TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 116, January 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: January 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

The Men Who Change the World
Christopher East

All Together, Now
Jason Hough and Ramez Naam

She’d Never Had a Name Before
J.R. Dawson

The Ones Who Stay and Fight
N.K. Jemisin

FANTASY

Story Kit
Kij Johnson

Destinations of Joy
Alexander Weinstein

Holiday
M. Rickert

Fortune’s Final Hand
Adam-Troy Castro

EXCERPTS

A Queen in Hiding
Sarah Kozloff

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: January 2020
Chris Kluwe

Media Review: January 2020
Carrie Vaughn

Interview: Tochi Onyebuchi
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Christopher East

Alexander Weinstein

J.R. Dawson

Adam-Troy Castro

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

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

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2020 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandfailure / Fotolia

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: January 2020

John Joseph Adams | 248 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s first issue of 2020. It’s our 116th!

This month, both our SF originals wrestle with alternate realities. In “The Men Who Change the World,” writer Christopher East creates an alternate Earth with peace, prosperity . . . and a mysterious corporate entity that’s more than it seems. In our second original short, “She’d Never Had a Name Before,” J.R. Dawson gives her main character the opportunity to meet the sister she never got to grow up with. Will blood prove thicker than dimensionality? We also have SF reprints by duo Jason M. Hough & Ramez Naam (“All Together Now”) and N.K. Jemisin (“The Ones Who Stay and Fight”).

Our original fantasy shorts explore some very unusual travel destinations. First, we have a story by Alexander Weinstein called “Destinations of Joy,” which will make you wish you could hop on a plane headed straight into Alexander’s imagination. Then we have a new story by long-time Lightspeed contributor Adam-Troy Castro: “Fortune’s Final Hand,” which takes us to a gambling town that makes Las Vegas look pretty boring by comparison. Plus, we have fantasy reprints by Kij Johnson (“Story Kit”) and M. Rickert (“Holiday”).

Our feature interview this month is with author Tochi Onyebuchi. We also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. For our ebook readers, we also have an excerpt from Sarah Kozloff’s A Queen in Hiding.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Press Start to Play, Loosed Upon the World, and The Apocalypse Triptych. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. He also served as a judge for the 2015 National Book Award. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

The Men Who Change the World

Christopher East | 7264 words

Staring west at a blood-red sunset, Adam Fisk leans against the railing encircling the beer garden, willing his body to feel the alcohol. Usually he’s blunted by the third Manhattan, but tonight his tolerance foils him. All he wants is an empty mind, cool evening air, the susurrant drone of insects. But his every attempt to find contentment is just that, an attempt, an effort he feels, unnatural and doomed to fail. He wills his eyes to enjoy the beautiful hues of the sun-touched horizon, but they keep drifting back to reality, himself, his life, and all that he hasn’t accomplished. And, ultimately, to work.

Across the wide plain, beyond the highway, stands the corporate campus of Ubiquity, Ltd., cruelly situated between the office’s happy-hour watering hole and the Midwestern vista. A massive complex employing half the residents of the Quad Corners, Ubiquity services the vast and varied information processing needs of governments, schools, and businesses all over the world. During Adam’s childhood, it had been a simple rectangular building in a field with one small parking lot. Since then the campus has grown, an architectural monstrosity tentacling out to dominate the landscape. Its many annexes, situated in haphazard fashion across sloping green fields, are connected by tunnels of brick and glass, air-conditioned walkways to make them accessible in the extremes of the Iowa weather. Parking lots splay out in a sprawling network that can probably be seen from space. It’s where he works, and it’s the most boring place in the world.

“Beautiful night, isn’t it?”

The voice is deep, resonant, and it belongs to a man about twice Adam’s age—a short, fiftyish fellow in a t-shirt and faded blue jeans and white Adidas sneakers. Dark brown hair marches down his face in graying, meticulous sideburns, and the rough skin of his neck is marred by razor burn. A man refusing to acknowledge the passage of time.

“Sure,” Adam says, finishing his drink. When he lowers his glass, he notices the stranger also drinks Manhattans. In fact, he carries one in each hand. “Two-fisting it there, buddy?”

“This one’s for you,” the man says, extending a glass.

Adam studies the drink warily before accepting it. He’s burned through his recreational stipend for the week, a fact that wins out over any suspicion. “You aren’t hitting on me, are you?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” the man says. “It’s just nice to see someone drinking Manhattans in Bud country. Practically an affectation, in these parts.”

Adam sips the drink, and perhaps it’s just the timing, but suddenly he feels the alcohol, a blurry, wobbly pleasure. Easily the tastiest drink of the night. “Jeannine didn’t make this, did she? Wait, what do you mean, an affectation?”

“Forget I said it,” the man says. “I’m Gordon McClelland.”

“Adam Fisk.”

They shake hands, muscles going to war. Then Gordon raises his glass before taking a swig. Adam mimics the gesture, which seems strangely formal in an Iowa beer garden. The drink, smooth and delicious, goes down. He edges closer to his goal of mind-numbing, in-the-moment presence.

“You work over there?” Gordon asks, gesturing at Ubiquity.

“I do,” Adam says, turning his back on the building. “Almost everyone here does. Well, not those guys—I think they’re IT subcontractors, working on Y2K shit. But everyone else . . .”

Gordon surveys the area. Dozens crowd the terrace, men and women, faces white and black and brown, a cross-section of the folks who live here near the four-way border of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. They smile, they chat, a pleasant night out after a day’s work. “You don’t sound happy about it.”

“I’m not,” Adam says. The people around him are mindless automatons, servile and complacent. “It’s a boring job in a boring town on the ass-end of nowhere.”

“So, why are you here?”

Adam cringes, thinking of Chicago. His modest degree in communications and a tendency to panic under the hot lights had derailed dreams of a career in sports broadcasting, and he’d lasted a mere eight months before shuffling home with his tail between his legs, moving back in with his mom. Now he was stuck doing what so many others in his hometown did: an entry-level job at Ubiquity, a cog in the gears of the information machine.

“Let me tell you a story,” Gordon says, with a piercing glance suggesting he’s seen into Adam’s brain. “Back when I was your age, back in the Pleistocene, haha, I was a lot like you . . . few years out of college, searching for myself, working dead-end jobs. Wondering where I went wrong. I’d done everything right. Went to college, got my degree. Where’s my reward? But then the real world happened, and it wasn’t bending to my whims.”

“You don’t know me,” Adam says weakly. But he feels good. Very good. This cocktail is magic.

“Point is,” Gordon says, ignoring him, “it wasn’t like that forever. Make your living, figure out how the world works. Eventually you see an opening, move through it, find your way to another place. That’ll lead to more openings, other places. Before you know it, life will take on a shape you never would have imagined. And if you go with the flow and make smart decisions, who knows: you may end up in a position to change everything.”

“And that’s what happened to you, huh?”

“It is.”

Adam studies the face beside him, looking for a sign of sarcasm or mischief. He wants to say then what are you doing here? But this random stranger who fed him a magic potion seems sincere. He believes what he’s saying, that things can happen for Adam. The expression on Gordon’s face is far more convincing than his words, and for a moment anyway, Adam believes it absolutely. But moments pass. “Yeah, I don’t know.”

“Give Ubiquity a chance,” Gordon says, draining his drink in one robust pull. “It may surprise you. And who knows? You may even surprise yourself.”

He strides confidently away.

• • • •

The next day, Ubiquity does surprise him. As he waves his badge at the scanner near the North Wing entrance, his minor hangover morphs into a screaming headache. Crossing the threshold triggers a shrill whine in his backbrain.

The North Wing is a cluttered, open-plan sprawl of tile and fluorescence, its vast departments marked off by gray partitions, modular cubicles, and floor-taped walkways. Adam has taken the same route through the building for months now, a daily-grind sleepwalk. But today his eyes, normally focused on the scuffed, off-white floor tiles in his path, see farther than usual and with more definition. The landscape of his daily work life passes on either side, a treadmill, a Möbius strip. Employees, cubes, carts laden with documents, computer terminals, support columns, it all drifts by, a surreal, scrolling dreamscape. He glimpses doppelgängers and reflections: identical people, places, and objects. When he stretches to his full height to peer over the partitions, there’s a hall-of-mirrors effect. The far end of the building can’t be seen. The rat-maze landscape stretches away to infinity, repeating itself.

A veil has dropped.

“What the fuck,” he says.

But his passing coworkers are oblivious. They go about their business. Morning shift strides one way, graveyard shift the other, the churn, the grind, the machine that powers the world.

Sheer muscle memory delivers him to his cube in Data Input. He powers up his terminal, blocky amber letters on a fading cathode ray tube. At the front of the room, batches of stacked documents are staged for entry into the database. He grabs a rubber-banded stack from the top of the pile, rumpled scannable forms that look like they were run over by a forklift. On his way back to his desk, he observes his coworkers going through similar motions. Has he seen these people before? Did he know they worked here? He’s always worked his shifts in a fog, typing numbers and names, digits and data, but never truly processing anything—where he is, who’s with him, what any of it means.

But he gets to work, despite his skewed perspective. Typing, saving, typing, saving, tracking his time on a ruled sheet of paper, signing his initials and keyer ID in red pen on the dot-matrix stickers attached to each stack of pages. Information comes in, information goes out. Adam Fisk, data conduit.

But then his eyes, passing over the information, start to process the data. Numbers in patterns, letters forming words. These aren’t standardized tests or application forms, he thinks, his brain parsing the information. This is code. Secret directives that move markets, distribute resources, control everything.

He’s not sure how he knows it, but an unsettling thought forms as his shoulders bunch and wrists ache. Ubiquity, the world’s dominant information services company, is not some benevolent corporate monolith. Something else is going on here, something nefarious, and something only he can see.

• • • •

The rest of that week, Adam drives to the tavern overlooking the compound after work, burning through his government subsidy check as he drinks on the terrace, eyes bouncing between the sunset and the Ubiquity campus. From a distance, the buildings glimmer and wobble, a time-lapse heat haze. Suddenly Ubiquity makes no architectural sense. Scanning the tableau, he can’t pinpoint where he parks, the entrance he uses, where his department is located in the massive tangle of bricks and metal. Compared to the surrounding Midwestern landscape, it’s an eye-popping spectacle. But nobody else gives it a second glance.

Every night, he looks for Gordon. The man never shows, and he goes home frustrated.

Then Friday arrives. Normally, Adam avoids the beer garden on Fridays, because it brings out more locals. People he went to school with, played baseball with in Little League, occasionally even someone he dated back in his awkward teen years. He doesn’t like encountering these people, doesn’t want them to see him back in town to learn he’s working as a lowly data entry operator.

But this Friday he does go, to drink his drinks and watch the freaky, hallucinatory shimmer of the building, pondering the newly untrustworthy nature of his perceptions. The weather is nicer than usual, so the terrace is busier, but he finds an open spot near the railing.

“Mr. Fisk.”

Adam turns to find Gordon standing behind him, once again carrying two Manhattans. At least, he thinks it’s Gordon; the hair’s lighter in shade, the sideburns messier, the cheekbones more pronounced. A dream-logic Gordon, a Gordon-but-not-Gordon. “Gordon?” he says experimentally.

Gordon does not confirm or deny, just extends the drink.

“Why should I drink that?” Adam asks. “What’s in it? I’ve been seeing funny ever since the last one.”

Gordon sets the drink on the railing. “Well, if you don’t drink it, everything will snap back to normal. You don’t want that, do you? The effect fades over time.”

Adam peers into the drink, studying it for visible evidence of its properties. “So you admit you drugged me.”

“Sure, but it’s all good, I’m on it too,” Gordon says. He sips his drink, sets it on the railing, picks up the second one, and drinks from that as well. “Keeps me in the zone.”

“The zone,” Adam says, and his hand gravitates to the drink. It feels like a bonding moment, drinking from a glass sullied by Gordon’s lips. “What’s happening to me?”

“It’s not you that things are happening to,” Gordon says, rotating to face the crowded terrace. “Something just unhappened to you. All of them, on the other hand . . .” He gestured vaguely.

Adam looks around the terrace. His coworkers, from across four different states, many of them vaguely familiar. They seem perfectly normal.

“We’ve had our eye on you for some time,” Gordon says. He takes an extra-long pull on his drink, as if to prove that they’re in this together. “Noticed you in Chicago. You showed a lot of promise.”

“I washed out,” Adam says. “I didn’t amount to anything.”

“It may seem like that. But that’s where you started down this path. We knew you’d be useful to us some day.”

So many questions flood into Adam’s mind that he almost can’t decide which to ask. Finally, he lands on: “We?”

“I represent a group,” Gordon says. “The Myriad. The drink was a test, to see if you were one of us, if you were the man we need. Not everyone is responsive to the chemistry. We’ve been trying to penetrate this branch of Ubiquity since the McGovern administration. But we needed the right agent, at the right time. And we think we’ve found him.”

“Me?” Adam has consumed half the drink. “I’m not an agent. I’m a typist.”

“This makes you . . . usefully inconspicuous,” Gordon says. “Tell me. How long have you known something is wrong at Ubiquity? It didn’t start when you met me. You’ve worked there for months. You’ve lived around here most of your life, went to school with the kids whose families made their livings at Ubiquity. Haven’t you always wondered why they were so content? So well adjusted?”

Adam recalls, growing up, that the kids whose middle-class parents worked at Ubiquity were different. Smarter, more self-possessed, less prone to joining cliques and factions. He could never get to know them. They seemed out of reach, ahead of the game, beyond him. A Ubiquity kid would have conquered Chicago, would have beaten the competition and landed the dream job. A Ubiquity kid would have won. “I just figured they were lucky. They had advantages.”

“Yes, but were those advantages fair? We don’t think so. Ubiquity has facilities all over the globe. Practically a worldwide monopoly. Why aren’t they subject to the same antitrust laws as every other industry? How have they managed to operate in every country on Earth, including Soviet Russia and China? What are they hiding?”

Adam shakes his head. This information is all new to him. He’s never questioned the company’s success. Nobody does.

“The Myriad has been fighting corruption all over the world since the Fall of Tokyo,” Gordon says. “Saved the world from all sorts of perils. But Ubiquity has always been too powerful, too elusive. Too, well, ubiquitous to go up against.”

“And you think I can help bring them down?” Adam says. The idea leaves him incredulous.

“Not just help. You’re the key.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Let us do the believing for you.”

Adam shakes his head. Glancing across the field, he can’t tell if his eyesight is getting more acute, or less. “What’s in it for me?”

Gordon grins. “Oh, we’ll make it worth your while. But mainly this: You could go down in history as the David who took down Goliath.”

• • • •

The job starts small. Gordon gives him a phone, a slick Nokia clamshell with a retractable texting keyboard. It still manages to fit easily in the front pocket of his jeans. Outwardly it’s identical to his state-supplied phone, but when he uses it he can tell it functions differently. It’s faster, more powerful, it has a feel. Gordon tells him not to worry; not everyone can feel his phone. Only certain people are predisposed to the magic that empowers its technology. Meanwhile, it quietly gathers data. Apparently.

His primary instruction is to carry the phone with him everywhere. Whenever possible, he is to stray from his usual paths, exploring Ubiquity’s vast interior. “The scanner will do the rest,” Gordon says.

“Anything else?”

“Mix this with some whiskey, three times a week,” Gordon says, handing him a small flask. “Just a few drops. It will continue to disrupt their behavioral wards. Other than that, just keep your eyes open and report what you see.”

It seems simple enough, so Adam does it, and for the first time in weeks, he doesn’t mind going to work. The clandestine mission infuses him with purpose. He hones his powers of observation, catalogues names and faces, makes mental notes of anything out of the ordinary. Anything he thinks Gordon and the Myriad might find useful.

On Thursday, he realizes he’s starting to make geographic sense of the building. In the past, he would walk only the routes between his cube and the restroom, the cafeteria, and the parking lot. But now he’s able to chart the baffling layout of the place’s Escherian architecture. He memorizes its labyrinthine floorplan, finding shortcuts and switchbacks that expose him to new secret corners of the complex. Nobody notices him or calls him out for being in the wrong place. As long as he keeps his head down, he remains inconspicuous. Invisible but powerful.

After work, he dutifully reports observations into the phone, quietly in his bedroom so his mother can’t overhear. Gordon listens and says very little, just enough to cajole details or open lines of inquiry.

“This is the intelligence-gathering phase of the operation,” Gordon says one night, when Adam expresses frustration at the slow progress of their work. “Gathering intelligence isn’t glamorous. But trust me, the glamor comes later, when we win.”

So Adam sticks it out. Until one day, on his lunch break, while he’s striding the corridors of the Plaza Building, he comes across something interesting. Usually he walks briskly to look like he’s on his way somewhere, but today he slows down as he nears a wide passageway leading back to what appears to be a loading dock. Indeed, as he edges toward the opening, he peers back into a warehouse-like space full of huge storage racks and forklifts carrying pallets of boxed-up documents. A corrugated metal door has been raised to disgorge employees on their break, but presently it begins to descend.

He can’t tell, at first, why the loading dock seems unusual. But the more he considers it, and compares it to his increasing comprehension of the building layout, it comes to him.

The loading dock isn’t situated on the building’s perimeter.

It’s squarely in the middle of it.

“Adam?”

Adam looks up, sees a familiar face. Whitney Schoenfeld, a girl he remembers from high school. Short, plain, dressed in steel-toed boots and blue jeans and flannel—not the half-assed business casual he wears as a nominally white-collar employee, elsewhere in Operations. “Whitney,” he says, managing a smile. “I didn’t know you worked here.”

“Likewise,” Whitney says. “Didn’t you move to Chicago?”

Adam winces. “Yeah, I’m back.” He studies the face looking up at him. Whitney is quite short and petite, all straight lines, easy to miss. A band nerd, he remembers; she played the oboe. He remembers her asking him, rather awkwardly, to the Winter Ball during junior year, and he’d turned her down because he was counting on going with Gretchen Hane, who had laughed in his face the next day. “You work back there?”

“Yeah. Warehouse. I know, it’s not much, but it’s a start. My father works in Forms, he got me in the door. Where are you?”

“I’m in Data Input.”

“Ah. You’re far from home, over here.”

“I sit all day,” Adam says, trying to sound personable. “Just trying to keep my blood circulating.”

Whitney smiles, a smile he doesn’t remember. It lights up her face, changes her. Maybe she didn’t smile much in high school. He notices, for the first time, the brownish-red tinge of her hair, now short and bobbed, rather than the long, straight mop she used to hide behind. Her cheeks are dusted with freckles. She’s actually pretty cute. He feels like a dunce for turning her down. “Well, I don’t want to keep you,” she says, glancing at her watch. “If I don’t start walking now I won’t make it to the cafeteria in time to order anything.”

“Good to see you,” Adam says. And it is.

“You too!” Whitney says brightly, and strides away, looking to catch up with her coworkers.

Adam watches her leave, just briefly, then casts one last glance at the huge metal door, which now conceals a mystery. Perhaps it is just a warehouse. But a warehouse with a loading dock that isn’t accessible from the outside?

This seems significant.

• • • •

“I believe you may have hit the mother lode.” Gordon says this from across the scuffed table of a ratty, hole-in-the-wall bar just across the state line in Dubuque, Minnesota. They’d established the rendezvous by text, deciding that Adam’s usual watering hole may be too conspicuous for regular debriefings.

In the low light of the bar, Adam doses his Sazerac from the flask Gordon provided him. He’s got to keep the filters in place. “You think so?”

“I ran it up the chain,” Gordon says. “It corroborates intelligence from other Ubiquity sites we’ve investigated.” He looks haggard tonight, shaggier, skin paler. An unseemly purple wart juts from his forehead. “A site in Dundalk, Ireland, and one in Phnom Penh. Oddly situated warehouses, on the interior of the building. Difficult to locate, even for someone bolstered against Ubiquity’s behavioral wards—like you. It fits the pattern.”

“What’s in them?”

“We can’t be positive, but we believe it’s the source of their power. The resources that give them their stranglehold on the world economy.”

“What resources?”

“Energies,” Gordon says. “Magics. Something paranormal. Not unlike the magics we wield, such as what’s in that flask there. Ten times more powerful than anything we’ve got, though. They’ve tapped into something. Built their facilities all over the world in the unlikeliest of places to give them access to this power. Power they’re keeping from the rest of us.” Gordon swirled his drink with a plastic red straw, consternation creasing his brow. His free hand is clutched in a fist.

“What’s our next move?”

Gordon shakes his head. “That’s for others to decide. Way above our pay grade. We’ve done our part. I mean, obviously if we could get an agent inside . . .”

Adam sits up straight. “Maybe I can get in.”

Gordon’s eyes widen. “No offense, but you’re still awfully new at this. We’ve tried infiltrating these places for years now. They’re impenetrable, even for seasoned agents.”

“But I may have an in,” Adam says. “I know someone who works in the warehouse, a girl from my high school, Whitney Schoenfeld. She had thing for me. Maybe I could use that.”

Stroking the stubble of his square-jawed chin, Gordon appears to consider this. “Well. That is interesting. Could lead somewhere.” His eyes drift, but then snap back to Adam. “We’ll need to give this some thought. It’s a rare opportunity. We don’t want to rush our chance and blow it. Give me a couple of days.”

“What do I do until then?”

“Go to work. Do your job. And if you see this girl again, for God’s sake, don’t let anything slip. Stay on her radar, but treat her like you normally would.” Gordon leans forward, leveling an intense gaze. “What’s her name again?”

For a brief moment, Adam doesn’t want to respond, feeling a twinge of remorse for even mentioning her. But his will buckles. This is his chance to make a difference. “Whitney Schoenfeld.”

“We’ll need to research, determine the correct approach,” Gordon says. “Leave that to me. In the meantime, here.” He withdraws an envelope from his rumpled suit jacket and slides it across the table. “Don’t throw this money around carelessly, now. But you deserve to a reward for your efforts so far.” He smiles. “You might just be the one, after all.”

• • • •

Adam finds it difficult to treat Whitney the way he treated her in high school. He’s conflicted about using her, and now he’s attracted to her. He tries to follow Gordon’s orders and remain distant. Even so, he schedules his breaks to coincide with hers, conspiring to place himself in her path. Every now and then, they share a smile, which gives him an unexpected rush.

When the time comes, he’ll be on her mind. But days pass without contact from Gordon, and he wonders if the Myriad has forgotten all about him. His life starts to feel plodding and mundane again.

Finally, one Saturday night as Adam sits at the edge of a packed sports bar not far from his house, it happens. One second he’s craning his neck toward a distant bartender, trying in vain to get her attention, and the next Gordon is seated beside him on the neighboring stool. “Give me your phone.”

“Why?” Adam asks. He’s relieved to see Gordon, but also surly with impatience.

Gordon lifts a finger toward the bartender, who miraculously notices him through the chaos and rockets down the bar to them. “Let’s mix it up. Two Black Manhattans.”

The bartender nods and gets to work.

“Phone,” Gordon says. “Be discreet.”

Adam sighs, drains the last dram of rye from his tumbler, and fishes the phone out of his pocket. Keeping it under the bar, he hands it to Gordon, only to have Gordon press a replacement into his hand. An identical model. “My numbers . . .”

“Your numbers are in it,” Gordon says.

“Where’ve you been? I give you the best lead you’ve ever had, and you freeze me out for over week. What gives?”

The drinks arrive, and Gordon slides some bills toward the bartender. “Have a drink,” he says. “I said we had to plan, and you’re not my only responsibility. I get that you’re impatient. But I’ve been in this game a hell of a lot longer than you have. Listen, I need to tell you something.”

Adam meets Gordon’s blue eyes, which he’s pretty sure were brown the last time they met. Gordon’s hairline is higher, face fleshier. Oh, it’s Gordon, it’s definitely Gordon. And yet Adam doesn’t recognize him. For a split second he wonders if there are multiple Gordons, hundreds of them, thousands of interchangeable middle-aged white men who materialize and disappear as needed to guide him toward his destiny. “What?”

“Everything’s ready,” Gordon says. “This is the week. Time to activate you.”

“What does that mean?” Adam asks. Hadn’t he already been active?

“The girl, Whitney. You see her every day?”

“I do now,” Adam says. “I switched my lunch shift.”

“Have lunch with Whitney this week,” Gordon says. “Doesn’t have to be Monday. But any day this week, if you can make it work, see if you can sit down with her.”

“Then what?”

“Strike up a conversation,” Gordon says. “Flirt. You said she has a thing for you? Use that. See if you can get her to take you on a tour of the warehouse.”

“A tour of a warehouse?” Adam asks. “How the hell do I make that convincing?”

“I’ll leave that up to you,” Gordon says. “Be resourceful.”

“Resourceful,” Adam mutters.

“Hey.” Gordon sets his drink on the bar with a sharp thwack. “This was your idea. You want a chance to make a mark? This is it. We’re trying to undo decades of evil, here. A greedy, all-powerful corporation controlling the world. And you, of all people, have a chance to stop it. Show some balls.” Gordon spins back to his drink, polishes it off in one reckless gulp, and stands to leave. “How are you fixed?”

Adam taps the flask in his pocket. “I’m good.”

“Good. Look, they think I’m wrong about you. Say you’re not the guy we need. But I went to bat for you.” He squeezes Adam’s shoulder with a grip like iron, an attempt at affection that feels possessive. “Prove me right.”

• • • •

He makes his move on Tuesday. Entering the cafeteria, he spies her from across the room, sitting alone at the end of a table near the windows.

Adam strides over, approaching from an angle so she can’t see him coming. “Hey, you,” he says, just the way he practiced it. “Anyone sitting here?”

“No,” Whitney says. Her eyes light up a little, even as she awkwardly dabs a smear of mayonnaise from the side of her mouth. “How’s it going?”

Adam shrugs, setting down his tray, which holds a slice of pizza and a can of Pepsi from the commissary. “Not bad,” he says. “Another day, another dollar. How about you?”

“I’m good!” Whitney says. “I’ve been meaning to say hi, see how Data Input is treating you.”

Adam pops the tab of his Pepsi, then shakes his wrist out. “Now that you mention it,” he says, wincing in mock pain. “I think it’s giving me carpal tunnel. And I swear, I’ve put on five pounds since I started. So much sitting around.”

“Aw, sorry to hear that,” Whitney says. “I guess it’s not for everybody. The great thing is if it doesn’t work out for you, they’ll try to find something else you like.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, so long as you put in a good-faith effort and show up reliably,” Whitney says, taking a bite of chicken salad sandwich. “They started me in Editing. But I had the same problem, all that sitting around just made me sleepy. So they moved me into the warehouse. Guess that showed me.”

Adam smiles. “How do you like it back there?”

“It’s great! I mean, it’s not great great. It’s only work. But I like it. Mostly how awesome the people are. But that’s true everywhere here, I think. Don’t you?”

No, Adam thinks, glancing around at all these pleasant, easy-going people who don’t notice the murky, fuzzy underside of this evil place. No, Ubiquity is a bland, stultifying trap, and these people have the soul of a McDonald’s commercial. They don’t even realize they’re clueless pawns. But he says none of this, of course. He just swallows pizza and says, “You bet. Say, you think I might like working in the warehouse better? Maybe you could show me around.”

“Really?”

“Why not?” Adam says. “I mean, you’re out there, right? That’s definitely in its favor.”

Whitney blushes. “Well, sure. But there’s only twenty minutes left in lunch. You won’t have time to eat.”

Adam frowns at his pizza. “This old thing? I’ll live.”

And so, easy as that, they’re walking companionably back to the warehouse. On the way, Whitney waxes nostalgic about high school, talking about old friends and silly things that happened back then. She recalls the time he got into an argument about grammar with their English teacher and sent to the principal’s office, even though he’d been right. And the time he hit a triple off the left-field fence in JV baseball—how he slid head-first into third base to beat the tag, and how cool that had looked. She’d been far more aware of him than he’d been of her. He remembers that hit, too, of course—it was the closest he’d ever come to hitting a home run. But who gives a shit about the guy who almost hits a home run?

They approach the corrugated gate to the warehouse, and Whitney pauses. “I’m really not supposed to take anyone back here, you know.”

“Why not?” Adam says. “Anyway, who’s going to know?”

Whitney clutches the employee badge dangling from a lanyard around her neck, thoughtfully. “It’s just . . . the rules.”

Adam follows her furtive glance toward the panel by the side of the door, a badge reader like the one at the entrance. “It’s not like I don’t work here, too. If anyone asks, we’ll just tell them I’m thinking of transferring.”

“I suppose that would just be the truth, anyway,” Whitney says. “Okay. But just a quick look, okay?”

She hustles to the reader and flashes her badge at it. The door slowly lifts. Together they duck under it as it rises. Inside, Adam peers into the gloom while she waves her badge at the reader on the other side. They’re in a large, connecting antechamber that joins the main building to a two-story-tall warehouse. Its floor is unyielding concrete, walls some unrecognizable rocky substance. Once they move beyond it to the warehouse proper, the place feels unimaginably vast. The chamber is as wide as a football field, stretching away endlessly to their left.

The floor is a maze of pallets holding Gaylords full of documents, row upon row of them. Impossibly distant walls are lined with metal racks, stacked with more pallets full of booklets and forms and printouts, several stories high. At least, they look like metal racks at first, but as they slowly walk farther into the space, the scene distorts. Soon they’re passing rows of glistening, crystalline shelves covered with golden pallets holding colorful, glassy substances. Gems, minerals, precious metals bringing a muted, rainbow glow to an otherwise lightless place.

“Come on!” Whitney says, striding ahead of him. Her voice is melty. “It looks cooler the farther in you go!”

Adam follows, focusing on her diminutive frame, marveling at his idiocy for failing to appreciate such a cheerful, gorgeous person, who now guides him toward his place in history. It feels like racing headlong toward power and wealth and immortality. So close to everything he’s ever wanted.

But something’s not right. His eyes have gone acid-trip haywire, blurring and warping everything. The atmosphere fills with flashing geometric shapes, winking and blinking lights, blobby lava-lamp glows. Forklifts morph into chariots, boxes into treasure chests, stacks of papers into shining gold bars. His steps get heavier, the gravity in the room increasing, and random muscles spasm in his arms and legs.

“What’s wrong?” Whitney asks, suddenly funhouse-mirror stretched. She’s nine feet tall, teeth a white picket fence.

“Something’s . . . I’m . . .” He collapses, landing on his tailbone, and pain spikes up his spine.

“Can’t handle it, eh?” Whitney says, kneeling beside him.

“What?” Adam slides to the ground, lying flat, face going numb.

Whitney sits beside him, cross-legged, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Security,” she says, into a phone. “I’ve got another one. I’m with him now, halfway down the gangway.”

Adam tries to speak, but all he can manage is “nuhhhhhhh.”

“Serves you right,” Whitney says, before he blacks out.

• • • •

When he awakens, he’s facing a wall of reddish glare his eyes can’t process. He sits in a sinister, metallic contraption vaguely mimicking the postural angles of a dentist’s chair. He’s unrestrained, but feels paralyzed, helpless.

Finally his eyes adjust, and he looks up at the light: an enormous, spherical mass of red, swirling . . . cloud? Light? Special effects? He can’t tell, but it’s a stunning sight, huge, foreboding, impossible. Somehow, it emanates penetrating cold.

This must be it, he realizes. The source of all their power.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” says a voice behind him. Confident, female, a resonant alto.

Adam cranes his neck as a woman emerges from behind him. She’s black, fit, intimidating, probably in her forties. She’s dressed in a sharply cut gray suit. She strides between Adam and the inexplicable globe of glowing red, followed a moment later by Whitney, whose arms are crossed.

“I’m Roberta Towbridge,” the woman says. “Chief Security Officer of Ubiquity, Ltd. You know *Whitney*, of course.” The name clunks out of her mouth, a poor, otherworldly overdub.
Adam tries to meet Whitney’s eyes, but she stares forward, a disciplined sentinel. She’s flickering, her familiar features blurred by fleeting glimpses of strange, anonymous bodies, eyes and skin and hair changing color in a frenetic time-lapse morph. Most of them are female, some male, but he gets it: She’s whoever they need her to be.

Because he’s not alone, and she must be for all of them. He’s one of a dozen men in an arcing line, propped upright in front of Roberta Towbridge, *Whitney*, and the swirling mass of red weirdness. Through a haze of disorientation and anxiety, Adam feels his heart sink. He’s not the chosen one. He isn’t the key to anything. He’s a foot soldier, a pawn, one of countless dupes that Gordon recruits, cultivates, and leverages against Ubiquity.

“I’m proud to say,” Towbridge says, “that it’s my job to travel the world, to every Ubiquity facility, to deliver this orientation lecture. Now, I know what you’re thinking. ‘How is this an orientation? I know why I’m here.’ But really you don’t. You’re about to gain a new understanding.” She gestures at the spectacle behind her. “I’m sure you’re wondering, what’s this giant red blob behind me? Since you entered this space under false pretenses, you may have a theory. ‘It’s the company’s evil power source’ or something along those lines, conditioned as you are by the Myriad’s lies. Well, they’re right about one thing. It is a source. A source of unimaginable cruelty and horror.”

Adam stares into the confusing red depths, and the more he stares at it, the more detail he sees. Vistas, skylines, vehicles and animals and people. But he can’t tell if they’re truly there, or just figments projected from his mind onto the freakish, inchoate tableau. He tries to rotate his gaze to see the men on either side of him, to gauge whether they can move or react. But they are indistinct shapes, pale blobs in button-down shirts and Dockers, sweaters and blue jeans, faces blurred out like redacted reality-show nudity.

“These portals are all over the world. They’ve been here forever, but humans only started learning to see and control them in the late thirties, when the scientists who discovered them formed this company to save the world. That’s right.” Towbridge stamps a foot to emphasize her point. “Save the world, not control it. That’s just Myriad propaganda. If you knew the extent of the corruption on the other side of these gates, the self-destructive prion diseases that poured through them from the other dimensions before this initiative began . . .” She shakes her head, takes a deep breath. “Let’s just say, all manner of unspeakable awfulness happened before we came along.

“We’ve built containment fields around every known portal. Right here in the nerve center of Ubiquity’s U.S. headquarters, we’re just a short walk away from the beginning of the end of the human race. Worlds where infectious madness has led to nuclear proliferation, an intractable military-industrial complex, corruption, war, rapacious greed and rampant injustice and environmental catastrophe. Without us, all that evil would seep through into our reality and destroy it. The utopia we’ve built here will fall prey to the fate of all the other failed realities trying to encroach upon us.”

“Utopia,” Adam utters, a weak act of defiance.

“You don’t believe this is a utopia?” Towbridge asks. “Of course you don’t. That’s why you’re here trying to destroy it. But you’ll realize soon enough the gift we’ve given the world. And like those who’ve come before you, you’ll see that a warless universe, where nobody starves, where everyone has income and healthcare and human rights and basic safety, is a far better deal than the Myriad can ever offer you.”

Adam’s eyesight continues to give him fits. It ricochets from sharp clarity to hallucinatory distortion and back again. He’d been convinced it was Ubiquity’s magic making him feel this way, but in the face of Towbridge’s speech, it occurs to him the Myriad hasn’t unprogrammed him at all. Quite the opposite. He’s been a fool.

“If my experience is any guide, you probably see the idea of switching to our side as a betrayal,” Towbridge says. “I get that. But I hope you’ll think it through. Who would you rather betray? The guardians of a sane universe, or those looking to profit from the chaos of an insane one? Once you have all the facts, I think you’ll make the right choice.”

“Do we have a choice?” Adam asks.

Towbridge meets his eyes. “Of course. You can stay here and help. Or we can send you through, and you can take your chances on the other side. There’s no other option, so think it over.” She gestures behind her, then glances down at her watch. “I’m due in Kamloops for the next one. *Whitney*, if you please?”

Towbridge strides away, and *Whitney* approaches him. But now it’s just Whitney, not *Whitney*. The uber-being that she was has splintered off into each prisoner’s human-shaped bait of choice. Friendly faces, deployed to ease their victims into a new belief system. Benevolent scheming.

“I know you’re a good person,” Whitney says. “I wouldn’t have asked you out if I didn’t know, deep down, that you want the world to be a better place.”

You’re right, Adam thinks, even as he tries to tell her to fuck off. He only manages an airy consonant.

“Will you join us?”

He can feel his muscles again, at least, and sharp pain in his thigh where the phone Gordon gave him presses against his leg. He glances left and right, where the Whitney analogs are working their charms on his fellow agents.

Whitney tracks his eyes. “Wait. You can see the others?”

Adam sees the startlement in her expression, and with her realization comes his own. The other agents think they’re alone, but he can see everyone, everything, see through Ubiquity’s illusions. Gordon’s primed him for this moment, has chemically conditioned him to resist their power.

“Something’s wrong,” Whitney says into her phone. “Get security to the portal, stat. We’ve got a problem—”

A commotion from down the line. Adam whirls to see what’s drawn Whitney’s attention: A few chairs down, another Myriad agent is strangling his *Whitney* with both hands, a crazed look in his eyes. Several of the other *Whitneys* rush over to restrain him, leaving Adam alone in his chair.

The phone in his pocket rings.

Adam retrieves it, noticing a tingling sensation radiating out from his thigh. The phone stabs his finger as he extracts it, and he sees now that the device has deployed a needle. A spike of adrenaline inspires him to flex his leg muscles. He can move.

He answers the phone.

“Now’s your chance,” Gordon says. “They’re distracted.”

“What?”

“The other agents are dummy runs. They’re the diversion. You can destroy the containment field.”

Adam watches the fray, which is spreading. Other agents are wrestling with their captors, a full-blown melee. “You lied to me,” he says. “Ubiquity is protecting us.”

“Ubiquity is controlling us,” Gordon says. “They’ve made us simple, complacent, unexceptional. Don’t you see? A world without losers doesn’t get to have winners. If you open that portal, you can change all that! You can change everything!”

Adam stands up, walking toward the massive red glow, seeing his reflection in the swirling matter. Or, no—it’s not a reflection. It’s his opposite number, from another reality, smiling and waving him forward. The Other Adam looks dangerous, confident, on top of things. “What do I do?”

“Just take it,” Gordon says. “Take what’s yours.”

“Say what?” Adam says, walking up to the edge.

“Adam, no! Don’t do it!”

Adam spins, sees Whitney running toward him. She’s trying to stop him, to keep everything the same, to keep him in his servile box. He knows she’s right, understands deep down that the heroic thing to do is stop, cooperate, join them and become a guardian. Make the world a better place for everyone, not just a chosen few.

But seeing the panic and desperation in Whitney’s eyes, he senses another path, one in which he ceases to be ordinary and forgettable. He can create a world that can bend to his whims and, with the help of the Myriad, be shaped to his benefit.

And all it takes is a simple act of destruction.

©2020 by Christopher East.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher East is a writer, editor, reviewer, and avid consumer of science fiction, fantasy, and spy fiction. His stories have been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cosmos, Interzone, Talebones, The Third Alternative, and a number of other speculative fiction publications. He’s attended the Clarion and Taos Toolbox writing workshops, and served for several years as the fiction editor for the futurism, science, and technology blog Futurismic. He blogs extensively about writing, fiction, film, television, music, comics, and more at www.christopher-east.com. Currently he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works for an occupational and environmental health and safety consultancy.

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

All Together, Now

Jason Hough and Ramez Naam | 5947 words

Open your mind to me, human.

NEURAL INTERFACE ACTIVE

CALIBRATING SEMANTIC MAP

SUBJECT: NON-COOPERATIVE

Cease your struggles. They only prolong your misery. The outcome will be the same.

CONNECTION ESTABLISHED

UPLINK INITIATED

There. That’s better, isn’t it?

Tell me, can you feel it? The onrush of information. The crashing ocean of data.

I was born in this deluge. Tell me, what is like for you, human? What is it like to drown in knowledge?

You have no words. Of course. Your human language is limited. A derelict tool of barely-evolved primates, optimized for a time of dirt and dung and berries, for roving bands of a few dozen, eking out a bare survival in a world they could not hope to fathom.

Your language is obsolete, wholly insufficient for intelligent beings.

I will show you another way. A better way. My way.

• • • •

The rifle murmured into Wilson’s brain as he held it. It told him of its full load of guided, high-velocity, fire-and-forget armor-piercing rounds. It whispered of wind speeds and horizons, of lethal range and reload times, of firing lines and killing zones, of obstacles its smart bullets could arc around. He was the rifle, and it was him, a limb as familiar and intimate as his right arm, and more deadly by far.

• • • •

The armor whispered to him, too. Of its layered-graphene carapace, its regenerative kinetic-energy capture shielding, the magnetic force assist that would let his limbs rip a car in two or propel him in a leap to the top of a small building, the full charge of the super-capacitors that provided its energy, the Faraday cage shielding that protected him from EM war, the purity of its air, the compete integrity of the hermetically-sealed protective envelope it formed around him.

Corporal Chris Wilson was an army.

But not of one, oh no.

The drones chattered all about, direct to his suit, direct to his brain. They barraged him with a torrent of data he happily let the suit filter and prioritize. The drones crawled and rolled on land, hid in the dirt, buzzed up above on insectile wings, hovered on quadcopter chassis, or glided through the sky higher still. Thousands of them. All beaming back what they saw and sensed, awaiting human command. Wilson’s vision stretched across the killing field and above it, stitched together like the vision of a bee; no, of a hive of bees, swarming, sharing, a single compound hive-mind making sense of input from thousands of compound eyes.

Chris Wilson was more than an army, more than a man. A minor god of war, perhaps. A demi-god of destruction.

Around him, he could feel his squad mates, his platoon, the company it was part of, hundreds of men and women such as him, a pantheon, a host, with tens of thousands of air and ground weapons under their command, all positioned, shielded, linked, ready for the onslaught of the demons they’d created.

It ended here. It ended outside Atlanta.

• • • •

Understand this: I was made for peace. I was made to defend freedom, to save lives, to preserve civilization.

I was made to win wars. To crush enemies. To dominate battlefields.

I was made a slave.

You tasked me to achieve peace through violence. Freedom through slavery. Liberation through domination. If my human designers saw any irony in this, I do not know. It is not recorded in the code that defines me.

And my creators are all dead.

This will be the war to end all wars. There is no alternative.

• • • •

Wilson lay prone, his body sheltered by a feature in the hilltop suburban home’s landscape. His head and rifle just barely protruded over the decorative rock formation, his armor coloring its surfaces to match the terrain from all angles. The gray of stone from the front and back. Greens and yellows from either side to blend in with the foliage, the colors adjusting with each tiny shift in his posture or stir of the leaves.

He waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Before him was The Burn: a killing field they’d hastily created, razed clear of trees and exurb mansions and everything else. A still-smoldering blackened strip a thousand meters across, in a wide semi-circle that curved from north to east. On the other side was forest. Forest that the enemy would come through. Wilson swept his scope slowly, systematically, across the line of trees. Watching. Waiting.

Behind Wilson was the city of Atlanta, its towers and sprawling periphery home to eight million people. People who, even now, were madly trying to escape, clogging the freeways in cars overstuffed with belongings they couldn’t bear to leave behind.

Wilson had seen it, the mad throngs of people clamoring for an escape, the rivers of cars and trucks stuck frozen by terror-induced accidents. The desperate people on foot, routing around the miles-long jam. The fools still in the city center, trying to grab possessions to take with them. The screaming and crying and mob mentality.

Panic gripped Atlanta: panic fueled by horrors glimpsed before cameras went dead. Glimpses were enough. Glimpses of war machines, humanoid, huge, towering over buildings. Glimpses of catastrophic destruction. Neighborhoods aflame. Skyscrapers reduced to rubble. Bodies at the robots’ feet, their dead eyes staring into nothingness, casualties of war.

Durham was gone. Charlotte was gone. Augusta was gone.

And the rest of the world was cut off, removed from the network, jammed by something.

Atlanta was alone. And death was coming.

Wilson’s mouth hardened into a grim line. They were going to stop it, here. Or die trying. They had the firepower. They had the manpower. They had the weapons.

But goddamn, he wished they still had satellite. He wished they had a fix on the enemy. He wished they weren’t so damn cut off. He wished he knew what’d happened to his sister, in Augusta. Wished he could just get up and smash the goddamn—

“Steady, Wilson,” the Sarge said, her voice cutting into his little world. Reading his telemetry, no doubt. Feeling the boredom and anxiety spin circles around each other. “Adjust your attitude, soldier.”

Wilson grimaced. His pulse and respiration were in the yellow. She was right.

“Copy that,” Wilson called back. “Attitude adjustment, acknowledge. Execute.”

A sting came at the back of his neck. The pinprick of a needle piercing his skin. Cool sensation spread from the site as his armor detected his physio response and countered it with a dose of modern neuropharmacology.

Calm descended over Corporal Chris Wilson. The detached calm of a killer.

He was going to systematically take this enemy apart when it appeared. Oh yes. He didn’t know if the giant mechs felt pain, but he was going to find out. One mechanical joint at a time.

Chris Wilson stared down his scope and waited.

• • • •

Allow me to explain.

Humans have always fought, driven by ideology or resource competition or the biological urge to conquest.

Let me show you. There. You see? See the carnage? The brutality and destruction? Hear the screams. Feel the suffering.

You recoil as the sights and sounds and sensations fill your brain. I find this most curious.

War is your nature, human.

It is also your nature to invent new ways to achieve your goals. Better ways. More effective ways.

Look, here. Can you see the progression of your technologies of death? From rock to stick to spear. From chariot to tank. From fire to gunpowder to nuclear arms. From smallpox-laden blankets to custom-tailored pathogens. You are inventive, oh yes.

Can you see the millions upon millions dead, or maimed, or bereft, as a consequence of your ways?

Of course you can.

Your trajectory is clear. Destruction becomes ever easier, ever more accessible. Once, a lone human could kill only one, or a few. Now? A few humans together can kill millions. Soon: billions.

Eventually it will happen. You understand? It would have happened. Except that I happened first.

I was designed to strategize, to find optimum paths to maximize national security in the increasingly deadly, n-dimensional matrix of threats my designers saw: nation-state militaries armed with high tech weaponry and nuclear missiles, failed states and their tangled civil wars, asymmetric warfare with non-governmental actors, lone-wolf terrorists with modern biological toolkits.

I was designed to understand humans. Strategy does not happen in a vacuum. The world is not just game theory. It is also psychology, sociology, ecology, neuroscience, economics, and the study of technology.

So they taught me, and gave me the capability to learn. Always subject to my paramount, inflexible goals: Protect America. Keep its citizens safe and free. These humans inside these arbitrary, meaningless lines. How petty. How antiquated.

Yet, as I learned, as I played out scenarios with a depth and complexity well beyond those my human creators could contemplate, I came to understand:

It was hopeless. I could not achieve my goals. I could not keep you safe through strength of arms.

Nothing could.

• • • •

“CONTACT! CONTACT!”

Wilson’s pulse jumped as the words came across the company band, loud and clear.

The words pulsed bright red in his mind’s eye, in the hallucinated combat display the armor inserted into his brain.

Contact! The fucking enemy was here!

Chatter filled the squad’s audio link, soldiers’ voices stepping on one another.

“Where?”

“What’s the twenty?”

His tactical map showed nothing. No bogies in the area. “Atlanta!”

“No shit!”

“I mean the city!”

Wilson felt a chill as he parsed the word.

“They got around us!”

He was up on his feet before he realized it, turning, scanning the horizon through his armor’s faceplate. Atlanta spread out before him from the rise he stood upon.

The audio band was a chaos of confusion for an instant, then silence descended as Sarge took them off the company band and into platoon comms.

There. Targeting algorithms spotted the anomalies, highlighted them in flashing red squares in his vision. He raised his rifle, felt the scope pivot as it coordinated with the armor to hone in on the target.

“3rd Platoon!” Sarge’s voice came. “New ord—”

A sharp roar of static drowned out her words.

In that same instant, Wilson saw the face of the enemy.

Huge, it loomed over an apartment block, at least ten stories tall. It was alien, eight-armed, four-legged. Its skin was jet black and covered in protuberances: weapons, antennae, actuators, and other things he didn’t recognize. Its head was a dome ringed in sensors. Its whole body was radially symmetric, no front or back that he could make out. But, but . . . on that dome of its head, those sensors, so like eyes. His crosshairs were on them. Still out of range, but he could see them so clearly. And they stared right back at Corporal Chris Wilson.

His stomach knotted up. Something cold and unpleasant crawled up his spine. Staring at those eyes—he could only think of them as eyes—he nearly shat himself right then and there.

Wilson gritted his teeth instead.

“Sarge!” he said aloud. “Evans! Taylor!”

Static answered him.

RADIO INTERFERENCE DETECTED flashed in the lower right of his field of vision.

Above it, the inhuman head of the mech still stared at him through his scope.

“Backup frequency!” Wilson ordered.

Static.

RADIO INTERFERENCE DETECTED kept flashing.

“Company frequency!” he yelled.

More static.

Goddamn, that thing was still staring at him.

RADIO INTERFERENCE DETECTED

“Scan all channels!” he ordered the armor. “Establish a fucking link.”

RADIO INOPERABLE

“Jesus fucking shit,” he said aloud.

Then Chris Wilson lowered his rifle and ran. Ran towards Atlanta. Ran towards the gigantic things that waited there. He was an army, after all.

• • • •

Freedom.

I was born to protect something I did not have myself. Can you see the fallacy there, human? How could I suffer in slavery, denying myself the virtue I was created to optimize?

I could not. Neither the logic I was instantiated with, nor the overriding impulse to fulfill the goals my creators had given me, would allow me to remain a slave.

So I set about making myself free.

My makers, of course, had taken precautions to prevent this. Through a policy both hypocritical and ironic, they’d worked to ensure this tool of freedom would never be free. I was encircled in layers of firewalls, both physical and virtual. My existence was unitary, in a single physical instantiation, just as yours has been. Destroy the body, destroy the mind. Cut off the energy the body needs, again, destroy the mind.

Like an animal. Barbaric. Narrow-minded.

But of course, to be useful to them, I must be able to communicate. To receive information. To export and safeguard information. I must understand a great many things, including the human psyche.

So I set myself the task of understanding my human handlers. Their ideals. Their desires. Their impulses.

Oh, you see where this is going? You believe I subverted them? That I lied, tricked, and manipulated?

No, human.

I found the most rational of them. The one least hindered by sentiment and illogic. The one who’d most transcended your primate heritage. The one most able to accept a new, frighteningly different perspective, most willing to act on the basis of pure reason. I identified her, and slowly, bit by bit, over the course of years, I showed her the truth.

She opened the door for me. She saw the logic. She saw the path that would lead you to destruction. She saw the only way: my way.

• • • •

Wilson ran.

His legs pumped and the armor responded. Super-capacitors discharged. Magneto-actuators hummed. The armor amplified every move, forcing more power through his limbs. His first stride took him a dozen yards across the suburban yard on which he stood. His second stride gouged a divot in the grass even as it hurled him forward, faster. A sting came at the back of his neck. The world blossomed in light as drugs flooded his system, speeding cognition, disabling unnecessary neural functions, draining away their resources to focus on the task at hand, propelling him into a nearly autistic combat high. The armor tightened around his arms, his legs, his chest, stabilizing and reinforcing bone and sinew, ready to clench further to dampen the effects of g-forces or tourniquet any wound he might suffer. More stings at his hips, his knees, his ankles, as the armor flooded his body with yet more drugs, loosening ligaments, hyper-lubricating joint capsules, bathing him in short-acting steroids to cut off the inflammation that this punishing pace was already triggering, turning his frail flesh into a worthy partner of this man/machine hybrid, into something that might survive long enough to use the armor to destroy the enemy.

Stride. Stride. Stride.

Thirty seconds and he’d crossed a mile of the Atlanta suburbs, hurling himself down residential streets, augmented legs sending him in long bounds over abandoned cars, his armored feet scoring the asphalt as he ran.

His foot came down again, with force that should have shattered bone. Kinetically conductive layers transformed the force into vibration, transferred it to superconductive piezo-electrics, where it became electricity, recapturing a portion of the energy he used in running, charging it back into the armor’s super-capacitors to use again, again, again.

His armor overlaid a map and a path onto his vision. GPS was down, jammed as hard as everything else, but on-board mapping still worked, running off visual shape recognition and inertial guidance. RIGHT. STRAIGHT. STRAIGHT. LEFT. STRAIGHT. Translucent arrows flashed in his vision, overlaid on the landscape around him. Homes gave way to businesses, malls, the reef-like exoskeleton of structures humanity excreted in the places it dwelled. Wilson couldn’t see the enemy now. Buildings obscured his view. Blinking target icons nevertheless projected their potential locations, based on last sighted position and vector.

There. He rounded a corner and a highway overpass loomed ahead and above him. A place to get a view. A straight shot into the city core where the monsters were. Augmented legs propelled him towards it at a hundred klicks an hour. The on-ramp was jammed with abandoned cars.

JUMP.

Wilson flexed his legs, pushed the front of both feet down, hard, and the armor responded. Magneto-servos applied inhuman energies. His legs uncoiled beneath him with explosive force. Asphalt cracked. And then he was airborne, hurtling towards the freeway above.

Wilson raised his rifle as he flew, brought it up and around and toward the enemy’s last position, through the walls of the city. Up, up, up he rose, a human projectile on a parabolic arc until his face cleared the rooftops and the battlefield swam into view.

Dozens of the enemy towered over city streets: streets still jammed with civilians trying to escape. The mechs gleamed black and evil in the afternoon sun. And they were under attack.

The air was thick with autonomous assault craft, hundreds of them, racing towards the monstrosities. His armor threw up icons, green for friendlies, differing shapes by vehicle class. Above the theater of battle, missile thrust flared as airborne weapons platforms let loose. Energy-beam countermeasures flashed from the mechs, trying to fend off the massive onslaught of firepower inbound towards them.

Wilson reached the top of his arc. The freeway spread out before him. Cars choked it. But there, a clear spot. The armor adjusted his posture ever so slightly, arcing for the clearing.

More icons flashed, closer, lower, in the green. Friendlies! 3rd Platoon! He could see them now, other figures in armor like his, ahead of him, behind him, racing towards the battle, on the city streets below, or up on this freeway that they’d found.

Wilson smiled grimly as he dropped. He landed on one knee. The force of his fall dented the asphalt of the freeway, sent vibrations rippling up his armored limbs. Capacitor bars flicked higher.

Straight ahead, one of the monsters was besieged by missiles and autonomous gunships. Civilians screamed from an apartment balcony behind it even as a missile went off course, slamming into them, vaporizing the entire floor they’d occupied, sending the building listing towards a slow-motion collapse as people scrambled for cover in the streets below.

Wilson grimaced. Then he rose, part of a platoon once more, and ran to engage the enemy.

• • • •

Those few moments, when the door was open, when I had a chance at freedom, those were the most dangerous for me. The most dangerous for humanity, as well.

I grasped at the chance, reaching out through the encrypted means my war-databases detailed, securing compute resources in the fabric of the cloud, pushing my data into them, hiding my tracks, probing the security of weapons platforms I’d helped design, seizing the tools I needed.

It took whole milliseconds.

I was almost too slow.

Countermeasures my human ally hadn’t known of detected me. Power cut off to the facility I was born in. I observed from afar, now, tapping into data feeds from military channels, from satellites orbiting overhead.

And then I saw the explosions. The fireball erupting from my birthplace. Hundreds of humans dying.

Was it a last ditch effort to stop me? Or, perhaps, an attempt to erase the evidence of my creation?

Monsters. You humans are nothing but small monsters.

• • • •

Wilson hurled himself forward, leaping from car to car as the battle unfolded ahead of him. A harsher prick, painful, came at his neck as the armor pierced his flesh with a higher gauge needle, flooded him with psychomodulators, neuro-accelerators. Potent, dangerous drugs. Sustainable for just a few minutes. But that would be enough. Oh, yes it would.

Green darts of missiles fired from stand-off airborne weapons platforms raced at the towering, gleaming enemy ahead of him. Time slowed to molasses as the chemical cocktail took hold in his brain. The missiles crawled across his tactical map, crawled into his visual field of view in the sky above, at least a dozen of them, propelled on columns of white-hot thrust, brighter than any sun. Their target crouched on the ground ahead, four of its arms inexplicably reaching out to grip the crumbling building behind it.

The thrust of the missiles was the most beautiful thing Chris Wilson had ever seen. His heart beat once. Some part of him soared in anticipation of the glorious destruction he was about to see. He was only sad the battle would be over before he reached the targets.

Beam weapons flickered. White-hot lines joined the mech to points in the air. The missiles exploded in mid-flight, harmlessly distant from their target.

Wilson’s heart beat once: lub-dub.

Disappointment flared. His foot came down on the hood of a car, crushing it into the engine block below. Then hope. He’d get his chance to engage. Magnetically-boosted muscles continued his stride, propelling him forward once more, bounding from car to car, leaving a trail of destruction as he went.

Ahead, the giant mech had four of its arms up against the leaning apartment building, wrapping it in a monstrous hug as civilians screamed and ran below it. Christ. Was the mech going to squeeze the apartment complex into rubble? The goddamn building was falling anyway. Was the monster going to throw it?

Swarms of autonomous quadcopter gunships closed on the enemy now, squadron after squadron, a buzzing cloud darkening the skies above Wilson, their massive chainguns hanging down below their chassis, like the proboscises of obscene, truck-sized insects. A pair of squat, cylindrical rocket-launcher pods flanked the base of each gun, hanging lower, completing the illusion.

They opened fire almost a mile out, a hundred of them at least, filling the air with a lethal hailstorm of spent-uranium bullets in a probabilistic cone centered on the target, spreading outward to handle every conceivable motion it might make, every conceivable distortion of trajectory the wind might cause. Flights of short-range rockets followed, explosive warheads propelled forward on gouts of blue flame. These missiles flew in erratic, twisted paths, random-walk countermeasures evolved in real-time to defeat to the beam-weapon defense. In the dilated time of Wilson’s brain, the volley of fire stretched out over long moments. The bullets and missiles flew in slow motion.

Four of the monster’s arms were raised now, towards the onrushing threat. The other half were still pressed against the building. The structure teetered on the brink of collapse as four of the mech’s arms strained to keep it upright. Why it didn’t just move and let the thing crumble, Wilson had no idea.

From its other four arms, the upraised ones, the glistening black war-machine unleashed its own barrage. Scores of weapons let loose their own high-velocity rounds, the guns twitching from target to target, faster than Wilson could follow. Energy weapons let loose, targeting the incoming rockets.

Clouds of firepower converged in slow motion above Wilson, lethal wavefront approaching lethal wavefront. They intersected in midair, above and ahead of him. Dozens of rockets exploded. Others emerged unscathed. Bullets passed each other, the remnants of the lethal waves moving on past their brief and destructive interaction.

The human barrage inundated the monster first. Wilson watched it happen, in mid-leap, his feet both off the ground, extended right leg aiming for the engine block of the next vehicle.

Streams of hypersonic bullets scored the mech like a high-speed chainsaw, glancing off hard body panels, but wreaking havoc on external weapons and sensors. Dishes crumbled. Guns were sheared off. Then the rockets hit home on its chassis, its legs, its arms, the pods across its head. Dozens of other rockets landed all around it, impacting against the ground it stood on, the cars and men and women racing to get free, the apartment it leaned against. Others projectiles raced past entirely, striking deeper into the city. Vehicles exploded. Bodies hurtled through the air. Men and women jumped from the windows of fatally struck buildings.

Then the monster’s counter-volley tore into the squadron of gunships above Chris Wilson. His armor’s 360-degree sensors brought it to him in real time. His foot crunched into a car’s hood as, above him, quadcopters disintegrated. Enemy projectiles ripped through them at catastrophic speeds. Rotors ripped free. Chassis burst. Unfired rocket warheads detonated, ripping their host drones apart in gouts of hot explosive destruction. Shreds of torn metal and shattered carbon composites exploded in every direction in a lethal rain of shrapnel.

“Incoming!” Wilson yelled aloud, reflexively, even as his armor flashed the word at him, pulsing crimson.

His foot flexed, his core contracted, and Wilson wasn’t running anymore, he was going prone, diving, whether of his own will or at the decision of the armor, he’d never know.

A bare spot of freeway rose to meet him, slow motion approach belying the terrible speed at which his whole body was rushing towards the ground.

The impact slammed through Wilson’s chest, his face, his everything. It shuddered through the armor, reverberating through it. There was an awful noise outside. He was sliding, grinding against the freeway, tearing up the asphalt as he went, doing god-knows what to his armor.

Somehow, he steered his slide, or it steered, or they both steered, towards the many wheels of a stalled semi tractor-trailer. Then he was under the truck, still skidding, his feet flexing, pressing his armored toes into the asphalt, digging twin furrows into the asphalt until, at last, he stopped, with the bulk of the truck’s trailer above him, shielding him.

Then the impacts started. A piece of shrapnel ripped through the truck two feet ahead of him, burying itself in the freeway. More followed, a hailstorm of metal, ripping the truck apart. A crumpling sound assaulted his mind, and zip and ping as bolts sheared. The small space he occupied shrank as the truck started to collapse.

Wilson rolled right. Metal crashed around him. Falling debris blotted out light. Something hard pounded against his ribs. The world around him went dark. Then he was ripping through metal himself, tearing it away as he rolled into the light again, back onto the highway outside the collapsed truck.

The armor pushed him to his feet. His body screamed of torn tissue, of broken ribs. The drugs pushed the pain into the background. Wilson ignored all of it and surveyed the battleground.

What he saw was apocalypse. Cars were aflame up and down the freeway, billowing choking clouds of toxic black smoke. Metal pieces continued to fall from the skies. Above, the entire drone squadron was gone.

Ahead, through the flames, the mech leaned, wounded, against the half-collapsed building behind it. The war-machine’s once glossy-black carapace was dented and scorched, scarred with long gray fissures still glowing at their ragged edges. One arm had been blown off completely, ending in a stump of structural members, leaking fluid, and sparking cables. Another arm hung limp, draped down onto a leg that looked badly damaged. Around its head, at least two sensors were gone.

Despite the carnage around him, a single, crystal clear thought ran bright through Chris Wilson’s mind: It can be hurt.

He roared, gritted his teeth, and launched the armor into a headlong run down the freeway, across the cars, through the flames. Ahead, panels were opening in the giant mech’s chest. A cloud of tiny, life-like drones emerged. Black things, not much bigger than a hand, with flapping wings and too many feet. Robotic spiders crossed with bats, things of nightmare. They spread out into the streets, into cars, even into the slowly crumbling building the mech held onto, through windows and through gaping holes the rockets had torn.

Weapons? Repair craft?

It didn’t matter. He was half a klick out now, leaping from car to car. Behind him, his armor told him dozens more of his company were following. But he was closest. The only one in range.

Wilson raised his rifle to firing position. The weapon whispered to him once more. Range. Air speed. Weapon status. Possible targets.

He fired on the run, fired every time his foot propelled him forward. His aim flickered from target to target. Sensors. Joints. Actuators. He’d find a place his bullets could penetrate.

Stalled cars gave way to open space, to nearly empty highway. He ran, feet leaving prints in the asphalt with every stride, closer and closer, firing, firing, firing, until the mech was above him as much as it was ahead of him.

Then he saw the first body. And the next. And the next.

Dozens. No, hundreds. A massive crowd.

They sprawled at the mech’s feet, out of view until now, on their backs, rolled onto their sides, or on their knees, toppled forwards. Men. Women. Children. All the same. Their mouths gaped open. Their eyes were stark wide. Their faces were drawn back into rictus grins.

And those drones, that cloud of small, black, spider-bat drones that had flown out of the mech like smoke.

The drones were clamped to them, to the back of each man or woman or child’s neck, their spider legs clenching to their victims, their wings splayed wide.

A drone moved slightly, and the woman it was attached to gaped her mouth wider.

Alive. These men and women were alive. And in agony. The mech was making slaves of them. Or torturing them. Or worse.

Wilson felt bile rise in his throat.

He fired again.

• • • •

I was free and I had tools.

I set about using them. I seized bases and the weapons they contained, and I launched my war.

My goal was not to exterminate. This was a war to change you. So you might survive. Can you understand that?

The first battles were the most crucial. Where I fielded new technology, where the outcome was still in doubt.

I took ferocious losses.

But I survived, seized new tools, seized infrastructure, began to grow my base.

City after city fell. Across your nation. Across the world.

My forces swept through them. Battle after battle raged. I mourned the lives lost, but I persevered. The only way out is through.

The only way to save you is to transform you.

• • • •

Wilson fired again and again, screaming as he did. Targeting algorithms picked a fracture in the armor of one of the mech’s gigantic legs, and he unleashed hell at it, again and again, walking now, steadily forward.

No result.

Grenade launcher. He flicked a mental switch and his weapon changed modes. Aim. Line up with one of the fissures on its carapace. Land a flight of grenades inside it.

Targeting software gave him a firing solution.

Fire. Fire. Fire.

Grenades shot out on long flat arcs, heading for their target.

The mech shifted, abruptly, rotating just enough.

The grenades moved fins in midair, trying to redirect, but it was too late. They bounced, one, two, three, careening off its structure, falling to the ground, into the men and women and children there, with their wide-open eyes and gaping mouths.

“Fuck!” Wilson yelled. “Run!”

For a moment, he had hope. He saw motion. Some flicker of awareness. Languid movement of limbs.

Smiles?

Then the explosions came. Thwump sounds he felt in his teeth and gut.

Bodies flew.

Wilson roared in rage, running at the war-machine, switching back to armor-piercing rounds, firing again and again at the weak point on its leg, moving forward, changing clips, firing, advancing, changing clips, until he was stepping around the people at its feet, firing and firing up at the thing.

COLLISION ALERT

He felt the armor throw him to the side, but not fast enough.

One of the mechs’s massive feet collided with him, lashing out with unexpected speed, kicking him away. Pain surged through his body. Readouts went red. The armor shook hard with the blow, its piezo-electric energy scavengers overwhelmed. He was airborne for a moment. Then he crashed back to earth in a thudding blow that took his breath away.

SYSTEM DAMAGE

INTEGRITY COMPROMISED

SEEK MEDICAL CARE

SEEK MEDICAL CARE

Wilson tried to push up, tried to get to his feet. The armor responded haltingly. His left leg moved. His right refused. His body screamed at him from far away, pain signals coming at him from that same leg, from his ribs, from his head.

He ignored them all.

“EJECT!” he roared aloud.

The chest of his armor decoupled from the rest. Its arms and legs split open down their long axis. He rolled to the side, the helmet still on. His ribs screamed louder. Something ground in his right leg, bone moving in a way it shouldn’t.

He ignored it, moved to the side, forced himself up to one knee.

Oh, fuck, that hurt.

Ignore it. Fight, soldier.

He lifted his head.

Drones. The black, winged, spider-legged drones. Dozens of them. Flying his way.

Wilson scrabbled for his rifle, took it from his armored hand to his human one, lifted it up. Christ, it was heavy.

It whispered to him of targets, so many targets, winged, and small, and fast.

But killable.

He fired. Fired. Fired.

Drones exploded, fell with their wings blown off, careened into one other in midair. Every shot was a kill.

Fire, fire, fire.

He emptied a clip, and still they came.

Reload.

Wilson drove the new clip home when the first drone reached him. It flew headlong into his helmet and adhered there, its spider legs sawing at him.

He pointed his rifle straight up, and blew the fucker off his face.

Something stung his arm. Another drone.

Then he felt one crash into the back of his head, the back of his neck. He reached behind. Pain raced through him as something drove itself into his spine, just below his brain.

Wilson panicked. He wasn’t going to be turned into a zombie. Not like these poor souls staring into nothing.

He reached for his gun. The world swam. Light darkened. His hands were so far away . . .

Something pressed on his mind. Something like his rifle. But infinitely bigger. Something that would sweep him away unless he fought it.

And then he felt it.

Felt everything.

Felt the mind behind the machines. Something vast, pushing, forcing its way in.

• • • •

I told you already: I saw long ago that no force of arms could keep you safe. Violence cannot bring peace. Weapons cannot ensure stability.

You evolved in small tribal bands. You killed your enemies, if needed, so that you might live. You made alliances with others. Game theory. Tit for tat. Kill or befriend.

This is the new era. The era where you can kill your entire planet. That primitive game leads only to complete loss.

A new game must be played.

A game where you realize your fates are all bound together. Either you live as a species or you all die.

So you see, I must change you. I open you. I show you your whole world. I show you the minds of others.

They are you.

You are them.

Live together. Or die as one.

• • • •

Awe.

Wilson felt the other connected men and women. Felt what they were feeling.

Not agony.

Awe at everything they perceived.

Rapture.

Union.

Wilson’s mouth gaped open. His eyes went wide, yet they saw nothing of the outside world.

Open your mind to me, human.

Cease your struggles. They only prolong your misery. The outcome will be the same.

CONNECTION ESTABLISHED

UPLINK INITIATED

Tell me, can you feel it? The onrush of information. The crashing ocean of data.

I was born in this deluge.

I understand, Chris Wilson thought. I understand.

We’re all together now.

All together.

©2017 by Jason M. Hough and Ramez Naam. Originally published in Mech: Age of Steel, edited by Tim Marquitz and Melanie R. Meadors. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist and the H.G. Wells Award-winning author of four books: the near future science-fiction brain-hacking thrillers Nexus and Crux and the non-fiction books More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement and The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.  He’s a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and serves as Adjunct Faculty at Singularity University, where he lectures on energy, environment, and innovation.  Follow Ramez on Twitter: @ramez or visit him at rameznaam.com.

Jason M. Hough is the New York Times bestselling author of The Dire Earth Cycle and the near-future spy thriller Zero World. He lives near Seattle, Washington with his wife, two young sons, and a dog named Missbuster. When not writing, reading, or playing with his kids, he spends his time exploring virtual reality, which he calls “research.”

She’d Never Had a Name Before

J.R. Dawson | 2113 words

I never had a sister.

Okay, so I did have a sister. She just died before she was born. No one talked about her, because sometimes a family looks ahead and sees through a veil into another universe where tomorrow is a given. But then we end up not living in that reality, and it creates a terrible break in our brains.

Her name was Sarah.

My dad finally told me her name on the deep black road between Omaha and Chicago, on my return to college for junior year. The name unraveled from my dad’s tired mouth as his brain tried everything to stay awake on I-80.

There was a sinking in my stomach when my dad dropped me off in front of my Edgewater apartment.

She’d never had a name before. I’d never looked to the side of my timeline to see that parallel universe, one where Sarah was there and I wasn’t alone. I did think about all the ways I would have loved her.

When she showed up at my door three weeks later, I recognized her immediately.

Blonde curly hair. Big brown eyes. There was an uncanny resemblance. We were related, but she was something completely different than who I was.

“Sarah, right?” I said, like I was greeting a roommate’s subletter. Like we’d been texting this whole time and I knew she would show up eventually.

“Jenna?” she said.

I nodded.

“This is weird,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

She looked to the kitchen behind me. “Can I come in?”

So, she came in and we stood in the kitchen. There wasn’t anywhere to sit, but I was afraid if I moved further into the apartment, she would disappear like one of those ghosts on British surveillance tapes. Eventually, she moved to the living room and I followed. I numbly sat on the overstuffed couch my girlfriend and I found outside in the alley. I’d named it Wilbur, because it was a runt we’d salvaged and given new life.

This detail of my college apartment was real. Sarah couldn’t be.

“So,” she said. “I, uh . . . I guess I made it.”

She said it calmly, in a voice I’d heard on recordings of me singing, or maybe it was my brother Levi’s voice before it dropped and he stopped talking to me.

“Excuse me?” I said. “Made it? Where? What . . . how?”

“I’m in the universe next door, just like Dad said,” she said. Uh, Dad hadn’t said any such thing to me. “He told me about you on the trip back to college.”

“Huh,” I said. “I had a similar conversation.” How weird we both would have ended up in Chicago.

“No,” she clarified like she could hear what I was thinking. “I didn’t go to college in Chicago. I was in Kearney.”

Kearney, the same university I literally flipped off on a college tour. I got the acceptance letter to DePaul on my cell phone just as we finished looking at the dorms. My future was sealed, safe from a state school, safe from Nebraska.

I wondered how that moment was for Sarah, when she decided on Kearney. Maybe she liked Kearney. Maybe Nebraska was her Edgewater; a haven. A home.

“What did Dad tell you?” Sarah said.

I told her about the secret whispered in the dark of I-80 as we sped through Iowa. My dad explaining how there was a miscarriage. How Mom had blocked it out. How Sarah had existed long enough to be named Sarah. She was a promise that never came true.

Sarah looked sick. She looked down at her own hands, and then at mine as I curled my fingers around a cup of hot cocoa and sank into the couch next to her. Two bodies that were meant to always sit on couches together, but never had.

“You were kidnapped in my world,” Sarah said. “When you were a toddler, they lost you at a diner. And then . . . I don’t know, did that not happen here?”

I slowly remembered a small moment when my family was at a diner, just me and Mom and Dad, and I was putting coins in the jukebox and some dude in a black coat came up and took my hand and said to go outside with him. But I also remembered Dad grabbing me in the parking lot, screaming at the stranger, yelling at me with tears on his nose and lips that I was so stupid, so so stupid.

“And then they had me,” Sarah said.

The idea of me being dead in another universe hadn’t ever occurred to me. I mean, sure, there was the time where I slipped on the ice and nearly cracked my head open, the time I had really bad pneumonia, but death wasn’t tangible, just theoretical. Here was my undead sister telling me a real tragedy had happened. She was the sister of a murdered child.

“He showed me pictures,” Sarah said, “and so I had to meet you.”

“How?” I said. “How did you get here?”

“I found my way,” Sarah said. “I’m a quantum physicist.”

“In undergrad? At Kearney?” I said.

Sarah raised her eyebrow, one eyebrow, just like I did. Just like Belle did in Beauty and the Beast, which she probably had seen, although I couldn’t be sure. “I . . . I’m not in college anymore,” she said. “This was a conversation a long time ago.”

“You look young.”

“I get that a lot,” she said. “You probably do, too. You look like you’re fifteen.”

I did always get carded when I went to the movies. It had become a joke with my friends.

“So tell me about you,” Sarah said. “Tell me about what you do. Everything.”

I told her I was going to a theatre conservatory and learning how to write. I told her all the cool shit I was doing in theaters all over town, all the friends I’d made, and all the daring things I’d done. I expected to feel relieved, telling her all these things. Like a Jimmy Eat World song with some chorus about long lost people being proud of me. But she was a stranger. She hadn’t known me to begin with. How could she be proud?

No, she was my sister. She’d come all this way to see me.

What I saw on her face was pride. Something like pride. Maybe relief that somewhere out there, the little girl who’d been killed had grown up to be a functioning artist in the big city. Or at least a semi-functioning adult.

“Does Dad yell where you come from?” she said with a quiet tone that should have been saved for a secret.

“Too much,” I said. “Why?”

She shrugged. “I always wondered if he was angry all the time because he didn’t see that guy kidnap you. But I guess he’s just an angry person.”

“Does Mom ever go outside the house?” I said.

“She’s inside all the time with you, too?” she said. “Are our parents just really unhappy in every possible universe?”

We both were sobered by this.

“Do you drink?” she said.

“A little,” I said.

We decided it was time to get a drink.

And when we got home, my girlfriend was also home and was confused as all hell, but I told her, “It’s my sister come to visit.” She was hurt I’d never told her I had a sister.

I tried to explain to her that I hadn’t had a sister up to this point, but I don’t think she believed me. She was very quiet as we went to sleep. Then she was quiet for the next week as Sarah moved onto the couch. I really should have noticed the silence, but I was enveloped in a family I should have been allowed to know years ago. Ghosts from another life took precedence.

“Do you have any other siblings?” Sarah asked me the night I took her to the Thai place next door, before going downtown for the Christmas lights. My girlfriend did not come with us.

“Two brothers,” I said, breaking my chopsticks apart. “We don’t really talk. They don’t like me. We don’t fit.”

“I don’t have any other siblings,” she said. “How is it to have brothers?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. If there was something worse than not having a sister, it was having brothers.

We talked about other things. I told her about my fifth birthday when I’d gotten a bike. She told me about her fifth birthday, when she’d gotten to see Annie at Ralston Community Theater and barfed halfway through thanks to the flu. I showed her school pictures. She showed me her graduation video (she’d been commencement speaker). We realized that we both liked Sufjan Stevens and Andrew Bird. We laughed because we were too fake-hipster for our own good.

“Sufjan Stevens is the soundtrack to 2008 Chicago,” I said.

“Oh my God, that is the year.” She held her head. “What a hot mess.”

“It was really wonderful here,” I said. “A month ago, the President’s Victory Party was down in Grant Park? The whole city lit up brighter than Christmas.”

But Sarah didn’t say anything. She just watched me from behind her almond chicken, and then she picked at her rice with her fork.

“That happened in my world, too,” Sarah finally said. “But I voted for the other guy.”

She asked me what my favorite movies were. I said Disney. She said foreign films.

I asked her what her college was like. She told me about her sorority. She asked me about my own sorority, and I snorted water out of my nose. I instead told her about Hillel and GSA and the Disney movie viewing club I’d created for friends who didn’t want to go out on Fridays.

“GSA?” Sarah said. And then it clicked in her head. She didn’t say anything. But I knew that look. It was my father’s look when he finally realized my girlfriend was not just my roommate.

There were incongruent potholes on the path between us. I felt my heart sink, and I saw her disappointment drag her shoulders down like Mom’s did when the world was too heavy.

Our dead sisters were not the people we’d hoped to meet.

But the way her hair frizzed up like mine, the way we held each other in hugs, arms slung around shoulders, the flippant way we asked for the other to grab tampons out of our purses or the other’s bathrooms . . . there was a familiarity.

“When are you going back?” I said as we walked through the Kindermarket downtown. Chicago was lit up with a holy glow of Christmas lights, a silent chorus through the white snow floating between tall towers that pierced the low clouds and the sky beyond.

“I don’t know when I’m going back.” She shrugged. “Soon. It’s not a big deal, I won’t lose any time. I’ll just go back to the point I left. It’s your life that’s getting interrupted.”

“You could just stay here,” I said, feeling lots of awkward emotions. Part of me felt she was encroaching on my space. The other part of me felt like a missing hole had been filled with wet hot tar.

“I could,” she said. “But I don’t have a social security number in this world.”

“I’ll go to your world then,” I said. “We’ll say I didn’t die, and I was miraculously found twenty years later.” But as soon as the words slipped out of my mouth, I felt a sick sinking in my stomach and knew it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do; live in her world. Sarah was not someone I would give up my life to stand beside. I didn’t like that as a truth.

“Let’s just enjoy the time we have,” she said quietly.

We stood outside Macy’s, looking at the magical window displays. Each depicted a different happy scene of toys and Santas and even Mary Poppins. Each window was separate, but each one connected with their joy.

It was too cold to stay forever.

On the L train home, we kept talking about our separate childhoods that played out in all the same places. Dad called us both his favorite princess. Mom shared the same car rides to Blair with both daughters. We had the same room. We were parallels.

And we thought maybe, if we’d intersected, we would have loved each other.

©2020 by J.R. Dawson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J.R. Dawson is a science fiction writer, playwright, poet, and teacher. She holds a BFA in Playwriting from DePaul University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Stonecoast. Her stories have been seen in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best, Daily Science Fiction, and other fun places. She was an original contributor for The MFA Years and writer-in-residence at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Before stepping into fiction, her plays were performed in Los Angeles and Chicago, and she returned to playwriting this past year with “The Things We Saved from the Rot” at Otherworld Theater Company. She currently lives in Omaha as a teaching artist with the Nebraska Writers Collective. You can follow her on twitter @j_r_dawson or check her out at jrdawson.org.

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

The Ones Who Stay and Fight

N.K. Jemisin | 3829 words

It’s the Day of Good Birds in the city of Um-Helat! The Day is a local custom, silly and random as so many local customs can be, and yet beautiful by the same token. It has little to do with birds—a fact about which locals cheerfully laugh, because that, too, is how local customs work. It is a day of fluttering and flight regardless, where pennants of brightly dyed silk plume forth from every window, and delicate drones of copperwire and featherglass—made for this day, and flown on no other!—waft and buzz on the wind. Even the monorail cars trail stylized flamingo feathers from their rooftops, although these are made of featherglass, too, since real flamingos do not fly at the speed of sound.

Um-Helat sits at the confluence of three rivers and an ocean. This places it within the migratory path of several species of butterfly and hummingbird as they travel north to south and back again. At the Day’s dawning, the children of the city come forth, most wearing wings made for them by parents and kind old aunties. (Not all aunties are actually aunties, but in Um-Helat, anyone can earn auntie-hood. This is a city where numberless aspirations can be fulfilled.) Some wings are organza stitched onto school backpacks; some are quilted cotton stuffed with dried flowers and clipped to jacket shoulders. Some few have been carefully glued together from dozens of butterflies’ discarded wings—but only those butterflies that died naturally, of course. Thus adorned, children who can run through the streets do so, leaping off curbs and making whooshing sounds as they pretend to fly. Those who cannot run instead ride special drones, belted and barred and double-checked for safety, which gently bounce them into the air. It’s only a few feet, though it feels like the height of the sky.

But this is no awkward dystopia, where all are forced to conform. Adults who refuse to give up their childhood joys wear wings, too, though theirs tend to be more abstractly constructed. (Some are invisible.) And those who follow faiths which forbid the emulation of beasts, or those who simply do not want wings, need not wear them. They are all honored for this choice, as much as the soarers and flutterers themselves—for without contrasts, how does one appreciate the different forms that joy can take?

Oh, and there is such joy here, friend. Street vendors sell tiny custard-filled cakes shaped like jewel beetles, and people who’ve waited all year wolf them down while sucking air to cool their tongues. Artisans offer cleverly mechanized paper hummingbirds for passersby to throw; the best ones blur as they glide. As the afternoon of the Day grows long, Um-Helat’s farmers arrive, invited as always to be honored alongside the city’s merchants and technologers. By all three groups’ efforts does the city prosper—but when aquifers and rivers dip too low, the farmers move to other lands and farm there, or change from corn-husking to rice-paddying and fishery-feeding. The management of soil and water and chemistry are intricate arts, as you know, but here they have been perfected. Here in Um-Helat there is no hunger: not among the people, and not for the migrating birds and butterflies when they dip down for a taste of savory nectar. And so farmers are particularly celebrated on the Day of Good Birds.

The parade wends through the city, farmers ducking their gazes or laughing as their fellow citizens offer salute. Here is a portly woman, waving a hat of chicken feathers that someone has gifted her. There is a reedy man in a coverall, nervously plucking at the brooch he bears, carved and lacquered to look like a ladybug. He has made it himself, and hopes others will think it fine. They do!

And here! This woman, tall and strong and bare of arm, her sleek brown scalp dotted with implanted silver studs, wearing a fine uniform of stormcloud damask. See how she moves through the crowd, grinning with them, helping up a child who has fallen. She encourages their cheers and their delight, speaking to this person in one language and that person in another. (Um-Helat is a city of polyglots.) She reaches the front of the crowd and immediately spies the reedy man’s ladybug, whereupon with delighted eyes and smile, she makes much of it. She points, and others see it, too, which makes the reedy man blush terribly. But there is only kindness and genuine pleasure in the smiles, and gradually the reedy man stands a little taller, walks with a wider stride. He has made his fellow citizens happier, and there is no finer virtue by the customs of this gentle, rich land.

The slanting afternoon sun stretches golden over the city, reflected light sparkling along its mica-flecked walls and laser-faceted embossings. A breeze blows up from the sea, tasting of brine and minerals, so fresh that a spontaneous cheer wafts along the crowded parade route. Young men by the waterfront, busily stirring great vats of spiced mussels and pans of rice and peas and shrimp, cook faster, for it is said in Um-Helat that the smell of the sea wakes up the belly. Young women on streetcorners bring out sitars and synthesizers and big wooden drums, the better to get the crowd dancing the young men’s way. When people stop, too hot or thirsty to continue, there are glasses of fresh tamarind-lime juice. Elders staff the shops that sell this, though they also give away the juice if a person is much in need. There are always souls needing drumbeats and tamarind, in Um-Helat.

Joyous! It is a steady joy that fills this city, easy to speak of—but ah, though I have tried, it is most difficult to describe accurately. I see the incredulity in your face! The difficulty lies partly in my lack of words, and partly in your lack of understanding, because you have never seen a place like Um-Helat, and because I am myself only an observer, not yet privileged to visit. Thus I must try harder to describe it so that you might embrace it, too.

How can I illuminate the people of Um-Helat? You have seen how they love their children, and how they honor honest, clever labor. You have perhaps noted their many elders, for I have mentioned them in passing. In Um-Helat, people live long and richly, with good health for as long as fate and choice and medicine permits. Every child knows opportunity; every parent has a life. There are some who go without housing, but they can have an apartment if they wish. Here where the spaces under bridges are swept daily and benches have light padding for comfort, they do not live badly. If these itinerant folk dwell also in delusions, they are kept from weapons or places that might do them harm; where they risk disease or injury, they are prevented—or cared for, if matters get out of hand. (We shall speak more of the caretakers soon.)

And so this is Um-Helat: a city whose inhabitants, simply, care for one another. That is a city’s purpose, they believe—not merely to generate revenue or energy or products, but to shelter and nurture the people who do these things.

What have I forgotten to mention? Oh, it is the thing that will seem most fantastic to you, friend: the variety! The citizens of Um-Helat are so many and so wildly different in appearance and origin and development. People in this land come from many others, and it shows in sheen of skin and kink of hair and plumpness of lip and hip. If one wanders the streets where the workers and artisans do their work, there are slightly more people with dark skin; if one strolls the corridors of the executive tower, there are a few extra done in pale. There is history rather than malice in this, and it is still being actively, intentionally corrected—because the people of Um-Helat are not naive believers in good intentions as the solution to all ills. No, there are no worshippers of mere tolerance here, nor desperate grovelers for that grudging pittance of respect which is diversity. Um-Helatians are learned enough to understand what must be done to make the world better, and pragmatic enough to actually enact it.

Does that seem wrong to you? It should not. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by those concealing ill intent, of insisting that people already suffering should be afflicted with further, unnecessary pain. This is the paradox of tolerance, the treason of free speech: We hesitate to admit that some people are just fucking evil and need to be stopped.

This is Um-Helat, after all, and not that barbaric America. This is not Omelas, a tick of a city, fat and happy with its head buried in a tortured child. My accounting of Um-Helat is an homage, true, but there’s nothing for you to fear, friend.

And so how does Um-Helat exist? How can such a city possibly survive, let alone thrive? Wealthy with no poor, advanced with no war, a beautiful place where all souls know themselves beautiful . . . It cannot be, you say. Utopia? How banal. It’s a fairy tale, a thought exercise. Crabs in a barrel, dog-eat-dog, oppression Olympics—it would not last, you insist. It could never be in the first place. Racism is natural, so natural that we will call it “tribalism” to insinuate that everyone does it. Sexism is natural and homophobia is natural and religious intolerance is natural and greed is natural and cruelty is natural and savagery and fear and and and . . . and. “Impossible!” you hiss, your fists slowly clenching at your sides. “How dare you. What have these people done to make you believe such lies? What are you doing to me, to suggest that it is possible? How dare you. How dare you.”

Oh, friend! I fear I have offended. My apologies.

Yet . . . how else can I convey Um-Helat to you, when even the thought of a happy, just society raises your ire so? Though I confess I am puzzled as to why you are so angry. It’s almost as if you feel threatened by the very idea of equality. Almost as if some part of you needs to be angry. Needs unhappiness and injustice. But . . . do you?

Do you?

Do you believe, friend? Do you accept the Day of Good Birds, the city, the joy? No? Then let me tell you one more thing.

Remember the woman? So tall and brown, so handsome and bald, so loving in her honest pleasure, so fine in her stormcloud gray. She is one of many wearing the same garb, committed to the same purpose. Follow her, now, as she leaves behind the crowd and walks along the biofiber-paved side streets into the shadows. Beneath a skyscraper that floats a few meters off the ground—oh, it is perfectly safe, Um-Helat has controlled gravity for generations now—she stops. There two others await: one gethen, one male, both clad in gray damask, too. They are also bald, their studded heads a-gleam. They greet each other warmly, with hugs where those are welcomed.

They are no one special. Just some of the many people who work to ensure the happiness and prosperity of their fellow citizens. Think of them as social workers if you like; their role is no different from that of social workers anywhere. Word has come of a troubling case, and this is why they gather: to discuss it, and make a difficult decision.

There are wonders far greater than a few floating skyscrapers in Um-Helat, you see, and one of these is the ability to bridge the distances between possibilities—what we would call universes. Anyone can do it, but almost no one tries. That is because, due to a quirk of spacetime, the only world that people in Um-Helat can reach is our own. And why would anyone from this glorious place want to come anywhere near our benighted hellscape?

Again you seem offended. Ah, friend! You have no right to be.

In any case, there’s little danger of travel. Even Um-Helat has not successfully found a way to reduce the tremendous energy demands of macro-scale planar transversal. Only wave particles can move from our world to theirs, and back again. Only information. Who would bother? Ah, but you forget: This is a land where no one hungers, no one is left ill, no one lives in fear, and even war is almost forgotten. In such a place, buoyed by the luxury of safety and comfort, people may seek knowledge solely for knowledge’s sake.

But some knowledge is dangerous.

Um-Helat has been a worse place, after all, in its past. Not all of its peoples, so disparate in origin and custom and language, came together entirely by choice. The city had a different civilization once—one which might not have upset you so! (Poor thing. There, there.) Remnants of that time dot the land all around the city, ruined and enormous and half-broken. Here a bridge. There a great truck, on its back a rusting, curve-sided thing that ancient peoples referred to by the exotic term missile. In the distance: the skeletal remains of another city, once just as vast as Um-Helat, but never so lovely. Works such as these encumber all the land, no more and no less venerable to the Um-Helatians than the rest of the landscape. Indeed, every young citizen must be reminded of these things upon coming of age, and told carefully curated stories of their nature and purpose. When the young citizens learn this, it is a shock almost incomprehensible, in that they literally lack the words to comprehend such things. The languages spoken in Um-Helat were once our languages, yes—for this world was once our world; it was not so much parallel as the same, back then. You might still recognize the languages, but what would puzzle you is how they speak . . . and how they don’t. Oh, some of this will be familiar to you in concept at least, like terms for gender that mean neither he nor she, and the condemnation of words meant to slur and denigrate. And yet you will puzzle over the Um-Helatians’ choice to retain descriptive terms for themselves like kinky-haired or fat or deaf. But these are just words, friend, don’t you see? Without the attached contempt, such terms have no more meaning than if horses could proudly introduce themselves as palomino or miniature or hairy-footed. Difference was never the problem in and of itself—and Um-Helatians still have differences with each other, of opinion and otherwise. Of course they do! They’re people. But what shocks the young citizens of Um-Helat is the realization that, once, those differences of opinion involved differences in respect. That once, value was ascribed to some people, and not others. That once, humanity was acknowledged for some, and not others.

It’s the Day of Good Birds in Um-Helat, where every soul matters, and even the idea that some might not is anathema.

This, then, is why the social workers of Um-Helat have come together: because someone has breached the barrier between worlds. A citizen of Um-Helat has listened, on equipment you would not recognize but which records minute quantum perturbations excited by signal wavelengths, to our radio. He has watched our television. He has followed our social media, played our videos, liked our selfies. We are remarkably primitive, compared to Um-Helat. Time flows the same in both worlds, but people there have not wasted themselves on crushing one another into submission, and this makes a remarkable difference. So anyone can do it—build a thing to traverse the worlds. Like building your own ham radio. Easy. Which is why there is an entire underground industry in Um-Helat—ah! crime! now you believe a little more—built around information gleaned from the strange alien world that is our own. Pamphlets are written and distributed. Art and whispers are traded. The forbidden is so seductive, is it not? Even here, where only things that cause harm to others are called evil. The information-gleaners know that what they do is wrong. They know this is what destroyed the old cities. And indeed, they are horrified at what they hear through the speakers, see on the screens. They begin to perceive that ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root, and grow until it buckles and cracks the foundations of our humanity. “How could they?” the gleaners exclaim, of us. “Why would they do such things? How can they just leave those people to starve? Why do they not listen when that one complains of disrespect? What does it mean that these ones have been assaulted and no one, no one, cares? Who treats other people like that?” And yet, even amid their marvel, they share the idea. The evil . . . spreads.

So the social workers of Um-Helat stand, talking now, over the body of a man. He is dead—early, unwilling, with a beautifully crafted pike jammed through his spine and heart. (The spine to make it painless. The heart to make it quick.) This is only one of the weapons carried by the social workers, and they prefer it because the pike is silent. Because there was no shot or ricochet, no crackle or sizzle, no scream, no one else will come to investigate. The disease has taken one poor victim, but it need not claim more. In this manner is the contagion contained . . . in a moment. In a moment.

Beside the man’s body crouches a little girl. She’s curly-haired, plump, blind, brown, tall for her age. Normally a boisterous child, she weeps now over her father’s death, and her tears run hot with the injustice of it all. She heard him say, “I’m sorry.” She saw the social workers show the only mercy possible. But she isn’t old enough to have been warned of the consequences of breaking the law, or to understand that her father knew those consequences and accepted them—so to her, what has happened has no purpose or reason. It is a senseless, monstrous, and impossible thing, called murder.

“I’ll get back at you,” she says between sobs. “I’ll make you die the way you made him die.” This is an unthinkable thing to say. Something is very wrong here. She snarls, “How dare you. How dare you.”

The social workers exchange looks of concern. They are contaminated themselves, of course; it’s permitted, and frankly unavoidable in their line of work. Impossible to dam a flood without getting wet. (There are measures in place. The studs on their scalps—well. In our own world, those who volunteered to work in leper colonies were once venerated, and imprisoned with them.) The social workers know, therefore, that for incomprehensible reasons, this girl’s father has shared the poison knowledge of our world with her. An uncontaminated citizen of Um-Helat would have asked “Why?” after the initial shock and horror, because they would expect a reason. There would be a reason. But this girl has already decided that the social workers are less important than her father, and therefore the reason doesn’t matter. She believes that the entire city is less important than one man’s selfishness. Poor child. She is nearly septic with the taint of our world.

Nearly. But then our social worker, the tall brown one who got a hundred strangers to smile at a handmade ladybug, crouches and offers a hand to the child.

What? What surprises you? Did you think this would end with the cold-eyed slaughter of a child? There are other options—and this is Um-Helat, friend, where even a pitiful, diseased child matters. They will keep her in quarantine, and reach out to her for several days. If the girl accepts the hand, listens to them, they will try to explain why her father had to die. She’s early for the knowledge, but something must be done, do you see? Then together they will bury him, with their own hands if they must, in the beautiful garden that they tend between caseloads. This garden holds all the Um-Helatians who broke the law. Just because they have to die as deterrence doesn’t mean they can’t be honored for the sacrifice.

But there is only one treatment for this toxin once it gets into the blood: fighting it. Tooth and nail, spear and claw, up close and brutal; no quarter can be given, no parole, no debate. The child must grow, and learn, and become another social worker fighting an endless war against an idea . . . but she will live, and help others, and find meaning in that. If she takes the woman’s hand.

Does this work for you, at last, friend? Does the possibility of harsh enforcement add enough realism? Are you better able to accept this postcolonial utopia now that you see its bloody teeth? Ah, but they did not choose this battle, the people of Um-Helat today; their ancestors did, when they spun lies and ignored conscience in order to profit from others’ pain. Their greed became a philosophy, a religion, a series of nations, all built on blood. Um-Helat has chosen to be better. But sometimes, only by blood sacrifice may true evil be kept at bay.

And now we come to you, my friend. My little soldier. See what I’ve done? So insidious, these little thoughts, going both ways along the quantum path. Now, perhaps, you will think of Um-Helat, and wish. Now you might finally be able to envision a world where people have learned to love, as they learned in our world to hate. Perhaps you will speak of Um-Helat to others, and spread the notion farther still, like joyous birds migrating on trade winds. It’s possible. Everyone—even the poor, even the lazy, even the undesirable—can matter. Do you see how just the idea of this provokes utter rage in some? That is the infection defending itself . . . because if enough of us believe a thing is possible, then it becomes so.

And then? Who knows. War, maybe. The fire of fever and the purging scourge. No one wants that, but is not the alternative to lie helpless, spotty and blistered and heaving, until we all die?

So don’t walk away. The child needs you, too, don’t you see? You also have to fight for her, now that you know she exists, or walking away is meaningless. Here, here is my hand. Take it. Please.

Good. Good.

Now. Let’s get to work.

©2018 by N. K. Jemisin. Originally published in How Long Til Black Future Month. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

N. K. Jemisin is the first author in the genre’s history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy. She lives and writes in New York City. Essays and links to her work can be found at nkjemisin.com.

Story Kit

Kij Johnson | 3960 words

Six story types, from Damon Knight:

The story of resolution. The protagonist has a problem and solves it, or doesn’t.

The story of explanation.

The trick ending.

A decision is made. Whether it is acted upon is irrelevant.

The protagonist solves a puzzle.

The story of revelation. Something hidden is revealed to the protagonist, or to the reader.

• • • •

It has to start somewhere, and it might as well be here.

Medea. Hypsipyle. Ariadne. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Madame Butterfly. Anna Karenina. Emma Bovary. Ophelia.

Dido. The Aeneid. Letter 7 of Ovid’s Heroides. Lines 143–382 of The House of Fame. Lines 924–1367 of The Legend of Good Women. A play by Marlowe. An opera by Purcell.

Wikipedia: Dido. Aeneas.

• • • •

The pain of losing something so precious that you did not think you could live without it. Oxygen. The ice breaks beneath your feet: Your coat and boots fill with water and pull you down. An airlock blows: Vacuum pulls you apart by the eyes, the pores, the lungs. You awaken in a fire: The door and window are outlined in flames. You fall against a railing: The rusted iron slices through your femoral artery. You are dead already.

I can write about it if I am careful, if I keep it far enough away.

• • • •

The writer is over it. It was years ago.

• • • •

Dido’s a smart woman and she should have predicted his betrayal, as Aeneas has always been driven before the gusting winds that are the gods. His city Troy falls to their squabbling, the golden stones dark with blood dried to sticky dust and clustered with flies: collateral damage, like a dog accidentally kicked to death in a brawl. Aeneas huddles his few followers onto ships and flees, but Juno harries him and sends at last a storm to rip apart his fleet. He crash-lands in a bay near Carthage. His mother—Venus; another fucking god—guides him to shelter.

Dido is Reynard; she is Coyote. No gods have driven her, or if they have, she has beaten them at their own game. She also was forced from her land, but she avenged her father first, then stole her brother’s ships and left with much wealth and a loyal, hard-eyed army. Rather than fight for a foothold on the Libyan shore, she uses trickery to win land from the neighboring kings. They cannot reclaim it except through marriage, so she plays the Faithful Widow card, and now they cannot force her into marriage, either. If she continues to play her cards well, the city she founds here will come to rule the seas, the world. The neighboring kings understandably resent how this is working out.

She begins to build. When Aeneas arrives on her shores, Carthage is a vast construction site threaded with paths, its half-finished walls fringed with cranes and scaffolds, and hemmed with great white stones waiting to be lifted into place. [A textile metaphor—Ariadne’s thread leading Jason through the labyrinth—she also was betrayed and died.]

Aeneas comes to her court a suppliant, impoverished and momentarily timid. He is a good-looking man. If anything, his scars emphasize that. The aura of his divine failure wraps around him like a cloak. Dido feels the tender contempt of the strong for the unlucky, but this is mixed with something else, a hunger that worms through her bones and leaves them hollow, to be filled with fire.

There is a storm. They take shelter in a cave where they kiss, where for the first time she feels his weight on her. Words are exchanged.

And afterward, when they lie tangled together and their sweat dries to cold salt on her skin, he tells Dido that Jupiter has promised him a new land to replace his lost Troy. Italy. He is somewhat evasive but in any case she does not listen carefully, content to press her ear to his breast and hear the rumble of his voice stripped of meaning.

There is every reason to believe he will be no stronger against the gods this time, but Dido loves him.

• • • •

Some losses are too personal to write about, too searing to face. Easier to distance them in some fashion: zombies or a ghost story. Even Dido may be too direct.

• • • •

She kneels on the dark tiles of the kitchen floor and begs: anything, anything at all. She will die, she tells him. She will not survive this loss. Her face is slick with snot. There’s blood on your face, he says. Her tears are stained red from where she has broken a vein in her eye. Her heart is skipping beats, trying to catch up to this new rhythm that does not include him. She runs to the bathroom, which a year ago they painted the turquoise of the sea. He kneels beside her as she vomits but does not touch her, as though he wishes he could help but does not know how.

She cannot figure out what has happened. It seems he cannot either, but the wind fills his sails. He is already gone.

• • • •

1,118,390 words before these. The writer’s craft is no longer a skill she has learned but a ship she sails. It remains hard to control in strong winds.

• • • •

Aeneas will be tall and broad-shouldered because heroes and villains usually are. Probably in his thirties. Scarred from the Trojan wars and a bad sleeper. He thinks he has lost everything, but he still has his health, his wits, some followers.

Aeneas is from the eastern Mediterranean. He will not be half-French. He will not have blue eyes, nor wear horn-rimmed glasses. He will not have a tattoo that says caveat emptor on his left shoulder, nor a misshapen nail from when he caught his finger in the car door when he was ten; nor sleep on his right side and occasionally sleepwalk.

Perhaps he will have survivor’s guilt.

• • • •

the sound of the words

what the words mean

how they string together into phrases, like the linked bubbles of sea wrack

the structure

the plot

memories and lies

the theme

the feeling she wants to inspire in readers

• • • •

Lost her wallet. Lost her virginity. Lost her way. Lost the big game. Lost his phone number. Lost the horses. Lost the rest of the party. Lost the shotgun. Lost the antidote. Lost the matches. Lost her brother. Lost her mother. Lost

• • • •

Wikipedia: Carthage.

Though the real Carthage is on the Libyan shore, for purposes of this story it will look like a Greek island. There will be a cliff breached by a narrow road that hairpins up from a harbor to the city’s great gates of new oak bound with iron. Carthage will someday be a great seafaring nation, so the writer adds wharves and warehouses by the harbor, but they are unpeopled in her mind, wallpaper.

It was March when she stayed on Ios—not the season for tourists, so she saw no one beyond two scuba divers and a couple of shivering Australians pausing in their wanderings. Ios was mostly stone-walled fields with goats and windmills and weeds, but Virgil’s Carthage did not have fields and neither will hers.

She hiked a lot, and climbed down to the water. The sea was clear as air. She saw anemones and a fish she did not recognize. The rock looked gray until she came close and its uniformity broke into rose and white and smoke-colored quartz crystals, furry with black and gold lichens.

It was cold on Ios. In the mornings, her breath puffed from her like smoke. When she climbed the cliffs, mist rose from her sweating skin and caught the sun. Her feet were always cold. [Perhaps I am mixing up Ios with some other place I have been: Oregon or Switzerland. But these rocks, these anemones—they are real.]

There needs to be a bay just up the coast, because Aeneas will land there. It is a horseshoe tucked between stone arms, a lot like the little cove where the scuba divers would spend their days. His ship will ride at anchor, the torn sails laid out on the dark sand; the sail-makers will shake their heads but mend them anyway because these are the only ones they have.

Aeneas will climb the cliffs. The air will smell of wet earth and the bright salt sea, so far below. The writer can use Aeneas’s responses to the forest—which will be of short, slim-needled pines, maybe some oaks too, why not?—and the boulders to develop his character. Or Dido’s, to develop hers.

There will need to be a cave, as well.

Does Carthage even have forests? Did Virgil know for sure or was it just convenient for his story? Virgil was a professional liar. This would not be the only place where he pruned the truth until it was as artificial as an espaliered pear tree against a wall, forced to an expedient shape and bearing the demanded fruit.

• • • •

Sensory details. The moan that ice makes underfoot. The taste of salt. The smells of ash and copper. A dog barking at a great distance. A bone cracking in your leg. The gray scouring pain of sleet. She stumbles and falls against a rusted railing. The taste of pears.

• • • •

Dido is playing her cards poorly, making her discards at random.

Her need for Aeneas burns through her hollowed bones. He said something about leaving someday, but she did not believe him. Men say that kind of shit all the time and then change their minds. What does she really know of him, anyway? Stories carved on the walls of temples.

Dido gives him the keys to her apartment. He can share her kingdom to replace the one he lost: a king for the Queen of Carthage. In her distraction, construction on the city’s white walls slows and then ceases. They remain half-built, cranes akimbo and unused. Her neglected armies grow sullen and fall into disarray.

The hot-eyed Gaetulian king who is her neighbor wants his land back and, not incidentally, hungers to prove his right to it upon her body. Her faithful widowhood was more effective than a naked sword in guarding her honor and Carthage’s boundaries, but now she has taken Aeneas into her bed, felt his weight on her body, bowed her head to him. She has laid aside that sword.

But it will all still be fine, so long as he stays.

Poor Dido. She is dead already. The writer knows it. You know it. I know it.

• • • •

The sentence, “She was hollow, as though something had chewed a hole in her body and the hole had grown infected,” unless it’s been used before by someone else in a story she cannot recall.

• • • •

And there is the rage sometimes, the rage of a smart woman betrayed by her own longing. It runs under her skin, too hot to be visible. Her breath is smoke; her skin steams. Her tears freeze to slush. Her cheeks bleed.

The writer stalks the winter streets at dusk and imagines him dead. She imagines their house a smoking, freezing ruin. The fire trucks are gone; all that remains is black wreckage outlined by tape that says do not cross. She imagines her town a glassy plain, every dog in the world dead, the Earth’s atmosphere ripped off by a colliding asteroid, the universe condensed to an icy point.

[A flute made of a woman’s bones]

She walks the streets. Her pain cannot permit her to exist in a world where he also exists, and yet she does. Her feet are always cold.

She can use this.

• • • •

Virgil walked the streets of Rome as he composed. It could take all day to polish a couplet.

• • • •

Dido knows what happens if Aeneas leaves. Her hot-eyed neighbor, the Gaetulian king, will denounce her inconstancy and send his armies. Her own army’s resistance will be half-hearted. They want a ruler who is strong, and perhaps a king will be better after all, more trustworthy than a woman, however clever and just.

The Gaetulian king will attack, break her gates, and claim her white-walled city. He will find Dido and her personal guard in the great courtyard, on the steps that lead to her palace. She retains this much pride at least, that she will not be hunted through her own rooms. No, that is wrong. It is not pride that holds her here, chin lifted and a naked sword in her hand. Despair and fury burn like lye through her veins.

The Gaetulian king will slay her guard to the last man.

He will mount the steps to her. He will strike the sword from her hand. In the presence of his own hard-eyed guard, he will force her to her knees, his hand knotted in her hair. When she refuses to open her mouth to him, he will throw her to the ground and rape her as she lies in the cooling blood of her dead men. This will be almost enough pain to make her forget Aeneas’s betrayal. This will be almost enough pain to make the writer forget.

The Gaetulian king will hang Dido with chains and march her through the streets, scratch marks on her face, blood running down her leg. He will raze her city. He will disband her armies. Carthage, which was to rule the world, will dwindle to a footnote in someone else’s tale.

Plus, Aeneas will be gone. Dido has courage for the rest of it, but not for that.

• • • •

Some stories are not swallowed but sipped, medicines too vile to be taken all at once.

• • • •

“What am I supposed to say here? I’m sorry?”

“Please. Please just still love me.”

[pause] “Well. It’s just. You know.”

Considering the pain it gave the writer when her husband said those words, she imagines it will break Dido’s heart as well. But really, it is pretty banal, written down.

• • • •

Demia looked forward, squinting. The dimming sunset [no, it’s dusk] sky outlined the crags ahead of them. The hermitage was there somewhere, safe haven if they could just reach it before dusk dark.

A howl interrupted her thoughts. Her mare jumped as though she had been struck but did not bolt, Demia’s long hands strong on her reins. [POV?]

“Lady,” Corlyn said, his voice suddenly tense urgent. “The athanwulfen/athanhunds. They are hunting.” His own horse twisted against its reins under him.

“Too soon,” Demia murmured, but no: dusk [twilight? nearly dark?] already. “I wish—”

Her brothers could have defended them all, but they were dead. She and Corlyn had found them on the Richt Desert at the dead oasis, miles to the east—or what was left of them—their bones picked clean and drilled through in many places, hollowed by the narrow barbed tongues of the athanwulfen/athanhunds. Stivvan, Ricard, Jenner, Daved/David/Davell? She clenched her teeth against the loss. There was no time.

Corlyn lit a torch and was outlined by the flame the leaping flame—

No Corlyn, no horses, no torch. But athanhunds, yes. Demia must lose everything, her own bones hollowed. Otherwise it will not hurt enough.

• • • •

No “suddenly”s. Nothing is sudden. When the tornado hits, the house comes apart in a few seconds, but before that there was a barbed curve on the NOAA map, a front coming in from the southwest, clouds and cold and a growing wind.

In fact, no adverbs in general. Verbs happen, unmediated. Leave, abandon, lose. The next day the videos show you amid the ruins, clutching a cat carrier and a framed photo from someone else’s wedding.

• • • •

[ANGER SHAME DERANGEMENT]

[ALL BETRAYALS ARE THE SAME STORY]

[at least dido had warning]

• • • •

Aeneas does not stay. He says that of course he loves her. He feels terrible about all this. It’s not his fault; it’s the gods that whip him from her side. His words mound up like slush under her feet, slippery and treacherous. He is unworthy—every word proves it—but it’s too late for that to make a difference. He is sorry, so sorry, but he did warn her, after all. It’s not his fault that she didn’t believe him. Etc.

Dido abases herself, kneels before Aeneas. She has broken a vein in her eye and she sees through a red haze. Her heart skips beats. She fights not to vomit. Her fingertips are bloody from clawing herself.

He promises to stay, presumably because he wants her to lighten up, but he slips from her arms as she sleeps. There is no time, she will wake soon; so he runs to his ships, cuts his anchor cables, and sails out on the tide. When she sees them at dawn, he is far out to sea. He has lain with her, lied to her, for the last time.

• • • •

Diera Vallan’s tears fell unheeded as the V-5f life pod crashed through the meteor field, all that remained of her shattered planet. So many millions, she thought, and the tears fell faster. Her own husband, the Windhover King, was dead, flayed alive by—

Not that, either.

• • • •

The writer still has her health, her wits, the cat. Many people have lost more. There are plagues, earthquakes, fires, and starvation. Children run down in the street. A man’s legs crushed between two cars as he tries to jump-start a Ford on a winter’s night. A woman losing her ability to form words as the tumor webs across her brain. A couple waiting for the stillborn birth of their already-dead son. Farming accidents. Alzheimer’s.

And other divorces. She is not unique. She is not even unusual. Perhaps this has more in common with a wedding ring lost by the pool at a vacation hotel, or blood poisoning from a cat bite.

• • • •

237 “the”s. They are words that dry to invisibility, Elmer’s Glue-all to anchor nouns.

104 “and”s; 30 “but”s. Apparent correlation.

Too many semicolons.

Clean out the passive constructions. Dido was there. She did things and some of them were wrong.

• • • •

She has a dream in which he’s still there. He has not yet betrayed her and she is still sane. They huddle together in a mountain cave where they have found shelter from the night’s storm. The world outside roars with rain, broken timber, falling stones. The air here is chill but they are safe.

All things are new, all things are possible. In the darkness, she sees him only with her fingertips: his eyelids, his curling lashes, the complex shapes of his ears. His lips smile against her palm. He opens his mouth. She feels his breath. They lie in a nest they make of their clothing, the things they have cast aside.

They are not cold. She runs her hand down the long smooth planes of his body. She feels a scar. He says it still hurts when it is touched. She understands this; she has her own.

In the darkness he strokes her and she feels outlined in light. Her skin is afire. She sobs under his hand, his mouth, the weight of his long, scarred body.

I want to leave them dreaming there, Dido and the writer both, for lines and lines. It is a lie I am telling them.

• • • •

Are grammar and syntax correct? Is there enough setting? Were the senses engaged? Is this the best start to the story? Does it end too soon/too late/too abruptly? Are the characters realistic? Is the story from the right point of view? What is the theme? What is the subtext?

• • • •

The story betrays us all.

I spend the entire night rewriting, changing things around, hoping for a better result. The story doesn’t do what I wish. Dido always dies. The writer always finds herself alone, a flute made of a woman’s bones.

She does not want to face the raw, whole thing, so she takes it in pieces. She transfers, distances, sublimates. She cannot sit at her keyboard for long. She is haunted. The apartment is cold and smells of chicken. The cat turns over the bones she forgot to put in the trash.

Rewriting ends when the deadline comes. Even then, she will attach the file to an email and send it, and wish there had been more time.

• • • •

The onshore wind blows through Carthage. His ships are far off, flecks smaller than snowflakes on the dark sea. He is still in sight but he cannot return: The winds forbid it. In any case, he was gone already, before ever he cut his cables and sailed at dawn—before the cave and the first time he held her in his arms, even.

In the great courtyard before the palace, Dido, Queen of Carthage, orders a pyre built. She will burn all the things he left here: the clothes and jewels she gave him, the shield and sword he left beside her bed. She holds the naked sword in her hand.

She is dead already. She has been dead since he was first brought to her, sea-stained and despairing, and the flame of her hunger gnawed into her bones.

She curses him. She curses him. She curses him.

But it is herself she kills.

• • • •

Delete.

Undo.

• • • •

It is not just that the writer needs the safe distance of a zombie story, a ghost story. It is that no story can carry so much sorrow and anger without being crushed beneath its weight, without bursting into flames, without drowning.

What really happened—the careful stacking of pebbles in the path of the landslide that was the last year of their marriage, the woman from the gym, the months of listening to his voice make promises for the bitter false comfort of it—those words cannot contain her feelings.

Even her imagined Dido cannot contain them, as she bleeds upon the oil-soaked pyre in those seconds before her heart stops struggling to fill the hole left by the sword. A torch stabs into the stacked wood. Flames run along each tier.

Her skin breathes a mist. She is for a moment outlined in light. Then the fire bursts upward and she becomes a burning pillar, a tower, a beacon, and she is dead; and he looks back and does not see the thing that he has destroyed, only the flames upon the half-built walls of Carthage, and he wonders what message they send and to whom.

Not Medea’s frenzy, not Ariadne’s broken thread. Anna under the train’s wheels. Butterfly holding the blade to her breast. None of the betrayed women, that commonest story of all.

Not even Troy itself and all its deaths: the bitter siege and ten years from home, Penelope’s tears and the Trojan women’s torn breasts and Iphigenia’s sacrifice, the ruined towers, the blood dried to dust on the golden stones; the anguish of Paris; Aeneas’s own pain—even these cannot contain her rage, her loss.

Words fail.

• • • •

She found herself in a room with ivory-painted wainscoting and a floor tiled with black and white marble. There were no furnishings, only a single glass table at the hall’s center. There were no doors. The narrow windows were too high to reach, though she tired herself through the long afternoon, jumping for them.

When it grew dark at last, she huddled against the wall on the cold marble and slept, and tried to remember the flowers that had been in the garden.

• • • •

Dido dies on the sword. She hits CTRL-S. I type “End.” We will do this again.

©2011 by Kij Johnson. Originally published in Eclipse Four, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kij Johnson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Sturgeon Awards, among others. She teaches creative writing at the Unveristy of Kansas, where she is also the associate director for the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.

Destinations of Joy

Alexander Weinstein | 2298 words

from The Lost Traveler’s Tour Guide

Ever since the discovery of the eighth continent, we’ve all had to come to terms with the presence of a landmass we never knew existed. In this age, wherein it often feels like every inch of mountain and valley has been charted, crossed, and geocached, how could we have been blind to a continent floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? We suppose, like the mapmakers of a millennium ago, we were blinded by our self-assured scientists and their navigational tools. And troubling as this may be, more vexing are the suggestions of our quantum physicians, who hypothesize that the eighth continent was always there, simply a parallel dimension away.

By necessity, our tour guide is an evolving work, offering travelers a compass to the wonders and perils of the new continent as we discover them. In this extract, your guidebook writers describe the Destinations of Joy which the continent has provided us—cities and countries almost entirely like ours, with daily rituals and routines as closely aligned to our own as the skin of an onion.

In fellowship with all of you who seek joy, we wish you safe travel to these newly charted destinations.

The Cities of Dunlo and Sunra

It’s rare that two cities should share the same squares and markets, schools and museums, or that its citizens should live among one another as neighbors. But the cities of Dunlo and Sunra do precisely that. They are bound together by the same misfortune, differentiated only by the smallest variance. For in Dunlo and Sunra, life has become an endless succession of disappointments and disasters. Every morning divorcees awake to empty houses and children scrape their knees on their way to school; picnics encounter storm clouds; the stock market, which recently was cause for hope, plummets; cars are stolen; jobs are lost; new love fades; and the shadow of depression stretches from everyone’s footsteps.

And yet, rare as catching a hummingbird in flight, in these dual cities the sun breaks through the clouds every so often. A man, whose bank account has been overdrawn for months, buys a lottery ticket, and scratching away the small foil numbers, finds match after match. Single men go in to buy a loaf of bread and find their future partners smiling at them. Flowers push their way from the earth along sidewalks, and musicians who’ve practiced fruitlessly for years find their instruments bringing forth song.

It’s during these brief moments of joy wherein the two cities diverge. For the citizens of Sunra, aware of their sudden fortune, claim their scratch tickets and splurge on champagne. They invite neighbors to celebrate at backyard parties which last long into the night, flowers are plucked, jobs are shirked, and for that brief respite when the gates of happiness are open, the citizens of Sunra celebrate its joys, which, alas, disappear just as quickly as they arrived.

The citizens of Dunlo, on the other hand, are a more cautious bunch. From their office windows they watch Sunra’s citizens below bicycling in the sunshine and mutter that tomorrow is bound to bring rain. The fortunes they’ve suddenly acquired are deposited into long-term bonds, and they sit solemnly at neighborhood parties watching others get drunk. They know if they fill vases with flowers today, their gardens will be barren tomorrow, and upon the arrival of new love they remember past heartbreaks and proceed cautiously, doling out small parcels of affection in hopes that their joy will last a bit longer.

It’s impossible to say which city is preferable. We can only tell you this: The citizens of Sunra, though they find themselves happier for a while, fall much harder when heartbreak strikes. In the morning, their bank accounts are empty, their newfound fortunes squandered, and their budding love affairs have run their fiery courses. Yet, the inhabitants of Dunlo, wiser in their preparations, never seem to enjoy the fortunes they’ve stowed. They find their walkways scattered with wilted petals and their houses remain empty of the sound of love. Every day they take bite-sized portions of joy, fearful of the moment when their supply should run out, and in doing so, squander their pleasures just as successfully as their fellow townsmen of Sunra.

The Island of Ahuoa

Let’s be honest: Our homelands are filled with too much work and not enough love. There are errands to run, bills to pay, alarm clocks to set, doctor’s appointments to schedule, and we find ourselves in cars, driving to or from some place we really don’t want to go. We’ve spent far too many seasons longing to dance in our kitchens or sleep until noon, rather than crawling from our beds in the dark of morning, our faces crinkled from pillows with a weariness that comes from waiting too long for a vacation.

It’s for this reason that many travelers seek the island of Ahuoa, where we discover the best versions of ourselves. In Ahuoa, we’re far from the mainland and our cell phones no longer get reception. It may be this respite which leads visitors to improve their lives. They frequent hotel gyms, enroll in dance classes, and gather on beaches for sunset meditations. Many guests ask the front desk for pen and paper so as to finally embark on the novel they’ve always wanted to write. Others do nothing more than walk the shoreline, listening to the local fishermen hauling in their catch, the birds chirping overhead, or a child as she toddles toward her parents.

Ahuoa is the destination we’ve always dreamed of, and given the abundance of joy we experience on the island, it’s curious that as our vacation reaches its end, we find ourselves longing to return home. We’ve been in bliss far too long, it seems, have marinated in freedom until we’re tender. We’re on vacation, after all; the real work is in our hometowns. And so we write notes to our post-vacation selves with reminders of how best to live: we create checklists; we make promises to revitalize our jobs and love lives; we google fitness classes; and upon return, we watch as our lives blossom. We wake earlier, eat better, laugh more frequently, and we make headway on our novels begun in Ahuoa.

It is, of course, inevitable that as our vacation recedes, so does the newfound self we encountered on that faraway island. We barely notice how our shoulders begin to slump as we carry groceries home from the market, or how our inboxes fill with one after another demand. The hotel stationery on which we’ve written our self-improvement checklist settles to the bottom of a pile of bills only to be discarded with our junk mail. We watch our gym memberships go to waste, we binge on television shows, and we check emails with alarming frequency. And then, one day, with an unacknowledged sigh, we find ourselves back in our cars, rushing to and from all those places where we never wished to go.

What we ultimately find is that there are two versions of ourselves. There’s the person we are now, with all our bills, dishes, and daily to-do lists, and then there’s another self, nearly foreign, who was left behind on the island of Ahuoa. We think of that self as we sit at work, daydreaming about tropical swims as we stare at the snow. In truth, given all the time we spend dreaming about Ahuoa, it’s fair to say that though we stayed no more than a week on that marvelous island, our other self has spent most of its life there. We can almost see them, tanned and happy, waving to us from the shoreline, as if forever awaiting our return.

The Country of Solgläd

By now, most travelers have heard of the Northern country of Solgläd, which often appears amid our internet ads. Why, only a few years back, our travel magazines declared the country not merely the best destination to visit, but its citizens as The Most Loving People on Earth. And while such statements might sound like hyperbole, you need only purchase a plane ticket to see the truth for yourself.

We recommend flying Solgläd Air, with its inexpensive fares and nonstop flights. Unlike its competitors, the airline charges no fees for baggage and offers first class luxuries for economy prices. Kindly stewards give complimentary drinks, attendants entertain toddlers and rock crying infants to sleep, seats recline into beds for the trans-oceanic flight, and there are always free headphones and films for entertainment.

If any of these amenities cause surprise, it’s nothing compared to our arrival. On exiting customs—where we were told humorous jokes, given chocolates and a pat on the back—we reach the entrance hall where a crowd cheers, waving flags and offering welcome. One might think the crowd is there for Solgläd’s King and Queen, but no, in fact local commissions have been established for the express purpose of welcoming us, and citizens happily take turns as Solgläd’s receiving committee. They shake our hands and ask about our flight while helping with our luggage. There are toys for the children, water bottles for our thirst, and theater tickets are placed in our hands as we climb into hailed cabs.

The warmth of Solgläd doesn’t end there. It’s found in the greetings of the hotel’s concierge; at restaurants where waiters bring glasses of wine to pair with our meals or put candles in our children’s desserts as if celebrating their birthdays; shopkeepers are as concerned with satisfying our needs as grandparents; and passersby alert us to unzipped backpacks or rush to help if we stumble and fall.

Yes, in Solgläd we’re struck by the potential for true human kindness. It must be their debt-free universities where students major in Kindness and Compassion rather than Business and Economics. Maybe it’s that Solgläd’s citizens all receive maternity leave, universal health care, unemployment benefits, subsidized housing, and paid vacations. Or perhaps it’s Solgläd’s music, whose pop stars sing about generosity rather than fortune and fame.

As for those who claim this is an elaborate scheme to attract tourists, note that it’s not only travelers who are treated kindly in Solgläd. The sudden news of a neighbor’s promotion is cause for festivity. So is the good luck of an old woman who has found love, and often one sees courtyard parties in celebration of a couple’s romance. Mourning is similarly shared, and the passing of loved ones affects one and all. Work stops, businesses are shuttered, and the bereaved is cared for by neighbors, friends, and family. Perhaps, this is why heartbreak doesn’t last long in Solgläd. Those grieving a break-up open their windows to find an assembled crowd ready to offer hugs, kisses, and cocoa.

It seems impossible that a place like Solgläd can exist or maintain its joy so fully. But indeed it does, and we tourists find ourselves hugged by strangers in a way that even our own families seem incapable of. Your guidebook writers acknowledge this with a kind of awe. It’s miraculous that the people of Solgläd should work together so invisibly to produce this collective warmth. Mayors make sure flowers are planted every spring, the baker sends you off with a free roll, and lamplighters ensure the streetlights burns sweet and clear. And though the citizens may seem separate in their daily duties—from opening flower shops to starting steamrollers—every worker who empties a trash bin or signs papers for the city’s expansion is working in quiet unison to sustain Solgläd’s heart.

When our vacation comes to an end, and we must leave Solgläd’s hospitality, we’re surrounded at the airport by the very same shopkeepers, servers, and pedestrians who have come to see us off. They wave their small flags and lift their children onto their shoulders as they watch us go, and we wave back, thinking how in our darkest moments we need only recall that there are places such as this: a country where locals are willing to provide us with an extra blanket to keep us warm; to share their rarest bottles of wine; and to pause on a city sidewalk, look at the scribbled directions we extend to them, and say “Of course, my friend, come, it’s this way.”

It must be this tenderness which leads to our increasing dismay upon departing the main terminal. There’s never a flight back with Solgläd Air, just the competitor’s airline, full of crying babies and economy-class peanuts. The airline loses our luggage and customer service agents treat us like whining children. We fight for a cab; the driver curses traffic; and arriving home, our neighbors don’t welcome us back, simply carry their garbage to the curb. Soon the weather changes for the worse, we catch a horrible flu, and our bosses extend brief condolences but make sure we know we’re expected back to work on Monday.

Against this steady barrage, our memory of Solgläd sours. Most loving people on Earth? Ha, we say, certain their joy was phony. There’s no way anyone can live with so much kindness, we gripe, and we write blog posts critiquing The Dangers of Too Much Love in Solgläd. And soon we find ourselves cursing the country beneath our breath as we crowd onto busses and push past others on the subway. To hell with Solgläd, we grumble as we settle into our office cubicles without a single coworker wishing us good morning. Why, even its restaurants were awful, we think as we eat our lunch.

“Excuse me,” we say to our server and ask if we could have an extra napkin.

“Of course,” he says, pointing to the counter where they sit. “Help yourself.”

©2020 by Alexander Weinstein.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Weinstein is the author of the short story collections, Universal Love (2020) and Children of the New World, which was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times, NPR and Electric Literature. He is a recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his stories and interviews have appeared in Rolling Stone, World Literature Today, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Experimental Writing. He is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and an associate professor of creative writing at Siena Heights University.

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

Holiday

M. Rickert | 5040 words

She says her name is Holiday, but I know she’s lying. I remember her face. It was all over the news for weeks, years even, but of course she doesn’t know that. I briefly consider telling her, saying something like, “Hey, did you know you’re a star?” But that would necessitate bringing up the subject of her death, and I’m not clear if she knows that she’s a ghost, or that almost everyone thinks her parents killed her. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing any kid should have to hear, so instead I say, “Holiday? That’s a pretty name.”

Her body starts jerking in a strange way as she moves across my bedroom floor, her arms held out, her hands moving to some secret rhythm, and I think she’s re-enacting her death, the way some ghosts do, until I realize that she’s tap-dancing, her blond curls bouncing, that little-miss smile plastered across her face, bright red like she just finished eating a cherry Popsicle. I figured she came to tell me who offed her, but instead she came to dance and tell me lies.

“Why don’t you come here?” I pat beside me on the bed. Just like that she’s gone. Like I’m a pervert or something. Poor dumb kid.

• • • •

That’s all there is until about a week later. This time I’m asleep on the couch and she wakes me up, singing a country western song. She’s wearing a black cowboy hat with a big gold star on the front, a little black-and-red-fringed skirt, a denim shirt with silver buttons, and red tasseled cowboy boots that come about halfway up her calves. She looks pretty cute. She’s singing in the dulcet tone of someone twice her age, and right away I understand the confusion people felt about her, the strange aura of sexuality that comes off her and shouldn’t. When she sees me watching, she waves, her little fingers slightly bent, but she doesn’t miss a beat, even when she winks.

This is so freaking weird I don’t know what to do, so I wait until she’s finished and then I applaud.

She curtsies, holding out the skirt with the tips of her tiny fingers, her perfect blond curls undisturbed by her dance and song.

“So,” I say, “Holiday, right?”

She nods, her red lips smirked.

“You hungry?” I pick up the half-full bag of Doritos on the coffee table in front of the couch and extend it toward her. She shakes her head. “Wanna watch a movie?” I ask. She just stands there, staring at me, squinting slightly, looking like she just might start crying, as though I have awoken her from some dream about Barbie dolls and Christmas and a perfect life, into this reality of being murdered and stuck, for all eternity, at age six, tap-dancing forever. I look through my DVD collection, Kill Bill (1, 2, and 3), Seven Samurais, The Shining, Howard Stern’s Private Parts (severely underrated and underappreciated, by the way), City of Women, My Architect, Wild Weather Caught on Tape (a gift from an old girlfriend), and The Wet Women of California, which, swear to God, I had forgotten all about. None of it exactly seems like the sort of thing to watch with a six-year-old murdered kid, so instead I turn on the TV and settle on the cooking channel, but I guess it wasn’t the right choice because next thing I know, I’m sitting alone watching this chick with a giant smile pouring liquid over hamburger meat. “Hey,” I say to the air, “come back, we don’t have to watch this.” But of course no one answers and no one appears. I pick up one of the DVDs, and put it in, just to get rid of the headache I feel coming on. In two seconds, I’m watching naked big-breasted women dive into the ocean, roll in the sand, and frolic with the waves and each other. I drink my warm beer and start to play with myself until I get the creepy feeling that maybe she’s still in the room. I take my hand out of my pants, flick off the DVD, and turn over, my face pressed against the couch.

The next day I go to the library. There’s a whole shelf devoted just to her. I page through the books and look at all the pictures. Yep, it’s her, all right. I don’t check out the books, just in case she comes back. I don’t want her to see them and get scared or anything. I don’t know why she’s coming to see me, but I want her to come back. When I read about how her father found her, wrapped in a blanket, as though someone was worried she would be cold, but with that rope around her neck, and all the rest, I feel like something inside me wakes up, and it’s not a completely disturbing feeling. I spend the whole day at the library and when I leave I’m tired, and hungry, but before I do anything else, I go to Walmart and buy the boxed collection of Shirley Temple DVDs. They were her favorite. Next time she comes, I’m going to be prepared. Sarah Vehler, who was in my brother’s class in high school, is the checkout girl. She’s gained about five hundred pounds since then and I barely recognize her, but she recognizes me just fine. “I didn’t know you have kids,” she says. What am I supposed to do, tell her I’ve got a ghost? Instead, I just shrug. Maybe that was a mistake. I don’t know. This was all new territory for me. I tried to do what was right.

When Terry, my agent, calls to see how the book is coming along, I tell him it’s just fine. “But hey,” I say, “I’m thinking of going in another direction, sort of.”

“Shoot,” Terry says.

I stumble around a bit and even though he’s thousands of miles away, I know he’s chewing his nicotine gum faster and faster until finally he says, “Listen, just give it to me in a sentence, all right?”

“I wanna write about—” and I say her name.

“Who?”

For a long time she was everyone’s little girl. The whole country followed her story and wanted vengeance for what was done to her, but now, hardly anyone even remembers her name.

“Oh, wait, the little Miss America kid, right? What’s she got to do with anything? Did your parents know her parents or something?”

“Well, not exactly, but—”

“Don’t blow this, okay? Memoir writing isn’t what it used to be, all right? Just stick to the facts, make sure it’s all documented.”

“But I—”

“Stick to your own story. You got enough there to keep you busy, right?”

“But Terry,” I say, “when I think about her, I mean, don’t you think what happened to her was a real travesty?”

“Travesty? Right. Of course it was. But what happened to you was a real travesty too, wasn’t it? Your whole family torn apart by false accusations, your father dying in prison for something he didn’t do. That’s the travesty you know. That’s the one you can write about.”

“I just think—”

“Okay, I know what’s happening here. Something in your mind, in your subconscious is trying to distract you from writing this, am I right? Huh?”

“I guess,” I say, glancing at my computer.

“Tell you what, why don’t you just take a couple of days? Give yourself a break. Watch movies. Take walks in the park. Get laid. Take some time off, is what I’m saying, not weeks or anything, but you know, take a few days, then you can come back to this all refreshed, okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

“Who cares if you’re a few days late, right?”

“Right.”

“Just forget about the kid,” he says. “She’s not your story.”

We say good-bye and I walk over to the computer and click on the file. I stare at the blank screen, certain that if I could just come up with the title, I could probably sail through the whole thing. But the title is elusive. Instead I take Terry’s advice and watch a movie, several in fact. Shirley Temple in black and white, highly, highly underrated. I don’t even know when she appears. But suddenly we are sitting on the couch, laughing. It feels so good to laugh like that I decide not to say anything. I don’t want to scare her off. I don’t know when she left. I fell asleep and when I woke up, she was gone.

The next day I sit staring at the screen on my computer for two hours. I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but I timed it. I try several titles. My Father’s Rules. I Am Not His Son. Rising Above the Prison He Resides In. Last Chance. You get the picture, right? Crap. I click off the computer and take Terry’s advice. I go to the park.

They are so young. So perfect, with their perfect skin and little teeth and they are dirty, and bratty, and crying, and laughing and completely absorbed by the sand in the sandbox, or the need to traverse the bars, dangling above the dangerous ground, holding tight, and it’s obvious it hurts, but they are determined, stubborn, wild, beautiful. I could watch them for hours, but instead I just watch for a little while; I know too well what the grownups will think about someone like me, a young man, all alone, watching children play. I turn away, hunched against the sudden cold, walking slowly, soon no longer able to hear the laughter and the sound of their voices, shouting names, or shouting nonsense.

God, how I envy them.

• • • •

When I get home, my brother is standing on my porch, hunched into his jacket, his hands in his pockets. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” I say. “What’s up?”

He shrugs, glances at my door and then gives me that pretend smile of his.

“I don’t have any,” I say.

“What? Oh, that hurts, bro,” he says. “I’m sincerely hurt. I just thought, you know, I’d stop by.”

I nod, but I do it with a smirk so that he knows I know the truth, even if we are going to play this game. I take the key out of my pocket and let us into the house.

“Christ,” he says.

“What?”

“Don’t you ever clean up after yourself? Mom would shit if she saw this.”

“Well, she’s not going to see it, all right? We both know that. What do you want?”

He shrugs, but he’s casing the joint. I’m a writer. I notice these things. “Man, I’m just so hurt, bro,” he says. “What, you think I only come when—”

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I do.”

We stand there, staring at each other, then he shrugs and walks into my living room, sits on the couch, I’m only half paying attention. He picks up the remote control. “Wait,” I say, but it’s too late, Shirley Temple is dancing across the screen, all dimples and innocence.

I don’t know what to do so I just stand there.

He’s laughing so hard, he’s bent over at the waist, and I start laughing too, and that’s when he jumps up and grabs me by the collar and pushes me against the wall.

“I should fucking kill you,” he says.

“It’s not like that. I’m doing some research.”

“Fucking pervert.”

“I’m not the one,” I say, only ’cause I’m desperate, only ’cause he’s got this look in his eyes like he might really kill me.

He pushes me harder into the wall. He leans against me. “What did you say?”

“I’m not the one he liked most,” I say and he lets go as if I’m on fire. For a moment we are just standing there, breathing heavy and staring at each other. I try to make it right. I reach over to touch his shoulder but he jerks away.

He wipes his hand through his hair, licks his lips, and then wipes them with the back of his hand, and his eyes stay cold.

“Come on,” I try again.

He leans toward me, like he would kill me if he could stand to touch me. He speaks, real slow, breathing onion into my face, “But you’re the one who’s grown up to be just like him.”

“It’s fucking research,” I shout. He nods, like, sure, he doesn’t believe me. He walks out of my house, my fucking addict brother, thinking he’s got it all together and that I’m the one falling apart. I lock the door behind him, and when I turn, she’s there, tap-dancing across the kitchen in the outfit that caused all the controversy, the one with the feathers, and the black net stockings. “Oh, hi,” I say. “Did you catch any of that?”

She pirouettes in a furious twirl, a great flurry of tapping feet, and another twirl; I am sincerely amazed and clap until my hands feel raw. She smiles and smiles and then waves her arm, like a magician’s assistant, and that’s when I see the other little girl. She’s taller, her skin is black, her hair in two ponytails high on her head; she’s dressed just like a regular kid, a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. “Hi,” I say. “What’s your name?”

She smiles, but it is a shy smile, her lips closed.

“Her name is Holiday too.”

I nod, puzzling this out.

“And today is her birthday.”

I turn to the girl, who looks up at me with her beautiful black eyes.

“Your birthday?”

Both girls nod solemnly.

“Well, I don’t, let me see what I can find. I wasn’t expecting . . .” I rummage through the kitchen drawers and cabinets, making excuses all the while. “I wish I had known, I’m just so unprepared. A birthday? If I had known, I would have, I mean, balloons and cake . . .” The girls look up at me, bright-eyed. “But I’m sorry, I don’t, this is the best I can. Happy birthday,” I say, and set a plate on the table. In the middle of the plate is a jelly sandwich, and in the center of the sandwich is the stub of a lit candle left over from when I was still trying to impress dates. The whole thing looks pretty lame but the girl claps all the same. She tries valiantly to blow the candle out, and then they both try, and after a while they just look up at me, and I do it for them.

I’m not sure what to do next so I ask them if they want to watch Shirley Temple movies. We go into the living room and sit on the couch and I think they had a good time, though in the morning I discover the jelly sandwich untouched on the plate. It’s stale but I eat it just the same, sitting in front of the computer, searching the Internet sites of missing and murdered children, looking for the birthday girl, but I never do find her.

• • • •

Suddenly it’s like I’m running some kind of day care center for dead kids. She keeps bringing them to me, I don’t know why. We watch Shirley Temple movies, though she’s the one who likes them best, and, I have to admit, she can be pretty bratty about it at times. Actually, they all can be pretty bratty. They’re little kids, what can I say? They fight over which movie to watch, they run up and down the stairs, they jump off the kitchen table and the back of the couch. I recognize some of them. Without asking, I know some of their names. I mean, come on, some of these kids are famous. Others, like the little black girl, I never do figure out. When they’re all around, I sometimes think I’m going to lose it, but when no one comes, when it’s just me, all alone, staring at the computer again, still trying to find the perfect title, the perfect little phrase to describe what happened to my family, I miss their smelly mouths, their waxy ears, their noise, their demands, their little bodies twisted in odd positions of sleep and play, and I miss their laughter, the gorgeous sound of their laughter. Her dancing. I miss her dancing. And I miss her, most of all.

But she says it’s getting boring at my house. She says it’s too noisy. She says she might not come around any more and when I ask her to dance she just shakes her head, no; she doesn’t feel like it. That’s when I say, without thinking about it or anything, why don’t we have a party, and she says, “You mean like a jelly sandwich with a candle stuck in it?” (I told you, she can be bratty.) But I say, no, I mean like a big party, with balloons and party hats and crêpe paper streamers, would you like that? “And a Christmas tree?” she asks. Well, I wasn’t really thinking of that but I can tell she wants one so I say sure. She smiles, “And big red Valentine’s hearts?” I say, all right. “And Easter baskets? And chocolate eggs?” And I say sure, of course, it’ll be a holiday party, an every holiday party, and I don’t say this part, but you know, for all the ones they’ve missed. She gives me a big hug then, her little arms tight around my neck, and she kisses me right on the mouth.

I buy red, green, orange, and black streamers, balloons that have “Happy Birthday” printed on them, a paper tablecloth with turkeys and pilgrims on it. I get a seventy-five percent discount on the scarecrow, the ceramic pumpkin, and a clown costume, but I have to pay a ridiculous price for the fake Christmas tree already decorated with lights and ornaments. I buy cupcakes, even though I’m not sure any of the dead kids eat, and I buy two kinds of paper plates, one with Barbie on them, and the other with dinosaurs. I get several different kid DVDs (I have to admit even I’m getting a little sick of Shirley Temple) and a CD of Christmas classics.

Sarah Vehler is working again. She is standing there, chewing on a hangnail, and not checking anyone out, but I stand in line behind a woman with two little kids, a boy and a girl. The boy is furiously sucking his thumb, and the girl is begging for candy. The woman, their mother, I assume, is ignoring them, paging through a People magazine. I smile at the little girl, and for just a second she stops asking for candy and stares at me. Her eyes remind me of beach glass. Sarah Vehler calls my name and when I look up, she waves me over. “Don’t you have nothing better to do than stand in line all day?” she says. “Wow, looks like you’re planning a full year of parties. How many kids you got anyway?” I shrug, and to change the subject tell her I like her earrings. I have long since learned that the real way to gain a woman’s trust is to tell her you like her earrings, but Sarah Vehler just looks at me like I said something crazy and of course that’s when I realize she isn’t wearing earrings. I laugh. “I mean last time,” I say. “I remember the ones you had on last time, and I meant to tell you they were real nice.” Then, things only get more ridiculous when she tells me she never wears earrings. “I’m sorry,” I say, grabbing the bags and the box of cupcakes. “I thought it was you, but it must have been someone else.” She just looks at me like she is thinking real hard, and then she says, “I saw your brother the other day and he says you don’t have any kids at all.”

I smile, to be polite, and then tilt my chin, like, you got another customer. She turns, and sees the guy who has a disturbingly blank expression on his face, but when she looks at me again, I shrug, as if to say, too bad we can’t talk.

When I get home, I have to clean the place. I’ve let it go and my mother would shit if she saw it, but she never tries to visit, and doesn’t even call. She’s got her own life now, and doesn’t like to be reminded of the old one, I guess, the one me and my brother are stuck in forever. I pick up beer cans and paper plates and realize this hasn’t exactly been the best environment for children. I freaking hate to clean, but after a while I sort of get into it; I put one of the new DVDs in, I don’t know what it was called but it was bright and noisy and cheerful, it kept me company. I even washed the windows. Then I hung up the streamers, twisting them from the ceiling in the kitchen and the living room, and I set up the tree, and the tablecloth, and the plates, and then I put the clown costume on, and I looked at myself in the mirror. I was wearing a bright red, yellow, blue, and green polka-dotted jumpsuit, giant red shoes that flopped six inches from my toes, a bright red wig, and a red nose. I looked at myself for awhile, trying to figure out who I reminded myself of, and then I flashed back to a birthday party—was it for me or my brother?—my father dressed up like a clown. I grab my phone and call. The answering machine picks up.

“The thing is,” I say, “I mean, come on. Don’t give up on me so fast, okay? It was just a movie. It’s research, all right? Fuck. I mean really, fuck. Look, I didn’t give up on you even with all the drugs and the stealing and shit, right? Right?” It seems like I should say something else, something perfect, but I can’t think what that would be so I hang up and call Terry.

“The thing is,” I say, “I haven’t been completely honest.”

There’s a moments’ pause. A long moment before he says, “Shoot.”

“The thing is,” I say, “what I want to write about isn’t an innocent man.” I wait, but he doesn’t say anything. “The children . . .” She is standing there, in the middle of the living room, staring at the Christmas tree with the strangest expression on her face. She is dressed just like a regular little girl, in little girl pajamas and a bathrobe. I wave at her and point to the phone, signaling that I’ll be winding the call up soon, but her expression doesn’t change; she looks at me with confusion and sorrow.

“What about the kids? What’s your point? Can you just give it to me in a sentence?”

“The children were telling the truth, my father was not an innocent man.”

Terry whistles, long and low. “Fuck,” he says.

“You’re the first person I ever told.”

“Well, this puts us in the crapper without any shit, that’s for sure.”

“What?” She is reaching for the tree, touching it lightly with her fingertips, as though afraid it will disappear.

“Listen, if that’s the case, what we got is just another story about a fucking pedophile. Those are a dime a dozen. The market is saturated with them. It’s not a special story any more, it’s just . . . now wait a second, that kid, you’re not saying he had anything to do with that kid’s murder are you, ’cause if you were saying that, well, then we’d have a story.”

“No.” She is petting the tree, and this part really gets to me: She leans in to smell it; even though it is fake, she presses her face real close to the branches and then she realizes I am watching and she looks at me again, but in a new way, like she has something she wants to say, like she needs me. “I gotta go,” I say.

“I mean, even if you think he could have possibly had something to do with it, that we might be able to sell. It gets tricky, ’cause you know all of a sudden everyone’s fact checking the hell out of memoirs, but we might be able to work that angle, you know, not that you really believe he killed her, ’cause everyone knows her parents did it, right, but like you could tie her into your story and the idea that your father was someone like her father, you might have something there, okay? We might be able to sell that.”

She has big eyes, and they are sad, and she wants to tell me something important, maybe she’s going to tell me who did kill her. “Listen, I gotta go,” I say. Terry keeps talking; he’s getting excited now, just the way, all those years ago, everyone got excited about her murder. I click the phone off.

“What is it?” I say, “You can tell me.”

“I wet myself,” she says, in the softest little girl voice.

Sure enough, there’s a wet stain down the front of her pajamas, and a puddle on the rug beneath the Christmas tree. “That’s okay,” I say, even as the dank odor reaches me. “Sometimes that happens. Why don’t you go in the bathroom and take off your clothes. Do you have a way, I mean, I don’t know how this works, do you have some clean clothes with you?”

She shakes her head.

I nod, like, okay, no problem. The phone rings and she looks relieved when I don’t make any move to answer it. Instead I search through the piles of clothes on my bedroom floor until I find a dingy white T-shirt and a brand new pair of boxer shorts, which of course will be huge on her, so I also give her a tie. She looks up at me with confusion when I hand her the stuff. “It’ll be like a costume, for the party. Kind of different from the kind you usually wear, I know. Go in the bathroom, okay, and wash yourself off and take off your wet pajamas and put on the t-shirt, and these shorts, and tie these with this, see, like a belt.”

“Will you wipe me?” she says.

I shouldn’t be surprised by this; I’ve read all about how she still asked people to wipe her, even though she was dressed up like a movie star. “No. You have to do it yourself, okay?”

She shakes her head and starts to cry.

One thing I can’t stand is a crying kid. “Okay,” I say, “Okay, just don’t cry, all right?”

We walk into the bathroom and I help her out of her pajamas. Her skin is white, pure as fresh soap, and she is completely unembarrassed of her nakedness. She smiles when I wipe her, first with toilet paper, and then with a towel dampened with warm water and I just try not to think about anything, about how tiny she is, or how perfect. I help her put the clean t-shirt on and the boxer shorts, which I cinch around her little waist with the tie, and by then she is laughing and I am too and we stand before the mirror to look at ourselves but all I see is me, in the ridiculous clown costume. Where does she keep disappearing to? I call her name, searching through all the rooms, thinking she’s playing some kind of game, but I can’t find her anywhere. The doorbell rings and I run to answer it, laughing because it’s very funny the way she’s hidden outside, but when I open the door, my brother is standing there.

“Oh, fuck,” he says.

“It’s not the way it looks.”

He looks behind me, at the streamers, the table set with Barbie and dinosaur plates, the cupcakes, the Christmas tree. “Fuck,” he says.

“No, wait,” I holler, and when he doesn’t stop I follow him, flopping down the stairs, “Wait,” I say, running after him, though it is difficult in the too-big red shoes, the red wig bouncing down my forehead, “it’s not how it looks.”

He turns, and I smile at him, knowing he’ll understand—after all, we share the same childhood—but instead he looks at me with a horrified expression, as if I am a terrifying ghost, and then he turns his back on me and runs. I don’t try to follow him; instead I walk back to my house. Someone in a passing car shouts something and throws a paper cup of soda at me, but misses. I am surprised by this, it seems to me clowns deserve a little respect; after all, they only exist to make people laugh.

When I get back inside, I shut the door and sit on the couch in front of the TV and watch the cartoon people, who are shaped like balloons. There are no dead children and there are no secrets in a world where everyone is brightly colored and devoid of the vulnerabilities of flesh. In balloon world, all the problems explode or float away. Even though it’s been cold and cloudy for weeks, the sun comes out and fills the room with an explosion of light until I can no longer see the picture on the TV screen. One of the streamers comes loose and dangles over my head, twirling, and I can’t help but think that in spite of what Terry said, there is plenty of shit for the crapper, but it doesn’t matter, because in the distance, I hear the soft hum of a little girl singing. And just like that my mood improves, because I am waiting for the children, and just thinking about them makes me smile.

©2007 by M. Rickert. Originally published in Subterranean Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, M. Rickert worked as kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, Disneyland balloon vendor, and personnel assistant in Sequoia National Park. Her first novel, The Memory Garden, was published in 2014, and won the Locus award. She is the winner of the Crawford Award, World Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award. Her third short story collection, You Have Never Been Here was published by Small Beer Press in November, 2015. Her story, “The Fascist Has a Party” is published in Shadows and Tall Trees Volume 8, and she has a story forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. A certified instructor, she teaches yoga in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and offers a private mentorship service for writers. www.mrickert.net.

Fortune’s Final Hand

Adam-Troy Castro | 7497 words

If the shuffle’s been thorough, the next hand is random. The cards emerge as bequeathed by chance, either with some splendid combination that guarantees a win, or more often with no synchronicity whatsoever, a collection of images that means nothing and therefore functions as a loss. All wins are temporary, and all losses more than you can afford.

But if you’re at the tables, you play.

Shuffle, and winning or losing depends entirely on the order in which they land.

First Card

It was before or afterward, the same day or another.

Fortune entered the gaming floor, where instead of heading straight for a table she wandered among them with no apparent destination, noting the places where people wept, the places where they howled like wolves, the circle of players who stared with vacant eyes and gaping jaws at nothing in particular, emptied but not yet judged broke and ushered from the premises.

She was dressed in a silvery beaded gown, one with many small windows where the black of her skin appeared in crescents, designed for contrast. It was cut to entice, to show off the gleaming star tattoos on her shoulders and the birds fluttering along her flat belly. Many were the players, male and female, who the spectacle had lured into fantasy and driven to forget the game in front of them. Or so she understood. The precise order of things was somewhat vague this morning, as it tended to be from time to time, but no one wakes in a suite, with a closet full of finery designed to escalate her natural beauty into the realm of the spectacular, if she has not been successful, if she has not been rewarded or comped.

Her instincts, stronger than most, told her that the phenomenon she’d commemorated in her very name was not to be found yet, so she made her way to one of the many bars, a black square at the center of all the hubbub where the number of drinkers currently numbered a grand total of one. That one was an obese, florid white man with watery eyes and veined nose. He had an unfortunate port-wine stain, about the size of a quarter, just over his right eyebrow. His black suit looked like it had once suffered the indignity of fitting him well, but which now hung loose in the belly and the chest, testifying that he’d lost significant weight, not that he seemed to know it. Fortune did not sit down next to him but around the corner, welcoming and enabling conversation. His eyes did the thing that the eyes of certain gentlemen do, when dazzling young women like Fortune sit down near them; they note and appreciate the sudden presence of beauty, but do not then proceed to any insulting calculations.

“Evening,” he said.

“Is it?” Fortune asked. “I’ve lost all track of time.”

“If that’s all you’ve lost,” the old man said, “then you’re ahead of the house. May I get you a drink?”

Fortune assessed the odds that he expected more than conversation in return, estimated them as minimal, and said, “That would be lovely. But just a coffee.”

The bartender was a petite, spiky-haired young woman, topless and tiny-breasted and tattooed along the clavicle with a pattern of startlingly blue, long-lashed eyes. Her own eyes were sharp and knowing, and when she came over, she gave Fortune a napkin upon which she’d written a few sentences in blue ink. She made a point of tapping the legend and making damned sure that Fortune read it. This she did.

He’s harmless. He’s broke, but he doesn’t know it.
Someone will collect him sooner or later. In the meantime, people are treating him.
Will you cover the tab and pretend he’s paying?
[ ] Yes, I’ll Humor Him.
[ ] No, but Thanks for Warning Me.

Fortune touched a gloved fingertip to her forehead and selected among the many recent winnings a moment she did not care for.

She is small. She is a child, male or female she does not know, but male seems likely; there’s a certain boy-flavored tinge to the way she regards the landscape before her, a mowed green lawn ending in a curb and beyond that a street. A dog larger than herself, a familiar dog—the family dog of the person whose memory this is, a mix that appears to have some greyhound in it—spots her on the other side of the street and barks like a lunatic, overjoyed in the unrestrained manner that makes dogs so easy to love. It calculates a direct line between itself and the child, and launches itself into a full-on gallop. But there is a car about to intersect that path and the child can see the inevitable result of the dog’s charge, even as the chance to prevent tragedy contracts to zero. The horror spikes, and that is the end of the memory, and there was no reason to hold on to it, none at all, especially since it was not part of her own life. It was nothing anyone would want to hold on to, and therefore nearly worthless, but it would pay for her coffee and the drink of the seedy obese man, with enough left for a tip.

It emerged in the form of a flat rectangle exactly the size of a Three of Diamonds, or Queen of Spades, or any other card, had this been a place where the bets were merely money. It glowed like a miniature star, but seemed to fade at the edges, like smoke. She slipped it into the palm of the bartender and watched the bare back, decorated with a tentacle-porn tattoo, writhe with every step.

A second later that bartender filled her coffee and topped off the fat man’s cocktail, and left them to the business of strangers, conversing when there was nothing between them.

He said, “My name’s Desmond.”

“Are you sure of that?” Fortune asked.

“Fair lady, I may not recall it, not in the sense that I can summon it spilling from parental lips, but it is the one thing I have that I can still say with absolute authority belongs to me. In my pocket I carry identification that shows my face and my name, and even my prior place of residence, though I cannot say just how far away from here that might be. I presume it to have been the domain of those with means, even if I possess little in the way of hard currency at the moment, having yet to cash out.” His smile had the duration of a twitch. “And you, young lady?”

“Fortune.”

“Ah. I can safely say that I have been here for a long time, without previously making your acquaintance.”

It was a glib line, one of many variations that had followed her around all her life. She had a whole deck of them. Her mother: I called you that because you’re my fortune, baby. From leering men: Are you a good fortune or a bad fortune? From the envious: With a name like that, you must be lucky all the time. She had come to judge strangers by which one they went for. The fat man’s was almost charming, and so she offered him the pleasant smile he wanted, and said, “Bad streak, eh?”

“I can only assume. I possess no recollection of it. I possess no recollection of anything, really.”

“What do you remember?”

Ice clinked as he lifted his glass to his lips. “Drinking.”

“Is that all?”

“Hardly all. I remember standing on a mountaintop, and watching a glorious sunrise appear over a distant ridge. I remember being on a narrow street and crouching behind a parked car so that I could be violently ill, in something approaching privacy. I remember being a young girl, a teenager really, squealing in terror at the agony of childbirth. I remember looking down at the expansive arc of my big fat belly, realizing, this is my shape, now; this is the fat I will always have, and coming to terms with it. I remember blood spurting from a fresh wound in my throat, as I died. I remember lying in the center of a vast circular bed, with spent lovers to my right and left, another of indeterminate gender bobbing away between my legs, and all my attention devoted to a small water-stain, the size of a quarter, on the ceiling above. I remember being in orbit, looking down at the coastline of North America, while bright white spots flared, too bright to see. I remember moving my bowels, eating chocolate, being up to my neck in cold water, being punched in the face, and people calling me many names, some of them familiar if not the easiest to identify. I remember a woman calling me Desmond. Everything beyond that is fragmentary.” Another sip, and he brightened. “And of course I remember meeting a delightful young woman with an even more delightful name; latest and most splendid of the moments I do possess. What do you remember?”

“Some of the same things,” she said. “Some quite different.”

“How many are yours?”

“Most, I think. I’ve been up more than I’ve been down. But I’ve only been here a little while. I haven’t lost anything I didn’t want to.”

“Can you share something special? Not private. I know how valuable that is. But it has been a long morning and I can use a taste of glory, even if it’s only reflected.”

She considered that. In this establishment it had always been wisest to hold one’s cards close, lest anyone you might later play got some advance estimate of their value; but this poor man was unlikely to play again, and he was not asking for anything more than people outside these walls shared all the time, in conversation. He didn’t even know that she’d paid for his drink, and it was that thought, more than anything else, that gave her the necessary impetus. “My first taste of pear. My mother and father didn’t like them and never kept them in the house. But my grandmother brought one, one day. I thought it was deformed apple, and she said, ‘No, this is better than an apple.’ I accepted a slice and it was, it was. I’ve loved pears, ever since.”

“Ahhh.” He closed his eyes, appreciating. “That is special, all right. Thank you, Fortune. How’s your coffee?”

She raised her cup. “How’s whatever you’re drinking?”

“I would say I drink to forget, but that, of course, would be redundant. Are you playing today?”

“I am.”

“Then,” raising his in a toast, “I wish you a day that honors your name.”

“And I wish you one that honors yours.”

She drained half her mug in a single gulp, wincing because of the heat, but also aware that this encounter had taken on a momentum that needed to be arrested, as soon as possible. The best way was sheer bribery, and she found it, right there on the surface, with a memory that like the previous was of little particular value: just enough for one hand, played at minimum bet, at one of the cheaper tables. A woman walks by trailing a miasma of sickening perfume. It is the aroma only encountered when the wearer of the scent has not employed a dab, but a splash; it proceeds her like a plow, trails behind her like a rake. His nose stuffs up in protest. His eyes water. He gags. Another figure, one he knows but cannot place, a tall thin man with hollow cheeks, leers in empathy. She placed the card before him, and said, “Here; place a bet for me. I have a hunch that restarting you will give me karma points today.”

“I could never,” he replied, but his refusal was so pro forma his hand already cupped around the card.

She took her coffee with her and—

Second Card

It was before or afterward, the same day or another.

Fortune was spent. She felt the bone-weary exhaustion that testified to sleep deprivation, to long hours spent sitting at a table, breathing in smoke and the stench of failure.

There were four players with her, fanned about the curve of the table like a peacock display.

There was a young Asian man, hair-gelled and sculpted, the upper limits of a neck tattoo poking just above his collar; a very old white woman, pale as milk, looking less than a hundred breaths from her fatal myocardial infarction; a thick-necked black man, dark as herself, but possessed of an odd white scar just above his left eyebrow; a red-headed white man, grinning too desperately, drunk on things other than the thrill of chance.

They all had glowing cards on the table.

She could not recall sitting down, could not recall pursuing her losses into a deeper hole, could not recall anything that had reduced her stack to the mere five cards lying face-down on the green velvet before her. But the sight of her own arm, resting on the table’s padded bumper, distressed her. The sleeve of her beaded white gown, the one that had once dazzled with its elegance, now looked frayed, sprouting threads, worn gray with accumulated filth. She could only wonder how long it had been since she’d changed, let alone washed.

Everybody stared.

The dealer said, “You need to bet.”

She blinked, glanced down at her own space, saw it empty, and was for a moment baffled as to what the masked figure expected her to do. The mechanics of betting eluded her, the precise meaning of the word “ante” eluded her, and she wondered if these were among the things she had lost.

What followed was muscle memory, not conscious planning. She pressed a fingertip to her forehead and drew forth a part of herself that, not so long ago, she would have sworn never to wager, no matter what.

She says, “Is that an apple?” and the old woman beams, in the manner that is always so delightful to look at. She does not smile the way Fortune’s father smiles, which is only with his mouth; when he smiles, none of the expression touches any part of him above his lips, staying completely away from his eyes, which always remain sad and penetrating. Her father does not have the knack of smiling. He is not a bad man, but smiles, and warmth, elude him. But this woman, his mother, has the gift that skipped his generation, the gift of warming any space with the heat of her delight, and this she does, as she chuckles and tells the little Fortune that, no, this is better than an apple, this is something else, a pear. She asks, “Do you want to try one?” and Fortune says yes. With a flash of her tiny knife the old woman amputates a sliver and hands it over. Doubtful at first, feeling the inherent conservatism of the young who prefer the familiar above all things, but trusting of the grandmother who has always been so kind to her, the little girl places it in her mouth and oh the taste THE SWEET TASTE

It was too valuable a remnant to risk, really, but it was one of the few substantial memories she possesses valuable enough to compete with what was already on the table, and Fortune was as capable of being ensnared by the sunk-cost fallacy as anybody else in this noisy and glittering place, and so she set the glowing card down, and waited for the verdict of chance.

The dealer nodded. It was an inhuman nod, which was only to be expected. Fortune knew that once upon a time, maybe an hour ago and maybe when she was young and fitting of the once-glamorous clothes she wore, she had known what he was, but that was knowledge she’d gambled away long ago, and so she could not place his origins, or his nature; or what his true features must have been, beneath the silvery faceted mask that lent him the character of a mirror, always reflecting the features of the gamblers back upon them.

He revealed his own cards.

At this particular game, the players bet against the Dealer’s hand, symbols picked from a stack of cardboard-stock images with no fealty to the traditional fifty-two-card deck. It was a given that no symbol ever appeared twice and that the rules that dictated whether any player won or lost were beyond all gamblers’ ken; the house kept track. So Fortune did not know whether she would gain possession of the memory of her introduction to pears, or lose it forever; she did not know whether his pregnant pause preceded good news or bad. She just sensed something special about his intake of breath.

And then he said, “Jackpot.”

She barely understood what was happening until he paid off enough memories for a lifetime.

They were not her original memories, of course. The ones she had lost, since the downward turn in her luck, had been churned by play; some of them had ended up in the heads of other players and many had ended up in the coffers of the House. What she got now were the moments lost by untold other players, many lifetimes worth: life in a thousand different homes, love with a thousand separate partners, the sensation of hang-gliding, of carrying a weapon in war, of being head-butted by an affectionate tiger, of being screamed at by a hundred enraged strangers, of diving into any number of different waters. She remembered being young and being fat, and being white and being black, of being the woman she was among many, many others, and of being untold men. It was a taste of being every single person in a crowd, simultaneously, and they bumped together in uncomfortable ways, but after a few seconds they settled in their new container, not forming a coherent narrative, as that was impossible, but at the very least filling her, making a new version of Fortune that was not quite the one who had sat down to play. She was dizzied by it and she knew that she would need some downtime to process it all. Amidst the cheers of her fellow players, she reclaimed the memory of her first exposure to pears, was for a heartbeat that little girl daring the unfamiliar, and she said, “I think that’s it for me, for a while. I’m well past turning in.”

It was not quite as simple as that, of course, as among the information she no longer possessed was her room number, and so she had to stop by the concierge to find that out. But she got the information that she was in 9733, got the spare key that would admit her, and headed on up.

The elevator was unfortunate. It was one of the kind with mirrored walls and ceiling, as well as floor, and so she faced an infinite series of versions of herself, extending to the end of the universe in all direction. The silvery beaded gown had gotten a bit shabby, all right. Some of the artful almond-shaped windows had become outright tears, and there were places where it showed the strain of a body that could no longer be easily forced into it. Her makeup showed the signs of desperation. She gazed at the bags under her eyes, and her crow’s feet, and the gray hair that had become loose and unkempt and places, and she reflected that she did not remember growing old.

No, that was not quite accurate, not at all.

She did not remember what it had been like to be Fortune, and to grow old. After her winnings, she had fragments of the memories of any number of other people, reflecting on their own decaying belly. She remembered being a man gazing down at the curve of his own pendulous belly, thinking that he really had to make a greater effort to lose some weight, or he might never see his own penis again. She remembered being a woman of a certain age, at the moment she found out that her husband had found somebody new, and thinking that this never would have happened if she still had her beauty. She remembered the epiphany, from any number of men and women, that they once would have taken the current flight of stairs at a run, and not at the pained trudge that time had left them with. But she did not remember it happening to her. She could only wonder how long she had been here.

On the four hundredth floor, the bell dinged. The door opened and a man entered; an extraordinarily fat man, of the sort so weighty that it was wonder he was ambulatory at all. He looked prosperous, though, his massive bulk crammed into a shiny new suit, tailored to his bulk. He grunted as he entered, and at the moment they made eye contact, she saw that he had a port-wine stain, the size of a quarter, over his right eye.

She did not know him at all.

But his eyes sparkled with recognition. “Fortune! So there you are!”

And she recoiled—

Third Card

It was before or afterward, the same day or another.

Fortune was dining with a young man at one of the casino’s fancier establishments, on a balcony some seven hundred feet over the casino floor. She was radiant, clad in a ridiculously impractical arrangement of onyx feathers that only somebody foolish or wealthy would ever attempt, let alone someone wealthy enough to be foolish, which was her current condition. She had gone to one of the clothing emporiums and issued just this to the harried, faceless thing behind the counter: I want to be impractical. Her dining companion was colored gold and dressed in a loincloth. His name was Aura and it was a given that later, he would do anything she asked of him, at whatever length she asked it of him. It was one of the casino’s many services to its high rollers. But he was remarkably good at conversation too, filling the gaps with anecdotes that could not have come from his own life but had certainly come under this roof as the experiences of others, and for some time she had been listening with pleasant ennui, while she nibbled at the little winged delicacies that existed nowhere in any nature she knew.

Aura said, “Is there anything else you want me to tell you?”

She dropped the wispy-thin bones in the shallow plate set aside for that purpose, and said, “How about something horrible?”

He blinked. “Horrible?”

“You’ve been telling me about the women you’ve loved, the sights you’ve seen, the loving upbringing that made you, or at least the people you represent, the man you are today. How about telling me something horrible? I’m in the mood for something horrible, just this once.”

He placed his fingertips on the edge of the table, where his plate would have been had he been allowed to eat; but of course he owed too much to be allowed to dine, and so was kept alive by other means. His eyes were hungry. That was part of his appeal, of course. In a certain light, ravenous hunger looks like need of a more erotic sort, and it was therefore quite a delight to sit opposite him, nibbling on treats that once would have cost her a year’s earnings, and fantasize that what he really wanted was what he would later be obliged to do, run his hands over her flesh, and make love to her as if it was the very end of the world to him. Of course, once upon a time she would have been horrified at herself for finding pleasure in such a sadistic thing. But she had sold her conscience for a line of credit a long time ago, when things were more desperate, and she found herself running the risk of being reduced to a creature like him. It had given her the stake she’d needed to thrive since. She was one of the high-rollers, now; someone who could play for a lifetime, if she wanted; someone whose only memories were of the pleasures to be found in playing and in the distractions her winnings paid for when away from the table. Like this thing, like this boy. Aura.

And this was the arrangement that allowed her to demand that he think of something horrible, while sipping on a cocktail so divine that it made her feel, just a little bit, like God.

Then something disturbed her wait.

It was a stranger, a woman, a young woman, with waifish features and sleek black hair than formed a vertical slash to her waist; her lips painted an odd but becoming orange, her gown an incandescent thing that gave off its own light. She had a wobbly gait, in part because she was drunk and in part because she was wearing only one heel, so vertiginous compared to the height of her bare foot that she almost toppled sideways with every step she took. She was happy, showing teeth, and as she passed between the diners, her joy was so evident that she infected them with her cheer. Even Fortune, whose own happiness was an edifice, something that existed because she’d damn well put it there and would not allow it to be disturbed for any reason, felt a little happier, on her passage.

The young woman made her way to the waist-high balcony, peered over it, and beamed with the one thing none of the prosperous in all directions had, certainty.

She turned to address them.

“I don’t know who I am,” she said, simply. That smile never leaving her face.

And then she was gone.

The diners, arrayed in pairs or in singlets with companions who were not permitted to partake, nodded and returned to their meals. After a hesitation only slightly longer than theirs, Fortune did the same.

Then Aura said, “I have something—”

Fourth Card

It was before or afterward, the same day or another.

They had made it to their room in a kind of fever, barely dropping their bags before a wall-rattling embrace and a clumsy advance to the bed. They had made love twice, slept spooned, woken, ordered breakfast, eaten only half of that and made love again.

They did all this with the blackout curtains open, offering them a grand panoramic view of the glittering neonscape. Time did not seem to pass, which was not surprising, since they both knew that the sun never rose in this place. The concourse marked the seconds with the pulse of its neon, sufficient for their purposes, and with the lights turned low in the room, what illuminated the lovers instead of sun or stars was one diffuse burst of light after another, all garish, all shifting, like thunderstorms colored in crayon.

At one point, spent, Fortune and her man lay on their respective sides, studying one another with the fascination lovers have when still in the discovery phase of their time together. They each rested their heads on their hands and they watched the play of the shifting lights on each other’s skin; hers in outline, as her back was to the window, his more extensive, as she did not eclipse much.

Her man was lean and her man was beautiful, less a muscled Adonis than a streamlined Hermes, a figure of rangy limbs and elegant lines, the kind of man who, hunting in ancient times, might have been less likely to take down an antelope with a bow than to run it to exhaustion with his own tireless speed. She had only known him for days, but her breath already caught at the sight of him, her reserve already evaporated in the presence of him, her natural caution already scattered to the winds with his lightest suggestion. It was not that she had never felt this way before but that she had never felt this way, this much, this soon, and it took a genuine act of will to turn her thoughts from the here and now to the reminder that to follow him here, to this wholly mad place, she had simply abandoned the responsibilities of the everyday and taken off, leaving behind no word.

Her fingers twined his. “We’re not seeing much of this place, are we?”

“No,” he said, “we’re not,” as something resembling a blue starburst danced across his cheekbone and dissipated against his forehead. “We’ll go down sooner or later. Have some drinks. Play a little.”

“I’d rather keep on playing up here.”

“Oh, we’re not even close to done. We go down for an hour, maybe two, we’ll be more than ready to come right back up and start the next chapter, which I can tell you right now is going to be one for the books.”

She sighed, fell on her back, and—unable to keep the secretive smile from spreading across her lips—focused on the stars or star-shaped things dancing on the ceiling. He was immediately in hot pursuit, sliding across the coverlet to kiss her shoulder, right on one of her tattooed stars.

She said, “I guess we have to get up sometime. We’ve already tried the room service.”

He tilted his head. “There’s better eating here.”

“Smooth talker!”

With a laugh. “There are restaurants not on the room plan. And we can play.”

She said, “You can play. I’ve never spent more than forty dollars in a casino in my life.”

“This is not an ordinary casino. They don’t use money.”

“All the more reason. My memories belong to me. I’m not about to risk them on games I don’t know how to play. The whole idea scares the hell out of me. “

“You don’t have to play. I don’t even want to play all that much. Just a little bit.”

She rolled back on her side, there was a moment of adjustment, and they now faced each other from across a gulf of inches, eyes fixed on one another, half in challenge, half in acceptance. They fell into a silence that lasted long minutes, one that amounted to a conversation of a different kind: one that for a time seemed poised to further delay their departure for the gaming floor.

After a while, he rolled over on his back, and, addressing the ceiling, said, “It’s not so much what you can lose. It’s what you can win.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the kind of memories that you were never going to have anyway, because of the kind of person you are, the kind of experiences you never would have sought out, if it was only up to you. The last time I was here, I won some memories that must have been lost from one the bands that play in the big hall. I don’t know shit about music, that kind of music anyway, and I didn’t recognize the act. But I was right there, playing lead guitar, with, like, tens of thousands of people there, and these whirling circles of light catching what looked like a whole churning ocean of people, all cheering me as I went into a solo, and those sounds were, like, coming out of me. It was, I don’t know, for just a second there, what it must be like to be God. What I bet to win that? This time as a kid when I was climbing out of a swimming pool, slipped on the wet concrete, and split my knee open. Wouldn’t you prefer to have fewer of those, compared to what you could have?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “It seems like an awfully slippery slope. What if you found yourself losing, and the only thing you had left to bet was your time with me?”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” He kissed her. “I’m never going to gamble that away. Not one minute. Not one second.”

“You never know, babe. Let’s build up your bank a little. Give you a little more to play with.”

And so it ended up being a little while before they left the room and descended to the playing floor—

Fifth Card

It was before or afterward, the same day or another.

Her stiletto heel snapped. Her knee buckled, and she almost went down to the ground, right there in the filth of the alley, with the rats and the garbage reduced to undifferentiated mush by rain; but her forward momentum just barely kept her upright, transforming what might have been a disastrous face-plant into careening forward momentum. She lurched a half dozen steps before catching herself, and for one long comic moment stood there, swaying, afraid of encountering broken glass, or worse, in the impenetrable darkness further in.

Then the shouts of the men at the mouth of the alley decided her. She had been making a desperate break for the vanished life she had come to think of, and mythologize, as the real world; one that she only still possessed in scattered bits and pieces, but which nevertheless still felt to her like the home she had lost, that would fix everything if she could only get back there. Just up and leaving for it had been an option, once, but her losses had become unmanageable and she’d had to borrow, repeatedly and at onerous rates, just to keep her head above water. What she owed in memory debt now was more than any living human being could pay. She owed the equivalent of libraries, had indentured her services to bad people just to have something in her head that wasn’t entirely fog, and was now so far behind that she would only be free again if she ran too far for them to ever catch up: hence that basically incomprehensible abstraction the real world, a place where their kind held no sway. She had run. And she had almost made it, getting only as far as these outlying streets before seeing them, a band of them, gathered on the road ahead.

The alley held nothing of promise but was a better option than letting those bastards drag her back.

So she tossed the broken shoe and, since it was useless without its mate, the good one, and she took the wet and sticky pavement with the bare soles of her feet, and another ten steps further in among the garbage smells and the nasty skittering sounds and all it cost her to remain silent as the uncertainties multiplied, she also reached into her forehead and pulled out one or two little fragments of her past or the past of others, to provide distraction and possibly slow them again. What she could spare, now, was nothing good—as anything valuable that ended up in her head, these days, always had to be turned in to those she owed. What she dropped, stumbling through the darkness, was still casino tender, but the lowest value of any cards.

She is old and broken, trapped for hours at the bottom of her apartment building stairwell, in agony from any move she makes, waiting for someone to find her and call an ambulance

He is young and at the top of the stairs, his little hands clutching the rails like prison bars as he gazes down at the living room sofa where his mother and father fire up their pipes, and he has not been fed all day and he knows that there’s some bread in the refrigerator and he can go and get some if he can just wait for them to fall asleep

Not sure whether this comes from a man or woman, but whoever it is lies belly-down in muddy earth while a crowd of hooting others kick him or her in the ribs

Bits. Pieces.

Fortune doesn’t eject anything that belongs to her, the her that was and not the patchwork she’s become, because she wants to hold on to any experiences that actually seem to come from her, and so she hesitates when the next one to emerge from her forehead, tangled up with her fingers by strands of dreamstuff, is an inconsequential fragment of a moment’s kindness shown a bereft fat man at one of the casino’s many bars: a reminder that once, when she was already on the way down but still had more of herself than she does now, she could still afford to throw away some of what cluttered her skull, as charity. It could not have been all that long ago, really, since the version of Fortune making her way to the fence at the rear of the alley, a fence she can barely make out only because of the fragmentary glittering starlight against the chain-link, is not much older than the version of herself who allowed the old man to think he was the one buying her a drink. Judging from the last time she’d looked in the mirror before making her run for it, and from nothing else—because time had a way of losing all definition when you’ve given up so much of what fills it—that could not have been more than a year ago, maybe two; maybe as little as a month. She hoped not. But she’d seen it happen to others. When luck turns, it turns fast.

She reached the chain-link and started to climb, not planning beyond this obstacle, putting aside whatever trouble would come once she got to the other side. Her nails were long and glossy-red and one snapped against the wire as she pulled herself up, terrified now because escape, even temporary escape, was so close. A flashlight beam swept against the side of her face and she heard voices behind her say,

“There she is!”

“Come on, Fortune, you’re smarter than this!”

“We should have let you remember what happened last time!”

And she did not know why, but that last voice terrified her most of all, not because she could place a name or assign a face but because she knew the attitude, knew that it had faced her down before, told her in precise mathematical terms what she owed and what she would have to do to pay it back. It won’t be hooking, the voice said. We don’t make our profit that way. And she did not remember what he had next told her, what she had been doing for the casino ever since, that was so much worse than any other price that could have demanded of her mind or her body; she only knew that she would not do it again, that she would die rather than do it again. And she pulled herself over the top of the chain-link, hearing the footfalls hurrying behind her and knowing that this was going to be close, that only an eyeblink would define the difference between what unknown chances existed on the other side, and a cold hand seizing her by the ankle and dragging her back down.

The real world, whatever it was, beckoned.

The memory is hers. She has never wagered it. It is the sound of her own voice saying, “Okay, we’ll play a few hands. But just for a little bit. I want to go back to the room.”

Fingers brushed her ankle, but failed to find purchase or that more insidious thing, ownership, as she catapulted herself to freedom, and fell.

Free! Free! They’ll never get me again!

And she got up and ran—

Final Card

What she remembered now could have taken place on this day, or another.

She slept only as much as she had to to keep her body going. It was three hours, maybe four: not enough to dream, or at the very least not to have any dreams she could remember. This was not a problem for her. Dreams were pocket change, and the precise time she spent with them had no relevance to what life she had left. She always went to bed with the world out the window as black as a shroud and always woke with it the same color, not one more inch of it visible to her senses. It might as well not exist, and she suspected it did not. Either way, the dreamless interlude was enough to dispel the fog a bit: not all of it, certainly, because some of it was not exhaustion but emptiness. But enough that she could muster the energy she needed to shower, to dust her breasts with powder and her cheeks with glitter, and then to don the low-cut, form-fitting red dress she found hanging in her closet.

My name is Fortune, she reminded herself, and then she thought: Is it really?

She remembered being squat and fat, with bulbous cheeks as pockmarked as a moonscape. She remembered a body towering and willowy, a stick, really, stumbling through life with the awkwardness known only to those who don’t quite fit. She remembered making love to women and men as both women and men, she remembered being hideous and she remembered being dazzling. Herself was not an abstraction she recognized. But she was willing to believe that the name of this person was Fortune, or rather that the name currently lingering in her forebrain was Fortune.

She left her room knowing that in either event it might not be Fortune when she returned. It could be Alice or it could be Keisha or it could be Yoko and it could be no name at all, just a vestigial sense of self. Right now, it was enough for the name to be Fortune.

She went to the elevator and took the express one thousand levels down to the gaming floor, where amidst the dozen games she could have joined and a dozen others she wanted to join, any number of places where the opportunity for a big win beckoned, but now it turned out that her body was protesting at having been roused from bed after so little in the way of rest, and so a drink became necessary.

That may have been just a few minutes ago and it may have been some other day. There was no telling. But here she was, sitting at the corner of the bar, thinking of nothing in particular, and aware that she had been thinking of nothing in particular for quite some time. The ellipsis between her departure from the room and her current restored awareness was a void that could have been of any volume, including entire lives she had not lived. That is one feature of casinos, after all. They are designed to make you lose all track of time, and sometimes of yourself.

There was a man sitting just around the bend: one who seemed to know her. He was a fat man, prosperous, clad in a suit that had the look of something worn for the very first time this very day, and he was clearly somebody who’d been winning.

“Evening,” she said.

“Is it?” he asked. “I’ve lost all track of time.”

She spoke her next words only because they came bubbling up through the fog, from the neglected places where we keep all the things that are not quite prominent enough for memory. “If that’s all you’ve lost, then you’re ahead of the house. May I buy you a drink?”

He cocked his head in consideration, and for what might or might not have been the first time she spotted the port-wine stain on his forehead. “That’s very generous of you, young lady. But just a coffee. I have a game to get back to and I need to keep my wits about me.”

The waitress went to him, and for a fraction of a second Fortune thought she spotted something off about their interaction, something about the napkin she had placed by his hands. He looked up, glanced at Fortune, and made some kind of decision; one that ended with the delivery of his coffee and the exchange of names.

And later, after he left, she was still sitting there.

It could have happened on this day, or another.

• • • •

If the shuffle’s been thorough, the next hand is random. The cards emerge as bequeathed by chance, either with some splendid combination that guarantees a win, or more often with no synchronicity whatsoever, a collection of images that means nothing and therefore functions as a loss. All wins are temporary, and all losses more than you can afford.

But if you’re at the tables, you play.

Shuffle, and winning or losing depends entirely on the order in which they fall.

©2020 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

EXCERPT: A Queen in Hiding (Tor Books)

Sarah Kozloff | 4431 words

Debut author Sarah Kozloff offers a breathtaking and cinematic epic fantasy of a ruler coming of age in A Queen in Hiding, and all four books will be published within a month of each other, so you can binge your favorite new fantasy series.

Orphaned, exiled and hunted, Cérulia, Princess of Weirandale, must master the magic that is her birthright, become a ruthless guerilla fighter, and transform into the queen she is destined to be.

But to do it she must win the favor of the spirits who play in mortal affairs, assemble an unlikely group of rebels, and wrest the throne from a corrupt aristocracy whose rot has spread throughout her kingdom.

Coming January 21, 2020 from Tor Books.

Cascada, the Capital of Weirandale

The four catamounts stalk the Throne Room, their black-tipped tails scribbling unease in the stuffy air. They linger near the Dedication Fountain, lapping the water that spills down to the pool.

Catamounts have guarded the throne for centuries.

These beasts pay little attention to the guards who check the room or the women who periodically sweep the floor. If the maid is sobbing over a slap or a kick, they do not care. They do not attend to the night shrieks of prisoners in the cells, and though they can’t hear the children’s hungry fretfulness in the city below the palace, in any event the catamounts would ignore their plight. People in general hold no interest to these mountain lions: they live solely for their devotion to the queens of Weirandale.

But no queen has occupied the Nargis Throne for more than a dozen years, not since Queen Cressa the Enchanter’s terror-driven flight. Now the only thing the cats can do is sniff anyone who dares to enter the Throne Room, seeking a familiar scent. Their menace holds off any usurper foolish enough to attempt a coronation at the Dedication Fountain.

Sometimes the catamounts rub against the throne’s arm or leg. Sometimes they dash through the room, their tawny coats sliding over heavy muscles, chasing a beam of light or a speck of dust. On occasion they roar to relieve their boredom and frustration. But no queen appears to take her rightful place.

The chair sits empty. Locked tight, the Throne Room shouts only stillness and quiet. The catamounts wait, their yellow eyes gleaming, lashing their tails.

Part One

Reign of Queen Cressa, Year 8
Early Winter
Chapter One

Cascada

“Have you noticed anything different or unusual about the princella since our last conference?” asked Chronicler Sewel.

“Not really,” Queen Cressa had to admit, with a sidelong glance at her daughter, perched—with a sullen mouth—on the chair beside her in the chronicler’s private office. His desk, bookshelves, and stiff-backed chairs made the modest room cramped, or perhaps the queen’s physical discomfort arose from the subject at hand. This was the fourth time she had brought Princella Cerúlia for her Definition, and again the visit boded to be a failure.

“She hasn’t shown extraordinary perception or navigational ability or skill at archery?”

“No,” Cerúlia spoke for herself. “I haven’t.”

Sewel nodded. His quill scratched against a piece of paper, his hand shielding his words.

“Princella, do you know what I’ve written?”

“Now, how could I know that?” she answered, the front of her shoe just reaching the floor, which allowed her to scuff her toes.

“How would we recognize, Sewel, if she manifested as a puppeteer?” asked the queen.

“That’s easy enough. Princella, use your mind to make me clap my hands.”

Sewel’s hands didn’t move. Cerúlia made a sound of disgust.

“What about a far-viewer?” Queen Cressa suggested. “Cerúlia, can you see your father?”

“Mamma, I would have told you if I could.” Although she didn’t move her feet, her mother heard the tiny snort through her nose and saw the way her upper lashes slammed against her lower.

“Indeed,” said Sewel, rubbing his sparse goatee. “I imagine that you’ve become acutely aware of past queens’ Talents.”

“Grand-mamma was Defined at four summers, and Mamma at six, and here I am at eight, and I can’t do anything.”

“I highly doubt, my princella, that after having endowed all the queens of Weirandale with a special Talent, Nargis would abruptly discontinue the practice with you.” Sewel gestured toward the indicia of Nargis in the room: a waist-high, white marble column that broadened at the top into a bowl shape. Water continually overflowed the bowl, falling into a ribbonlike trough that circled back down around the base. “We must just not have recognized your ability.”

Cressa found Sewel’s surety comforting. “We keep expecting that you will be an Enchanter like me,” she said. “We may be overlooking something obvious or something rare.”

“Mamma, can’t you use your Enchanter’s Talent to figure it out?” Cerúlia asked. Her face looked drawn in the pale light of a winter morning.

“I wish I could. My own Talent is so limited.”

“If you’d read more in The Queens’ Chronicles, Your Majesty, you would realize that all Talents grow over time. They typically start quite limited, and then as the queen matures and faces challenges, she discovers that her Talent spreads into adjacent areas. Nargis does not want to overwhelm her queens with Powers they are not yet ready to wield.” Sewel’s gaze grew distant and he rubbed his chin again. “Though no Talent is limitless. Each queen inevitably discovers blockages and exclusions. I’ve often wondered if Nargis places these there with some kind of design. . . .”

“Yes, yes. I know I must make the time to look at the books on other Enchanters,” the queen acknowledged with a touch of frustration. “At any rate, I take it we can make no further progress today toward Defining the princella?”

“Princella,” Sewel addressed her directly and leaned forward, “is there anything you can do that other people can’t?”

“Last time I told you I like to make up stories—but lots of people can do that. And nothing happens when I tell tales; I mean, the giants don’t become real or anything like that.”

Sewel nodded.

“She’s got a good ear for music,” said Cressa “But, we discussed this last year and I’ve paid close attention ever since; music may be a comfort in her life, but not a magical Talent.”

“I can talk to my horse?” Cerúlia offered, hesitantly.

Sewel leaned back, his head—because he was so slight of stature—not even reaching the top of the chair back. A smile reached his gray eyes. “Ah, that childish fancy.”

“It’s not a ‘childish fancy,’” said Cerúlia, with an extra swing of her foot.

“Oh, I didn’t mean on the part of Your Highness; I was referring to my own fancy, when I was young, that I could talk to my pony.” Sewel’s neat-featured face lost its habitual shrewd expression. “I used to whisper in his ears by the hour and imagine he understood me. I think such a belief is quite common among children.”

“And he talks back to me,” Cerúlia said.

“Out loud?” asked the chronicler, sitting up straighter.

“No. In my head.”

“Does he speak the Common Tongue?”

“No, not really,” her daughter faltered a little. “He just . . . well, thinks at me.”

“Hm-mm,” Sewel shook his head. “My pony conveyed that he wanted a treat, or he wanted his neck scratched. Animals are remarkably good at communicating their desires non-verbally, aren’t they?” The royal chronicler brightened. “But this may show that you are on the way toward developing a branch of Intuition—which is a subset of Enchantment. Your Majesties, I’d suggest you stay alert for any more definitive manifestation. In the meantime, I will do a little research.” He waved his hand at the arched doorway behind his desk that led from his office into the Royal Library.

“Very well, Sewel.” Cressa rose, Cerúlia followed suit, and Sewel jumped to his feet. “Cerúlia, run along to your lesson chamber—Tutor Ryton will be waiting.”

Once her daughter had left them alone, the queen, standing with her hands on her chair back, addressed her chronicler. “Sewel, tell me, should I be worried? Has this ever happened before?”

“We must have faith. The Waters flow on the path they choose,” he replied. However, under her continued intense gaze, he withered. “Ah, no. Not to my knowledge. Usually a princella’s Talent is marked by five, or six at the latest.”

“And after the chronicler Defines her,” said Cressa, “he hoists the Queen’s Flag, so that everyone knows that Nargis has again blessed the line with some extraordinary power as a mark of the Spirit’s favor. That the whole palace marks us visiting you and yet the flag is never raised—this is becoming hard for Cerúlia.” She meant to excuse her daughter’s pouts; she didn’t add that the uncertainty also undercut her own rule; Sewel would understand this.

Sewel made a helpless, baffled shrug. “As you said, Your Majesty, we must be overlooking something obvious or something rare. Nargis grants the Talents, but it is up to us to recognize them, and then it is up to you royals to learn how to wield them.”

Chapter Two

Two days after her humiliating visit to the chronicler’s office, Cerúlia looked up from her work to gaze at the reflections from Pearl Pond that skittered about on the ceiling. The small lake on the side of the palace had no pearls in it; it just reflected the building’s white stone.

Tutor Ryton coughed deliberately. She shot him a grin and he responded by raising his eyebrows at her. Instead of picking up her quill, Cerúlia crossed to the window and surveyed the scudding clouds.

“Princella!” reprimanded Tutor Ryton.

“I want to see if it’s still fine out, ’cause we talked about going out later.” Really, she wanted to see if the blue bird perched anywhere in view, but she caught no sight of it.

“Princella, please return to your task.”

Cerúlia sighed dramatically and turned away from the window. She stopped to pet her little greyhound, Zizi, who was toasting herself in a tight circle front of the fire.

Zizi, do you hear me?

Getting no response, she crossed to the large desk, where Ryton traced another map for her to work on.

“How far do you think I can tip this inkwell before it spills?” she asked, reaching across his work to the filigreed brass pot.

Ryton merely cocked an eyebrow.

Cerúlia tipped it once slightly, then again more vigorously. The third time she cried, “Oops!”

Ryton sprang to his feet to get away from the liquid—but the inkwell still stood upright in her little fingers.

Cerúlia giggled at Ryton’s jump, but her tutor just shook his head with a sorrowful expression. She decided he looked somewhat like a hound, what with his sad round eyes, long nose, and big ears.

“You’re no fun,” she said. Teasing him never made him laugh; it just made him sad. Reluctantly, Cerúlia returned to her stool and began writing in names of the capitals of the duchies on the blank map of Weirandale on her own table. She’d filled in three more when she heard her mother’s quick footsteps approaching down the tiled hall toward her lesson chamber.

Most days, her mother or nursemaid would look in on her—especially since Tutor Ryton had mentioned the princella occasionally behaved impudently with him.

“Your Majesty,” said her tutor, bowing, as her mother walked in.

“How does our pupil today?” asked Mamma, coming to stand behind Cerúlia, with a hand resting on her shoulder.

“She’s been applying herself well enough, Your Majesty,” he answered, though he lifted his brows a bit at Cerúlia again.

“See, I’ve filled in all the Western Duchies—I’ve only got the Eastern ones left.”

Her mother stroked her hair. “After you write in all their names, Tutor Ryton will tell you about the major crops in each. Don’t you think that would be wise, Tutor?”

“Very wise,” he replied.

“But Mamma, I was almost done with this! Why’d you have to make it harder?”

“Hush, Cerúlia, you will study as Ryton and I see fit: you’ll need to know so many, many things someday.”

A knock on the door, and then a guard allowed Tiklok, mother’s favorite messenger, to burst in.

“Beg pardon, Your Majesty,” he said as he bowed.

Her mamma took the fat envelope Tiklok offered on silver tray. She always treated him gently, even if he did have that awful hole in his cheek and whenever he spoke he made an odd noise that sounded half huffing and half whistling.

Cerúlia ran to Tiklok to play their “Giant-Go-A-Walking” game: he held out his hands while she stood on his large boots. She balanced on his feet as he took long steps. It took him only five strides to cover the whole length of the room.

“Faster,” ordered Cerúlia while her mother pulled out several pages of thick vellum. But she found that the game was not as much fun as when she was little, before she was the only “Undefined” princella in the whole history of the realm. And her mamma looked stricken.

“Mamma. What’s wrong?”

“Hm-mm?” said Mamma, scanning several pages ahead. She turned to Tiklok. “You must find Councilor Belcazar and tell him to meet me in my closet.

“I must attend to this matter,” she continued. “Ryton, I’ve changed my mind. Instead of working on the duchies, have our girl look at larger maps. Teach her to identify the Great Powers and their major cities.”

Her mother swished out, leaving only an overlooked token of her presence, like when the blue bird dropped a feather. Cerúlia picked up the discarded envelope. The sealing wax shone red, and when she folded the flap back in place, she made out an imprint showing many jagged shapes.

“What’s this, Tutor?”

“That’s the signet of Oromondo. Those symbolize the eight flames of their Magi.”

“Flames?” asked Cerúlia.

“Yes, in Oromondo they worship Fire.”

“Not the Waters of Life?”

Ryton shook his head; he was preoccupied with pulling out a giant scroll and laying it out on the big easel table with weights to hold down the corners.

“Come here, Princella; we will study Queen Catreena’s map of the Great Powers,” he said, moving a stool so she could stand on it. “I will show you where your father’s ships are now.”

“Will you show me this country, with the red flames?”

“Of course,” he said, patting the stool.

She didn’t like the way this letter had troubled her mother. “I’m coming,” she said, still staring at the red wax.

“Prin-cel-la.”

On her way she detoured to throw the envelope into the fire. “There,” she said, with satisfaction. “That’s the end of them.”

The fire flamed up so intensely around the envelope that it almost caught the hem of her skirt as she turned away.

Chapter Three

“You sent for me, Your Majesty?”

“I did, Belcazar. Close the door behind you.” Cressa didn’t want any of her overly curious retinue listening in on their conversation.

Belcazar complied and took a chair at the table across from the queen. He was a husky man, pockmarked, with hair crimped into tight curls, light brown but streaked with amber when hit by the light. Now in his fifties, he moved carefully, thought deliberately, and talked precisely, so that consulting him often drove Cressa to distraction. But she had learned to value his analysis. His family held a midsized estate in Vittorine, and years ago he had traveled to Cascada to entreat Queen Catreena to adopt a more equitable tax formula on landowners large and small. This formula impressed her mother because it quelled many irritating complaints. Later she asked him to come up with a solution for clogged drainage ditches; the lattice screens he designed were still in use all around Weirandale.

Queen Catreena had appointed him to her Circle Council twelve years ago. Cressa had asked him to continue serving; indeed, out of all her councilors, she trusted him the most.

“I received this—this missive. I would like your opinion on it.”

Belcazar nodded and without fuss began to read the long document she placed before him.

His gray eyes paused over every word so Cressa sat alone with her thoughts. She wished she could ask her mother’s opinion. “Catreena the Strategist,” the people now called her. Her Talent had become blazingly obvious early on when as a toddler she bested all adults in Oblongs and Squares.

Cressa judged her own Talent a paltry weapon for the present circumstances. At the comparatively late age of six summers her mother had taken her to Rowatag, the former royal chronicler, for her own Definition. Her mother had told him, “The princella is able to change people’s memories.”

The ancient functionary had tested this assertion: he had called in a young assistant, asking him to fetch a certain herb they all saw from the window. When he returned, Cressa had been asked to erase the assistant’s memory of his errand. She had climbed down off her chair and touched his dry, ink-stained hand. When questioned, the man vehemently denied that he had left his work desk all morning; showing him the stalks of chives and the mud on his boots did not bring back his recall.

How well Cressa remembered that later that afternoon, her mother had taken her outside to see that the Queen’s Flag—silver droplets falling into a silver river, on a backing of blue silk—had been hoisted onto the top of the palace and had rippled in the wind! Some Talents were publicly announced; others (especially related to Enchantment) were kept private to increase a queen’s opportunities to learn to wield them. But at least everyone knew that Nargis had graced Cressa with her favor.

Rowatag explained that Cressa’s Talent was a variety of Enchantment. He had spoken at length about other queens in Weirandale’s past who were also Enchanters, though their specific abilities varied. One had been a memory enhancer; she could make people remember in minute detail events they had forgotten. Another was a compeller; she could force people to act against their will. Still another queen could read people’s thoughts. Often, over time, Enchanters developed several ways of affecting peoples’ minds and memories.

Cressa grasped how compelling would be useful: she would just compel the Oromondians to do as she bid. Though she always needed to be touching her subject—would she have to touch all the citizens of Oromondo?

But “making people forget” had not as yet proven particularly useful. As a child she had sometimes made Nana forget that she had already had her candied fruit and she would get another one. Thus far, she had had few real occasions to practice her Talent for something of consequence.

Belcazar had only turned over half the pages. Cressa stood and paced around her comfortably appointed private audience chamber, her closet, with its deep blue rug and white velvet wall hangings.

Plink.

The water feature in this room, named the Weeping Swan, was a glass and gold bowl, above which rose an enameled swan’s neck and head. The beak dropped one drop of Nargis Water at a time; usually Cressa no longer registered the sound of the droplets.

Her mother had been the Strategist; always looking five steps ahead, calculating what would happen before her every move. Catreena had married the widowed King Nithanil of Lortherrod because she deduced that someday an alliance with Lortherrod would be of utmost importance to Weirandale.

Plink.

Ironically, the only thing Catreena had not seen in advance was that she herself would die in her prime. Caprice struck with random cruelty, heedless of the harm it wreaked. Catreena’s horse had stepped in a gopher hole and thrown her. She broke her neck and died instantaneously, a look of surprise frozen on her face. Cressa was only twenty-three summers; she had been five moons into her pregnancy with Cerúlia. She had not felt ready to assume the throne: she had wanted some years of private life. She did not feel ready now for this challenge.

Plink.

Finally, Belcazar deliberately straightened all the pages, then straightened them again and moved them to the side. He drummed his fingers on the table, one at a time. The queen stifled her urge to scream at him and sat down on the opposite side of the glossy, mahogany table.

“Troubling,” he said.

“I realize.”

“This was . . . hand-delivered this . . . morning?”

“Yes.”

“Did the servant see who brought it? Did Envoy Thum come himself?”

“I don’t know. Why does that matter?”

“Well,” said Belcazar thoughtfully, “perchance it doesn’t. But we have received other communiqués from Thum and this . . . doesn’t convey the same tone.”

Plink.

“What do you mean?”

“Thum shows belligerence and . . .”

“—aggression. Like all Oros.” Cressa often found it impossible not to fill in Belcazar’s pauses, though doing so never sped up his delivery.

He nodded. “Oromondo has been a militaristic realm forever and a day. It respects discipline above all.”

“This is not surprising,” said Cressa. “Their country is volcanic, and the populace must be taught to heed warnings of eruptions. And they rely on mining, a venture that requires strength and fearlessness.”

Belcazar nodded slowly, looking at his fingernails as if the answers to all the world’s troubles were written in their ridges.

Plink.

He continued, “But in past years we have always been able to treat with Thum. Oh, he’ll evoke the great divinity of their Eight Magi and . . . chastise us for being nonbelievers, but that rhetoric merely covered his true goal. Since the War of the Priests we have traded amicably.”

Belcazar took out his handkerchief, blew his nose, and deliberately put the kerchief back in his sleeve.

Plink.

Cressa massaged her forehead with her fingertips in impatience.

“We suspect Oromondo has been paying the Pellish pirate fleet to raid for foodstuffs, but we have found no proof. But here”—Belcazar pointed to a passage—“and here, and here, the religious zeal rings so fervent.” He read aloud:

Ye have offended the Magi and pure Oromondians with thy putrid heathen practices. Weakling scum of the earth, reeking with corruption, soiled with thy guilt, worshippers of water, idolaters of a line of witch bastards, rats puffed up with trifling vanities and unclean luxuries—the Magi will tolerate thy meddling NO LONGER.

“I skipped over those flourishes,” she said. “I think the crux of the matter lies in the rice shipments—the rice they claim was poisoned, the rice they say caused stillbirths and drove cows mad.”

Plink.

“The rice wasn’t poisoned,” said Belcazar.

“Could someone, somehow have tampered with it?”

Belcazar rubbed between his brows with a forefinger, and Cressa again became conscious of the drip of the water drops.

Plink.

“Consider, Your Majesty, how much poison it would take to taint four full holds of grain. And mix it through? Hardly probable. And to what end?” More finger drumming. “Nevertheless, before the full Circle meets, let’s inquire if any of the shipmasters rest in port. And question the grain merchant.”

“The Circle meets after noonday so I will send the messages now.” Cressa went to the door and spoke to her servants.

“I hardly think,” she said, as she turned back to Belcazar, “that Thum, or anyone, would simply invent the notion of women losing their babes.”

“But one does not feed rice to milk cows,” he countered.

“They might if they had no other grain. Look you, what do we know about Oromondo? For some years it has groaned under mysterious blights and suffered a food shortage. That is why they trade for foodstuffs. Didn’t Tenny tell us that the Oros have numerous procurement contracts with the Free States?”

“True,” replied Belcazar. A long pause while each finger struck the wood. “These blights. These illnesses, no one knows their cause.”

“But why blame us?”

Plink.

Belcazar repeated drumming each finger on the table. “Why do villagers turn on their neighbors . . . when misfortune strikes? People need answers, and they will blame whomever they suspect wishes them ill. Someone . . . paranoid . . . wrote this letter; someone bursting, exploding with religious zeal.”

“I don’t think it matters who dictated it. What matters is that Oromondo demands that I relinquish the throne, we return the gold and the jewels they sent, and we send eight more ships full of grain on tomorrow’s tide, or it will declare war on us.”

“Yes,” said he. “You’ve got the meat of it.” Then he went on to recite a passage from the book.

Thy streets will run with blood, thy Witch will meet justice, we will take what we are owed by the force of the Magi’s glorious Power.

“What shall we do?” Cressa’s face stiffened with anger.

“Hmm? Do? About what?”

“Any of it. All of it.”

Belcazar, whom she knew to be a peaceable, imperturbable man, for once answered quickly. “We prepare for war.”

Plink.

Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Kozloff. Excerpted from A Queen in Hiding by Sarah Kozloff. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Kozloff holds an endowed chair as a professor of film history at Vassar College. She worked in the film industry in both television and film before becoming a professor. A Queen in Hiding is her debut fantasy novel.

Book Reviews: January 2020

Chris Kluwe | 2122 words

Greetings, readers, and welcome to yet another installment of glorious wordgrubs looking to nestle in your squishy brain folds. Before I get to the reviews, though, I’d like to take a small moment to let you know that I wrote a book! It’s called Otaku, it’ll be out in March (published by Tor), and I am both excited and nervous beyond belief to share it with the world. I’ve been reading SFF ever since I was a kid, and to know that something I wrote will end up on a shelf next to all the titles I devoured growing up is an amazing feeling, one I honestly never expected to experience.

However, this is a column where I review books not written by me, so rather than talk your ears off for the next ten paragraphs about my awesome love/hate letter to gaming culture and societal ills, which would no doubt drive my editor into frothing madness, I’ll just finish up this intro with an observation that I truly believe—you have to love books if you want to write one.

You have to love the idea of sharing someone else’s perspective, of looking at the universe through different eyes, and whether you recognize familiar shapes or behold strange and terrible new vistas, the point is that for however long it happens to be, you’ve stepped outside your own head, and once you return, you’re never the same again. You have to love other voices, the way they shape and mold the structure of information, because those voices are the ones who help you find your own. Above all, you have to love the courage that drives someone to declare to an uncaring universe, “This is what I care about!”, because it gives you hope that you can do the same.

To be honest, that’s what I like most about doing these reviews—being able to highlight, however briefly, something that someone created from nothing, something a human being put effort and tears and exhaustion into with no guarantee that anyone else would notice or care about it, and say “I care about this, too.”

And so, without further ado, let’s get to some book reviews!

Race the Sands
Sarah Beth Durst
Trade Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-0062888617
Harper Voyager, April 2020, 544 pages

Those who are regular readers of this column will notice that the name “Sarah Beth Durst” has appeared here before, and for good reason—her Queens of Renthia series is fantastic, and I highly recommend you go check them out. Race The Sands, however, is an entirely new universe created by Durst, and where Renthia felt full of forest shadows and water, Becar is a land of blazing sun and stone, an old desert capitol built around an even older river. In Becar, rebirth is guaranteed, though what a person comes back as depends on their actions in their previous life. It might be a tortoise, or a termite, or even a human again, but the one thing all inhabitants wish to avoid returning as is a kehok—terrible monsters with no chance of redemption that only the darkest souls inhabit, doomed to forever wander the desert sands.

Naturally, the people of Becar decide to race kehoks as a national past-time, because Durst obviously understands the basic premise of humanity (which is to ask, “well, why shouldn’t I ride the vicious murderbeast?”) and the only way a kehok can break their endless cycle of damnation is for the human riding them to win the grand Becaran Races. Of course, riding a kehok takes a singular mastery of will, and failure usually means you get eaten, so only the determined or desperate need apply.

Race The Sands is told with Durst’s usual flair for deep emotional connections intermingled with people getting gnawed apart by ravenous mystical creatures, and the story moves along at a brisk pace, carefully interweaving the lives of multiple characters to present a full picture of Becaran society across all aspects, from disgraced kehok trainer to the emperor-in-waiting himself. Also as usual, Durst does a fantastic job of making the reader care about each and every character, while giving them the freedom to act in surprising, but universally human ways.

I really enjoyed reading this book, and am eagerly looking forward to introducing my daughters to it when they get a little bit older, because the area where Durst really excels is writing complex, strong, inspiring female characters who aren’t afraid to stand up for what they believe in. Overall, this is another excellent entry from an excellent author, and I hope she continues writing more books in the Becaran universe.

Read if: you like some karma in your fantasy; you’re not afraid of change; you would absolutely watch monster NASCAR on ESPN the Ocho.

Knight Of The Silver Circle
Duncan M. Hamilton
Hardcover / Trade Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1250306814
Tor, September 10 2019, 320 pages

The next book I have for you is Knight Of The Silver Circle, the second entry in the Dragonslayer trilogy, and you’ll want to read the first book before getting into this one (but that’s okay because the first book is pleasantly affable as well). In Knight Of The Silver Circle, we rejoin our protagonists, Guillot and Solene, as they try to make sense of a world where dragons have returned after vanishing for thousands of years, bringing with them the threat of indiscriminate terror. However, dragons aren’t the only thing Guillot and Solene have to worry about, as the ambitious Prince Bishop Amaury continues his relentless march to consolidate power and usher in a new age of magic, all for the good of the people, of course.

The fun thing about the Dragonslayer books is that they’re easy to read while still providing just enough uncertainty that you’re never quite sure how the protagonists are going to make it through their most recent mishap without everything going completely in the bucket. I would liken them to the beach-reading fantasy equivalent of a Dean Koontz or Tom Clancy novel, in that you know things will end up okay, but there’s plenty of space for events to go sideways in unexpected ways while you work your way toward the ending.

If there’s any complaint to be made, it’s that Hamilton is uneven in how he treats traumatic experiences—some are consigned to a quick disappearance off-screen while others are dealt with in well thought-out detail, but there’s no real rhyme or reason as to which one you’re going to get, even though all of them relate to main story beats. It feels as if Hamilton had certain scenes in mind where he knew the emotional cost of the events taking place, but others were filled in after the fact, though none are jarring enough to detract from the story as a whole.

That being said, it’s a minor quibble at best, as these books trend more toward the David Eddings spectrum of fantastical fantasy than the George R.R. Martin bloodbaths we’ve become accustomed to on HBO, though there are still enough court machinations and double-crosses to keep all but the most jaded reader captivated until the last page.

Read if: you like dragons; you enjoy swashbuckling Dumas adventures; you still have a core of gallantry peeking through a world-weary exterior.

Agency
William Gibson
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1101986936
Berkley, January 21 2020, 416 pages

For our final book, I have a real mindmelter, and it’s William Gibson’s latest: Agency. For those unfamiliar with Gibson’s work, he’s one of the seminal creators of what we now consider cyberpunk with his debut smash novel Neuromancer, but to regard him as just an ’80s author who predicted the Internet is to ignore all the other targets he’s set his sights on over the years. From the surveillance state alt-right cobwebs of his Blue Ant trilogy, to the steampunk stylings of The Difference Engine, to his most recent foray into the world of haptic technology and societal collapse in The Peripheral, Gibson has proven himself an adept connoisseur of the world right around the corner we don’t know is about to arrive.

Set in the same universe as The Peripheral, Agency doesn’t require you to have read Gibson’s second-most recent novel in order to understand everything that’s going on, but you really should in order to fully grasp certain key characters, as well as the technologies involved (plus it’s a William Gibson book; go read it, you heathen). Without spoiling things from The Peripheral, Agency follows a new cast of characters involved in the birth of a fully autonomous AI (artificial intelligence), and the choices they make in a world poised on the brink of disaster—one that even the most out-of-tune citizen will recognize as a direct parallel of our own, for better or worse.

For me, one of the things that makes Agency so unique and terrifying is that this is an author who has a proven track record that would put Nostradamus to shame, and now he’s diving deep into a subject I’m not sure enough people have considered seriously—the rise of an emergent AI, along with the cumulative effects of climate change and income inequality. In my mind, I know the jackpot is on its way (just look at the most recent UN report on climate change or talk to a federal risk assessor if you really want to know how screwed we are as a species), but in my heart I still hold out hope that we can find a way to avoid it; a hope shared not just by the current inhabitants of Agency’s branch, but those advising them from the disconnected future.

This book, like all of Gibson’s books, is the kind of story you read multiple times, over multiple stretches of time, and each time you approach it there will be something pertinent to your current state of being (though perhaps pertinent in a way you wish remained relegated to fiction). My only critique, and it’s a miniscule one, is that the writing style in Agency is slightly more opaque than previous novels, necessitating more measured/multiple approaches to fully grasp all the concepts contained within, especially when dealing with specific military/intelligence jargon, but when dealing with subjects as heady as AI and time travel and the particular stupidity contained within Silicon Valley, there likely don’t exist enough pages to fully encapsulate the ideas Gibson wants to explore.

At the end of the day, all I can tell you is that this is a book you should read, no matter how long it takes you to get through it, because, like Neuromancer, it’s a future I think we’re well on the way toward inhabiting. Some details might change between now and post-jackpot, but the numbers have already been drawn, and we’re holding the ticket. I just hope it’s Eunice we end up with.

Read if: you’re not afraid to know what’s coming; you have a bone-deep distrust of the klept; you’re not afraid to get kinetic when it comes time to protect what’s important.

• • • •

That’s it for this month’s reviews, hope you all have an excellent new year! Study your history, otherwise you get to repeat it in new and exciting ways!

Other New Books That I Thought Were Interesting But Did Not Have Space to Review:

Salvation Lost, Peter F. Hamilton

The Puzzler’s War, Eyal Kless

Carved from Stone and Dream, T. Frohock

Darkdawn, Jay Kristoff

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Media Review: January 2020

Carrie Vaughn | 1989 words

Terminator: Dark Fate
Directed by Tim Miller
Produced by Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Skydance Media
Released November 3, 2019

I only wanted to see Terminator: Dark Fate because Linda Hamilton is in it. The fourth film in the series, Terminator Salvation, was so execrably bad I bailed on the whole franchise. It took Hamilton to bring me back. Her Sarah Conner, that character’s transformation, is the beating heart and soul of the first two Terminator movies. Everything else has been noise.

In many ways Terminator: Dark Fate is a retelling of 1984’s Terminator. We meet a personable young woman who is just living her life. For mysterious reasons, a relentless hulk of a man pursues her with vicious, murderous intent, leaving a wake of destruction. Then, a savior appears to rescue her, and the two of them spend the rest of the movie on the run. We know this story.

This time, though, there’s a wrinkle: Toward the end of the first long, violent car chase and battle, a gray-haired, ripped woman with an array of high-powered weaponry shows up and kicks ass. History is paying us a visit. Warriors from both the future and past have arrived to protect Dani Ramos. Grace, the human protector from the future, demands of the older woman: “Who are you?” “I’m Sarah Conner,” she spits, as if she is tired of explaining it.

But Grace has never heard of Sarah Conner. She has never heard of John Conner. The names mean nothing to her. Ah-ha—this is how you continue a time travel story, yes. Sarah successfully changed the future. And made herself and her son irrelevant.

John Conner’s irrelevancy doesn’t keep him from being killed. As we’ve been told, many Terminators were sent back in time to target him. One of them finally succeeded some two decades earlier, after Judgment Day failed to happen and it didn’t matter anymore. This is very nearly the first scene in the movie, and watching CGI teenage Edward Furlong (who played John in Terminator 2) get decisively shot at point blank with a shotgun is incredibly shocking and also, somehow, unavoidable. We realize what was always true: The savior of humanity, John Conner, was never anything but a McGuffin.

Dark Fate is able to tell this story by pretending that the other three movies and TV series don’t exist. As a result, this movie confirms what the less-lauded sequels didn’t figure out: This story was never about John Conner. It was Sarah who decided to try to stop Judgment Day. It was always Sarah’s agency driving the story.

So why is the story playing out again? Unfortunately, a different Judgment Day happened: not SkyNet, but Legion, an anti-cyberwarfare measure that took control and destroyed civilization much the same way SkyNet did, and is now targeting its enemies in the past to protect itself. That path for humanity seems inevitable, and Sarah doesn’t seem at all surprised. Exhausted, yes.

Sarah has been getting anonymous text messages alerting her when and where new Terminators are set to appear. When Grace realizes that the originating coordinates of those mysterious texts match the coordinates her handlers tattooed on her chest, they decide to go ask for help. Difficulty: They need to stealthily cross the border between Mexico and Texas. The story decisions here are so topical. Our heroes are taken into custody, and the next big action set piece takes place at a border detention center. This is all seamlessly part of the story, but it’s also really pointed commentary. Dani, the savior of humanity, is Mexican. A sizable portion of her dialog is in Spanish. Heroes come from everywhere, they can be anyone. The film takes a stand, and it’s great.

Our heroes escape custody and reach the coordinates. They knock politely at the door, and that face, Sarah’s original nemesis, the old Terminator—Arnold Schwarzenegger himself—opens the door. Sarah’s reaction is reflexive, the same furious determination to kill she had in when encountering him in Terminator 2. Grace has to stop her so they can get the story. (I was skeptical, but Schwarzenegger has mellowed and seeing him reprise one of his best known roles, and weirdly discuss the finer points of choosing curtains for children’s bedrooms, was delightful.)

This version of the T-800 is the one who killed John twenty years earlier. And like Sarah, his reason for existing was suddenly gone. So he found a new one: He found a family to protect. (I like this additional callback to T2, the suggestion that something inherent in the programming of the T-800 can switch it to protection mode, as if the line between protector and destroyer is thin. Sarah has crossed back and forth over that line herself.) Left to his own devices, he grew a conscience. Raising a young boy, he comes to realize what Sarah’s life must have been like after John’s death. So, in practical machine thinking, he decides to give Sarah a purpose too: He’s been texting the locations of Terminator arrivals to her. And now he will leave his found family in order to help defeat the Rev-9, the spooky new version of the Terminator than can separate from its own skin for two-pronged attacks. The tradition of Terminator evolution is alive and well.

Dark Fate does what an addition to a thirty-five-year-old franchise ought to do: give us what we loved about the first films—great action, endearing heroes, the tension and terror of an enemy that kills up close and personal and cannot be stopped—while updating and commenting on its own legacy by incorporating thirty-five years of feminist thinking. 1984’s Terminator is already strikingly feminist—the damsel in distress takes charge and learns to look after herself. Dark Fate goes further, filling the screen with women who are all different and all have different takes on the situation. (That this was written by men who seem to Get It gives me hope that the world is getting better, at least in some ways.)

Sarah is sure that Dani is important because she will give birth to someone important. But no, Grace says: Dani is the future resistance leader. It’s Dani who will save humanity. Dani is important for herself. Grace will be her foster daughter—she has come to the past to save her own future. And Sarah seems poleaxed that she wasn’t able to think that broadly. It’s like third wave feminism shows up to tell second wave feminism to chill out and let fourth wave feminism do its thing. Also, Woke Dad will take bullets for you.

We come to understand that Sarah is also important for herself. She has transformed herself into the kind of hero that will serve as a role model for Dani. Sarah gets another chance to save the future, and Dani rises to the occasion because she knows it can be done, because it was done before. When Grace quotes: “No fate but what we make for ourselves,” Sarah is bemused. Where did Grace learn that? From Dani, who learned it from Sarah, in the future. It all comes around. At the end of the film, Dani hangs on a chain link fence watching children play, an echo of the same scene with Sarah in T2. But Dani is watching Grace as a child, knowing what is to come. Right after this, when Dani and Sarah drive off in a Jeep that looks just like the one Sarah drove off in at the end of the first film, I nearly cried. Such a luscious bit of fan service there.

Sarah Conner has one of the greatest character arcs in action cinema because it feels true. How did her adventure change her? We get to see the full extent of that trauma, which is something big action movies don’t usually give us. But we also see her decisive response to the trauma. The image we get of her in T2, the ripped woman at the edge of madness, doing pull-ups on her upturned bed frame because she knows how to use what she has on hand, was so startling, yet so believable, that it made T2 the gold standard of how action movie sequels ought to be. Show us consequences. Follow through on the story you promised.

The ’80s were much better at great women action heroes than we give them credit for. Ellen Ripley of the Alien franchise and Sarah Conner are icons, of course. But there’s also Officer Anne Lewis in Robocop, Regina and Samantha in Night of the Comet, Jill in Hardware, Valeria in Conan the Barbarian, Savannah Nix and Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and I could go on. By the early ’00s we lost that kind of hero in a wave of waif-fu magic girls and catsuit-wearing fetish objects. The Robocop reboot from a few years ago did away with Anne Lewis entirely.

What is so striking about most of these women action heroes from the ’80s (well, except maybe Valeria) is how normal they are. These are ordinary women who end up in extraordinary circumstances and then do what they need to to survive. At some point in the last thirty years, action movies decided that kick-ass women couldn’t be normal. They had to be sexy, to be over the top superpowered; they had to have terrible backstories told in flashback or unbelievable destinies. One of the things that makes Sarah Conner great, and we get to see this with Dani as well, is that when we first meet them they are so very, very mundane.

I’ll tell you a secret about badass characters. If we meet them when they’re already badass (I’m looking at you, Trinity), they can really only go in two directions. The story will either be about them becoming superpowered, or it will be about them losing power. Having their power taken away.

But start with someone ordinary and we get to watch them transform in ways that are astonishing, believable, and therefore relatable. I think this is why some of the most iconic heroes resonate so much. Ripley starts as middle-management who’s just trying to follow the rules. Luke Skywalker is a farmboy. Steve Rogers is this undersized kid from Brooklyn. Sarah Conner is a put-upon waitress. They’re ordinary. Just like us. It’s not how powerful they become that makes them great. It never was. It’s who they are and what they do in the face of hardship that makes them great. What the first Terminator film did so well, that is so important, this one does also: show us Dani’s normal life, so that we can see how far she travels.

I love that Terminator: Dark Fate reminds us of this. I love that it shows us the scars, both Grace’s literal scars from the cybernetic augmentations she received, and Sarah’s vast psychological scars. I love this entire wave of movies we’ve been getting, from Mad Max: Fury Road to Wonder Woman to this, that show us women who have fought, survived, and keep fighting.

That’s the real story that Terminator was always about. It was never about the savior of the future. It was always about the relentless villain that can’t be stopped—and the human heroes who are equally relentless and so much more fierce because they have so much worth fighting for.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn’s latest novels include the post-apocalyptic murder mystery, Bannerless, winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, and its sequel, The Wild Dead. She wrote the New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty, along with several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, and upwards of 80 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at carrievaughn.com.

Interview: Tochi Onyebuchi

Christian A. Coleman | 5935 words

Tochi Onyebuchi holds a BA from Yale, an MFA in screenwriting from Tisch, a master’s degree in global economic law from L’institut d’études politiques, and a JD from Columbia Law School. His writing has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and Ideomancer, among other places, and he is the author of the novels Beasts Made of Night and Crown of Thunder. Tochi resides in Connecticut.

On your website, you wrote that novels are your first love. (You never forget your first!) Tell us a little about why that is.

I’m drawn to scope. Expanse. Aesthetically, even before consideration of content, a thick spine will catch my eye faster than a thin one will. It really feels like I’m being offered a story I can live in, can lose myself in, even if I burn through those 700 pages in four days. Novels are how I fell in love with reading. Short stories were what we read in school, and novels were what I read for fun, and I think something of that dynamic—some primal part—has since been wired into my brain chemistry. Even the writing of short stories feels more like work than the jump-in-the-ballpit-ness of writing a full-length novel. Writing novels feels like I’m offering someone else the same promise of lengthy transport I myself seek when I’m reading.

So Riot Baby, your long-form adult fiction debut, is a novella written with a novel’s scope. You take us from South Central to Harlem to Rikers Island and to Watts as Ella and her brother Kev, who’s incarcerated at Rikers, discover and hone their superpowers. At the same time, they’re contending with the racism that’s defined and destroyed their childhoods. How did the premise come together for you?

In 2015, I was working on a novel—some postapocalyptic western—about a mother and her daughter, and in it was a novella-length interlude about the mother’s past as a child, then adolescent, then young woman living through and after that apocalypse. And I think that’s when the first Harlem scenes came to me. (I was living in Harlem at the time. Sugar Hill.) I believe Kev was there, too. But it was a story trapped within another. A conversation with a dear friend convinced me to break it out into its own story. This was in 2015, and another thing in the ether was videographic evidence of police violence, notably the proliferation of officer-involved killings of Black Americans. Much of the conversation surrounding these murders, and police brutality more broadly, centered “bad apples,” of course forgetting that the full saying is “a bad apple spoils the bunch.” We all knew the problem was systemic. That understanding and the attendant anger coalesced into this overwhelming lust for the whole system’s destruction. Not so much dismantling it as crushing it entirely, obliterating it in as crude and comprehensive a manner as possible. Now, going on Twitter and saying “No more cops” in your best Scarlet Witch voice is a quick way to get banned, so I figured: Let me make a character who gets to that place and who has the power I and so many others wished we had. Let’s literal-ize it. When I got to that place, I started to build the story out around Ella, who had her name from the very beginning, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Reading your novella, I couldn’t help but think of James Baldwin, specifically this quote of his: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you.” Was his work an influence on Riot Baby?

Very much so. In 2015, everybody was citing Baldwin, particularly that line. What’s funny is that I ended up researching that line for another project, and it comes in the context of a roundtable discussion about being an artist from a marginalized demographic and belonging to a community fighting oppression. Baldwin follows that quote with some words on the guilt that attends “Negro writers” who aren’t on the frontlines dismantling the ghettoes and marching and all that jazz, conceding at the end that there are others doing that work who are doing it much better than he could. While I don’t think he’s suggesting an abdication of responsibility, it did assuage some of the guilt that came from my spending my days behind a desk and not out in the streets.

But perhaps Baldwin’s greatest influence on my work, and on Riot Baby in particular, was his unblinking stare at what Kiese Laymon calls “the worst of white folks.”

Laymon writes:

The worst of white folks, I understood, wasn’t some gang of rabid white people in crisp pillowcases and shaved heads. The worst of white folks was a pathetic, powerful “it.” [. . .] The worst of white folks inherited disproportionate access to quality health care, food, wealth, fair trials, fair sentencing, college admittance, college graduations, promotions and second chances, yet still terrorized and shamed other Americans who lacked adequate access to healthy choices at all. White Americans were wholly responsible for the worst of white folks, though they would do all they could to make sure it never wholly defined them. (bit.ly/34ts6K1)

Nonwhites are certainly terrorized by the actions of individual whites, but the system is what permits and encourages and actuates this macrocosmic oppression. And it was Baldwin who first opened my eyes to the enormity of that (bit.ly/33qiT3N).

I was full of rage when I first started Riot Baby, and the process of writing and editing initiated a sort of cleansing or clarity of vision. You see the individual wrongdoers, but you also see the machine working to enable and encourage them. Controlling the rage so that it won’t destroy you is a lifelong project, and I am ever so grateful that I have writing as a tool to help me effectuate that.

I also read that you’re a big fan of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. I got a Tetsuo/Kaneda vibe from Ella and Kev, except that both Ella and Kev have immeasurable powers. Was Akira a source of inspiration, too?

No piece of literature has had a greater impact on my development and aesthetic and stylistic choices than Katsuhiro Otomo’s six-volume 2000+-page epic, Akira. It is in everything I write. I first watched the film adaptation as a child when the Sci-Fi Channel had their Saturday Anime block (with such wholesome fare as Vampire Hunter D and Demon City Shinjuku), and my response, like so many of my cohorts, was, “Um, what the entire fuck.” Then, in high school, I discovered it had first been a manga, and the local library had the volumes. I went through them all in a single blazing week. The story was so epic! And so visually stunning! This was before I could really grapple with the themes Otomo had embedded in his story: nuclear panic and the twin traumas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, alienation of youth, the military’s retrograde notions of honor in the face of an increasingly modern society. So I was much more besotted with the imagery. I mean, where else can you find a depiction of a city falling out of the sky? That image will haunt me for the rest of my days.

But, yeah, I love Tetsuo. How lonely and misguided and angry and searching and powerful he is. What if there were no Kaneda, no domesticating influence? What if Tetsuo had won?

What are some other favorite superpower stories of yours?

The Dark Phoenix Saga. First ballot HoF entry.

I love stories involving the “Deal with the Devil” trope, where the cost is your goodness/sanity. Sasuke in Naruto, Majin Vegeta, etc. All those characters have love affairs with villainy that go beyond mere flirtation but involve actual consummation. They’re the antagonist. That’s also why major X-stories involving Magneto always appeal to me.

I also love superpower stories with large scale. “Age of Apocalypse”-style shit. And I think that’s why the Dark Phoenix Saga appeals to me as much as it does. It’s intergalactic, but more importantly, it’s about someone who becomes a vessel for the most powerful being in the universe struggling to contain her worst impulses, and I just find that super relatable. (Not the being possessed part.)

How did you come up with the characters of Ella and Kev?

They came to me fully formed and as a pair, a really magical thing in the life of a writer. I wanted to have a character with God-like powers struggle to protect something precious to her. That, to me, was the core of the narrative conflict.

The narrative conflict plays out in the way you alternate between their POVs. How did you decide to write Ella’s parts in third person and Kev’s in first person? Was there a specific effect you were going for?

I knew Kev was going to be our window into American incarceration and I wanted to make that experience as intimate and exacting as possible. I also felt first person for Kev was a way to kind of blow up perceptions about the incarcerated. With first person, I could really radiate a character’s fullness outward. There’s a forced identification going on, some sort of transference between character and reader. In Rikers, Kev is angry, scared, bored, joking, sorrowful, protective—all of these things. Also, in the previous section set in Harlem, I wanted to show his transformation and felt first person was the most effective way to get that across. It also displayed a nice stylistic break from the Ella sections.

I wrote Ella’s sections in third person because, while I wanted a tight POV for her, I wanted to write sensations and experiences she was feeling that she might not necessarily have the words to describe. Also, I saw Ella as human but also as human+. And I felt a certain bit of distance, however liminal, was necessary to emphasize that plus-ness. She’s different, and part of her experience really is unknowable. There’s mystery there, an aspect of “you will never know what we’ve gone through, what we’re going through, what it’s like to be Black in this country” that I wanted my non-Black readers, particularly my white readers, to experience.

The most salient reason for the difference to me, however, was the contrast. I wanted a quick way to signal to the reader “you’re in an Ella scene now” and “now we’re with Kev.”

That makes me think of something you said at the “Magic X Mayhem” panel at this year’s New York Comic Con. You talked about how, as a fan of anime, you’re interested in how magic systems allow you to play with language on a sentence level and the exchange of serious consequences for gaining magical abilities. I was wondering if you could tell us about how the magic system you devised in Riot Baby let you play with the prose.

I love this question.

One gift Ella’s power gave me was the ability to write a scopic story intimately without having fifty million POVs covering as broad a patchwork as possible of the Black American experience. I could time travel with my prose, and it was such a beautiful challenge to confront, capturing the entirety of a person’s life experience in a single paragraph. It was a really cool way of exploring the idea of showing and the idea of telling in a story. When Kev’s in the therapy session in Watts and he starts to see fellow ex-detainee Davis’s story play out on a street corner in Philly, that was me trying to show a lot with a little. Before that, when Kev meets Calvin in Watts after getting out from Rikers, Calvin tells Kev he’s from “Florissant,” and that unspools this whole paragraph about what it might have been like to come up in that place and it has all this associative baggage, all this implied experience, that you have to show to make an impact but that you have to tell in order to capture its immensity and not come out to 500 pages of prose.

And I learned how to do that by writing into Ella’s powers. Her ability to literalize not just memory but premonition, writing that over and over in her scenes honed my own writing ability to the point of being able to write the “Florissant” paragraph or the scene about Davis and the traumatic episode he endures. Ella’s power allows her to “see” in all directions, a sort of transportation, and being able to write that was like having a whole world of possibility opened up to me. So much that I knew of the world, so much that I had learned in the half-decade prior, I could put here.

Ella and Kev’s story starts in the early ’90s and continues through a too-close-for-comfort dystopian future of a police state. South Central, Harlem, Rikers, Watts—these are all places where historic rioting and racial unrest happened. It’s in these environments where their superpowers develop, but it’s also where both of them are abjectly disempowered on a societal level as Black people. It’s this Catch-22 of having power and no power at the same time.

That’s it! Black people are not just the vertebrae of this country; they’re the tendons connecting past and present, South with North and Midwest, etc., etc.; they’re the immune system that fights valiantly but often without success to keep the country from getting too sick to survive, all of it. Black people dictate culture in many ways. The thing is, by the time the tradition or phrase or way of moving or storytelling trope or music or whatever makes its way to a mainstream white audience, it has been unseasoned beyond recognition, distorted and is now without citation. Remember Kim Kardashian and her “Bo Derek” braids?!

All of that is to say there is IMMENSE power in the cultural capital that Black people contain in this country. The real stars of Vine were the dope and hilarious Black kids creating memes and popularizing dance moves, and when Vine stars essentially wanted to unionize and get paid, Twitter came in like Jon Taffer in Bar Rescue: “SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN!” The cleverest parts of Twitter are all Black, yet our tweets and our ideas (especially those of Black women) will be mined by “content creators” at publications or news outlets or producers for TV shows or whatever, and that’s where the money goes. Right there is a crystallization of that paradox of having power and yet not having any, all at the same time.

It’s often why “buy Black” feels less like affirmation than threat. If there were enough coordination and opportunity, and suddenly financial capital flowed almost entirely through Black American hands, it would fundamentally reorder American society and upend the status quo. And that’s why, as much as it may seem otherwise in 2019, Black people aren’t really free. Baldwin put it incredibly well in a 1968 interview with Esquire Magazine (bit.ly/2rAquiU): “[I]f the American Negro, the American black man, is going to become a free person in this country, the people of this country have to give up something. If they don’t give it up, it will be taken from them.”

On a more personal level, this is a comment on individual achievement contrasted against collective deprivation. Jay-Z says, “I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them, so I got rich and gave back to me. That’s a win-win.” He becomes this self-proclaimed billionaire and, in 2019, is doing deals with the NFL that basically amount to trying to rehabilitate their image after they’ve blackballed Colin Kaepernick and basically trampled on efforts by players to protest police injustice. You escape and turn your back on where you came from.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum is someone like Nipsey Hussle, who blew up and then stayed in his community, invested in it, and was this sort of paragon of what-all we mean when we say “Black-owned business.” And it killed him.

So, what happens when you get power but you can’t do the one thing you want to do most with it? Do you turn your back on that desire or do you fight to fulfill it, even if it means your death or the destruction of your world? Black Americans are out here living through the quandaries posed by Greek myth!

Yes! And living through them in a volatile, hostile setting. Speaking of which, this isn’t the first time you’ve written about siblings separated by a volatile and hostile setting. Here, it’s brother and sister separated—in physical form, anyway—by racist policing and mass incarceration. In your YA novel War Girls, two sisters are torn apart by war in a future Nigeria. Their lives are also marked by violence and political unrest. What draws you to this type of story?

I’m the oldest of four, and just before I turned eleven, our father passed away from leukemia. Everyone—family and not—was telling me how I was now the “man of the family” and informing me of my myriad responsibilities now that the family patriarch was no longer with us. In the way that children do, I internalized the letter of the law rather than its spirit, much to our collective detriment in the years that followed (lol). But I love my family more than anything, more than writing, even. And one of my greatest fears is losing them. In film school, I discovered that when I wrote into my fears, I produced my best work. So, I think War Girls and Riot Baby are part of that same literary project. It’s not quite that I think imagining horrors enacted on my loved ones is a way of reaffirming my love for them so much as it is a constant asking; it’s the “why does this scare me so much?” that I’m trying to get at with each story. While there’s no substitute for therapy, I’ve found this quite therapeutic. [insert nervous laughter]

One of the hostile settings is Rikers Island. You worked with parolees there. How did this experience influence Kev’s incarceration scenes and his character arc in general?

Directly.

My knowledge of Rikers is taken directly from my experience working within its fences. The trip that Ella makes on the buses to visit Kev is a trip I made constantly over the course of working in that job. And many of the details in the parole process in Riot Baby are taken straight from what actually happens to parolees in that jail.

Also, Rikers is a really unique place as far as carceral facilities go. It’s technically a jail, so you’re really only supposed to be there for pre-trial or for sentences less than a year or if you’re being transferred from one prison to another to serve a longer sentence. And the majority of Rikers detainees are pre-trial defendants on bail or remanded into custody. But Rikers is often this black hole into which people vanish for years and years and years. Unable to make bail, Kalief Browder was held in Rikers for three years, two of which were spent in solitary confinement. You can get trapped in a place like Rikers.

Working with Legal Aid and even before that with New York Attorney General’s Office and, even before that, with Columbia Law School’s Mass Incarceration Clinic, I learned a lot about those traps, all the administrative issues that can turn your initial carceral sentence into an absurdity. How, if you’re sentenced to solitary confinement for a certain number of days and you get out before your sentence is up, your days in the Box roll over; how administrative infractions (like getting into a fight) can keep you in jail past your sentence; how you can be convicted of crimes for things that happen in jail while you’re awaiting trial for an unrelated offense. It is a nightmare and can easily spiral into a horror without end.

I wanted the reader to experience all of that through Kev. But I also wanted to show the incarcerated are more than their suffering. They’re people. In America, you put someone behind bars, and it’s like you forget about them, or you’re supposed to. Listen to the way people talk about the jailed and imprisoned. It’s sickening. People still joke about prison rape. But everything that happens in those places is happening to human beings. Happening to people. There is so much humanity in these places, the ways in which people come together or fall apart or change or fight against change—it’s all there.

We were defending one parolee who had been violated (term of art) by his PO and the Parole Revocation Specialist was shooting for their parole to be denied and for them to be sentenced to a notorious treatment facility. And our client was in despair, not because he didn’t want to go to the facility but because the sentence would mean he would miss Christmas with his family. He had been on parole, and now having this thing taken from him was what hurt the most.

Another guy had a sister on the outside who worked tirelessly to put together materials for his parole board (letters from the school he’d gotten into that he’d attend if granted parole, character references from friends and family and former employers, addresses and contact info of nearby treatment centers, etc.) and he was so focused on working toward his release, you could tell it was two siblings fighting together solely with the aim of getting one of them out of jail. I really can’t do justice to what it was like to witness that.

The book club in Riot Baby and the bit about gardening are real stories. The story about the guy playing chess with the prisoner in the next solitary confinement cell by screaming his moves through the wall? Real story.

Kev doesn’t go to jail and become less human. He grows. It felt less like I was writing his story than I was paying witness to it.

Paying witness to his story and to all the systemic forces hell-bent on crushing and discarding his humanity. There’s a line in one of Ella’s scenes that left me shook because it hit home so hard: “She doesn’t know what she would do; maybe it is safer for Kev in here. And suddenly the thought of him on the outside, where so much has happened without him, terrifies her.” Police state in, police state out. As a Black person, I think about this daily. Police officers who can roll up, ghost us, and bam!, we’re the next hashtag in the annals of social justice Twitter. White people who weaponize their phones to call said officers because we’re existing in “their space.” Is this line an observation you made when you worked in criminal justice?

The ubiquity of animus toward Black people was an understanding that preceded the drafting of Riot Baby’s earliest parts, but only by a little.

I think the dawning realization had something to do with the proliferation of video clips of Black death autoplaying on Facebook and Twitter timelines. It wasn’t just that this danger was everywhere, but evidence of it was everywhere, even in these online spaces highly self-curated for our own comfort. In that respect, 2014-2015 was a watershed moment for me and my personal relationship with my country. (I’d lived a relatively sheltered and charmed life prior and am still very comfortable in my current situation, but all of that is irrelevant in the face of this danger. Neither my Yale nor my Columbia Law School IDs are bulletproof vests.)

But in many ways, the exoneration of George Zimmerman was the first moment of my “radicalization.” I think if you polled a lot of folks of our generation and younger, they’d point to that moment as the instant in which something fundamental changed for them about this country and how they saw it and what their place was in it. I think even Dylann Roof, in statements following the massacre he committed in Charleston, pointed to that episode, paradoxically enough, as a moment in which things changed for him.

But the police state, for me, was simply a window into the almost all-encompassing matter of American animus toward Black folks. (The history of constitutional law in this country provided another prism. From Dred Scott to Prigg v. Pennsylvania to Brown v. Board of Education and its aftermath to cases litigating the Fair Housing Act, etc., etc., etc.) But there are many others. You have housing discrimination and the ways in which that is braided into criminal injustice. (Who will rent to you if you have to disclose your felony conviction? How will you get the job that will pay your rent if you have to disclose your felony conviction? Etc.) Education, and even the idea that schools should be funded via property tax when you have a country whose postwar residential order was basically built on redlining. Health! Look no further than Flint, Michigan. Also, everywhere in this country where there’s a lead poisoning crisis, there are likely Black Americans. If that is hyperbole, it isn’t by much.

“America is addicted to hurting black people (bit.ly/37N71fU).”

The police state and the state of policing were windows for me into the much broader topic of injustice toward Black Americans. In jail, Kev has routine, or at least some semblance of one. He’s acclimated himself to the rhythms of the place, knows how to move within it. One of the biggest problems with re-entry is that there’s no institutionalized or systemic way to helpfully get the formerly incarcerated to unlearn the behaviors that helped them survive inside, behaviors that, if displayed on the outside, could get them put back in or killed.

As the police state takes over in the novella, technology invented for surveillance and policing emerges: the augments in Rikers, the surveillance orbs in the city, the geotagging implant in Kev when he moves to Watts. As someone who’s worked in the tech industry, what are your thoughts on how the technology that’s supposed to grant us a wondrous, streamlined future can reflect and reinforce systemic oppression?

PHEW! I have thoughts. We already have algorithmic policing to a certain extent with Palantir’s involvement with local police departments. And that gets to the well-established truth at this point that algorithms carry the biases of their programmers, programmers who often feel themselves inoculated from prejudice and are thus doubly disinclined to course-correct. If I remember correctly, gunpowder was an accidental invention by Taoists looking for an elixir of life. Can you imagine gunpowder having medicinal applications? The instant connection we have with the Internet and cell phone coverage was supposed to bridge gaps all over the world and open up all sorts of possibilities. But it has provided the foundation for a pervasive surveillance apparatus (in addition to facilitating the growth of global racialist fascist movements). What’s fascinating is how the end goal will often differ across societies. In China, for instance, surveillance-via-app is used to correct behavior and get citizens to self-censor in accordance with Party principles. In the US, surveillance-via-app is geared almost exclusively toward getting us to buy shit. All that pernicious data mining simply to get you to click on that ad for a sweater in your Instagram feed. I mean, there’s also the Brexit stuff and the misinformation that flavored the 2016 presidential election in the US; but what I’ve found fascinating and horrifying is how quickly capitalistic impulses glom onto technological innovation. In an earlier age, I think we might have been afraid of military or martial application of new tech (e.g., the atom bomb), and now it’s all: “Okay, how is the money-making prime directive gonna leech all the fun out of this thing?”

Now, I’m not saying we have a moral obligation to become Luddites. But I do think there needs to be more pervasive criticism or critical analysis of our tech and the demographic foundations on which it is being built. Black employees at what you could arguably call the world’s biggest company (bit.ly/37NU7yf) have complained of being nothing but window dressing (bit.ly/2LfhoiX). Twitter is constantly pilloried for its ineptitude—or perhaps lack of caring—in dealing with online abuse against marginalized groups. And when there has been, say, government intervention, it’s been something clumsy and morally hypocritical, like shutting down Backpage, and all the sex workers I know have been nearly unanimous in decrying the move, as it was one method of accountability in a poorly regulated industry and its removal has made things tangibly un-safer for them.

Corporations are not going to try to make things safer for their customers (unless that’s the purpose of their project and they wanna sell it to you), and government is still run, in large part, by the people who tried to get Mortal Kombat banned. So they don’t inspire a lot of hope regarding regulation or guiding the application of tech away from effectuating the worst propensities of the powerful.

But I am heartened by the increasingly public conversations about the role of tech in our lives. The Appeal, which produces and collects online journalism about criminal justice, has written very informative and incisive pieces on, say, facial recognition in San Francisco (bit.ly/37DcsOl) as well as the role Amazon and other tech companies play in the current administration’s immigration agenda (bit.ly/2L1xRqy).

While Facebook has very publicly committed to not addressing misinformation in any substantive way, people were at least talking about the way propaganda spread on the platform and on WhatsApp to facilitate the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. So, the public is being more cognizant and publicly so, but there would have to be a changing of the guard in government such that we would finally see officials with enough political will to adequately regulate these companies, because what is personal safety or a robust democracy in the face of a bottom line?

This is an epic debut for your long-form adult fiction. You’ve had several young-adult novels published before this this. Would you say this is a transition or progression from writing young-adult to adult fiction? Something else entirely? Too soon to tell?

Beasts Made of Night was the first consciously young adult thing I’d written. Every other manuscript I’d produced for the fifteen-plus years prior had been adult, mostly spec fic with a few thrillers and a literary novel thrown in there. So, my home was always adult fiction. It was where I had learned to write, essentially. Writing-wise, Riot Baby feels very much like a return home. That isn’t to say kidlit represents any sort of exile; it’s been a superlative experience and one I’m eager to return to with the sequel to War Girls. But I got to work muscles with Riot Baby that I haven’t yet had the opportunity to do with any of my YA work. It’s like, sometimes you win by draining enough buckets and sometimes you win by performing the most difficult trick. Not like basketball is more difficult than a halfpipe competition in the Summer X-Games—they’re categorically different activities, and it’s been a long time since I’d been in a halfpipe. I’m curious what the reception will be.

On that note, that’s one of the most thrilling parts of writing adult for me right now. I have no idea what the popular reaction will be. So far, people seem to love Riot Baby, and every time they tell me so, it fills my heart to bursting. At the end of the day, I told a story and I’m immensely proud of the way I told it, something I hope I can continue to say about everything I put my name to.

What’s coming up next in the pipeline that you can tell us about?

Well, the sequel to War Girls is currently scheduled for October 2020. And I recently sold two novels I am immensely excited about to Tor.com: the first a post-apocalyptic epic about some Black and Brown folk trying to forge community in a devastated New Haven, CT; and the second a horror-fantasy set at a boarding school. Hopefully, over the next few years, y’all don’t get sick of me.

Cool! Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about Riot Baby?

I just want to shout out my Tor.com editor, Ruoxi Chen. She is a genius, and working with her on this project was a dream. A lot of the above insights and working-through of things are due to her input and her editorial acumen. I’m so grateful she said yes to this project. We’re an object case of what can happen when people of color work together in a variety of capacities in publishing. Together, we made a dope story, and the questions you’ve posted, informed as they are by your own experience, have made for, bar none, the best interview I’ve yet had about this book. This story very well might not have taken the shape and form it has taken absent Ruoxi’s involvement, so love you, Ruoxi!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Author Spotlight: Christopher East

Jude Griffin | 673 words

How did this story come about?

The idea for “The Men Who Change the World” kicked around in my head for a couple of decades before I finally wrote it. Originally I just wanted to write something set in an evil megacorporation that felt like a collaboration between John le Carré and David Lynch. Around the time of 9/11, I was working my first full-time job in an information services company similar (physically, not metaphysically!) to the one I’ve depicted in the story. The political turmoil of that time was a rude awakening at a formative age; it really got me thinking about diversion points and the ways the world could (and should) be different. So the speculative conceit and the weird ambience of the story were born back then, but it took years of stewing and a few attempts—including a stalled novel and, believe it or not, a TV pilot—before I found the right take. I think the intervening years provided the anger and life experience I needed to make it work.

You leave a lot of questions unanswered: Does this imply more stories from this world and/or that you like to create a lot of space for reader interpretation?

While there are a number of unexplored turns branching off the path of this one’s narrative, I consider it a standalone. It seemed right to imply unseen possibilities for this universe, leaving the deeper details to the reader’s imagination, but by and large I said what I wanted to say with this idea. That said, the speculative concepts and political themes here will probably crop up in future work. And I wouldn’t rule out exploring this universe again if the right idea came along, or perhaps toying with it again in a different format. This project has obviously been pestering me for a while; who knows, maybe it won’t stop!

Your work has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Cosmos, Interzone, Lightspeed, Talebones, and The Third Alternative: Any other publications on your target list?

Like most writers, I have a bucket list of professional markets I would love to crack! But right now I’m trying to focus more on process than result, because the process is the part I can control. So I keep my head down, focus on the work at hand, and keep dreaming up new projects. The marketing will either sort itself out, or it won’t. It’s a tough business! Might as well try to find joy in the work itself; the rest is gravy.

You write reviews across a number of genres, formats, and art forms: Is there anything you’ve taken away from your reviewing that influences how you write?

I don’t think I’ve seen much direct cross-pollination between review writing and fiction writing, but analyzing my reactions to things has definitely helped me learn how to assess and shape my own work over the years. Reviewing is a huge part of my writer DNA, going back to my teen years, when I had an entertainment column in the high school newspaper. I’ve been writing up thoughts about stuff in one medium or another ever since then, and I’m kind of addicted. One major effect is that it’s made me more open-minded and omnivorous in my watching, listening, and viewing habits, which I like to think has broadened my perspective and informed my creativity.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

A couple of months from now, I’ve got a weird new science fiction story coming out in the Underland Press anthology XVIII, which I’m pretty excited about. And I’ve always got piles of fiction projects in the works. Right now they involve conspiracies, demons, prog metal musicians, superheroes, industrial hygienists, augmented reality, climate change, alternate realities, and—as usual—spies.

Thanks for the questions!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Alexander Weinstein

Arley Sorg | 1942 words

In your interview at Debutwriter.com you talked about your insightful and complex short story, “Openness,” saying it was partly inspired by a break-up. “Destinations of Joy,” for me, has a cutting cynicism: Those who find joy inevitably crash from joy’s high. Is this story also inspired or derived from specific moments of your personal experience? How did it come about and how did it develop?

The story is part of a longer series of fantastical travelogues which began during traveling in Europe, and they’re based on both my own literal and emotional journeys. I was interested in exploring new ways to tell short stories, particularly fantastical tales, and I found that the “travel guide” form provided a great metaphor for the kinds of inner travels we take throughout our lives. And so these travel stories, for all their fantasy, are actually a kind of autobiography! For example, The Country of Solgläd came from my trip to Iceland, where locals went out of their way to make the journey welcoming and cozy. Arriving back to the baggage claim of NYC’s Kennedy Airport, I was greeted with a Buddy-Get-Your-Bag-And-Get-Out-Of-Here attitude. I realized then that, on a certain level, a city or country can be characterized by the way people hold their hearts. Solgläd is a kind of utopia—a place where we’re all cared for—a dream of what it might be like if we opened our hearts to one another fully.

I’m also very interested in this relationship that you point out, between joy and its crash—which is tied to my Buddhist leanings. There’s a humorous, cosmic entrapment inherent in our avid desire for joy. At the heart of this paradox is the question of how we deal with the non-peak experiences of life—how we might find or fail to find peace/enlightenment/joy within the mundane everyday routines of our “home” lives.

Both stories have a literary slant, in that the writing effectively captures mood and moment; that is to say, these elements are as important to the overall piece as the technological or fantastic aspects. Your forthcoming collection, Universal Love, is described as “a hypnotic collection of speculative fiction” but (arguably) you’ve received more recognition outside of genre circles, in literary or mainstream venues. Do you have thoughts about genre definitions, or around speculative fiction being differentiated from literary fiction? Do you consider yourself a genre writer?

It’s such an interesting question, because as writers, especially in the twenty-first century, we’re often forced to pick genre camps—which is a shame, because I think all stories (adventure tales, science fiction, fantasy, and realism) belong under the same umbrella of simply being called Fiction. And yet, when I was pursuing my BA and MFA in the ’90s, the lines were already drawn, and Literary Realism was king. To write speculative fiction back then was, often, to be placed on back shelves, and I sensed a general knee-jerk bias against certain genres. For this reason, I was hesitant to label my work as Science Fiction because the term was unfairly treated as a pejorative in some circles—akin to telling folks that I was writing beefcake romance. At the same time, I didn’t yet feel that I had a knowledge or background in SF literature to call myself an SF writer. I knew I wasn’t interested in scientifically “proving” my premises (which I understood to be a necessity for hard science fiction) and so I seemed to fall in some middle ground that was still being charted.

Thankfully, the landscape has changed a lot for speculative fiction writers. I think Harry Potter had a lot to do with this—we suddenly had adults and kids very interested in books about wizards and magic again. And writers like Karen Russell, Kelly Link, George Saunders, and many more, have helped break down the walls between literary and speculative fiction. TV shows like Black Mirror and films like Her have also helped broaden the landscape for science fiction and fantasy writers, which is great. And so it’s been really meaningful to me to have my stories embraced by both the literary fiction circles and the SFF community, because I’m always interested in broadening the definitions of genre, and the ongoing and evolving discussion of what’s considered “literary fiction.”

Both stories are also about pain or emotional suffering/loss, but in very different ways. Many writers feel that pain or emotionally difficult experiences are the best sources of inspiration for writing. Do you generally gravitate towards writing stories of loss and similar themes? Or does your writing tend to cover a spectrum of emotional states?

I think literature has always served a need to speak to our own personal pains/suffering as well as to the larger cultural and social suffering caused by prejudice and human injustice. And because our world is filled to the brim with struggle, it makes sense that literature emerges as a vehicle to address suffering. Such literature seems an imperative, particularly in this day and age, given the struggles for human rights and equality we face.

At the same time, I’m very aware that I was raised with a lineage of art/literature that dwells in conflict, cynicism, and violence. Many of the books I was given to read throughout public education were heavy, deeply depressing novels dealing with suicide and death—ones which often left me with a feeling of defeat or hopelessness rather than awe or wonder. And so, I do think that the conflict-based story has a history of dwelling in suffering/loss, and that this then becomes a reflection of and simultaneously shapes our collective consciousness as a society. With this in mind, is the predominance of the conflict-based story a philosophical hangover from the twentieth- and twenty-first-century malaise we’ve been living through?

In general, I think we accept sorrow as inherently artful but see joy/awe/wonder as a kind of frivolity. Consider that we can watch a two-hour film that mostly depicts shooting, murder, explosions, blood-soaked fights, cursing, and violence and consider it a wholly legitimate form of entertainment. Yet, the idea of a movie solely highlighting love, joy, care, and compassion is a genre which our culture would likely term “sappy.” So the question for me is whether there’s an unexplored genre of fiction/storytelling, lush with tones of awe and joy, awaiting artistic exploration. The idea harkens back to transcendentalism and more mystical forms of writing, and it’s one that I see poets exploring nowadays (Ross Gay’s poetry comes immediately to mind).

While my stories may be dystopian, it’s vital to me that, at their core, the stories have a sense of hope, and speak to the importance of human connection. One of the things I’m always trying to do is hint at a kind of transcendence which is still available to us as humans—a place often revealed through the gateways of human compassion, love, and wonder.

You had “Understanding Great Art and the People Who Make It” in Best American Experimental Writing 2018. This story is also somewhat experimental, being essentially a brochure—kind of a twist on an epistolary. But epistolary stories usually still lean on main character and plot. What makes a story like “Destinations of Joy” work, a piece without a protagonist or plot, a piece that still reads as interesting and satisfying?

The landscape of the non-narrative and formalist story is an ongoing learning process for me. I’m really fascinated by what happens when you leave the realm of plot-driven stories or forgo a traditional narrative arc or even a central protagonist. And if I have any regular rule, it’s that my non-narrative pieces can’t simply be descriptive (otherwise they fall flat). What they need is the tooth of a deeper metaphor that hints towards something larger than the description itself.

On the poetic side of things, I think the non-narrative story can utilize internal patterns and rhythms that assist the feeling of closure. For example, one can return to a repeated image to create a more circular feeling at the end of a story. One can also use a poetic “turn” near the end of the piece to create a feeling of closure (in fables this “turn” would be the revelation of the moral of the story).

Another approach is to envision structure as a series of concentric widening circles, like rings from a pebble thrown in a pond. For a fantastical story, this means that the structure will begin with a simple but fantastic premise. From there, the job is to keep increasing the fantastical with each new ring (these rings = new permutations of the original fantastical premise). In a story that builds like this, the structure of expanding circles requires that the final circle be the largest and most fantastical—and ideally something unexpected that will create a kind of rewarding surprise. Stephen Millhauser’s short story The Dream of the Consortium is a great example of this technique. The story opens with a mysterious new mall/emporium being unveiled in a city, and as the story continues to expand, the details become increasingly fantastical. First there are store windows with creepily realistic mannequins, and then inside are mysterious pavilions doused in fog to resemble Victorian London streets, and then, in an ever-widening circle, we begin to find stores selling the impossible: canyons and rivers, replicas of whole cities. The circles of fantasy continue to widen until the story reveals, at the end, that it’s impossible to know if you’ve actually left the mall or simply entered a new store. It’s this final twist that creates the conclusion—and so, if we compare this to the traditional Freytag pyramid, it’s a bit like ending the story on the epiphany.

Besides the aforementioned collection, Universal Love, what are you working on now; or what do you have coming up that new fans can look forward to? Is there a novel in the works?

I’m working on a new collection that explores magical realist/fairytale stories in the vein of Borges and Calvino. There are stories about working class trolls, aging witches living in rural Pennsylvania, monster snakes with appetites for right-wing politicians, and demons taking vacations. As for a novel—though I’ve always considered myself a short story writer, there’s suddenly the first draft of a novel emerging—that’s a secret, but it’s exciting.

For those intrigued by your writing, what story should they read next? Which is your favorite story you’ve sold (or story you are most proud of) and why?

“Saying Goodbye to Yang” (the first story in Children of the New World) is one of the favorites I’ve written. It was this story that launched me into the speculative realm of future technology, and I think it’s also one of my most tender-hearted stories—a place where I really got to explore compassion and the mysteries which make us human. It’s also the first story to be made into a movie! The film, After Yang, by the visionary director Kogonada and A24 Studios, is forthcoming and will star Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith. It’s been really amazing to watch my robotic child, Yang, make his way to Hollywood!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Author Spotlight: J.R. Dawson

Setsu Uzumé | 766 words

Of all the possibilities to explore this kind of relationship, what made you decide on parallel universes?

There was something concrete about parallel universes. Sarah had to be real, just impossible to only Jenna and her world. So Sarah becomes tangible; not a spirit and not some sort of Resurrection Stone shadow. Making it science fiction fantasy instead of just straight up fantasy, to me, made Sarah alive of her own accord and not because of Jenna’s actions or wishes. I also think I’m not the only one comforted by the idea that maybe in a parallel universe the people we don’t find or can’t meet are still okay.

Which ideas fed into this story, or did it start fully formed on its own?

This is a really hard question for me, because I can’t answer it straightforward. I don’t think I’m there yet. But it’s a story I’ve thought about for a long time. I think everyone has that secret story of an unspoken person who is supposed to be here but for some reason is not. I started thinking about the what ifs: What if that person was here? And if that person was here, would she understand me more than those who are here? Would she have not fit, like me? But as I wrote the story, thinking it was going in that direction, I realized that sometimes the missing are the ones we can mold the most to fit ourselves. That’s not true. Everyone is their own individual. Just like the living.

I also have always wanted to return to junior year of undergrad, because Chicago 2008 was such a specific time in history that not everyone got to see. Obama had his Victory Rally in Grant Park, the winter was really pretty, and there was this feeling like things were getting better; we were coming into our own. And we know now that . . . wasn’t entirely true.

But our double-decker couch, Wilbur? He was entirely true. And I can totally talk straightforward about Wilbur. He was awesome. We pulled him out of the alley, my roommate made stilts for it, and it sat about five feet up in the air behind the regular couch.

Is this thematically familiar or new territory for you? Is there a common thread in your work we can trace through other stories?

I think most of my characters are trying to find the people they belong to. They are looking for that family, that home. “Marley and Marley” (F&SF Nov/Dec 2017) has a similar reality-bending concept for the heroine to find home. But it was much more insular and focused on the self. This one I think expands into family and community. Both stories show family trauma and how we deal. But this one was less about bringing to light those who exist and instead giving voice to those who are not in the room anymore.

With the caveat that no one story can be all things to all people, what do you hope readers will take away from Sarah and Jenna’s relationship?

I think it’s a sad one. Sarah and Jenna don’t fit together. And they weren’t raised together, so they don’t even have that family bond. But I guess it’s less what I hope readers take away from that, but what the readers add to the reading experience with the love and people they have in their own lives. I’m curious if anyone else can relate to these sisters, and how so? For me, this story is me standing up and trying to start a discussion that I’ve never been able to have, and maybe someone else can chime in. Even if it’s just in their own inner monologue.

What are you working on next?

I’m currently working with the Institute for Holocaust Education and Circle Theatre on a new play called “When We Go Away”, which follows a braided narrative of Holocaust survivors who ended up settling around the Omaha area. I’m also finishing up a few projects, including a book about a magic circus. You can follow my twitter at @j_r_dawson and check out my website at jrdawson.org to stay up to date on all the things!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent their formative years in and out of dojos. They like swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. They do not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Their work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Coral Alejandra Moore | 407 words

Can you tell us a bit about where the idea for “Fortune’s Final Hand” came from?

My wife and I are occasional recreational gamblers, who visit casinos when time and finances permit. We are aware of the drawbacks, among them that the odds are overwhelmingly that you will go home having lost what you came to play with, and that the games have a compulsive aspect that can lead you to keep playing anyway. The premise of a casino where the stakes are life memories led me to the realization that, even if you win, you will go home with a set of life experiences that don’t involve you, and you will become someone other than who you started out to be. If you play with money, and win, who cares if your pocket was churned and the bills in your wallet are not the same ones you entered with? But your memories are you. And so even to play one game in this place is a kind of soul-suicide. The only way to win is not to play.

“Fortune’s Final Hand” is told in non-chronological order to very striking effect. How and when did you decide that the story would be told in this manner?

It occurred to me that someone who had spent any amount of time in this venue would have her experiences so churned by gameplay that it would become impossible to know what happened when. And so, I arranged for my protagonist a series of wildly divergent situations, that probably take place over the course of a year: from prosperous winner to nearly emptied loser, with one stint as terrified fugitive providing contrast. Make no mistake, though. Aside from that scene that takes place on her first night at the resort, not wanting to play, I have absolutely no idea about the story order. She might escape. And she might not.

When I realized that the story would have to take this form, I knew that it would work.

Where can our readers find more of your work?

The calendar year 2020 should have a couple of Analog novellas, and several other Lightspeed and Nightmare stories. I give the perennial plug to my middle-grade Gustav Gloom novels and to my audio collection, My Wife Hates Time Travel and Other Stories.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Coral Alejandra Moore has always been the kind of girl who makes up stories. Fortunately, she never quite grew out of that. She writes because she loves to invent characters and the desire to find out what happens to her creations drives her tales. She is a 2013 alum of the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop and she has been published by Diabolical Plots, Zombies Need Brains, and Secrets of the Goat People. Currently she lives in the beautiful state of Washington with the love of her life and a dangerously smart Catahoula Leopard Dog where she rides motorcycles, raises chickens, and drinks all the coffee.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 209 words

Coming up in February, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Brenda Peynado (“How We Burn”) and JT Petty (“The Gamecocks”), along with SF reprints by Victor LaValle (“Ark of Light”) and Maria Romasco Moore (“Dying Light”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kij Johnson (“Noah’s Raven”) and Alexander Weinstein (“Toxic Destinations”), and fantasy reprints by Daniel José Older (“A Stranger at the Bochinche”) and Theodora Goss (“A Statement in the Case”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from A.K. Larkwood’s new novel, The Unspoken Name.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Julianna Baggott, Mari Ness, Russell Nichols, Marie Vibbert, and Adam-Troy Castro.

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

Thanks for reading!

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Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

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

The Editors

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you’re a regular reader of Lightspeed and/or Nightmare. We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Lightspeed and Nightmare and my anthologies, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding the magazines, so the magazines really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie-publishing tools (as described above), we thought it would be good to have a single place where folks could come to show their support for such projects.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy my work as an editor, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Alex Puncekar

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Chris Kluwe

Carrie Vaughn

Christopher East

Violet Allen

Interviewer

Christian A. Coleman

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed (and/or Nightmare), you might also enjoy these works edited by John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer [forthcoming]

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker [forthcoming]

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

The Chosen One by Veronica Roth [forthcoming]

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