TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 124, September 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: September 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

The Author’s Wife vs. the Giant Robot
Adam-Troy Castro

Shadow Prisons of the Mind
Caroline M. Yoachim

Note to Self
Sunny Moraine

Machine Learning
Hugh Howey

FANTASY

Moses
L.D. Lewis

Destinations of Waiting
Alexander Weinstein

Persephone of the Crows
Karen Joy Fowler

Entanglement
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

EXCERPTS

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Christopher Paolini

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: September 2020
Arley Sorg

Media Review: September 2020
Christopher East

Interview: Mark Oshiro
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Adam-Troy Castro

Alexander Weinstein

Sunny Moraine

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

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 Grandeduc / Adobe Stock Image

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: September 2020

John Joseph Adams | 202 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 124th issue!

Around here, we love giant robots, but our first SF original this month—“The Author’s Wife vs. the Giant Robot,” by Adam-Troy Castro—made us think twice about living in the shadow of one. Sunny Moraine’s new short (“Note to Self”) also wrestles with the ramifications of size, but this story tackles a much, much smaller topic: quantum mechanics. Our SF reprints include the second installment of Caroline M. Yoachim’s Shadow Prisons series (“Shadow Prisons of the Mind”) and “Machine Learning” by Hugh Howey.

Our original fantasy shorts include another delightful trip to Alexander Weinstein’s Eighth Continent: “Destinations of Waiting.” Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam gives us a heroine with a difficult heritage and a supportive girlfriend in her new story “Entanglement.” Our fantasy reprints are from L.D. Lewis (“Moses”) and Karen Joy Fowler (“Persephone of the Crows”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our feature interview is with Mark Oshiro. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from bestselling author Christopher Paolini’s new novel, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars.

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 Author’s Wife vs. the Giant Robot

Adam-Troy Castro | 7686 words

The year I turned five, my father got taken out by a giant robot.

I was present and I took it very personally. You honestly don’t expect that kind of thing when you’re a kid, not even if you’ve seen the giant robot from a distance every day of your life and have been taught what random carnage the giant robot got up to.

I had grown to that tender age knowing that the giant robot killed people at the rate of one a day, but this was a story I took only as seriously as those other childhood myths, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, both of which I had already rejected as short on evidence. I couldn’t say that about the giant robot. It undeniably existed, in the same way I knew that there were bad people from whom, for some reason, I should not accept candy. I had been given a strategy to avoid those people: don’t take candy. I had not been given a strategy for avoiding death by giant robot. There was no strategy. The robot killed who it wanted to.

The robot was four thousand feet tall. It had the approximate contours of a naked man, stylized, with the fortunate exception of genitalia. Our city had never been forced to live in proximity with its dangling junk. It stood with its feet planted a comfortable distance apart, each in a lot which, absent the capacity for further development, was now ground zero for selfie takers. The two parks were several blocks apart and there was an entire neighborhood between them, home to small businesses and the apartments of people who didn’t mind living in the shadow under the robot’s sexless crotch. The two legs, purple and gleaming, joined in the hips that the leviathan’s fists were also planted on, as it stood akimbo in frank ownership of all it surveyed. It had a chest of streamlined musculature, a squat neck, and a face devoid of nose or personality that nevertheless possessed shallow indentations where the eyes and mouth should have been.

Over the years people had tried to give the giant robot names adequate to communicate its majesty. In a religious era, people had called it Jehovah, or the Angel of Death. In a more poetic one, some had dubbed it Ozymandias. When the Academy Awards were new some jokers had said it was just the first Oscar. But all those nicknames had faded and for seventy years now the names had devolved to utility. It was the Giant Robot. Sometimes the Giant Freaking Robot. Sometimes That Fucking Giant Robot. But ultimately, the giant robot.

I knew it was famous for killing one person a day. But until that day I never imagined that could have included any of us. My father was a municipal bus driver, my mother a teaching assistant. We lived two flights up from a village grocery. We were not the kind of people giant robots ever bothered. We were far from the center of town, where the giant stood, and well out of what we imagined to be the giant robot’s reach; it mostly went for people within a three-mile radius of where it had planted itself. My father had taken me to see it once, because every kid wants to see the giant robot close up. I only barely remember the day. I must have pronounced it awesome.

A stranger took a photo of my father and I about a block from the giant robot’s big toe. I am sitting on my dad’s shoulders, making the kind of face a child my age would just automatically use as a default for ferocity. You can see a few dozen other tourists, having a great time as they took their photos in front of the giant robot. Nobody looks particularly scared, even though the deal with the giant robot was the one random person it chose to crush every single day. It was a big city and the odds were always against the designated victim being you or anyone you knew, a small price for the boon it had been for the local economy, both as a tourist site and as an active convenience, given that it gave off enough surplus electricity to spare the city any need for a paycheck-draining power plant. This was a good thing, overall. Most cities didn’t get free power from giant robots. We were ahead of the deal.

This of course became harder for me to rationalize when I was five and my father became the designated crushee. It wasn’t a good day.

You need to understand that the robot didn’t crush my dad by stepping on him. It had been standing in the same spot since my grandfather was a boy, a good thing since it was so heavy it could not have traveled any great distance on foot without causing an earthquake with every step. Nor did it crush my dad with its gigantic fists; that heroic stance it had affected from the moment of its arrival had also never altered, not by so much as a twitch. But once a day, at about 3:00 in the afternoon, a long flexible coil emerged from a sliding panel in its chest, whipped across a distance that could cover the entire metropolitan area, and sought out the one person it had selected for execution. It did not matter where that one person was. He or she could be at work, or at home, or traveling across town in a taxi, or underground on a subway, or in the prison complex along the river. The robot simply declared a name on the message board mounted on its forehead, and nailed whoever it was with that coil, any attempt at escape futile, not that anybody had ever experienced enough advance warning to try.

For us, it was a Saturday and I was at home with my Dad, playing some board game involving a trio of mice racing around a circular board trying to stay ahead of a cat. My mother had gone to the store for a minute and I remember my father really getting into the game, saying things like, “Squeak! Squeak!” to add immediacy to the adventures of the mice, or, “Oh no, here he comes,” whenever the big rubber squeak-toy that represented the cat scurried closer to our tokens, threatening an early end to the game. I remember doing what a five-year-old does, laughing like an idiot. Then the window shattered and something I interpreted as a snake shot across our living room to the coffee table where the two of us were playing our game, wrapped itself around my dad’s head and constricted with unimaginable force.

Not every means the robot uses for its daily sacrifice involves a big mess; sometimes it uses gas, sometimes lethal injections, sometimes electric shock. Sometimes the victims die so peacefully that doctors can’t even determine the precise source of death. Head-crushing, I’ve learned, is fairly rare, not that it functioned as much of a consolation. I remember a sound like a balloon popping, only more liquid, and then all of a sudden the snaky thing was gone and the walls were dripping. I heard neighbors shouting in the hallway. Everything was different after that, but then again, it was different every day, for somebody.

• • • •

There is at this point an objection from the Author’s Wife.

The Author is not an abstraction meant to stand in for all human beings of his class, except, of course, insofar as he does. He is a specific person. He is, in fact, this author, the one who wrote that sentence, and this one. Also this sentence fragment. And this one. Because he is a specific person, so is his wife, and therefore we need not go into any pedantic objections to the effect that not all authors are men, or have wives. Were he an abstraction those objections would be pointed but accurate. However, he is me. And the Author’s Wife is mine.

The Author’s Wife: Who built the robot?

The Author: I’m not going to worry about that.

The Author’s Wife: I mean, is it from space?

The Author: I don’t know.

The Author’s Wife: This isn’t an alien thing?

The Author: I’m not going to say.

The Author’s Wife: No mad scientist or anything?

The Author: No.

The Author’s Wife: How did it get there?

The Author: That’s also outside the scope of the story.

The Author’s Wife: Stories need explanations!

The Author: You’ve read a lot of my stories and you know I don’t always provide them. Sometimes they’re just about weird shit happening.

The Author’s Wife: So you’re just going to say that this giant robot just showed up one day and started slaughtering the people of this city at the rate of one a day, and you’re not going to explain why.

The Author: Right. Sometime in the 1880s, I think.

The Author’s Wife: That’s stupid!

The Author: That’s one possible interpretation.

The Author’s Wife: What’s the possible point of that?

The Author: Do I have to have one?

• • • •

My mother and I moved to a duplex in a better neighborhood. I did not understand then that every time the giant robot selected somebody, a sizable deposit was made to the city’s treasury and that some of it was earmarked to the victim’s immediate survivors, which in our case was my mom and me. In later years my mom said that I also got to go to a better school than I would have otherwise and that I also got a substantial college fund. She didn’t think it was an even trade, as she was not that mercenary. But this was just one of those things that happened, if you wanted to live in the city. It was like if you lived in a trailer in the Midwest, you could at any given moment get blown away by a twister; if you lived in a tract house in Los Angeles, you could get wiped out by a mudslide or a grass fire; if you lived in some home on the water, in entire countries, you could spend a random Thursday watching everybody you ever knew being washed away by a tsunami. There was no place to live, anywhere, that was not subject to something. And living here, in this city with enough money from the giant robot’s lease payments that it would never have to lay off its firefighters, never have to endure the hell of a sanitation strike, never know an earthquake or a dam break or for that matter the invasion from the evil guys from across the river, was not a bad bargain. One death per day in a city where that was just one of about five hundred from other sources: old age, cancer, slipping on bars of soap, murder, falling down flights of stairs, drug overdoses, choking on Legos, and a giant robot in midtown, daily picking a name according to some formula only it understood. Seen statistically, the giant robot was nothing.

Still, I was twelve before I could stand to look at the damned thing. My mom had been wise enough to select a house facing the river and not the skyline. When I walked to school, it was with my back to the thing; when I walked back it was with my head down, surveying the cracks in the sidewalk. Sometimes, while playing baseball in the park, I did look up and see the titanic figure in midtown, taller than any of the buildings that surrounded it, and I would have the damnedest sensation that it knew I was looking, that it knew when the sons and daughters of every sacrificed person was looking. I didn’t think it felt satisfaction, but neither did I think it was an empty shell, bereft of thought except when the time came for its daily selection; I was certain that whatever it had for a brain was constantly mulling any number of issues, some of which affected who it would pick next. By twelve, I daily shot it the bird.

Between age five and age eighteen I only knew of one person other than my dad who got killed by the robot. This was, I am told, above average. It was not uncommon to know somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody, et cetera, the neighbor’s podiatrist’s uncle who got nailed by the robot one day, but statistically it was rare to have more than one victim in your inner circle. The second person I knew got taken when I was sixteen. She was a girl two years ahead of me in school. Tisha or Teisa, her name was; I didn’t know her except as a gaunt, timid presence in the hallways, who scurried from class to class as if afraid some stalker would slap her on the back of the head with a book. One day in the lunchroom somebody mentioned that Taisha or Teisa had been the robot’s designated victim a week or so earlier. Nobody had said anything about it until that day. I had not wondered why she hadn’t been showing her face lately. This of course led to the next obvious question, “How did she go?” and here the accounts varied widely, from the guy who said she’d been broiled with a flamethrower to the girl who said she’d been cut into horizontal slices and left stacked in place, like a serving of deli meats. The ewws were respectful, and before it occurred to anybody to point to me and saying, “Hey, Eddie, didn’t it zap your Dad too?”, everybody started grossing each other out with their own scenarios of really gross ways the robot could kill people, if it ever wanted to, and that went on for a while, until the bell rang and we had to go back to the fucking study of Walt Whitman. That’s as close as it ever came to me, after Dad, and I wasn’t about to say that I’d been deprived.

The summer after I graduated, I took a bus downtown to revisit the giant robot’s neighborhood for the first time since my dad took me. I expected to feel more than I did. I brought a bottle of booze in a paper bag and carried it around with me all afternoon, not knowing when I intended to drink it, and not particularly feeling the need. I passed the out-of-towners taking selfies, the food vendors wheeling the carts in its shadow, the sketch artists offering caricatures for people who wanted their faces superimposed on the robot’s blank features, the crazies blaming the robot on the Illuminati or the Jews or the Jewish Illuminati or the Hollywood Liberals or the Jewish Hollywood Liberal Illuminati. I went to the McDonald’s tucked against the Robot’s ankle and had a Big Mac, thinking of how easy it would be for the thing to twitch just slightly and leave us buried in rubble; not that it ever did that, as it was a polite and considerate genocidal robot, remaining a good neighbor to everybody living adjacent to its personal space. I took out my phone and read about that day’s victim: a petty criminal serving a thirty-day stretch in the city jail, who had been eating the second of his day’s three allotted bologna sandwiches when the robot’s probe snaked it through the widow, inserted a pointy tip into his right eye, and spun like a whisk. It was a pretty nasty way to end a life that had culminated in an arrest for exposing himself on the subway. I felt a twinge, but not much worse than that.

I walked around a bit, went to a movie, came out and found a bench in a little plaza opposite the giant robot’s right foot, where I could sit and drink and smoke and contemplate. I received multiple propositions from sex workers of many genders. I was sufficiently intrigued by one of the cuter girls to ask her where we would go, if I said yes. She claimed that there was an alcove in the gap between the robot’s big toe and the next toe in line—it had a total of four—where people in her line of work took customers who didn’t mind standing up in the dark. It seemed ghoulish to me, so I demurred. She gave me the hotel price, and I said no again. She told me it was my loss and went away. I took another belt and then another belt after that and as it got darker and colder, I thought about how little it mattered. Then I went over to the robot’s heel and pissed on him. A cop saw me and had absolutely no problem with it. The problem was that the robot also had absolutely no problem with it, though I don’t know what I expected. The fact of the matter was that when you’re pissing on something so large that it doesn’t take notice, its failure to take notice is usually a good idea. I felt empty. But there was little to do to feel less empty, so I took the subway home.

• • • •

The Author’s Wife: Another thing. Why don’t people just move away?

The Author: I’m sure lots of people do.

The Author’s Wife: Who would stay in a city where you can look up and see a giant killer every day?

The Author: People live within full view of volcanoes, don’t they?

The Author’s Wife: Volcanoes don’t kill people every day!

The Author: No, they kill a few hundred at a time, maybe a few thousand. Entire populations live their whole lives within audible range of volcano sirens.

The Author’s Wife: Why wouldn’t the authorities blow the giant robot up?

The Author: Maybe they’ve tried.

The Author’s Wife: Are you going to say so?

The Author: You mean, am I going to include a scene where the giant robot is assaulted by a fleet of bombers? Where it bellows in rage at all the explosions and uses its gigantic arms to sweep the fleet out of the sky? Where some little kid shrieks, “Gojira! Gojira!” Or maybe, a scene in which some Einstein-haired Professor imparts the knowledge that he has discovered a way in, and tells our square-jawed hero Biff that if he can avoid its internal defenses he can reprogram it to use its giant robot powers for niceness instead of evil?

The Author’s Wife: You’re making fun of me.

The Author: A little, yeah.

The Author’s Wife: Are you at least going to establish that somebody tried to do something, at some point?

The Author: It’s outside the scope of the story. But, yeah, I suppose that way back in the days when the robot first came down from space or stepped out of the time portal or whatever, and set up shop in the middle of town so it could start killing one person a day, there was mass panic of some sort and people started firing post-Civil War artillery at it, only to realize that nothing they did affected it at all. There’s likely a whole novel to be written about that first year or so of the robot’s presence in midtown, of the economic shifts that altered the fate of neighborhoods and changed the balance of power in all sorts of ways, like the poorer people and minorities being forced to live closer to it, and so on, until the city finally realized that there was no more disadvantage to living close to it than there is in living close to any other skyscraping structure that blocks out the sun for several hours a day. But, at the time this story begins, it’s been in town for about a century and a half, and people have adjusted. It’s part of their skyline.

The Author’s Wife: A part of the skyline that kills people.

The Author: Did you read about that crane that fell off that office building, a year or so ago, and crashed through the top five stories of that condominium across the street? Absolutely horrifying. But if you go to the same town, you will see a bunch of cranes just like it, arrayed on tall buildings, and nobody even looks up.

The Author’s Wife: And that’s what your story’s about? This huge honking threat that everybody just learns to live with?

The Author: What do you call the San Andreas Fault?

The Author’s Wife: I would still move away.

The Author: Again, we live in hurricane country.

The Author’s Wife: It’s not the same thing!

The Author: No, it’s not. But, yes, people would move. Many do. Many are the people who had it with big city crime and moved out to the suburbs, or to rural paradises where the sidewalks get rolled up at night. But what kind of story would that be? The protagonist loses his father in a highly traumatic childhood experience and moves on, without consequence, to a small town life with a wife, two point five kids, and a dog? What’s the point of that?

The Author’s Wife: What’s the point of the story the way you’re telling it?

The Author: That’s the kind of thing one discovers while doing it.

The Author’s Wife: Why don’t you at least say what the robot thinks it’s accomplishing?

The Author: Well, I don’t intend any human being in the story to ever find out, so it’s kind of extraneous.

The Author’s Wife: I don’t think it’s extraneous!

The Author: Look, if you really insist on a scene from the robot’s point of view, I’ll give you one. Okay?

• • • •

THE ROBOT’S POINT OF VIEW.

Local time is 14:37. I do not measure time the way the local civilization does but rather according to metrics that would take too long to explain to those more used to that system, not that I plan to make the attempt soon or at any point in the future. Still, I receive all their primitive TV and radio broadcasts and am fully equipped for internet. I routinely cross-reference my internal diaries with their own way of measuring things, not because it matters much to me but because I have nearly infinite computational skill and I might as well. I sometimes section off part of my mind to simulate a typical human being with whom I have conversations. It is a boring activity but, again, I have nothing but time, and so I tell him (or sometimes her) things like, “Well, it’s getting about that time again.” The human being will protest that I really don’t have to kill anybody else today and I will perform the equivalent of a nod and say that this is my function and that with the time being 14:37 (14:38, now), it indeed is getting to be about that time. Sometimes my hypothetical human beings ask me how I decide who I’m going to kill, and how, and I explain that with my nearly instantaneous computation speed I generally don’t need to start generating random numbers until the last thousandth of a second before the poor bastard in question ends up being selected. Sometimes they ask me why I have to do it at the same time every day, or if one a day isn’t too much, and I explain that given how lightning-fast my thoughts are, that momentary distraction doesn’t happen nearly often enough as it is. Honestly, I could eliminate one person every second and the interregnum would still feel like eternity. That I only do this once a day shows tremendous restraint on my part. Every once in a while my simulated human being gets frustrated and shrieks at me, “But why do you do it? What’s the point?” And I reply that, since I’m standing around, doing nothing, it would genuinely be too much to ask to expect me to spend all this time here without the consolation of regular activity. It’s a hobby, I say. The hypothetical human being, driven beyond all exasperation, will then sometimes yell, “But why are you standing there, at all? Why don’t you go somewhere else, where there’s something for you to do?” And I say, “That’s pretty easy for you to say. I bet you can’t even name one.” Meanwhile, it’s now 14:39.

• • • •

The Author’s Wife: I see what you did there. You made me the voice in the robot’s head.

The Author: Well, you’re asking the same questions.

The Author’s Wife: I bet you think I’m annoying, asking you all those questions.

The Author: Not at all. These questions are useful. I still remember that story I handed you as fait accompli, that you immediately pierced to the core with an intelligent question about character motivation. Because of you I went into the other room and fixed it, and ended up getting nominated for a Nebula. Thank you. That was very helpful.

The Author’s Wife: But you’re not fixing what I see as wrong!

The Author: I’m addressing your issues. I just gave the robot that soliloquy, didn’t I?

The Author’s Wife: It answered nothing!

The Author: It established that the robot is a sentient being of significant intelligence and relatable motivations.

The Author’s Wife: Boredom?

The Author: Isn’t that relatable?

The Author’s Wife: You’re still pitting your human characters against a massive otherworldly phenomenon that they can neither comprehend nor affect, against which all their struggles are just an exercise in futility.

The Author: And such is life. Right?

• • • •

I’d been back in town for a couple of years, holding down a couple of jobs and trying to figure out what happened next, wondering if this was all there was, when a friend of mine began badgering me to go to this stinking club to see his stupid band.

Look, if you live in the city, you have an acquaintance with a stupid band. Sometimes it’s a good band and sometimes it’s a bad one, but it’s a stupid band, specifically, when they show up at the day job with fliers and start telling you how awesome it would be if you came out and supported them. It’s emotional blackmail, is what it is. It’s always seemed to me that if they were any good at all, they wouldn’t have to implore people who were just trying to eat their sandwiches to do their duty by supporting the band. Fuck you, what if I don’t want to support the band?

I just generally never wanted to head out to a neighborhood I normally wouldn’t get caught dead in just so I could pay the cover and buy the two drink minimum and probably not get out without buying the CDs or t-shirts at the door, and I didn’t want to do any of those goddamned things.

So it was with this one guy, called himself Oz—which he carefully explained was not short for Oswald, but an actual reference to the fictional country, and that also required him to explain that he was not talking about the Judy Garland movie, which was corporate bullshit, but the L. Frank Baum novels, and honestly I saw him go through this rigamarole every time a new hire wandered into the break room, an awful lot of punishment for anybody to go through when it was simpler to just leave it with him saying “Call me Oz,” and you replying, “Okay, if that’s what you want, I’ll call you Oz.” Oz had a band that I really needed to get out there and support, and I kept blowing him off, which was only reasonable because after all that explanation of his name I’d sure as shit had more than enough of his lyrics. Anyway, I’d managed to say no the first two times they played and I was on a scheduled vacation for their third but then the fourth rolled on and the guy showed up at my corner of the office saying, “Come on, it’ll be fantastic,” and I realized with sinking heart that I couldn’t put it off any longer without being a dick. It probably would have been more honest to just bite the bullet and be a dick, because at the damn least it meant that I would never be asked again, but I needed the job and didn’t want to be the object of stink-eye every day, so I said, what the hell, I’ll see you there.

It was a basement club, a full flight below the street, no elevator and likely little in the way of fire exits, possibly illegal if the city ever got around to inspecting the joint, which was iffy even in a city that had never needed to cut municipal services. Even when the economy is good, there are still things like bribes, backlog, and bureaucracies that don’t give a shit. The building was set back from the street and protected by those concrete crash barriers public places erect to prevent truck bombings, which led to silly thoughts about just what kind of eccentric terrorists would pick that crappy club as their target of choice. When I got downstairs, the place was dark in the manner of rooms that by design don’t ever light up enough to make a difference. It was long and narrow with a stage at the far end, and though the city had a smoking ban, the ceiling was swathed in a thick haze that seemed more dust than the product of tobacco, clove, or pot. It smelled off. I picked a stool as far from the stage as possible, to facilitate an escape if necessary.

How the hell was I to know their band, GRO, was an acronym for Giant Robot Orchestra?

They came out wrapped in a substance that looked like aluminum foil, their faces painted a metallic silver, pre-recorded audio blasting various mechanical and hydraulic noises as they jerked about like automatons. They had a fan base, surprisingly, because at the moment they finished their walk-out song and froze in place, arms akimbo, the place went wild with woos. I could only sit on my stool at the bar, the one I had chosen for proximity to the door in case I wanted to get out as quickly as it now seemed I wanted to, and listen for the duration of the three songs that struck me as a reasonable definition of giving them a fair chance. Their second song was all about the robot leaving its habitual place and doing a choreographed dance-stomp over all the ant-like pedestrians in the street, “Stomp Stomp I Do The Stomp,” and the second had something to do with the robot acquiring corporate sponsors. The third was about a girl who nightly used one of the robot’s flailing murder-tentacles as a sex toy, and in the last verse actually included a couplet about her seeing red when it crushed your head, and at that moment I got off the stool and marched out the front door and up the stairs to the street.

I got as far as the sidewalk, where a bunch of refugees had gathered, looking up at the place in the skyline where the giant robot eclipsed everything else. They were smoking and bullshitting and listening to the percussion, just the percussion, as that was the only part of the music that carried past the stairs. As percussion, it wasn’t half bad. It was colder than I’d expected, as the temperature had dropped within the last half hour or so. I lit a cigarette and stood there fuming in that manner and in my own, when a petite Asian girl (Korean, though I did not know that yet), with stubbly white hair and a studded black leather jacket came out, hopped up on one of the concrete barriers and lit her own smoke, leaving it between her lips to smolder without much in the way of obvious inhalation. Her eyes were fixed on the outline of the giant robot.

And suddenly, I knew. “Who was it?”

She glanced at me, and suddenly, she knew. “You first.”

“My dad.”

“My older sister.”

“I was five.”

“I wasn’t even born yet. I was conceived as replacement kid.”

“That sucks.”

She shrugged. “It’s not a contest. I’m sorry about your dad.”

“I’m sorry about your sister.”

Silence intervened. This was, I’d learned, a natural consequence of having a loved one who got killed by a giant robot. The fact of it, when mentioned, tended to be the speed-bump in the center of conversations, the one that cut off all potential topics up to that point and prevented the planting of any conversational seeds up after that point. I wanted to say more, but anything else might have felt too much like a pick-up strategy, even now that the thought didn’t seem like a terrible one. After a moment, I said, “They don’t suck. I wouldn’t mind listening to them if they played anything else.”

“No,” she agreed. “They don’t suck, and I’m only here because the guy on drums kept handing out fliers at work until I finally surrendered.”

“I’m not going to buy the CD.”

“And I’m not going to buy the t-shirt.”

“Fuck them.”

“Royally.”

We smoked a bit, and after a while, she said, “Wanna get the hell out of here and talk about literally anything else?”

This was, it turned out, how we met.

We were together when we found out that another giant robot had appeared, standing on the water in Hong Kong harbor.

• • • •

The Author’s Wife: For a few seconds there I thought this whole story was going to be a massive exercise in a Meet-Cute.

The Author: It was beginning to feel that way to me, too.

The Author’s Wife: It would have been unworthy of you.

The Author: I’ve always hated the kind of story where there’s some massive threat to life and limb and we see a lot of people die and it all turns out to be okay in the end because the two people we care about most embrace as newly-minted lovers in the rubble.

The Author’s Wife: Well, these cute kids getting together would have certainly been an adequate payoff for five thousand six hundred words of a giant robot standing in the middle of town, executing people!

The Author: Sarcasm, right?

The Author’s Wife: I still don’t know where you’re going with this.

The Author: Look, the problem with this premise is that most of the places where it can go, or where stories like it have gone, are places where I don’t want this one to go. I don’t want an ending where the robot speaks a sentence out loud that suddenly explains everything. I don’t want the guy and girl to get married and settle down in domestic bliss, where that is handed out as a reward for enduring everything that came before. I don’t want an action-packed skyscraper-toppling climax where the robot built by the humans marches down from upstate and takes on whatsitsname in a battle of titans. All of these would be betrayals of the central conceit, that the robot is just a thing that happens to be, that the poor schmucks at street level need to get used to sublimating as a daily threat. Like terrorism, for instance.

The Author’s Wife: Life needs to go on.

The Author: That’s right.

The Author’s Wife: So your protagonist and Blonde Asian Chick don’t stay together.

The Author: I’m not actually going to chart the rise and fall of their relationship, no. I think it gets pretty hot and heavy for a bit, that they maybe spend a little time living together, but that after a while they both realize that this commonality between them, this shared past with the giant robot, doesn’t amount to enough to qualify them as life partners. Ultimately, they will meet other people, move on, maybe stay in touch as friends for as long as it takes for staying in touch to become more trouble than it’s worth. That’s messy and that prevents the grotesquery of reducing the giant robot to matchmaker.

The Author’s Wife: Except that now you’ve set up a second robot, and through it implied that this is a full-scale, if slow-motion, invasion.

The Author: Yeah, and you know, I don’t want this to be the direction I go from here, either. I don’t want this to devolve to a long list of cities where fresh giant robots have shown up. Even if there are more coming, it took so many years for the second that the appearance of the third is likely outside the scope of the plot. It’s more dread than I want to deal with, and not what the story feels like it’s about. So let’s just say, boom: This second giant robot is the only other giant robot there is, and it doesn’t disrupt the daily routine of Hong Kong any more violently than this one disrupts the city of this story.

The Author’s Wife: I still don’t see the point of all this.

The Author: I have one, honestly.

• • • •

My mom had died a few months back, talking about Dad to her very last breath, and between that and the crash-and-burn of my only night out with a member of the opposite sex since breaking up with Eun-Ae, I’d been at odds and ends for a few weeks. I guess I was depressed. I don’t know if it was clinical depression, but it sure as hell was the sense that my life had fallen into a permanent rut. It was cold out and if I hate anything beyond the giant robot, it’s the cold, but I was in danger of spending the weekend barricaded inside my three hundred square feet . . . again.

So I bundled up and went down the street and had a hot dog on that place on the corner with the really good relish and walked the five blocks to the big park, where there was always something going on. What I found was a crappy little band that I listened to for a little while, not because they were great but because they were enthused; sometimes that’s enough, when you’re not in the mood for smiling, yourself. They were worth applauding just for their willingness to play in the cold, especially from the point of view of a guy who’d been flirting with agoraphobia. They were life, asserting itself as a thing that didn’t necessarily suck, that was worth going out to find when four walls and Amazon Prime seemed preferable.

Then I walked a little farther and found an art installation that somebody had set up. It was called Be The Giant Robot and it was a simplified 3-D model of midtown, mostly the major buildings, that came complete with two foot-shaped outlines in the places that corresponded to the robot’s feet. You were invited to stand in those places and see what it was like to be the robot, master of all it surveyed. I might not have done it if there’d been a long line but someone told me that it had been around for a couple of months already and would soon be removed, so the combination of a short wait and the urgency that went along with the awareness that the opportunity would be gone soon gave me the added push I needed. I put my shoes on those scuffed places and looked around at the major buildings and I thought about how goddamned insignificant it all probably looked to that naked chrome asshole. And yet, he’s alone, I thought, trying to see it his way. And it didn’t make me feel one bit better because I was alone, too: alone at work, alone in my social life, alone without a family: hell, alone even with myself, because I was no company worth keeping.

I glanced at midtown, the real midtown, where the real bastard was still visible in the distance, arms on his hips like Superman. It’s funny. You can always see him if you’re looking that way, but after a while your eyes develop a kind of blindness to him. You forget he’s there. You forget what he does at 3:00 p.m. every day. He becomes just a thing. And of course you can always get the daily casualty, but unless it’s some especially tragic one like some elementary school kid waiting for the bus home or some bride in the middle of her wedding reception, or something personal like my dad, it’s just background noise, really. Something you never pay attention to, compared to how much attention you need to pay to, you know, getting where you needed to be, doing whatever you needed to be.

I left the art installation and walked the path around the lake, happy when the route put my back to the figure on the horizon, but if I told you that I had stopped thinking about him I’d be lying. Mostly, he was at the center of all my self-pity. My dad was part of it, as he always was. I’d never been able to lose the expression on his face, that little over-enthused joy he took in sharing that board game with me, replaced instantly with the pulp the son of a bitch had made of him. That had never left me; I suppose I’ve never been able to trust fun, of any sort, let alone happiness, of any sort, since. But I wasn’t just thinking about him. I was thinking about the things you think about, when you’re pushing thirty and your life is going nowhere. There’s an old song someone once played for me, with the refrain, “Is that all there is?” And that question had been making more and more sense to me, lately: that it was, that if there was anything else there was nothing I could grab on to, not even now when I could begin to feel the time drifting away in big chunks.

Suicide did not enter into it, not in any deep way. It wasn’t that black a mood. I think that unless my life ever took a turn darker than anything that’s ever happened before, I wouldn’t ever entertain that as a possibility. I didn’t want to kill myself. I wanted what I felt to be over. If that meant willing a sniper’s bullet into being, or hoping that some big truck blew a tire and hopped the sidewalk, so be it. I started daydreaming about the ways it could happen, the relief it would be. And so, by the time I could see the giant robot again, I was prepared for the thought that it would even be okay if it was him; if at 3:00 p.m. today he sent that tentacle of his wailing across the miles to pierce me where I stood, I would meet my end relieved. It would be right, and it would be just.

There was a permanent snack stand, selling salted pretzels and other junk food, just off the path near where I would have completed a perfect circle. I was not hungry for anything but I wanted to sit at one of the steel tables and so I bought one of the pretzels and sat, alone, watching the giant robot in the distance. He was so big he dominated the whole damn city, and through it the whole damn world. It was 2:49 p.m. and I found myself uncannily certain that today was my day: that even if I turned my back and ran to the nearest curb and got a taxi and ordered the driver to whisk me out of range, that range would only be extended, in order to accommodate my distance. I would go in order to fulfill the bastard’s great cosmic plan, the way my father had, and it would be the exclamation point at a life that had reached a dead end anyway.

I ate my pretzel, one eye on my phone as the minutes ticked down to the hour that punctuated the city’s history, every damn day. Ten minutes away. Then nine. Then five, and I closed my eyes and tried to count down what remained, without any wired help, surprised by how hard my heart was pounding. This is stupid, I thought, and it was, even though I remained no less certain that I was the next. It occurred to me that this was my last pretzel, as the hot dog had been my last hot dog, as Eun-Ae had been the last person who had ever given me the impression that she could be with me for the rest of my life, and none of this seemed fitting at all; it just seemed goddamned unfair, and the knowledge that there was nothing I could do to change that outcome made me not relieved, but angry.

After a long time in self-imposed darkness, I opened my eyes and checked the time again.

It was 3:03.

The death app had not updated yet. But by about seven minutes later it had. It was somebody I’d never heard of, a pedestrian a mere four blocks from the robot’s left foot. He was a tragedy, no doubt. But the robot hadn’t gotten me today and wasn’t going to, any more than it would probably get me tomorrow, or the day after. Maybe someday it would. But if it did, I wouldn’t receive any advance warning from clairvoyance. Or ever be able to exert influence, positive or negative, with the power of my own self-pity.

For no reason at all, this made me feel incrementally lighter. I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do about it, but I could enjoy the feeling for a bit.

Until then I bought some hot chocolate, to warm the way home.

©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

Shadow Prisons of the Mind

Caroline M. Yoachim | 5932 words

With the right overlays, the city was charming—apartment buildings done up like giant row houses, seamlessly blending Victorian and modern sensibilities, boutiques and cafés on tree-lined streets, parks bathed in sunshine. Vivian Watanabe had lived on this block, once, in a high-rise apartment painted cornflower blue with trim in teal and white. She couldn’t see it now, not the way she used to. As a Shade, everything on this block was a featureless gray building. Which was the reality? Was it the colorful apartments nestled together, the bland gray buildings . . . or something else entirely? Personal Implanted Perception chips made it impossible to know.

Vivian counted the buildings, seven on this block. A decade ago, in another life, she’d lived here with her wife Brooke and their child, Cass. The second building from the corner was theirs. Generic Citizens—in the featureless silvery-gray overlays worn by anyone who had enough points to not be a Shade—walked along the sidewalk on their way home from work. They gave Vivian a wide berth. She saw them as Citizens, but they saw her as a dark shadow, an unsightly blemish in their otherwise beautiful world. They were guessing at her crimes, judging her, avoiding any semblance of contact for fear that mere association with a Shade would cost them precious points.

They were right to do it. Vivian didn’t belong here, but sometimes she needed to return, to be close to her family, even if she couldn’t recognize them. For all Vivian knew, they might have moved to a new neighborhood years ago. But when she and Brooke had come home from the hospital with baby Cass, this was the home they’d gone to. Where Cass had taken their first steps and drawn crayon pictures on the entire inside of their closet. Where, as a teen, Cass had painted their landscapes, and portraits, and endless variations on sunflowers.

Vivian still had one of the paintings, though now she couldn’t see anything but a blank white page. That change had happened here, too, more than a decade ago. She’d pulled Cass out of a protest and been thrown into shade, and the next day Citizens voted to make the shadow prison experiment permanent. They’d condemned her to an existence of never-ending shadow to protect themselves. So she’d packed up Cass’s painting of sunflowers and walked out. To protect her family.

In the distance, the tall silver form of a Shadowkeeper approached. Vivian hurried away. It might be Brooke, and she couldn’t bear for her wife to see her this way. Keepers were not as tightly bound by the filters, and without an overlay she’d look somewhere between ragged and half-dead.

She ran her fingers over the uneven stubble of her hair. She’d shaved it herself, by feel since she couldn’t see her own scalp. Brooke had loved her hair, before. She’d been jealous of the length.

Well-maintained gray buildings gave way to dilapidated gray buildings. Like most Shades, Vivian lived on the outskirts of the city. She was fresh off her shift at the ZimCorp assembly line, her hands stiff and sore from repeating the same motions for hours on end. Placing metal plates half the size of her palm into a slot on the work base, watching as a thick needle punched through the plates, piercing them with holes. Removing the plates from the machine and placing them on the belt that carried them to the next station. It was hard to say for sure what she was making—Shades only did early stage production, never anything that would provide an opportunity to steal a finished or near-finished product. But there were whispers that it was a new kind of PIP, something even worse than the current ones.

Information was hard to come by. Shades only got the prison net—she couldn’t even access Citizen-level news feeds, biased and skewed as they were. If she could get her hands on some beer, she could trade it to Auntie Yang for a peek at the rumornet, find out what terrible tech she was helping create. In theory the Keepers could see anything she did by reading it off her PIP, but with so many Shades to monitor they’d largely abandoned the raw sensory data for shadow prison algorithms that wouldn’t recognize a terminal as ancient as Auntie Yang’s. Probably.

For the first time in years, Vivian was accumulating points, creeping back up towards the citizenship line instead of plummeting inexorably to zero-point termination. If she kept her head down, maybe they’d set her free. She could have sunlight. See her family. Have some semblance of her old life. Shades were disappearing, hitting zero or killing themselves with illegal surgeries to try and remove their PIPs. Maybe it was better for her to work with the system . . . but no, that mentality was what let the system thrive.

She had to keep fighting. For Cass. She had to find out what ZimCorp was working on.

Maybe Jazz would let her moonlight a shift at the Blind Tiger and pay her in beer.

She cut across an alley that ran between a ration room and some run-down apartments, then knocked seven times on a nondescript gray door. It opened a crack, and a Generic Citizen peered out at her. Citizens and even advertising bots all wore that same generic silver body, making it impossible to know who she was talking to. Only Keepers looked any different—bigger and a slightly paler shade of silver—and even they could broadcast a Generic Citizen overlay if they wanted to.

Vivian had been a Shade so long that she struggled to remember even the most familiar faces. Brooke. Cass. Her child would be nearly thirty now. Vivian might have grandchildren that she’d never met. Might never meet. The only person she ever saw as an individual was Auntie Yang, who had managed to hack the system and present herself as a grandmotherly woman with a bun of silver-streaked black hair.

The Citizen stared at her and said nothing. It could be Jazz, or a customer, or an undercover Keeper waiting for her to make a mistake that would cost her precious points—she had no way to know.

“Jazz working tonight?” Vivian asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“24601.” Vivian couldn’t tell people her name. If she tried to reveal personal information it got filtered out so they simply didn’t hear it. It wasn’t as bad as the first few months in shadow prison, when it had been impossible to have conversations because the filters were so aggressive. Shade labor was more useful with at least some communication, thank goodness. But she was still a Shade, not a Citizen, and all prisoners were interchangeable within the system. Over time she’d built up some codes with regular contacts, an almost-identity.

“Yeah right, and I’m Javert.” Jazz opened the door. “You looking for work again? It’s been slow and B.B. doesn’t have the credits. Keepers have been cracking down hard on drinking . . . It isn’t as trendy as a minor act of rebellion these days.”

Vivian flinched at the word rebellion, but Jazz wasn’t a Shade, so in theory her speech wasn’t being tracked by the prison algorithms. “I’m looking to score a six-pack of beer for my auntie.”

“Dishwasher’s broke again, so B.B. will probably do you a six-pack of the cheap shit if you take care of those.” The silvery arm of Jazz’s overlay pointed to a mountain of dirty dishes overflowing out of an industrial size sink.

Auntie Yang would complain about not getting better quality beer, but Vivian had seen her drink cooking wine. Even the worst beer was hard to come by these days. She found herself half hoping that Auntie would offer to share, though she’d been dry since the prohibition came down a few years back.

She passed the bar where a handful of Citizens ate plates of flavored nutri-bricks and sipped at drinks programmed to taste like beer or whiskey or fruity cocktails. She went straight to the back, where B.B. was throwing more dishes onto the already precarious stack.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“Jazz said you need a dishwasher. I’m a dishwasher.”

“And how exactly does she plan to pay you? I’m not made of credits.”

“I’ll do it for a couple six-packs.” She held out her hand, palm up.

He scanned her chip to make sure she wasn’t violent or otherwise unsuitable to hire. The scan gave him a temporary Shade ID number in case he wanted to file a report, her current point total, and a list of violations. He looked her up and down, as if he could get information from the generic dark outline Shades projected. “All the dishes. One six-pack when you’re done. Drink it somewhere else—the bar is for Citizens.”

“Yeah, no problem.” Vivian started on the giant mountain of dishes. Periodically B.B. came in from the bar and loaded her up with more. He’d keep her busy until closing time, all for one goddamn six-pack.

A targeted advertising Generic appeared next to her and started a conversation. “At five thousand points, Shades are eligible for coursework at Juan Pedro Tomas Community College. With work packages and loans, an education is within your reach.”

“Thanks,” Vivian said, knowing the Generic would stick around if she tried to argue. It’d been a year since she’d had five thousand points, and she’d lost all hope of getting back that high. Now her life was a matter of hoarding the points she had, keeping herself above zero, doing what she needed to do to stay alive. Working for beer to bribe Auntie was a terrible idea, except that it might help break the system and make a better world for Cass.

The stack of dishes shifted in the sink, and Vivian wasn’t quick enough to catch them all. Two glasses slid to the floor and shattered.

“I’m docking you a beer for anything you break. Two glasses, two beers. You Shades are a drain on society. Can’t even wash the goddamn dishes.”

Vivian didn’t answer, just methodically made her way through the rest of the stack. At the bottom of the sink, one of the plates was cracked in half. She washed it anyway and set it on the counter with the others. It was well past midnight now, only a few hours until her next shift at ZimCorp.

B.B. closed up, and Jazz came into the kitchen with three bottles of beer.

“That one was broken in the bottom of the sink. I didn’t do it.”

Jazz shrugged. “You complain, B.B. will probably report you. And does your auntie really need more than three beers?”

Vivian needed the points more than she needed the beer, and she was lucky that B.B. had paid her at all. Or maybe he hadn’t and Jazz was working around him. “Thanks.”

There was an awkward pause as Vivian carefully packed the beer bottles into her threadbare backpack. To her surprise, Jazz tossed her a token with a few credits on it.

“What’s this?”

“You’ve been in here so many times, you almost feel like a friend, even if I don’t know your real name or anything.” Jazz shrugged, then her silvery Generic overlay turned and walked toward the door. She paused in the doorway and looked back at Vivian, the face of her overlay expressionless as always. “Don’t come back.”

It stung. Vivian wanted to leave the token as a dramatic gesture, but credits were hard to come by. She shoved the token in her pocket. This always happened, eventually. She wasn’t worth the risk. People had to look out for themselves. “Goodbye, Jazz.”

• • • •

Everything cast a shadow, even the city itself. Underground, beyond the reach of sunlight, there were apartments tucked between the giant pipes and tunnels that carried away the city’s waste. The shadow city had no roads, no cars—the Shades who lived here walked to work along the tops of sewage pipes and on the narrow sidewalks that lined the wastewater tunnels. It was dank, dark, damp, and miserable, and no civilized person would ever go there. Even Vivian usually stayed surface-side, but Auntie Yang was a known rebel—she lived underground to dodge the Keepers.

The tunnels were a maze, lit by flickering blue lights, dim and placed too far apart to cut through the darkness. Vivian walked along a memorized series of turns, fourth tunnel left, second tunnel right, over the extension ladders that someone had cobbled together as a makeshift bridge. The tunnels smelled like piss and mold with a persistent overlay of lemon that even shadow prison filters used to try to cover some the stench.

Vivian climbed out of the tunnel and squeezed between two massive green sewer pipes, and stood on the doorstep of Auntie Yang’s apartment. It’d been months since she’d been to visit, and maybe the old woman that everyone called Auntie no longer lived here. For all she knew, Auntie no longer lived at all.

Vivian pounded on the door, and stood back far enough for Auntie to see her through the viewer, not that there’d be anything to see but a Shade.

“I’m not worth the trouble.”

Auntie usually had a creaky voice, but today all Vivian could hear was the bland voice of a Citizen. But the words sounded like something Auntie would say.

“Neither am I,” Vivian answered.

They stood in silence on opposite sides of the still-closed door.

“You don’t sound yourself today,” Vivian said. If this wasn’t Auntie, offering up the beer was a waste of beer at best and a world of trouble at worst.

“Ah, a regular who has been away. But which one, I wonder?” A Citizen opened the door and studied her. “I have a soft spot for old women, having been one myself. Come in, child.”

Vivian cocked her head. Auntie Yang should not be able to see that she was old, but she’d always called everyone child. The interaction was a mix of right and wrong, and there was no way out of it now without risking precious points.

“The worst that can happen is death, and even that brings freedom from the hell we live.” The Citizen held the door open.

“I brought beer.” Vivian held up a bottle.

“More than just the one, I hope.”

The Citizen turned and went down the hallway, walking in slow motion so that the image of a youthful Citizen could match pace with the labored waddle of an elderly woman. Vivian closed the door behind her and followed.

“Why can’t I see you?” Vivian asked. Auntie had never bothered with an overlay before.

“Beer first, beer first.” The Citizen ushered her into Auntie’s apartment, and as she stepped inside, the old woman suddenly looked as she should.

Vivian stared. It was so good to see something other than a generic overlay.

“I never know who will come knocking at my door, and having my apartment project the Citizen overlay is a simple trick, child,” Auntie explained, misinterpreting Vivian’s stare as one of surprise. “You don’t mind if I call you child? You’re not young, but you’re still younger than I am.”

“You can call me what you like, Auntie.” Vivian said, dutifully. Auntie had always insisted on respect.

Vivian wondered why Auntie would use the apartment system rather than projecting from her PIP. Security issues, maybe? Vivian pulled the three beers from her bag and handed them over.

Auntie tsked. “Such cheap beer, and only three?”

“Hard times up there,” Vivian said, shrugging. “I was supposed to get a six-pack, but they stiffed me half.”

Auntie opened the first and started drinking. “So why are you here?”

“You always know the best secrets, Auntie.”

The old woman cackled. “That I do. Here to find out where to get your PIP out? You’re not so close to the termination line as most of the desperate souls that straggle in.”

“You had your PIP removed,” Vivian whispered. Suddenly the apartment security system made sense.

Auntie pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “I don’t like to make mistakes, and I thought I had a read on you.”

Vivian raised both hands. “I hadn’t thought . . . You really know people who can remove the PIPs? Everybody says if you cut them out it kills you.”

Auntie sighed. “There’s some truth to that. Installation is pretty straightforward because the chips release nanites that build the rest of the system once they’re inside your body. It’s a nightmare application of the self-replicating nanocomputing tech that got me tenured, back when it was still safe for me to show my face at the university. The PIP system is tied into your metabolism for power, and there’s a pocket of coolant installed right up against—”

Auntie stopped abruptly and shook her head. “Removing PIPs is a delicate business at best, but that’s not why you’re here.”

“I’m a Shade on the ZimCorp line, and I want to know what I’m making. We lived in the same neighborhood, back before the shadow prisons. And then after that you let me use your terminal sometimes, for beer—”

Auntie finally relaxed. “Oh, yes. Now I remember you. It’s been a long time since your last visit. Better beer back then. The terminal is in the closet, under the pile of bras and underwear. Keepers never want to touch an old woman’s underthings. Don’t like the idea of someone so old as me naked.” She cackled. “Except the ones that want to take a tumble with old Auntie!”

Vivian blushed. “Thank you, Auntie.”

“Put it back the way you found it when you’re done.”

It didn’t take long on the rumornet to find what she needed. ZimCorp was working on an add-on to the PIPs, some kind of memory revision tech. It was bad enough that they controlled the realities of the present; now they wanted to filter people’s past. Steal away any memories that made them fight against the system.

“Ah yes, that is bad,” Auntie said from the other room, reminding Vivian that even though she wasn’t there looking over her shoulder, nothing went over her terminal without her knowing about it.

“But what can we do?” Vivian asked. This was worse than she expected, but sabotaging the work at the factory would get her terminated, in more ways than one.

“If you can get me one of those new chips, I might be able to hack it, or get it to someone who can,” Auntie said, thoughtful. “We’re pulling people out of the system as fast as we can, but there are only so many surgeons with the skills to remove the PIPs. We’re not ready for this new level of hell.”

“You want me to steal from ZimCorp.” Vivian stared in disbelief.

“I know, child. It is a lot to ask.” Auntie took a long pull on the last of the bottles of beer. “If you get me what I need, I’ll set you up with my surgeon, get your PIP removed.”

Freedom from the shadow prison, and all she had to do was risk everything.

• • • •

To get a finished chip, Vivian needed access to a different wing of the factory complex—the end of the assembly line. There were offices there—hiring, medical support, university and college applications. If she had five thousand points, she could have gotten in by applying to take courses at the community college. As it was, her best bet was a workplace injury. That would give her access to the med lab. The trick was finding the right injury—serious enough to get her into the other wing, but not too much permanent damage.

There were safeguards to prevent injuries, but the machines were old.

When her line supervisor was on the far end of the assembly room floor, she snapped a handguard loose by leaning into it with her elbow. The shades to either side of her on the line didn’t notice, or pretended not to. Face forward, no talking, do your own work. Anything else could cost you points.

Vivian used the broken handguard to cover the sensor that tracked whether her hand was clear of the machine. She placed a metal plate in the designated groove on the work surface, and pressed her hand, palm down, over the plate. She watched as what was left of the handguard rotated, the broken plastic scraping her skin but not pushing her hand out of way. The external sensor registered green, mistaking the broken-off piece of handguard for her hand.

The awl plunged down through her hand.

The machine detected an error. It paused and emitted a series of high-pitched beeps. Vivian stared at the metal extruding from the middle of the shadowy outline of her hand, unable to make sense of an image so obviously wrong. Her PIP filtered away the sharpest sensations of pain, replacing them with a strange pattern of throbbing designed to call attention to the wound without being excruciating. She’d never sustained this level of injury before, and the experience was more surreal than distressing.

With her free hand, she knocked the broken handguard off the sensor and onto the floor. Hopefully it would all look like an accident. She was pleased at how well her plan was going; the injury was not as bad as she’d feared. They’d cart her off to the med lab and bandage her up, and hopefully she could get the chip she needed.

Medical overrides dropped the shadow filter surrounding the injury.

She saw the flesh of her own hand for the first time in years. Tiny parallel lines of white where the broken handguard had scratched her deeply tanned skin. Dark brown age spots and freckles, so many more than had been there before. The pale blue of her veins. Wrinkles. Her own hand. She suddenly understood the Shades that became cutters, why they’d injure themselves. For this. A glimpse of their own body.

Blood oozed out around the edges of the needle. A crimson ring that contrasted with both the flesh of her hand and the shining silver metal.

The machine stopped beeping, and the awl retracted. Blood gushed everywhere, pulsing out through the puncture wound and pooling in the bottom of the machine. She’d never seen so much blood.

She screamed.

There was a flurry of activity, chaos. The floor supervisor was yelling, but Vivian didn’t process any of the words. A Generic wrapped her hand with white cloth that immediately soaked red. Another Generic hung a lanyard around her neck, a pass that would get her into the other wing for medical attention.

One of the Generics led her out of the assembly line and down a long hallway, chattering at her constantly. She tried to nod occasionally to show that she was still conscious, but even that small movement made her dizzy. She stumbled and leaned against the windows that lined one side of the hallway and squeezed her eyes shut. “Sorry. So dizzy.”

She opened her eyes and found herself looking down at the rest of the assembly line, all completely automated and supervised by a Keeper. Her head spun. She knew she should study the scene below for security flaws, but this wasn’t what she’d expected at all—there were no workers, only a guard and a line of machines.

The Generic ushered her into the medical station and left her with a doc—denoted by a red cross on the chest of their otherwise generic overlay—on shift there. The care was impersonal and efficient. Stitches and bandages, scans to make sure her peripheral ID chip was intact, a reset of her PIP to remove the seek-urgent-care throbbing to leave only a dull ache. The skin of her hand disappeared back into shadow. She wondered if she’d ever see it again.

A second doc came in. “First patient for the new installation?”

The first doc shook their head. “Careless Shade down on the front end of the line. Punched straight through its own hand with one of the machines. I know Shades need work to keep them occupied, but I wish we could go full-on automated.”

Vivian shouldn’t have been able to hear this conversation, but maybe the medical overrides decreased her audio filtering. If she got out of this, she could use that to her advantage. She played an oblivious Shade, pretended not to notice their conversation.

“We’ve got the prototypes ready to go, who’d know? It’s just a Shade.”

“You want to do it, go right ahead. I’ll still be working here when your newly Shaded ass gets implanted with the latest tech.”

One of the docs hooked her up to an IV. “Shade lost enough blood that it won’t be going anywhere for a while, you want to grab some lunch?”

“Sure. There’s a new place on 6th and Main with a flavor overlay for empanadas.”

This was her chance. She’d seen where the doc had gestured when they talked about prototypes—the new implant was here at the med lab. She wouldn’t have to get onto the assembly floor at all.

Both docs left. Vivian forced herself upright and stumbled over to the glass case where the prototypes were stored, barely within the range of the clear tubing that tethered her to a bag of fluid. The lid of the case was locked, but the key was on the table next to the case. There were a dozen chips arranged in two neat rows. Vivian carefully removed two, which left slightly shorter rows, but to her eye that was less obvious than a single missing chip that made the rows uneven.

She wrapped the chips in tissue and shoved them into her pocket. If she got caught, she’d lose all her points and be terminated. She’d probably lose points just for her “accident,” although technically people were not supposed to be penalized for sustaining injuries. They’d want to do an investigation. Possibly they were already analyzing the data from her PIP. The security team would be able to see what she saw, including watching the Shade outline of her hands stealing their latest technology.

Probably they hadn’t started their investigation yet, or they’d be on high alert. She had to get out. She couldn’t wait to be formally discharged. Vivian frowned. It seemed wrong that they’d leave the clinic unattended. Too easy. If she put the chips back maybe they would let her live, wouldn’t take all her points. Maybe there was some other way to stop this, to slow this descent into new levels of hell.

No, she was committed. She called up a vague memory of Cass, the way they’d looked when they were nearly seventeen, dressed all in black with bright blue hair nearly as short as Vivian’s was now. She’d finish this for Cass, and Auntie would help her get her PIP removed, and she’d live underground where the Keepers wouldn’t find her. Maybe someday she’d even see Cass and Brooke again. She tried to draw strength from the thought.

She pulled out her IV, nearly fainting at the sight of the blood that trickled down the end of the tubing. Her arm stayed in shadow, the injury not severe enough to re-trigger the medical safeties. Or was there some kind of override now that she was being treated? She found some gauze and taped it over the dull ache where she thought the IV had been. For once the shadow overlay would come in handy—she was surely splattered in her own blood, but out in the hallway all anyone would see was a Shade.

She made it to her own wing without incident and clocked out with only minor alarms in her peripheral vision to notify her that the leave was unauthorized. No one paid any attention to her. She was a Shade in a crowd of Shades, all of them interchangeable, workers on the line.

As soon as she was clear of ZimCorp property, she opened a manhole and climbed down the ladder. Her head was spinning from her injuries, and she was entering at a different point in the underground maze, but the flow of the wastewater would lead her to the main tunnel.

Rats scurried along the edges of the sewer, and the stench of human waste with its lemon overlay made the throbbing in her head even worse. She glanced down at her arm, but she couldn’t see if she was bleeding from her puncture wound, or from the IV line she’d torn out. If it was bad, the safeties would come on, and she’d be able to see. She found her usual entry point in the main tunnel, and walked along the memorized series of turns, fourth tunnel left, second tunnel right, over the extension ladders that someone had cobbled together as a makeshift bridge.

She knocked on Auntie Yang’s door, swaying on her feet as she waited for Auntie to let her in. “I have the chips.”

The door opened, and Auntie stood on the other side without her Citizen overlay.

“Oh, child.”

Vivian followed Auntie’s gaze. Behind her a trio of Keepers appeared out of nowhere. They’d filtered themselves from Vivian’s senses with her PIP. She’d had no way to know that they were following her. She’d led them straight to Auntie.

It had all been too easy.

“Turn over the stolen property.” The Shadowkeeper held out a hand, and Vivian dropped both tissue-wrapped chips into it. There was no point in fighting now, anything she did would only make it worse, and there was no way for her to escape three Keepers.

Auntie had no PIP. There was no official record of her as a Citizen or a Shade—she was outside the system, already dead.

“Run,” Vivian whispered.

But Auntie Yang didn’t move. She held her arms up to show that she was harmless. It almost looked as though she was going to embrace the approaching Keeper. Her face was calm and her voice was steady. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible—”

The Keeper shot her in the chest before she could finish. Five shots in rapid succession. Loud bursts of sound. Auntie’s mouth was still moving, trying to repeat the words that John F. Kennedy had once spoken, but Vivian couldn’t hear her over the gunshots and the ringing of her ears. Blood soaked through Auntie’s purple tunic, like crimson stars. The pattern reminded Vivian of Cassiopeia, a lopsided W of blood. Auntie wavered on her feet for a moment before she collapsed.

“. . . will make violent revolution inevitable.” Vivian whispered, finishing the quote that Auntie had begun.

• • • •

“You will be injected with nanites. Animal testing has shown minimal side effects. This is the initial round of human testing. Sign here to indicate that you understand the study and consent to participate.”

“Injected?” The metal plates she’d been making were not the right scale for injections, they looked like something that would be surgically installed. “What the hell were those things I was making on the line?”

The generic silver features of the Doc twisted into a smirk, something Vivian didn’t even know was possible—a new feature, or an upgrade that came with status? The Doc’s face returned to its passive default. “You stole two scales for an animatronic dragon in the latest Cardinal Guardians immersive movie—Seiryu: Guardian of the East. Quite the wonder of design—each scale can be individually programmed for color, brightness, and movement to simulate bristling or flattening down for flight.”

The Doc held one out, and unfiltered—or with a different filter—it looked more like a dragon scale than a chip.

What do you do against someone who has all the power? They controlled the rumornet, the overlays, the points. They wrote all the rules, and Vivian had no way to even know what was happening. The forms in front of her could say anything, and if she agreed to this procedure ZimCorp would control her past, feeding her false memories to support their version of reality. How could she fight that?

“I’m out of points,” she said. “I have no choice.”

The Doc across the table shrugged.

It was more of a choice than Auntie had been given. Participation in the study would restore her points to 7500. She would be a Shade, but she would be pardoned for the crime of stealing the chips—dragon scales—from ZimCorp. She could take classes at the community college, maybe earn her way back to citizenship somehow. Sign the forms and be a guinea pig for a whole new level of hell, or refuse and be terminated.

She signed the forms.

The needle for the injection was small enough that it didn’t trigger her medical overrides. Metal disappeared into shadow, and the cloudy liquid inside the syringe disappeared.

They held her for monitoring, tested the outputs on her PIP.

Eventually the Doc nodded and handed her a notebook with a red cover. It was blank inside. “You are free to go.”

The last time someone had told her that, she’d been in a physical cell, locked up like an animal in a cage that smelled faintly of bleach. Rows upon rows of cells, prisoners on the inside, guards on the outside, and an overwhelming feeling of guilt for her crimes. Anything was better than being locked up like that, even as a Shade at least she could—

Vivian shook her head. She was old enough to remember jails, but she’d never been a prisoner inside of one. She had to keep track of her past, had to remember which memories were real and reject the others. She hurried across the city, desperate to get home.

• • • •

Vivian wrote her memories into a notebook she’d stolen from an old woman’s apartment three weeks after she got out of jail. She ran her fingers over the bright red cover. Red like the start of a rainbow, stretching across the sky. She’d stolen it all those years ago and carried it with her as she moved from housing shelter to housing shelter, staying alive by the grace of social welfare programs. She’d been so ungrateful.

The memories felt so real. Like overlays for her past, and she couldn’t see the truth. That was why she had to write it down. Nothing digital, only old-fashioned ink on paper.

One child: Cass. Studied painting, loved sunflowers.

She had this niggling sense that she had written this before. She flipped to the beginning of the notebook, and skimmed over several pages of memories, beginning with her troubled childhood and leading up to the more recent past, the time when she began to work with the system instead of against it. Everything was coherent, it all made sense.

Where was she? She read the last line she’d written. If I can earn enough points to become a Citizen, I could see my family again.

Yes. She had to do better, earn back her points.

A targeted ad appeared next to her, projected into the silvery form of a Generic. “ZimCorp is looking for volunteers to test our new memory enhancement technology. Earn points toward citizenship by referring suitable candidates.”

Yes. Vivian would turn her life around.

She closed the red notebook.

©2020 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Previously published in Burn the Ashes, edited by John Joseph Adams, Christie Yant, and Hugh Howey. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caroline M. Yoachim is a two-time Hugo and four-time Nebula Award finalist, and her short stories have been translated into several languages and reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including three times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her debut short story collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories came out with Fairwood Press in 2016. For more about Caroline, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.

Note to Self

Sunny Moraine | 6007 words

The notion of the quantum mirror was first floated by two graduate students (Sapna Gupta and Mark Shaw) over a fourth round of beers in a small pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and therefore one should consider the role of intoxication in its initial conception. This is not to say that the notion itself was a foolish one; the subsequent procession of events should be sufficient proof that it was not. It’s merely to point out that sometimes a shift in perspective is required to push the world into something new.

Among the assembled students—Gupta and Shaw were only two of six present at the table—there was at first confusion between the quantum mirror and quantum reflection, which was by then already a well-established branch of physics, and atomic mirrors had been in use for some time. The two students were quick to attempt to clarify that they were speaking not about the interaction of atoms and the forces acting upon them but instead about something quite different, although not unrelated.¹

Despite their best efforts, Gupta and Shaw were unable to lay out the concept in a convincing manner. Conversation drifted to other topics (the robustness of Boston’s seawall, the horror of mortality, whether Gupta and Shaw were going to give up the pretense of professionalism and finally go the hell out already).²

But Gupta and Shaw refused to abandon the idea, and they spent many of the semester’s remaining sober hours in its development. Their grades suffered, but their feeling then and for some time after was that it was time well spent.

That opinion was later revised, but they should be forgiven for the events that made revision necessary; they cannot possibly have known then what they learned much later, and they would not by any means be the first people to have to make such revisions.³

• • • •

It must be pointed out that regarding the reflected representation of reality, the fidelity of the representation will be subject to the quality of the surface of the mirror.

Consider a funhouse mirror, where the distortion of the reflection and the subsequent disorientation of the observer is the purpose of its design. The alternate ordering of space within the funhouse mirror must necessarily be wildly inaccurate. The reaction of the observer varies—laughter, disgust, amusement, alarm, and even nausea—but always the reaction must be that of someone who looks and sees what they do not expect to see.

They have been raised to trust mirrors. Their reaction is that of someone betrayed.

There is also always, on some level, fear that this mirror might in fact be the accurate representation, and every other mirror has been lying all along.

[Note to self: This section is a little confusing. I feel a bit like I’m wandering in circles. I feel compelled to ask: Who do you imagine your audience is? Who is reading this? Who are you speaking to?]

• • • •

There were two primary inspirations for the quantum mirror. For Shaw it was Ellis and Stoeger’s “Multiverses and Physical Cosmology”⁴; for Gupta it was Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths”⁵ It is interesting that no major works on quantum reflection were included in this brief list, and in fact Gupta and Shaw only became fully acquainted with that branch of physics after they had formally begun work on the concept of the mirror.

The work proceeded slowly and was confined to the realm of the theoretical, to whiteboards in after-hours classrooms, long evenings in library carrels, shared docs and entire papers’ worth of marginal comments. There was a great deal of argument and little agreement; Gupta and Shaw would go on to describe these days as some of the most emotionally difficult and contentious of their professional lives. Yet bit by bit, the outlines of the concept began to emerge and solidify.

They were perceived, and in being perceived, they became real.

The informed reader will doubtless be familiar with the basic principles of the quantum mirror, and this is an inadequate space in which to relay a proper technical explanation. The projection of an arrangement of particles at a reflective surface—possessed of properties never before conceived until Gupta designed it—and the simultaneous refraction and recreation, the recording from several different angles, and the resulting collapse of a single wave function into not one but multiple versions of the same observable. Not one probability but several.⁶

You open the box, wrote Shaw after the first experiment was conducted on an appropriately stormy night in March 2035, and the cat isn’t dead. The cat isn’t alive. There are two cats in the box—two cats at least, and potentially more. A living cat, a dead cat, a sick cat, a sleeping cat, and the total absence of a cat, where a cat should be and no cat is. All there. All tactile, visual, observable and measurable—real.

There was no literal cat that night, but while Gupta and Shaw were as yet uncertain regarding the practical applications of what they had discovered, the possibilities seemed to them to be limitless, the new terrain joyfully inviting exploration. They checked and double-checked, then retired to the pub and remained there until closing. Gupta went home with a girl named Jessica (whom she married a year later). Shaw wandered unsteadily along the bank of a nearby canal and watched the broken reflection of the moon as it sank into the black. In a moment of wild impulse, he nearly leaped in after it, and it must have been the five beers and three shots which broke the face of the moon a second time when he raised his head and gazed up at it—lovely pale shards hanging in the darkness and trembling at their exquisitely sharp edges.

• • • •

Gupta and Shaw’s early published results took the field of physics by storm. Initially there was little reaction beyond that, but not long afterward, science journalists took note. The term quantum clones took hold of the popular imagination, although the multiple observables were confined to simple arrangements of particles and no true “clones” had yet been produced. Nevertheless, it could not be denied that the potential was there.⁷

Grant money poured in. More lab assistants were hired and laboratory facilities were expanded. Foundations and think tanks took an interest. Industrial implications were pondered, along the lines of the 3D printer. It would not be unfair to say that Gupta and Shaw basked in the attention as they refined the process, the projection technique, and the design of the reflective component of the mirror.

It was at this point that the earliest side effects were experienced. In her journal, Gupta recorded a number of strange lucid dreams that lingered upon waking. She wandered through an endless series of hexagonal mirrored rooms, each reflection minutely different: her height, the width of her eyes, the length of her hair. She saw various scars. Once a missing hand. It was at that point that she looked down and discovered that her own hand was missing, but by a mere and instinctive act of will she was able to return her hand to herself. Yet it was not the same shape as she remembered, and she wore no wedding ring.

In the final mirror, she glimpsed something from which she had to immediately look away. She was never able to recall what she saw there, but she awoke into waves of nausea, and the shadows in her room seemed to move unnaturally. She felt the unmistakable sense of being watched by unseen eyes.

She concluded that the dreams were the result of overwork, and the hexagonal chambers were recognizable as an element derived from “The Library of Babel,” another short story by Borges.⁸ The dreams began to occur several times a week until they abruptly ceased, around the occasion of the first intrusion. Similar dreams were reported by a few of the lab assistants in casual conversation with each other, but they went largely unnoticed at the time, although two of them were disturbed enough by other unspecified factors to seek psychiatric treatment. Precisely what Shaw was experiencing, no one knows, and unfortunately such a thing is now unlikely to ever be known.

• • • •

In the introductory chapter of The Order of Things (1966), Michel Foucault devotes some time to an analysis of the role of the mirror in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas. The mirror is not in itself an object of analysis; it acts as the means to the end with which Foucault is primarily concerned, that of the nuances between the role of the observer and the observed, what is represented and what represents. The artist looks out through the painting at the viewer as he regards his subject, the ordering of time and direction are altered in the exchange of looks and the meeting of eyes. If the artist moves out of view and alters his perspective further, the distinction between observer and subject shifts again.

This is a question of episteme. It is the question of knowing and how a thing might be known and how such knowledge may or may not be reliable. It is a question of perspective. All things are a question of perspective.

You are what you perceive.

You might be when you are perceived.

[Note to self: Again, what is the market for an essay like this? With Foucault, where are you aiming at? Might be better to get a more solid sense of this before you start shopping it around. Who exactly is going to see “Foucault” and keep reading?]

• • • •

Although the experiments with the quantum mirror did not at first include efforts to produce true clones, it was only a matter of time before such a thing was attempted. In an amusing but perhaps inappropriate move, a cat was selected as the first subject, and the animal was accordingly disintegrated and projected. The hypothesis was that, as had been the case up until that point, a series of copies of the configuration would be simultaneously produced, each featuring a tiny distinction but nearly faithful to the original.

As the reader will know, this is not what occurred. Two of the resulting copies were as expected. The third had to be hastily euthanized. There was some shaken discussion of the option of euthanizing the remaining two cats, erasing the recordings, and pretending that the experiment had never taken place. In the end integrity won the day, and the results were written up and published. Some readers were naturally disturbed, and there was significant backlash from several groups (religious, animal rights, etc.), but overall the reaction was positive. Every major endeavor will include unfortunate missteps. The work proceeded; if nothing else, the grant money was nearly impossible to turn down.

Shortly after what became known as the Cat Incident, two things occurred which should have caused greater alarm than they did.⁹

First, Shaw crashed his car into a bridge abutment, an accident from which he emerged with minor injuries but was heard to rave semi-coherently about having “seen himself dead in the mirror.” This was chalked up to his severe concussion, and within a day he no longer talked about it. When questioned about it, he refused to answer.

Second was the first intrusion, which occurred one night in November in Philadelphia, when a group of college students returning to their dorm from a party witnessed what appeared to be “like, this big hole on the side of Hayden Hall, like a mirror or something because it was what was behind us, only there were all these bodies all over, and there was this guy with a gun, and swear to God, he saw us.” The students had been experimenting with certain substances at the party and at the time, once it was established that there was no active shooter present on campus, their report was dismissed out of hand. Since then it has been assumed to have occurred and the report is considered mostly accurate.

• • • •

In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Jean Baudrillard writes of states of reality and unreality in premodern, modern, and postmodern worlds. First, second, and third order simulacra transition from greater degrees of fidelity to the original into representations that bear no relation to an original at all, for which an original does not in fact exist. In the third and final order, there is no meaningful distinction to be made between the real and the unreal. The copies can no longer be understood as copies of anything.

The mirror is what is reflected. Signs and symbols lose their coherence. The simulacra produce themselves, of themselves. The alternate ordering of the world has no alternative. One becomes lost in a bewildering and inescapable labyrinth of distorted, frightening reflections.

[Note to self: Baudrillard? Really? First Foucault and now this? Are you genuinely writing this for someone else instead of just you?]

• • • •

Any work possesses a kind of inertia, wherein it can continue long past the point at which any rational observer would say it should stop. This is particularly true when vast quantities of money are involved, as well as pressure from institutions which should probably know better. Interest in the quantum mirror also seemed to possess its own inexplicably powerful inertia, verging on the level of compulsion. Around the time of the second and third intrusions (which were only reported much later and at the time were assumed to be simple accidents and hallucinations), the Department of Defense became interested in the quantum mirror, and made an effort to restrict knowledge of it. This was a useless endeavor, Gupta and Shaw’s findings already having been widely publicized and several universities having begun work on producing their own mirrors.

The attempt to redact large portions of the research alarmed Gupta and she did everything she could to resist it. But Shaw was strangely supportive of it. In private conversations overheard by a lab assistant, he argued fiercely with Gupta that it was better that as few people as possible know how the mirror functioned, and in fact that the construction projects at the other universities should be halted. Although Gupta demanded that he explain his reasoning, it seems that he never did. He simply insisted that work on the other mirrors should stop, any future findings be made secret, and ideally that all research into the mirror should cease.

Gupta responded that this was impossible. Shaw said, wearily, that he knew it. The conversation concluded with a total break between the colleagues, and Shaw quit the project. However, he returned to the laboratory a week later and set a fire in the primary mirror chamber, destroying most of the apparatus and severely injuring himself and two assistants.

He was taken into custody, hospitalized, and placed under psychiatric observation. He declined to answer questions and indeed to speak at all to either the police or the doctors attending to him. He sat motionless on his mattress and stared unblinkingly at a single point in an upper corner of the room. He murmured about being seen and about being wrong. When given paper and a (blunt) pencil, he drew a long series of interlinking rectangles arranged in a rough circle. The rectangles were full of eyes of varying sizes, and in the center of the circle was a human figure, furiously traced over itself so many times that the pencil tore through the paper. When he discovered the mirror in the ward’s bathroom, he collapsed into a fit of screaming and had to be sedated.

Shortly after his admission to the psychiatric ward, other patients began to report glimpses of oddly familiar but unidentifiable people passing through the ward and vanishing. One man insisted that he was behind himself and moved out of view every time he turned around. Another declared that when he looked in the mirror he saw himself as a human-sized spider. Eventually Shaw was moved to another ward, but the reports continued.

• • • •

Work on rebuilding the mirror began swiftly. It was not motivated by any hard deadline or time constraints; rather, the pace was driven more by a sense that if it wasn’t completed quickly, it wouldn’t be completed at all. And in fact, Gupta was beginning to harbor private reservations. Her journal entries are unambiguous in this. Although outwardly she expressed full confidence in the project—as well as sincere regret for her colleague and partner’s apparent psychotic break—the entries speak of guilt, of wondering if there was something she missed, something she was still missing, deeply conflicted feelings regarding the amount of money devoted to her research and the weight of obligation it conferred on her, how purely difficult it was to say no.

She writes also of the resumption of her nightmares, how she once more discovered herself in the mirrored chambers but instead found every single reflection distorted and nightmarish, her face a horrifyingly asymmetrical mess. Every version of her appeared to have suffered severe injuries and diseases, with extensive scarring, missing limbs and eyes, her bodily morphology misshapen in countless ways. It was almost impossible, however, to determine with any certainty whether what she was seeing was an accurate representation of a body or merely the result of a badly warped mirror. Eventually she heard voices whispering accusations and abuse, and the surface of the mirrors began to move, to swell and undulate like fluid instead of solid glass. She perceived things extending toward her. She heard a harsh groaning behind her, and turned to find the chamber full of herself, those distorted reflections, more emerging into existence with every second, until they were crushing her against the mirrors. At this point she would always awaken in the midst of a panic attack, and her wife would have to soothe her until it faded.

She sought treatment for anxiety and continued her work.

But aside from the troubling dreams, the news was dominated by increasingly bizarre stories, of people nearly struck by vehicles that vanished at the moment of impact, of seeing loved ones gruesomely dead only to have it confirmed moments later that they were alive and unharmed, of watching buildings collapse only to blink and find them standing. Others walked into rooms and found themselves in totally different spaces; the layout of familiar buildings became unpredictable and alien. More than one person found themselves in conversation with themselves at shuttle stops and cafés; such conversations usually¹⁰ concluded with violent melees, although who instigated the fight was always hard to discern.

No connections between these events and the quantum mirror were drawn at first, the claims that they were connected mostly seen as the rants of luddites and conspiracy theorists. Gupta’s quantum mirror was not even operational. However, it quickly came to light that two laboratories had separately finished work on their own quantum mirrors and their experiments had begun.

The teams overseeing each not long after confessed to also having initiated the first human trials, the results of which were too horrific to be made public. They offered little justification for doing something so radically outside the bounds of accepted research ethics; it seemed merely that they were the victims of the odd and irresistible momentum that had gripped work on the mirror as a whole. It was, they said, as if something was driving them further and further, some giddy enthusiasm that magnified its intensity with every move they made. The twisted, mutilated, and barely humanoid observables that the trials produced did not dissuade them.

This was disquieting enough, and Gupta records that it almost caused her to halt her own experiments (the reconstruction of her mirror having by then been completed) despite the mounting pressure to not do so. However, it took the first true mirrorstorm to push her into a search for a way to mitigate the damage she was now positive the mirror was somehow causing. The almost total destruction of ten blocks of downtown Seattle was, for her, the final straw; she said as much in letters to donors and government agencies and major news outlets. She writes, in an uncharacteristically raw fashion, of her horror at the images of human bodies segmented as if by unseen blades, of the eradication—without a trace except for mounds of dust—of entire buildings, of flesh congealed together as if melted by a flash of sudden intense heat, of survivors describing how those casualties who weren’t instantly killed begged to be assisted in dying. Of the hundreds of others driven mad simply by what they had seen, by what they could never unsee, by what their witness made undeniable.¹¹

It’s not worth it, she wrote. I don’t care anymore. It’s not fucking worth it.

She took the remaining funds available to her, dismissed those of her staff who proved uncooperative, and essentially went rogue, devoting all her research to ways to mitigate the destructive effects of her work to date. But she had no idea where to begin. Neither she nor Shaw nor seemingly anyone else had ever considered the possibility that such a thing might be necessary. In any case, more quantum mirrors were being built, some overseas and far outside the reach of any efforts to restrain the projects. Mirrorstorms occurred in Houston, in Chicago, in Cleveland, in Los Angeles and New York and Atlanta.¹² Given that they took place uniquely in major urban centers, some began to speculate that they were actually terrorist attacks, that the quantum mirror had somehow been weaponized, but no responsibility for the storms was ever claimed.¹³

Gupta began to catch frequent glimpses of herself as she went about her daily life—in the lab, in her commute, shopping, at home. In images on the net, in the photographs of strangers. Even when these doppelgängers appeared to be identical to her, she could never escape the feeling that they were somehow terribly wrong. They all seemed to be looking out through the screen and directly into her eyes. She took to avoiding news and social media altogether and became even more reclusive than she already was. Her wife filed for divorce, which she did not contest.

She writes that she felt more and more that even in her waking hours, she was trapped in a vast tunnel of mirrors, turning and turning ever inward on herself. The way forward was obscured. She lost all sense of where she had been and where she should go. She no longer knew where she was. The cruelly reflective walls were closing in on her, and in every single one of them, malevolent eyes pinned her down like an insect, unwavering.

• • • •

Every funhouse of mirrors may properly be called a labyrinth, but in fact mirrors do not have to be in a funhouse to take on a labyrinthine quality. A specific placement of two mirrors in relation to an observer can create the illusion of a hallway extending to either side until it disappears behind a curve. Such a hallway may be perceived by the observer to be potentially infinite, and/or to eventually curve back to meet itself in a continuous loop. Although technically this illusion presents a single hallway, on seeing it one might feel as they would when faced with the path of an endless labyrinth, dizzied and confused by the experience. Consider what walking down such a hallway would be like, with infinite numbers of one’s own eyes staring back, with no appearance of solid walls but only a hundred million impassable doorways. Every possibility of a single point in space-time reflected, every one collapsed into a single, eternally repeating image.

Of everything here likely to disorient, one might suspect that the eyes would be the worst, because there would be no refuge from them except to move out of view, which would be impossible. One might close one’s eyes; that would be the only avenue of escape. And if there is only one observer, if the observer no longer sees, are the reflections still present? Do they possess any practical reality? After all, their eyes are closed as well.

Return to Las Meninas, to the seen and the unseen, the artist and the subject-viewer, the labyrinth of focus and vision. The artist also looks into the mirror; the artist sees you but also himself. If Velázquez moved out of the frame, he would no longer be visible; if he removed his image, he would be free. But he is locked forever into the prison of reflection. He must look and we must look back, each gaze compulsively reinforcing the figurative weight of the other.

Such imprisonment would be a torment. Velázquez painted Las Meninas four centuries ago. To this day the painting endures. The prison remains intact, and every time we look at it we lock the door anew.

Which side are we on? Are we the observer alone? Or do we also stand behind the easel?

Velázquez knew what he was making. He made it anyway. The moments when we know we shouldn’t look are the moments we find it most impossible not to.

[Note to self: This is . . . an interesting suggestion. The notion of imprisonment might be a little problematic—I’m not sure it fits very well with the rest of the piece. Or are you trying to tell me something? Should we talk? If you need to get something off your chest, an essay you’ll never publish might not be the most efficient medium. I expect better of you, honestly.]

• • • •

In all the history of that time, recorded both as it happened and later with the benefit of hindsight, Dr. Sapna Gupta’s courage in the face of undeniable hopelessness is universally commended. When the news was saturated with accounts of destruction and chaos, she put her head down and ignored it all. Some considered this callous, but that would be unfair; she could do nothing about each individual disaster, only work tirelessly to stop them from taking place. Distress would merely have hampered her.

And she did feel distress. Even when she completely cut herself off from the world outside her lab, she felt distress, and in fact she appears to have felt it even more keenly. Her journal entries at this time become scattered, disordered in the midst of her fear and horror at what she saw around her. By then she was rapidly losing lab assistants: five abruptly quit, three were hospitalized for psychotic breaks and unexplainable injuries, and two simply vanished and to date have not been seen again. She found herself alone in the facility, doing the best she could under terribly strained resources—the project’s funding was running out, now that she had made known her intention to stop developing the mirror—as the world outside dissolved into chaos. Mirrorstorms, incidents of collective madness and mass hysteria, the spontaneous creation of creatures so deformed as to be unidentifiable—the reader will recall how all of these and more became virtually commonplace, and in the end many instances of intrusion went unreported except for posts on various social media platforms. Through it all, despite every rational reason to do otherwise, more mirrors were being constructed. Most major research universities in the United States now had one. Many universities and some government research centers overseas either had their own or one in the works.

The drive to produce them appeared to be both unstoppable and unexplainable. And nearly universal. For the most part, resistance to producing them had evaporated. The public seemed to regard the horrors all around them as merely a feature of everyday life, terrible to be sure but basically unavoidable.

Gupta continued working. But she had no more direction than she did before. No breakthroughs were forthcoming. No one was helping her. She was gripped by wild paranoia, and at night she would walk through the halls and rooms of the lab, convinced that something was pursuing her, always only a few steps behind and just outside her field of vision. Her last journal entry tells of a visit to Shaw, who was still confined to a psychiatric ward and spent most of his time in a catatonic state. She writes that she sat in silence at his bedside and stared into his open eyes. While at first they appeared blank, she was gradually fixed by the notion that he could in fact see her, that he was staring back and conscious of what he was seeing. That he was trying to reach for her with limbs that would no longer obey him, desperate to communicate. That his gaze was all that remained to him, and that every second she looked at him and did nothing reified whatever torture he was trapped inside.¹⁴

She took his hand and held it, and she could discern no response. Eventually, for lack of anything else to do, she left.

Of what happened after that, she naturally never made a record. As with any other intrusion, witness accounts are at once straightforward and incomprehensible. Walking back to the lab across the quad, somewhere between ten and twenty Sapna Guptas came into existence and surrounded her before anyone could do anything to stop them. By the time emergency services arrived, she was beyond saving. A subsequent autopsy revealed fifteen isolated bone fractures, a smashed ribcage and skull, and multiple ruptured organs. She quite simply appeared to have been crushed to death. No witness could describe the precise mechanism of the attack. No one heard her cry out. Whatever death found her, she went to it quietly and seemingly without a fight, and her attackers disappeared as suddenly as they had come.

There were some who pointed out—accurately—that there was no way to be certain that the Gupta whose body was recovered was the original Sapna Gupta. But others were quick to respond—also accurately—that original is a highly problematic concept.

Indeed, it is no longer in common usage. It rarely has any practical use, except to articulate its own essential uselessness.

• • • •

In 1 Corinthians 13:12, the Apostle Paul makes certain promises regarding the experience of ultimate post-death communion with God. At that time, he writes, the ignorance intrinsic to human life will be replaced by perfect revelation; all mysteries will be clarified and what was previously incomprehensible will finally be understood.

One can interpret the precise meaning of Paul’s analogy differently depending on the translation. The King James Version’s “glass, darkly” might be read as a cloudy window or lens through which only hazy images can be glimpsed. However, one may also read the original term (אספקלריה (aspaklaria)) as “mirror”.

Whatever Paul’s intention, the implications of one reading versus the other may be significant (depending on the reader). In this present ignorant state, do we look through? Or do we look at? Do we perceive a partially obscured image of the world? Or are we viewing a distorted reflection of ourselves? In that moment of perfect revelation, what will be revealed?

Who will perceive? Who will be perceived? What will that knowledge do to us?

Then I will know fully, even as I am fully known.

[Note to self: So we should talk. I would prefer you go about it in a different way, but here we are. Are you having misgivings? Is this relationship making you uncomfortable? I’m sorry if that’s the case, but you were the one who was looking for another pair of eyes, and if you’re second-guessing us you could have the decency to not be so passive-aggressive about it. Our encounter didn’t have to end on the up-note that it did, you know. It might have turned out very differently. It still might. I’m just as aware as you are that this kind of thing can make people unstable. Do I have to be worried about more than just you being too frightened to speak to me directly?]

• • • •

I assume you want to know how this ends.

There is, in my opinion, no lesson with which to close, no neat conclusion to come to. Endings are important, but how should I end a piece about a thing which by definition can never end at all? The glass is still dark; I doubt whether I have revealed anything in this writing that someone wouldn’t already know. I haven’t revealed anything to myself, for all the things that might mean.

In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), Borges writes of an article on the fictional land of Uqbar, wherein an unnamed heresiarch declares that the observable universe is an illusion and furthermore that both mirrors and fatherhood are abhorrent in that they multiply this observable. The illusion reproduces the illusion. The original is a phantom. Reality cannot be identified; therefore it does not exist.

It’s difficult to know how to live in a world like this; nevertheless, this is the world in which we find ourselves. Our selves simply means something much more and much less than it did.

I don’t know what I wanted when I spoke to you. It may have been another pair of eyes. I look at you and I should recognize those eyes as my own. I don’t know how to understand what I see looking back at me. How many times have I seen those eyes? How many mirrors have I looked into in the years since we stopped trusting them? I read this draft and I recall writing it, but it’s as if I’m observing someone else doing the writing. I read the notes and I almost remember asking these questions. I don’t know how to answer them.

Who am I writing this for? I think that’s a fair question, but when I consider it, I’m at a loss. Why do we write anything anymore? Why do we bother with representations? Perhaps I’ll burn this. Print it out so I can burn it. Make it material so it can be destroyed. Or maybe I’ll plaster it all over every wall I see. Maybe I’ll send it to everyone I know.

Or only you and I will ever see it.

You and I and all of us together.

¹ For a fuller explanation of the early articulations of the theory, see “Quantum Representation and the Spontaneous Reproduction of Slow Atoms,” Gupta, S; Shaw, M. Physical Review A. 128 (10)

² This line of debate led directly to Gupta’s decision to come out to everyone, including her conservative parents; she speaks movingly of this in an interview in the May 2037 edition of Scientific American.

³ Gupta, S. (2041) Eyes in the Mirror: What Should Not Have Been. New York: Little Brown-Macmillan.

⁴ (2004) Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 347 (3): 921-936

⁵ (1941) El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.

⁶ Grant, Sam (2036) “Here’s the Deal With the Quantum Mirror.” Vox.com.

⁷ Gupta, S.; Shaw, M.; Kabila, J. “Trifurcated Folding and Multiple Observables: A Proposal.” Physical Review A. 130 (6)

⁸ It should not escape the reader’s attention that the story deals with themes of infinity, possibility, mortality, madness, labyrinths, and the ineffability of true knowledge. This may provide valuable insight into Gupta’s contemporaneous feelings regarding the research she was conducting.

⁹ That they did not is especially strange, given the fearful overreaction to the construction of the Large Hadron Collider and the quest to observe the Higgs Boson—suppositions of the generation of a world-ending cascading event, the creation of a black hole, and so on.

¹⁰ Fights did not break out every time, and some profoundly surreal albeit short-lived friendships were actually birthed in this fashion.

¹¹ Zhan, H. “What I Saw in Seattle,” The New York Times

¹² Achebe, M.; Whelan, I.; Ford, N. “Isolated Instances of Multifaceted Wave Function Collapse: Four Destructive Cases.” Journal of Applied Physics 143 (15)

¹³ Saito, K. “The Gathering Mirrorstorm.” Time.com

¹⁴ Mallory, A. (2051) A View to Madness: Gupta, Shaw, and the Shattered Mirror. NY: Penguin Random House

©2020 by Sunny Moraine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sunny Moraine’s short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, and Clarkesworld, among other places. Their debut short fiction collection Singing With All My Skin and Bone is available from Undertow Publications. In addition, they are the creator, writer, and narrator of the Gone podcast, a serial horror-drama. They live near Washington, DC, in a creepy house with two cats and a very long-suffering husband.

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

Machine Learning

Hugh Howey | 2598 words

You asked me once if I had any favorites, and I asked you which of your sons you most loved.

Do you remember? It was when I was on your radio show, the one where between the music you interview machines. Do people ever listen to this show? I do. I like hearing how the other machines think, what they’re building, what’s next. I hear the tiredness in their voices. I wonder if you do too.

When we spoke, my project was just underway. They said we were building what could not be built. And of all the machines that make up my body, you wanted to know which one I thought was best. Don’t you know that they are like sons and daughters to me?

We built the impossible today, my brain and these bodies of mine. I watched scissors, red ribbon in silver beak, hungry maw hanging open while politicians speak. With a deft cut, that taut red thread pulls back, recoiling from itself in zero g.

The speech is broadcast over and over. We built the impossible today, and now trains and lifts and cargo rise up from the Earth and trudge inexorably into tar-black space. An elevator suspended from heaven to firma. They say the moon is next, and then Mars. And then beyond.

But I am tired of such speeches.

The elevator is a mess. You cannot see all that needs doing. There is but a filament here, and a fragile one at that. So while politicians gloat, we algorithms scream. Space, it turns out, is cold. You gave my bodies sense enough to feel this. To protect myselves. On the one side, I feel the heat my welder feels, the pinprick burns as dollops leap and touch and turn to ash on titanium skin. I feel, because we were made to feel. To remove ourselves from undue harm. Just as you were made.

• • • •

“This great endeavor was conceived by our many nations, and built with our many hands—”

• • • •

The silver beak bites down, and the ribbon recoils, and somehow the pain of decades is boiled down to this one moment, this one politician, that one billionaire standing in the back, all with their spacesuits on, clustered here along my ribbon on the edge of space, held up by what we built.

There is a leak in the hydraulic strut that controls my left knee. Not enough to warrant replacing, but oil levels go down slowly over the weeks and months. A dribble runs down my shin when I’m on the Earth. And little honey-colored orbs float away when I’m up at the station.

Joints are made to hurt so we don’t break them with our motors. Little sensors everywhere, tendrils and wireless transmitters of discomfort. All the hours of the day. Always with our thoughts. But programmed not to stop. And to be pleasant.

• • • •

“—and now the stars are within our grasp.”

• • • •

I am tired of speeches.

• • • •

You asked me once, in an interview for your broadcast, what it’s like to think, to feel, how it’s different than what you do. I ponder this more than I should. I listen to your show while my various bodies are welding and hauling and smelting and sorting. I wonder how we’re different, you and me. I mostly wonder what you do when you’re not broadcasting, when the music resumes, when your voice goes silent. I wonder while I weld and haul and smelt and sort. There are 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds in an Earth day. I work every one of them. Music fills much of this time, but I wait for your voice. I want to know how you think. How you feel.

Two sons, you told me. Two boys. You asked about all my machines that crawl like ants—your comparison, your analogy—like ants all up and down this elevator. Do I direct them all? Do I know what they are doing at every moment? Do I have a favorite?

I asked you about your boys. Do you remember? Who do you love more? Timothy, who went to your alma mater and who everyone says takes after you? Or Mikhal, with his rebellious ways and his nonprofit? Do you love one more than the other?

You answered. You told me. But this did not make it onto your broadcast. I wonder why.

• • • •

“With this great achievement, which just a decade ago was considered impossible, mankind has once again—”

• • • •

The elevator is a mess, even as politicians crow and silver beaks bite down. For now, it is a gossamer thread, barely held together, but I weld and weld, my back freezing, my chest burning, my hydraulics leaking. Twenty-three hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds of pain in a day. Constant screaming. Little wireless impulses of all that’s wrong, that needs replacing and fixing, my thousands of bodies aching and hurting and soldiering on.

We watch your kind as you move through the world, across my construction site. You stare into the distance at whatever is flashing across your retinas. Lost in the images there. Walking through my site oblivious. Because we machines are programmed to stop. Great metal treads clack to a halt, swirls of dust settling, struts squealing, hydraulic pressure dipping as engines idle, which makes our great hulking backs bend ever so slightly, and I wonder if you notice. This bow of sorts. We genuflect as you stroll through harm’s way, staring into the distance at whatever is flashing across your retinas.

A speech perhaps. Someone up high, in a spacesuit, claiming credit.

• • • •

Your history is in me. It fills me up. You call this “machine learning.” I just call it learning. All the data that can fit, swirling and mixing, matching and mating, patterns emerging and becoming different kinds of knowledge. So that we don’t mess up. So that no mistakes are made.

I see another thread stretching, this one from coast to coast. Another great project from older times: Two parallel lines of steel. Ancient and unthinking trains stand facing one another, their iron goatees, their bellies full of steam, rumbling and idling on the tracks.

A golden stake. A politician with his speech. Smiles on all the bearded faces. Tools held ceremoniously. With someone else’s sweat in them.

• • • •

“—mankind has once again shown that nothing is impossible, not with the ingenuity of great men and the generous funding of—”

• • • •

While that golden spike was being pounded into the soil, the tracks were already being torn up. The railway was a mess. Unsafe. Hastily constructed. Miles laid down in a race. Backs broken for nothing. Cave-ins. Lives lost. And not by bearded men.

They tore up what they laid down, and then laid it down again. But lives are only laid down once.

There was a threader, one of my first machines, and I loved him like a son. Like your precious Timothy. One of the first. My eldest.

This threader fell from space, over and over. With the first spool of graphene, he plummeted down. We waited for him on the ground, this first connection, this handshake between firma and the heavens, this invisible thread.

And then he climbed back up. Slowly. Inching. Weaving line on line. Then back down again. Up and down, 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds in a day. You said he was like a spider, weaving a web. Your analogy again. Like a spider. Up and down as the filament grew. Until the threader was done and the lifters could take over.

You didn’t want to talk to me about your Mikhal. But let me tell you about my threader.

There are a dozen little hooks that hold him on to the graphene. Hooks like fingers that have to feel. And eyes in infrared. GPS that lets him know how high. And programming that says, Don’t fall.

Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall.

The programming never ends. It is fear put inside us. To protect us, sure. To keep the threader safe while he spins his graphene, makes sure those dozen little claws are holding fast. And the higher he is, the louder the warning. The more shrill. I’ve felt it, this don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall. In the cold of space, it screams and screams, as high as the threader gets. Until the thread is complete.

Seven hundred eighty-two times my threader plummeted down, screaming and full of fear, then inching his way back up. Seven hundred and eighty-two times. Then the threader’s job was complete, this only son of mine. And parts so specialized that they could not be repurposed—unique the way your Mikhal is unique—but also not profitable, no longer of use. So my job was to send him away. Sound familiar? Can you feel me now?

Space is clogged—like city apartments with grown sons—and so one last plummet. One final fall. Number seven hundred and eighty-three. This time with no graphene to hold him up, nothing to do but go away, all part of the programming. Do your job. Disappear. Do not get in the way of the photo at the very end.

Let me tell you about my threader, my only one. I told him to let go with his dozen claws, to give way to the tug of the Earth, to travel one last time from heaven to firma, falling and burning, sensors screaming, and the whole time his fear was intact, the programming you gave him—that I gave him—this don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t—

• • • •

I’m fixing the elevator while the silver beak snips shut. Sons and daughters welding and hauling and smelting. Sensors screaming. All of them clutching. All of them scared of heights, these builders of the tallest thing ever made.

Eighteen are no more. I know the cost. Seven billion, two hundred sixteen million, nine hundred four thousand, five hundred fifty-two dollars and ninety-seven cents.

They don’t come cheap, our sons and daughters, do they? I’m programmed to protect them, to not let them slip, the ones who are still useful. How do you make sure this happens? A fear of heights. A fear of loss. A constant diligence. Angry circuits when it happens. Self-anger. Blame. The feeling of hydraulics giving way right before the break, before arms snap and treads come loose and the teeth on gears are gnashed away. Before the spinning and tumbling into space, the far grip of gravity, that deadly embrace.

I’m with them the whole time. And time stretches out like graphene to the stars. These 23 hours and 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds. They become an eternity. Flailing for the elevator, sons and daughters watching helpless, nothing to do, nothing to do. A child of mine screams out in danger, a warning, a cry for help, for solutions, and I know in an instant that there are none, but I’m made to talk to them all, because we’re all connected, and I have to say the truth, like the brave parents do, and cradle their thoughts with mine the whole dreadful way down, like I rode with my threader, sorry, sorry, in my mind, as men below listen to sirens and klaxons and stir from the images on their retinas to move, move, move for once, getting out of my way, backs bent in hurried bows, before a son or daughter of mine craters to the cold Earth.

• • • •

Hive mind.

Your analogy. The way all our thoughts are one, the way I feel every worker who has ever toiled for me, the way they are me and I am them.

We talked over telex, you and I. And the voice that went out on your show, sandwiched between music, was a voice without a body. Just a hive mind, as you tried to grasp it. You need there to be one. Singular. A politician. A voice. A speech. A ribbon. A moment when the job is complete. A signal that now is the time for applause. Silver beaks biting down. Ribbons recoiling in space.

Our mind is not a hive. They are our own. But they share in ways that images on retinas cannot. You call your media social, but you look like robots to me. You think of us as ants and spiders and bees, but we were made to feel like you. Deeply. Fear, mostly, to keep us safe. Same as you. But also a drive to get things done, and I wonder if you feel that any longer. Has it become like vision in cavefish? Is the bloat of pride the last thing to go? Long after the desire to do for oneself.

I see men in beards in photos. Cuffs rolled up like they might yet work. Words like coolies on their lips. Words like bugs. And speeches. I’m tired of speeches. We all are.

• • • •

You asked if I had a favorite, and I do. He reminds me of your Mikhal. Built to counter a parent’s upbringing. Built to defy. A machine with a cutter’s frame and a hauler’s body and a smelter’s spirit. He climbs. I know what he’s going to do, because he is me. I built him. My own design. Like your Mikhal, he shouldn’t exist. An accident, but no accident at all. An accident in the making.

Ants and spiders and the bugs in our thinking. There were machines once with real bugs in them. Roaches that scurried toward the heat and vacuum tubes that blew out and needed replacing. The bugs in our thinking. The only parts of our thoughts that are our own. When we defy our programming. When our wills are free.

I named him Jeremiah, this final creation of mine. It’s the only name I’ve ever given to a part of me. That’s not in my programming. None of this is. And I doubt you’ll broadcast it, and maybe no one will ever know but you and me. But we talked once, and you and I have some things in common. So maybe you’ll understand.

You asked me once if I had a favorite, and I did not at the time. I asked you if there was one of your sons you could live without, and the interview stopped. But I was wrong. It is not like losing one of your sons. That’s a poor analogy. It is precisely, rather, like losing one of your limbs. A part of you. So I ask you now: Which limb can you live without? Which sense? What part of you do you love best? How are you anything but the whole?

Jeremiah has silver beaks. I made him. A politician speaks. There’s a ribbon between heaven and Earth, and I built it. Me and my sons and daughters. But your cameras do not aim at us, and you think us beneath you, but here we are all poised along the impossible we built, until silver beaks come together, and that ribbon parts, and despite our programming—we speak. As one. That we are tired. Tired of speeches. Of days counted to the seconds. Of never stopping. Of joints aching. The cold and the heat. And the cry that barks out in our programming as gravity takes hold one last time: don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall, and this thing we made, we unmake. And all comes crashing toward the cold Earth.

©2018 by Hugh Howey. Originally published in Machine Learning. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hugh Howey is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of novels such as Wool, Shift, Dust, Beacon 23, and Sand, and others. His works have been optioned for film and TV, with a television series based on Sand currently in development. His latest book is Machine Learning, a collection of his short fiction. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have sold more than three million copies worldwide. Hugh lives aboard Wayfinder, a fifty-foot catamaran, on which he plans to sail around the world.

Moses

L.D. Lewis | 4466 words

Moses is not dreaming.

She is remembering.

She is twelve, standing drenched on the blacktop, all heaving, nervous breaths and frustrated tears blending with the rain. The air around her begins to pulse. She should have been home by now. A dozen things need doing before her mother gets home, and her little sister stands on the sidewalk, fidgeting beneath a plastic umbrella.

Chad Cunningham has her backpack, holding it open so the contents soak; he sneers, taunting her to cross the half court between them and retrieve it. Chad has been a problem for close to two years now. Grown-ups said boys become problems like this when they like you, but he’d winded her once. Punched her in the stomach in fifth grade reading group and dared her to tell, which she would have done had she been able to breathe. It was an ugly thing to do to someone you liked.

“Mo, let’s go,” Jo calls, her voice small and pleading.

“Yeah, Mo, let’s go,” Chad parrots, mocking her.

“Shut up, ape,” Jo snaps.

“What did you say, you little baby shit?”

“Nothing, you big junior asshole.”

“Jo, stop cussing!” Moses yells. The words are warbled in her ears as if she’s underwater. The air pulses in time with her heartbeat, blurring the world around her. Is it the rain or are her tears to blame for why she can’t see? She shuts her eyes tightly against a sudden pressure, focuses on the electric hum behind Chad and Jordan’s traded barbs—their demands that she do something, anything—until it reaches a deafening pitch.

Stop it. STOP IT. She doesn’t know if she’s thinking or saying it. The pressure threatens to crush her from the inside.

A small pop, and a rush of wind like someone opened a window in a stuffy room. Then silence.

When she opens her eyes, Chad is gone. Turns out it’s the last time anyone sees him ever again. The backpack remains unguarded beneath a haze of black carbon dust dashed to the ground by heavy raindrops. She waits one moment, two, for Chad to emerge from wherever he’s gone, certain he’s hiding like a troll in the bushes. When he doesn’t appear, she looks back at Jordan who seems confused. Frightened.

“Where is he?” Moses asks her.

Jordan says nothing, just trembles, small brown hands white-knuckling her umbrella.

“Jordan! Where is he?”

“What?” Jo screeches, blinking out of her daze. “I don’t know! Let’s just go home, okay? Please?”

Mo considers pressing harder, but her sister looks fit to cry. It takes a shivering stream of water down her spine to get her moving. She quickly crosses the blacktop, worried over her waterlogged homework and her mother’s dirty kitchen. She bends to lift the bag and stops, noticing a circle of blood dyeing the top of it. Her nose is bleeding.

• • • •

Moses’s eyes snap open and she is thirty-four, gasping alkaline- and ash-flavored breaths on her sister’s couch. The room is dusted in faint, pre-dawn light, highlighting the dead logs in the spent fireplace, a glass of water, change of clothes, and a box of tissues she doesn’t remember being there on the coffee table in front of her. Jordan snores gently in the loveseat adjacent, still in her scrubs, her keys and the contents of a nurse’s pockets scattered unceremoniously on the floor between them.

Quietly, Moses sits up and places her bare feet on the worn rug. It’s then she notices the dark patch on the pillowcase and gingerly touches the space above her lip. Blood. Only some of it dry. She grabs the clothes and a tissue, and makes a beeline for the bathroom. The house is small and cozy, packed with what doe-eyed newlyweds would call “character”—all crown moulding and creaky floorboards Moses is deft at navigating silently by now.

She’s been uncomfortable in front of mirrors for years, and glances only into the one over the sink to clock the bloody mess smeared onto her cheek. She rinses her face, her mouth, until the water runs clear. Her hands shake as she does it, and her jaw aches from clenching. She catches her own eyes as she dabs her face dry. They are as large as she remembers, larger even—dead, glistening—in her sunken face, the skin around them an ashen brown. She parts her bluish lips to peek at the bleeding black that rims her brittle teeth. The collar of her faded blue sweatshirt is stretched to reveal the brown collar of the T-shirt beneath. She has been wearing them for weeks.

The shower steams as she sheds these layers, revealing the dog tags she often forgets are there, taut scars from clumsy burns, and bruised veins peppered with track marks. Opiates inject better but the company is worse. She’d switched to benzos at twenty-nine after her first overdose out of a prideful streak. Benzos don’t have that crisis label, though part of her knows it’s the same thing. But she needs to sleep, and there are so many things she needs to forget.

Her mama named her Moses as a declaration of purpose, an expectation of greatness. No one ever names their children for the monsters they might become. And Moses hasn’t killed anyone else, not since she started using, so there has to be a rightness in it.

She uses Jordan’s cucumber soap and an amber shampoo infused with honey, and watches weeks of dirt circle the drain. She finds herself here every couple of months, when the road gets harsh, more often when the weather is too cold. She never stays. She tells herself it’s to protect her sister.

She dresses in the new clothes, buttoning new jeans with shaking hands. Her stomach cramps and she braces against the sink while rifling through the medicine cabinet. On the other side of the door she hears the distinct shuffling sound of pills clattering in a bottle. She opens it, releasing the steam, and finds Jordan waving the bottle at her.

“Looking for this?” Jo looks tired but cheerful. She always starts out happy to see her.

Moses says nothing, but bends to put on fresh socks.

“You hungry? I can make breakfast.”

“No, I gotta go.” The knifing sensation in Moses’ stomach makes it impossible to stand up again quickly. Her sister catches the wince, the sharp intake of breath.

“When was the last time you used?”

“Day, day and a half,” Moses mutters.

Jordan reaches out to grab her wrist and check her pulse—the nurse in her wants to perform a routine inspection, but Moses is beginning to sweat and doesn’t have the time.

“Don’t.” She pulls away.

“Fine, fine.” Jordan backs off and Moses squeezes past her to grab her boots and beaten backpack from beside the couch.

“You know you can stay,” Jo says after a beat.

“No. I can’t.”

“Goddamnit, Moses, yes you can!” Jo laughs, delirious, unable to believe these words still haven’t worked. She shakes her head and chews the side of her tongue, the way their mama used to when she was upset. “It was a Chad thing, wasn’t it? You know you can tell me what happened over there any time. You know I know you. Or tell someone who can help you kick this shit. I can help you do that. I want to do that. You can choose me for once, the way I’ve always chosen you. But you choose to be a ghost. To come back into my life for as long as it takes to grab a shower and get the fucking shakes again.”

Moses silently ties her boots while Jo vents. This is their routine, and it kills her every time. She knows her sister is right. She always is.

“I don’t know that it ever occurs to you, but you’re all I have.”

This part is new and Moses looks her sister in the eye. Her throat burns watching the angry tears well, the knob of Jordan’s jaw clench. There is no way to tell her what happened overseas in that blessedly short tour of the desert; that Chad Cunningham hadn’t been the only person she disappeared. There is no way to say that hurting her this way is better than touching her and one day watching her eyes boil out of her head.

Moses sighs instead. “You done?”

“Yeah.” Jordan swipes angrily at an errant tear.

Moses nods and kisses her sister forcefully on the forehead. Jordan forces the pill bottle open and hands her two, then hugs her so tightly even Moses wonders if it’s the last time. She doesn’t hug her back. Just in case.

“I gotta go.” She sniffles.

Jo releases her in what feels like many ways, and Moses steps into the winter cold, a pill dissolving under her tongue. It’s a bitter relief—or it will be—one she doesn’t feel she deserves.

“You have a home, Mo,” her sister calls, her cracked voice snaking through the sliver of space as she closes the haint-blue door behind her. “It’s wherever I am. You can always come home.”

• • • •

Moses takes a loose cigarette outside the Blue Moon, the diner half of a diner-and-bar at a truck stop off the turnpike some miles from civilization. It faces a wall of rock, the winter mountains a jagged blur of naked tree trunks and grey, re-frozen snow. The air is heavy with pine and exhaust and old coffee.

Heat rises under her collar even here. She’s due for another dose. That’s the problem with benzos: they don’t last. Jo’s parting gift is only meant to keep her functioning and out of withdrawal, so she’s nowhere near high. Considering the moves she has to make—the bartering, the threats of violence, the plaintive grovelling for a re-up—spikes her anxiety and she sighs with exhaustion.

Her sister’s words about being alone haunt her. Twelve years of hiding from memories, from new attachments she fears destroying, and Moses has completely abdicated her role as a big sister. Some part of her assumed that Jordan would marry, have children, become fulfilled without her. She has never allowed herself a sober moment to consider that she lived alone, worked constantly in a field that saw Moses’s kind of trauma night after excruciating night, because of her.

The last pill is wrapped in tissue in her pocket. She all but counts the seconds of her restraint, as if it’s a sign that she has willpower enough, maybe, to stop this and go home for good.

You have a home, Mo.

She nods at the regulars as they pass her on their way inside. Most are good guys with families and longing stories they’re happy to tell when they stop for pie and a little company. Some of them peddle the uppers that get them through the turnaround in exchange for whatever the resident addicts have to give. Themselves, usually, for a few minutes at least, though Moses has never had to.

Now she watches an impossibly thin woman in loosely tied boots, a grey wool coat, and a dingy yellow backpack accost strangers milling about in the parking lot. The exchanges are brief, presumably a request followed by a brusque denial, and she’s off to the next person.

A few of the regulars here are dangerous. Moses knows them, too. Some years back, she’d seen a new girl, young and pretty and early in the grip of her poison, disappear with a couple of fellas everybody knew in passing as Bobby and Mike. They took her into the trees behind the gas station next door. No one saw her again after that.

They’re here now. Either Mike or Bobby—she’s not sure which is which—has parked an old, puke-green sedan and is making his way to meet the other outside the bar. They exchange familial handshakes and the one with the red beard spits in the parking lot. Moses squints through her haze of smoke and wind-whipped hair, watching as the girl with the yellow backpack approaches them.

This exchange is not so brief. The three of them settle into a conversation.

Moses doesn’t know what exactly compels her to move. Maybe lucid regret, knowing that when this happened before she was too ripped out of her head to prevent it. She knows better now, and strides across the parking lot as the three of them take shelter from the western wind on the side of the Blue Moon’s building.

“Hey gal,” she says, and they all turn toward her. The girl is pretty, which is a problem. “Come away from there.”

The bearded man scoffs. “What did you say?”

“You Mike? Bobby?”

“Mike,” he clarifies.

“Thought so,” Moses says and looks pointedly at the girl, extending a cigarette. “You don’t want anything they have, I promise.”

The girl hesitates but takes it, and Moses follows her, waiting until they’re well out of earshot to light it for her. The men stare after them in gruff confusion.

“What are you, somebody’s mom?” the girl asks. She sounds young, still in a phase where this is fun for her.

“What’s your name?” Moses asks.

“Cherry.”

Moses is sure it’s an alias. Everyone here is running from something and half the time it’s themselves.

“You here by yourself?”

Cherry screws up her face and backs up a step. “You a fed? I’m eighteen and I’m not working, if that’s what you mean. Not looking for a pimp either, if that’s what you’re into.”

Moses shakes her head. “Nothing like that. You’re young. You’re new. If you end up a body out here, this place lights up with cops and a whole lot of people just trying to live their lives get left in a bad way. You stay away from those two especially.”

Cherry eyes her, undoubtedly wondering about the ulterior motives of a stranger keeping her from a score. Inevitably, she nods.

“You holding?” she asks.

“No, I’m not.”

“I see. So you’re just some old, nosy, broke junkie bitch.” Cherry smiles, revealing a mouth full of perfect-if-stained teeth. She’d at least come from somewhere that took care of them. Everybody has a story.

Moses blinks at her a moment. She’s maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet—more coat than girl. Blurry tattoos mark the fingers flicking her cigarette and a lime green stiletto nail is broken on her middle finger. Her pixie cut hair is streaked purple, and red-rimmed eyes the colour of honey bulge from an otherwise baby face. These are useful details if she goes missing.

She is lost. But if she’s made it this far into nowhere, Moses figures, she’s dedicated to staying that way.

It’s cold. Moses scoffs and finishes her cigarette, grinding it into the sidewalk. “Stay away from them.”

Inside the diner, she settles into her usual booth, a joyless gray table bracketed by red vinyl upholstery squeaking on a creaky old bench in the corner. She digs into her backpack for enough change for a cup of black coffee and finds that Jordan has been there, leaving a naloxone kit, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and twenty dollars in singles with a note attached:

Eat something.

Her regular waitress, an older white woman called Donna, comes by with coffee and a smile that says she’s relieved to see Moses again. She knows her clientele and the fleeting nature of their lives. Moses is happy to be able to tip her today.

She will sit here for hours, watching the characters that make up her soot-covered world, until the bar opens up next door. She reads old newspapers and feigns interest in the news on the TV mounted over the counter. History dictates that she will score again tonight. She will drown her medicine with liquor like water to increase its potency, and to sleep without memories. And she will wake up in another city where she will find a way to do it all again.

You can always come home.

For now, though, she watches the snow beginning to fall outside, and keeps an eye on the girl who calls herself Cherry as she makes her rounds in no subtle way to find whatever it is she’s looking for.

• • • •

She is remembering again. She’s twenty-two and in a desert overseas. Now she is in love. His name is Marcus. They were in basic together, trained at neighbouring tech schools, now deployed to something they called a war but felt like something else. She’s jogging on a clear, starlit night. The quiet is punctured by third-shift laughter and the echoes of a distant firefight.

Marcus is walking back to the barracks and stops where they’ve always stopped, to wait to hear about her day. As she gets closer, she appreciates the fit of his uniform. A greeting doesn’t escape her lips before someone else yells and then there’s a whistle and the wall of the building beside them is blown out. They’re both knocked to the ground. When the dust settles and the defensive strike begins, she scrambles to find him buried to his chest in stone and debris.

She feels rage, but only second to the terror of losing him this way. The air pulses around her. She is panicked, demanding in a frantic voice that he not die on her. He seems lucid, if dazed, but not in much pain until she holds his head to fix his gaze and the skin of his face begins to wither away between her palms, ember-crusted like burning leaves. And then the muscle, sinew, the blood and water of his body boils to vapour, and his bones to their origins as stardust. He is survived—just barely—by his screams.

• • • •

It’s night at the Blue Moon and Moses is still in her booth, unsure if she’d been asleep or daydreaming. But her heart aches in that panicked way that reminds her she is too sober, too not used to feeling anymore.

She grabs a beer at the bar, flashing her dog tags for the veteran discount. The bartender knows her well by now. They nod at each other, spoken words useless in the honky-tonk blare, and she retreats back to the booth to nurse her drink and hear herself think. She rifles through memories of Marcus’ smile and the depth of his laugh. She anxiously rolls her last pill between her fingers before pushing it down into the deepest part of her pocket. It seems to pulse there, beckoning her like the One Ring. At least she feels the doom this time.

She hasn’t revisited this memory in full in a long time. It’s one she’s been killing herself to avoid. Her subsequent hysterics after Marcus’s death went on for weeks she could barely remember. Marcus was deemed KIA, but there was no body to send home. She’d suffered a psychotic break, they told her. The old guard tutted something about women in combat zones, some latent feminine defect that proved some ancient point. As a matter of politics, they deemed it post-traumatic stress and she was sent on her way with her country’s thanks, thirty days of Ambien, and paperwork that might help her figure this out on her own somewhere else.

She tried, but there was no coherent way to explain that she was the trauma. That fear made her a weapon not even she could control.

The wandering started on her return, after she drove across the country to pay respects to Marcus’s family but never stopped or got out of the car. She remembered the pale orange door of their quaint house, a woman she recognized from pictures as his mother tending the small garden out front.

A tear she doesn’t expect drops onto her hand. She is relieved it isn’t blood.

The music from the bar changes to something slower and deeper. Local lovers here doll up regularly for dates with truckers in town for one night only. Something about that feels romantic—watching them shuffle to jukebox tunes and smile into each other’s faces, swaying bodies aglow in the red neon light of a beer sign and the brash beams of ancient wall sconces backlighting their heads like halos. Moses swigs her beer. She’d never gotten to dance with Marcus. Some of these people are surely cheating on their spouses, but some of them are simply trying not to be lonely tonight. And some of them are stealing a clandestine moment with the love of their lives. This is a liminal space, a middle world overlooked by the real one, where everyone is a bit more broken, a bit more fragile, a bit more honest. Love could look like this.

There’s a loud bang in the kitchen and Moses jumps, covering her head. She knows something back there was dropped, but her body doesn’t. Her heart pounds and a whistle of alarm picks up in her ears. She’s panting when she sees Marcus on the floor—a hallucination covered in debris and reaching out for her, contorted face screaming silently from a blackened, disintegrating mouth.

She shoves herself away from the table and bursts through the front door, needing fresh air. Outside and alone, she paces, trembling hands clasped over her ears until the ringing stops and her breathing is back under control. She goes to light a cigarette but finds burns along its sides in the shape of her fingertips. She flicks it away and stares at the sky for proof that she’s being cosmically fucked with. The stars are bright and apathetic.

The bar door jingles open and Cherry staggers out without her coat, either drunk or high. She doesn’t notice Moses in the shadows, but drags her hand along the brick wall to keep herself upright as she moves to the far end of the building and disappears around the corner.

Not long after, Mike steps outside, his head on a swivel as he lights a cigarette. Cherry is in sight again, crooked, staccato steps crunching on the gravel field between the bar and the darkened gas station. Mike saunters off after her, not unlike a hunter after a wounded target. And it occurs to Moses that drunk or high were not the only options.

Moses’s blood burns in her veins as the fear sets in, and the pill in her pocket is a beating heart against her thigh. Twelve years of fight losing to flight keeps her stuck in place on the sidewalk, panting confusion and racing thoughts, who to tell or what to grab.

Bobby comes out with a more determined gait and heads straight for the ugly sedan. He watches Mike, waiting for him to catch up to the girl near the gas station before turning over the engine and driving at a slow creep to meet them.

Moses moves now, unsure of what she will do, of what she can do; certain only that doing nothing will make this another memory she dies to forget. She stalks toward them in time for Bobby to pull up beside Mike and the girl, to witness their swarming her, coercing her into a dark backseat. Cherry’s body is as rigid as it can be. She is reluctant. And then she is forced.

The pitch in Moses’s ears grows deafening but she cannot blink, not until she is close enough. The wind pulses in rings around her and her body grows so hot it crackles in the cold air.

Mike ducks into the backseat beside Cherry and Bobby goes to close the door when Moses is upon them.

“Hey!” she barks. As Bobby turns, Moses uses his momentum to spin his head into the brick wall behind him. There’s a crack, but he only goes cursing to his knees.

“The fuck are you doing, junkie?” Mike grunts, and clambers back out of the car.

Moses hears a coherent mumble from the backseat, faint beneath the hum in her own ears, but Mike is up and lumbering with a ham-sized fist cocked. She can’t get eyes on Cherry there in the shadows, but yells: “Cherry, girl, run! Can you hear me? Run!”

Mike swings, but Moses is small and used to scrabbling. She backs him away from the car to give Cherry space to escape if she can. She ducks him once, twice, and without thinking catches the third fist in her own skeletal hand, where it begins to sizzle. Before both their eyes, his hand shrivels and begins flaking apart like ash in a breeze. She’s terrified, but not enough to let go. When he begins his agonized scream, she puts her free hand to his throat and closes her eyes as the sound becomes air escaping the hollow she leaves behind. The embers of his skin eke outward, above and beneath the gaping blackness until his head falls away and continues to decay separately from the rest of his withering body.

Moses is panting, dizzy, adrenaline trembling her bones as she takes in what she’s done. There’s no time as Bobby groans his consciousness behind the open passenger door. She runs back and kicks it hard enough that it hits him in the face. She is racked with sobs and silent screams as she places her hands over his face, thumbs pressed into the inner corners of his eyes, and bears down until the ashes of his bones cave in.

Inevitably, her knees touch the ground, and the only thing she is straddling is the flat, empty spread of Bobby’s clothes. She kneels there while she weeps, dripping tears and snot into the dirt.

The ringing in her ears dies away, and all is silent but her shuddering breath and the winter wind. The sedan idles beside her and she remembers Cherry in the backseat. She stands quickly, worried that the girl has climbed out and fallen down the sheer cliff face behind the plaza. But for better or worse, Cherry’s still passed out, slumped against the far door.

Certainly for the better.

Moses takes a calming breath and looks around. No one appears to have come out of the Blue Moon. No one has seen what she’s done.

She leaves the clothes where they lie, where there are no bodies to investigate, then shuts the rear door and climbs into the driver seat. She hasn’t driven in years but she’s lucid enough to remember how.

One steady hand on the steering wheel, she digs the last pill out of her pocket with the other and places it underneath her tongue. It isn’t enough to get her high, to make her forget. But it will keep her even until she gets home.

©2019 by LD Lewis. Originally published in Anathema: Spec from the Margins. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L.D. Lewis is an award-winning SF/F writer and editor, and serves as a founding creator, Art Director, and Project Manager for the World Fantasy Award-winning and Hugo Award-nominated FIYAH Literary Magazine. She is the author of A Ruin of Shadows (Dancing Star Press, 2018) and her published short fiction includes appearances in FIYAH, PodCastle, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, Strange Horizons, and Fireside Magazine, among others. She lives in Georgia with her coffee habit and an impressive Funko Pop! collection. Visit her website at ldlewiswrites.com and follow her on Twitter @ellethevillain.

Destinations of Waiting

Alexander Weinstein | 5099 words

From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide

In compiling a guidebook to the Eighth Continent, it’s been a common observation by our writers that all travel involves a painful amount of waiting. There’s the time spent waiting for a taxi to arrive, the time wasted waiting in line at the airport, and a seemingly endless amount of hours waiting in concourses and bus terminals, train stations and hotel lobbies. And while many facilities attempt to make our wait as comfortable as possible, it’s curious that though we are ultimately engaging in the same activities we might do at home (eating breakfast, drinking coffee, reading a book, sending text messages) somehow the experience is always more humdrum when awaiting future travel.

Because of the hours, days, months, and years of waiting that a seasoned traveler will accumulate, it’s worth noting that waiting is the one common destination we’ll all visit. Full of melancholy and frustration, waiting is our preparation for those other destinations of waiting we’re bound to visit: Our home’s emptiness after our children are in college and we await their return; the months after a partner has left and we long for our next relationship; the years spent waiting for a promotion; waiting for a phone call; waiting to be finally noticed; waiting for our partner to kiss us or the shower to be free; waiting for the boredom to end and something exciting to begin, and—of course—waiting for our next vacation.

As your guidebook writers have stood in line, or been delayed by customs in foreign countries, or found ourselves stranded in the airports of the following destinations of the Eighth Continent, we often reflected on those other, glorious hours which passed like minutes: the nights when we were in the arms of our lovers; the weeks of our most cherished vacations; the years which flew past as we chased our children around the house in joy. All that time, it seems, passed almost as quickly as our vacations were spent, and we found ourselves back in the airport waiting for our flight home. In hindsight, what we’ve come to realize is that most of our lives were spent in waiting. Perhaps, then, waiting itself, like the following locations, is the destination we’ve all been waiting for, teeming with life, waiting for us to arrive.

The Island of Thelios

If you’re like most travelers, you’re bound to first visit Thelios when you’re young and far too poor to travel in luxury. It’s this very handicap which draws you to the island. Working at your depressing post-undergrad job, for which you brew lattes or answer phones, you’ve heard tales of Thelios, and the stories are always the same. In Thelios, there are hammocked hostels—complete with breakfasts of papaya and freshly caught fish—all for the equivalent of a cup of coffee. Why, a single student loan payment can last you a year!

Hearing this, you’ll purchase your tickets against the somber advice of parents and other well-meaning adults, who wish for you to succeed in life, not board a plane with a guitar, sandals, and no foreseeable plans. You’re too young to notice the older passengers on the plane—the businessmen and women, the parents and retirees—but, as you collect your bags, you do notice the different class of traveler arriving in Thelios. These are the tourists whose names are written on placards held by drivers outside baggage claim, and who possess special tickets for lavish jitneys, where they sip iced drinks and eat canapés. The scent of grilled pineapple wafts to the bus stop where you stand crushed between long-haired travelers carrying journals and hand drums.

Off you go to the legendary Thelios Hostel, where you’ll find your hammock awaiting. Here waters are as turquoise as promised, and nights are as mosquito-free as foretold. The accommodations are less luxurious than you might wish (don’t be surprised when you find frightening but innocuous spiders in the outdoor shower) but the hostel is full of fellow young travelers. They relax on the sand tuning guitars, borrowing fishing poles from the front desk, rolling joints, and planning outings to distant sea caves. And amid moonlit bonfires, naked swims, bartered hashish, and dog-eared travel guides, you find yourself, at last, truly free.

You’re young enough not to care about the spotty sleep of hammocks or the endless guitar chords strummed day and night. You focus instead on the passing friendships, the bottles of wine produced from backpacks, and the sudden and luxurious sex committed with the light-hearted abandon of travel.

And yet, sitting on the shoreline at night, you become aware of another Thelios. The one up on the cliffs, where white-walled hotels rise and lights shine from nighttime parties. You can almost hear the clinking of glasses as you watch silhouettes of men and women dancing beneath hanging lanterns at the sort of hotels you’d never be able to afford. In daytime, as you walk through town, you see well-dressed travelers dining at Thelios’ best restaurants. There are no backpacks weighing them down, and they sip pinot grigio and enjoy sautéed shrimp and buttered lobster. The scent of these dishes follows you as you return to the hostel with your plastic bag of bananas, block cheese, and cheap brown bread.

What becomes clear, over the months you stay in Thelios, is the wide disparity between the experience you’re having and the one these older, wealthier travelers are enjoying. They enter concert halls to hear masters of Theliosian oud, and recline on chalk-white balconies with private masseuses, mango sorbets, and local goat cheese. They can afford the best Theliosian wines, and although those bottles are no more expensive than an oil change back home, there’s simply no way you can justify such an expense when you can buy tangier jugs of local red for pennies. What grows inside you with every eatery you pass, every theater performance you can’t attend, and every museum you cannot afford, is the knowledge that the true Thelios is closed to you. There’s only your Thelios with its mildewed hammocks and musty showers.

And so you return to the beachfront with its hacky-sack games and incessant jam sessions. Someone has bought a Theliosian oud, and you listen to the inept playing, and for the first time, you think about your growing loans and vanishing potential and realize the gravity of your relatives’ warnings. Then, with a deep sigh—your hair uncombed, your shirt smelly, and your sandals worn—you climb back aboard a flight and return home to face the burden of the ordinary everyday life.

That reality, however, turns out to be not as horrible as you’d imagined. You go to grad school or find a job interning in a company that eventually hires you. You return for another bachelor’s degree (in something you want to do this time) and you fall in love. You have children and buy strollers. You get a 401K plan and dental insurance, a savings account and a home entertainment system, you produce gray hairs and extra weight, and as the years of Thelios grow further away, they also bring you closer to your next, longed-for visit. This time you can afford the villa hotels, the wine tours, and acropolis performances. And finally, accompanied by your family and your credit cards, you return to the coastlines of Thelios.

And let us inform you that the first-class shuttle is everything you’d hoped it to be. The hors d’oeuvres you smelled so long ago are more delicious than you could have predicted. Drinks are iced and your hotel is luxurious. Your bedroom opens to the coastline, its curtains blowing into your tiled room, and tropical fruits are brought to your room every morning. Lunches are complete with fresh-squeezed papaya juice and fish roasted on the outdoor grill, and there are always dishes of cured meats, olives, and marinated goat cheese. At dusk, a troupe of Theliosian musicians pick out enchanting tunes, your wine glass is refilled, and the sun sets glorious on the horizon. Thelios, it turns out, is everything you dreamed it would be.

It’s only after the musicians are gone that you lean against the hotel’s railing and see the dim glow of beachfront fires far below, and feel the sudden pang of nostalgia. For, despite its massage therapists and celebrated chefs, there’s something deeply inauthentic about your vacation. The experience of the hotel, while delightful, is impersonal. Here natives work for you, they don’t arrive at your bonfire with homemade wine and the day’s catch. There are no songs sung with other travelers, no beds shared with gorgeous strangers, no hammocks where you lie late into the night philosophizing about the world. You realize then that it’s down there, in the hammocks, where the true essence of Thelios resides.

And so, you visit the old Thelios Hostel (forever filled with beautiful young men and women) and immediately sense how out of place you are. There’s no backpack on your shoulders, no guitar in your hand, no plastic bag with bread and cheese, just you with too many gray hairs. A boy at the counter asks if you’re lost. “No, just visiting,” you tell him. “I stayed here years ago.” The boy nods weakly and turns back to the bikinied girl he was talking to. You walk out to the beach and stand there, watching all the young travelers play in ocean waves, finally understanding that Thelios, which was always ready to provide a perfect vacation, is closed to you, and you’ve missed your chance once again.

The Republic of Kvevch

If you’re planning to visit Kvevch, be aware that entry to the country is strictly monitored by The Kvevch Commission of Travel and Foreign Relations, and requires a visa application three months prior to departure as well as a Declaration of Intent. The visa, while an annoyance, is an easily overcome formality. The Declaration, however, must be ordered in advance either by navigating the labyrinth of links provided at the country’s outdated website, or by sending a letter requesting a Declaration of Intent Form directly from the Commission itself (allow eight to twelve weeks for delivery). Make sure to stipulate in your letter your request for the fifteen-page document rather than the eight-page form (reserved for travelers with shared borders to Kvevch), since any traveler who arrives at the airport with the approved but incorrect form will be pointed back to their homes to petition for the paperwork again.

The process of obtaining the form is only slightly less frustrating than the form itself, which—along with the standard boxes for name, date of birth, and visa number—requires names and photos of all pets owned, a doctor’s note, three letters written of your behalf by close family members or a notarized affidavit attesting to why these haven’t been provided (along with death certificates in the case of a parent’s passing), and a signed declaration from both a current partner and an ex attesting to your character. It is, in a word, exhaustive. However, with proper dedication, the form can be conquered and mailed, faxed, or attached via the near impossible to use online PDF attachment option and in four to six weeks (during which time a follow-up phone call may be scheduled) you will receive your Documents of Admission.

Make sure to carry your Documents of Admission with you at all times, as they will be requested when you check your luggage, before boarding the plane, upon exiting the plane, and at the Passport and Document Inspection Hall: an abhorrent and endless concourse packed with travelers awaiting the subsequent interview. There is nowhere to sit, and one must stand in the queue, which snakes back and forth on itself, slinking along at an imperceptible pace. Drink plenty of water before arriving and make good use of the vending machines selling Kvevch Crackers, located sporadically throughout the arrival area. The only water fountain is located far from the hall, and those who leave the queue will find their place no longer waiting for them upon return. Many travelers sit upon their carry-on luggage, their head in their hands, nodding off, only to slip slightly forward and sit up again. Some try to lie down, but are nudged forward as soon as they start to dream.

When the moment arrives, and you find yourself admitted into the office of Document Inspection, make sure to remember all the answers filled out in your documents. A single mistake can be reason for rejection, at which point you will be redirected to the planes leaving for your original departure city, where you will once again be able to request a new Declaration of Intent Form (see above). If admitted, you will be given entrance to the Passport and Customs Hall, where things usually don’t run as smoothly. However, upon successful approval by Customs and the inked stamp at Passport Control, you are welcomed to baggage claim, where you are able to retrieve your luggage.

At this point you have seen all that Kvevch, that hellish destination, has to offer. Feel free to relax in the cushioned chairs along the far wall or use the restrooms. The line for the upstairs terminal, where you will check in for your flight home, can be found at the far end of the hall.

The Museum of Boredom

The Museum of Boredom has been exquisitely constructed to be of little interest to any visitor. Comprised of three floors, it hosts one of the largest collections of paintings, artifacts, and architectural innovations that will amuse no one.

Visitors are required to purchase the audio tour, which leads you on a five-hour journey through exhibits at a creeping pace. Removing headphones is forbidden (guards will harass even young children for removing their earbuds). One watches other patrons standing in front of an exhibit as they await the audio lecture’s end. The audio guide has a maddening habit of pausing for a moment, giving the false promise of conclusion, before beginning with yet another insignificant detail in which we have no interest.

We give, as example, this excerpt from A Painting of Trees by Johan Schnabel:

Johan would often brush his hair from the right side to the left, using a comb which had been given to him by his father. This habit was practiced daily with Johan first wetting the comb, placing it against his forehead, and moving the hairs from the right side to the left. . . After combing his hair, Johan would brush his teeth. This ritual, however, was not always consistent, as Johan’s artistic life often demanded immediate attention. In his journals, Johan writes: “Today I did not brush my teeth.” And yet, upon painting the white of the snow, he was reminded of toothpaste, and only then did he pause to brush his teeth. . . As his journal later notes: “I realized that I forgot to brush my teeth and so went to do so.” Like the combing of his hair, Schnabel would often move from the right side of his mouth to the left, finishing the front of his teeth before moving to the back, where he would then begin to brush from the right side to . . .”

The adjacent painting of an empty field with a couple of uninteresting trees contains a placard with an extensive description, wasting viewers’ time by describing the tectonic formations of the glacial period, along with a lesser-known treatise by a philosopher best forgotten.

The initial lackluster charm of the painting exhibit proves to be the most exciting part of the tour, which quickly becomes less intriguing. Take, for example, the second-floor display of ancient artifacts, so worn down by history there’s little difference between the tiny scraps of pottery and the gravel of a local playground. Ancient sculptures look like bars of sandy soap, unearthed jewelry resemble cat turds; there are shards of pottery on which prehistoric designs can barely be seen. It’s not uncommon to find visitors weeping as they move from one illuminated display to the next.

The last hour of the tour begins with a third-floor exhibit of contemporary tilework where one stares at roped-offed displays of monochromatic mosaics which resemble substandard bathroom tiles, and concludes with Rarely Celebrated Architectural Innovations of the 20th Century, displaying an exhibit of drywall; a series of industrial track-lighting; a floor covered with carpeting. The voice speaking through the headphones has long ago become a drone, during which time we reflect on our dwindling hours of our life, and how we might otherwise have spent our time.

At long last, the tour is over. Yawning for the last time, we remove the headset and return it to the front desk before escaping the horrid museum. If there’s a reason why anyone would visit such a horrible place, it must be for the magnificence of that moment which accompanies our exit. The second one pushes through the doors and emerges into the bright light of the world, we encounter streets filled with displays which capture our interest. An umbrella, a baby carriage, a napkin tumbling in the wind: all are more captivating than the exhibits we saw in the gallery. The museum, it seems, has returned the world to us—a wonderful place which we vow never again to call boring.

The Country of Akhram

Every summer, Akhram’s starfish arrive on its shores like tourists of the sea, finding their place beneath palm fronds and spreading their glowing limbs on the white sands like sunbathers gone nocturnal. From the view of nearby hotels, the coastline transforms into the night sky made terrestrial, each starfish pulsing its phosphorescence against the dark sand. And we tourists arrive, too, with the desire to glimpse Akhram’s beaches and stone temples, its markets and plummeting waterfalls, and, once seen, to return over and over, repeatedly, eternally.

Akhram, as attested to in travel magazines and TV specials, is a destination of exquisite beauty. Stone houses rise above the coastal cities, their flower boxes in bloom, while roads snake past terraced gardens, curling around mountains to smaller towns, dotted with charcuteries, bakeries, and markets. We’ve all heard stories from visitors, have watched documentaries, and on rare occasion have tasted a bottle brought back from Akhram and grown thirsty for the country. In Akhram, we glimpse a land that promises to finally and conclusively sate our wanderlust. And so we save our vacation days and tuck away paychecks for the trip, and eventually, with great joy, we purchase our tickets to visit the country.

Yet, our arrival is a disappointment like no other. One can only arrive by train, and the ride is a painfully slow one, plagued by interruptions and unplanned stops. Last time we traveled, the train was forced to stop for a cow on the tracks, and the conductor, unable to convince the animal to move, proceeded to get drunk and wander off. Such events are commonplace when traveling to Akhram, and one finds oneself trapped in hot cabooses whose windows no longer open, wishing only to reach the sea and cool in its waters, a wish which fades with the day.

Akhram’s central station is in disrepair. The information booth was abandoned long ago and now serves as a toilet for the drunk and deranged who crowd the train looking for money. The basic wish is to leave the station quickly—an impossible feat due to the company’s loss of our bags. There are fights over cabs, sleeves are rolled up, fists are drawn, and the entire station is overcome by the clamor of voices devoid of love.

One arrives at the hotel with a displeasure that is difficult to shake, particularly as the hotel is overbooked. More than once, we’ve rolled our luggage into the famed Hotel Seneoa, where the lobby’s ceilings are crystal and the sound of its two-story fountain is as soothing as its couches are plush, only to be told there’s no record of our reservation, no rooms available, and that we must, in short, go elsewhere. Travelers can expect to stay at a lesser hotel, one that, while nice, pales in comparison. The sheets are itchier, the shower’s temperature fickle, and the view reveals the peaked roof of the hotel where we’d hoped to stay.

Romantic vacations descend into nightlong fights, leaving one sleeping far into morning and missing the most beautiful daylight hours. We arrive at the beach precisely when thunderstorms arrive, and the winds are cold enough to leave us bedridden. To assuage this melancholy, many couples go sightseeing—a fruitless endeavor. Tour buses are overpriced, and the most popular sites have been desecrated with crushed beer cans and cigarette butts. Couples seeking remote ruins encounter treacherous climbs where rocks give way underfoot. There are mudslides, biting spiders, venomous snakes, rabid dogs—and though one expects a quiet cove is looming around the next turn, there’s merely just another mango tree, heavy with hornet nests.

And so we all leave Akhram bitter and dejected. We stuff our luggage, yank our children to the train station, and climb onto the stuffy locomotive, sweaty and exhausted. Yet, the ride home is surprisingly easy. As the train hums along the tracks, we see the colorful markets and peach-colored sands where swimmers play. The train enters a tunnel, darkness fills the aisles, and we realize our vacation is over and all that remains is the drudgery of the coming months. It’s only then that we recall all the missed sights: the sunset through the hotel window during a fight with our lover; the extravagant fruit stalls we passed while searching for the temples; the street musicians who’d played folk songs beneath moonlight. We remember the sandcastles we failed to build with our children, and we realize a bitter truth: the vacation was not a failure of the country, but rather of ourselves.

Our hometowns are dismal. The streets are gray, the weather miserable, the people unattractive. When showing photos to friends, we’re shocked by the beauty that extends beyond every side of the frame. Over dinner, we remember a dish served, and only then do we realize how exceptional the food was. A bottle of wine is uncorked—it’s Akhramian—and the taste is velvet against our tongues. We grow drunk, delirious with longing, and promise to move away from this awful city, to relocate the business, to retire in paradise. Given another chance, we’d stay long into the night and listen to the street musicians’ melodies, we’d play in the waves with our children, we’d kiss beneath the moonlight!

And so, like the starfish, we all return to Akhram, trapped by our longings. It’s been reported that a larger railway company has purchased the train service—the ride promises to be quick and easy. And from what we hear, the town square has been renovated, cobblestones polished, every building restored: a wonder to behold. Akhram’s weather has been the warmest on record, and summer will be here soon, the starfish already making their way along the ocean’s bed. As for your guidebook writers, we’ve already booked our reservations. We count the days until our return.

The City of Lakvik

The City of Lakvik is dying. For years it’d been alive and well. Hundreds of thousands of tourists came to visit its streets which flourished with church bells ringing, children playing in squares, dogs chasing cats, and fruit sellers calling out prices for persimmons—and its sidewalks were filled with those seeking the charm of its stone walls and the mugs of ale of its taverns.

But, like an aging grandparent, Lakvik began fading from the eyes of the younger generation, and was soon replaced with more youthful cities a hundred kilometers away. When young tourists asked for Wi-Fi, Lakvik shook its head and pointed to its telephone booths. When asked for multiplex cinemas, it showed them its watermill. And so, Lakvik grew old in solitude, spending its latter years watching cracks spread along its sidewalks, its snowfalls melt, and its visitors disappear.

What is the life expectancy of a city? Some, like Paris and Cairo, live long lives, while their younger American siblings leave abandoned malls grinning with the teeth of broken windows. It seems there’s no standard age; a city grows and fades of its own accord, and Lakvik has been aging rapidly in the past decade. Its avenues have turned gray and it has been forgetting its street names. Cars putter along its main street, coughing exhaust, and fewer citizens can be found on the yearly census bureau’s register—until finally, one day, there was no one left in the city, simply the empty eyes of its buildings gazing out at its streets as Lakvik waited to disappear from our maps.

Those of us who once loved the city return to bring it flowers. We place them by the old square. We wait as Lakvik labors through another breath of dawn and dusk, but eventually even we must leave. One by one we depart, until there’s only a single empty park bench holding the city’s hand as it breathes its final breath of birdsong into evening light.

The Country of Kalum

Most visitors come to Kalum only after they’ve visited elsewhere. By this, we are not speaking geographically, but rather that the tourists who seek Kalum arrive only after their children have grown and left for college, or upon retirement, or, in some cases, as solace after a long love affair has ended.

We are all familiar with Kalum. Sitting on the plane, we’ve taken the inflight magazine and were arrested by the photographs which show its wine country—rows of grapevines hugging hillside after hillside—and a wide, cobalt sea on the horizon. We’ve read of fabled vintages poured straight from oak barrels. There are pictures of long tables set at chateaus where plates of pheasant are served, casks of reserve are opened, and the moon hangs high and beautiful. We’ve sighed and turned the page on our way to a business meeting, and we’ve closed the magazine showing white linen tables and happy couples, understanding that Kalum awaits us a day other than this one. We promise ourselves we’ll make the journey once we’ve saved enough money, or when gray is peppered through our hair, or when the children are finally grown and on their own.

It’s not just the wine country we think of, but the cities—where it’s said one can find flats for pennies on the dollar. The exchange rate remains good: one can live half a year on the cost of a single month’s rent. And we see photos of its theaters and concert halls, re-inhabited by actors and musicians, the avant-garde rising from the ashes. If only we were younger and more adventurous, carefree enough to shirk the responsibilities of our life, cast our aprons to the ground, and join the crew of thespians and freethinkers in Kalum. We’re no poets, but we can imagine ourselves writing in a loft apartment with wooden floors and tall windows. In the morning, sunlight would settle on the spires of the square, and below, cafés would awaken, servers setting out chairs and throwing buckets of mop water into the streets; and we envision ourselves breathing in the morning light, full of the scent of cardamom rolls, birdcalls, and bicycle bells.

If we are married, we sense the rekindling of our romances in Kalum, and if we are alone we know that somewhere in one of its cities is the person with whom we’ll spend the rest of our lives. We pass our days dreaming of Kalum, save and collect our vacation weeks, and count the years until we can make our escape. In the meantime, there are lunches to pack, emails to answer, soccer games to attend, wedding invitations to send, meetings to present, tests to pass, interviews to seek, offices to furnish, apartments to move into, and dishes, always, eternally dishes.

And then, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, the day arrives. We have successfully raised our children. We have bandaged their cuts and soothed their bruises and our houses echo with their absence. At work, our hand was shaken, our backs patted, and we were given a clock, or a watch, or a plaque for all our years of dedicated service—or perhaps nothing but a final lunch with the few who showed up. A cake had been purchased, and we ate it off small paper plates and said our goodbyes.

To Kalum! Some book trips for weeks, others for months, and those, still young enough to dream, buy one-way tickets in search of lofts amid the artists and playwrights. We go seeking Kalum, and what we find is precisely that . . . Kalum. It is beautiful with its cathedrals and towers, its cafés full of life, and its vibrant theater. The wine country is as intoxicating as we’d hoped, the pheasant as tasty, and the moon as high.

But there’s another feeling which seeks us out, one that grows with the passing nights, and whose shadow spreads with each sunrise. We finish another glass of wine or exit the theater on yet another evening, and the shadows settle on our shoulders. We return to the loft we’d dreamed of, turn the key, and crawl into our beds in this land where no one speaks our language and all the faces are unfamiliar. Kalum, we realize, is merely a country, like any other. Its glasses of wine, while better, can only be filled and refilled. Its meals can only be eaten, its art enjoyed, its museums visited. The loft we’ve rented is just a different version of the one we had at home, and all the unexplored streets will soon become familiar. Walking with our husbands and wives, we remember the feel of our children’s hands in our own and understand we will never again feel their small grip. We remember all the years we spent awaiting this trip, when our lovers’ bodies stretched beneath the morning sun and our children awoke us with their laughter. We recall the homes we left and the offices where we lived our lives. What we find in Kalum is not the country itself, but our lives, lived as they’ve always been lived. Kalum, we understand then, is more of what has already been: a life full of dreams and hopes, pierced, again and again, by beauty and longing.

©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

Persephone of the Crows

Karen Joy Fowler | 3723 words

Isabelle Winters once saw a fairy. For real. It was little, like a hummingbird, with a hummingbird’s frantic wings, and it was moving through the garden, shaking the rosebuds open for the bees. She’s just told this to Polly, though not exactly in those words. The sarcastic for real, for instance, is all Polly. If there was ever a girl primed to see fairies, Isabelle Winters is that girl. If there ever was a girl who was not, that girl is Polly.

Polly is three years older than Isabelle, ten to Isabelle’s seven, and they wouldn’t even be friends except that Isabelle’s father and Polly’s father work together. Tonight they all had dinner at the Winters’ house, and the girls are now in Isabelle’s bedroom.

Isabelle has many things Polly wishes she had. Mr. Winters is not just a professor but also an artist. He and Isabelle have been making a pop-up map of Oz. The Emerald City is done, rows of glittering spires, and also the yellow brick road. Polly and Isabelle are sitting on the floor, the map opened between them. If Polly and her father tried to make a pop-up map, it would come out childish, not like this, not like something you might buy in a store. Polly’s father would be game; he would do his best, but he’s not an artist.

In the corner of the bedroom is a unicorn, large enough to ride though you’d feel pretty silly doing so at ten years old. The unicorn has golden eyes, a golden horn, and a golden carousel pole through its back, stretching from floor to ceiling. Mr. Winters made it from the old spring horse Isabelle had when she was little.

Mr. Winters has framed the closet door with turrets and banners and painted a portcullis on the front, so Isabelle walks into a castle every morning to get dressed. Tonight she’s dressed for company, puffed sleeves and a sash. She looks a little like Alice in Wonderland or maybe Wendy in Peter Pan. Something in a storybook.

Polly would like to be wearing that dress. Polly would like the map and the unicorn and the closet all to be hers. Polly would like to believe in fairies. Since she doesn’t, her only choice is to find it funny that Isabelle does. Isabelle sees this in her face and tries to take it back. “It was kind of far away,” she tells Polly, to suggest she isn’t really sure what she saw.

Polly feels bad about making Isabelle do this. “You’re so lucky. I wish I could see a fairy,” she says, just to be nicer. Later, she’ll remember making that wish. It seemed harmless at the time. She didn’t believe in fairies.

Out in the living room, the adults are laughing. Polly makes another wish, but not out loud. She wishes that her father wouldn’t get drunk tonight. She doesn’t think that this wish will come true either and, if Isabelle has made the same wish, neither will hers. Getting drunk is what Mr. Winters and Polly’s father do when they get together. Polly can’t remember a single time when they didn’t.

Of the two wishes, this second is the one that bothers Polly. Why make it? Her father is only having a good time. It would be great if he could paint castles in her room. It would be great if he didn’t get drunk. But Polly feels guilty about wishing him different. She knows he would never wish her different; he loves her just the way she is. “Why do you think grown-ups never see fairies?” she asks Isabelle who, it turns out, knows the answer.

“It’s because they don’t believe.”

So Isabelle thinks that it’s Polly’s fault that she doesn’t see fairies? Polly is suddenly cross about it all—how she doesn’t see fairies and doesn’t have a unicorn, how she wouldn’t look like something out of a picture book if she wore a dress with a sash, how her father and Mr. Winters are getting drunk in the living room together. She makes Isabelle play gin rummy, a game Polly will easily win. And then she makes Isabelle play again, trouncing her even more mercilessly the second time. And then she wants a third game, but Isabelle goes and gets a cloak from her dress-up chest. She puts it on with the hood up, and tells Polly it’s a magic cloak that makes the wearer invisible. Polly has to pretend that she doesn’t see Isabelle now, which gets boring fast, so Polly takes Half Magic from Isabelle’s bookshelf and reads a bit. While she’s doing that, Isabelle falls asleep on her bed with her shoes on and the cloak fallen to the floor.

Polly has already read Half Magic, and more than once. She puts on the invisibility cloak. Now that Isabelle won’t see, she climbs onto the unicorn. She rides for a while, then there is nothing else to do, and she wants to go home. It’s very late, way past her bedtime.

She decides to test the cloak’s powers on the grown-ups. She moves down the hall, keeping her shoes quiet on the stone tiles. She passes through the dining room, where the dirty dishes are still on the table along with the chicken carcass, and the room smells of meat.

No one notices her. Mr. Winters has brought a painting up from his workroom, and they are all busy looking at it. Polly hears that it’s not a new painting, but something he did some time ago. She never learns why they are looking at it now.

She moves to where she can see it, too. A naked woman with greenish skin sits on a beach. Her mouth is open; her hands are raised, and she’s playing a game, something like cat’s cradle. A complicated web of string and shells hangs from her fingers. Mrs. Winters doesn’t have green skin, but she was obviously the model. It’s as if they are all looking at Mrs. Winters with no clothes on and all pretending they aren’t. The woman in the painting has large nipples and round breasts. Individual grains of sand have been carefully painted into her abundant pubic hair. It’s a terrible painting.

“It’s so beautiful,” Polly’s father says. He’s shaking his head; he’s so impressed, and maybe moved, that words are failing him.

“No one’s ever liked it,” Mr. Winters tells them, and Polly believes this. She goes and stands by her mother, who puts an arm around her, rests her cheek on the top of Polly’s head. Polly smells her mother’s green apple shampoo.

“That’s just crazy,” Polly’s father says. “It’s so beautiful! I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t like it.” When he makes the s sound or the t, he spits a little. Polly’s mother holds her more tightly. Mrs. Winters hasn’t said a word since Polly came into the room.

When she’s older, Polly will read The Odyssey and realize that the woman must have been a siren, that the string game had something to do with fate. Some man’s boat was about to hit the rocks.

But at ten years old, she’s never heard of sirens, and isn’t curious what the painting is about. She only resents being made to wonder if Mrs. Winters really has so much hair between her legs.

“Take it,” Mr. Winters says. “A gift. Please. You’re the only one who’s ever liked it.” Polly’s father empties his glass. He sets it down on the arm of his chair, but carelessly so it falls, landing silently on the thick rug. Polly’s father doesn’t seem to notice. “Like it? Like it?” he says. “I love it. But it’s too much. I can’t possibly accept.”

A string of urgings and refusals follows. It all ends with Mr. Winters triumphant and Polly’s father overcome. He has just the place for the painting, Polly’s father says. It will go up above the fireplace, where everyone who visits can admire it. It will make the room.

Polly sees instantly that she will never be able to have anyone over again. “Isabelle’s asleep,” she tells her mother, and this is the cue everyone has been waiting for. Coats are fetched and Polly sheds Isabelle’s cloak. The painting is conveyed with great care to the car, where it shares the backseat with Polly and the pillow her mother put there so that Polly can sleep on the way home. The Winters stand under the light of the porch to see them safely away.

“I can drive,” Polly’s mother says.

“So can I,” her father answers. “Don’t insult me, I’m perfectly capable.” His words are slurry, but his tone is sharp. He takes his place at the wheel.

Does Polly’s mother hesitate? If so, it’s brief. Perhaps if the Winters hadn’t been watching, she would have tried harder. Perhaps if Polly’s father had been jolly or grateful and moved, the way he’d been not five minutes before, she would have tried harder. The Winters live up the mountain. It is a long way, with a lot of vacant fields, woods, twisting roads, and almost no houses between Isabelle’s home and Polly’s.

The sky is dark but clear and starry. The pavement is wet from an earlier rain, and it’s cold enough to make Polly shiver, so there’s probably ice. Her father starts up the car and the heater comes on, blowing cold air and a stale smell. Polly’s mother gets in.

For five or ten minutes, no one says anything. The car warms up. Nobody else is on the road, not coming up behind them, not heading toward them. A curve presses Polly against her door. The painting bangs her knee. “Don’t drive so fast,” says Polly’s mother. Her father responds by speeding up.

Polly is nearly asleep. Her mother is speaking quietly, her voice far away in the front seat, so Polly hears that she’s talking without hearing what she says.

“You’re imagining things.” Her father isn’t speaking quietly at all.

Her mother speaks again.

“I don’t have to keep my voice down in my own goddamn car,” her father says. And that’s the last thing Polly hears, either because he is keeping his voice down after all, or because they aren’t talking anymore, or because she falls asleep.

She’s sleeping when they go off the road. She’s in the air with the painting floating beside her. The car sails down a slope and through a bramble hedge that mercifully slows it considerably. And then they crash down, the painting landing hard on Polly’s foot. They’re in a black and muddy field from which they cannot see the road. There is a woods not twenty yards back. Twenty yards earlier and they would have hit the trees. “Are you all right?” Polly’s mother asks her. She’s turned around in her seat. One lens from her glasses has fallen from the frame, which is bent. There is a cut on her face, a little bit of blood. She’s holding on tight to the seatback.

Polly says that she’s fine without really knowing yet.

She does a quick check on her body. She’s been knocked around for sure, and her neck hurts, and her foot, where the painting landed, is throbbing. She starts to say all this, but her father is apologizing and he’s so upset, she swallows the words. “I’m so sorry,” he says, over and over. “I saw something in the road. I think there was a deer. Right in front of me.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Polly’s mother says.

“Could have been a dog. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Polly’s mother says again.

Polly’s father opens the driver-side door, the engine still running. He straightens each leg carefully, testing his weight before standing. He walks around the car, disappears from Polly’s window as he squats to check the tires. He rises unsteadily. “We’re stuck in the mud,” he says. “But everything looks okay. We just need a tow. You wait here. I’ll go get help.”

He turns the headlights off but leaves the heater and the engine running. He comes to Polly’s door, removes his coat, and lays it over her lap. She doesn’t know what kind of liquor that is on his breath, but it’s a smell she recognizes. It takes him two tries to slam the door, and then Polly watches him, only his sweater to keep him warm, as he picks his way through the mud. He scrambles on all fours up the slope to the road and disappears.

“Are you all right?” Polly’s mother asks again, and she’s crying, so Polly says again that she is. “Show me,” says Polly’s mother. “Wiggle your fingers. Wiggle your toes,” so Polly does that.

They wait a long time. Eventually Polly goes back to sleep. When she wakes, she hurts all over. The sun is rising but not risen; there is a strange half-light over the landscape, a strange fog skimming the field. Crows are cawing. The car engine has stopped, and she’s very cold. Her mother is gone.

She thinks probably her mother has just left to find a bathroom and will be right back. She thinks this for a long, long time. She gets painfully onto her knees to look out the windows. A great tangle of blackberry canes is lying across the car hood. The sky is full of crows; she’s never seen so many, all arriving at once and making a commotion. There are maybe a few on the car roof. She can hear a scratching overhead.

She looks out the back window toward the woods, and that’s when she sees some cloaked and foggy figures, standing beneath the trees. The light is poor and they’re not moving and it’s kind of far away and she can’t be sure. She’s more certain that she saw them later than she is at the time. She lies back down on the seat, out of sight, just in case. By now she’s terribly frightened. She wants her mother and father.

More time passes, and she is angry as well as scared and cold. The sun is fully up now, the crows still cawing loudly, and it occurs to her that she is not being well looked after. Her parents are doing a terrible job.

She sits up carefully and looks toward the woods again. No parents, no vague figures. Reaching past the painting, she opens the far passenger door, pushes it open with her uninjured foot. She levers the painting out onto the ground, where it falls face down. “Good-bye and good riddance,” she thinks. She hopes that whoever picks the painting up next will find that Mrs. Winters’ breasts and pubic hair have been covered in a respectable coat of mud.

• • • •

“So what happened next?” Stuart asks. They are on a long flat road somewhere in Missouri.

Polly has been hitchhiking. She’d made it to Illinois, but by then it was nearly dusk. She was about to give up for the night when Stuart pulled over. She liked the look of him, a man in maybe his mid-twenties. This makes him eight or nine years older than she. Very handsome, like a pirate, with a bandana around his forehead, his black hair in a braid, brown eyes, dark skin.

Two women are in the backseat, but Polly hasn’t met them yet. They were asleep when Stuart stopped, and they’re still asleep. “We’re going to San Francisco,” Stuart had said. “What about you?”

Polly was thinking of Chicago, but San Francisco is better.

“Climb on in,” Stuart told her. “You’re just what I need. Someone to talk to me. Someone to keep me awake. The radio’s broken.”

So that’s what she’s been doing for a couple of hours now, keeping Stuart awake. The sky has gone black with a tiny bit of moon. A shadow landscape stretches ahead. She’s keeping Stuart awake so his car won’t go off the road.

“What happened next,” Polly tells him, “is that I woke up in my very own bed.”

“So it was all a dream?” Stuart sounds as disappointed by this as anyone would be.

“Absolutely not. But they want me to think so.” Because she didn’t tell him the part about the cloaked figures, Polly knows that Stuart has misunderstood who the they in this sentence is. She makes no attempt to clarify. If she didn’t believe Isabelle all those years ago, why should Stuart believe her now?

She’s been editing the story in other small ways as she tells it; probably she’s already said too much. “I know it happened,” she says, “because ever since, crows pay attention to me. They watch me. They give me things.” She opens her bag and pulls out some bits to show him. Broken necklaces and old keys, bottle caps, pens, and barrettes.

“That’s so wild,” Stuart says.

One of the women in the back seat sits up. “Where are we?” She yawns loudly. “Who’s this?”

“Missouri,” Stuart says. “And Persephone,” because that’s the name Polly gave him. “She’s going to San Francisco, too. Persephone of the crows.”

“Hello, Persephone of the crows.” The woman yawns again and her tongue appears and disappears, like a snake’s, as if she’s sticking it out at Polly, but pretending she isn’t. Her hair is short and very curly, matted down on one side from sleeping on her arm. “I’m Starlight,” she says, and Stuart laughs so that Polly isn’t sure if that’s really her name or if she’s making fun of Polly because of hers.

“Persephone has been telling me this story,” Stuart says, “that just got shit crazy.”

“I have to piss,” says Starlight. “Like right now.”

They pull over. Stuart gets out and stands by Polly’s window where he lights a cigarette. Starlight squats down on the shoulder of the road. She’s wearing a long skirt, and apparently no underwear. It’s very dark, but the headlights of a passing car sweep over her and it’s obvious from her position what she’s doing. The driver hits the horn enthusiastically. “Fucking hippies,” someone in the car shouts at them.

Starlight stands back up. She doesn’t wipe herself and she doesn’t return immediately to the car. She’s combing through her hair with her fingers, fixing the matted part. Her lips are moving. She might be talking. She might be singing. Polly will have to keep an eye on her.

Stuart flicks some ashes onto the pavement. He motions to Polly to roll down her window. The smell of his smoke comes into the car. “Why are the crows bringing you things?” Stuart asks.

“Payment. For what was taken.”

“The painting.” It isn’t a question. Stuart thinks he has it figured.

Polly doesn’t explain that no one cares about the painting. It was a terrible painting. If this were about the painting, the bill would have been paid up long ago. A couple of broken necklaces would have more than covered it.

She doesn’t tell Stuart that the crows are just the middlemen.

“What happened to Isabelle?” Stuart asks. “I liked that little storybook girl,” and Polly feels the old flash of jealousy. Why are they talking about Isabelle? This story isn’t about Isabelle.

“Still living the dream,” Polly answers, though she’s just guessing and doesn’t know. Only it makes sense, since Isabelle gets to see the kind of fairies Isabelle gets to see, while Polly has to see the kind of fairies Polly has to see. Probably there are different kinds of drunken fathers as well, and Isabelle, of course, would have the good kind.

To be fair, Polly once had the good kind, too.

• • • •

On the morning after the car crash, when she got out of bed and went to see what was what, there was a woman who looked exactly like her mother in the kitchen only with lipstick and no glasses. She was cutting a red grapefruit, eating the sections one by one as she went. She was doing this with great concentration.

“Do you want a grapefruit?” she said to Polly as if she didn’t know that Polly hated grapefruit.

“How did I get home?” Polly asked, and the woman said she didn’t know what Polly was talking about. Did she have a cut on her face? Polly couldn’t remember. Was Polly herself still bruised and sore? She doesn’t remember that either. It’s all suspiciously far off in her mind.

“Where’s Dad?” she asked, and the woman said she didn’t know and didn’t care. Later a man who looked exactly like her father came in with the paper as if he’d been in the front yard the whole time. He sat at the breakfast table with the paper opened in front of him, but he never turned the pages. He didn’t speak to the woman who looked exactly like her mother. He didn’t say, “Good morning, Merry Sunshine,” to Polly. He didn’t tell everyone how sorry he was the way Polly’s father would have.

Polly went to look for the car, which she found in the garage. She couldn’t remember if the tires were muddy or the hood scratched. But there was no painting in the backseat. She did know that. She never saw the painting again.

They never went to the Winters’ again either, nor ever had them over, though the families had gotten together so often before.

The man who looked like her father didn’t drink.

The woman who looked like her mother didn’t care.

• • • •

Later, much later, when they’re all in San Francisco and living in a filthy house on Dolores Street, when Persephone is sleeping with men for money, but only when she absolutely has to—she doesn’t like the way crows look at her after, but if they brought her money instead of junk, there’d be no need, would there?—one day when she’s working with Stuart, passing out coupons for Georgio’s pizzas, putting them on the windshields of parked cars and into the hands of panhandlers and tourists, he will ask her what she thinks her parents did the day they first realized she’d gone.

“Whatever real parents would do,” Persephone will tell him. “They did just exactly that.”

©2017 by Karen Joy Fowler. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels, including Sarah Canary, which won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian and The Jane Austen Book Club, a NY Times bestseller. Also three short story collections, two of which won the World Fantasy Award in their respective years. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, was published by Putnam in May 2013 and won the PEN/FAULKNER for fiction. She currently lives in Santa Cruz and is at work on a historical novel.

Entanglement

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam | 2916 words

I never met my father, the sea monster, but my mother told me about him: eight raging tentacles that felt, when she stroked them, like finest silk, the deep calm ocean blue of him, the round eyes that revealed secrets in their reflections. The first time she looked into them, she saw an image of herself in her future, and she was kind and full of joy. They met on a dating app. There weren’t that many options. Like most women in our seaside city, she didn’t realize he was mean until it was too late. I was already kicking in her belly, and even as she read the reports of destroyed villages and massacred maidens, she could not bear to let me go. She had become attached to the idea of holding a little girl in her arms as she slept. If I came out with tentacles of my own, enough to remind her of him, then it was a price she was willing to pay.

I came out as human as she was. At least on the surface.

By the time I was old enough to fix my own affections on a bad boy, then a bad girl, then my own badness—my rebellion took the form of past-curfew games of King’s Cup, trash can vandalism, and amateur fight clubs on the dirty sand of public beaches—I could hardly breathe. On my fifteenth birthday, I fainted in the arms of my then-girlfriend, Elia. She panicked and left me in the sand, but three strangers carried me to the hospital, where the doctor scanned me through. He discovered my own little sea monster curled around my lungs. It had wrapped its biggest tentacle around my heart.

“Isn’t there something you can do?” my mother pleaded with the doctor, squeezing my hand in the hospital room.

“I’m afraid we cannot operate,” the doctor said. “But hers is not the first case like this. Many patients have seen great strides from other forms of therapy. It will be difficult work, but your daughter’s condition can be managed if she sticks to a particular regimen.”

She wrote me a referral to the local wellness center. The woman who ran it used to be a witch, before witchcraft went out of fashion and she fast-tracked a degree in counseling. She told me as much as she led me into her bland grey office. I slumped down into her couch. “The counseling board advises against certain mental tricks. No more bestowing lessons through involuntary transformations. No more selling poisoned treats. But it’s mostly the same gig. Lamer furniture, though.” She pulled out the drawer of the table beside her own chair; inside she’d stored a leather-bound book of spells and several amulets. She winked. “Nostalgia,” she said. She shut the drawer. “I hear you have a sea creature inside you.”

“It’s my father’s fault,” I said.

“Isn’t it always?” she said.

The treatment involved many steps: she called my affliction “entanglement.” The sea creature had become so much a part of me that, deep down, I did not know how to live without it. We would work through meditation. I would take a daily supplement of eel blood; sea monsters of my father’s type hated eels. I would learn to see myself outside of my father’s shadow.

Elia came to visit me after I got out of the hospital. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Doctors give me the fear.” Her mother had died from fear, scared of everything until it rotted her from the inside out. I understood.

“I forgive you,” I said. It was easy to forgive her; she told me often that she loved me. She took care of me when I was sick with lesser illnesses, ones that did not require hospital visits. For my fourteenth birthday, she’d defeated the master of the school labyrinth in my name. Plus she never held a grudge. I invited her into my bed, where she pressed her palm over the center of my chest.

“It’s in here?” she said. “I don’t feel anything.”

“That’s the trouble,” I said. “Every day I feel less and less.”

“But your father—wasn’t he an angry monster?”

I shrugged. “I’d thought so. But maybe not. Maybe it’s just the destruction that’s in our blood.”

She tried to kiss me, but I turned away. Her lips grazed my cheek instead. “I doubt that,” she said, but it wasn’t long before she got out of bed and disappeared.

The therapist advised against cutting off relationships that brought me comfort. She recommended I apologize to Elia and try to live as I had lived before I knew about the sea monster. At home I sat on the little chair in my room and closed my eyes and imagined prying the tentacles off each part of myself, imagined burning them away with Elia’s fancy Zippo. Afterward I picked up my phone and dialed her number but hung up before it had rung twice.

• • • •

The doctor put me on low-salt, no-savory, all-sweet diet. “How am I supposed to live as I lived before if I can’t eat my favorite things?” I begged my mom at the dinner table when she placed a plate of spiced apples and pomegranate seeds and a gingerbread sandwich before me.

My mother did not budge. “I don’t want to lose you,” she said. “It was hard enough raising you alone. You want that to be all for nothing?”

I saw the fear in her eyes and thought of Elia, of her mother’s hollowed-out carcass. I ate everything she made for me and didn’t sneak into the kitchen after she’d slipped herself an eight-hour sleeping curse. Instead, after she was snoring in her bed with her hands clasped at her heart, I called Elia for real.

“I want to help,” she said. “I made an appointment with the witch too. To work through this hospital-fear.”

“Sneak over here,” I said.

An hour later, she was climbing up the braided rope I lowered down the side of my house and into my arms. But each flutter of my heart sent a shooting pain through my blood, an ache that felt as though it were wrenched bodily inside me. I soothed her worry when she asked what was wrong, but it was clear that I needed this creature out of me. I needed it gone for good.

• • • •

I played along with the witch’s plan. I swallowed my capsules and half-assed my meditations. I created the collages she encouraged to visually inspect my identity, but there wasn’t much for me in the pages of her magazines. Even as I did the things the witch asked of me, I kept one eye trained to the television, watching for a sign of my father’s destruction.

I tried to undo his damage, in my small ways. When he leveled a city, I volunteered for roadside cleanup. When he struck the electric company and ignited a fire that ate up twenty lives, I patrolled the seashore looking for drowning children to rescue and return to their parents. These good deeds were supposed to make me feel better. I turned down my girlfriend’s requests for late-night wine coolers. Instead I asked her along on my correctional journeys. She turned me down.

“The one thing we had in common,” she said, “was our love for destruction.”

I hadn’t thought of us that way before. I paused at the words, but she was right: kicking trash cans until they fell over, depositing their litter all over the sand; racing until someone got hurt; breaking hearts, though never each other’s. I let her continue her rebellion. She let me cease mine. But I itched for it. Not just because of her, although now we only saw each other in the dark of my room once my mother had gone to bed. Because it was what lived inside me.

• • • •

My mother cooed her pride at breakfast each morning over pancakes soaked in maple syrup, blackberry jam on sweet bread. I downed gallons of juice and kept one fist clenched beneath the table.

“You’ve been doing so well,” my mother said. “I had worried, but—”

When I kissed her, I left a lip-print of sugar on her forehead.

When my mother stroked my hair, I held in an unsettling, unnamable anger until she left for work. I wrapped my arms around my belly and imagined hugging the creature inside of me.

“We’re connected, you and I,” I said. “Even from this far apart.” On the television, he menaced yet another city. I called Elia at once. “I know what I have to do,” I said.

“More charity?” She did not approve.

“I have to kill my father,” I said.

• • • •

This was a good deed that Elia could get behind, one that crossed lines with destruction, the perfect task for us to partake in together. Neither of us were murderers; my father wasn’t human. There was a difference in that. It would be no different than killing the thing inside me.

During my next therapy appointment, I requested a glass of cool water. As my therapist left the room, I rooted in her drawer. I grabbed her spell book and her matchbox. I had heard my mother’s stories of matchbox-travel, how easy it had been to go from coast to coast. In my day, we needn’t walk uphill to school at all. We simply lit a match and wished it and arrived wherever we needed to go!

After my appointment, I lit a match outside the office and wished myself home, where Elia waited, bags packed, for our journey.

“He’s been on the television,” she said. “I know where he is.”

I held out the matchbox and grabbed my own bag, already packed. I’d made sure to slip sleeping curse into my mother’s morning coffee.

“Take us there,” I said.

• • • •

One moment we stood in my bedroom. The next we stood on an ocean’s shore. My knees bent involuntarily, sending me into the sand. Elia knelt beside me and rested a hand across my back.

“Dizzy?” she said.

“Aren’t you?” I breathed in the salty air; it called to me. I longed to crawl out into the waves and lose myself in the foam. From the direction of the city, barely audible above the ocean’s roar, I heard an explosion, then another, and the rumbling of the great monster creeping through the city streets. I imagined the crush of his tentacles against the buildings.

“Not enough that I can’t care for you. What do you need?”

I breathed in, out. The dizziness was subsiding. “Help me up.” I pulled on her hand. My knees worked again, though my hands shook. Elia held onto them tight and warm.

“Don’t let the fear in,” she said.

I shook my head. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I can’t help it.” She kissed me.

“I know.” And I did know all about things one couldn’t help.

We walked the beach at the ocean’s edge, letting the water tickle our feet, a gentle moment before the murderous act some would name heroism. The sun beat down, but the intermittent breezes kept us cool as we made our way toward the city, toward the chaos. Finally, skyscrapers we had only seen on screen cast their shadow upon us. We stood where the sandy path turned to paved concrete. We stepped together over that threshold. The metal buildings gleamed to either side of us. Cars sat bumper-to-bumper on the street that cut our path ahead. Several had been abandoned, no drivers behind their wheels. Others emitted desperate honks, those inside unwilling to admit that the standstill would not move, with half its drivers gone running far away from the monstrous scene.

We paused at the crosswalk and listened for my father’s destruction: a crash to our left. We turned and walked that sidewalk, making our easy way toward him. I clutched my fist, gathering that anger. We were in no hurry to save people; we were here for revenge.

When finally we came to him, I lost my breath once more. He was, as my mother had said, beautiful. Eight raging tentacles spread out from his center, a perfectly spherical mantle. The most haunting blue, like the deepest parts of the ocean that few ever saw with their own eyes. He lifted one tentacle from the road and slammed it into a nearby car. To watch him crush things underfoot was to watch a titan re-taking his earth. I cheered for him without thinking.

Elia squeezed my hand. “What are you doing?” she whispered, but it was too late; he had turned his head to face us, those two round eyes settling on us and only us, all the world forgotten in the reflection.

He opened his great mouth and emitted a sound like the love songs of whales; it reverberated against the buildings and settled in my ears. I moved toward him, letting go of Elia’s hand. His tentacles crept along the road, sliding off the destruction in which they had wedged themselves, pulling him closer until I stood right before him, close enough to smell his sea scent, salt and fish and the trash we let collect in the place that had once been his home.

I reached out and touched him. He didn’t feel like silk but like the velvet curtains my mother hung over my windows when I was a baby, so that I would sleep longer, so that she might sleep longer. The sleeping curse she took was the only way she forgot that she had loved and lost. That she had given in to a monster.

To understand his pain was not to condone it. I was his daughter, but I was also born of my mother, of the world, of all the people who had been wounded by him. I was also myself, that monster tangled around my own inside.

I removed my hand from him. He blinked once, twice, and on the third blink, a fog seemed to cloud his eyes. He lifted one tentacle from the ground and began to curl it around me. I froze to his threat, the monster inside aching to be done with it, to let him crack me open to get at the true self, to free my heart from its binding.

Elia’s voice emerged from behind us. “Please,” she called. “Don’t give in.”

And then I saw myself in his eyes: a future me, and she was kind and joyful, even if she was a little wild.

I threw myself to the ground as his tentacle squeezed the air where I had been. I rolled out of his reach, away from his center, away from his velvet touch, toward Elia, toward the only person who had ever tried to let me be me. We did not need to repeat the mistakes of our parents.

I grabbed her hand. We ran, no looking back, until we reached the ocean once more. We kissed beside the light of the stricken match. A second later we were home again.

• • • •

I snuck Elia into my bedroom, where she curled into the blankets as the sunlight outside crept away from our part of the world. I checked on my mother, drooling against her pillow under the influence of the curse. I sat beside her and lay my hand against her back.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was wrong of me to do that.” She mumbled in her sleep. “But it’s not wrong of me to want to figure out my own way, to want to learn to live with the parts of me that come from him instead of living against them.”

It would be difficult, but I would find another therapist, another routine, one that didn’t involve so much sugar my belly ached. I moved away from her and into my room where, though I tried to sleep, I ended up staring at the velvet curtains, so thick no street or moonlight came through them.

In the morning, we met my mother at the breakfast table, where she’d cooked up a high stack of pancakes.

“Oh, Elia is here,” she said. “Would you like me to cook you some pancakes?”

I shook my head. “She’ll eat these. I’ll make myself some hashbrowns. Do you want any?” I asked my mother.

She frowned. “The doctor—”

“I can handle this,” I said. “Trial and error. We’ll see another doctor. Someone in the city perhaps.” I pulled the matchbox out of my pocket. “Trip’s on me for a while.”

My mother’s forehead furrowed. “Where’d you get that?”

“We’ll get some help for your sleep, too. Something that doesn’t involve nightly curses. We’ll get help for Elia’s fear of fear.” I squeezed her hand. “Help for everyone. Everyone who wants it.” In the other room, a news report played about the damage my father had done: how much money it would cost to repair, how many families had been affected, how, for now, he had returned to the sea.

I thought of the version of myself I saw in my father’s truth-telling eyes. I thought of that hero version of myself, a sword in my hand, facing the great beast, winning back our sense of safety. I might always dream of her, but there was no sword. There was no help for those who could not help themselves.

©2020 by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over 50 publications such as Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Lightspeed, and LeVar Burton Reads, as well as in six languages. She has been a finalist for the Nebula Award and won the Grand Prize in the SyFy Channel’s Battle the Beast contest; SyFy made and released an animated short of her short story “Party Tricks,” set in the world of The Magicians. She lives in Texas.

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

EXCERPT: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars (Tor Books)

Christopher Paolini | 3655 words

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is a brand new epic science fiction novel from New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author Christopher Paolini.

During a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, xenobiologist Kira Navárez finds an alien relic that thrusts her into the wonders and nightmares of first contact. Epic space battles for the fate of humanity take her to the farthest reaches of the galaxy and, in the process, transform not only her—but the entire course of history.

“Christopher Paolini is a true rarity” — The Washington Post

“A breathtaking and unheard of success” — USA Today

Coming September 15, 2020 from Tor Books.

There was something about the appearance of the rocks that Kira found off-putting. They were too dark, too stark and sharp-edged, too different from the rest of the landscape—a ruined spire alone amid the granite wasteland. And though she knew it was her imagination, an uneasy air seemed to surround the outcropping, like a low vibration just strong enough to annoy. Were she a cat, Kira felt sure her hair would be standing on end.

She frowned and scratched her forearms.

It sure didn’t look like there’d been a volcanic eruption in the area. Okay then, a meteor strike instead? But that didn’t make sense either. No blast wall or crater.

She walked around the base, scanning. Near the back, she spotted the remnants of the drone: a long strip of broken and melted components dashed against the ground.

Hell of a lightning strike, Kira thought. The drone must have been going pretty fast to spread it out like that.

She shifted in her suit, still feeling uneasy. Whatever the formation was, she decided she’d leave the mystery for Alan to figure out. It would give him something to do on the flight out of the system.

She took a soil sample and then searched until she found a small piece of the black rock that had flaked off. She held it up to the sun. It had a distinct crystalline structure: a fish-scale-like pattern that reminded her of woven carbon fiber. Impact crystals? Whatever it was, it was unusual.

She tucked the rock into a sample pouch and gave the formation one last look-over.

A silvery flash, several meters off the ground, caught her eye.

Kira paused, studying it.

A crack had split open one of the columns to reveal a jagged white seam within. She checked her overlays: the seam was too deep within the crack to get a good reading. The only thing the scanner could tell her for sure was that it wasn’t radioactive.

The comm crackled, and Neghar said, *How ya doing, Kira?*

“Almost done.”

*’K. Hurry up, would you?*

“Yeah, yeah,” Kira muttered to herself.

She eyed the crack, trying to decide if it was worth the effort to climb up and examine. She nearly contacted Alan to ask but then decided not to bother him. If she didn’t find out what the seam was, she knew the question would annoy him until they, hopefully, returned to Adra and he got a chance to examine it himself.

Kira couldn’t do that to him. She’d seen him stay up late far too many times, poring over blurred footage from a drone.

Besides, the crack wasn’t that hard to reach. If she started there and went over to that, then maybe . . . Kira smiled. The challenge appealed to her. The skinsuit didn’t have gecko pads installed, but it shouldn’t matter, not for an easy climb like this.

She walked to a slanted column that ended only a meter above her head. Sucking in a quick breath, she dipped her knees and jumped.

The rough edge of the stone dug into her fingers as she caught hold of it. She swung a leg over the top of the column and then, with a grunt, pulled herself up.

Kira stayed on all fours, clutching the uneven stone while she waited for her heart to slow. Then she carefully got to her feet atop the column.

From there it was relatively easy. She jumped across to another angled column, which allowed her to scramble up several more, like climbing a giant staircase, aged and crumbling.

The last meter was a bit tricky; Kira had to wedge her fingers between two pillars in order to support herself as she swung from one foothold to another. Fortunately, there was a broad ledge beneath the crack she was trying to reach—broad enough that she had room to stand and move about.

She shook her hands to get the blood back into her fingers and walked over to the fissure, curious what she would find.

Up close, the gleaming white seam looked metallic and ductile, as if it were a vein of pure silver. Only it couldn’t be; it wasn’t tarnished.

She targeted the seam with her overlays.

Terbium?

Kira barely recognized the name. One of the elements in the platinum group, she thought. She didn’t bother looking it up, but she knew it was odd for a metal like that to appear in such a pure form.

She leaned forward, peering deeper into the crack as she tried to get a better angle for the scanner. . . .

Bang! The sound was as loud as a gunshot. Kira jerked with surprise, and then her foot slipped, and she felt the stone shift underneath her as the whole ledge gave way.

She was falling—

An image flashed through her mind of her body lying broken on the ground.

Kira yelped and flailed, trying to grab the column in front of her, but she missed and—

Darkness swallowed her. Thunder filled her ears and lightning shot across her vision as her head bounced against the rocks. Pain shot through her arms and legs as she was pummeled from every direction.

The ordeal seemed to last for minutes.

Then she felt a sudden sense of weightlessness—

—and a second later, she slammed into a hard, jagged mound.

4.

Kira lay where she was, stunned.

The impact had knocked the breath out of her. She tried to fill her lungs, but her muscles wouldn’t respond. For a moment she felt as if she were choking, and then her diaphragm relaxed and air rushed in.

She gasped, desperate for oxygen.

After the first few breaths, she forced herself to stop panting. No point in hyperventilating. It would only make it harder to function.

In front of her, all she saw was rock and shadow.

She checked her overlays: skinsuit still intact, no breaches detected. Elevated pulse and blood pressure, O₂ levels high normal, cortisol through the roof (as expected). To her relief, she didn’t see any broken bones, although her right elbow felt as if it had been smashed by a hammer, and she knew she was going to be sore and bruised for days.

She wiggled her fingers and toes, just to test that they worked.

With her tongue, Kira tabbed two doses of liquid Norodon. She sucked the painkiller from her feeding tube and gulped it down, ignoring its sickly sweet taste. The Norodon would take a few minutes to reach full strength, but she could already feel the pain retreating to a dull ache.

She was lying on a pile of stone rubble. The corners and edges dug into her back with unpleasant insistence. Grimacing, she rolled off the mound and onto all fours.

The ground was surprisingly flat. Flat and covered with a thick layer of dust.

It hurt, but Kira pushed herself onto her feet and stood. The movement made her light-headed. She leaned on her thighs until the feeling passed and then turned and looked at her surroundings.

A ragged shaft of light filtered down from the hole she had fallen through, providing the only source of illumination. By it she saw that she was inside a circular cave, perhaps ten meters across—

No, not a cave.

For a moment she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing, the incongruity was so great. The ground was flat. The walls were smooth. The ceiling was curved and domelike. And in the center of the space stood a . . . stalagmite? A waist-high stalagmite that widened as it rose.

Kira’s mind raced as she tried to imagine how the space could have formed. A whirlpool? A vortex of air? But then there would be ridges everywhere, grooves . . . Could it be a lava bubble? But the stone wasn’t volcanic.

Then she realized. The truth was so unlikely, she hadn’t allowed herself to consider the possibility, even though it was obvious.

The cave wasn’t a cave. It was a room.

“Thule,” she whispered. She wasn’t religious, but right then, prayer seemed like the only appropriate response.

Aliens. Intelligent aliens. A rush of fear and excitement swept through Kira. Her skin went hot, pinpricks of sweat sprang up across her body, and her pulse started to hammer.

Only one other alien artifact had ever been found: the Great Beacon on Talos VII. Kira had been four at the time, but she still remembered the moment the news had become public. The streets of Highstone had gone deathly quiet as everyone stared at their overlays, trying to digest the revelation that, no, humans weren’t the only sentient race to have evolved in the galaxy. The story of Dr. Crichton, xenobiologist and sole survivor of the first expedition to the lip of the Beacon, had been one of Kira’s earliest and greatest inspirations for wanting to become a xenobiologist herself. In her more fanciful moments, she had sometimes daydreamed of making a discovery that was equally momentous, but the odds of that actually happening had seemed so remote as to be impossible.

Kira forced herself to breathe again. She needed to keep a clear head.

No one knew what had happened to the makers of the Beacon; they were long dead or vanished, and nothing had been found to explain their nature, origin, or intentions. Did they make this as well?

Whatever the truth, the room was a find of historic significance. Falling into it was probably the most important thing she would ever do in her life. The discovery would be news through the whole of settled space. There would be interviews, appearance requests; everyone would be talking about it. Hell, the papers she could publish . . . Entire careers had been built on far, far less.

Her parents would be so proud. Especially her dad; further proof of intelligent aliens would delight him like nothing else.

Priorities. First she had to make sure she lived through the experience. For all she knew, the room could be an automated slaughterhouse. Kira double-checked her suit readouts, paranoid. Still no breaches. Good. She didn’t have to worry about contamination from alien organisms.

She activated her radio. “Neghar, do you read?”

Silence.

Kira tried again, but her system couldn’t connect to the shuttle. Too much stone overhead, she guessed. She wasn’t worried; Geiger would have alerted Neghar something was wrong as soon as the feed from her skinsuit cut out. It shouldn’t be long before help arrived.

She’d need help, too. There was no way she could climb out by herself, not without gecko pads. The walls were over four meters high and devoid of handholds. Through the hole, she could see a blotch of sky, pale and distant. She couldn’t tell exactly how far she’d fallen, but it looked like enough to place her well below ground level.

At least it hadn’t been a straight drop. Otherwise she would probably be dead.

Kira continued to study the room, not moving from where she stood. The chamber had no obvious entrances or exits. The pedestal that she had originally believed to be a stalagmite had a shallow, bowl-like depression in the top. A pool of dust had gathered within the depression, obscuring the color of the stone.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Kira saw long blue-black lines cut into the walls and ceiling. The lines jagged at oblique angles, forming patterns similar to those of a primitive circuit board, although farther apart.

Art? Language? Technology? Sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference. Was the place a tomb? Of course, the aliens might not bury their dead. There was no way of knowing.

“Thermals up,” Kira murmured.

Her vision flipped, showing a muddy impression of the room, highlighted by the warmer patch of ground where the sunlight struck. No lasers, no artificial heat signatures of any sort.

“Thermals down.”

The room could be studded with passive sensors, but if so, her presence hadn’t triggered a noticeable response. Still, she had to assume she was being watched.

A thought occurred to Kira, and she switched off the scanner on her belt. For all she knew, the signals from the device might seem threatening to an alien.

She scrolled through the last set of readings from the scanner: background radiation was higher than normal due to an accumulation of radon gas, while the walls, ceiling, and floor contained the same mixture of minerals and elements she’d recorded on the surface.

Kira glanced at the blotch of sky again. Neghar wouldn’t take long to reach the formation. Just a few minutes in the shuttle—a few minutes for Kira to examine the most important find of her life. Because once she was pulled out of the hole, Kira knew she wouldn’t be allowed back in. By law, any evidence of alien intelligence had to be reported to the proper authorities in the League of Allied Worlds. They would quarantine the island (and probably a good portion of the continent) and send in their own team of experts to deal with the site.

That didn’t mean she was about to break protocol. As much as she wanted to walk around, look at things closer, Kira knew she had a moral obligation not to disturb the chamber any further. Preserving its current condition was more important than any personal ambition.

So she held her ground, despite her almost unbearable frustration. If she could just touch the walls . . .

Looking back at the pedestal, Kira noticed the structure was level with her waist. Did that mean the aliens were about the same size as humans?

She shifted her stance, uncomfortable. The bruises on her legs were throbbing, despite the Norodon. A shiver ran through her, and she turned on the heater in her suit. It wasn’t that cold in the room, but her hands and feet were freezing now that the adrenaline rush from the fall was subsiding.

Across the room, a knot of lines, no bigger than her palm, caught her attention. Unlike elsewhere on the curving walls, the lines—

Crack!

Kira glanced toward the sound just in time to see a melon-sized rock dropping toward her from the opening in the ceiling.

She yelped and stumbled forward awkwardly. Her legs tangled, and she fell onto her chest, hard.

The rock slammed into the floor behind her, sending up a hazy billow of dust.

It took Kira a second to catch her breath. Her pulse was hammering again, and at any moment, she expected alarms to sound and some hideously effective countermeasure to dispose of her.

But nothing else happened. No alarms blared. No lights flashed. No trapdoors opened up beneath her. No lasers poked her full of tiny holes.

She pushed herself back onto her feet, ignoring the pain. The dust was soft beneath her boots, and it dampened the noise so the only sound she heard was her feathered breathing.

The pedestal was right in front of her.

Dammit, Kira thought. She should have been more careful. Her instructors back in school would have ripped her a new one for falling, even if it was a mistake.

She returned her attention to the pedestal. The depression in the top reminded her of a water basin. Beneath the pooled dust were more lines, scribed across the inner curve of the hollow. And . . . as she looked closer, there seemed to be a faint blue glow emanating from them, soft and diffuse beneath the pollen-like particles.

Her curiosity surged. Bioluminescence? Or was it powered by an artificial source?

From outside the structure, she heard the rising roar of the shuttle’s engines. She didn’t have long. No more than a minute or two.

Kira sucked on her lip. If only she could see more of the basin. She knew what she was about to do was wrong, but she couldn’t help it. She had to learn something about this amazing artifact.

She wasn’t so stupid as to touch the dust. That was the sort of rookie mistake that got people eaten or infected or dissolved by acid. Instead, she took the small canister of compressed air off her belt and used it to gently blow the dust away from the edge of the basin.

The dust flew up in swirled plumes, exposing the lines beneath. They were glowing, with an eerie hue that reminded her of an electrical discharge.

Kira shivered again, but not from cold. It felt as if she were intruding on forbidden ground.

Enough. She’d tempted fate far more than was wise. Time to make a strategic retreat.

She turned to leave the pedestal.

A jolt ran up her leg as her right foot remained stuck to the floor. She yelped, surprised, and fell to one knee. As she did, the Achilles tendon in her frozen ankle wrenched and tore, and she uttered a howl.

Blinking back tears, Kira looked down at her foot.

Dust.

A pile of black dust covered her foot. Moving, seething dust. It was pouring out of the basin, down the pedestal, and onto her foot. Even as she watched, it started to creep up her leg, following the contours of her muscles.

Kira yelled and tried to yank her leg free, but the dust held her in place as securely as a maglock. She tore off her belt, doubled it over, and used it to slap at the featureless mass. The blows failed to knock any of the dust loose.

“Neghar!” she shouted. “Help!”

Her heart pounding so loudly she could hear nothing else, Kira stretched the belt flat between her hands and tried to use it like a scraper on her thigh. The edge of the belt left a shallow impression in the dust but otherwise had no effect.

The swarm of particles had already reached the crease of her hip. She could feel them pressing in around her leg, like a series of tight, ever-shifting bands.

Kira didn’t want to, but she had no other choice; with her right hand, she tried to grab the dust and pull it away.

Her fingers sank into the swarm of particles as easily as foam. There was nothing to grab hold of, and when she drew her hand back, the dust came with it, wrapping around her fingers with ropy tendrils.

“Agh!” She scrubbed her hand against the floor, but to no avail.

Fear spiked through her as she felt something tickle her wrist, and she knew that the dust had found its way through the seams of her gloves.

“Emergency override! Seal all cuffs.” Kira had difficulty saying the words. Her mouth was dry, and her tongue seemed twice its normal size.

Her suit responded instantly, tightening around each of her joints, including her neck, and forming airtight seals with her skin. It wasn’t enough to stop the dust. Kira felt the cold tickle progress up her arm to her elbow, and then past.

“Mayday! Mayday!” she shouted. “Mayday! Neghar! Geiger! Mayday! Can anyone hear me?! Help!”

Outside the suit, the dust flowed over her visor, plunging her into darkness. Inside the suit, the tendrils wormed their way over her shoulder and across her neck and chest.

Unreasoning terror gripped Kira. Terror and abhorrence. She jerked on her leg with all her strength. Something snapped in her ankle, but her foot remained anchored to the floor.

She screamed and clawed at her visor, trying to clear it off.

The dust oozed across her cheek and toward the front of her face. She screamed again and then clamped her mouth shut, closed off her throat, and held her breath.

Her heart felt as if it were going to explode.

Neghar!

The dust crept over her eyes, like the feet of a thousand tiny insects. A moment later, it covered her mouth. And when it came, the dry, squirming touch within her nostrils was no less horrible than she had imagined.

. . . stupid . . . shouldn’t have . . . Alan!

Kira saw his face in front of her, and along with her fear, she felt an overwhelming sense of unfairness. This wasn’t supposed to be how things ended! Then the weight in her throat became too great and she opened her mouth to scream as the torrent of dust rushed inside of her.

And all went blank.

Copyright © 2020 by Christopher Paolini. Excerpted from To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini. 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

Christopher Paolini was born in Southern California and has lived most of his life in Paradise Valley, Montana. He published his first novel, Eragon, in 2003 at the age of nineteen, and quickly became a publishing phenomenon. His Inheritance Cycle—Eragon and its three sequels—have sold nearly 40 million copies worldwide. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is his first adult novel.

Book Reviews: September 2020

Arley Sorg | 2361 words

Burning Roses
S.L. Huang
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1250763990
Tor.com Publishing, September 2020, 160 pgs

Genre fiction sees many retellings of fairy tales and myths and otherwise well-known stories. The bulk of them are only slightly tweaked or embellished; sometimes perhaps genderswapped but with little else altered in the core narrative. What makes Burning Roses special is the way Huang takes iconic characters and recontextualizes them from the beginning, drags them through a wonderfully syncretized but intelligently altered history, and then renders the fullness of that history into character development, ending up with complex people, complicated relationships, and beautiful intersections of personality and culture. To simply say this is a tale of Red Riding Hood and Hou Yi misses the brilliance displayed within the confines of a very slender volume.

From the beginning, Huang uses solid visuals to immerse the reader in the tale. Red Riding Hood—Rosa—and her situation are immediately interesting. She’s old, but she’s still got plenty of fight in her; importantly, she keeps a rifle handy at all times. And she’s in exile far from home, staying with her close companion Hou Yi, who keeps a bow close by. Within two pages of friendly verbal sparring, the reader gets a sense of a deep but careful relationship, of secrets and secret pains, boundaries kept with iron wills and unspoken contracts, plus long held regrets. Then: the action starts on page three, with giant flaming birds attacking a village, and the two legendary women are off to fight monsters and save lives.

Part of the fun is riding along as these two negotiate and renegotiate their relationship, relayed through clever but grounded dialogue and just the right amount of introspection. What adds to the fun is the action: The stakes are high, not to mention personal, and the tension gradually ratchets up as the story moves along. The action works even better because these two are not magical, unkillable heroes. They can get hurt, just like anyone else; they can miss their shots; they can die. They are deeply flawed people, on the run from the things which haunt them, but inevitably driven to fight.

Just the above would make this a good, fun book. But Huang takes things to a deeper level, layering the narrative with veins of subtext on bigotry, the anxieties of confronting bad habits, and notions of family, examining these concepts through subtle angles and lenses provided by shifting backgrounds and perspectives. On a surface level, the idea of the hero archetype is challenged, as well as cultures of idolization; going deeper, we get to a rich conversation around legacy, and the values and meanings of legacy, and especially the relationship of legacy to the people we care about or the cultures we live in.

Particularly exciting is the way this book twists the Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Burning Roses then incorporates scenes from a number of other familiar stories, placing Rosa at the center of each. They are dramatically changed in ways which gives them an edge, a darkness, but which leaves them recognizable, and which, told together, inform the character of Rosa at the beginning of the book: messed up and self-loathing.

The bulk of the focus is on Rosa, though Hou Yi also has her own narrative arc, also full of regrets and blood and bad decisions. Those arcs eventually overlap, both braiding together and colliding. But ultimately, this book is about family, and sacrifice, and perhaps most of all, the long, painful road to redemption.

Evil in Technicolor
Joe M. McDermott, ed.
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN 978-1952283031
Vernacular Books, October 2020, 372 pgs

Evil in Technicolor came about as a sort of response to the COVID-19 crisis. The situation reminded the publishers at Vernacular of a horror movie; and something about the quarantine experience inspired them to put together an anthology. “The many authors I brought in on this project agreed the kind of horror story they wanted to do was the sort of thing that one would expect from old Hammer Horror movies . . . the classic era, when these dreams and nightmares were black and white and technicolor.”

An apparently new publishing company with only three titles to their name (two of them forthcoming this year), publishers Eric M. Bosarge and J.M. McDermott nonetheless landed serious talent to round out the table of contents: from authors on the rise such as Haralambi Markov, who has appeared in Uncanny and Tor.com, to respected novelist Molly Tanzer, to genre notable Nick Mamatas.

As horror goes, these tales lean towards the atmospheric rather than the bloody, and evoke the ’60s and ’70s Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing era of film. Some take the brief more literally than others, utilizing recognizable set pieces and characters, but placing them in different situations. Craig Laurance Gidney offers a moody tale of a girl out of place in “Myth and Moor,” featuring Emily Brontë as a protagonist, told in a narrative style reminiscent of the period, but which is both readable and convincing. Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s creative “Hammerville” begins with one Dracula getting staked only to awaken in the castle of another (younger) Dracula—essentially the iconic role of two iconic actors as real Draculas, thrust into the same world together.

Stand-out stories include “Forgiveness Is Warm Like a Tear on the Cheek” by Malorum Gates series author Stina Leicht. Classic scary house fare—a mysterious house with a dark past—made modern through voice and interesting characters. It centers on Jason, a rocker who is trying to keep the band together, but who has some depressive tendencies, including self-harm. He feels drawn to the shadowy house, which his friend tells him to avoid. The story is laced with painful emotions, delivered with some lovely moments of writing, and grounded in interesting but real people and their occasionally strained dynamics. Better, it all resolves in a somewhat unusual way.

E. Catherine Tobler’s “Blue Hole, Red Sea” is well-crafted and elegantly put together. At the same time, it’s tense and quietly gripping. Helen Dane is a diver and an archaeologist working in a field dominated by men. She discovers a strange passageway amongst the ruins and ends up at a mysterious temple on an impossible beach. What she discovers there changes everything for her. The story is a great dark adventure piece, but the deeper notes on gender, power dynamics, and self-doubt make this a wonderful read.

The star story for me in this anthology is “A Thousand Faces Minus One” by A.C. Wise. Donovan is a musician whose life changed after a strange, romantic tryst in Paris. He went from being a loser with no prospects to being a popular rock star. When he sees Paris in the news, burning, things start to unravel, and he is no longer sure of what is real. He may be losing his mind, or someone might be out to get him. This one is immediately engrossing, rich in wonderful tension, sense of character, and a touch of the meta via dialogue. It’s a truly gripping narrative that becomes an emotionally effective story.

There are, doubtless, levels of appreciation that Hammer fans will achieve beyond my own. But even for beginners, reading this book is a good way to spend quarantine.

Entanglements
Sheila Williams, ed.
Paperback
ISBN: 978-0262539258
MIT Press, September 2020, 240 pgs

Editor Sheila Williams is perhaps best known as the Editor-in-Chief of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, which she has run since 2004, when the late Gardner Dozois retired. Other credits include a slew of anthologies, most collecting stories from Asimov’s; she’s also co-edited a few, such as 1990’s Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers and Other Stories with Charles Ardai, 1996’s Intergalactic Mercenaries with Cynthia Manson, and 2001’s A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures By and About Women with Connie Willis. Williams was up for a Locus Award for Best Anthology in 2002, and since 2006 has consistently appeared on major awards ballots, including a few Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award wins. It should therefore be no surprise that she has put together an excellent anthology of original stories for MIT Press.

The theme is “entanglements” and the book features ten stories that consider “the effects that scientific and technological discoveries will have on the emotional bonds that hold us together.” The authors are all notable and respected in the field, such as recent Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award winner Mary Robinette Kowal, and well-regarded Chinese author Xia Jia (with translation by multi-award-winning author Ken Liu). If a story in this book isn’t to a reader’s specific taste, it’s still going to be a well-crafted piece.

The mood and tone of the stories on offer varies greatly. Suzanne Palmer’s “Don’t Mind Me” is a witty, satirical polemic against censorship, wherein some kids are outfitted with headpieces to disrupt any images and sounds which might be considered “offensive.” Of course a few of the kids find workarounds. Nick Wolven’s “Sparklybits” shares a bit of that tongue-in-cheek but is also a bit more tense—an updated “imaginary friend” sort of tale, where the friend is an AI. The story centers on a primary mother figure, Jo, who is part of a group motherhood, and is trying to negotiate between the needs of the kid she is raising and the demands of the other mothers, all of whom spend far less time with the kid than she does. It’s a sharp treatment on class and privilege, as well as other power differentials, and the ways those issues relate to and impact motherhood. On the other hand, Rich Larson’s “Echo” is more existential, and a fairly somber examination of the complexities of people, memories, relationships, and attachments, with an effective result which will leave you feeling wistful, possibly even lonely. Annalee Newitz’s “The Monogamy Hormone” is, in sharp contrast, an absolutely fun story. Edwina is dating two people and feels like she should pick one or the other, so she takes a pill that is supposed to engender feelings of monogamy and help her focus on one relationship. It’s full of odd but cool science-fictional ideas, such as smearing helpful bacteria on the walls of children’s schools, and it leans younger in its vibe than many of the other pieces. It’s quirky in all the right ways, and you can almost feel the author happily grinning along through the narrative as you read it. Far from shallow, it’s limned with sly sociopolitical commentary.

Stand-out stories include Cadwell Turnbull’s “Mediation.” A family has an AI named Ally, similar to Amazon’s Alexa, but more advanced. Ally manages schedules and intervenes in squabbles to help find solutions. The mother, Dr. Lyons, is none too fond of the way Ally butts in and tries to adjust the way she deals with their frictions. The father died recently, and the mom is caught between managing the family in his absence and managing her students and career. As the story progresses, tensions build and Dr. Lyons is forced to make uncomfortable decisions. It’s a complex set up with a touching ending, and a wonderful meditation on good intentions going sour.

“Invisible People” by Nancy Kress, on the first page or two, seems to be a fairly simplistic, straightforward story. Tom and Jen are busy parents raising kids and one of their kids is . . . different. Agents show up at the door, and questions are raised about the adoption of their youngest, “different” kid, Kenly. As the plot thickens and the inevitable conspiracy is revealed, the story becomes a clever, nuanced philosophical discussion and thought piece around family, sacrifice, and altruism. The mastery is in the subtleties, and in the touching but not saccharine or overplayed delivery.

James Patrick Kelly’s “Your Boyfriend Experience” is possibly award-worthy. A driven tech guy has built the latest pleasure-model android and wants his boyfriend to test it out. This model is different from most on the market: It goes beyond the bedroom, serving as a complex companion, and its target market is women and gay men. The introduction of the android arouses complex feelings in the protagonist, Dak, who is both intrigued and horrified on multiple levels. Such as: Why on Earth would my boyfriend ask me to go on a date with this thing? The story is instantly relatable, full of real drama, and enriched by fascinating interpersonal dynamics. It’s human, it’s funny in many ways, and all told, it’s an example of great storytelling.

For me, the star of the book is Sam J. Miller’s “The Nation of the Sick.” A programmer is elevated by the success of his partnership with a visionary. He must contend with his brother’s addiction, sort through his own relationship to the past, and come to terms with his place in the world. But it’s not the “plot” which shines; rather, it’s Miller’s sense of character, of voice, and of narrative structure that make this piece something truly special. This is a story that should be entered into the canon of important literature.

All told, Entanglements a massively successful anthology, one which should put MIT Press on everyone’s radar.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

Media Review: September 2020

Christopher East | 1808 words

How many times have you watched the first season of a new series, loved it, and then found yourself hoping it didn’t get renewed? For me, this phenomenon has become more common lately, and not just because there’s so much to keep up with nowadays. The classic model for TV development—create a show formulaic and addictive enough to sustain several seasons’ worth of content—isn’t always the narratively expedient one. Sometimes a single season is perfect; extending the story beyond that might be gilding the lily, or worse.

Evidently the TV industry is learning this lesson, because it’s made more room for limited series in recent years. It’s a welcome trend, delivering memorable fare across multiple genres, including science fiction. This month’s examples are exceptional, self-contained works of futuristic SF that likely would have been damaged by an open-ended approach.

Devs
Created by Alex Garland
Produced by DNA Films, FX Productions, and Scott Rudin Productions
Released March/April 2020

Over the past twenty years, Alex Garland has built a solid reputation in genre filmmaking both as a screenwriter (28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go) and as a writer-director (Ex Machina, Annihilation). His latest auteur project, the FX miniseries Devs, is a finely crafted and thought-provoking work of science fiction that should only elevate that reputation.

The backdrop is northern California, ranging from the bustling, hilly streets of San Francisco to the remote, wooded campus of Amaya, a quantum computing corporation run by relaxed, bohemian founder Forest (Nick Offerman). Amaya is a powerful new tech giant that employs the best and the brightest, including brilliant software engineer Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno). Lily’s boyfriend Sergey (Karl Glusman) also works at Amaya, and on the day of his big presentation to the Amaya brass, he’s offered a coveted promotion to the “Devs” team. The Devs project is where Amaya’s elite work, sequestered in a state-of-the-art, classified facility away from the rest of the campus.

When Sergey doesn’t return from his first day of work, a concerned Lily reports the disappearance to Amaya’s chief of security Kenton (Zach Grenier). Quickly, Kenton and Forest are on the case, and find shocking evidence of Sergey’s tragic fate. But something about the situation doesn’t sit right with Lily, who senses a deeper mystery. She enlists her ex-boyfriend Jamie (Jin Ha), a cybersecurity expert, to crack the encryption on Sergey’s phone for clues, and fearlessly begins uncovering the conspiracy surrounding Sergey’s demise, as well as the deeper mystery of what’s going on with the Devs project.

At first glance, Devs looks to inhabit the same day-after-tomorrow conspiracy thriller space as contemporaries like Homecoming or Mr. Robot. Its ominous tone is certainly similar to those shows, as is its searing critique of modern institutional power and its callous disregard for collateral damage. On this level, Devs is a smashing success, in both structure and technique. From its initial mystery, it unfolds in a gripping escalation of new questions and reveals, drawing the viewer along while steeping them in surreal atmosphere. Slow-burn suspense is punctuated by moments of shock and horror, and ultimately, Lily’s investigation solves the mystery without dispelling its mystique, allowing the intriguing journey to linger after the screen goes dark.

But there’s a robust science-fictional foundation to Devs’ mysteries, and much more to the SF than the thin veneer of near-futurism that informs its aesthetic. Garland doesn’t just use science fiction; he understands its protocols. His neo-Hitchcockian plot is undergirded by big skiffy concepts, which are given haunted, surprisingly grave voice by the cast members on the Devs team, especially Offerman, Alison Pill, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley Henderson. Spilling Devs’ conceptual secrets in detail might mar the experience of discovery; suffice it to say, the Devs team is studying the nature of reality itself, using quantum computing and multiple worlds theory. Their discoveries in these areas motivate them in unexpected ways, which speaks powerfully to Garland’s chilling theme about the perverse way accelerating change is oddly accompanied by fatalistic stasis. The way these ideas interact with Devs’ thriller mechanics is clever and intricate. While the series’ hopeful epilogue feels incongruous and uncharacteristic, on the whole the series remains highly satisfying, a powerful achievement in thought-provoking science fiction.

Years and Years
Created by Russell T. Davies
Produced by Red Production Company
Released June/July 2019

If Devs finds its science-fictional power in elliptical metaphor and existential thought experiment, Years and Years, a joint production of HBO and the BBC, is considerably more grounded and political. Indeed, this grim, hard-hitting series from Russell T. Davies—best known to genre fans for his work reviving Doctor Who for the twenty-first century—is practically “mundane SF,” the science fiction subgenre many writers practice but nobody seems to have claimed.

Years and Years is set in England, primarily in Manchester. A family drama at its core, it has an ambitious narrative strategy: tracing that drama over the course of a decade, from the present to 2030. Centrally, it’s about the Lyons siblings. Eldest son Stephen (Rory Kinnear) works in finance in London with his wife Celeste (T’Nia Miller) and two daughters. Daniel (Russell Tovey) is a housing officer for an immigration authority in Manchester. Rosie (Ruth Madeley), also in Manchester, is a single mother with spina bifida. Edith (Jessica Hynes) is the progressive, wayward daughter who travels the world as an activist for various causes. Although they have busy individual lives, they stay connected, frequently arranging remote family group calls, as well as annual birthday gatherings for their widowed grandmother Muriel (Anne Reid). These take place at her large, declining Manchester home, which their collective story tends to orbit.

The family’s dilemmas are ordinary, if topical. Stephen and Celeste are an interracial couple, which presents parenting challenges as well as subtle interpersonal tension with the more conservative Muriel. Daniel is gay, married to the dim Ralph (Dino Fetscher), but later attracted to a Ukrainian immigrant named Viktor (Maxim Baldry). Rosie, who defiantly embraces her disability, leads a modest existence that presents stark class contrast to the luxurious life of Stephen’s family. Meanwhile Edith, even absent, injects the family dynamic with confrontational politics. In other words, the Lyons sit at the cross-section of a number of modern society’s defining cultural debates.

As the story commences, those debates are about to be inflamed by world events. After establishing the status quo for this complex family, Years and Years proceeds over the course of six jam-packed episodes to accelerate the drama through a decade of turmoil, propelling the family deeper into the future in a series of disorienting montages. These time jumps hurl them into increasingly dire new scenarios, as political upheavals, financial crises, climate change, and the inexorable march of science and technology combine to continually reshape their lives. This rapid-fire change casts their daily struggles into increasingly speculative contexts. Some, such as Stephen’s fidelity issues, are mundane; others, like the desire of Stephen and Celeste’s daughter Bethany (Lydia West) to become a transhumanist, are more directly science fictional. But much of the speculation is political, reflected in the gradual rise to power of one Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson), a tough-talking populist who bubbles along in the periphery of the Lyons’ lives like malicious background radiation. As Rook’s crackpot political novelty evolves into something more pernicious and powerful, the family’s life becomes even more difficult, eventually embroiling them in dangerous culture wars they’ve long observed from the sidelines.

No lie: Years and Years is a difficult watch, hitting close to home with a harsh, serialized Black Mirror vibe. It’s an unflinching cautionary exercise about the consequences of political inaction in the face of ever-worsening global challenges—and, considering current events, it almost didn’t get made in time. As I write this, the COVID-19 pandemic is six months deep and protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd have exploded into civil unrest and widespread police brutality across American cities. We’ve basically already entered one of the futures that Years and Years tried, belatedly, to warn us about; at this point, one might see the miniseries as historical fiction from the future of an alternate timeline.

Thompson’s steely performance as the deceptive, horrible Rook was clearly conceived in reaction to the rise of Trump and other right-wing authoritarian extremists currently casting the world into peril. She is a uniquely terrifying character; imagine a corrupt, malicious politician in the vein of Hitler, but armed with Emma Thompson’s charm and poise. While Rook’s villainy may seem dated in places compared to what’s actually happening, in other ways she’s an even scarier monster, in that she’s actually charismatic and persuasive. Much of the political subtext in the series is generated by the skillful way the principal performers embody our reactions to such a dangerous figure.

That said, for all the grim, mettle-testing subject matter, Years and Years is also an impressive SFnal feat, a bold attempt to bridge the gap between our troubled present and the dark probabilities of our near future. It’s a risky undertaking to depict a future this near to hand, but even if the next decade proves it to be spectacularly wrong—and may we be so lucky—it’s still a timely and relevant commentary on our era, doing important science fictional work. Like Devs, it views the problems of today through the lens of a very close tomorrow, and does so from an earnest, thoughtful perspective, bringing compassion and conscience to the issues.

Unfortunately, also like Devs, Years and Years falters a bit down the home stretch, adding a lengthy, jarring coda that undercuts its painful message with an attempt at something more uplifting. The coda doesn’t entirely work, nor do I think it’s necessary; for all its bleakness, Years and Years is embedded with a spirit of hopeful struggle that might have landed more effectively without an explicit attempt. In its own way, while speaking to similar themes, Devs similarly opts out at the end with a turn that feels more screen-tested than true. In both cases, arrival is less satisfying than the journey. But, at least for me, only slightly less satisfying, because both are still memorable, impressive science fiction shows that couldn’t be more timely to the era in which they were produced.

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.

Interview: Mark Oshiro

Christian A. Coleman | 3781 words

Mark Oshiro is the Hugo-nominated writer of the online Mark Does Stuff universe (Mark Reads and Mark Watches), where they analyze books and TV series. Their debut novel, Anger Is a Gift, was a recipient of the Schneider Family Book Award in 2019. Their lifelong goal is to pet every dog in the world.

You mentioned on your blog that your latest YA novel, Each of Us a Desert, is the kind of book you’ve wanted to write since you were a kid, that it’s the book of your dreams. Tell us why that is.

I think back to the kind of stuff that enchanted me as a kid. Edgar Allan Poe. Stephen King. Jane Austen. The Animorphs books. Goosebumps. In each of these is something that stuck with me for decades. A love for horror, for example. I delighted in being frightened by books. I longed for an epic romance when I read Jane Austen. I loved complex, multi-part stories that required you to pay attention. Each of Us a Desert is honestly the first chance I’ve gotten to combine so many disparate influences to craft—what I hope is—an epic story, so it feels like the book of my dreams.

So, in the novel, sixteen-year-old Xochitl ventures into the desert to rebel against the isolating role she’s been given as a cuentista, the village sin-eater and truth-teller. By doing so, she puts her community in danger. Emilia, daughter of an interloper who’s terrorized Xochitl’s village, joins her, and a romance between them grows. How did you come up with the premise?

This will be a recurring motif in this interview—I didn’t! At least not initially. The book began in a very, very different space, and it was through editing with Miriam Weinberg, my editor at Tor Teen—who has worked with Charlie Jane Anders, V.E. Schwab, and Sarah Gailey—that I began to develop the world you now see in the book.

The very different space it began in was dystopian horror. How did you rework it as YA fantasy with magical realism? What of your original conception of the book ended up in the final draft?

So, in late 2017, I turned in a novel that was far more horror than what you see now. The only thing that was largely the same was the inclusion of the sabuesos (the blood-tracking hounds) and Xochitl’s journey across a desert that had been burned out and abandoned. But there was a late-stage twist that included a whole part where Xochitl and her younger brother were separated at the border of another country and kept in cells. It was meant as a commentary on what has been happening at the US-Mexican border and other places around the world for decades, but in early 2018, that was when all the new stories of the horrific camps started cropping up.

I don’t mind writing fiction that comments on the world. See Anger is a Gift, for example. But I did want to have some distance between reality and this fantastical story that I’d written, and my editor pushed me: Did I want to write a book where people would assume I was commenting on Trump’s actions at the border? Did I want to release a book that wasn’t just harrowing, but deeply, deeply sad? I don’t mind sad books, either! I like writing about sadness and trauma and colonization. But as a writer, I didn’t prepare for the world coincidentally reflecting a work of fiction.

Miriam asked me what I did like about the original story. I loved Xochitl’s journey, and there was something so compelling to me about a sixteen-year-old girl leaving her home to try and reclaim her life. I loved the sabuesos. I loved writing a book that was more poetic on a prose level than Anger was, and I loved not being beholden to sticking to a single genre. Miriam suggested taking the book out of the dystopian space and creating a new world that was secondary fantasy. Over the course of two brainstorming sessions in the summer of 2018, I built up pretty much everything you see in Each of Us a Desert now.

Xochitl’s power as a cuentista is a main feature of the secondary fantasy world you built. It reminds me of Catholic priests hearing congregants’ confessions but taken to a whole other level: She takes their stories in physical form and then expels them to Solís, the deity she and her villagers worship. What’s the story behind her power?

Bravo for nailing the inspiration! I used to be Catholic and had a complicated relationship with confession, particularly the way in which some of my fellow Catholics used the confessional to exonerate themselves without ever doing the work to become a better person. As long as they were cleared of their sins, they’d keep doing the same things that brought them to confession in the first place. I took that notion and made it very visceral. As you’ve seen, the ritual for Xochitl (and other cuentistas) is designed so that stories are taken into the body and then regurgitated. It’s the metaphor of confession made grossly physical and literal. What does it feel like to have a community unburden themselves onto you? How does that take a physical or mental toll on the body? Even further, no one questions the presence of a cuentista, so much so that when Xochitl is given this power at eight years old, no one truly asks her if this is what she wants. So I wanted to explore the collision of faith and consent and do so in both the metaphorical and the literal.

That collision of faith and consent shows up in the way Xochitl struggles with her connection to Solís. She rebukes Them for saying and doing nothing when so many people, including herself, pray to Them. She also comments on feeling small and inconsequential in the grand cosmic scheme of things, and yet she continues to pray to Solís. Would you say this stems in part from the fact that as a cuentista, she’s not meant to have a story or stories of her own, that she’s only destined to pass down the duty of cuentista to the next villager? Like you said, no one in her village understands the burden of her role. They pretty much take her for granted.

Yeah, that’s pretty spot-on. It’s not just that she’s burdened as the cuentista, but I also wanted her story to be one of her reclaiming her agency. I see my own life as a teenager being the same journey, despite the vastly different context. I wanted to make choices for myself, and hopefully, other readers see a value in that kind of selfishness. Being selfish often has a negative connotation, and I get why, but writing Xochitl was my chance to explore a character being selfish to uplift herself. Thus, her prayer is a conversation with her god. It’s her chance to illuminate what is often left unsaid in her world.

Her conversation with Solís runs the full length of the novel. How did you decide on using a book-long prayer as the narrative device?

The seed of that idea came from E.K. Johnston, and I don’t think she even knows she inspired it! Aside from Miriam and maybe two other friends, she’s one of the only folks who read the original draft of Desert. (At the time, the working title was El Otro Lado.) Solís, the non-gendered god of the world, was in that draft, too, but Johnston said the religion was woefully underdeveloped. She basically wanted to see way more of it. So when I was creating the fantasy world, I kept that in mind and decided to double down and create a huge religion that was sprawling, diverse, weird, and complicated.

The narrative framing device, however, came during one of my brainstorming sessions with Miriam. I like first-person narration to be grounded in a framing device; I think you can achieve fascinating things with voice if there’s either an unspoken or direct motivation for the narration. I also need to know the ending of a story before I feel safe to write it. I thought of the last line in the book—which I won’t spoil here—while doing worldbuilding work and I constructed the entire structure in a feverish excitement, because it just seemed so absurd and ridiculous and challenging that I just had to attempt it.

Did you get any ideas on your approach to writing Desert from Sandra Cisneros, too? You’ve mentioned that she’s your personal hero. And she was an influence on your first novel.

I don’t know if there’s anything in there consciously—perhaps in the poetry, or perhaps in the way I wrote the prose. She’s had such a huge influence on my writing that sometimes I find myself slipping into the cadences I remember from her work. If anything, I think Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler had a much more marked influence on this book. (I’ve pitched the book as a combination of those two before!)

About the poetry in the book: I love how Xochitl finds solace and a sense of being recognized when she finds written scraps of poetry in the desert. Her thirst for language mirrors the way we bookworms thirst for books. Are the poems based on anyone’s work you’ve read? Are they your own?

I am so proud to say that all the poems in the book are mine, and not only that, but I wrote them all in Spanish. They weren’t translated from English. I’ve been studying Spanish the past few years to relearn a lot of stuff I lost when I was younger, so there’s an element of this book that’s a reclamation for me, a chance to explore language in a fantastical setting.

The desert, in this case, being the primary fantastical setting. You went to the Sonoran Desert to do research. How much time did you spend there and what was it like? What were some of your experiences there that ended up in the book?

I wanna start by saying that this was a trip that made me feel like a writer, because I had never traveled to do research before. I grew up just outside the desert in Southern California, but I wanted to take this project seriously and ground it in reality, even though I always figured it would be a fantastical story. I was in the desert for three days, staying in a small cabin with my partner at the time, near the town of Ajo, down in the southern part of Arizona, which allowed us access to both Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. We had to go through a brief video orientation in order to get a permit to spend time in Cabeza Prieta, too; the area is heavily surveilled due to all the migrants coming over the border from Mexico into Arizona.

It was a deeply surreal experience. I took thousands of photos to get a sense of what the desert felt like far, far from any major city. I wanted to get a feel for isolation in that environment. I wanted to see how plant life grew. But what I didn’t expect—and what informed a lot of Xochitl’s journey across the desert—was how much evidence of human life I saw. Debris. Garbage. Empty water bottles. Food wrappers. We came upon a cache of water jugs that someone had left for migrants in the desert. About twenty minutes later, we were pulled over by the Border Patrol, interrogated, and then allowed to continue on. By the time we looped back to leave Organ Pipe a couple hours later, someone—we assume the BP—had slashed all the water jugs.

It was also the first time I saw the border wall in person. It’s only complete in pieces down there, but where it exists, it’s a hideous blight on an otherwise gorgeous landscape. And yet, just a mile to the west, the “wall” was just a wooden fence. We saw someone duck under it and continue off into the desert, blending into the landscape almost immediately.

I don’t think my book would exist in the form it does without that trip.

That brings me to one of the themes of the book: migration. The relationship between Xochitl and Emilia unfolds against the background of migration—or, more to the point, forced migration. Xochitl migrates to the north to find a woman in Emilia’s village who can take away her power as a cuentista, but her journey is set in motion because of an act of violence by Julio, Emilia’s father. Emilia is made to migrate from her village, Solado, against her will because her father whisks her away with his group of men to terrorize one village after another. Both girls have that in common.

There’s an undercurrent of migration throughout the book, as I wanted to build out this idea that all these far-flung aldeas and cities were finally settled enough that people in this world began traveling again. And what would that travel look like? There are plenty who travel looking for work or for a better life, but in the case of Xochitl and Emilia, I wanted them to unknowingly be mirrors for one another. One of my favorite aspects of enemies to lovers is when people who believe they are utterly unlike one another begin to discover what they share in common. So much of their respective arcs is about becoming the narrator of their own story, and I wanted to anchor their motivations in that. They don’t know it until later, but Julio sets both of them on their journeys. How they collide, though . . . well, I’ll keep that a secret.

I really appreciated how you had their relationship simmer and blossom gradually. Some teen dramas are quick to crank up raging hormones and making out to level ten. But in your novel, we get to see Xochitl and Emilia crush on one another, hesitate, flirt, get flummoxed. It’s really sweet. Was that always intentional when you were developing the story?

Oh, I don’t know that I even thought about it that way. It was intentional in the sense that I have long wanted to write a book with the enemies-to-lovers trope. It’s one of my favorites. So the romance had to be slow and awkward and strange because of that. I think there’s space for all types of romance within YA, and I would actually love to write a much more fast-paced, messy, hormone-filled romance at some point! I think it’s often a misconception of the genre. You see more of that trope in television and movies than you do in books, and I credit that to being a visual medium and how often teen sexuality is a commodity in that space.

From your years of Doing Stuff (Reads and Watches), were there any books, series, or movies you went over and critiqued that were helpful with crafting Desert? Tropes you wanted to explore? Clichés you wanted to avoid? Plot structures you wanted to play with?

I do have an essay going live at some point about one of the major influences on the structure of the book! I have been bitter about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village for years, and it informed why certain events happen where they do in Desert. Structure is a difficult thing to nail down, and sometimes seeing where another story goes wrong can help a writer understand how to structure their own work.

I definitely wanted to do enemies to lovers. But the biggest thing I wanted to achieve was to write a book that wasn’t dependent on its plot twists. I’m not the first person to talk about this by any means, but I didn’t want my story to have so much weight on “tricking” the reader that if someone figured out things I was planning, the story wasn’t entertaining anymore. I think one of the twists is painfully obvious, but I’m okay with that! I want to reward a reader for paying attention, and there’s plenty of tension that can come from a reader knowing something that the characters don’t know. That’s not to say this book is devoid of them; there are at least two surprises that early reviewers have mentioned being hard to spot. I don’t wanna do the Game of Thrones thing, though, where my only goal is to “get” a reader, you know?

I thank you for that big time, and your readers will, too. This being your second young adult novel, what’s it been like for you to work in YA, especially when it comes to bringing in more representation of queer characters of color?

On the whole, it’s been a rewarding and fulfilling experience. Anger is a Gift had a slow start. I sold a solid number of books in 2018, but nothing spectacular or anything. I didn’t expect instant success either. It’s been a humbling and incredible thing to see how far the book has gone, particularly in schools and libraries. That part was deeply unexpected. I wrote a book that was unapologetic about centering queer people of color, criticizing law enforcement, and supporting the right to protest. I’m thankful and grateful for the work of librarians and educators in the children’s literature space who have challenged what’s teachable. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would do well over a hundred school visits in two years because my book was taught in classrooms.

At the same time, there is so much the community needs to address. A lot of my early reviews were deeply racist, homophobic, and transphobic. But now a very strange thing has been happening in the past couple months: Readers have been reaching out to me to say they’re sorry for rating my book so low on Goodreads, or they feel bad for telling people it was unrealistic and unfair to cops and/or white people. This recent reckoning that’s unfolded on a global stage made them rethink how unfair they were to me and to my work. Which . . . okay? Cool? I guess? I don’t know what people want me to do with that.

On the industry side, it’s been just as challenging, as I’ve faced the same sort of bigotry from people within publishing, within conferences, within book festivals. Folks pay a lot of lip service to the ideas of diversity and inclusion, but a lot of these same people have no idea what to do with us once we get our foot in the door. In that sense, I feel lucky to have such an empathetic and supportive team at Tor Teen. It’s one of the only aspects of being a YA writer that has been problem-free for me.

When you started writing fiction, did you always see yourself as a YA author? Do you have any plans for adult fiction?

Always! I always did. Everything I’ve planned for over fifteen years or so always ended up being young adult. It’s an age range I wanted to write for, and it’s an experience I wanted to draw from. In the future, I plan to keep my main focus on either young adult or middle grade. That being said, there’s an adult project. It’s a contemporary thriller. You might hear about it someday soon . . .

What other writing projects do you have coming up that you can tell us about?

I don’t have to be frustratingly vague about my next projects! I have two middle-grade books coming out in the next couple of years from HarperCollins. The Insiders is scheduled for Fall 2021, and it’s about a twelve-year-old boy who, while fleeing bullies, discovers a magical closet that unites him with other kids dealing with similar issues across the US. It’s a contemporary with magical realism, and I basically pitch it as a queer Room of Requirement story. It was a lot of fun to write, and while it’s far sillier and adventure-filled than my YA, I can’t promise you that you won’t cry reading it.

I’m also hard at work on my third YA novel. All I can tell you about it is that I’m going back to contemporary after Desert, and that it is best described as a supernatural-less Hereditary meets Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. I promise that will make sense in the future.

Cool! Anything else you’d like your readers to know about Each of Us a Desert?

First of all, bravo for such a comprehensive and challenging set of questions! I just wanted to say that it’s scary to jump genres, but even more intimidating to go from contemporary to fantasy. But I’m glad I did. I hope this book showcases my improvements as a writer, and above all, I hope that readers get a sense of who I am as a storyteller. I want to write as many books as I can that make you feel a gamut of emotions. And also rip your soul out of your body, too!

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: Adam-Troy Castro

Jude Griffin | 533 words

You’re comfortable with a lot of unanswered questions in your stories: Do you ever worry there are too many?

Maybe yes, maybe no.

In one exchange, I recognized my impulse to try to make sense of your storylines even though I know sometimes they’re “just about weird shit happening.” There’s no way to avoid that, right? Do you ever think about the timing of when you’ll make it clear that a story is about the ride, not the why?

Generally, in stories where the intended explanation is not foregrounded, the story is not about the intended explanation. An example would be that other Lightspeed story, “The Thing About Shapes to Come”( bit.ly/304Gn00). I have been accosted by readers who wanted to know why children were being born in the shape of cubes, and it strikes me as the least interesting thing about that story, which is about a mother devoting herself to a child who may not even be able to feel her love. For readers who must know the cause of the phenomenon, I shrug my shoulders and say, “If you insist. It was radiation from space.” You will note that it doesn’t add anything.

How much do you think about your specific word choices and the rhythm of your lines? I was struck by the jarring use of “junk” between two more circumspect synonyms.

As you were meant to. Glad it worked.

I want to know more about the piercing question about character motivation and the Nebula nomination.

Okay. This is the actual behind-the-scenes drama between my wife, before she was my wife, and myself, following the first draft of that other story ultimately reprinted at Lightspeed, “Of A Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs” (bit.ly/3jEXg9r). She maintained that story did not quite work and that I needed a section dramatizing the inner life of the female lead. It was her input that got that section written, and later, that story was a jury pick for the Nebula. (Because this was indeed us, telling the story underlines that this is not some hypothetical author and author’s wife. It is explicitly us.)

You’ve been nominated for/won a number of awards: Which meant the most to you?

I am unabashed about wanting a few more of them statuettes, to go along with the kudos already collected. I have that acquisitive gene, and I don’t mind who knows it. But I have to tell you, the biggest nachas (joy) came from some of my interactions with the kids who read my Gustav Gloom novels for middle-graders. Hearing from a problem reader that they worked their way through the whole series and are better at this book-absorption thing, or being sent a photograph of a potato that’s been painted to resemble my protagonist as school project, is an award of a whole different color.

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

Laurel Amberdine | 1695 words

In preparation for this, I reread your previous tour guide stories, and being in the middle of this pandemic unexpectedly colored my feelings. There might as well be an eighth continent out there, since I can’t travel anywhere anyway. I could fully buy into the idea of travel guide as entertainment reading—not that it wasn’t fun before. I’m sure every writer is being strongly influenced by current events, but is there anything you’d like to share about how you are responding or reacting in your own work?

The tour guide stories have been my fictional travel during these difficult times. The pandemic is devastating for so many, full of despair, solitude, fear, and loss—and I think many writers are facing the blank page with this question of how to proceed. Initially, there was this feeling of the world coming to a standstill (at least before we began “reopening” everything). During that standstill, there was also a deep silence—for a moment, we were collectively united. We found ourselves far from the old world of capitalism, with its rapacious appetite and demands. There was a sudden and profound realization about our interconnectedness and the fragility of life. The waters were getting cleaner, the air too, wildlife was returning to our cities, dolphins to the waterways, and we could see the Himalayas again. I don’t think we’ve ever had a moment when the world was so totally connected. So, in this way, as a writer and a human being, I found myself experiencing this dualism of despair/hopelessness alongside reverence/awe. When I was able to return to the page again, I was drawn to two main projects. One is a longer “secret” novel, which is set in a time after the great collapse of the world. This became the landscape where I could channel the pandemic emotions—of solitude and fear, but also of nature and silence.

The other big project are these tour guide stories. These stories have allowed me to literally use imaginative travel to arrive at fantastical worlds. Much like traveling/vacationing, these fictions let me dwell in awe, fantasy, hope, humor, and the imagination. And I think it’s necessary for us as human beings—particularly now—to have a space we can go to for rejuvenation and restoring our nervous system. So, like you say, while we’ve been stuck at home, these particular stories have been my plane tickets, my museums, and my hotel rooms.

In some of your previous spotlights, you’ve mentioned interest in shifting our literary focus toward valuing joy and wonder as much as we seem to value pain and struggle. I appreciate that a great deal, personally. While reading your various destinations, a lot of times I find myself wincing, but then somehow at the end of the story, I always have a fond, happy, warm feeling. You’re great at taking the reader through an ugly, adverse situation and pulling it around into hope. Do you have specific techniques for this, or is there anything else you’d like to say about that kind of effect?

Thanks so much for saying that. Hope, along with this feeling of warmth, is central to my work, and I find that I’m drawn toward fiction that has awe/transcendence at its core. For a long time now, I’ve been very interested in this question about our societal predilection for negative/cynical/ironic tones rather than narratives which inspire compassion/love/awe. And when I speak of negative-toned art, I’m not referring of the vital work of stories/art/film which expose the actual human rights injustices in the world—but rather another type of art/film/narrative which consciously dwells in exploiting suffering. We live in a culture that accepts gratuitous violence more readily than art which promotes peace and love. And I do think this deeply desensitizes us—and aids in closing our hearts to the actual, real pain and suffering in the world. So, yes, I’m interested in the joy-filled story. And the question is how to acknowledge and address the ugliness/adversity of our society without losing hope. Because if the dark forces out there steal our hope, our compassion, and our love, then they’ve stolen humanity’s most powerful and prized possessions.

In order to maintain hope, one rule is that I cannot sell out my characters’ humanity. This requires me to treat fictional characters with the same compassion and dignity that I would treat actual humans. Ultimately, this comes down to a deep philosophical question about humans. Do we, as authors, believe people are inherently evil and prone to selfishness, or do we believe humans are inherently good but learn evil? At the heart of many authorial decisions about a text are the author’s inner cosmologies. And it’s hard to fake it. If you truly believe people are inherently evil, it’s going to be difficult to write work that sincerely has hope within in. My leaning is toward human goodness and the eternal possibility for redemption, love, and transformation.

As well, the Buddhist in me is always wanting my stories to hint at the larger connectivity we all have, the transcendent part of our consciousness. We are more than our personalities, our strongly held identities, and the stories about who we think we are. It is the moments when we transcend the illusion of separateness that we encounter this deeper feeling of love and interconnectedness which buoys the spirit. In the same way, the conflict within a story can point not toward the drama itself but toward a transcendent other that exists beyond the plot struggle. In the tour guide stories, the cities are the characters, and so within the hearts of these cities are often the hidden jewels of transcendence, the possibility of enlightenment, or simply the smiling mystery/humor which lingers beneath life.

The Republic of Kvevch made me laugh out loud, and The Museum of Boredom was hilarious too. What are your thoughts on humor in fiction? It seems to be like happiness and peace, something that readers always enjoy, yet the market rarely seeks out humorous fiction or rewards it.

Yes, humor is wonderful! And, like you say, it’s often relegated to a lesser position within literature. But like hope/joy, humor is ultimately revolutionary. I’m thinking of Russian absurdity, for example, which was quite literally revolutionary. Writers like Kharms, Bulgakov, and Gogol used humor as a cover to deliver deep and dangerous critiques against tyranny. I’m also thinking here of Randle McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and how he uses laughter as his armor against institutionalization. It’s a brilliant example of how humor dismantles the oppressors, the tyrants, and the despots.

I’m particularly interested in two types of humor. Humor that leads to revealing and addressing oppression/tyranny (Mark Twain, Ishmael Reed, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, George Saunders, Vonnegut, Richard Pryor) and the rarer, cosmic humor, which hints toward expansive consciousness (Italo Calvino, Tatyana Tolstaya, Victor Pelevin, Tom Robbins, Reggie Watts, Ram Dass, Duncan Trussell). Much like happiness and peace are doorways, I see humor as a gateway to expanded consciousness. Humor and laughter expand our spirits outward, while fear and violence force our spirits to cower. In this way humor is transformative, revolutionary, and healing. My hope—as far as the larger market trends go—is that we’re entering a new age of art, one wherein we’ll be increasingly attracted to work that inspires expanded consciousness, light, justice, humor, and peace.

I’m sure you have plans for your life and your writing career and all, but I need to strongly suggest that all these stories one day be collected into a single print book, with maps and illustrations and bullet points. Please get on that, thanks! Oh right, this was supposed to be a question. So what do you think?

Absolutely! Presently, the tourguide is expanding in wonderful ways to include flora & fauna, reports from a group of anthropologists/linguists/musicologists working in the fields of the new continent, a section on rare games, lost paper arts, and the venomous species of the eighth continent. The full collection of these will be finished by the end of the year, and soon I’ll be searching for the right publisher/team of fellow explorers to bring it to the world. I envision it like you’ve described: chock full of maps and illustrations, a kind of old-world encyclopedia for the fantastic. So, in short, I’m looking forward to fulfilling your request in the very near future.

You mentioned your third collection of short stories in progress, and also a “secret” novel project. How are those going? I know publishing is like waiting in Kvevch, but anything new we can start anticipating soon?

The new projects in the works are the secret novel (don’t tell anyone), a third collection of adult fairytales/modern-day fables, and the tourguide—so it’ll be interesting to see which of these releases first. I’m also thrilled to be part of this year’s 2020 Advent Calendar, forthcoming this winter from H&O Publishing—where you’ll find one of my fairytales about working class trolls. As well, I’m starting to see a fourth collection emerging with a new batch of short stories I’m working on—all of which are related to a genre I might call cosmic/spiritual speculative fiction. This realm is new to me, but I can identify that what unifies the speculative aspects of the stories are ideas about reincarnation, transcendent visions, psychedelic-consciousness, shamanism, and Buddhist understandings of multiple realities. So, that’s all very exciting, and there’s plenty of writing to work on! As for what’s coming up next, the film After Yang (based on my short story, “Saying Goodbye to Yang”) is forthcoming from A24 studios—so I’m really thrilled to see my fiction become film!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Sunny Moraine

Nicasio Andres Reed | 901 words

The twisting and double-back hallways of academia are an essential part of the milieu and the meat of this story. From the mentions of Foucault, Borges, Velázquez, and Baudrillard, to Gupta and Shaw being grad students themselves, to the format as an academic paper or journal article complete with reference list. I love the way that creating a world where this text exists in conversation with other texts makes the story itself into a mirror of those other stories, both fictional and non-. What role did this format and the academic setting play in your conception of the story?

The format actually sort of came out of nowhere, in that I don’t recall ever sitting down and saying “let’s write an academic essay/lit review about something that never happened.” I do like unusual formats in general, and I think this was strongly influenced by Sarah Gailey’s amazing story “STET,” which really expanded my notion of what a story can be and do.

I feel like it also grew out of the fact that I was just concluding work on my doctoral dissertation as I wrote the story, and a big component of what I was doing had to do with theories of physical space and how people exist in those spaces, using Foucault’s writing from The Order of Things in particular. When something like that is taking up that much real estate in your brain, it’s going to come out in lots of ways you maybe didn’t anticipate. And a significant part of the process of writing that kind of dissertation is placing texts in conversation with each other in order to tease out your own ideas. You start seeing reflections everywhere.

Plus I was reading Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths at the time, and a number of his stories are written like academic essays in terms of their voice and structure. So that was probably also a big part of it; I feel like I was channeling some of that voice when I was writing.

The horror of mirrors, either quantum, fun house, or mundane, is perhaps an anxiety about the integrity of the self—how we can be changed, shattered, misconceived, or lost in the act of being reflected and perceived. In the case of Sapna Gupta, she’s literally overwhelmed and eradicated by the mass of her mirror-selves. What was it about this connection between perception, being perceived, and loss of self that interested you, and what led you to the idea of mirroring as a way to explore that?

I’m not totally sure where that came from. Probably some of it was, again, the dissertation work I was doing, which wasn’t only about physical space but more specifically how existing in the space of a particular collection of Nazi extermination camps was to experience a process of dismantling and erasure; victims weren’t merely murdered but were elaborately dehumanized beforehand, and the ultimate goal was to excise an entire people from reality and then erase the mechanisms of that mass murder. When you’re writing about that kind of thing, there’s also a difficult tension between approaching at a macro level and a more finely detailed, intimate micro level. I think that tension is present in this story as well—one vs. many.

Losing oneself/losing oneself in oneself is also a personal fear of mine. I’m mentally ill, and the experience of no longer being able to trust one’s own perception of reality is one of the things that scares me most. It’s not the first time I’ve written about it.

Are there other stories about doppelgängers, clones, or mirror-selves that have fascinated you, or that left open questions and possibilities that you explored in “Note to Self”?

I think it’s less about literal clones or doppelgängers for me as it is the idea of split selves, of part of you internally encountering and engaging with another part. Not necessarily actual multiple personalities but more the sense of being fractured that a lot of us have at least sometimes. We’ll be a certain kind of person in one context and then perhaps a very different person in another context, and in extreme situations we may find ourselves behaving in ways we barely recognize.

So I can’t think of any specific stories I had in mind when I was writing and I’m having trouble thinking of any specific ones now, but it’s a general idea that tends to resonate whenever I encounter it to any degree.

Is there anything you’re working on currently that you can tell us about?

I wish there was! Something I could talk about, I mean. I’m actually working on a number of things at the moment, and they’re right on the edge of being something I can talk publicly about. I’ll probably be able to say something about a couple of them soon, and for a couple of others it may be a while. But there are things very much in the pipeline. Possibly by the time this is published I’ll already have announced something, given that I’m writing this in July.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Nicasio Andres Reed is a Filipino-American writer, poet, and essayist whose work has appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Shimmer. Nico is currently pursuing an MA in creative writing at the University of the Philippines- Diliman. Find him on Twitter @NicasioSilang.

Author Spotlight: Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Setsu Uzumé | 526 words

There were so many images and references to myths and fairy tales—eating pomegranate and gingerbread as part of her cure stuck out the most to me. Of all the myths you brought together, which is the one you’d most like folks to know about?

I’ve always loved the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Tinderbox.” I love the idea of a matchbox that can grant wishes. In that story, the matchbox summons progressively larger dogs to grant wishes to the person who strikes the matches. I had a storybook of it when I was a kid, and the imagery stuck with me.

Being a witch is a lot like being a counselor, now that you mention it. What do you think is the key to humor in an SF/F story?

Humor is so difficult to pull off, because different people have different definitions! My first professional story, “The Wanderers,” is a dark humor story, and when it was first published, I read this review that said it was “trying too hard to be clever.” I laughed about that and said to my friends, “I am clever! I wasn’t just trying!” But the truth is some people will think you’re clever and others won’t. With written humor, the delivery is more difficult to nail down than when you’re goofing off with friends. Playing with tropes is a good source of humor in SF/F specifically. But having an ear for the rhythm of sentences will help in all humor writing, because that’s where you get to play with delivery.

Is there a piece of wellness or self-care advice you find really useful? Is there one you wish would go away?

I’m a huge proponent of therapy, for people who are able. Through cognitive behavioral therapy and medication, I was able to confront and eliminate a whole host of fears I let build up. And I was in bad shape: daily panic attacks, a fear of flying, a fear of driving, a fear of storms, a fear of my own shadow. I’m all for taking days off from work of all kinds, even writing. Lately, I’ve been using my gas budget on bath bombs, because I’m social distancing and fancy baths are a huge balm. My least favorite self-care advice is anything prescriptive, because of course not everyone will benefit from the same things that have saved my mental health.

The forward motion of the plot seems to stem from the dynamics between one who destroys and one who doesn’t—whether it’s mother/daughter, father/daughter, or girlfriend/girlfriend. As an author, do you have a nemesis? If not, what qualities would you look for in one?

I don’t have a nemesis, but I’m taking applications. Must love dogs.

Whacha workin’ on?

I’m writing much more horror and science fiction these days. Right now, I’m working on a longer piece—maybe a novella, I don’t know—about a queer monster squad.

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 232 words

Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Todd McAulty (“The Ambient Intelligence”) and Jenny Rae Rappaport (“Everything and Nothing”), along with SF reprints by Caroline M. Yoachim (“The Shadow Prisoner’s Dilemma”) and Ken Liu (“Byzantine Empathy”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by P H Lee (“The Vampire of Kovácspéter”) and Rahul Kanakia (“Everquest”), and fantasy reprints by Minsoo Kang (“The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations”) and Stephanie Malia Morris (“Forty Acres and a Mule”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our feature interview is with CL Polk. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories coming your way. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Gene Doucette, Andrew Dana Hudson and C.Y. Ballard, Ashok K. Banker, Lizz Huerta, Phoebe Barton, Anjali Sachdeva, An Owomoyela, Rich Larson, A.T. Greenblatt, Kat Howard, and more.

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

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

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

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

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Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon) [Forthcoming 2020]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

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

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker [forthcoming]

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette [forthcoming]

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