside my helmet.

“Not hardly.”

“Bring it on.” He yelps. “Shit! You sneaky little—”

“Ha!” Gemmy crows.

One of her Stalker squads got close enough to do some damage to Gar’s factories, and he diverts mobs to counter-attack. It’s not a devastating blow, not here, with rebuilding so easy, but it slows him down. The comm station whirrs and clicks behind me, sending out waves of unguessable purpose that barely register on my mobcom’s sensors. I build a squad of Diamonds, one-shot laser-bombs of immense power, and send them on a complex path that will take them out through a rent in the hull.

Gemmy, safely relocated behind my perimeter, settles down to build a steady stream of mid-range mob to supplement our forces. Vivian launches another attack on my line, with the same lack of success. When Gar throws another wave of small mobs against me, I start to guess that they’re covering up for some other scheme. Not much I can do, with so many of my resources committed to defense, but Gemmy takes the initiative again, sending a flying wedge of fast-moving spider-mobs deep into enemy territory. Once again, they fight their way in close to Gar’s mobcom before his defenses annihilate them.

“Look!” Gemmy crows, shooting me images. “Only one diffuser!”

My suit helpfully highlights known enemy mobs and installations, and I can see she’s right. Gar has built a diffuser—a mob that projects a defensive field that spreads out the energy from beam weapons—but only one. Gemmy’s brief attack has left the turtle-shaped thing glowing a faint blue-green.

“Five Diamonds ought to be able to punch right through it,” Gemmy says. “You can take him out!”

“Risky,” I say. My stomach flipflops. “If he’s got another one hidden, it’ll all be for nothing.”

“We’re accomplishing our mission just by sitting here,” Gemmy says. The comm machinery seems to have finished its task, or else is waiting in readiness for a response. I have no idea how long we were supposed to hold it for. “If we’re going to actually win this fight, we need to take a few risks.”

I close my eyes. My Diamonds, flying free in the black outside the General Randolph’s hull, have maneuvered to a position where they have the closest shot at Gar’s mobcom. He’s still fairly close to the surface of the wreck, with only a few metal decks between him and the outside. Gemmy’s right, damn her, damn Gar for not keep his defenses up, damn me for even thinking twice about it.

“I’ll try.” I twitch my hands, entering the firing coordinates.

Gemmy sends her mobs out, to occupy the Minoan’s attention, and the dead corridors of the hulk once again erupt with laser fire and detonations. The Diamonds maneuver a bit into better positions. I thumb the clearwave on, thinking I ought to say something, but click it off again without speaking when I can’t think of what.

The first Diamond fires, releasing its exotica and blossoming into a brilliant sphere of energy. Tiny components, in the millionth of a second before they’re consumed by the explosion, focus that power into a coherent beam and direct it down into the ancient battleship. The laser cuts the decking into vapor and hits the hemispherical field projected by the diffuser, splashing into a curling, blue-green mist. The diffuser’s glow doubles, then doubles again as two more Diamonds fire, the combined energy of their beams coursing through its overworked circuits. The fourth one burns it out entirely, in an explosion that sends fragments pinging off Gar’s mobcom.

Then the fifth Diamond goes off, its beam sweeping a narrow arc in the fraction of a second of its existence, slashing a path of destruction through Gar’s the exposed factories and harvesters in a wide semi-circle and missing his mobcom by meters.

There’s a long moment of silence. Then—

“Shit,” says Gar. “Shit.”

“Myr?” Gemmy says. “What the hell happened?”

“He’s crippled,” I say. My Behemoths lurch into motion. “Hit him now!”

She sends her mobs forward, too, but I’m not sure it’ll be enough. Normally, blasting an enemy’s factories to bits is enough to win an encounter, but with all the resources he’s got in easy reach Gar will be able to bootstrap himself back up again in no time, especially with Vivian to help. And with so much of my force locked into a static defense, I’m not sure Gemmy and I can overwhelm him.

Still, no regrets. I had a choice, and this time I made the right one.

“Myr?” Gars says, as the Behemoths join the battle.

I wonder if he knows what I did. I don’t want to talk about it, not with Gemmy on the line. “What?”

“I’m really sorry about this.”

I have only an instant to grasp what happens next. A tunneler mob, digging through solid metal, slipping between decks and insinuating itself past all my barriers. Not enough payload for more than a nuisance attack, except that my mobcom is sitting in the comm station, and under that comm station is one of the biggest exotica stores on the whole derelict ship. The tunneller must have attached itself ages ago, working with its integrator to turn the battery into an enormous bomb. Now my sensors pick up the swelling energy, far too late to do anything about it.

Still, no regrets.

The world goes white.

I open my eyes. I must not be dead after all.

My suit confirms this. There’s no link to the mobcom, no network or even clearwave connection, but it flashes diagnostics for my stupid, fragile meat-body. One leg broken, soft tissues all over damaged by shockwave. Nothing it can’t fix, given time, and its already made a good start. I’ve been unconscious for nearly five hours.

I’m floating free, an odd sensation. All our encounters take place in null gravity, of course, but I’m usually strapped securely into my gel-seat. Now I’m in a small, dark space, lit only by dozens of flickering indicator lights. By their faint glow, I can make out a control console, a seat, and a suited figure. I’m inside a mobcom, but not a familiar one. Someone has plugged my suit into a power line—it can keep me alive indefinitely on its own, as far as food and water and medicine goes, but it needs external power to do it.

I wonder if I’m a prisoner. I’ve never heard of an operator being captured before.

The suited figure, seeing my movement, beckons me over. I pull myself toward the console, and there’s a comm cable waiting. My suit isn’t designed to interface with Minoan equipment, but the other operator has been making some basic modifications, and it fits the jack on my gauntlet.

“It’s me,” Gar says. “Are you all right?”

“I’ll live,” I say. “What happened?”

“Your mobcom was cracked wide open, but it managed to eject its bottle before it went up. I had some mobs take a look, and when they saw your suit was intact, I brought you back here.” There’s something tight and unpleasant in his voice.

“Lucky me.” I mean that. The mobcom has all the armor—the suit isn’t designed to do much without it. The difference between a blow that would break the mobcom open and one that would break it open and turn me into paste is only a hair’s breadth. “Did you pull your punch?”

“What?” He shakes his helmeted head. “Oh, no. I wish I . . . ” He pauses. “Listen. There’s something you need to see. We got a broadcast an hour ago.”

Video flashes into my vision. I recognize the jagged lines of the Minoan Ark from a hundred propaganda videos, the sinister face of the Enemy, as seen from an escorting cruiser. Then a tiny spark of light blossoms in the center of the screen, rapidly expanding into a roaring ball of energy that must be hundreds of kilometers across. The huge, ancient ship shatters into a thousand spinning pieces, fragments blasted free just ahead of the all-consuming sphere of light.

I blink, trying to understand what I’m looking at. The Minoan Ark. The last bastion of their civilization. Where they keep their factories, their food supplies, their Command. Their children and their creche-schools.

The end of the war.

“I . . . ” Tears are welling in my eyes, wicked away by my faithful suit. “I don’t . . . ”

“That’s not all,” Gar says. “Here.”

Another video. This time, its home. The smooth curves of the Circean Ark, as friendly and familiar as the inside of my mobcom. The tiny world on which I was raised, with my creche-brothers and sisters, where I hoped to go walk in the gardens if I could ever get enough leave.

The same tiny spark of light, the same expanding sphere. I close my eyes before I can see the end.

“They were developing a new weapon,” I say, dully. “Something . . . complicated. A wormhole tachyon something something, Annie said.”

“Apparently, the comm station here on the General Randolph painted a target on the Ark,” Gar said. “A few minutes later, that thing went off. As best we can tell, the same effect happened on your side, at the same time.”

“They lost control.” I want to cry, laugh, and curl into a tiny ball of guilt all at once. “Those stupid, stupid bastards. They built a new toy and they let it get out of control.”

“That’s what my side thinks, anyway.” He shakes his head again. “Either way, it hardly matters what happened now.”

Nothing matters now. The war is over. No one left to fight.

There’s a long interval of silence. I can hear Gar’s ragged breathing over the open channel. I wonder if he’s been crying.

“What happened to Gemmy?” I say at last.

“She pulled out after the explosion. I don’t blame her, you ought to have been dead. When these images came through, I sent her a message telling her I’d picked you up. Last I saw, she’d turned her torch around and headed back this way.”

“Why? What are we going to do now?” What was there to do, except ghost ourselves and be done with it? My suit could still manage that much.

“Vivian is off building out our anti-ship weaponry. We’ve got plenty of energy here.” He sounds almost shy. “When we’re ready, I’m going to broadcast an invitation to both sides. Everyone who’s left.”

That might about to a few dozen mobcoms, a few cruisers, some corvettes. “To do what?”

“To build a new Ark.”

“Here? Both sides?”

He nods.

“Do you think they’ll listen?”

“The operators will,” Gar said. “You told me the secret. It’s just a job for us, and now the job is over. Time to move on.”

“The officers on the cruisers might object.”

“Have you ever thought about what a mobcom could do to a cruiser, if you decided to take it apart?”

I’d never even considered it, but the answer was obvious. Cruisers were fat, fragile wetships, and their tiny crews would be no match for a gang of mobs.

“You really think it will work?” I say.

“It might. We’ll have the mobcoms’ fusion bottles, all the resources of the General Randolph. We can take the cruisers apart, if necessary. Go and fetch more wrecks. Figure something out.” I can tell, somehow, that he’s smiling. “It beats the alternative.”

“Yeah,” I say after a minute. “I suppose it does.”

Another silence.

“I saw what you did,” Gar says. “With the Diamonds. I wanted to say . . . thank you. For not taking the kill-shot.”

“I thought about it,” I say. “But—”

“And I really am sorry for taking mine.”

“Don’t worry.” I shake my head. “I won’t take it personally. It’s only a job.”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2015.

From So Complex a Beginning

Julie Nováková

What if we discovered a planet that’s started being habitable only recently, nevertheless teeming with life? How could we determine if it had just originated and evolved so fast, or had been a product of an intervention by some alien intelligence? And what if the future of our space exploration and settlement depended on the answer to that question?

Ecosystem engineer Irena Belova is not happy to be in charge of answering it, to say the least . . .

By the way, habitable planets around white dwarfs (and possibly other stellar remnants) are a real possibility, and we should know more about whether, where and under what conditions they exist already in the coming decades with telescopes such as JWST, WFIRST or ARIEL. Readers interested in more about that can check our my Clarkesworld article (“The Undiscovered Country: Planets of Dead Stars”), but one should start with the story ahead . . .

Bright, piercing light everywhere. The world flipped around, and then came to a standstill.

I stumbled out of the Witten Jump capsule that had held me during my voyage, trying in vain to overcome the sickness and grateful that no one was waiting for me in the entry chamber. That would make my arrival highly undignified.

One of the crew waited in the adjacent section. He smiled widely and extended his hand. “Hi, I’m Magnus—Doctor Magnus Ulsen. You must be Doctor Irena Belova. Welcome to Ariadne.”

“Yes. Nice to meet you, Dr. Ulsen,” I decided to stick with the surname.

He didn’t show any disapproval. “How was your journey? Would you like something to eat, or get some rest first?”

“I’m fine, thank you. I’d like to start doing my job as soon as possible.” And hell of a job it is, I added to myself. More like a punishment.

I wondered whether I wouldn’t be better off today if I had changed my opinion on ass-climbing some time ago. Well, too late to start now.

Ulsen nodded, his smile not wavering. “Of course. Shall I introduce the rest of the crew to you, go through the data and then calibrate the drone?”

“Well, we can hardly do it in a different order.”

This time the smile faltered a little.

Four weeks, countless moments of anger and two Witten Jumps earlier, I had been having a passionate discussion with my boss.

“Why me?” I asked again, louder.

“Because you’re the expert,” Peter Wolfe repeated. He looked tired from having to talk with me and eager to grasp at any excuse to leave. “You’ve claimed yourself that there’s no better ecosystem designer than you.”

“That is correct.” My impatience grew every second too. “However, you don’t need an environmental designer for this. This is way out of my expertise.”

“The board thought otherwise.”

The board is full of . . . well, politicians, I thought. I must have still had some remnants of self-preservation because I did not say it aloud.

“Then the board probably had incorrect information to base their decision on. You need a team of planetary geochemists and exobiologists. Not an engineer.”

He frowned. “You’re leaving in three days. You should start packing.”

“Wait—I’m serious. I get it, the board wanted one independent expert to review the situation at the site while the teams work on the data from here. But let me sum up my mission: I’m to decide whether a planet was terraformed and artificially seeded with life. I can’t do that. If the answer is not obvious for the hundreds of scientists studying it for months now, I won’t bring anything new to the problem. In theory, it should be quite easy to tell whether a planet was terraformed, at least if the process occurred in a period we can study by drills in the rocks and ice. The fact that so far no one was able to tell suggests that neither will I.”

I continued quickly before he could object: “What do you want me to do then? If you expect me to have a look at local life and tell you that aliens for sure did or did not design it, I’m sorry. It’s impossible to design a complex planetary biosphere. Hell, it’s hard enough to design a space habitat ecosystem with life forms we know! A whole biosphere just can’t be done de novo; too many random variables. If life was brought there and then left to evolve independently, we could notice a sudden appearance of advanced forms in the fossil records. We could also tell if the life on JN15W591 had the same roots as somewhere else. But as far as we know, it’s unique and the fossil records don’t tell us much. That’s about it. There’s no need to send me there because I won’t be able to tell either way. You could still go to the board and explain it to them.”

Wolfe looked at me thoughtfully for a while. I dared to hope I convinced him.

“Have a safe journey,” he said then, bowed his head with a little smile and walked away.

I hated my task from the moment it had been assigned to me. It was a) political, b) nonsensical. It wasn’t just hard. From my point of view, it was so near impossibility that we could just approximate it as impossible—meaning the job I was sent to do here was just a load of crap.

I lingered on these happy thoughts as Ulsen showed me into the main control room. Two people occupied it, a short stumpy man and a tall dark woman. “Dr. Belova, please meet my colleagues, An-Bai Chen and Zorya Kovalenko.”

We exchanged polite if brief greetings. These two didn’t seem to share Ulsen’s capacity to pretend being friendly; Chen seemed undisturbed at best and Kovalenko was eyeing me suspiciously.

“Zorya, will you show Dr. Belova our equipment?”

“Sure,” she answered with no enthusiasm. “From here, you can control all probes in the system. But we’ve got just a few machines elsewhere, we’re very focused on the planet.”

“I know. The probes come from another orbital station, correct?”

“Right. None have ever been on Ariadne and we repair damaged ones indirectly through telemetry. They never came in contact with any life from Earth.”

I nodded. “The risk of contamination would be too high.”

She explained to me the various levels of controlling the probes and checking their data while Chen and Ulsen worked at their terminals. I suspected they were just highly trained mechanics decorated with a degree. They maintained everything working properly, but probably did no actual science themselves; that was up to hundreds or thousands who regularly received data from Ariadne through small Witten Jump probes. Not that this crew wouldn’t be important; it was, vitally. It was probably just an under-appreciated job. Like mine.

Ulsen stood up again. “Would you like to see the miracle now?”

“Certainly.” I did not reciprocate his grin.

He took me to one of the few portholes and waved his hand towards it. Once again he smiled proudly, as if introducing his own creation. “This, Dr. Belova, is JN15W591. We just call it Jane.”

Looking down at the planet, I had to admit it was impressive. Below us lay a brand new world to explore, a large terrestrial planet teeming with life, all blue, greenish and brown, with visible mighty rivers and large savannas, closely orbiting a white dwarf—not so closely to give it a tidally locked rotation, but near enough for it to be a unique sight.

I took a sharp breath. “Thank you, Dr. Ulsen. I’ll retire to my cabin now. I’m a little tired. Can we calibrate the drone tomorrow morning?”

“Sure.”

I could not sleep much that night. Long weeks of devastating semi-conscious telemetry and work with endless data awaited me, starting tomorrow. I felt enraged. Perhaps—or am I just being paranoid again?—it really was meant partly as a punishment for how furious I made some powerful people feel with my honesty about their plans for new station environments I had been supposed to design. I could just follow them blindly, smile politely, flirt a little occasionally . . . Hell, no, I can’t act that well. They never liked me anyway. I should try to make the best out of this situation. Seeing Jane’s biosphere directly could inspire me in my designs.

But still I was quite pissed off.

The first time I opened my eyes on the surface of Jane, it felt strangely surreal, as if in a dream. It sort of was. The actual me was lying in a supportive gel on Ariadne, fed by tubes and wired into a computer through which I was controlling the drone’s body. As I tried a few movements, everything felt more real every moment. A cocktail of modulators pumped into my brain made it think this was my own body and discard a slight delay in its responses. My head would hurt like hell days after I’m finished here.

I was standing in the middle of a vast grassy plain, or more precisely covered with something that very remotely resembled grass. I could see some animals—a few small insectoids down in the grass, a herd of maybe two dozen mastodonts in the distance. I wondered who came up with the common names. Probably some bureaucrat rather than a scientist. The “insectoids” were nothing like insects on Earth. Instead of a chitinous exoskeleton, they had inner supporting structure made of silicates—unlike anything else known to us. And the “mastodonts” sported anteater-like scales and were capable of rolling into a ball if facing some kinds of danger.

Here I was, a lone figure on the face of JN15W591, the planet that threatened to bring the government down. Of course, it was only an excuse. But it came in a bloody convenient time.

Beneath my feet was a political firestorm. And also a world that shouldn’t have existed.

A chthonian planet, a remnant of a gas giant’s core stripped of its gaseous components by close proximity to its star after it inflated into a red giant. However, the star was now a white dwarf and the scorched planet’s orbit migrated into the new habitable zone. Just a billion years elapsed since then—and yet I was standing on a world teeming with complex multicellular life.

Highly improbable, yes, but impossible? Who am I to tell? How can we know that life based on different principles than life on Earth cannot evolve faster? Too few data points . . .

A message window appeared in the corner of my view. I gave a mental order to open it.

How are you doing, Dr. Belova? May we be of any assistance? Magnus

I felt as if I suppressed a sigh, though the robotic body was incapable of such tasks. Ulsen was undoubtedly curious—and maybe even worried or feeling threatened, depending on his opinions about JN15W591 and his political views. That’s what this wonderful world must inevitably come to. Since the discovery of Witten Jumps a century ago, every single dispute converged to one question: Should we expand as quickly as possible, or keep a low profile? Technologically, we were capable of visiting countless systems and colonizing at least one every few years. However—should we? Suddenly a theoretical question about whether there were unforeseen dangers awaiting us among the stars, such as possibly hostile aliens or armies of life-cleansing machines, became all too real.

So far, no advanced aliens, just over a dozen planets with life, mostly only microbial and apparently nothing more sentient than a rat. No remnants of civilizations either. I wouldn’t recommend you a career in exoarcheology, unless you wanted to sit at your desk all the time, writing outlandishly titled popular books.

No wonder JN15W591 was promptly renamed “the impossible planet” after its discovery had leaked. Authors of “First proof of alien life-seeding?” at least had the decency to keep the question mark. A lot depended on whether advanced civilizations existed previously. If so, it would play in the hands of those in favor of much slower, more cautious exploration.

The politicians started fighting again, resulting in me, a bloody ecosystem engineer, lying naked in a tub of slime and controlling a humanoid robot on the planet’s surface.

I frowned and sent Ulsen a note: Not so far. If I need anything, I’ll let you know.

I could control most of the machines on Jane and share their data, so I made contact and reviewed their tasks. Most of what occurred to me naturally was already done: drilling through the bedrock and polar ice caps, endless chemical analyses, taking countless samples of local life, analyzing their biochemistry, cellular structure, metabolic pathways, genetics . . .

I had no idea what new to do. But as I was here mostly to reevaluate the findings, I ran tests again to see if they weren’t compromised originally. While the probes worked, I sat on a small boulder, observing my surroundings and lost in thought. During my voyage to Ariadne, my brain and its implants were fed with results from the data already gained here. My head was full of information about “Jane”. However, I had little time to really think about it so far.

Most of the volatiles here came from comet and asteroid impacts, bringing water and simple organics. How long could it take to form enough oceans and atmosphere for life to be able to arise?

Ask an ecosystem engineer, I thought bitterly. Whole teams of exobiologists and biochemists haven’t agreed on the origins of life. Could comets bring enough material at all? The compounds of life would have to have been brought here in the last billion years, during which complex life appeared too. Improbable. But nowhere near a proof that someone had tampered with it.

Numerous theories tried to explain how life on Jane evolved so fast. Short early intensive bombardment, quick formation of atmosphere, UV leading to more mutations accelerating the evolutionary process . . . All as fragile as fine china and very untestable. Fables. I knew why I didn’t become a theorist and chose engineering instead. I couldn’t answer questions about terraforming or the origin of local life. But I could try to determine whether that life really arose here.

Fossils.

However, that one’s tricky. Geochemistry of Jane makes fossilization harder than on Earth. The little we have looks like life wasn’t brought here in advanced forms. We even have probable microfossils from about three hundred million years after the planetary nebula formation. Of course, we’ll never know if they belonged to the same lineage of life as what we see here today.

Biochemistry was of no use to me either. For all I knew, it was compatible with local geochemistry. Genetics were far trickier. Life on Jane stored genetic information on PNA: a peptide chain bearing bases with a transcription code different than anywhere else we’ve been. If transcription had indeed been a correct term: it went in two steps on Jane, first replicating the original strand with some bases modifications and only then creating multiple copies of the translation template. Many hypotheses have been proposed about its purpose: Greater stability of the code itself? Multiple error checkouts? Could it have been designed for a better control over the local life? But no one found any clearly artificial sections like gene drives. It was all fascinating and curious but again of no help to me. If someone had really brought life here, they cared little to include any instruction manuals.

I frowned. I really hoped I could find something after I could think about it here. But that was never likely, was it, Irena? Time to do some actual work.

On my third two-day telemetry shift, I noticed a strange event. A small wasp-like creature interrupted me in a funny way: it sat right into one of my robotic eyes and looked as if it was trying to sting me. Poor choice, little one. Go somewhere else.

It arrived to the same conclusion and flew to a nearby group of grazing mastodonts. One of them looked up, gave a deep bellow and rolled into a ball. They were on a slightly sloped terrain, and it started rolling down. A curious sight! Others followed, but one was not fast enough. The wasp landed while the animal was still vulnerable. Trying to penetrate the thick scaly skin would be futile, but it found a soft spot by the eye and delivered its sting. I watched with curiosity. Very shortly after, the mastodont started shaking and fell dead. The insect then buried itself in its eye and disappeared.

It was a strange enough and somewhat frightening sight—I naturally imagined something so deadly creeping up the brain of a human. Will it wait for others of its kind to use up the carcass and procreate there? Or is it a queen, already pregnant with thousands of fertilized eggs, prepared to lay them here and have the large mastodont as a source of food and a safe haven for her children?

Well, hardly safe, I reminded myself. The carcass must surely attract a lot of scavengers.

Yet when I approached the carcass later that day, it still lay untouched. Strange . . . Was the insect perhaps so venomous?

Nothing easier than to look it up. I found the moment of the mastodont’s death in my memory bank and went back. There. It must get stung any second now . . . Any second . . .

Suddenly, it started trembling. It fell.

No, no, I must have overlooked it . . .

I played the record again. I saw it just like back then—except there was no insect.

If my current body had a heart, it would start racing right now.

A discrepancy. It should not be possible. The memory bank stored everything I saw, heard, smelled or touched on this planet, all the data from this drone. How could there be such a mistake?

Only if it hadn’t been a mistake at all.

I made a search for the wasp-like creature. The system offered many suggestions, however, this species seemed not to exist in the database at all.

Damn. Damn!

Only one plausible option. Someone hacked my data feed and deleted information about this species from Ariadne’s data banks. Why? Why was this insect so important?

And second, admittedly more pressing to me right now: Who did it?

And what more is he or she capable of?

I had a familiar streak of paranoia. But this time, it was justified. Whoever did this would surely know that I knew. They might go murder my helpless organic body in the supportive gel on Ariadne and I could do nothing about it. It would take at least twenty minutes before I fully awoke. Before I’d be ready to defend myself, maybe an hour. I couldn’t even connect to Ariadne’s computers to see with the station’s cameras and deadlock the doors.

As I was still alive a moment later, I collected myself and started thinking more sensibly. Killing me would benefit no one. Too many people knew about my mission. If something happened to me, even an accident, it would lead to an extensive investigation. They needed me alive.

Perhaps they didn’t know that I’d found out. An automatic algorithm might have deleted the data. The crew might not be looking at my memories. Actually, they might not be involved at all. It could be an AI which found its way on Ariadne, either before I arrived here or with my transport. Planted by . . . whom? A radical who wanted to keep the existence of other civilizations quiet? A biotech corp eager to exploit any interesting discoveries first?

In any case, my life was hopefully not at peril, for the moment, and I just learned something most valuable about my mission. I finally had a good start.

I sat in the dining room—what a pompous name for a tiny cabin with a table and a couple of chairs—and chewed my lunch with little appetite. The door creaked and Chen stepped him.

“Hi. May I join you?”

I shrugged. “I can hardly refuse.”

“Has anyone told you how wonderful personality you’ve got?”

I was in no mood for jests. Three hours ago, I awoke from my two-day telemetry shift, I had a horrible headache and vomited what little acid was left in my stomach. I felt like I couldn’t go on with this work. To hell with all my augments. They hardly helped.

But someone at Ariadne had been trying to conceal evidence from me. I didn’t like being messed up with.

“Sorry, just tired,” I said. I watched him sit down with a bowl of something not exactly appetizing. “What about you?”

“Me?” Chen smiled. “No, my work is thankfully not so exhausting.”

“What exactly is your specialization?”

“Officially, I’m a software engineer. I oversee that all is working as it should and yields reliable data. But in fact, we’re all just doing the same boring routine day after day. A trained monkey could do it,” he snorted.

I’d done some reading on Chen, Kovalenko and Ulsen. He was right; they were all over-qualified for the largely maintenance jobs here. He’d worked on a Pluto research station before, and both Kovalenko and Ulsen had been involved in a scientific mission on Proxima b, a lifeless but highly interesting and challenging world.

“Well, I’ve heard augmented chimps got better jobs, to be honest,” I sighed.

Chen laughed bitterly. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“But I’d exchange it with you any day.”

“Really? I’d give everything to have your job and so would Magnus or Zorya, I’m sure! I’m a little envious of you.” A tiny smile flickered on his face. “I mean, at least your job is meaningful.”

If I weren’t so exhausted, I’d have burst into laughter.

“What we do takes most of the time between getting up and going to bed again. Every single day the same. But it takes time and has to be done. We’ve always got some bugs.”

I flinched. Bugs? Is he trying to threaten me?

“Are you alright, Doctor Belova? You’ve gone very pale.”

“Of course I am. Just a little weary,” I said quickly. Don’t be paranoid, Irena, control it!

“You should get some sleep.”

“Good idea. In fact, I’ll go now.”

I almost ran into Ulsen in the corridor.

“You look nervous, Doctor,” he remarked. “Is there anything wrong?”

“I’m tired. Nothing else.”

Ulsen smiled at me. “Of course. You’ve got a lot to do. But don’t work yourself too much.”

Was he trying to suggest that I should ignore my duties?

“I can hardly avoid it,” I said coldly. “Now, if you excuse me . . . ”

I went to my cabin but couldn’t fall asleep, however hard I tried. I considered medication for a while but decided against it. Sedating myself into sleep was not an option. My brain was already full of waste from my long telemetry sessions. I needed to stay as alert as possible when awake.

Eventually I couldn’t bear staring into the low ceiling, thinking about my task and the crew and diving into deeper and deeper despair. I got up, headed back to the dining room. A glucose-rich snack might not be a bad choice.

I heard voices from inside and stopped.

Chen was talking: “ . . .so aloof! She’s a pretentious cow, thinking she’s so much better than us. Thank god she’ll be gone soon.”

Yes, now we see who’s pretentious here, I thought bitterly. I could trust no one. Chen, Kovalenko, Ulsen—every and any one of them could be the culprit and my enemy.

I completely lost my appetite. I stood in the corridor for a moment, listening to them.

“Easy for you to say.” That was Kovalenko. “She’s messing up with my schedule, repeating experiments, offering no explanation . . . Like she doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing!”

“That might be the case,” laughed Ulsen. “But hey, try to be a little nice to her. She might not be stable. She resigned her previous post some years ago due to personal reasons, but a friend of mine knows another friend . . . Long story short, she became paranoid. Like clinically paranoid. Could no longer do the job. But she didn’t choose this mission. Some unqualified bureaucrat came up with her name, offered it to the council . . . No wonder she’s clueless. An-Bai’s right, she’ll be gone in a couple of weeks. There’s no reason to make the time harder for her or any of us, right?”

Right. I turned and walked away silently.

When I heard Chen, I felt somewhat betrayed and a lot more weary and beaten than moments ago. As Ulsen was speaking, something else came up. I got angry. How dare he dig into my past like this and use it against me? I felt hot, simmering rage.

Good. Let it fuel me in continuing my job. Because I’m certainly not giving up, you bastards.

Before I submerged into my gel tank again, I changed the combination on the door and gave Ariadne a command not to let anyone in under any circumstances. I may have still been paranoid—but I was going to call it cautious.

Back on Jane, I continued looking for my deadly wasp while pretending to do other tasks. I managed to cut several probes off the system as if they had broken down. Their data would be streamed to me but not to the station.

The poisoned mastodont’s body was still where I’d left it the last time; still nearly intact. The inside of its brain yielded a surprise: Not only it had been infested by larvae of the wasp that killed the animal in the first place. These were already dead or dying, parasitised by slightly smaller and sleeker but anatomically similar worms. A quick sequencing showed the two species had been closely related. Nothing too surprising in cases of hyperparasitism known on Earth.

The probes found several other dead animals of various branches, fitting the same patterns. Their brains contained either the killer wasp’s larvae, or its own parasite’s as well.

My probes extracted the poison, injected it into meat samples and left them around for scavengers. Those eaten resulted in a quick death of the scavenging animal. My little wasp’s poison had apparently been very potent and fast-acting. The probes’ equipment was too crude for a proper biochemical analysis but it seemed to bind to a protein produced by nearly all animal life on Jane according to the database I had to access. Its purpose had been unknown so far; it didn’t seem to do any important function, despite being produced in all studied cell types of all cataloged animals. How come no one had noticed this before? True, they had too much data to go through, but still . . .

They didn’t know about the poison. They knew nothing of these two wasp species, edited away from the databases . . .

I had to end this session in the middle of my efforts. I was already past the scheduled time. I would be risking brain damage otherwise. As impatient and nervous as I felt, this had to wait.

Ulsen was as friendly and annoying as ever. “Any success yet?”

I gave him a grim look. “Not your business.”

“Oh, don’t be disappointed if it’s not going well. Everyone knows your mission is complicated. It would probably take decades! I don’t know what your supervisors were thinking.”

Chen and Kovalenko simply ignored me. I was grateful; worrying about their intentions during every seemingly innocent conversation had really been getting on my nerves. Any member of the crew could be an agent working against me. It sounded paranoid, but . . .

Justified suspicion, I had to remind myself.

Finally, after two days of modern-day torture, I could resume my work down on the planet.

I was registering more and more cases of the parasitoid wasp’s actions. In a vast majority of the cases, though, its reproductive efforts were in vain; its own parasite had found it.

With the poison, I was on the same track as before: it killed animals swiftly with no exceptions save for these two species. Peculiar . . .

I had relied on my own memory and conclusions, never went through the records again and only used my “stolen” probes for my continued experiments. Yet despite all these precautions, I evidently hadn’t been careful enough.

A new message flickered right in the center of my view: What are you doing, Irena?

I froze. Ariadne was listed as the sender; no further information was available.

The text changed.

That may have been the wrong question. You are actually not doing anything physically. You’re lying in a tank full of gel, unable to move, or to scream . . .

Had they bypassed the security? Ariadne herself might have been the perpetrator, some clever AI buried in her processes . . .

I almost felt my distant heart racing. I hesitated just for a second before sending back my own message: Who are you?

You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?

I was probably conversing with a human. An AI might well be programmed for this type of mocking responses—but why? A simple program, just covertly hiding facts, would be safer.

What are you trying to conceal from me?

Stop it. Sit out the rest of your mission and leave happy. Dig more and you’ll be stopped.

I cut all the channels but those from my body. I was effectively blind, seeing only through this one drone. Only now I allowed myself the luxury of fear. If the perpetrator managed to get in the telemetry cabin, I might die any moment, seemingly in an accident. Maybe quickly—just ending my processes instantly. Maybe it would be slower and I’d know it, I’d feel but couldn’t do anything in my physical body . . .

Cut it, Irena, I snapped at myself. You’re right. You can’t do anything about that. But you’re here. This might be your last chance. It’s now or never. Think!

The wasp that had brought me on this track had been noticed by my adversary before and swept beneath the table; why? Its poison could likely kill any animal on this planet. A coincidence? Hardly. But what purpose would it serve if someone truly designed this?

Ah . . . of course. I was trying to be a scientist so much that I almost forgot that I was an engineer. And what would an ambitious engineer do if designing a completely new system, uncertain of its success and wishing to be able to eradicate parts of it if needed?

Install kill switches.

It was perfect—so perfect I wondered why we had not done it yet. Such control . . . Different groups of organisms would have their specific kill switches. In fact, there may be whole series of switches in each one of them, for every branch . . . You could use them for steering the process, or for more prosaic reasons. Do you have a herd of cattle for slaughter? No need to take the animals down one by one, invoking stress in them, lowering the quality of their meat . . . Just administer poison that kills them instantly and painlessly. You need not to worry; you’re fully immune to the poison, you designed it so. Need to change an ecosystem in an entire region but it’s too complicated to relocate all the animals? You can dispose of them by the wave of your hand. Heartless. Cruel. But efficient.

The switches must had been implemented in otherwise barely used proteins—and unarguably very disfavored by selection—but some remained functional up until today. There should be yet undiscovered molecular mechanisms focused just on their preservation. No one could find them so far because they didn’t know what they were looking for!

And the best part: it was testable. We could look for more switches and repair mechanisms. If we find them, then we have the closest possible thing to a proof that life on Jane had been bioengineered long ago.

Awake on the station, I was faced with the only option I had: send a message out now even if it meant that the perpetrator would realize I knew. This couldn’t afford to wait, even though I was feeling dizzy and my headache grew worse.

I had no choice but to find Ulsen and ask him for a Witten Jump probe. Only he could authorize releasing one.

“Why?” he frowned. “We don’t have that many to use them for small information transfers, you know. The next one is scheduled in one week. Isn’t it enough?”

“No. I need one now.”

He shrugged. “All right, Doctor Belova. If it’s truly necessary . . . ”

“It is,” I stood my ground.

“Follow me. I’ll authorize it.”

I almost let out a sigh of relief. He led me to the transmission room calmly but I still kept my hand on an injector in my pocket. I filled it with strong sedative in the telemetry room, a dose sufficient to quickly send anyone into blissful oblivion. I just hoped I would be able to use it. I was blinking dark spots away from my vision and trying to stop my hands from trembling.

Ulsen leaned over the terminal and set about preparing the probe. I kept my distance from him and the door, leaning a bit on the wall. The side effects felt worse this time.

Suddenly the door opened. I flinched.

Kovalenko walked in and headed straight to Ulsen. “Magnus, we’ve got a problem with one of the relays –”

“Not now. This is a priority.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Really?”

She turned her attention to me, studying me for a while.

I drew a sharp breath. “Yes, really. If you could leave us to it.”

She glanced at Ulsen and he nodded. “Go. We’ll sort out the relays later.”

Kovalenko left without further comments.

“All set,” said Ulsen. “Ready to upload the data and record anything you need. But what is so important that we need to make an unscheduled Witten Jump?”

“That is a part of my job.”

He looked somewhat offended but nodded. “All right. If you insist.”

“I do. Now leave, please.”

His hand stopped just above the door panel. He turned to me. “You see, I can’t.”

He started after me. I used the support of the wall behind me and kicked him hard. He staggered. I used the moment to stab him with the injector.

And failed.

I missed him. Darkness surrounded me for a moment. I stumbled.

He brought my arm down, seized it and wrenched my wrist. I cried out, trying to reach the door with my other hand. But nothing happened. It was locked.

Kovalenko.

Ulsen knocked me down. I found myself suddenly on my back, in pain and out of breath. He was keeping me pinned, but didn’t hit me again.

“Zorya!” he cried. “Go get it!”

What were they planning? Poisoning me so it would look like a telemetry control accident?

“Oh,” I breathed. They had already started. They must have changed the combination of my drugs before the last session, just slightly to be able to cover it up. That’s why I had been feeling worse now. Little would suffice to tip the already fragile balance . . .

I struggled against Ulsen, but I was too weak. I glanced at the injector. No chance I could get to it. But at least he made one mistake. If he had ordered Kovalenko to inject me with it, I’d be as good as dead already.

“Why?” I wheezed.

“You know, don’t you?” Ulsen whispered. His eyes were gleaming madly. So a radical. No hint of the existence of alien civilizations must ever get out for us to continue pushing the limits of exploration and conquer more space . . .

I heard the door opening. I chose the moment to lash out as hard as I could in my sorry state. Ulsen’s attention was partially drawn away by the sound of footsteps. He regained it quickly but it still gave me time to free one of my arms and strike him. He uttered a cry of pain. I felt less pressure on my legs and tried to free them. I glimpsed someone else’s feet and kicked out in an attempt to bring Kovalenko down.

“Wait!”

I saw it was Chen who was trying to seize Ulsen. But the station controller wasn’t making it easy for him. He let me be and focused on Chen.

I crawled away until I reached what I needed. Just as Ulsen managed to strike the smaller man’s head, I thrust the needle of the injector into his neck. He lashed out but already feeling the effects of the sedative, he missed me and fell on his knees. Then he tumbled completely. I almost followed him and had to grasp the terminal to stay on my feet.

Chen seemed shaken but remained conscious.

“Where’s Kovalenko?” I managed to ask him.

“Telemetry control room. We need to get her to the med, she’s bleeding badly . . . We struggled, she bumped her head on the edge of the tank . . . ”

“Alright. Let’s go.” However murderous intentions she might have had, I didn’t wish her to bleed out. I glanced at Ulsen. “I think we can safely leave him for the moment.”

Six weeks and two Witten Jumps later, I was sitting in a restaurant opposite Peter Wolfe. A couple of floors above us, politicians were frantically discussing the impacts of my findings. I didn’t care for their quarrels and was peacefully enjoying my lunch. Well, almost peacefully.

“So how does that insect that brought you to this conclusion fit into the big picture?” asked Wolfe and sipped his wine. “I didn’t quite catch that one from your report.”

I swallowed and smiled. “A happy accident. After they left, life on Jane had plenty of time to evolve independently. Accidentally, one of the species evolved resistance to the main poison. Its repair mechanisms probably malfunctioned, maybe caused the mutation. Later one of its populations gained the ability to produce it. If it wasn’t for its parent species, it might have spread across the planet and caused a great environmental catastrophe. But the original immune insect, not producing the toxin itself, could hold it down by parasitism. The chances of that all together are low; but the species on Jane are many, mutations frequent and in the end, the occurrence comes down to probability. It might not have happened at all. But it had, luckily for us.”

“Luckily indeed,” Wolfe nodded. “It seems you had good luck on your side.”

I put aside my fork. “May I ask you something, sir?”

“Go on.”

“You had a suspicion that someone on Ariadne tampered with the data, didn’t you?”

He didn’t answer; didn’t have to.

“Chen became suspicious about the data and his crewmates and tried to hide a warning in one of his messages. But he didn’t know whether it got to someone. He didn’t make any further attempt in fear he might be right and they would find out. Chen didn’t know whether he could trust me, so he just joined in chats about what a nuisance my presence was. However . . . if he hadn’t brought down Kovalenko when he followed her in the telemetry room, I might not be alive today.” I frowned. “You had suspected something wrong and still sent me there! I wasn’t really supposed to come with any breakthrough finding, was I? I was there just to make them nervous, push them to make a mistake and reveal themselves.” Even if that mistake could have been my own death! You suggested me not because of my skill, but because of my past—send in someone paranoid, that will push them over the edge . . .

Wolfe smiled. “Oh, even if that were true, you would never have been just that. You have a talent for finding unexpected connections, and I trust you can dig well in unprecedented data. I certainly wasn’t mistaken in that.”

“With all due respect sir, you can be a hell of a bastard.”

His smile broadened. “So can you, Irena. So can you.”

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September/October 2019.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Eugene Fischer

Eugene Fischer is an award-winning author whose fiction has been published in such places as Asimov’s Science Fiction and The New Voices of Fantasy, translated into multiple languages, and developed for television. He’s won the Otherwise Award (formerly the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award), placed 2nd for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and been a finalist for the Nebula Award. He studied physics at Trinity University, is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and adjunct professor at the University of Iowa, where he created and taught “Writing and Reading Science Fiction,” the school’s first undergraduate creative writing course for science fiction. Since moving back to his home state, he has lectured on the rhetoric of genre for the Writers’ League of Texas, worked with the nonprofit Austin Bat Cave to create a science fiction writing summer camp for children, and taught classes through The Writing Barn for early-career SFF authors. He continues to lead fiction writing workshops at conventions and take clients for editing and critique. He lives in Austin, where folks he knows call him E. J.

Django Wexler

Django Wexler is the author of flintlock fantasy series The Shadow Campaigns, middle grade fantasy The Forbidden Library, and YA fantasy The Wells of Sorcery. His latest is epic fantasy Ashes of the Sun. In his former life as a software engineer, he worked on AI research and programming languages. He currently lives near Seattle with his wife, two cats, and a teetering mountain of books. When not writing, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts.

Julie Nováková

Julie Nováková is a scientist, educator and award-winning Czech author of science fiction and detective stories. She published seven novels, one anthology, one story collection and over thirty short pieces in Czech. Her work in English appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog and elsewhere, and has been reprinted e.g. in Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019. Her works have been translated into eight languages so far, and she translates Czech stories into English (in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, F&SF). She edited an anthology of Czech speculative fiction in translation, Dreams From Beyond, co-edited a book of European SF in Filipino translation, Haka, and created an outreach anthology of astrobiological SF, Strangest of All. Julie’s newest book is a story collection titled The Ship Whisperer (Arbiter Press, 2020). She is a recipient of the European fandom’s Encouragement Award and multiple Czech national genre awards. She’s active in science outreach, education and nonfiction writing, and co-leads the outreach group of the European Astrobiology Institute. She’s a member of the XPRIZE Sci-fi Advisory Council.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and an eight-time Hugo Award Finalist for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His next recent anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 5, will be published later this year by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

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