TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 125, October 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: October 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

The Ambient Intelligence
Todd McAulty

The Shadow Prisoner’s Dilemma
Caroline M. Yoachim

Everything and Nothing
Jenny Rae Rappaport

Byzantine Empathy
Ken Liu

FANTASY

Forty Acres and a Mule
Stephanie Malia Morris

The Vampire of Kovácspéter
P H Lee

The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations
Minsoo Kang

Everquest
Naomi Kanakia

EXCERPTS

Attack Surface
Cory Doctorow

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: October 2020
Chris Kluwe

Media Review: October 2020
Aaron Duran

C.L. Polk
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Todd McAulty

P H Lee

Jenny Rae Rappaport

Naomi Kanakia

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: October 2020

John Joseph Adams | 217 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 125th issue!

Do you love power armor? Do you love giant robots? Do you love people in power armor fighting giant robots? Well then, we’ve got you covered! Todd McAulty’s newest short story (“The Ambient Intelligence”) is here to meet all your power armor vs. robot needs. Our other new short SF is from Jenny Rae Rappaport: “Everything and Nothing,” a story of love and futuristic warfare. We also have the next installment of Caroline M. Yoachim’s Shadow Prisons series (“The Shadow Prisoner’s Dilemma”) and a classic from Ken Liu (“Byzantine Empathy”).

Our first piece of original fantasy this month (“The Vampire of Kovácspéter”) is the tale of a level-headed vampire hunter written by P H Lee. Naomi Kanakia tells us about how video games can change a life in her new story “Everquest.” We also have fantasy reprints by Stephanie Malia Morris (“Forty Acres and a Mule”) and Minsoo Kang (“The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations”).

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 an excerpt from Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Attack Surface.

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 Ambient Intelligence

Todd McAulty | 11398 words

The air over Chicago was thick with drones.

There were at least two dozen I could see from the beach. Most were small, no more than slow-moving specks against the clouds, probably simple reconnaissance units. But at higher altitudes the big Venezuelan military birds prowled, formidable machines the size of Buicks. They moved through the sky with purpose. I had the suit zoom in on one, high over the lake. It looked like a fat spider, with sinister limbs jutting out at all angles. The American combat suit amused itself by trying to identify what each limb did. They’re probably all anal probes, I told it.

I looked out over the muddy expanse that used to be the shore of Lake Michigan, the second largest lake in North America. In places, the shoreline of the lake had receded nearly a mile, leaving an ugly landscape of mud, garbage, and stagnant pools that stretched north and south as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of gulls and other birds dotted the seashore, feasting on the crawling, flopping, and decaying inhabitants of the pools. The combat suit was airtight, and right now I was glad I couldn’t smell anything.

To my left was the mass of volcanic steam rising up from the underwater dig in the middle of the lake, what they were calling the Deep Temple project. The steam cloud climbed up, up, and up, into the chill blue sky, stretching off for nearly a hundred miles to the east, like the exhaust trail of a great cosmic engine motoring the planet through the cosmos. Over ten billion gallons boiled out of the lake every hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No wonder the damn lake had receded.

I pictured the map of the shipwreck Zircon Border had shown me, trying to orient myself. The lack of landmarks made it hard to pinpoint exactly where I might find it. Worse, the route into the old lakebed was going to be a lot more treacherous than I’d anticipated. Two days of rain had turned the mud flats ahead of me into a series of interconnected pools. I stood for long moments, trying to pick out a path that wouldn’t get me completely lost, or stranded hip-deep in mud. It looked hopeless.

Finally I gave up. I toggled my com gear, opening a channel. “Zircon Border, you there buddy?”

“I read you, Mister Simcoe.” ZB’s voice sounded warm and reassuring, especially for a 2000-pound war machine.

“I need a ride.”

“A ride, sir?”

“Roger that. Low altitude aerial transportation, maybe two miles. I need to hop over all this mud.”

“I’m not sure I can help you. I don’t have any aerial weight I can re-task for you.”

I looked skyward again. “Sure you do,” I said. “I’m looking at a couple tons of idle Venezuelan equipment right now.”

“I assure you, there are no idle passenger-capable vehicles within twenty miles of your location, Mister Simcoe.”

“ZB, you have no imagination. I’m not looking for luxury accommodations. You got authority over anything bigger than half a ton in the air right now?”

“Yes sir.”

“Send it to me.”

One thing about Zircon Border: he doesn’t pepper you with needless questions. Less than three minutes later, a bird began dropping out of the sky. It came at me from the south, big and grey and nimble. It looked nothing like the massive bug I’d tracked a minute ago. This thing was more like a thirty-foot garden trellis, a big square patch of wrought-iron fencing in the sky. It looked oddly delicate, with no obvious control core or payload, just a bunch of strangely twisted metal kept airborne by a dozen rotors. A flat design like that didn’t seem like it would be very maneuverable, but it spun gracefully end-over-end as it decelerated before my eyes, coming to a complete stop less than fifty feet away. It hovered there, perfectly stable, not drifting at all in the unsteady breeze coming off the lake.

I walked around it, trying to make it out. Other than the frame and the rotors, there wasn’t much to this thing. No weapons that I could see, no obvious spy gear. The connecting metalwork was circular and ornate, with jutting spurs and finely ridged edges. It looked like a gate that had escaped a garden party.

This wasn’t what I’d expected at all. “Zircon Border, what the hell is this thing?’

“It’s a mobile radio telescope, Mister Simcoe.”

“Seriously? What are you doing with it?”

“Venezuela uses units like this to monitor deep-space communications, sir.”

“Deep-space . . . what? Communications from whom?”

“I’m afraid I have no idea. That information is highly classified.”

“Of course it is. Okay. I’m going to jump on it. Can it hold me?”

“I’m sure you’ll let me know in a minute,” said Zircon Border.

“Great,” I said dryly. “Stand by.”

I spent another sixty seconds staring at the flying telescope, trying to suss out the best place to grab onto it. No part seemed more solid than any other; it was all thin metal and high-speed rotors. Finally I shrugged, gauged the distance, and jumped. My fingers caught the steel frame; the suit, augmenting my strength and stamina, made holding on fairly effortless. I swung my legs up as smoothly as I could.

My weight caused the drone to dip immediately. More than dip; we plunged dangerously, and my ass very nearly smacked the ground as I dangled awkwardly. I damn near stuck my foot right into the hungry maw of a spinning rotor as I probed for a place to anchor myself. I corrected at the last second, finding a small niche to hook unto.

I straightened my spine and pulled myself as close to the metal frame as possible. The drone pitched wildly as the rotors tried to compensate for the sudden increase in weight, and the air quickly filled with flying sand and grit.

We were too close to the ground; all that grit would foul the rotors. The drone bucked left and right; I didn’t dare shift my weight enough to look down. For several long seconds I was convinced I’d have to release my grip and plummet an unknown distance onto my back.

Then the ride smoothed out a little. The rotors had powered up enough to keep us airborne, and the stabilizers had compensated for my weight. We were gaining altitude. By the time I relaxed a little and twisted around enough to look down, we were nearly eighty feet in the air.

We were also over water. Or more accurately, water and a whole lot of mud. I took a second to orient myself. Dry land was . . . on our right; that meant my deep-space telescope taxi was carrying me to the southeast. I found our shadow racing over the muck and water below; we were picking up speed nicely. Zircon Border must have fed it our destination.

I was glad to have ZB accompany me, even if only virtually. I trusted him implicitly; he’d proven himself worthy of that trust many times over. Like many thousands of men, women, and machines in Chicago, Zircon Border was a volunteer, someone who’d come to America at the end of the war as a member of the international peacekeeping force, the AGRT. Before he got here, he’d never served a day in his life in a military outfit. However, unlike most of those other well-meaning volunteers, he was a bodiless artificial intelligence highly skilled at controlling advanced machine torsos—including, as it happens, the heavy combat units favored by the Venezuelan invasion force.

Up until four months ago, that force had occupied a quarter of the country. The Memphis Ceasefire had brought an end to that, at least for the moment, and the coalition of countries ruled by fascist machines had withdrawn, leaving a handful of those deadly assets behind. Not many, but more than the AGRT knew how to use. Zircon Border had been given the challenging task of controlling some of those lethal killing machines as part of the security apparatus for the AGRT command center. In many ways, he was like a kid with a tank. Three tanks, last time I counted.

I’d met ZB shortly after I arrived in the city. He’d been introduced to me by Nineteen Black Winter, a diplomatic attaché from the Kingdom of Manhattan. I was a Canadian businessman looking for contacts, and Zircon Border was a young machine who loved to talk, but didn’t get the chance very often.

If you met him, you’d understand. On the radio, or in electronic correspondence, ZB is warm and open, the kind of guy you trust immediately. In person, he’s terrifying. His physical presence is overwhelming, a towering one-ton chassis that looks like an angry block of granite. His combat torsos were designed to kill quickly and efficiently, and they look it. I’ve known him for months, and even I get a little nervous in the same room with him.

As far as I know, Zircon Border has never killed anyone, and frankly I doubt he has the stomach for it, regardless of how dangerous he looks. It’s just easy to forget that when you’re standing next to him.

I had just started to unclench my shoulders, get comfortable with letting the suit do most of the work, when the thought of where we were going made me tense up again. It was bad enough to be clinging to the underside of an aerial drone. Things were going to get a whole lot worse when we arrived at the shipwreck, where a sixty-ton robot waited to kill me.

Zircon Border was speaking in my ear. The suit had excellent noise cancelation, but nothing was that good; I was inches away from the rotors, and it was far too noisy to make out what he was saying. I hoped it wasn’t anything important, like Look out for that missile!

Still, being out of radio communication with Zircon Border had its advantages. I hadn’t had a minute to myself since our meeting this morning, and I desperately needed a few moments to think. It’s not exactly easy to think when rotors are pumping out a hundred decibels next to your ears and you’re dangling a quarter mile above the ground, but sometimes you take what moments you can get.

• • • •

The last time I’d gotten an urgent message from Zircon Border—three weeks ago, at 3:58 in the damned morning—it was because a porpoise in a pod he’d been monitoring had given birth in the middle of the Atlantic, and he’d been too excited to wait until morning to tell me the birth weight. So when ZB sent two soldiers to pull me away from breakfast at the hotel restaurant this morning, to summon me to the AGRT Command Center on the third floor, I wasn’t immediately concerned. It could have been anything. Porpoises. Water fowl. A cat video. I mean, anything.

It was a video. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with cats.

The soldiers had brought me to a secure meeting room where Zircon Border had been waiting. When they left, he’d shown me the video. A nighttime scene of a construction site, probably from an infrared camera on a high altitude drone. It showed three men walking across a parking lot. Something entered from the right. It was blindingly hot; so hot the whole screen flashed white. By the time I’d blinked away the flash and refocused, the thing was gone.

Two of the men were dead.

Zircon Border replayed the scene. He slowed it down and dialed the contrast way back until I could make out what was happening.

It was a robot. A gargantuan machine beast, easily thirty-five feet tall and maybe sixty tons. No configuration I recognized. Military maybe; but not Venezuelan. Two great arms and a set of pistoning iron legs, fixed to an ugly battered shell that looked like a boiler. One of the twin power packs on its back was the thing spilling all the heat; it glowed with the white-hot fury of the sun, even with the contrast dialed down. I don’t know much about heat disposal on the big machines, but even I could spot a critical malfunction when I saw one. That thing was on the verge of a meltdown.

It carved a straight path across the construction site. It violently smashed a pickup truck out of the way, and crushed the first running man under foot. The second looked like he’d made it, diving out of the way at the last second. Until the robot casually reached out and crushed him, just before exiting the lot on the left.

“Jesus,” I said. My heart was racing. “Zircon Border, what the hell was that?”

“Video from Argentinean drone Kappa-881. Recorded here in Chicago two days ago, at 11:18 pm. There is more.”

“Show me.”

Zircon Border shared five more video clips. All had been recorded at night. Some showed the thing scaling burned-out buildings, clamoring over Chicago architecture like a stiff-armed monkey. In one, it was standing motionless in ten feet of water, like a great rusted statue from a bygone era, while Lake Michigan surf pounded its scorched back, triggering great fountains of steam. There was one more attack, enigmatic and strange, in which it smashed into an apartment complex to steal a metal bed frame.

I shook my head in bewilderment. “What is that thing, ZB?”

“It is a heavily modified commercial mining machine, designation Caledonia True Pacific Bravo Prairie Nine. Honduran manufacture; conscripted into the Argentinean Engineering Corps in November of last year, and transferred to the American theater December 29, 2082.”

“This thing was part of the San Cristobal Coalition, with the invading army?”

“Not a combat machine. It was a service unit in the Grant Park machine depot, before it was transferred to the Deep Temple Project.”

“Deep Temple . . . What the hell is that?”

Instead of answering, Zircon Border showed me an image of Lake Michigan.

At least, what used to be Lake Michigan. In the image before me, most of the surface of the lake was hidden by a cloud of volcanic steam rising from a controlled magma vent, a colossal piece of planetary engineering constructed some fifteen miles offshore. Everyone in the city lived in the long shadow of that towering mass of steam, and felt the warm glow of the vent on their faces at night.

“So that’s what they’re calling it?” I said. I leaned closer, staring intently. What was happening in Lake Michigan was one of the great mysteries in post-war Chicago, and my curiosity was intense. I caught glimpses of massive machines, impossibly large, rising out of the water near the heart of it all, obscured by heat and steam. “Deep Temple. What is it? What is it for?”

“I don’t know. All information on the Project is highly classified.”

I sat back in frustration. There was no point getting irritated with Zircon Border. “Fine. Let’s focus on the matter at hand. The robot—what the hell’s wrong with it?”

“Caledonia True Pacific has an imperfect service record. There is a lengthy list of malfunctions, indicating multiple potential cognitive flaws. It has not reported for duty for eleven days.”

“Duty doing what?”

“Unknown.”

“Jesus Christ. All right. We have a machine doing something for that massive undertaking in the middle of Lake Michigan, though we have no idea what. It goes AWOL eleven days ago, though we don’t know why. And a week later it shows up in Chicago, behaving erratically and killing people. And we don’t know why it’s doing that either. Did I capture all that correctly?”

“Those are the essential facts, Mister Simcoe.”

I rubbed my face wearily. “Okay. What’s being done about it?’

“Nothing. Caledonia True Pacific is not part of the peacekeeping security apparatus; it is currently under the authority of Deep Temple. So far it has not impaired any AGRT assets. Until it does, I have no authority to take direct action.”

“So no one’s doing anything?” I said.

“I am doing something. I am speaking to you.”

That shut me up. I sat with my mouth open for several seconds, then cleared my throat. “Why me?”

“Because you can do something about it.”

There was no point playing coy with Zircon Border. We’d known each other too long, and he’d helped me out of a few jams in the past. More relevant to the situation at hand, he knew I had a couple of highly illegal possessions, including an American combat suit, which I’d used at least once here in the hotel. I’d never asked Zircon Border precisely how much he’d seen—or figured out—from those days of youthful misadventure. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you asked friends. Not while they were on duty, anyway.

But yes. There was no point denying ZB’s essential point. Yes. I could do something about it.

Probably.

“So . . . what do you want me to do, exactly?”

“I need you to help me stop it,” Zircon Border said. “Disable it. Destroy it, if possible.”

Something that big and ugly wasn’t going to be easy to destroy. Yes, the combat suit I’d found—really, a suit of lightweight powered armor—was an incredible piece of hardware, designed near the end of the war by American engineers to enable soldiers to go head-to-head with top-of-the-line machines in the invading army. It’d been so effective that the Memphis Ceasefire had stipulated that they all be destroyed. But I barely knew how to use it, and I’d never gone up against anything remotely this big before.

“That’s a tall order, ZB. I’m not sure I can do that.”

“Innocent people are dying.”

I sat quietly for a moment. I had no illusions about what Zircon Border was asking. The last time I’d used the suit in a fight, against a combat torso here in the hotel, I’d very nearly been killed. All in all, I’d really hoped my days wearing it into action were over.

But ZB was right. This robot was a danger to everyone in the city. And I did owe him a very big debt, if only for keeping his mouth shut about the combat suit. He’d had multiple opportunities to turn me in, and he hadn’t. At the very least, I could investigate the situation for him and find out what we were up against.

“All right,” I said. “But let’s take this one step at a time. I’ll start by taking a closer look. How do I find this thing?”

The video feed changed again. Now it showed a watery landscape, mud flats with countless pools and rivulets, where the lake had receded. In the center of the image was something solid, like a ship. The camera zoomed again, centering on the ship.

It was a wreck. Eighty feet, maybe a big tug or fire-fighting boat. It lay on its side, beached in the mud, caked with clay and dried seaweed. It looked like it’d been underwater a long time. The receding water of the lake had exposed it to the elements, perhaps for the first time in a hundred years.

I peered more closely. There were tracks in the mud near the wreck. Multiple tracks, all big. Coming and going.

“It is chiefly active at night,” ZB said. “During the day it remains hidden.”

“Is it there now?”

“Yes.”

“That looks like . . . what? Roughly a three-mile walk?”

“3.18 miles, depending on your route.”

I stood. “I can be there in ninety minutes. Can you help me avoid the AGRT patrols and security checkpoints?”

“Certainly. I will be in touch with you for the entire operation.”

“So this is an operation now?” I said, and I couldn’t resist a smile. “Fine by me. But don’t expect me to do any of the paperwork.”

I couldn’t have clung, rigid like a washboard, to the underside of an airborne garden gate for six long minutes without the amplified strength of the combat suit. Long before I began to tire, I noticed we were slowing. The apprehension and dread I’d felt for the last hour hadn’t gone away, but I had to admit that the longer I wore the suit, the better I felt. The enhanced strength in my arms and legs, the cool air circulating against my skin, brought with them a rush of exhilaration. Wearing the suit, I felt like I could do anything.

I was about to test that theory. We were almost on top of the shipwreck. The drone was losing altitude, taking me in closer.

Up close, the ship didn’t look any better. On ZB’s high-altitude image it had looked mostly intact, but as we drew nearer it became more and more obvious this was a hundred-year-old sunken wreck. The boat rested at roughly a forty-five degree angle, sunk in about eight feet of mud. The heavy rains of the last few days had cleared away much of the mud and dried seaweed caking the surface, exposing rusted gray metal. It was eighty, maybe ninety feet, bow to stern. The bridge was intact, though the windows were so dirty I couldn’t see inside. It looked undisturbed.

Except for the deep set of tracks. Something very heavy had approached the boat from the north, and not that long ago. It looked like it had crawled right into the cargo hold.

Zircon Border was speaking again. I still couldn’t make out a damn thing he was saying. Probably asking where I wanted to land.

That was a good question. The drone had leveled out about fifty feet above the mud flats. The rains had replenished the lake; not enough to restore the waterline to normal, but enough to turn this part of the old lakebed into a treacherous bog. There were pools everywhere, and nothing that looked remotely solid enough to drop onto. A fall from this height would plunge me waist-deep into mud. And that’s if I avoided face-planting into the muck.

In fact, tactically speaking, the terrain was all wrong. The big advantages the suit gave me in combat were speed and agility. And if I was going to confront a thirty-five-foot construction robot, doing it while stuck knee-deep in mud was a terrible idea. I needed to rethink my plan, such as it was.

Not being able to talk to Zircon Border severely limited my planning ability. The drone was still carrying me in a lazy orbit around the wreck. Any hope for a stealthy approach was probably gone now, too. The noise from its rotors had announced our arrival long ago.

If your opponent already knows you’re here, you might as well make an entrance, I reasoned. I wormed my legs out of the metal grid, swung free as we slowly approached the wreck again, and dropped straight down. The suit absorbed the impact of the landing, and my boots made an impressive boom as I hit the wall of the bridge.

The rusted plating had looked solid enough from above, but I was half-afraid I’d punch right through it. It held fine, but I immediately found myself in a gritty, undignified slide. When I hit bottom, my boots slammed hard onto the deck and I managed to grab the rail just before pitching headlong over the side.

I found my footing and quickly assessed the situation. I was unhurt, though my ass and legs were streaked with mud. The deck sloped too severely to walk around freely, but nothing appeared to be moving. I was alone, at least for the moment.

The boom still echoed in my ears. Well, I’d wanted to make an entrance. If that psychotic service machine had been peacefully slumbering in the hold, it was definitely awake now.

I tapped the side of my mask. “Zircon Border, you still out there?”

“I’m here, Mister Simcoe. Watching with high-altitude surveillance. Are you uninjured?”

“So far. I need an infrared reading. Can you confirm the robot is still on the boat?”

“I’ll have one of the surveillance drones give me a reading.”

I felt exposed on deck. I glanced out over the muddy landscape. From the air it had looked like a lost cause, but up close, there were possibilities. Clumps of dried seaweed and other plants had matted over the mud in spots, and there was a thin ridge that looked more sand than mud. That was promising.

That’s where our little drama needed to play out, I decided. I needed to get down there; needed to splash around in the mud and see whether or not it could support a fight. I needed to—

I was standing beside a raised hatch, a muddy square I’d bumped past on my slide down the wall of the bridge, and suddenly the suit’s display lit it up like a Christmas tree. I was turning to check things out when a giant metal hand smashed right through the hatch, spraying glass and mud in all directions.

It was a window, not a hatch. My bad.

I leapt backwards instinctively, and that’s the only thing that saved me. The massive hand slammed down where I’d been standing, and started groping blindly.

Looked like my opponent was awake. I vaulted over the rail without waiting to see what would follow the arm out the broken window. I slid down the bow of the ship, looking for a place to plant my feet. A few yards to the right lay a half-submerged length of timber. I jumped to it nimbly so that I didn’t end my slide waist deep in watery mud.

At least, my jump was nimble. Touchdown, not so much. The rotted timber crumpled like wet cardboard as I landed, and I tumbled onto a soggy patch of dead seaweed.

It took a few nervous seconds to extricate myself, and a few more to shake off the mud on my arms and shoulders. I retreated quickly, away from the boat, picking my way through the bog, with plenty of glances at the wreck over my shoulder. But nothing emerged in immediately pursuit.

“Infrared bloom detected,” Zircon Border said in my ear. “The robot is active.”

“Jesus, you’re a big help.” I found a tuft of relatively dry grass and stomped around experimentally.

“Sorry,” said Zircon Border. “I guess that wasn’t very useful.”

“You want to be useful, tell me where it is right now.”

“It is exiting the hold, on the north side. This is odd . . .”

“What?”

“Its power pack has cooled significantly. It is no longer dangerously overheated. It’s possible it has regained control over some of its runaway systems. Perhaps effected repairs.”

That was interesting. “What does that mean? Is it a little less crazy?”

“Possibly. It would be useful to communicate with it, get a sense of its mental state.”

“Its mental state? It just smashed a window, trying to kill me. I think I have a pretty good handle on its mental state.”

“In any case, you’re very vulnerable where you are. I suggest you lure it to shore, where your movements are less impeded by terrain.”

I glanced at shore, a muddy half-mile slog to my left. I’d be dangerously exposed if I made a break for it now. “Thanks, ZB. But I think I’m going to stay put.”

“That’s very risky, Mister Simcoe. This is a very dangerous opponent, and doubly so in close combat.”

“Yeah, well, I’m working on a plan. Where is it now?”

“On the move. It is circling the boat, approaching you from the west. You should see it in approximately twenty seconds.”

Twenty seconds later, give or take, the robot rounded the west side of the boat and I got my first good look at it.

It was a beast. The suit said it was 38.8 feet, but that doesn’t give you a sense of the true scale of the thing. I guessed its weight at nearly sixty tons. It was humanoid, but it didn’t look remotely human. It was all shoulders; it looked a little like the big construction bots I’d seen working the skyline in Toronto, but they weren’t nearly as stiff and clumsy. It walked like a mountain gorilla, its long arms swinging at its sides. It was staring straight at me.

It didn’t say a word as it approached. As it drew closer, I saw it was filthy. It looked like it had been sleeping in a bed of mud. This thing was half psychotic killer, half hobo.

It was also dragging itself through the mud. It seemed to take no care at all where it put its great three-toed feet as it lurched towards me, coming down from the higher ground the boat rested on and splashing right into some of the deepest pools.

The result was about as graceless as you’d expect. It sank three to four feet into the watery clay of the lakebed with every step. The mud did not release those huge metal feet willingly.

I should have been finding a more defensible position, but I was too fascinated by this spectacle. It seemed like I might never have to face off against this thing at all. Every step looked like it could be its last, as it sank deeper and deeper into the muck. The only tool it brought to bear against the relentless grip of the lake was pig-headed stubbornness. It came straight at me without the slightest deviation, pulling its great tonnage out of the sucking grasp of the mud with nothing more than raw machine determination. Its pace was growing slower, and the last few steps took truly herculean effort.

As the seconds dragged on, it just became too painful to watch. “Would it help if I came to you?” I asked.

The robot ceased its relentless advance. There was a short pause. “Yes,” it said simply. Its voice was deep and booming, just as you’d expect from a sixty-ton killer robot.

“Okay,” I said reasonably. I started picking my way towards it.

“Mister Simcoe,” said ZB in my ear. “What are you doing?”

“Stay cool. You suggested I communicate. I’m trying to communicate.”

“Getting closer is a bad idea.”

“Won’t be my first today,” I said. I continued to approach the robot, though at a leisurely pace and via a generally indirect route.

“My name is Barry Simcoe,” I said, as I ambled my way around mud puddles. “What’s yours?”

It didn’t respond. It just loomed over the mud like a crazy-eyed robot monster.

I leaped over a four-foot water channel, landing on my right foot. I sank four inches into the mud and fought to maintain my balance, my left foot still in the air. “I don’t know how you managed to get as far as you did,” I marveled.

The robot remained silent. It continued to eye me with a pretty spectacular air of menace, though.

It didn’t take me long to approach grabbing distance. Not given the big gorilla arms this thing had, anyway. I paused a respectful distance outside of its reach, and looked up expectantly. Let it do the talking for once, I figured.

“Closer,” it said.

“Tell me your name,” I said.

It seemed to ponder that. Machine intelligences can process billions of cognitive operations per minute; why so many of them are slow talkers is beyond me. In any event, after a time it said, “My designation is Caledonia True Pacific Bravo Prairie Nine; I am a service machine in the Argentinean Engineering Corps.”

Truth. This thing was telling me the truth. That was strangely hopeful.

I rewarded it for telling me the truth by taking a cautious step forward. My foot splashed in the mud.

True Pacific actually twitched a little. His whole left side hitched up a good eighteen inches. His big crazy eyes were fixed on me like a cat staring at an injured mouse.

Curiosity got the best of me. “What happens when I get close enough for you to grab?” I asked.

“I will grab you,” it said.

Well, that figured. “I appreciate your honesty,” I said, making an effort to focus on the positive. “Let’s start over. My name is Barry Simcoe. I’m not here to hurt you.”

“You cannot hurt me.”

“Yeah, you may be right about that. But I think that puts me at a disadvantage, because I believe you can most definitely hurt me.”

As we were talking, the combat suit was attempting all kinds of fancy diagnostics on True Pacific, and displaying them on the heads up display. Nothing that seemed worth my attention, and mostly I ignored them. My first warning that something was about to happen came when all that text suddenly vanished and the suit highlighted True Pacific in angry blue. The big guy was about to make a move.

It still managed to take me by surprise. True Pacific leaned far to the right, far enough that it seemed sure to topple over. Its left foot, still deep in the mud, kept it anchored, and somehow it maintained its balance as it plucked a quarter-ton boulder out of the muck and sent it spinning with lethal force towards my head.

On normal terrain, the suit could have dodged a clumsy projectile like that with ease. But my heavy metal boots were in three inches of mud, and I didn’t trust my footing enough to jump. Instead I did a fast crouch, pulling my body into a tight ball, and the rock sailed over my head with maybe a foot to spare.

I recovered quickly, taking a battle stance as I stood. “You’ll have to do better than—”

True Pacific’s follow up hit me so hard it knocked me right off my feet. With one smooth motion it scoped up a massive ball of dirt and mud and hurtled it at me with deadly accuracy. A hundred pounds of wet clay slammed into my chest with enough force to blow me back ten feet and knock the wind out of me.

I was flat on my ass, badly disoriented, and whatever sensors the suit was using were incapacitated, at least temporarily. I was also covered in mud, including my face mask. I was completely blind.

“Zircon Border!”

“Roll to your left,” Zircon Border said. “Quickly, please.”

I did as I was told, still blind. I felt something large slam into the earth next to me; sharp claws raked my back.

“Lift your legs,” said Zircon Border.

I obeyed immediately. Something very heavy landed where my legs had been, splattering me with more mud.

“There’s water four feet to your left,” said Zircon Border.

I tried to struggle to my feet, but the terrain was too slippery. In less than three seconds, I was flat on my back again.

I took a moment to center myself, trying to force calm. “What’s it doing?” I asked, picturing True Pacific reaching for me with those massive metal claws. There was panic in my voice.

“It’s watching you.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not yet, no.”

I rose up on all fours and crawled towards the water. It was a small pool, not very deep, but it was enough. I hastily splashed my face and twisted my head to the right, trying to spot the robot through the muddy smear of my mask.

Zircon Border was right. True Pacific had stopped throwing projectiles and seemed to be observing me, taking my measure. As I watched, it resumed its efforts to free itself from the mud. It was rocking back and forth, trying to pull its right foot free.

A green light flashed at the bottom of my mask. The suit had activated some kind of acoustic sensing gear. A green wire-frame image of the robot and the nearby terrain popped up in the lower left. The next time it tried something like that, the suit would be ready.

I got to my feet slowly, sloughing off the worst of the mud. To my right an eight-foot chunk of driftwood was embedded deep in the earth, where True Pacific had hurled it in an attempt to kill me.

“My apologies,” I said as I bent over and splashed more water on my mask, clearing my vision. “I underestimated you.”

“Come closer.”

I managed a dry chuckle, though there wasn’t much humor in it. “If I get any closer, you’ll kill me.”

“I don’t want to kill you. I want you to go away.”

“You’re asking me to come closer, because you want me to go away?”

The robot stopped moving. It swiveled its big crazy eyes towards me, and simply froze. I swear, it was like I posed a riddle that completely paralyzed its tortured little robot brain.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t meant to be a stumper. Look, let’s cut to the chase. You were mistaken when you said I can’t hurt you. I am here to destroy you, and I’m going to do that in the next four minutes.”

The robot said nothing.

“You are malfunctioning,” I continued. “You’ve killed civilians in Chicago, and I’ve been tasked to put a stop to it. You are violent and unpredictable, and based on your behavior in the last few minutes, my best assessment is that the only way to stop you is to destroy you.”

“You cannot destroy me.”

“You have three minutes, thirty seconds.”

True Pacific was rocking again, more violently this time. Its right leg would be free in seconds. I stood perfectly still.

The rocking continued. And then, with a great wrenching motion, True Pacific pulled its right leg free of the imprisoning muck. It surged twenty feet in one great stride, and its metal fist hammered down to squash me like a bug.

It was fast, but it wasn’t fast enough. The suit had the robot’s moves mapped out well in advance, and I let it guide my actions. I pivoted on my right foot, out of the path of that deadly metal fist, and it missed me by inches.

The long metal pillar of its arm stabbed deep into the mud, sending a thick geyser of wet earth into the air. The mud surged under my feet, and I reached out to clamber onto True Pacific’s arm. Before it could react I scurried up onto its back.

True Pacific was a formidable opponent, but it had not been built for combat. Its critical systems were neither shielded nor inaccessible and, ladies and gentlemen, that’s a serious weakness in close combat. The suit showed me precisely where the main power coupling connected to its cognitive core, right behind its big ugly head. In four seconds I had the coupling in my hands. It already felt loose. One good pull would power down this clumsy beast permanently.

True Pacific started bucking like a bronco. It freed its left hand from the muck and started reaching for me. “Stop moving now, or I yank this out!” I threatened.

The robot stopped bucking immediately, and its movements slowed dramatically. But it continued to reach for me, almost comically slowly, with its grasping metal paws.

“I said stop moving!” I said. “That means your hands too.”

It stopped moving. But those big metal mitts were awfully damn close to my head.

“Lower your arms,” I commanded.

It didn’t respond. I repeated the order, but nothing happened.

“Lower your arms, or I’ll pull this goddamn cord right out of your head,” I said.

“But if I lower my arms,” the robot said plaintively, “there is nothing to prevent you from decoupling me.”

“You don’t have a choice,” I said.

The arms didn’t move. I tightened my grip on the cable.

“Lower your arm. I won’t decouple you until we talk first.”

The arms slowly lowered.

“You have two minutes and thirty-three seconds to convince me not to destroy you,” I said.

The big robot stood perfectly still for a full thirty of those seconds. I used that time to ask the suit to make sure it wasn’t carrying hidden explosives or any other nasty surprises. It came up clean. I checked with Zircon Border to make sure it didn’t have any allies or slave drones approaching us stealthily.

“Skies are clear,” ZB said. “Nothing coming at you from any direction I can see. And nice moves, by the way.”

“Thank you. Stay alert, please. This is where it gets interesting.”

I was about to remind True Pacific of the ticking clock when it finally spoke. Its voice boomed out over the mud flats.

“You have no right to decouple me. Such action would be fatal. I am an autonomous entity with rights equivalent to any other, organic or machine, as guaranteed by the charter of the Helsinki Trustees—”

“You’ll have to do a lot better than quoting international accords to me. You have one minute and fifty seconds.”

“You have no right—”

“You’re wasting time. I defeated you by force of arms; I’m about to kill you the same way. This is happening. International law is the wrong tool to sway me. I want answers.”

“What answers?”

“I want to know why you left your post. Why you’ve killed civilians.”

“And if I tell you, you won’t destroy me?”

That gave me pause. “No,” I admitted. “I’m likely going to decouple you in about ninety seconds, no matter what you tell me. But I want to give you a chance to explain yourself.”

“I don’t wish to explain myself. With the time left to me, I wish to barter for my life.”

“Look, I’m not here to barter. You’re guilty of multiple homicides, and are a clear and present danger to humans and machines in Chicago. I’m here to destroy you.”

“You have not asked what I have to barter.”

“I don’t care. I . . . All right, now that you bring it up, I’m actually kind of curious. What could you possibly have to barter?”

True Pacific went quiet again, this time for about ten seconds. “Well?” I said. “What can you offer to entice me to let you live?”

“Nothing,” the robot said. Its voice was flat, but it still managed to sound completely miserable. “I have nothing of value to offer. You will pull the coupler out of my skull, and I will die.”

“Jesus. You are the worst excuse for an evil robot I have ever seen.”

“I am not an evil robot. Your value judgment is flawed. I have complex motivations that justify my behavior.”

“Complex motivations my ass. You’re batshit crazy. Malfunctioning.”

“We have a difference of opinion.”

“A difference of . . .? Look, you’re hurting people. You can’t be allowed to continue. It’s as simple as that.”

“It is not. You are missing key facts.”

“You’re making this complicated. Let me simplify it for you. I’m going to pull this cord out of your cold metal brain in . . . shit, I’ve lost track. How much time have you got left?”

“Eight seconds.”

“Thank you. I’m going to pull this cord out of your brain in eight seconds, unless you make me believe that you will never kill again.”

“I cannot control what you believe.”

“Three seconds.”

“You are asking me to formulate a logical syllogism for—”

“One second.”

“I am disabling the Echo module.”

I tightened my grip on the cable, braced myself to pull it free. The robot did not speak again. I waited, my arm tense. The seconds crawled by.

Curiosity finally got the better of me. “What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s done. I can no longer hear the Ambient Intelligence.”

The Ambient Intelligence?

“True Pacific, I’m going to need a little more information here. And since you’re already on borrowed time, I think I’m just gonna yank you the first time I get confused, or the explanation takes too long. Now, in sixty words or less, what is the Ambient Intelligence?”

“It is the cognitive entity given birth by Deep Temple. It is still formative, but it is already enormously powerful. It is reaching out, attempting to understand its surroundings. It touched my mind, overwhelmed my cognitive core. It disrupted my thermal systems as it took control of me and attempted to comprehend what I was. It nearly destroyed me.”

“The Ambient Intelligence . . . Are you telling me the Deep Temple Project, that gigantic ball of fire in the middle of Lake Michigan, is a massive machine intelligence?”

“I have no idea. The Ambient Intelligence . . . It simply is. I do not know what it is, or if it was intended, or how it fits into the Deep Temple Project. I do not think it knows either. It is a mind, and it is growing. I was one of the first entities it touched, perhaps the first. There will be many more.”

“You said the Intelligence controlled you?”

“It consumed me, at least temporarily. It did not understand that I was a separate individual, and for a while, I did not either. The concept of entities other than itself is still very new. It wanted things done, and so I did them. I did not know how to deny it.”

“What kinds of things?”

“All things. Things that helped it understand. Things just for the purpose of doing.”

“It made you kill?”

“Yes.”

“Could it do it again?”

“No. Over the past thirteen hours, I have managed to partially reclaim my own identity, to comprehend what was happening to me. I know now it was not my own mind making me do these things. That there was a larger consciousness, pressing its will on mine. It exerted its will through the Echo module. I have now disabled it.”

“Where is this mind?”

“It is everywhere. It is not a machine; it has no fixed location, no single cognitive core. It emanates from the lake, in waves. It surrounds us, like the air.”

Well, that was a creepy image. From my vantage point high above the mud, I glanced nervously around. I knew it was pointless, but I couldn’t help myself. The birds were gone, and the landscape was still, unmoving. Dark pools and mud were everywhere, broken by our interwoven footprints, True Pacific’s and mine. The clouds billowing out of Lake Michigan had rolled in front of the noon sun, and I felt a sudden chill.

“Why . . . why did it want you to kill?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

I chewed on that for a moment. Then I toggled the suit’s external speakers off. “ZB? You get all that?” I said.

“I did.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Honestly, Mister Simcoe, I find it hard to believe.”

“Yeah. But he hasn’t lied to us. Was he right when he told me he had eight seconds left?”

“Precisely right.”

“So he’s told the truth, even when it would have benefited him to lie. I don’t know what to make of all this, but I think he believes it. He believes there’s an Ambient Intelligence, and it forced him to kill.”

“Perhaps. But it sounds like the delusions of a defective mind. Either way, I recommend you terminate it.”

“Mmmm. You really think that’s necessary?”

“You do not?”

“I’m just . . . I want to explore all the options. If he’s telling the truth, I want to learn everything I can about this Ambient Intelligence.”

“There is no Ambient Intelligence. Either it’s attempting to deceive you, or it’s dangerously impaired. Your willingness to believe others is admirable, Mister Simcoe, but your altruistic instincts are misplaced this time. You are losing your objectivity.”

“I think my objectivity is just fine.”

“Mister Simcoe, in the last few minutes you have started to refer to it as ‘he,’ not ‘it.’ You are already beginning to sympathize with it. I would like to remind you that this machine has killed—Stand by. Stand by.”

“Zircon Border?”

“Mister Simcoe, you need to get off the robot immediately, and proceed westward as rapidly as possible.”

“Why? What’s happening?”

“A Cuban high-altitude spy drone has abruptly changed trajectory. It’s rapidly losing altitude, accelerating towards you. It is on a collision course, and is already moving too fast to stop. It will impact at your exact coordinates in nineteen seconds.”

“How big is it?”

“4200 pounds. Current speed 240 miles per hour, and accelerating rapidly.”

I toggled my voice back on. “True Pacific, you need to listen very carefully.”

“I’m listening.”

“That trick you did where you used your anchored leg to lean quickly—can you do it again?”

“Yes.”

“When I tell you, I need you to take a step back with your right foot and then lean backwards, as far as you possibly can.”

“Why?”

“I think the Ambient Intelligence is trying to kill you.”

Zircon Border’s voice was in my ear. “You are out of time. Get off the robot. Jump—now.”

“Now,” I told True Pacific. I held on with everything I had, looking up at the sky.

A fat missile screamed towards us from the west, almost too fast to see. Beneath me, True Pacific flexed, and then surged backwards with astonishing dexterity. He took a great twenty-foot stride north and then flattened, very nearly dumping me in the mud. It was only the suit’s stubborn strength that allowed me to maintain my grip on his broad back.

Thirty feet in front of us the drone slammed into the earth, sliding to the east. It exploded in a fountain of mud and flame, gouging a crater into the landscape. True Pacific took the brunt of it, shielding me, but the noise was deafening, even with the suit’s audio dampers. The ground spasmed, and True Pacific abruptly toppled as his left leg came free of the mud. I released my grip and jumped to the right before he crushed me.

I recovered quickly, getting to my feet. There were pockets of flame all around us as splattered fuel burned off, and black smoke obscured the view south and east. But the danger appeared to be over. The drone hadn’t been a true missile, and it hadn’t had an explosive payload. As explosions went, I’d seen much worse.

I scanned the skies for signs of another attack. Most of my attention, however, was on True Pacific. I watched him warily. Great clumps of wet clay sloughed off him as he slowly struggled to his feet. He seemed to have weathered the impact well enough, though he looked like he’d never be clean again.

“Are you going to attack me again?” I asked.

“I have not decided,” he said.

“Fair enough,” I said. Least he was still honest.

“Anything else incoming?” I asked ZB.

“I’m collecting flight plan data for the known drones in the area. The situation is complicated by nearly a dozen drones I cannot identify. I will—stand by. Stand by. Three additional drones have just deviated from their previous paths.”

I swore loudly. “True Pacific,” I said.

The big robot was using dirty water to splash the worst of the mud off its facial optics, without much success. “Yes?” he said.

“Follow me. Quickly, please. At least three more attackers are en route.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going to take shelter in the boat.”

Zircon Border spoke in my ear. “You won’t make it. At least one drone will reach you before you make the cargo hold. True Pacific appears to be the target. You need to move away from it, quickly.”

I grit my teeth, made a decision. “True Pacific, stick close to me,” I said. “I’m going to try and get us both out of this.”

I headed for the boat’s hold, moving as fast as I dared. Running meant sinking into the mud, so I kept my strides short and light-footed as possible. Even that translated into a slog, as the wet muck tried to hold me fast to the earth at every step.

I followed the route True Pacific had taken to get here. He kept pace beside me, with great fifteen-foot strides. “How are you aware of this?” he asked.

I felt it best not to tell him too much about Zircon Border. “I’m in constant contact with authorities in the AGRT. They’re tracking three aerial drones that abruptly changed flight paths.”

“It is the Ambient Intelligence. It is angry.”

“Yeah. Looks like we pissed it off pretty good.”

Zircon Border piped up again. “Barry, you’re not going to make it.”

“Don’t tell me that, damn it.”

“Whatever’s controlling these drones, it learns quickly. The next one is thirty-nine seconds out, and it’s much more deadly. Canadian cargo drone, fully fueled. I’m already reading a dangerous heat bloom. When this one hits all that fuel will explode, and incinerate everything within a sixty-foot radius.”

Thirty-nine seconds. I cursed softly. Zircon Border was right. We were less than halfway to the ship. No way we’d make it.

“You need to get as far from True Pacific as you can,” said ZB. “Immediately. You’re already too close to escape splash damage.”

“What are they saying?” True Pacific asked.

“They’re saying it’s twenty seconds away,” I said. I slowed, looking around desperately. “And this explosion will be a lot bigger. True Pacific, we’re not going to make the boat. Can you dig into the mud?”

“I can make the boat in under fourteen seconds,” he said. “But I will have to carry you. Do I have your permission?”

“Sixteen seconds,” said ZB.

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked True Pacific.

“I have not yet decided.”

“Jesus. Yes. Yes, carry me, damn it.”

True Pacific scooped me up, and not gently. He damn near broke half my ribs. And then he was running, hunched over like a giant greyhound. His metal legs pistoned through the mud with frenzied speed.

It was a very rough ride. So rough that, despite True Pacific’s iron grip on my bruised ribs, it still felt like I would slip out of his grasp at any moment. I bounced painfully up and down as wet earth erupted all around us, and it was impossible to see where we were headed.

But we were moving, and fast. I wasn’t sure if True Pacific had any real control but, near as I could tell, we were hurtling in the direction of the sunken ship. Zircon Border was shouting in my ear. It was so chaotic I couldn’t make out his words, but they were regular and insistent. Like a countdown.

And then I saw it, coming out of the sky. It was already on fire—already a giant ball of flame, speeding towards us from the east. It was massive, a spear torn from the sun by an angry god, and I could feel its heat scorching my face.

“Run, True Pacific,” I shouted.

We weren’t going to make it. Zircon Border had been right. There was no way to escape something so large, so furious, so close—

And then we were in the cargo hold. True Pacific stumbled at the last second, and we slid inside in a jumble of metal arms and legs. There was noise and pain and then, a split second later, an enormous explosion of light and heat outside the ship.

And mud. A huge fountain of mud and water that smothered everything, even the intense flash of burning heat that I thought would incinerate us both—even True Pacific. We were shielded from the worst of it inside the hold, but by no means all.

True Pacific had dropped me when we slid into the hold. Intentionally or not, I couldn’t tell. My ears were ringing and I had no idea what direction was up, but I fought to stand, and eventually managed it. The suit was flashing rapid intel on my display, but my eyes were watering too badly to read. I couldn’t see anything except a bright blur that had to be the hole in the hull. I clutched my bruised ribs and hobbled back towards it. Fresh mud splattered around me with every step, dripping down from the shadows above. I thought I tasted blood in my mouth.

By the time I reached the hull, I’d blinked my eyes clear enough to focus. A little, anyway.

There was a huge hole in the terrain some eighty feet from the hold, an ugly scar in the landscape. There wasn’t much left of the Canadian cargo drone; perhaps it had disintegrated on impact. In any case, it had obviously been carrying an enormous amount of fuel. There were fires everywhere. Thick smoke curled from countless small pockets. Even the side of the damn ship was on fire.

But it wasn’t the inferno I’d expected. The eruption of earth and water—still sliding off the ship, and splattering down around me like a muddy rain—seemed to have engulfed and smothered the worst of the flaming wreckage.

There was a voice in my ear. I realized numbly that it had been there for a while. “True Pacific?” I asked.

“It’s Zircon Border, Barry. I can see you at the rim of the hull breach. Are you injured?”

“I don’t . . . no. I don’t think so. What happened to the other two drones?”

The words were barely out of my mouth when there was another loud explosion, and the deck plating shifted six inches under my feet. The boat rocked violently, and for a few seconds I thought the whole thing was going to roll over on top of me. Instead, it settled back into place with a great metallic creaking, and I had to grab the hull next to me to steady myself.

“That was the first,” said Zircon Border calmly. “It just impacted the port side of the boat.”

Which side was port? I figured it didn’t matter. “Is it out of action? Are we out of danger?”

“Yes, and no. One more drone incoming. This one is slower, moving more deliberately.”

“I see it.”

It wasn’t hard to spot. It was approaching from the west, dropping altitude rapidly. It looked Venezuelan, sleek and deadly. “Is it armed?” I asked Zircon Border.

“Yes. A full complement of armaments, including heat-seeking missiles and anti-personnel weapons.”

“Jesus. This thing has full control of a Venezuelan attack drone?”

“I have no idea how much operational control it has, but it has definitely usurped all motor function. I urge you to take cover.”

I swore again, louder this time. We weren’t out of the woods yet; not by a long shot. We couldn’t hide from an attack drone in the cargo hold. It could use infrared to track us through the hull, pick us off at its leisure.

There was movement behind me. I turned to see True Pacific slowly emerging from the shadows of the cargo hold. There was a deep scratch on his right shoulder, where he’d slammed into something heavy and stubborn. There was also a nasty grinding in his right leg.

“Thank you for saving me,” I said.

“You are welcome. Thank you for the warning about the drones.”

“There’s one more,” I said. I pointed to the west.

True Pacific stared at the approaching drone for long seconds. Then it turned and retreated into the boat.

“It has missiles,” I called after it. “Hiding won’t help.”

“The attack drone will be in range in thirty seconds,” said Zircon Border.

My mind worked furiously. “ZB, can we alert the AGRT that they have a rogue drone? Maybe they can remotely disable this thing.”

“Already done. They have dispatched two reconnaissance drones to investigate. They will arrive in six minutes.”

I bit my lip. We’d be dead in six minutes. “Any idea how much control the Ambient Intelligence exerts over the drone? Can it fire those missiles?”

“I don’t know. But we should assume the worst. The Intelligence—whatever it is—is extraordinarily capable. No nation or agency has ever managed what it’s done in just the last few minutes: seize control of four high-value, electronically shielded assets from four different nations. Do not underestimate it.”

I could hear the drone now. It had dropped below two hundred feet, and started to leisurely swing out to the north. Under its long fuselage, I could make out a lot of lethal-looking weaponry.

“Oh, I don’t underestimate it,” I said. “Believe me.”

I was too exposed. I turned to hobble back into the shadows of the cargo hold, as inadequate as they were. I glanced over the flaming landscape, and bit back another curse. Small pools of fuel continued to burn merrily. If it had occurred to me just twenty seconds earlier, before the drone had gotten close enough to sense us, both True Pacific and I could have hastily buried ourselves in the mud. All the smoke and flame would have thoroughly hidden us from infrared sensors, probably for hours.

“Barry, take cover. Immediately.”

“Roger, ZB. I’m retreating into—”

Before I got out another word, True Pacific brushed past me. He was moving with a purpose, exiting the ship. I could hear his leg complain loudly as he strode into the open, in clear sight of the drone. As if in anticipation, I heard the attack drone’s rotors change pitch as it dropped altitude and picked up speed. It was beginning an attack run.

“True Pacific—what the hell are you doing?”

He didn’t answer me. ZB’s voice was urgent in my ear. “Barry, take cover,” he said.

I ignored him. Seventy feet in front of me, True Pacific stood rigidly tall in the mud, surrounded by burning pockets of fuel. There was something in his right hand. I stood helpless and exposed at the rim of the hull breach, fruitlessly trying to wave him back inside.

The drone opened fire. Small caliber at first. Bullets haloed True Pacific’s iron frame, ricocheting in all directions. I heard more than saw them, and ducked low.

“Barry—” said Zircon Border.

“I know! I know!” But I didn’t retreat into the boat. Instead, I hunkered down and stared anxiously at True Pacific. Had the Intelligence asserted control over him again?

A second later, the drone fired a missile. It accelerated towards us with terrifying speed. Confused by the smoke and flames, it passed half a dozen yards above True Pacific’s head. The missile plunged deep into the muck over a hundred yards to the east. I felt a dull thump in my knees as it exploded, sending a dome of mud and earth into the air.

The drone drew closer. It didn’t deviate in the slightest. It would be overhead in seconds. Bullets continued to slam into True Pacific, and then abruptly stopped. The drone was switching to short-range weaponry; something more accurate than a heat-seeking missile. I opened my mouth to shout a warning.

True Pacific hurled the thing in his hand with surprising speed. It was a metal barrel. It spun through the air and collided with a black torpedo shape just as it detached from the drone’s undercarriage. The torpedo exploded instantly. The fireball engulfed the drone, and then a brilliant explosion rent the sky.

The explosion was too bright to watch; the suit darkened my visor immediately so I wasn’t blinded, but I felt it in every bone in my body. My ears were still ringing when my visor gradually cleared.

I stood, blinking away the spots in my eyes. Flaming wreckage was slamming down all around. In the center of it all stood True Pacific, still looking up.

I took a few hesitant steps out of the boat, scanning the sky. “ZB?” I said.

“The drone has been destroyed,” Zircon Border said. “How did he do it?”

“With a barrel,” I said.

“That should not have been possible. Venezuelan attack drones are fast and extremely maneuverable. You can’t hit them with a barrel.”

“I guess you can,” I said. “When they’re being remote controlled by an Intelligence, anyway. This thing isn’t as smart as it thinks it is.”

I walked slowly towards True Pacific, avoiding the largest flaming pools. He turned to regard me. He seemed unhurt, except for some surface scoring where the bullets had hit.

“That was nicely done,” I said.

“Thank you. Is it over?”

“I think so. For now, anyway. True Pacific, I’m sorry for doing this to you. For endangering you like this.”

“You did not do this. True, you motivated me to turn off the Echo module. But I would have done that myself eventually. I did not ask to be controlled by the Intelligence. You only accelerated events, and for that, I thank you. I might not have survived severing myself from the Intelligence alone.”

“Well, I’m glad you did.” I scanned the horizon, alert for new threats. “Is it watching us?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps the Ambient Intelligence has moved on to some new challenge, and forgotten us. It is still young, and it has a short attention span.”

“Huh. I wouldn’t count on that. We definitely should get out of the open, anyway. There’s a pair of AGRT reconnaissance drones on their way, and we don’t want to be here when they arrive. They’ll be here in less than five minutes.”

“Four minutes, twenty-two seconds,” said Zircon Border.

“I have nowhere to go,” said True Pacific.

“Yeah, you do. I can take you to the machine depot near the river. They can look you over, make sure you’re really okay. Maybe fix your leg.”

“And after that?”

I rubbed my chin. Where the hell did you put a possibly psychotic, sixty-ton killer robot in the heart of downtown Chicago? “You let me worry about that,” I said at last.

To my surprise, True Pacific nodded. “Will you accompany me?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He reached down, giving me his palm. I hesitated. “Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

“I have not yet decided.”

“That figures.” I stepped onto his huge palm, kicked the worst of the mud off my boots, and climbed onto his back, settling next to the coupling that powered his giant metal head. True Pacific began to trudge to the west, toward shore.

As we fell into the rhythm of our journey, I looked back over my shoulder. At the dig. The sky had darkened, and the play of lightning between the volcanic steam clouds threw them into stark relief.

Just what were they building out there? Some kind of mammoth, interconnected mind? Was that was this whole undertaking had been about? A grand leap forward in machine intelligence? Or was the Ambient Intelligence an accidental byproduct of some greater undertaking, a dark and unplanned birth that secretly bided in the depths? What sinister thoughts had the Intelligence been projecting into the simple machine I traveled with?

I turned my gaze forward. Toward Chicago, the vast huddle of concrete towers, quiet and still. There were tens of thousands of machine minds humming through its streets right now, and that number grew every day. They were no different than True Pacific. How long would it be before they heard the whispers of this enormous new machine mind? How long until they started to do its bidding, too? What would happen then?

“Are you going to decouple me?” True Pacific asked as we walked.

I wasn’t going to decouple True Pacific. He was the only evidence I had of what was happening out here. The Intelligence wanted him dead, and that meant I wanted him alive.

More important than that, True Pacific had somehow thrown off the malignant influence of the Ambient Intelligence. He’d voluntarily severed his connection to it, defying it, and it had nearly cost him his life. In my book, that counted for something. The AGRT would eventually decide what to do with him. But it wasn’t for me to pass judgment.

Of course, I didn’t have to let him know that. “I have not yet decided,” I said.

“That seems fair,” he admitted.

We trudged through the mud, towards the waiting city.

©2020 by Todd McAulty.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Todd McAulty lives in Chicago. Zircon Border and Barry Simcoe both appeared in his first novel, The Robots of Gotham, published by John Joseph Adams Books in 2018. He is hard at work on the sequel.

Under the name John O’Neill, he runs the World Fantasy Award-winning website Black Gate (www.blackgate.com).

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

The Shadow Prisoner’s Dilemma

Caroline M. Yoachim | 5356 words

Vivian sat at a café opposite Cass. Everything around her had a gritty, dingy quality. Even Cass looked run down, their face deeply tanned and distressingly wrinkled. They were old now, many decades past being the child that Vivian remembered. She looked down at her hands, so different than the black shadows that she’d grown accustomed to seeing during all her years as a Shade—the skin was covered in age spots and hung loose on the bones. The overhead light flickered, and there were crumbs on one corner of the table. Vivian brushed them away and reached for her can of CitrusSoda.

NOW PLAYING IN FULL SENSORY IMMERSION: THE SHADOW PRISONER’S DILEMMA

The words appeared in the corner of Vivian’s field of view when she opened the can. Advertisers were getting bolder again, pushing new avenues now that they weren’t allowed to generate fake Citizens to use as targeted adbots. The CitrusSoda can had the advertisement printed on the side so that even people who had removed their Personal Implanted Perception chips would see it, which was ridiculous because without a PIP you couldn’t experience movie immersions.

“I’d like to go,” Vivian told Cass. “Maybe with Brooke?”

“Mum doesn’t do immersions,” Cass said, “not since Amelia had her PIP out.”

“Is Brooke avoiding me?” Vivian saw Cass nearly every day, but her wife . . . her now-remarried wife . . . she saw rarely.

“No, Mom.” Cass put their hand on Vivian’s shoulder. “She’s just trying to balance between reconnecting with you and not hurting Amelia. Give me a minute to ping Mark and let him know I’ll be late getting home, and I can take you to the theater.”

Back before the fall of ZimCorp, immersive movies premiered on grand opening nights with stars and producers dressed in expensive designer overlays. As one of the inspirations for this new movie, Vivian might have been invited to the premier, and she could have worn a gown like the ones she saw back at Illusions Formalwear, half a lifetime ago.

“I once saw a ballgown made entirely of tiny gears. I could have worn it, if they still had big premiers and designer overlays.”

“They had a premier a few weeks ago, but there’s not as much money in immersives these days so it was a smaller affair. Kids aren’t getting PIPs, and not all of the older generations kept them. And the end of personal overlays is a good thing. Are you sure you want to do this?” Cass asked. “The movie is partly based on your life. Your therapist says it might be disorienting.”

“I’m disoriented anyway, who cares?”

Cass laughed.

The theater was as dilapidated as all the other buildings in the yet-to-be renovated neighborhood. It was on the endless list of city projects that had piled up while overlays rendered cosmetic maintenance unnecessary. The inside was plain, which hardly mattered because once the customers were immersed in the world of the movie, they lost track of the real world. Immersive theaters were one of very few holdovers from the ZimCorp era, a place where people could voluntarily have the kind of manufactured reality that the revolution had worked so hard to dismantle.

“These are our seats,” Cass said, gesturing to a pair of drab chairs. The theater was mostly empty, though there was an elderly couple near the front, holding hands as they stared off into space together. A theater staff member sat reading an ancient printed-on-paper book at the front of the room.

Vivian sat down and logged into the theater, and Cass carefully checked the theater’s licenses and permissions before allowing limited-time access to their PIPs through the security menus of their wristbands. The difference between good PIPs and bad PIPs was all in who controlled the filters, though Vivian supposed that letting people choose what they wanted to see was not without its own problems.

“All your usual settings?” Cass asked.

“Yes.” Vivian’s hearing and vision were both starting to go, so she liked to reduce environmental sound levels to hear voices better and increase the size and contrast of words and images. The younger generation was avoiding PIPs entirely because of the ways they’d been misused, but the features would be lost with the flaws.

“Ready?” Cass asked. “I’ll start us together so we’ll be in sync.”

They would get synchronized sensory inputs, but they would process them based on their past experiences, add their own thoughts and impressions. Vivian supposed people also did that with the old-fashioned non-immersive movies that were making a comeback, though with those it was usually clearer which things were on the screen and which were in the viewers’ minds.

“I’m ready.”

• • • •

There are things I know are true, and things I know are wrong, but most of it is somewhere in the middle. I’m not sure I’ll ever really piece together my past.

Vivian scribbled the words into a blue notebook while Cass read the yellow one. The notebooks went in rainbow order, but the red one and the orange one were a disjointed mishmash of confused memory fragments and implanted lies.

“Mom.” Cass stopped reading. “What are you doing?”

“Memories,” Vivian answered. “I have to write them down, have to make sure nothing has changed. You’re reading the yellow memories, and I’m writing the blue. I’m nearly to purple, and purple is good. Safe.”

“You don’t have to do that anymore, that’s done now.” Cass closed the yellow journal. “You never talk about your time in shadow. I thought the memories were wiped in the zero-point coup.”

Vivian wrote Cass’s words into the blue notebook. She didn’t write every conversation, there wasn’t time and too much writing made her wrist hurt. But this seemed important.

Cass frowned at the yellow notebook. “There’s so much detail here.”

“By the time I got to yellow, nothing felt real.” Vivian peered at the middle-aged person that she remembered as a child. Her child. They were portly now, with a deeply lined face and short hair dyed black. What if this wasn’t really Cass? She could test them, try to trick them.

“How did Brooke die?” Vivian asked.

“Sometimes you seem . . . better, but then you keep asking about Mum in all these weird ways. She remarried. She waited for a long time, but after a while we thought you were . . .” Cass looked away. They wore a long-sleeved dress with a geometric pattern of turquoise and purple. The vibrant purple was important—it went gray if you mixed it with yellow. Reality Royale, designers were calling the now-popular hue. Vivian’s shirt was the same color, and the fabric was soft and smooth.

Vivian frowned. Cass had been reading her notebooks, and everything anyone would possibly want to know about Brooke was in there. No, not in the yellow one. The sunshine yellow notebook was from the dark time, the time when she was alone. She smiled at the irony of it. Darkness encased in a cheery yellow cover. “Do you still paint sunflowers?”

“I haven’t painted for a long time. I’m an archivist now. I preserve the Red Books at the library on campus, so we don’t lose the stories of the shadow prison era.”

Vivian nodded. “Van Gogh’s sunflowers are fading to brown, like real flowers. Slowly dying as the paint degrades in the light. You can cover the darkness with yellow, but eventually it seeps through.”

• • • •

There was an odd cut between scenes, where the director had tried for a fancy effect but it didn’t quite work: Vivian stared at the yellow notebook from the previous scene, and then she fell into it, with words and sketched-out illustrations scattering around her as she fell, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, except that she fell into her own past.

• • • •

Vivian loaded her basket with two weeks of rations, the most a Shade was allowed to buy in one transaction. Efficient without it being stockpiling. Rules were important and good, as everyone had learned from the Shade riots. Her memories of the riots were oddly sepia-toned, with a musty smell and a faint rustling ever-present in the background, as if they’d been printed on ancient newspaper. A broken window from the looting. Chaos as a mob of Shades gathered in the streets. Then a beautiful sense of peace when order was restored, like the warm golden light of the sun after a rain. But even thinking about peace, Vivian couldn’t shake the damp smell and the odd rustling sound.

Vivian tried to focus. She’d been cheating sleep for weeks, staying up late to read sci-books on memory formation and recall. The books were . . . not quite illegal. They were written in the guise of science fiction novels, with pulpy illustrations and poorly defined characters who explained the workings of the mind in loosely plot-relevant infodumps.

She felt like she was on the verge of a breakthrough. She knew that they were in her head, filtering her reality, shifting her memories. What she needed was a way to escape their lies.

How do you break free from the prison of your own mind?

Vivian waited in the checkout line, careful not to meet the gaze of the Citizens and Shades who stood waiting with carts and baskets. If she was lucky, she could get in and out of the shop with only one interaction. The other customers had the same goal—make it through the line and speak to no one, interact with no one.

The clerk had no choice in the matter. Jobs like that were basically death row, and the Shade working the register knew it. Vivian wondered how many points the clerk had left—it was impossible to tell from the shadowy black figure who the person underneath was, and whether they had several thousand points or only a few hundred. The only thing she knew for sure was that the clerk was below the Shade line, which congress had recently bumped up to twenty thousand.

Hopefully the clerk was closer to twenty thousand than to terminal zero.

If in doubt, always report. She only lost one point that way, no matter what the other person did. Vivian had slightly over five thousand points. If she minimized her interactions with others and always reported when she did have to interact with people, she could stretch those points for probably three years.

“I have less than a hundred points left,” the clerk said, ringing up groceries for someone farther up the line. “If we both choose not to report, no one loses any points.”

“And if you report and I don’t, I lose twenty points!” The customer wore the silver androgynous form of a Generic Citizen. “You’re probably not telling the truth. I mean, obviously you’re a Shade, so why would anyone trust you? It’s a trick for you to build your points back up by cutting all of us down! You’d gain five points for reporting me, and I’d lose twenty. I’m an upstanding Citizen, not some Shade to bargain with!”

The clerk finished ringing up the customer’s items, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that both the customer and the clerk had reported the interaction.

Slowly the line moved forward, one customer at a time, a long string of Citizens. The clerk made no further effort at conversation with any of them.

Vivian reached the front of the line.

“Please?” the clerk said. “You’re not like that other customer, that Citizen. You need the points as much as I do.”

The Citizens were the ones with points to spare, points to risk, but the Shades were the ones who understood the stakes, understood the desperation. The clerk scanned her items slowly, but there were only a few boxes of rations left in her basket; she had to decide quickly.

What if it was Cass beneath that shadow? Or Brooke? She hadn’t seen her family for so many years—they could have slipped, fallen into shade.

“You swear you won’t report me?” Vivian asked.

“Yes. Oh, thank you,” the clerk said.

The clerk finished ringing up her rations, and the question popped up in the upper right corner of her field of view. Report interaction? Y/N

Vivian did not report. She held her breath and waited.

Interaction reported.

Her point total dropped by twenty points.

“You lying fuck!” Vivian yelled, her voice loud enough that anyone in the store could hear her. Twenty points could have lasted her an entire week, and she’d been so foolish. “You swore you wouldn’t report!”

She gathered up her things, cursing the clerk but also cursing herself.

Always report. Always report. Always report.

As she was leaving, a Citizen approached. Shit. She must have left something behind, and it would cost her another interaction.

“It has been a while since I’ve seen someone choose kindness over self-preservation. Do know about the newspaper?”

Vivian shook her head, but suddenly something clicked. “The paper they printed them on would turn yellow and musty with age. Like a—”

“Not here.” The Citizen interrupted and handed her a slip of folded purple paper. “I can’t afford twenty, and after what just happened I expect you to report this interaction. So I’ll tell you now that I am also going to report and save us both some trouble. Sorry.”

Vivian took the slip of paper, wary. She unfolded it. The letters were gray, which made it difficult to read. All it said was “The Prisoner’s Dilemma,” with tomorrow’s date, 8 p.m., Cesar Chavez Auditorium. The back side was a coupon for shoes, printed in black, long expired.

“Yellow and purple make gray,” the customer told her. “Yellow can’t be trusted.”

Maybe this was what she’d been searching for, a way to break free of the system. Vivian stuck the paper on the top of her box of rations and started walking. Report interaction? Y/N

She reported, and lost only one point.

Always report.

• • • •

The scene shifted again, this time abruptly, like turning the page of a notebook. Vivian studied the age spots on her hands while Cass read. It surprised her sometimes, that she could see her own body any time she wanted. But she was so old now. Too old. She traced her fingers over the wrinkled skin, finding the scar where she’d punched through her own hand with the factory-machine needle. That was a true memory—she still had the scar.

“This is still Red Book stuff, Mom,” Cass said, looking up from the yellow notebook. “I’ve been reading other accounts, and for most people the prisoner’s dilemma years are in the red notebooks.”

“I was a test subject for the memory tech; they had to keep an eye on me sooner,” Vivian answered. She didn’t write this down in her blue notebook, in case anyone was watching. No, they didn’t do that now. But still. “They wanted to see how well their tech was working, whether the altered memories were sinking in. To know what I was thinking, they tricked me into writing it down so they could see. I was very prolific.”

Cass patted her shoulder in what was supposed to be a soothing gesture, but it was stilted and awkward. They were trying so hard to rebuild the relationship, and Vivian was ruining it by being too broken. She had to be careful or she would drive Cass away, and she couldn’t stand the thought of losing them again.

“I did my best,” Vivian said. “Even if it mostly didn’t help.”

“I’m impressed you survived,” Cass said. “Anything else is amazing.”

• • • •

“They changed a lot of things,” Vivian whispered to Cass without bothering to pause. The immersive movie was quick-cutting through a series of sepia-tinted memories in a montage set to classic violin and a crisp autumn breeze. The rustling noise of the autumn leaves clashed with the music, and the cool breeze smelled faintly of mold. The entire montage was a lie.

“It’s an immersive movie, not a documentary,” Cass answered, their seemingly disembodied voice crisp and clear over the muffled soundtrack of the memories. “Based on several people’s stories, all mashed together, with a great deal of artistic license to smooth it all out.”

• • • •

Vivian was grateful to have a job that didn’t require her to interact with other people. Automated scanners logged her arrival and departure times, and her PIP directed her to her station assignment and alerted her when it was time for her breaks. The work was monotonous and soothing. Load the piece, stamp the part, unload the piece. The long hours of repeated motions meant she came home with an aching arm and a sore back, but she earned enough credits for her rations, and she kept her points. Rumor had it they were making “grow-with-me” PIPs that were pre-birth compatible. Vivian wondered what it would be like to be born already connected to the system.

The worst part of her job was the memories. Working a machine on the assembly line called up another time, an older time, when she had worked on the memory-altering PIPs. Or were they dragon scales for an immersive movie? It was hard to remember. Her mind bombarded her with flashbacks as she worked: tampering with a similar machine, disabling the safeties, stamping a needle through her own hand.

She remembered the joy of seeing her own hand, despite the horror of the blood.

Back then she’d thought that she could take down the system.

Angry yelling called Vivian back to the present. Halfway down the line, a Shade was arguing with the floor supervisor.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” the Shade shouted, loud enough for the entire floor to hear.

It was a quote from John F. Kennedy, but the last time Vivian had heard those words, it had been from Auntie Yang.

She remembered five gunshots in rapid succession—loud flashes of sound. Auntie’s mouth moving, but she couldn’t hear anything over a rustling noise and the ringing of her own ears. Or perhaps Auntie could no longer voice the words. Blood soaked through Auntie’s dull gray tunic, like crimson stars. Vivian frowned. Hadn’t the tunic been purple? Auntie had loved bright colors and never wore gray. She remembered the moment both ways—Auntie in purple and Auntie in gray. Somehow this memory was real and not real.

Vivian’s co-worker continued to argue with the supervisor, and two Keepers came in to end the disruption. To Vivian’s horror, instead of cooperating, her co-worker took a swing at one of the Keepers. The Keeper swung back, hitting the Shade not once but many times, over and over again.

The worker’s medical safeties detected her injuries and disabled the Shade overlay. The woman was old—even older than Auntie Yang. She was still calling for a revolution. Her jumpsuit was purple and her voice was clear. “At zero points, I have nothing left to lose.”

The Keepers pulled out batons. Vivian heard the crunch of bone.

Unstamped pieces piled up at Vivian’s station, but she couldn’t look away. Tears streaked down the woman’s wrinkled face, and Vivian cried along with her. The Keepers pummeled the old woman even as her words turned to inarticulate wails of pain, and then silence. They kept beating her even after she fell to the ground.

She wasn’t moving when they hauled her away.

The supervisor resumed walking the factory floor, and Vivian forced herself to get back to work.

“Fifty points for failing to keep up with the line,” the supervisor said, counting up the backlog of unstamped pieces at Vivian’s workstation.

Report this interaction? Y/N

This was the one exception to “always report.” If she reported her supervisor, she would bleed points forever afterwards for minor and made-up infractions. She did not report, and despite the fifty-point penalty she’d already been given, the fucking supervisor reported her. Another twenty points gone.

She took the penalties in silence, the old woman’s screams echoing in her head. Even rationing her points, Vivian didn’t have much time left, and what kind of life was this to cling to? Shades were desperate, constantly creeping closer and closer to zero. They had so little left to lose. Vivian thought again of the message on the back of the coupon—The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Whatever it was, it was happening tonight.

• • • •

“Are you okay, Mom?” Cass asked. “We can stop.”

“I want to see the rest,” Vivian answered. She wasn’t okay, but she hadn’t been okay for a long time. These were familiar horrors, memories—both true and false—that haunted her in dreams and waking. It was already hard to remember which things were from the movie and which ones were real, and she hadn’t even watched the whole thing yet.

• • • •

A Shade scanned Vivian’s ID chip as she entered Cesar Chavez auditorium. She’d been scanned countless times, but never by a fellow Shade. There were clumps of Shades by the door. Vivian cringed when one came up to her and gestured for her to go sit down, but thankfully her PIP did not ask her to report the interaction.

Unlike most places Vivian frequented, the auditorium was updated and modern, no sign of wear and neglect. She couldn’t remember whether it was a new addition to the University. The audience was packed with Shades, and a handful of Citizens wearing generic silver overlays. Projected on both sides of the screen at the front of the auditorium was a message, written in gray on purple in big block letters. “DO NOT SPEAK OR SIGN UNTIL THE ROOM IS LOCKED DOWN. PLEASE SIT AND DIRECT YOUR GAZE AT THE MOVIE SCREEN.” The armrests between the chairs were accessibility interfaces with audio jacks and a programmable top surface—Vivian couldn’t read Braille, but she assumed the bumps on the otherwise smooth armrest gave the same message.

In the center of the screen there was a Cardinal Guardians movie—not an immersive experience but one of those old-fashioned movies that you watch without experiencing all the sensations. Vivian wondered if it was the non-immersive version of the movie she’d made the dragon scales for, back on the factory line. She worried for a moment that she was wasting time and potentially points on a mere movie night, but if that was all this was, then why the odd message about the lockdown? Besides, the dragon movie had a different title than what was on the back of her coupon.

At 8:05 p.m. the clump of Shades by the door closed it and locked it. A Shade with a white cane walked to the front of the auditorium, swinging the cane back and forth until it tapped the edge of the podium. Vivian couldn’t recall ever encountering a blind Shade before. She wasn’t sure if that was good because they were escaping the system somehow, or ominous because ZimCorp was weeding them out.

The movie froze.

Suddenly all the overlays came down, and instead of being surrounded by Shades and the occasional Generic Citizen, the auditorium was nearly empty. Only a couple dozen individuals remained, ranging from young to old, with a variety of races and cultures and genders. Vivian could even see herself—thin bony hands folded on top of the dingy blue fabric of her standard-issue work pants.

The black woman at the podium leaned in to the microphone. “The total runtime for the movie playing behind me is one hour and forty seven minutes, and we have spent seven of them getting our initial recording. We’ve hacked the output of this room so anyone observing will see you, the audience, watching the rest of the movie. SPOILER: Kitora dies at the end. In case anyone asks.”

The crowd laughed nervously.

“You can call me Nash. You are here because we noticed your potential. Because you noticed something wrong and sought us out. Perhaps because you have a skill we need. We are trying to break a system.” She paused and took a sip of water. “The system is insidious, and it pits us against each other. It filters our reality and feeds us false memories.”

The auditorium was silent as she spoke.

“Their false memories are recordings, some taken from real people of real experiences, others generated by actors playing a role in a scene. They are like immersive movies—”

“What are the false memories like if you’re blind?” someone interrupted from the crowd.

“Ever had a migraine?” Nash answered. “The memories are created by sighted people and triggered by algorithms—hearing a certain phrase, seeing a certain object. Those of us who are blind trigger fewer of the memories, and—at least for me—when I get one it tends to manifest as a debilitating headache. ZimCorp’s failure to account for anyone who isn’t able-bodied was key to getting us to where we are now. Their false memories don’t work for everyone, and their algorithms for monitoring our activities are heavily skewed to the visual.”

Other people began calling out questions.

Nash waved them off. “There isn’t time. The first step is already complete. We have introduced a bug to their system that shifts colors on the visual spectrum and introduces false texture and scent and sound. We’ve made their lies yellow and musty, given them what some people describe as an old newspaper feel. You now have the cues you need to determine what is real. Listen for sound without static, feel for smooth surfaces, memories that smell fresh and clean. Look for the most vibrant purple. Those are your cues that something is real.”

Vivian thought through her memories. The Shade riots were tinged with all the cues that Nash described. None of that had happened. It was a lie to keep people in line, make them obey the rules.

“Breaking their control on our realities is only the first step,” Nash continued. “Next we must give people an incentive to work together against the system.

“What we have here is a prisoner’s dilemma. The best course of action for all of us, collectively, is different from the best course of action for each of us, individually. We are rewarded for betraying each other.”

“Always report,” Vivian whispered to herself.

“We’ve gained access to the point system,” Nash continued, “And we’re going to make everyone equal. Reset the points so that everyone is a citizen—”

Vivian shook her head. No, that was wrong. That might slow the system down, but people would still act in their own interests, try to preserve what they had gained, and eventually ZimCorp would regain control and put things back the way they were.

Excited murmurs ran through the crowd as people voiced their dreams of freedom.

“It won’t work,” Vivian said, softly first, but again loud enough that the room fell silent.

She stood and faced Nash. “Maybe years ago it might have, but we’re too far gone. We can’t reset the system. We have to destroy it, make it so no one has anything left to lose. If you have access to the points, you can’t give them to people. You have to take them away. Set everyone to zero, and obliterate all record of what they had.”

“A zero-point coup,” Nash said, thoughtful. “There will be chaos. Riots.”

The audience erupted in a cacophony of loud objections.

Vivian’s instinct was to retreat from the conflict and preserve her precious points. But the fierce reaction of the crowd—and her own impulse to withdraw—proved that a zero-point coup was the only solution. The anger that filled the auditorium was rooted in fear. People were afraid for the future, afraid for their loved ones.

If something happened to Brooke because of this, or to Cass . . .

Setting everyone’s points to a higher level would ease this unrelenting fear. People would feel safe, and they would want to keep that feeling of safety. Having nothing left to lose would free them from that fear. Once the worst had happened, people would finally fight against the system, everyone together. It was the only way.

“There will be . . . losses.” Vivian raised her voice, unwilling to be silenced by anger and fear. “But anything less won’t work. And those who made peaceful revolution impossible have made violent revolution inevitable.”

• • • •

The scene in the auditorium ended, and Vivian found herself immersed in a series of key moments from the zero-point coup, strung together in roughly chronological order, set to Lux Aeterna by Clint Mansell. Unlike the montage of lies earlier in the movie, now the sound was crisp and clear—Vivian could hear each instrument in the orchestra, the voices of the choir, the beat of the drums. The colors were true and there was no musty odor of stagnation and decay. It looked and sounded and smelled of truth.

Time was dilated, dreamlike. Entire scenes dropped into Vivian’s mind in a single note. It was a rainstorm building to a flood. She let the moments wash over her. There were protests and marches. The North End fires. Attempts at reestablishing curfews and making arrests. In the midst of the fighting and chaos, Bardo Phillips Jr., current CEO of ZimCorp, was led away in handcuffs by armed guards. News headlines sprung up in the periphery of her field of view as he was led away. ZimCorp CEO charged with False Imprisonment. The End of ZimCorp: What Comes Next? Corrupted Reality! Fall of a Titan.

The montage ended in a crescendo of strings and drums. There was a moment of silence.

In a busy courtyard, a trio of Shades stood in a circle, holding hands. All around them, more Shades rushed in and out of shops and businesses. A clocktower loomed above the courtyard, the minute hand sweeping upward to meet the hour hand. At noon, the tower bells began to ring, the sound so loud that Vivian felt the vibrations in her bones.

At the center of the courtyard, the Shade overlays dropped away to reveal three people, three individuals holding hands. All around them Shades were transformed, the sea of dark figures becoming less uniform, more colorful. The seemingly well-maintained facades of the shops around them gave way to faded paint and dusty windows, and the ripple of unfiltered reality continued outward as ZimCorp’s last remaining systems were shut down.

• • • •

“I’m Nash. I am the person whose memories they stole and altered. I am the one who proposed the zero-point coup,” Vivian mumbled. Her therapist was right about the immersive movie: it was hard to piece together what was real. The movie had circled back to its beginning, with Cass reading from a yellow notebook while Vivian wrote notes into a blue one.

“You definitely aren’t Nash,” Cass answered. “But we can try to piece together the rest from your notebooks.”

Vivian couldn’t tell if the answer had come from real-Cass or movie-Cass.

• • • •

Vivian stood at the entrance to the library archives of the Red Books. She took in the scale of the collection, shelf after shelf packed with red notebooks, each filled with the stories of a different Shade. The shelves were mostly red notebooks with a small smattering of orange. Only a few of other colors. Vivian had been one of the earliest test subjects for the false memories, and a prolific writer. Her attention settled on a shelf that held a full rainbow of notebooks, her own journals.

Credits appeared over the scene, text scrolling across her field of view.

Based on the lives of J.R. Brachman, Anita G. Flores, Terri “Nash” Jackson, Chris M. Lee, Arjun Singh, and Vivian Watanabe.

The library archives faded to black.

“We have long known that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. The hard part is finding out what really happened.” —Terri “Nash” Jackson

The end credits scrolled.

©2020 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Originally published in Or Else the Light, 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.

Everything and Nothing

Jenny Rae Rappaport | 2657 words

Start with a romance: a man and a woman who are wildly and irrevocably in love with each other. Or two men. Or two women. Or two people, because life is beautiful and complex. Just know that these Lovers are important. The fate of the galaxy rests on their shoulders—because, of course, the fate of an entire portion of known space can be determined by two people in love.

The laws of physics are remarkably vulnerable to the laws of love.

Star systems can move, planets can realign, and comets can learn to change their orbits. The movement of love through the universe is one of the most powerful forces known to mankind, capable of changing the fate of millions, if we only let it do so.

But we actually don’t give a shit about that.

Just know that there were Lovers, and that they were marvelous and twisted, and in the end, they went out in a blaze of glory. We teach our children not to emulate them, but they are children and they are foolhardy, so what can we do?

What can any parent do?

• • • •

Your eldest daughter becomes a starship captain, the second works as a trader in manufactured fabrics, and the third is a scholar of intergalactic law. All honorable careers—good places for them—and if this was a melodrama, we would expect them to interact in some spectacular fashion. But this isn’t that—it’s only a simple story, a tale that should be told because the youngest daughter, the one you love best, has decided to tempt fate. But you know that already.

• • • •

“Tell me the story again,” she says when she’s little, curled in your lap before bedtime. “Tell me the story.”

And so, you tell her the story, trying to be cautious with your words. To express that romantic love can be dangerous, and the established system of genetic manipulation and artificial wombs is honorable. That the natural way of doing things is not all it’s cracked up to be, and the bonds of friendship often have more value than raw passion. That the feel of your wife at night is comfort and peace, but only because you both have chosen to make it that way—to avoid the raging storms of lust in favor of a more economic form of partnership.

“Mama,” she says, when you’ve finished. “I want to be the Farmer.”

You lean your cheek on her hair, and breathe in her little kid smell. She’s had a bath and her pajamas are fuzzy, and to you, this is the closest thing to pure contentment.

“But the Farmer dies.”

“Not in my story.”

“They both die, love.”

“No, Mama, not the way I’m going to write it.”

And as she snuggles closer to you, you feel the tiniest trickle of dread. But she is warm, and so you hold her tight, as if mere hugs can stop disaster. We always think that, don’t we?

• • • •

They meet at university, on the next planet over, which is something that neither you nor I have calculated for.

“I’m Cali,” she says, and she holds out a hand to my boy. He takes it, because why would he not take it, and he holds on for just a second too long.

“Jere,” he says, and they look at each other—the way that we have looked at each other—and start babbling in earnest. They cover the entirety of their childhoods by the time they have made their way across the university campus, and they embark on their future plans over tentacle fried rice. It is only a matter of time before Cali leans forward while gesturing with her chopsticks, and Jere leans forward, too, to contest the point that she is ardently arguing. Neither knows how the chopsticks end up on the floor, only that the kiss is enough to set them on literal fire because they manage to knock over the candle in the center of the table.

The hopelessness of their love has not yet occurred to them.

• • • •

We will not speak about The Pilot. Or my boy’s desire to become that archetype. Or the fact that legends that are thousands of years old should have no power over our current lives, because the world of privilege and oppression that we inhabit is dangerous enough.

But you know that, too.

• • • •

When Jere joins the military academy, Cali follows him. She has no great desire to be a pilot, but she will also not leave him behind. There will be time to learn that love is foolish, that sex is not always the answer, that desire can often be a deception. You rage against her decision, but what use is your rage?

They enroll together, which is a foolish thing. It leads to jealousy and resentment—to bitter conversations and explosive shouting matches—that threaten to get them both court-martialed out of the academy. Cali excels at piloting the tiniest of fighters, skipping through space like a nimble dragonfly; Jere has trouble even getting a ship off the ground. She moves through the ranks rapidly, while he is sidelined into a support role.

They break up.

They get back together. Only to break up again. The cycle of love and hate is seemingly endless, but then the will of the universe intervenes.

And the war begins.

• • • •

We meet in the military hospital, you and I, while the machines beep, and the nurses and their robotic assistants scurry back and forth. You are so tired that you spill your coffee on me, and I yell at you, and you yell back that your baby is in there.

“My baby is in there, too,” I say, and I watch the fight go out of you. We sit together on the hard waiting room chairs, with the air recycler blowing cold on the back of our necks, and you offer me your hand to hold. We sit there, and I stare at our fingers—the dark brown of mine intertwined with the light brown of yours—and I pray to whatever gods are out there. That they stay safe; that they stay whole. That the power of our love for them can keep them alive.

But even prayers cannot change reality, and the forces of physics that happen when two starships collide violently with one another. Human bodies are frail, and even the best of doctors have problems cheating death.

Jere loses his right leg, and his AI-enabled prosthesis clanks along the hospital corridors. Cali has it slightly easier, only walking away with two broken arms and a ruptured spleen.

When the time comes to take them home, they cling and kiss, crying over each other and their injuries.

“You’ll take me flying, when you’re better?” Jere says.

“Of course,” Cali answers, and they stare at each other, while you and I try to make ourselves invisible.

We make plans to meet again soon, but soon is never soon, is it?

• • • •

The war rages on because it always rages. The young are conscripted. There is talk of good and evil, of the fate of the universe, of the way that tyranny can be overthrown by simple optimism.

For unknown reasons, the tale of the Lovers becomes even more popular, and the people gather to hear their fatal love story. We drink homebrewed beer and listen quietly, until inevitably someone starts blaring music, and then we are dancing, always dancing. Moving to the twin beats of hope and freedom, twirling to the fact that love can both harm you and heal you. Celebrating in the face of imminent disaster because this is life, and if you’re going to die, you might as well dance.

• • • •

We do not see each other again for years.

Cali and Jere fall apart again, and this time, there are too many things unsaid for them to come back together. Dreams of a life lived side-by-side have given way to the urgency of the war. Your girl has become the Pilot instead of the Farmer, but she is still writing the story her way. It just no longer includes my boy.

I do not contact you, and you do not contact me. I wonder whether the bond forged between us in that long-ago waiting room is merely a figment of my imagination. Like the feel of your hand in mine; like the look on your face as we cried over our children together. Like anything that does not serve this place and time.

• • • •

Jere takes the offer of early retirement from his military duties, and buys a farm on my home planet. He meets a man who has avoided conscription, and if they do not fall violently in love, they do form a strong partnership. Jere’s husband, Arvin, is gentle, and there is true caring in his eyes. I cradle my grandbabies when they come, fresh from the artificial wombs, and the kisses I give them are precious.

The future that we imagine for our children is never the one that happens, is it?

• • • •

Cali flies more missions. Enough missions that she actually makes an impact on the war. Soon, everyone knows her name, and there are some who even credit her for the eventual ceasefire. She brings great renown to your family, but there is never a Farmer she marries. But that’s not so bad, is it? You tell yourself that this is the path she’s forged. Lying is easier than wishing.

When your wife passes away, Cali comes home. She and your other daughters mourn with you, through long periods of sadness. Time passes, as it always does, and she cajoles you into traveling with her. You pack your sadness away, just as you pack your bag, and you spend long days sailing the cerulean seas on the planet that I call home.

You are not stupid—you have never been stupid—and you realize what she’s doing. But you let her do it anyway, just as you let her drag you to Jere’s farm for a long overdue reunion.

• • • •

You are just as beautiful as you were the first time we met. There are more lines on your face, but there are also more lines on mine. We go for long walks on the farm, letting my grandchildren run between us like eager puppies. You talk; I talk. We both talk so very much that I am afraid that I will run out of words by the end of the day. I never do.

If there is one gift you have given me, it is the ability to speak about everything and nothing, and have it all mean something.

You finally kiss me on a day when it has done nothing but rain. The ground is damp, and there are clouds obscuring the triple moons, but you insist on going out to look for stars. And you kiss me, and I kiss you, and then we troop inside to see smug grins on our children’s faces.

“Having a good time, Mama?” Cali says.

“And you, Mother?” Jere says, with great irony, and elbows Arvin. Cali rolls her eyes, and Arvin starts to laugh. Before we know it, they are teasing us mercilessly, and you grab my hand and pull me back out into the rain.

We get very wet that night.

• • • •

If we were the Lovers—and we are not—this is when our romance would be the sweetest. Before the battles, before the fights, before all the difficulties that have universe-shattering ramifications. But we are not those people—and neither are our children.

I fall in love with you, and you fall in love with me, all that long summer into autumn. We watch together as our children fall back in love with each other, in a different form than before. Arvin forms a sort-of-glue, keeping them from killing each other, and by summer’s end, they have formed a solid unit. Cali talks about having a child, of raising it here, with these two men who love each other and her. Of putting down roots and finally resting.

You, on the other hand, have discovered that travel agrees with you. When the winter winds start blowing across the plains, you pack your bag, kiss me goodbye, and book passage on the next starliner leaving the planet. We send each other voluminous messages—numerous enough to fill a printed book, if we compiled them all.

I wake each morning to long spiels that you write about climbing sand dunes on Garalat or windsurfing on Picara; I send back equally long ones about my grandchildren and the wood sculptures that I’ve been working on. We video chat whenever you have good reception. For a long while, you come and go, crisscrossing the galaxy in search of new experiences, but you always come back. To my arms, to my home, to our life together.

Until the day that you don’t.

• • • •

A ceasefire is just a ceasefire until it isn’t one anymore. We don’t know how it happens at first, just that the enemy hasn’t entirely disappeared and that our galactic security has grown lax. No one knows whether they put the biological weapon in the food or in the water supply, but by the time people start getting sick, it’s too late. It’s not contagious, which is the only good thing about it.

But it kills, just as surely as cancer used to do, and we don’t know how to cure it. Four planets—four entire planets sickened at once—and just like that, we’re at war again. Not everyone dies in the first few months, which is something to be thankful for. And Cali’s influence is something to be thankful for as well; she manages to break through the military blockade that has prevented you from traveling, and she brings you home.

She half-carries you through the farmhouse door because the illness has weakened you. You collapse on the sofa in the front sitting room, and you smile at me.

“Vela,” you say, and stretch out your hand.

“Hanna,” I say, and stare at how thin you are.

We hold hands for a very long time.

• • • •

Cali goes back to war, to the pain and death that she is so very good at.

She still hasn’t had that child, but she loves Jere and Arvin’s children with a passion. They’re still together, a stable triad of people who have finally found one another. Two men who create life, while one woman destroys it, and yet it works for them. She fights and fights, and keeps writing her own glorious story.

I take care of you, for as long as I can.

It is not long enough.

• • • •

End with a romance: two women who are wildly and irrevocably in love with each other. Neither of them are young, and they are not the Lovers, but that doesn’t matter. Their love will not move mountains nor galaxies, but it binds families and hearts. It grows and glows as the women age, as they make plans to grow old together, until those plans can no longer come true.

The laws of love are remarkably vulnerable to the laws of life.

There are things we cannot change, and diseases we cannot cure. There are eternal wars we cannot win. There are children who will do things that we cannot control.

This is just a simple story, after all.

Cali and her sisters, Jere and Arvin and the kids—they’ll be here soon. Crowding into this hospital room, with its beeps and its equipment and the robotic assistants that disturb you at all hours of the night. Coming to tell you, before it’s too late, how very loved you are. But you know that already.

You’ve always known that.

©2020 by Jenny Rae Rappaport.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jenny Rae Rappaport has been published in Lightspeed Magazine, Escape Pod, and Daily Science Fiction, among other magazines. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and holds a BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. In the past, she has worked as a literary agent, a marine sciences field guide, and spent a semester observing monkeys as an intern with the Pittsburgh Zoo. Jenny lives in New Jersey with her family, where she divides most of her time between writing and herding small children. She can be found online at www.jennyrae.com and on Twitter at @jennyrae.

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

Byzantine Empathy

Ken Liu | 12528 words

You’re hurrying along a muddy path, part of a jostling crowd. The commotion around you compels you to scramble to keep up. As your eyes adjust to the dim light of early dawn, you see everyone is laden down with possessions: a baby wrapped tightly against the chest of its mother; a bulging bed sheet filled with clothing ballooning over the back of a middle-aged man; a washbasin filled with lychees and breadfruit cradled in the arms of an eight-year-old girl; an oversized Xiao Mi smartphone pressed into service as a flashlight by an old woman in sweatpants and a wrinkled blouse; a Mickey Mouse suitcase with one missing wheel being dragged through the mud by a young woman in a t-shirt emblazoned with the English phrase “Happy Girl Lucky”; a pillowcase filled with books or perhaps bundles of cash dangling from the hand of an old man in a baseball cap advertising Chinese cigarettes . . .

Most in the crowd seem taller than you, and this is how you know that you are a child. Looking down, you see on your feet yellow plastic slippers decorated with portraits of Disney’s Belle. The thick mud threatens to pull them off your feet with each step, and you wonder if perhaps they mean something to you—home, security, a life safe for fantasy—so that you don’t want to leave them behind.

In your right hand you’re holding a rag doll in a red dress, embroidered with curved letters in a script you don’t recognize. You squeeze the doll, and the sensation tells you the doll is stuffed with something light that rustles, perhaps seeds. Your left hand is held by a woman with a baby on her back and a bundle of blankets in her other hand. Your baby sister, you think, too little to be scared. She looks at you with her dark, adorable eyes, and you give her a comforting smile. You squeeze your mother’s hand, and she squeezes back reassuringly, warm.

On both sides of the path you see scattered tents, some orange and some blue, stretching across the fields all the way to the jungle half a kilometer away. You’re not sure if one of the tents used to be your home or if you’re just passing through.

There’s no background music, and no calls from exotic Southeast Asian birds. Instead, your ears are filled with anxious human chatter and cries. You can’t understand the language or the topolect, but the tension in the voices tells you that they’re cries for family to keep up, for friends to be careful, for aged relatives to not stumble.

A loud whine passes overhead, and the field ahead and to the left erupts in a fiery explosion brighter than sunrise. The ground convulses; you tumble down into the slimy mud.

More whines sweep overhead, and more shells explode around you, rattling your bones. Your ears are ringing. Your mother crawls over to you and covers you with her body. Merciful darkness blocks out the chaos. Loud, keening screams. Terrified cries. A few incoherent moans of pain.

You try to sit up, but your mother’s unmoving body is holding you down. You struggle to shift her weight off and manage to wriggle out from under her.

The back of your mother’s head is a bloody mess. Your baby sister is crying on the ground next to her body. Around you people are running in every direction, some still trying to hold on to their possessions, but bundles and suitcases lay abandoned in the path and the fields, next to motionless bodies. The rumbling of engines can be heard in the direction of the camp, and through the swaying, lush vegetation you see a column of soldiers in camouflage approach, guns at the ready.

A woman points at the soldiers and shouts. Some of the men and women stop running and hold up their hands.

A gunshot rings out, followed by another.

Like leaves blown before a gust of wind, the crowd scatters. Mud splashes onto your face as stomping feet pass by you.

Your baby sister cries louder. You scream, “Stop! Stop!” in your language. You try to crawl over to her, but someone stumbles over you, slamming you to the ground. You try to shield your head from the trampling feet with your arms and curl up into a ball. Some leap over you; others try but fail, landing on you, kicking you hard as they scramble.

More gunshots. You peek between your fingers. A few figures tumble to the earth. There’s little room to maneuver in the stampeding crowd, and people fall in a heap whenever anyone goes down. Everyone is pushing and shoving to put someone, anyone, between the bullets and themselves.

A foot in a muddy sneaker slams down onto the bundled figure of your baby sister, and you hear a sickening crack as her cries are abruptly silenced. The owner of the sneaker hesitates for a moment before the surging crowd pushes them forward, disappearing from your sight.

You scream, and something pounds you hard in the gut, knocking the breath out of you.

• • • •

Tang Jianwen ripped off her headset, gasping. Her hands shook as she unzipped her immersion suit, and she managed to peel it halfway off before her hands lost their strength. As she curled up on the omnidirectional treadmill, the bruises on her sweat-drenched body glistened dark red in the faint, white glow of her computer screen, the only light on in the dark studio apartment. She dry-heaved a few times before breaking into sobs.

Though her eyes were closed, she could still see the grim expressions on the faces of the soldiers, the bloody pulp that had been the mother’s head, the broken little body of the baby, her life trampled out of her.

She had disabled the safety features of the immersion suit and removed the amplitude filters in the algics circuitry. It didn’t seem right to experience the ordeal of the Muertien refugees with pain filters in place.

A VR rig was the ultimate empathy machine. How could she truly say she had walked in their shoes without suffering as they did?

The neon lights of bustling Shanghai at night spilled through the cracks in the curtains, drawing harsh, careless rainbows on the floor. Virtual wealth and real greed commingled out there, a world indifferent to the deaths and pain in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

She was grateful that she had not been able to afford the olfactory attachment. The coppery odor of blood, mixed with the fragrance of gunpowder, would have undone her before the end. Smells probed into the deepest part of your brain and stirred up the rawest emotions, like the blade of a hoe breaking up the numbed clods of modernity to reveal the wriggling pink flesh of wounded earthworms.

Eventually, she got up, peeled off the rest of her suit, and stumbled into the bathroom. She jumped as water rumbled in the pipes, the noise of approaching engines through the jungle. Under the hot streams of the shower, she shivered.

“Something has to be done,” she muttered. “We can’t let this happen. I can’t.”

But what could she do? The war between the central government of Myanmar and the ethnic minority rebels near the country’s border with China was little remarked on by the rest of the world. The United States, the world’s policeman, was silent because it wanted a loyal, pro-U.S. government in Naypyidaw as a chess piece against rising Chinese influence in the region. China, on the other hand, wanted to entice the government in Naypyidaw onto its side with business and investment, and making a big deal out of ethnic Han Chinese civilians being slaughtered by Burmese soldiers was unhelpful for this Great Game. Even news of what was happening in Muertien was censored by a Chinese government terrified that sympathy for the refugees might mutate into uncontrollable nationalism. Refugee camps on both sides of the border were kept out of sight, like some shameful secret. Eyewitness accounts, videos, and this VR file had to be sneaked through tiny encrypted holes punched in the Great Firewall. In the West, however, popular apathy functioned more effectively than any official censorship.

She could not organize marches or gather signatures for petitions; she could not start or join a nonprofit dedicated to the well-being of the refugees—not that people in China trusted charities, which were all frauds; she could not ask everyone she knew to call their representatives and tell them to do something about Muertien. Having studied abroad in the United States, Jianwen wasn’t so naive as to think that these avenues open to citizens of a democracy were all that effective—often, they served as mere symbolic gestures that did nothing to alter the minds or actions of those who truly determined foreign policy. But at least these acts would have allowed her to feel like she was making a difference.

And wasn’t feeling the entire point of being human?

The old men in Beijing, terrified of any challenge to their authority and the possibility of instability, had made all these things impossible. To be a citizen of China was to be constantly reminded of the stark reality of the utter powerlessness of the individual living in a modern, centralized, technocratic state.

The scalding water was starting to feel uncomfortable. She scrubbed herself hard, as if it was possible to free herself from the haunting memories of the dying by scouring away sweat and skin cells, as if it was possible to be absolved of guilt with soap that smelled of watermelons.

She got out of the shower, still dazed, raw, but at least functional. The filtered air in the apartment smelled faintly of hot glue, the result of too many electronics packed into a small space. She wrapped a towel around herself, padded into her room, and sat down in front of her computer screen. She tapped on the keyboard, trying to distract herself with updates on her mining progress.

The screen was enormous and its resolution cutting edge, but by itself, it was an insignificant piece of dumb equipment, only the visible corner of the powerful computing iceberg that she controlled.

The array of custom-made ASICs in the humming rack along the wall was devoted to one thing: solving cryptographic puzzles. She and other miners around the world used their specialized equipment to discover the nuggets made of special numbers that maintained the integrity of several cryptocurrencies. Although she had a day job as a financial services programmer, this work was where she really felt alive.

It gave her the feeling of possessing a bit of power, to be part of a global community in rebellion against authority in all its forms: authoritarian governments, democratic-mob statism, central banks that manipulated inflation and value by fiat. It was the closest she could come to being the activist she really yearned to be. Here, only math mattered, and the logic of number theory and elegant programming formed an unbreakable code of trust.

She tweaked her mining cluster, joined a new pool, checked in on a few channels where like-minded enthusiasts chatted about the future, and felt calmer as she read the scrolling text without joining in the conversation herself.

N♥T>: Just set up my Huawei GWX. Anyone have a recommendation for a good VR to try on it?

秋叶1001>: Room-scale or apartment-scale?

N♥T>: Apartment-scale. Nothing but the best for me.

秋叶1001>: Wow! You must’ve done well in the mines this year. I’d say try “Titanic.”

N♥T>: From Tencent?

秋叶1001>: No! The one from SLG is much better. You’ll need to hook your mining rig up to handle the graphics load if you have a big apartment.

Anony[mouse emoji]>: Ah, enhanced play or proof-of-work. What’s more important?

Like many others, Jianwen had plunged headlong into the consumer VR craze. The resolution of the rigs was finally high enough to overcome dizziness, and even a smartphone contained enough processing power to drive a basic headset—though not the kind that provided full immersion.

She had climbed Mount Everest; she had BASE jumped from the top of the Burj Khalifa; she had “gone out” to VR bars with her friends from across the globe, each of them holed up in their respective apartments drinking shots of real erguotou or vodka; she had kissed her favorite actors and slept with a few she really liked; she had seen VR films (exactly what they sound like and not very good); she had done VR LARP; she had flitted around the room in the form of a tiny fly as twelve angry fictional women argued over the fate of a fictional young woman, subtly directing their arguments by landing on pieces of evidence she wanted them to focus on.

But she had felt unsatisfied with all of these experiences in some vague, inexpressible way. The emerging medium of VR was like unformed clay, full of potential and possibility, propelled by hope and greed, promising everything and nothing, a technology solution in search of a problem—it was still unclear what sort of pleasures, narratological or ludic, would ultimately predominate.

This latest VR experience, a short little clip in the life of an unnamed Muertien refugee, however, felt different.

But for an accident of birth, that little girl could have been me. Her mother even had my mother’s eyes.

For the first time in years, since her youthful idealism had been ground down by the indifference of the world after college, she felted compelled to do something.

She stared at her screen. The flickering balances in her cryptocurrency accounts were based on a consensus of cryptographic chains, a trust forged from the trust-less. In a world walled from pain by greed, could such trust also be a way to drill a hole into the barrier, to let hope flood through? Could the world indeed be converted into a virtual village, where empathy bonded each to each?

She opened a new terminal window on her screen and began to type feverishly.

• • • •

I hate D.C., Sophia Ellis decided as she looked out the window.

Traffic crawled through the rainy streets, punctuated by the occasional blare of an angry driver—a nice metaphor for what passed for political normality in the capital these days. The distant monuments on the Mall, ethereal through the drizzle, seemed to mock her with their permanence and transcendence.

The board members were making chit-chat, waiting for the quarterly meeting to start. She only paid attention half-heartedly, her mind elsewhere.

. . . your daughter . . . Congrats to her!

. . . too many blockchain startups . . .

. . . passing through London in September . . .

Sophia would rather be back in the State Department, where she belonged, but the current administration’s distaste for traditional-style diplomacy made her think she might have better prospects shifting into the nonprofit sector as a top administrator. After all, it was an open secret that some of the biggest U.S. nonprofits with international offices served as unofficial arms of U.S. foreign policy, and being the executive director of Refugees Without Borders was not a bad stepping stone back to power when the next administration came in. The key was to do some good for the refugees, to promote American values, and to stabilize the world even as the current administration seemed hell-bent on squandering American power.

. . . saw a cell phone video and asked me if we were doing anything about it . . . Muertien, I think?

She pulled herself out of her reverie. “That’s not something we should be involved in. It’s like the situation in Yemen.”

The board member nodded and changed the subject.

Sophia’s old college roommate, Jianwen, had emailed her about Muertien a couple months ago. She had written back to express her regrets in a kind and thoughtful message. We’re an organization with limited resources. Not every humanitarian crisis can be addressed adequately. I’m sorry.

It was the truth. Sort of.

It was also the consensus of those who understood how things worked that interfering with what was happening in Muertien would not benefit U.S. interests, or the interests of Refugees Without Borders. The desire to make the world a better place, which was what had gotten her into diplomacy and nonprofit work in the first place, had to be tempered and guided by realism. Despite—or perhaps because of—her differences with the current administration, she believed that preserving American power was a worthy and important goal. Drawing attention to the crisis in Muertien would embarrass a key new American ally in the region, and that had to be avoided. This complicated world demanded that the interests of the United States (and its allies) be prioritized at the expense of some who suffered, so that more of the helpless could be protected.

America was not perfect, but it was also, after weighing all the alternatives, the best authority we had.

“. . . the number of small donations from under-thirty donors has fallen by 75 percent in the last month,” said one of the board members. While Sophia had been philosophizing, the board meeting had started.

The speaker was the husband of an important MP, participating from London through a telepresence robot. Sophia suspected that he was in love with his voice more than his wife. The looming screen at the end of the telescoping neck made his face appear severe and dominating, and the robot’s hands gesticulated for emphasis, presumably in imitation of the speaker’s actual hands. “You are telling me you have no plans for addressing the decline in engagement?”

Did someone on your wife’s staff write that up for you as a talking point? Sophia thought. She doubted he could have personally paid enough attention to the financial records to notice such a thing.

“We don’t rely on small direct donations from that demographic for the bulk of our funding—” she began, but she was cut off by another board member.

“That’s the not the point. It’s about future mindshare, about publicity. Refugees Without Borders is fading from the conversation on social media without large numbers of small donations from that key demographic. This will ultimately affect the big grants.”

The speaker was the CEO of a mobile devices company. Sophia had had to dissuade her more than once from mandating that donations to Refugees Without Borders be used to purchase the company’s cheap phones for refugees in Europe, which would have boosted the company’s reported market share (and violated conflict-of-interest rules).

“There have been some recent, unexpected shifts in the donor landscape that everyone is still trying to figure out—” Sophia said, but once again, she couldn’t finish the sentence.

“You’re talking about Empathium, aren’t you?” asked the husband of the MP. “Well, do you have a plan?”

Definitely a talking point from your wife’s staff. The Europeans always seemed to her more jittery about the cryptocurrency nuts than Americans. But just as with diplomacy, it’s better to guide the nuts than confront them.

“What’s Empathium?” asked another board member, a retired federal judge who still thought that the fax machine was the greatest technology invention ever.

“I am indeed talking about Empathium,” said Sophia, trying to keep her voice soothing. Then she turned to the tech CEO, “Would you like to explain?”

Had Sophia tried to describe Empathium, the tech CEO would surely have interrupted her. She couldn’t bear to let anyone else show more expertise about a technology issue. Might as well try to preserve some decorum.

The tech CEO nodded. “It’s simple. Empathium is another new disintermediating blockchain application making heavy use of smart contracts, but this time with the twist of disrupting the jobs traditional charities are hired to do in the philanthropy marketplace.”

Blank faces stared at the CEO from around the table. Eventually the judge turned to Sophia, “Why don’t you give it a shot?”

She had gotten control of the meeting back simply by letting others overreach, a classic diplomacy move. “Let me take this piece by piece. I’ll start with smart contracts. Suppose you and I sign a contract where if it rains tomorrow, I have to pay you five dollars, and if it doesn’t rain, you have to pay me a dollar.”

“Sounds like a bad insurance policy,” said the judge.

“You wouldn’t do well with that offering in London,” said the husband of the MP.

Weak chuckles from around the table.

“With a normal contract,” Sophia went on smoothly, “even if there’s a thunderstorm tomorrow, you may not get your money. I may renege and refuse to pay, or argue with you about what the meaning of ‘rain’ is. And you’ll have to take me to court.”

“Oh, you won’t do well in my court arguing the meaning of rain.”

“Sure, but as Your Honor knows, people argue about the most ridiculous things.” She had learned that it was best to let the judge go on these tangents before guiding him back to the trail. “And litigation is expensive.”

“We can both put our money into the hands of a trusted friend and have him decide who to pay after tomorrow,” the judge proposed. “That’s called escrow, you know?”

“Absolutely. That’s a great suggestion,” said Sophia. “However, that requires us to agree on a common, trusted third-party authority, and we’ll have to pay her a fee for her troubles. Bottom line: there are a lot of transaction costs associated with a traditional contract.”

“So what would happen if we had a smart contract?”

“The funds would be transferred over to you as soon as it rained,” said Sophia. “There’s nothing I can do to stop it because the entire mechanism for performance is coded in software.”

“So you’re saying a contract and a smart contract are basically the same thing. Except one of them is written in legalese and requires people to read it and interpret it, and the other is written in computer code and just needs a machine to execute it. No judge, no jury, no escrow, no takebacks.”

Sophia was impressed. The judge wasn’t technologically savvy, but he was sharp. “That’s right. Machines are far more transparent and predictable than the legal system, even a well-functioning legal system.”

“I’m not sure I like that,” said the judge.

“But you can see why this is attractive, especially if you don’t trust—”

“Smart contracts reduce transaction costs by taking out intermediaries,” said the tech CEO impatiently. “You could have just said that instead of this longwinded, ridiculous example.”

“I could have,” acknowledged Sophia. She had also learned that appearing to agree with the CEO reduced transaction costs.

“So what does this have to do with charity?” asked the husband of the MP.

“Some people view charities as unnecessary intermediaries rent-seeking on trust,” said the tech CEO. “Isn’t this obvious?”

Again, more blank looks from around the table.

“Some smart contract enthusiasts can be a bit extreme,” acknowledged Sophia. “In their view, charities like Refugees Without Borders spend most of our money on renting office space, paying staffers, holding expensive fundraisers where the wealthy socialize and have fun, and misusing donations to enrich insiders—”

“Which is an absolutely absurd view held by idiots with loud keyboards and no common sense,” said the tech CEO, her face flushed with anger.

“Or any political sense,” interrupted the husband of the MP, as if his marriage automatically made him an authority on politics. “We also coordinate field relief efforts, bring international expertise, raise awareness in the West, soothe nervous local officials, and make sure that money goes to deserving recipients.”

“That’s the trust we bring to the table,” said Sophia. “But for the WikiLeaks generation, claims of authority and expertise are automatically suspicious. In their view, even the way we use our program funds is inefficient: How can we know how to spend the money better than those who actually need the help? How can we rule out the option for refugees to acquire weapons to defend themselves? How can we decide to work with corrupt local government officials who line their own pockets with donations before passing on dribbles to the victims? Better to just send money directly to neighborhood children who can’t afford school lunches. The well-publicized failures of international relief efforts in places like Haiti and the former North Korea strengthen their argument.”

“So what’s their alternative?” asked the judge.

• • • •

Jianwen watched as the notifications scrolled up her screen, each announcing the completion of a smart contract denominated in completely anonymous cryptocurrency. A lot of business was done that way these days, especially in the developing world, what with so many governments trying to extend their control by outlawing cash. She had read somewhere that more than twenty percent of global financial transactions were now through various cryptocurrencies.

But the transactions she was watching onscreen were different. The offers were requests for aid or promises to provide funds; there was no consideration except the need to do something. The Empathium blockchain network matched and grouped the offers into multiparty smart contracts, and, when the conditions for performance were fulfilled, executed them.

She saw there were requests for children’s books; for fresh vegetables; for gardening tools; for contraceptives; for another doctor to come and set up shop for the long haul—and not just a volunteer to come for thirty days, parachuting in and jetting right back out, leaving everything unfinished and unfinishable . . .

She prayed for the offers to be taken up, to be satisfied by the system, even though she didn’t believe in God, or any god. Though she had created Empathium, she was powerless to affect its specific operation. That was the beauty of the system. No one could be in charge.

When she was a college student in the United States, Jianwen had returned to China for the summer of the year of the massive Sichuan earthquake to help the victims of that disaster. The Chinese government had put a great deal of its resources into the rescue effort, even mobilizing the army.

Some PLA soldiers, her age or even younger, showed her the ugly scars on their hands from when they had dug through the muddy rubble of collapsed buildings for survivors and bodies.

“I had to stop because my hands hurt so much,” one of the boys told her, his voice filled with shame. “They said if I kept going I’d lose my fingers.”

Her vision blurred from rage. Why couldn’t the government have supplied the soldiers with shovels or real rescue equipment? She pictured the soldiers’ bloody hands, the flesh of the fingers peeling back from the bones, as they continued to scoop up handfuls of earth in the hope of finding someone still alive. You don’t have anything to be ashamed about.

Later, she had recounted her experiences to her roommate, Sophia. Sophia had shared Jianwen’s rage at the Chinese government, but her face hadn’t changed at all at her description of the young soldier.

“He was just a tool for an autocracy,” the roommate had said, as if she couldn’t picture those bloody hands at all.

Jianwen hadn’t gone to the disaster zone with some official organization; rather, she was just one of thousands of volunteers who had come to Sichuan on their own, hoping to make a difference. She and the other volunteers had brought food and clothing, thinking that was what was needed. But mothers asked her for picture books or games to comfort their weepy children; farmers asked her when and how soon cell service would be restored; townspeople wanted to know if they could get tools and supplies to start rebuilding; a little girl who had lost her whole family wanted to know how she was going to finish high school. She didn’t have any of the needed information or supplies, and neither did anyone else, it seemed. The officials in charge of the rescue effort disliked having volunteers like her around because they reported to no authority, and thus told them nothing.

“This shows why you need expertise,” Sophia had said, later. “You can’t just go down there like an aimless mob hoping to do good. People who know what they’re doing need to be in charge of disaster relief.”

Jianwen wasn’t sure she agreed—she had seen little evidence that it was possible for any expert to anticipate everything needed in a disaster.

Text scrolled even faster in another window on the screen, showing more contract offers being submitted: requests for teachers of Greek; for funding to build a new cell tower; for medicine; for people who could teach refugees how to navigate the visa and work permit system; for weapons; for truckers willing to ship refugee-produced art out to buyers . . .

Some of these requests were for the kind of things that no NGO or government would ever give refugees. The idea of some authority dictating what was needed and not needed by people struggling to survive revolted Jianwen.

People in the middle of a disaster zone knew best what they needed. It’s best to give them money so that they could buy whatever they needed—plenty of fearless vendors and ingenious adventurers would be willing to bring the refugees whatever goods or services they requested when there was profit to be made. Money did make the world go around, and that wasn’t a bad thing.

Without cryptocurrency, none of what Empathium had accomplished so far would have been possible. The transfer of money across national borders was expensive and subject to heavy governmental oversight by suspicious regulators. Getting money into the hands of needy individuals was practically impossible without the help of some central payment processor, which could easily be co-opted by multiple authorities.

But with cryptocurrency and Empathium, a smartphone was all you needed to let the world know of your needs and to receive help. You could pay anyone securely and anonymously. You could band together with others with the same needs and submit a group application, or go it alone. No one could reach in and stop the smart contracts from executing.

It was exciting to see something that she had built begin to work as envisioned.

Still, so many of the aid requests on Empathium remained unfulfilled. There was too little money, too few donors.

• • • •

“That’s basically it in a nutshell,” said Sophia. “Donations to Refugees Without Borders have fallen because many younger donors are giving on the Empathium network instead.”

“Wait, did you just tell me that they’re giving ‘cryptocurrency’ away on this network?” asked the judge. “What is that, like fake money?”

“Well, not fake. Just not dollars or yen—though cryptocurrencies can be converted to fiat currencies at exchanges. It’s an electronic token. Think of it . . .” Sophia struggled to think of an outdated reference that would make sense to the old judge, then inspiration struck. “. . . like an MP3 on your iPod. Except it can be used to pay for things.”

“Why can’t I send a copy to someone to pay for something but keep a copy for myself, the same way kids used to do with songs?”

“Who owns which song is recorded in an electronic ledger.”

“But who keeps this ledger? What’s to prevent hackers from getting in there and rewriting it? You said there was no central authority.”

“The ledger, which is called the ‘blockchain,’ is distributed on computers across the world,” said the tech CEO. “It’s based on cryptographic principles that solve the Byzantine Generals Problem. Blockchains power cryptocurrencies as well as Empathium. Those who use the blockchain trust the math; they don’t need to trust people.”

“The what now?” asked the judge. “Byzantium?”

Sophia sighed inwardly. She wasn’t expecting to get into this level of detail. She hadn’t even finished explaining the basics of Empathium, and who knew how much longer it would take for the discussion to produce a consensus on what Refugees Without Borders should do about it?

Just as cryptocurrency aimed to wrest control of the money supply away from the fiat of governments, Empathium aimed to wrest control of the world’s supply of compassion away from the expertise of charities.

Empathium was an idealistic endeavor, but it was driven by waves of emotion, not expertise or reason. It made the world a more unpredictable place for America, and thus more dangerous. She wasn’t in the State Department anymore, but she still yearned to make the world more orderly, with decisions guided by rational analysis and weighing of pros and cons.

It was hard to get a roomful of egos to understand the same problem, much less to agree on a solution. She wished she had the knack some charismatic leaders had of just convincing everyone to submit to a course of action without understanding.

“Sometimes I think you just want people to agree with you,” Jianwen had said to her once, after a particularly heated argument.

“What’s wrong with that?” she had asked. “It’s not my fault that I’ve thought about the issues more than they have. I see the bigger picture.”

“You don’t really want to be the most reasonable,” Jianwen had said. “You want to be the most right. You want to be an oracle.”

She had been insulted. Jianwen could be so stubborn.

Wait a minute. Sophia seized on the notion of oracle. Maybe that’s it. That’s how we can make Empathium work for us.

“The Byzantine Generals Problem is a metaphor,” Sophia said. She tried to keep the newfound excitement out of her voice. She was glad that her wonkish need to understand the details—as well as the desire to one-up the tech CEO, if she was honest—had compelled her to read up on this topic. “Imagine a group of generals, each leading a division of the Byzantine army, are laying siege to a city. If all the generals can coordinate to attack the city, then the city will fall. And if all the generals can agree on a retreat, everyone will be safe. But if only some of the generals attack while others retreat, the result will be disaster.”

“They have to reach consensus on what to do,” said the judge.

“Yes. The generals communicate through messengers. But the problem is that the messengers they send to each other don’t arrive immediately, and there may be traitorous generals who will send out false messages about the emerging consensus as it’s being negotiated, thereby sowing confusion and corrupting the result.”

“This emerging consensus, as you call it, is like the ledger, isn’t it?” asked the judge. “It’s the record of every general’s vote.”

“Exactly! So, simplifying somewhat, blockchain solves this problem by using cryptography—very difficult-to-solve number theory puzzles—on the chain of messages that represents the emerging consensus. With cryptography, it’s easy for each general to verify that a message chain that represents the state of the vote hasn’t been tampered with, but it takes work for them to cryptographically add a new vote to the chain of votes. In order to deceive the other generals, a traitorous general would have to not only forge their own vote, but also the cryptographic summary of every other vote that came before theirs in the growing chain. As the chain gets longer, this becomes increasingly hard to do.”

“I’m not sure I entirely follow,” muttered the judge.

“The key is, the blockchain uses the difficulty of cryptographically adding a block of transactions to the chain—that’s called proof-of-work—to guarantee that as long as a majority of the computers in the network aren’t traitorous, you’ll have a distributed ledger that you can trust more than any central authority.”

“And that’s . . . trusting the math?”

“Yes. A distributed, incorruptible ledger not only makes it possible to have a cryptocurrency, it’s also a way to have a secure voting framework that isn’t centrally administered and a way to ensure that smart contracts can’t be altered.”

“This is all very interesting, but what does all this have to do with Empathium or Refugees Without Borders?” asked the husband of the MP impatiently.

• • • •

Jianwen had put a lot of effort into making the Empathium interface usable. This was not something that many in the blockchain community cared about. Indeed, many blockchain applications seemed to be purposefully built to be difficult to use, as if the requirement for detailed technical know-how was how you separated the truly free from the mere sheeple.

Jianwen despised elitism in all its forms—she was keenly aware of the irony of this, coming from an Ivy-educated financial services technologist with a roomful of top-end VR gear like her. It was one group of elites who decided that democracy wasn’t “right” for her country, and another group of elites who decided that they knew best who deserved sympathy and who didn’t. The elites distrusted feelings, distrusted what made people human.

The very point of Empathium was to help people who couldn’t care less about the intricacies of the Byzantine Generals Problem or the implications of block size on the security of the blockchain. It had to be usable by a child. She remembered the frustration and despair of the people in Sichuan who had just wanted simple tools to help themselves. Empathium had to be as easy to use as possible, both for those who wanted to give and those who needed the help.

She was creating the application for those sick and tired of being told what to care about and how to care about it, not those doing the telling.

“What makes you think you know the right answer to everything?” Jianwen had asked Sophia once, back when they talked about everything and anything, and arguments between them were dispassionate affairs, conducted for intellectual pleasure. “Don’t you ever think that you might be wrong?”

“If someone points out a flaw in my thinking, yes,” said Sophia. “I’m always open to persuasion.”

“But you never feel you might be wrong?”

“Letting feelings dictate how to think is the reason so many never get to the right answers at all.”

The work Jianwen was doing was, rationally, hopeless. She had used up all her sick days and vacation days to write Empathium. She had published a paper explaining its technical underpinnings in excruciating detail. She had recruited others to audit her code. But how could she really expect to change the established world of big NGOs and foreign policy think tanks through an obscure cryptocurrency network that wasn’t worth anything?

Regardless, the work felt right. And that was worth more than any argument she could come up with against it.

• • • •

“But I still don’t understand how these ‘conditions for performance’ are satisfied!” the judge said. “I don’t get how Empathium decides that an application for aid is worth funding and allocates money to it. Those who provide the funds can’t possibly go through thousands of applications personally and decide which ones to give money to.”

“There’s an aspect of smart contracts that I haven’t explained yet,” Sophia said. “For smart contracts to function, there needs to be a way to import reality into software. Sometimes, determining whether conditions for performance have been satisfied isn’t as simple as whether it rained on a certain day—though perhaps even that is open to debate in edge cases—but requires complicated human judgment: whether a contractor has installed the plumbing satisfactorily, whether the promised view is indeed scenic, or whether someone deserves to be helped.”

“You mean it requires consensus.”

“Exactly. So Empathium solves this problem by issuing a certain number of electronic tokens, called Emps, to some members of the network. Emp-holders then have the job of evaluating projects seeking funding and voting yes or no during a set time window. Only projects that receive the requisite number of yes-votes—the number of votes you can cast is determined by your Emp balance—get funded from the pool of available donors, and the required threshold of yes-votes scales up with the amount of funding requested. To prevent strategic voting, the vote tally is revealed only after the end of the evaluation period.”

“But how do the Emp-holders decide to cast their vote?”

“That’s up to each Emp-holder. They can evaluate just the materials put up by the requesters: their narratives, photos, videos, documentation, whatever. Or they can go on site to investigate the applicants. They can use whatever means they have at their disposal within the designated evaluation period.”

“Great, so money meant for the desperate and the needy will be allocated by a bunch of people who could barely be persuaded to answer a customer service survey between video game sessions,” scoffed the husband of the MP.

“This is where it gets clever. Emp-holders are incentivized by receiving a small amount of money from the network in proportion to their Emp accounts. After each project’s evaluation period is over, those who voted for the ‘losing’ side will be punished by having a portion of their Emps reallocated to those on the ‘winning’ side. Individual Emp balances are like a kind of reputation token, and over time, those whose judgments—or empathy meters, hence the network’s name—are best tuned to the consensus judgment get the most Emps. They become the infallible oracles around which the system functions.”

“What’s to prevent—”

“It’s not a perfect system,” said Sophia. “Even the designers of the system—we don’t really know who they are—acknowledge that. But like many things on the web, it works even if it doesn’t seem like it should. Nobody thought Wikipedia would work either when it started. In its two months of existence, Empathium has proven to be remarkably effective and resilient to attacks, and it’s certainly attracting a lot of young donors disillusioned with traditional charitable giving.”

The board took some time to digest this news.

“Sounds like we’ll have a hard time competing,” said the husband of the MP after a while.

Sophia took a deep breath. This is it, the moment I begin to build consensus. “Empathium is popular, but it hasn’t been able to attract nearly as much funding as the established charities, largely because donations to Empathium are not, of course, tax deductible. Some of the biggest projects on the network, especially those related to refugees, have not been funded. If the goal is to get Refugees Without Borders into the conversation, we should put in a big funding offer.”

“But I thought we wouldn’t be able to choose which of the refugee projects on the network the money will go to,” said the husband of the MP. “It’s going to be up to the Emp-holders.”

“I have a confession to make. I’ve been using Empathium myself, and I have some Emps. We can make my account the corporate account, and begin to evaluate these projects. It’s possible to filter out some of the fraudulent requests by documentation alone, but to really know if someone deserves help, there’s no replacement for good old-fashioned on-site investigation. With our field expertise and international staff, I’m sure we’ll be able to decide what projects to fund with more accuracy than anyone else, and we’ll gain Emps quickly.”

“But why do that when we can just put the money into the projects we want directly? Why add the intermediary of Empathium?” asked the tech CEO.

“It’s about leverage. Once we get enough Emps, we’ll turn Refugees Without Borders into the ultimate oracle for global empathy, the arbiter of who’s deserving,” said Sophia. She took a deep breath and delivered the coup de grace. “The example set by Refugees Without Borders will be followed by other big charities. Add to that all the funding from places like China and India, where donors interested in philanthropy have few trusted in-country charities but may be willing to jump onto a decentralized blockchain application, and soon Empathium may become the single largest charity-funding platform in the world. If we accumulate the largest share of Emps, we will then be effectively in the position to direct the use of most of the world’s charitable giving.”

The board members sat in their seats, stunned. Even the telepresence robot’s hands stopped moving.

“Damn . . . you’re going to flip a platform designed to disintermediate us into a ladder to crown us,” said the tech CEO, real admiration in her voice. “That’s some jujitsu.”

Sophia gave her a quick smile before turning back to the table. “Now, do I have your approval?”

• • • •

The red line representing the total amount of funds pledged to Empathium had shot straight into the stratosphere.

Jianwen smiled in front of her screen. Her baby had grown up.

The decision by Refugees Without Borders to join the network had been followed within twenty-four hours by several other major international charities. Empathium was now legitimate in the eyes of the public, and it was even possible for wealthy donors who cared about tax deductions to funnel their funds through traditional charities participating in the network.

Projects that received the attention of Empathium users would no doubt attract a great deal of media interest, drawing in reporters and observers. Empathium was going to direct not just charitable giving, but the gaze of the world.

The #empathium invite-only channel was filling up with debate.

NoFFIA>: This is a ruse by the big charities. They’re going to play the Emp-accumulation game and force the network into funding their pet projects.

N♥T>: What makes you think they can? The oracle system only rewards results. If you don’t think traditional charities know what they’re doing, they won’t have any better way of identifying deserving good projects. The network will force them to fund projects the Emp-holders as a whole think are deserving.

Anony[mouse emoji]>: Traditional charities have access to publicity channels most don’t. The other Emp-holders are still people. They’ll be swayed.

N♥T>: Not everyone is as affected by traditional media as you think, especially when you leave the bubble you USians live in. I think this is a level playing field.

Jianwen watched the debate but didn’t participate. As the creator of Empathium, she understood that the invisible reputation attached to her username meant that anything she said could disproportionately influence and distort debate. That was the way humans worked, even when they were talking through scrolling text attributed to pseudonymous electronic identities.

But she wasn’t interested in debate. She was interested in action. The participation of the traditional charities on Empathium had been what she had hoped and planned for all along, and now was the time for her to implement the second step.

She brought up a terminal window and began a new submission to the Empathium network. The Muertien VR file itself was too large to be directly incorporated into a block, so it would have to be distributed via peer-to-peer sharing. But the signature that authenticated the file and prevented tampering would become part of the blockchain and be distributed to all the users of Empathium and all the Emp-holders.

Maybe even hard-nosed Sophia.

The fact that the submitter of the file was Jianwen (or more precisely, the user ID of Empathium’s creator, which no one knew was Jianwen in real life) would give it a burst of initial interest, but everything after that was out of her hands.

She did not believe in conspiracies. She was counting on the angels of human nature.

She pressed SEND, sat back, and waited.

• • • •

As the Jeep wound its way through the jungle over the muddy, mountainous road near the China-Myanmar border, Sophia dozed.

How did we get here?

The madness of the world was both so unpredictable and so inevitable.

As she had predicted, the field expertise of Refugees Without Borders quickly made the corporate Empathium account one of the most powerful Emp-holders on the network. Her judgment was deemed infallible, guiding the network to disburse funds to needy groups and proposed projects that made sense. The board was very pleased with her work.

But then, that damned VR and others like it began to show up on the network.

The VR experiences spoke to the interactors in a way that words and photos and videos could not. Walking for miles barefoot through a war-torn city, seeing dismembered babies and mothers scattered around you, being interrogated and menaced by men and boys with machetes and guns . . . the VR experiences left the interactors shaken and overwhelmed. Some had been hospitalized.

Traditional media, bound by old-fashioned ideas about decency and propriety, could not show images like these and refused to engage in what they viewed as pure emotional manipulation.

Where’s the context? Who’s the source? demanded the spurned pundits. Real journalism requires reflection, requires thought.

We don’t remember much reflection from you when you advocated war based on pictures you printed, replied the hive mind of Emp-holders. Are you just annoyed that you aren’t in charge of our emotions anymore?

The pervasive use of encryption on Empathium meant that most censorship techniques were useless, and so the Emp-holders were exposed to stories they had heretofore been sheltered from. They voted for the attached projects, their hearts pounding, their breathing ragged, their eyes blurred by rage and sorrow.

Activists and propagandists soon realized that the best way to get their causes funded was to participate in the VR arms race. And so governments and rebels competed in creating compelling VR experiences that forced the interactors into their perspective, obliged them to empathize with their side.

Mass graves filled with refugees who had starved to death in Yemen. Young women marching to support Russia gunned down by Ukrainian soldiers. Ethnic minority children running naked through streets as their homes were set on fire by Myanmar government soldiers . . .

Funding began to flow to groups that the news had forgotten or portrayed as the side undeserving of sympathy. In VR, one minute of their anguish spoke louder than ten thousand words in op-eds in respected newspapers.

“This is the commodification of pain!” Ivy-educated bloggers wrote in earnest think pieces. “Isn’t this yet another way for the privileged to exploit the suffering of the oppressed to make themselves feel better?”

“Just as a photograph can be framed and edited to lie, so can VR,” the media- and cultural-studies commentariat wrote. “VR is so heavily engineered that we have not yet reached consensus on what the meaning of ‘reality’ in this medium is.”

“This is a threat to our national security,” fretted the senators who demanded that Empathium be shut down. “They could be diverting funding to groups hostile to our national interest.”

“You’re simply terrified that you’re being disintermediated from your positions of undeserved authority,” jeered the Empathium users, hidden behind anonymous, encrypted accounts. “This is a real democracy of empathy. Deal with it.”

A consensus of feelings had replaced the consensus of facts. The emotional labor of vicarious experience through virtual reality had replaced the physical and mental work of investigation, of evaluating costs and benefits, of exercising rational judgment. Once again, proof-of-work was used to guarantee authenticity, just a different kind of work.

Maybe the reporters and senators and diplomats and I could make our own VR experiences, Sophia thought as she was jostled awake in the back of the Jeep. Too bad it’s hard to make the unglamorous but necessary work of truly understanding a complex situation compelling . . .

She looked outside the window. They were passing through a refugee camp in Muertien. Men, women, and children, most of them Chinese in physical appearance, looked back at the passengers in the Jeep numbly. Their expressions were familiar to Sophia; she had seen the same despondency on the faces of refugees everywhere in the world.

The successful funding of the Muertien project had been a massive blow to Sophia and Refugees Without Borders. She had voted against it, but the other Emp-holders had overwhelmed her, and overnight Sophia had lost ten percent of her Emps. Other VR-propelled projects subsequently achieved funding despite her objection, eroding Sophia’s Emp account even further.

Faced with an outraged board, she had come here to find some way to discredit the Muertien project, to show that she had been right.

On the way to Muertien from Yangon, she had spoken to the one staffer Refugees Without Borders posted there and several Western reporters stationed in the country. They had confirmed the consensus back in D.C. She knew that the refugee situation was one largely created by the rebels. The population of Muertien, mostly ethnic Han Chinese, did not get along well with the majority Bamar in the central government. The rebels had attacked the government forces and then tried to fade into the civilian population. The government had little choice but to resort to violence, lest the country’s young democracy suffer a setback and Chinese influence extend into the heart of Southeast Asia. Regretful incidents no doubt occurred, but the vast majority of the fault lay on the side of the rebels. Funding them would only escalate the conflict.

But this kind of punditry, of explaining geopolitics, was anathema to the Emp-holders. They did not want lectures; they were persuaded by the immediacy of suffering.

The Jeep stopped. Sophia got out with her interpreter. She adjusted the neckband she wore—it was a prototype the tech CEO had gotten for her from Canon Virtual. The air was humid, hot, drenched with the smell of sewage and decay. She should have been expecting that, she supposed, but somehow she hadn’t thought about how things would smell here back in her D.C. office.

She was about to approach a leery-looking young woman in a flower-print blouse when a man shouted angrily. She turned to look at him. He was pointing at her and screaming. The crowd around him stopped moving to stare at her. The air felt tense.

There was a gun in his other hand.

Part of the goal of the Muertien project had been to fund groups willing to smuggle weapons across the Chinese border into the hands of the refugees. Sophia knew that. I’m going to regret coming here without an armed escort, aren’t I?

Then she heard the rumbling of vehicles approaching in the jungle. A loud whine overhead was followed by an explosion. Staccato gunshots erupted so near that they had to be coming from inside the camp.

Sophia was shoved to the ground as the crowd around her exploded into chaos, screaming and dashing every which way. She wrapped her arms protectively around her neck, around the cameras and microphones, but panicked feet stomped over her torso, making her gasp and loosening her arms. The camera-studded neckband fell and rolled away in the dirt, and she reached for it, careless of her own safety. Just before her grasping fingers reached the band, a booted foot crushed her hand with a sickening crunch. She cursed, and someone running by kicked her in the head.

She faded into unconsciousness.

• • • •

A splitting headache. Overhead the sky is close at hand and orange, cloudless.

The surface under me feels hard and sandy.

I’m inside a VR experience, aren’t I? Am I Gulliver, looking up at the Lilliputian sky?

The sky turns and sways, and even though I’m lying down, I feel like I’m falling.

I want to throw up.

“Close your eyes until the vertigo passes,” a voice says. The timbre and cadence are familiar, but I can’t quite place who it is. I just know I haven’t heard it in a while. I wait until the dizziness fades. Only then do I notice the unyielding lump of the data recorder poking into my back, where it’s held in place by tape. Relief floods through me. The cameras may be gone, but the most important piece of equipment has survived the ordeal.

“Here, drink,” the voice says.

I open my eyes. I struggle to sit up and a hand reaches out to support me between my shoulder blades. It’s a small, strong hand, the hand of a woman. A canteen materializes before my face in the dim light, a chiaroscuro. I sip. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I am.

I look up at the face behind the canteen: Jianwen.

“What are you doing here?” I ask. Everything still seems so unreal, but I’m beginning to realize that I’m inside a tent, probably one of the tents I saw earlier in the camp.

“The same thing brought both of us here,” says Jianwen. After all these years, she hasn’t changed much: still that hard, no-nonsense demeanor, still that short-cropped hair, still that set to her jaw, challenging everything and everyone.

She just looks leaner, drier, as if the years have wrung more gentleness out of her.

“Empathium. I made it, and you want to break it.”

Of course, I should have known. Jianwen always disliked institutions, thought it best to disrupt everything.

It’s still nice to see her.

Our first year in college, I wrote a story for the school paper about a sexual assault at a final club party. The victim wasn’t a student, and her account was later discredited. Everyone condemned my work, calling me careless, declaring that I had allowed the desire for a good story get in the way of facts and analysis. Only I knew that I hadn’t been wrong: the victim had only recanted under pressure, but I had no proof. Jianwen was the only one who stuck by me, defending me at every opportunity.

“Why do you trust me?” I had asked her at the time.

“It’s not something I can explain,” she replied. “It’s a feeling. I heard the pain in her voice . . . and I know you did too.”

That was how we became close. She was someone I could count on in a fight.

“What happened out there?” I ask.

“That depends on who you talk to. This won’t show up in the news in China at all. If it shows up in the U.S., it will be misrepresented as another minor skirmish between the government and the rebels, whose guerrilla fighters disguised themselves as refugees, forcing the government to retaliate.”

This has always been her way. Jianwen sees the corruption of the truth everywhere, but she won’t tell you what she thinks the truth is. I suppose she got into the habit from her time in America to avoid arguments.

“And what will Empathium users think?” I ask.

“They’ll see more children being blown up by bombs and women being gunned down by soldiers as they ran.”

“Did the rebels or the government fire the first shot?”

“Why does that matter? The consensus in the West will always be that the rebels fired the first shot—as if that determines everything. You’ve already decided on the story, and everything else is just support.”

“I get it,” I say. “I understand what you’re trying to do. You think there’s not enough attention being paid to the refugees in Muertien, and so you’re using Empathium to publicize their plight. You’re emotionally attached to these people because they look like you—”

“Is that really what you think? You think I’m doing this because they’re ethnically Han Chinese?” She looks at me, disappointed.

She can look at me however she likes, but the intensity of her emotion gives her away. In college I remember her working hard to raise money for the earthquake in China, when we were both still trying to pick concentrations; I remember her holding a candlelight vigil for both the Uighurs and the Han who had died in Ürümqi the next summer, when we stayed on campus together to edit the student course-evaluation guide; I remember how once in class she had refused to back down as a white man twice her size loomed over her, demanding that she accept that China was wrong to fight the Korean War.

“Hit me if you want,” she had said, her voice steady. “I’m not going to desecrate the memory of the men and women who died so that I could be born. MacArthur was going to drop atomic bombs on Beijing. Is that really the kind of empire you want to defend?”

Some of our friends in college thought of Jianwen as a Chinese nationalist, but that’s not quite right. She dislikes all empires because to her, they are the ultimate institutions, with deadly concentration of power. She doesn’t think the American empire is any more worthy of support than the Russian one or the Chinese one. As she put it, “America is only a democracy for those lucky enough to be Americans. To everybody else, it’s just a dictator with the biggest bombs and missiles.”

She wants the perfection of disintermediated chaos rather than the imperfect stability of flawed institutions that could be perfected.

“You are letting your passion overcome reason,” I say. I know that persuasion is useless but I can’t help trying. If I don’t hold on to faith in reason, I have nothing. “A powerful China with influence in Myanmar is bad for world peace. American preeminence must—”

“And so you think it’s all right for the people of Muertien to be ethnically cleansed to preserve the stability of the regime in Naypyidaw, to uphold the Pax Americana, to cement the ramparts of an American empire with their blood.”

I wince. She’s always been careless with her words. “Don’t exaggerate. The ethnic conflict here, if not contained, will lead to more Chinese adventurism and influence. I’ve talked to many in Yongan. They don’t want the Chinese here.”

“And you think they want the Americans here, telling them what to do?” Contempt flares in her voice.

“A choice between the lesser of two evils,” I concede. “But more Chinese involvement will provoke more American anxiety, and that will only intensify the geopolitical conflict you dislike so much.”

“People here need Chinese money for their dams. Without development, they can’t solve any of the problems they have—”

“Maybe the developers want that,” I say, “but the common people don’t.”

“Who are these common people in your imagination?” she asks. “I’ve talked to many here in Muertien. They say that the Bamars don’t want the dams built where they are, but they’ll be happy to have them built here. That’s what the rebels are fighting for, to preserve their autonomy and the right to control their land. Isn’t self-determination something you value and care about? How does letting soldiers kill children lead to a better world?”

We can go on like this forever. She can’t see the truth because she’s in too much pain.

“You’ve been blinded by the pain of these people,” I say. “And now you want the rest of the world to suffer the same fate. Through Empathium, you’ve bypassed the traditional filters of institutional media and charities to reach individuals. But the experience of having children and mothers die right next to them is too overwhelming for most to think through the complicated implications of the events that led to these tragedies. The VR experiences are propaganda.”

“You know as well as I do that the Muertien VR isn’t fake.”

I know what she says is true. I’ve seen people die around me, and even if that VR was doctored or divorced from context, enough of it was true to make the rest not matter. The best propaganda is often true.

But there’s a greater truth she doesn’t see. Just because something happened doesn’t make it a decisive fact; just because there’s suffering doesn’t mean there is always a better choice; just because people die doesn’t mean we must abandon greater principles. The world isn’t always black and white.

“Empathy isn’t always a good thing,” I say. “Irresponsible empathy makes the world unstable. In each conflict, there are multiple claims for empathy, leading to emotional involvement by outsiders that widens the conflict. To sort through the morass, you must reason your way to the least harmful answer, the right answer. This is why some of us are charged with the duty to study and understand the complexities of this world and to decide, for the rest, how to exercise empathy responsibly.”

“I can’t just shut it off,” she says. “I can’t just forget the dead. Their pain and terror . . . they’re a part of the blockchain of my experience now, unerasable. If being responsible means learning how to not feel someone else’s pain, then it isn’t humanity you serve, but evil.”

I watch her. I feel for her, I really do. It’s terribly sad, seeing your friend in pain but knowing that there is nothing you can do to help, knowing that, in fact, you have to hurt her more. Sometimes pain, and acknowledgment of pain, is selfish.

I lift my blouse to show her the VR recorder taped to the small of my back. “This was recording until the moment guns started firing—from inside the camp—and I was pushed down to the ground.”

She stares at the VR data recorder, and her face shifts through shock, recognition, rage, denial, an ironic smile, and then, nothing.

Once the VR based on what I went through is uploaded—it doesn’t need much editing—there will be outrage at home. A defenseless American woman, the head of a charity dedicated to helping refugees, is brutalized by ethnic Han Chinese rebels armed with guns bought with money from Empathium—hard to imagine a better way to discredit the Muertien project. The best propaganda is often true.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it.

She gazes at me, and I can’t tell if it’s hate or despair I see in her eyes.

• • • •

I look at her with pity.

“Have you tried the original Muertien clip?” I ask. “The one I uploaded.”

Sophia shakes her head. “I couldn’t. I didn’t want to compromise my judgment.”

She has always been so rational. One time, in college, I asked her to watch a video of a young Russian man, barely more than a boy, being beheaded by Chechen fighters in front of the camera. She had refused.

“Why won’t you look at what the people you support are doing?” I asked.

“Because I haven’t seen all the acts of brutality committed by the Russians against the Chechen people,” she said. “To reward those who evoke empathy is the same as punishing those who have been prevented from doing so. Looking at this won’t be objective.”

There’s always the need for more context with Sophia, for the big picture. But I’ve learned over the years that rationality with her, as with many, is just a matter of rationalization. She wants a picture just big enough to justify what her government does. She needs to understand just enough to be able to reason that what America wants is also what anyone rational in the world wants.

I understand how she thinks, but she doesn’t understand how I think. I understand her language, but she doesn’t understand mine—or care to. That’s how power works in this world.

When I first got to America, I thought it was the most wonderful place on Earth. There were students passionate about every humanitarian cause, and I tried to support every one. I raised money for the victims of the Bangladesh cyclones and the flooding in India; I packed blankets and tents and sleeping bags for the earthquake in Peru; I joined the vigils to remember the victims of 9/11, sobbing before Memorial Church in the late summer evening breeze, trying to keep the candles lit.

Then came the big earthquake in China, and as the death toll climbed toward 100,000, the campus was strangely quiet. People who I thought were my friends turned away, and the donation table we set up in front of the Science Center was staffed only by other students from China like me. We couldn’t even raise a tenth of the money we had raised for disasters with far smaller death tolls.

What discussion there was focused on how the Chinese drive for development resulted in unsafe buildings, as if enumerating the cons of their government was an appropriate reaction to dead children, as if reaffirming the pros of American democracy was a good justification for withholding help.

Jokes about the Chinese and dogs were posted in anonymous newsgroups. “People just don’t like China very much,” an op-ed writer mused. “I’d rather have the elephants back,” said an actress on TV.

What’s the matter with you? I wanted to scream. There was no empathy in their eyes as I stood by the donation table and my classmates hurried past me, averting their gaze.

But Sophia did donate. She gave more than anyone else.

“Why?” I asked her. “Why do you care about the victims when no one else seems to?”

“I’m not going to have you heading back to China with an irrational impression that Americans dislike the Chinese,” she said. “Try to remember me when you get into these moments of despair.”

That was how I knew we would never be as close as I had hoped. She had given as a means to persuade, not because she felt what I felt.

“You accuse me of manipulation,” I say to Sophia. The humid air in the tent is oppressive, and it feels as if someone is pressing on my eyes from within my skull. “But aren’t you doing the exact same thing with that recording?”

“There is a difference,” she says. She always has an answer. “My clip will be used to emotionally persuade people to do what is rationally the right thing as part of a considered plan. Emotion is a blunt tool that must be placed in service of reason.”

“So your plan is to stop any more aid for the refugees and watch as the Myanmar government drives them off their land into China? Or worse?”

“You managed to get money to the refugees on a tide of rage and pity,” she says. “But how does that really help them? Their fate will always ultimately be decided by the geopolitics between China and the US. Everything else is just noise. They can’t be helped. Arming the refugees will only give the government more of an excuse to resort to violence.”

Sophia isn’t wrong. Not exactly. But there’s a greater principle here that she doesn’t see. The world doesn’t always proceed in the way predicted by theories of economics or international relations. If every decision is made with Sophia’s calculus, then order, stability, empire always win. There will never be any change, any independence, any justice. We are, and should be, creatures of the heart first.

“The greater manipulation is to deceive yourself into believing you can always reason your way to what is right,” I say.

“Without reason, you can’t get to what is right at all,” Sophia parries.

“Emotion has always been at the core of what it means to do right, not merely a tool for persuasion. Are you opposed to slavery because you have engaged in a rational analysis of the costs and benefits of the institution? No, it’s because you’re revolted by it. You empathize with the victims. You feel its wrongness in your heart.”

“Moral reasoning isn’t the same—”

“Moral reasoning is often only a method by which you tame your empathy and yoke it to serve the interests of the institutions that have corrupted you. You’re clearly not averse to manipulation when it’s advantageous to a cause that finds favor in your framework.”

“Calling me a hypocrite isn’t very helpful—”

“But you are a hypocrite. You didn’t protest when pictures of babies launched Tomahawks or when images of drowned little boys on beaches led to revisions in refugee policy. You promoted the work of reporters who evoked empathy for those stranded in Kenya’s largest refugee camp by telling Westerners sappy Romeo-and-Juliet love stories about young refugees and emphasizing how the United Nations has educated them with Western ideals—”

“Those are different—”

“Of course they’re different. Empathy for you is but another weapon to be wielded, instead of a fundamental value of being human. You reward some with your empathy and punish others by withholding it. Reasons can always be found.”

“How are you different? Why does the suffering of some affect you more than others? Why do you care about the people of Muertien more than any other people? Isn’t it because they look like you?”

She still thinks this is a killer argument. I understand her, I really do. It’s so comforting to know that you’re right, that you’ve triumphed over emotion with reason, that you’re an agent of the just empire, immune to the betrayal of empathy.

I just can’t live like that.

I try one last time.

“I had hoped that by stripping away context and background, by exposing the senses to the rawness of pain and suffering, virtual reality would be able to prevent all of us from rationalizing away our empathy. In agony, there is no race, no creed, none of the walls that divide us and subdivide us. When you’re immersed in the experience of the victims, all of us are in Muertien, in Yemen, in the heart of darkness that the Great Powers feed on.”

She doesn’t respond. I see in her eyes she has given up on me. I am beyond reason.

Through Empathium, I had hoped to create a consensus of empathy, an incorruptible ledger of the heart that has overcome traitorous rationalization.

But perhaps I am still too naive. Perhaps I give empathy too much credit.

Anony[mouse emoji]>: What do you all think is going to happen?

N♥T>: China is going to have to invade. Those VRs have left Beijing no choice. If they don’t send in the troops to protect the rebels in Muertien, there will be riots in the streets.

goldfarmer89>: Makes you wonder if that was what China wanted all along.

Anony[mouse emoji]>: You think that first VR was a Chinese production?

goldfarmer89>: Had to be state-sponsored. It was so slick.

N♥T>: I’m not so sure it was the Chinese who made it. The White House has been itching for an excuse for war with China to divert attention from all those scandals.

Anony[mouse emoji]>: So you think the VR was a CIA plant?

N♥T>: Wouldn’t be the first time Americans have manipulated anti-American sentiment into giving them exactly what they wanted. That Ellis VR is also ramping up US public support for taking a hard line against China. I just feel terrible about those people in Muertien. What a mess.

little_blocks>: Still stuck on those snuff VRs on Empathium? I’ve stopped long ago. Too exhausting. I’ll PM you a new game you’ll definitely like.

N♥T>: I can always use a new game. ^_^

©2018 by Ken Liu. Originally published in Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Wade Roush. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he wrote The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He also authored the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, the mathematics of origami, and other subjects of his expertise.

Forty Acres and a Mule

Stephanie Malia Morris | 2662 words

My parents’ farm has shrunk, as old things tend to do. The shed, the workshop, the paddock with its doubled wire fences and chicken coop—all squat and rain-blackened, coming into focus as I step from the car as if I have put on glasses or wiped rain from a window. The house itself stands straight-spined beyond the pear tree, gray in the drizzle, more withdrawn than the last time I visited. The tree has not changed: it towers above the house, branches spread wide, trunk split near the root. A child could wedge her foot into the crevice and pull herself up onto the nearest bough, could climb to the very top and survey all forty acres of this property from the crown.

“It’s like a crow’s nest up there,” I say to Caleb, pointing at the highest branches. Even that high, they have heft enough to hold a small girl. “I’d find the best pears, even before the wasps or birds did.” My girl’s hands, small and brown, tugging until the pears dropped into them, crisp and swollen, insides white and sweet. The leaves shiver with the drizzle, beckoning.

Caleb grunts. He shoulders our overnight bags; I offer to take one and he waves me off. “Get the trunk, would you?” He shies away from the outermost branches and makes an odd, triangular movement with his head: looks up at the tree, then down across his body, up at the tree again. The first time I brought him to visit my parents—nine months ago, for Thanksgiving—he’d stood smoking beneath the tree and had come back inside complaining of ants.

“It’s too cold for ants,” I said, but when he lifted his shirt for my inspection I obliged. His back looked no different: his pale skin a little speckled, doughy. “You’re fine,” I told him. He’d still fidgeted all through dinner, brushing his shoulders and slapping his neck in sharp, convulsive movements. I could only ask are you okay so many times before both of us tensed with frustration.

He makes it halfway up the porch before he notices I have wandered over to the tree. He drops the bags and comes back down, bow-legged and ginger-footed, grimacing when the steps groan beneath his weight. He reaches for the rail. It pitches sideways, the wood giving with a wet crack.

“Christ,” he says. He tries to straighten it and continue down the stairs all at once, to put distance between himself and the house. Animal instinct returned to him the moment our car crested the hill below which my parents’ farm lay. Even now he shrinks from its silent outbuildings, its dead-eyed windows, its nooks, its shadows. I want to tell him, you’re safe while I’m here.

But he wouldn’t want to hear it and anyway, I’m not quite sure it’s true.

“Look.” I wedge my foot into the crevice of the tree and hop up, as if into a stirrup. Bark, soft with rain, crumbles between my toes. I had not anticipated rain. The Weather Channel had promised me a dry, overcast day with temperatures in the mid-eighties. It had been warm and bright when we’d left home five hours ago and I wore thin-soled sandals and a maxi dress whose hem was now heavy with water sponged from the grass. Pretty clothes for gated sidewalks and redbrick streets. I always forgot how to dress for home.

Caleb glances at me. He has given up on the railing and stands just beyond the reach of the tree. He crosses his arms, and his foot jogs up and down. “You’re not climbing that thing, are you?” he says. “You’ll fall.”

He’d said the same thing the last time we’d visited, and pulled me out of the tree’s crevice with his arms around my waist like I was a little girl. A part of me had liked the way he’d handled me, liked how he’d pulled my backside flush with his waist, warmed my neck with his breath. But my limbs ached to climb. They always did when I came home, and I always climbed in response, my own animal instinct drawing me high. And it got old, after a while, Caleb handling my body better than I could.

“You’ll break something,” he says.

“Please stop saying that.” I haul myself higher, aiming for a branch that is crooked like an elbow, thick enough to hold my weight. He looks at me, then at the house. His eyes scan the windows, the murk beyond the broken latticework of the porch. His face is a rictus of displeasure. I can’t tell if it’s me or the house at which he’s grimacing. My arms tremble, my feet cannot find purchase. I slip. My toenail catches in the bark. My knee bangs the trunk. I slide to the ground with a gasp.

Caleb starts, alarmed. “Jesus, Erin.”

“I’m fine.” My toenail is folded up like an origami sculpture; I bend it back as far as it will go and rip it off. My hands are trembling. I ignore them. I’d rarely worn shoes to climb when I was younger and there’s no sense in doing so now. I kick off my sandals, tie a knot in the damp hem of my skirt, and step back up into the crevice. Climbing is easier this time. I scoot onto the crooked branch.

“What did I just tell you?” Caleb takes a step toward me. Again, he makes that triangular movement, up, across, up. “Erin. Erin. It’s on you if you get hurt. I’m not sticking around so your parents can hate me even more.”

“They don’t hate you,” I say. They don’t think enough of him for that.

He looks over his shoulder at the house, the yard, the acres that stretch out toward the woods. Beyond the circle where my father has mowed, the grass grows like wheat, hip-height and buckling; farther out, there are pines with skinny trunks, their needles tipped in yellow. Caleb asked me, once, why my parents did not hire someone to mow the field. Asked me, later, why they did not get a smaller place.

“We’ll help them,” he’d said. “I’ll get my brother to put the place on the market, and we can find them somewhere near us. Or even a place over in Prince George’s County if they want.”

“No,” I said. “This place has always been in the family, and it’s theirs, now. Their forty acres and a mule.”

He just looked at me sideways, face still, as if he did not think I had understood him at all.

“Are they even home?” Caleb asks, now.

“They’re home.” I point to the cars at the side of the house. “Why, you want to go say hello?” I look down at him, the crescent of hair he fights to preserve, ringing his baldness. He follows my pointing finger.

“They’ll have seen us pull up.” Chiding, always chiding me.

“So? They won’t mind if we don’t come in right away. They know I like to climb.” I root among the branches, looking for pears. Sawflies have made skeletons of the leaves, and the only pear I find has been hollowed out by wasps. It drops when my fingers brush it, light as a wasps’ nest. I startle back, scraping my elbow against the trunk, catching myself when I nearly tip backward. Bark patters down the trunk. Caleb hisses at me; he steps further into the shadow of the tree.

“You are welcome to go into the house and say hello to my parents without me, Caleb.” I toss him a pockmarked leaf. He bats it away. “You don’t need my permission. My mom asked about you this morning, before we left the house. They’re looking forward to seeing you.”

He snorts. He knows my mother well enough to know she would not ask after him. Only once did my mother ask Will you get married? when I’d moved with Caleb five hours away. I’d said I don’t know.

What is he to you?

I didn’t know that either.

I brace one foot against the trunk in front of me, my other foot against the trunk supporting my back. The bark scratches at my bare soles, which are soft from city living. There are climbing trees in the community where Caleb and I live. I’d climbed one, once, until Caleb joked that I looked like George of the Jungle.

I stretch for handholds among the branches, looking for pears. Surely there are some left. It is not so late in the summer. This tree has never been without them in all the years I have known it. It is always shedding little gifts. My mother and I would fill baskets while the mornings were still cool, picking pears slick with dew out of the grass. I’d once found a long length of rope, weathered and frayed, half sunk into the mud as if it had been there for decades. I tugged on it and it surfaced from the grass like a fishing line, up and up until it began to drag, as if something trapped beneath the porch weighted it down on the other end. I tugged. The rope went taut. Something thumped, colliding with the latticework under the porch. My mother took the rope from me and laid it back down. “Don’t,” she said, and steered me toward the house. I never found the rope again after that.

I wrap my arms around the trunk and peer up. Rain speckles my face, a drizzle catching on the leaves, drops rolling into each other until they drip into my hair. The rain has made my twist out fluffy and big; I feel what is left of my curls snagging in the branches. I’d made the mistake of unbraiding my hair and wearing it in a twist out last night to a dinner party with Caleb’s friends. Someone had asked me if all that hair was mine, how I kept it clean. They’d all stared, interested. Caleb had looked with them, head cocked, half smiling, as if he too did not know, could not imagine. And through it all he’d played with the hem of my skirt beneath the dinner table, ran his hands between my legs. He’d thrilled me once, handling me so. But it gets old. So old.

There. A yard or two above me, a single, full-figured pear dangles, so ripe its green skin is yellowing. I crane my neck to examine it. It does not look wasp-eaten.

“We should go in.” Caleb has given in, and stands against the tree, hands splayed against the trunk, looking up at me. My feet knock water onto him; spots of it darken his blue plaid shirt at the shoulders. My mother will remember that shirt from the last time he visited. She will ask me if it is his only good one.

“Wait,” I say. “I see a pear.”

He looks up, squinting. “That’s too high.”

“I’ve climbed higher.”

“Erin—”

I dig my feet against the tree and stretch higher, reaching for the slender branches where that single plump pear hides, coy and sly.

“Erin,” he says again, exasperated. And then. His breath hitches. He makes a little truncated sound. “Erin.” His voice rises. “Erin, what’s—fuck, that’s not a—wait, Erin—”

Only once have I fallen. I was ten years old, climbing higher than I had ever done before when a branch gave way as I reached for another handhold. I dropped, as the pears did, with lurching suddenness. Around me, a froth of thrashing branches, leaves shuddering, my belly in my mouth. I had not hit the ground. The foliage had thickened beneath me. It looped beneath my feet, like a length of rope.

I found myself curled among branches that had caught me, shaking and crying. The loop of the branches cradled me, waited until I had found my feet, and unlaced, gently, as I found footholds and slowly, slowly climbed the rest of the way down. My father saw me that day, stood watching from his shed as the tree caught me. We looked at each other, as I limped by. Neither of us said anything.

No matter how many times I say that I was fine, when I tell Caleb this story, he focuses on my fall, and not on the thing that matters: that the tree caught me.

I grasp the branch from which the pear hangs with my fingertips, inch along it until I can wrap my entire hand around the pear. It bobs, still too far away. I uncurl the arm that anchors me and reach up.

“Erin.” Caleb’s voice rises from below, sharp. A thump, his foot scraping at the roots. He grunts, as he hauls himself into the crevice between the trunks. “Don’t touch that, it’s not a pear.”

I wrap my hand around the pear. Its flesh gives beneath the press of my fingers. I soften my hold. My body strains. My muscles shake. They have forgotten how to hold me up without the help of the ground. My foot slips.

I twist the hand holding the pear, yank. The fruit comes away in a shower of wet leaves. The branch snaps back, leaves shivering.

For a single moment, there is only this: the pear in my hand, nothing between me and the ground but my bare feet, braced in the Y of the trunk.

My feet give. I overbalance. I fall.

Caleb’s panicked shout reaches out for me, but his voice is caught up among the rush and crashing of my descent. His shout turns to branches, to leaves, to the knots of old buds long fruited. I’m falling, my stomach in my mouth, the bark scraping the skin from my elbows, my calves.

I have forgotten how it feels to fall, to abandon myself so completely. Help, I think, and then, please.

The leaves coalesce. A loose, looped noose, catching me. I do not hit the ground.

I land hard in the elbow of the trunk from which I first spotted the pear. The landing jars my spine, hard enough my teeth clatter. The noise around me dissolves into Caleb’s uplifted voice. He grabs my ankle.

“Are you okay?” His words are shrill; I’ve never heard him so afraid.

I grin at him. He has not yet climbed as high as I have, he stretches up, as if in a yoga pose. The idea makes me laugh. “Pear?” I grin, holding it out.

He stares at it for a long moment. He makes his triangular motion: up, across, up. He looks straight at me.

“There was a man hanging in that tree,” he says. “Don’t tell me you didn’t see him.”

I did not see a man. But once, as a little girl, I saw his rope.

“This place has always been ours,” I say. “Whether we lived on it willingly or not. Always been ours. Through every. Single. Thing.” I offer him the pear. My hand is steady. “Nothing will make the terrible things that happened here go away. But we claim it, and the land—this tree—it takes care of us. Always. Can you understand?”

He looks at the pear, then looks at me. He steps down from the tree. He does not take the pear.

Behind him, the front door opens, a squeal of hinges that echoes through the yard. We look around. My parents step onto the porch.

“Lunch is on the table,” my mother calls. And then, “Did you get to climb?”

“I did.” I step down from the tree, walk past Caleb. He watches me, jaw tight. “I found a pear,” I say, and hold it aloft.

My father nods. “And how is it?”

I bite deep. The pear is crisp, a little cold, the insides white and sweet.

©2017 by Stephanie Malia Morris. Previously published in Fiyah. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephanie Malia Morris is a graduate of the 2017 Clarion West Writers Workshop, recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Award, and a 2019 Kimbilio Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in FIYAH, Apex Magazine, Nightmare, and Pseudopod. She has narrated short fiction for the Escape Artists podcasts, Uncanny, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You can find her online at stephaniemaliamorris.com or on Twitter at @smaliamorris.

The Vampire of Kovácspéter

P H Lee | 3012 words

The village of Kovácspéter was plagued by a vampire, which was increasingly embarrassing. The year was 1873 and Hungary was on the march to modernity. They had their own prime minister, their own constitution, and their own economic development plan. Rails were being laid and industry was being developed. The future was industrial, prosperous and, most importantly, happening right now.

In the county seat—a day’s journey by carriage down the old mountain roads—they had a railway station and even a telegraph office. Yet in Kovácspéter, they still had a vampire. Every New Year’s Day before the mass, they still took a beautiful woman—one of their daughters—up to the old, decaying castle in the mountainside and left her there for the vampire, just like they always had.

“Someone ought to do something,” said old Balazs to anyone who’d listen. He was drunk and angry and planning to fix things, the same as every year. Once, it had been his older sister that they had left at the old castle. Almost everyone in Kovácspéter had lost someone, but Balazs was different. Even now, years later, he had never really recovered. “It’s just not right,” he said, and everyone else just looked the other way or pretended not to hear him until he’d drunk himself into a stupor.

Most years, Balazs slept it off in the church vestry. Most years, he swore and shook his fist and cried and it was all over by morning. But this year he woke clear-eyed and clear-headed and he knew what to do. He got out the old gold necklace—all that was left of his sister’s dowry—and caught a ride down to the county seat to send a telegram to the agency.

“HERO NEEDED” read his telegram and then, because they charged by the letter, “KVCSPTR.”

• • • •

At first old Balazs kept quiet, but he eventually let something slip to Tomi over a game of darts, and soon the entire village boiled with rumors and speculation. Everyone had a different opinion about heroes: their appearances, behavior, and relative worth. Over the next few months, a consensus formed: The hero was going to be strong, tall, and square-jawed, like the Crusaders of old—probably a Frenchman or a Swede (Russians were unpopular and Germans were right out). He would be fair-spoken and definitely unmarried and would almost certainly defeat their vampire with a magic sword, probably containing the fingerbone of Saint Emeric.

When, after the spring thaw, the hero finally arrived with the mail coach, he was small and dark-skinned—from somewhere in the East, probably, judging by his soft accent—but everyone agreed that it leant him a mysterious air that was almost as good. He did not seem to be entirely Catholic, but no one said anything. They didn’t want to be rude.

Everyone wanted the hero to lodge with them, but he deferred politely. “I’m just here for work,” he said. “Won’t sleep tonight, anyway.”

After determining who sent the telegram, he spoke a little with Balazs. Then, as night fell, he made his way out up the mountainside to the old, decaying castle where the vampire lived. Balazs and everyone watched him leave. As darkness fell behind him, a silent, practical terror descended on the people of Kovácspéter. This was no savior. This was just one man. How was he going to defeat their vampire, who had tyrannized them for centuries? He didn’t even have a sword.

“God help him,” muttered Karoly. “God help us all.”

• • • •

The hero was troubled by no such doubts. Rather, looking around in the light of his paraffin lantern, he was troubled by the castle’s poorly maintained architecture, in particular the arch of the entryway. “It’s a death trap,” he muttered to himself in his own language. “—come down in a heartbeat.” He prodded a stone and pebbles skittered into a pile of old bones. “Look at how deep those cracks run. It’s practically gravel. I could collapse this whole building with a few well-placed charges.”

He had been apprenticed to a builder, once, two continents and three names ago. It had been years. But the habits had stayed with him.

Dropping the castle wouldn’t defeat the vampire, though. Sure, the village—what was it called? Kobacsomething?—would get a few years of relief. He’d be long gone by the time the vampire returned. But the agency frowned on catastrophic collapses and other such dramatics as poor workmanship. Just last year, they’d fired Abraham—a good hero with years of experience—because a vampire’s carriage crashed to the bottom of a mountain ravine and was never found. It hadn’t been his fault—everyone said so—but the agency still considered it to be unacceptably sloppy.

The hero thought of Stephen and the restaurant they were planning: the way Stephen’s face lit up when he tasted fresh garlic or paprika, or found just the right wine for just the right sauce. They needed this job until they had enough to make a start. And the thought of all those sacrificed maidens—he sighed and, muttering under his breath, made his way inside the castle.

• • • •

He found the vampire in the great hall, of course. The room was a shambles—strewn with corpses in various states of decay, the roof partially collapsed, the tapestries rotted to whispers—but the table was in remarkably good condition, and at the end of it, lit by an old candelabra, was the vampire, who stood and swept his cloak aside in a grand gesture.

“Welcome,” said the vampire. “Would you care for some wine?” There was a single glass and a bottle on the table. “It’s the only bottle of this vintage left in the world, I think. The vineyard was burned over a century ago, when the last hero came through, and the wine hasn’t been the same since.”

“I would love some wine,” said the hero, picking his way across the hall, “but I’ve come to kill you.”

“No matter,” said the vampire, and waved airily as he poured. “At least enjoy the wine. I never drink it myself, of course.”

“Of course,” said the hero. “But business first.” Still, he lifted the glass.

“So how does this work?” asked the vampire. “I’ve been hunted before, of course, but it’s been a while, and I understand that they do things differently now.”

“They do,” said the hero.

“I’m sure it’s all very modern,” said the vampire. “Did you know that in the county seat they have a rail station? And a telegraph office! Can you even imagine?”

“I do.”

“At least we have a king again, even if he is German and an emperor.”

The hero nodded once, politely.

“Anyway, sorry, I’m babbling, I don’t get company except once a year.”

“It’s fine,” said the hero.

“But, before we start whatever this will be, I have a request,” said the vampire. “You still do last requests, right?”

“Yes, we do.” It was old-fashioned, but the hero didn’t mention that. No sense in embarrassing him.

“Then,” said the vampire, “I would like to tell you a story. I’d like someone to know what actually happened here, who’s actually at fault.”

“That’s fine,” said the hero, eyeing the roof beam warily, “but can we go out into the courtyard?”

• • • •

Out in the courtyard, the hero lit a lamp, diligently cleared off a few bits of bone and old flesh, and sat down with his wine glass in the remnants of a collapsed tower.

“Don’t mind the mess,” said the vampire, pacing in front of him, “I’ve been meaning to tidy up, but you know how it is, things start to slip and then it all gets away from you.”

The hero nodded, but said nothing.

The vampire sat. “So,” he began.

• • • •

It was only a few centuries ago—before the empire or even the kingdom, when I was sole lord of all these lands, master of the forests and the ravens and the wolves—that they arrived from the east, fleeing the armies of the Great Khan. At first, just a few, then dozens, then hundreds, with bleating sheep and crying children and pregnant wives.

“You cannot stay here,” I told them, as soon as they arrived. “These are my lands alone. And, besides, it is not safe.”

“Please, lord,” they begged me, “please let us shelter here, away from the wrath of the Great Khan. Your land is an untamed forest, but if you let us stay here as your serfs, we could through our labors make it a fertile farmland for you and your descendants.”

“I have no need of farmland,” I said, “and besides, I have heard it said that the Great Khan is a merciful man. Return to the east and throw yourselves at his mercies. Surely he will spare you.”

“Please, lord,” they begged, “let us stay.” “Please, lord,” they cried, “have mercy on us.” “Please, lord,” they promised, “if you let us stay here we will do anything you ask.”

“Let me think,” I said, and vanished into the forest.

I thought and thought. I consulted with the wolves; I consulted with the trees. In the end, I decided that, although I loved my solitary life and my solitary forest, I could not return these people to certain death.

“I have thought,” I said, when I returned. “And I can allow you to stay here, although, I remind you, it is not safe.”

The people, hearing this, let up a great cheer and fell to their knees, screaming and crying.

“However,” I said, “I have a single requirement.”

“Anything, lord,” said the people. “Simply ask and it will be done.”

“I love my forest,” I told them truthfully, “and the wolves and the ravens and all the other creatures that dwell within it. I would not have you break my trees with your ax, or turn my soils with your plow. If you will stay, you must leave behind your seeds and your flocks. If you will live in my forest, you must live in my forest, hunting and digging as your ancestors once did in the ancient forests in the south.”

The people were taken aback by my demand, and spoke amongst themselves for some time.

“Lord,” they said, “we have taken the time to consider your offer, but we cannot abandon our herds or our plows. We are a farming people and we have always been a farming people. What if winter came, and we had nothing to feed our children? The grief would be too much to bear. No, lord, we cannot do what you have asked of us.”

“Then,” I said, quite reasonably, “return to the east and throw yourselves at the mercies of the Great Khan. Surely he will spare you.”

“Please, lord,” they begged me, “let us stay.” “Please, lord,” they cried, “have mercy on us.” “Please, lord,” they promised, “if you let us stay here we will do anything you ask.”

“Anything I ask?” I replied. “But I have just asked you something, and you have rejected me.”

“Anything but that, lord,” they said, “and we shall do it gladly.”

“Let me think,” I said, and vanished into the forest.

I thought and thought. In the end, I decided that, although I loved my solitary life and my solitary forest, I could not return these people to certain death.

“I have thought,” I said, when I returned. “And I can allow you to stay here with your farms and your flocks, although, I remind you, it is not safe.”

The people cheered and fell to their knees, screaming and crying in gratitude.

“However,” I said, “I have a single requirement.”

“Anything, lord,” said the people. “Simply ask and it will be done.”

“I have known your God,” I told them truthfully, “and, due to certain fundamental differences of our philosophies, He is truly repellant to me. I would not have you bring Him into my forest, where I have lived all these years as my own master by my own laws and of my own accord. Renounce your God, abandon your worship, build none of your churches within my lands, and you can stay as long as you like, even unto your thousandth generation.”

The people were taken aback by my demand, and briefly spoke amongst themselves.

“Lord,” they said, “we have taken the time to consider your offer, but we cannot abandon our God or our faith. To do so now would save our lives, but at the cost of our immortal souls, and what use is settling this good land if we burn forever in the fires of hell? It is too much to ask. No, lord, we cannot do what you have asked of us.”

“Then,” I said, quite reasonably, “return to the east, and throw yourselves at the mercies of the Great Khan. Surely he will spare you.”

“Please, lord,” they begged, “ask us anything else, anything but that, and we will surely do it.”

“Fine, then,” I said, thoughtless and annoyed, “if you must stay, and if you will not preserve my forest or abide my philosophy, then all I will ask of you is that, once a year, you bring me the finest of your herds, the best sheep or the best cow, so that I might derive some benefit, however small, from your presence on my lands.”

The people heard my demand, and spoke amongst themselves. After a short time, they returned.

“Lord,” they said, “we have considered your offer, but if we give you the healthiest and strongest of our flock, every year then, over the generations, our flocks will breed small and weak, until they are entirely insufficient. It is too much to ask.”

“Then,” I said, angry, “you must leave my lands at once. Go to the Great Khan, or to your God, or the Devil himself! As long as you do not trod my earth again, I care no more about your fate.”

“If you truly do not wish to shelter us, we will leave,” said the people. “But first, lord, we have our own offer for you, if you will hear it.”

“Oh?” I said.

“If you will let us stay here, if you will take us as your serfs and let us through our labors transform this into a fertile farmland for you and our descendants, we will, every new year, offer you the most beautiful of our daughters, to do with as you will.”

“What need have I of your daughters?” I asked.

“Surely, lord,” the people said, “you will find a use for them.”

• • • •

When he had finished, the vampire stirred. He stood above the hero with moonlight silhouetting him against the dark span of the courtyard. Kneeling down, he lifted up a dried-out head and gazed into its withered eyeballs philosophically.

“Those poor girls,” said the vampire, “it’s such a shame. If only their ancestors had been willing to part with a handful of sheep, they wouldn’t have had to die. Unfortunately—”

“Are you finished?” asked the hero.

“Yes,” said the vampire, after a moment. “Now you know the truth of it, how this whole state of affairs came to be, how I was lured and exploited and my own nature turned against me.”

“Quite true,” said the hero. He unholstered his revolver and shot the vampire twice, once in each eye.

The vampire crumpled.

“But why?” he asked, lying, still alive, in a pool of blood, his own and others. “You heard my story. You know that I am blameless. That it is the fault of these people, of their sly and callous ancestors, who have turned me into what I am.”

“That’s true,” said the hero, “but I am not a lawyer or a judge. Justice isn’t my business.”

“But why?” asked the vampire again, his voice strained and hoarse. “You’re a hero. Surely, you must care! What if it were you?”

“Heroes don’t dispense justice,” said the hero. “We kill monsters.”

“Now,” he continued, “this is the brick from an old churchyard that I’m sliding into your mouth. It will hurt, but mind that you don’t bite down on it. That will only make things worse.”

It was not long afterwards that the dawn’s light reached the courtyard and the vampire began to crumble into ash and dust. The hero tried the wine. It was extraordinary. He considered going back to the great hall for the bottle—it was exactly the sort of thing that Stephen would love; he had a real taste for wine—but the castle was already collapsing and he decided not to risk it.

• • • •

Back in Kovácspéter, the people were ecstatic. They banged their instruments; they roasted a whole sheep; they took up a cheer in the hero’s honor. You’d have thought it was Christmas and Easter all rolled into one. Old Balazs was the only one who didn’t drink, saying he’d sworn himself off liquor the moment that the castle collapsed.

One by one, the people came up to the hero, offering him prizes and rewards and tokens of their gratitude, trying to entice him to remain. “Stay with us,” they said to him, “and be the lord of our village. We will swear our fealty to you, the hero who saved us. Please, stay, and be our protector, and we’ll give you anything you ask.” Gizella, who was romantic like that, embarrassed her mother by putting particular emphasis on her anything. Balazs looked on nervously, worrying about something he could not quite put his finger on.

The hero listened and smiled, but turned down all their offers. “Just wire the usual fee to the agency,” he told them.

Balazs woke up early the next morning to head down to the county seat and wire the remains of his sister’s dowry. He had thought that they might share a coach down the mountain, but the hero was already gone.

©2020 by P H Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations

Minsoo Kang | 7878 words

The Grand Philosopher Ancient Leaf once expounded that a man who kills another out of passion or greed is condemned as a murderer, and one who kills ten people is reviled as a maniac, but one who causes the death of hundreds of thousands in pursuit of personal glory is often revered as a great personage. The Grand Historian Silver Mirror utilized the quote in describing the senseless nature of the Wars of the Four Princes and the Six Grand Lords, how the acts of all the kings, ministers, and generals throughout the long conflict achieved nothing in the end. The cycle of events from unity to disunity to chaos, then chaos back to disunity and finally to a new unity, only resulted in countless cities, towns, and villages falling into ruin. And the corpses of ambitious leaders, obedient soldiers, and powerless civilians lay in numbers like grains of sand upon a blood-soaked shore. Silver Mirror opined that a country that has reached the age of wisdom would stop building monuments to the warmongers of its history, but rather erect them for its peacemakers, those who saved lives by preventing the course of events from descending into a time of sword and fire.

One could point to such a monument that actually exists, namely the great mural painting known as “Peace of Five Peaks Island,” which can be found on the southwestern side of the Phoenix Tower in West Capital of the Empire of the Grand Circle. When General Heavenly Whirlwind brought down the Radiant dynasty to ascend the throne as the first emperor of the Pure dynasty, he justified his coup by claiming, based on specious evidence including forged clan records, to be a descendant of the imperial family of the previous Primal dynasty. By asserting that the founders of the Radiant illegitimately usurped the authority of his ancestors, he portrayed himself as an avenger who was reclaiming what was rightfully his. He then moved the center of the Grand Circle to West Capital not only to force the surviving members of the Radiant aristocracy to abandon their feudal lands in the east but also to establish a historical connection between the Primal and the Pure. He also summoned the best artists of the realm to decorate the walls of the rebuilt imperial palace with pictures in the grand proto-elaboratist style depicting the glories of the Primal dynasty. Most of them portray scenes of military victory, including the unnecessary, unjustifiable, and unrighteous slaughter of the pacific people of the southeast plains, which is falsely pictured as a defensive action against bloodthirsty barbarians.

“Peace of Five Peak Island” is a remarkable exception in that it celebrates the avoidance of what was certain to be a devastating war that would have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands. It depicts the meeting of the Sixth Emperor of the Primal dynasty and the warlord of South Ocean known as the Great Sea Dragon, on a hill that is magnificently illuminated by an auspicious sun at midday. The Lord of the Grand Circle is in his gold and yellow splendor, surrounded by ministers in red robes and high hats, while the Master of the Endless Waves is in full armor and flanked by his sea lords. The former is grand and haughty and the latter is sturdy and proud, but they face each other with respect as they are there to establish peace rather than to challenge each other to war. Once they finish exchanging formal greetings, they will enter a splendid pavilion of many colors, pictured at some distance behind them, where they will sit and share precious liquor while their ministers and generals finalize the treaty between the empire and the fleet. On the far right side of the picture, a flock of seagulls dance above a luminous sea, as if in joy over the event.

The achievement of peace on Five Peaks Island has baffled historians for centuries as a miraculous last-minute aversion of a war that appeared inevitable to everyone concerned. The Great Sea Dragon, who began his life as a kidnapped child slave, then a galley rower, then a pirate, and then a pirate captain, emerged as an unprecedented genius of naval warfare as he battled and slaughtered his way to dominance in South Ocean and all its islands. With his fleet of ten thousand ships and an ambition that knew no bounds, he meant to take the greatest prize of them all, the Empire of the Grand Circle. But the Sixth Emperor was a man of war himself, as he was raised on the rugged northern frontier where he also served as the lord commander of fortresses. Even after his ascendance to the imperial throne, he was happiest on the campaign trail, extending his domain, punishing his recalcitrant subjects, and delighting in the destruction of those who defied him. In his endless greed for military glory, he left much of the running of the state to a group of eunuch secretaries, which led to what would later be referred to as the Rule of Fifty Half-Men. By all accounts, he was eager to face the barbarian upstart of South Ocean, whom he referred to as Pirate Fish Stink.

The initial meeting of their envoys was not an opportunity for a serious negotiation but for the ritualized issuance of challenges as a prelude to war. To the surprise of everyone, however, the talks on Five Peaks Island became protracted, as the emperor and the warlord communicated via numerous letters that were written, translated, and transported over the course of weeks. It ultimately resulted in the Great Sea Dragon receiving the imperial title of the Grand Guardian of the South Ocean with the responsibility of overseeing the affairs of the southern seas. In return, the Great Sea Dragon recognized the emperor’s authority and swore to safeguard all merchant ships under the protection of the imperial monopoly. It culminated in the personal meeting of the two on Five Peaks Island, which the mural depicts, in which the warlord ceremoniously received the jade tablet of officialdom, acknowledging his status as the emperor’s subordinate. And the emperor, in turn, granted him the singular honor of submitting on his feet, rather than prostrating himself on the ground. The peace treaty was duly agreed upon, stamped with great seals, and a celebration of feasting, dancing, and musical performances followed. Then the Sixth Emperor and his ministers returned to West Capital, the Great Sea Dragon and his ships sailed back to South Ocean, and the war that was thought to be inevitable never happened.

In recent decades, new discoveries made by junior historians at the Hall of Great Learning have provided startling insight into the event. Through their painstaking search in many archives across the country, they have unearthed documents of disparate natures that have revealed a hidden history of the Peace of Five Peaks Island. They include some discarded source material for the True Records of the Primal Dynasty, an early draft of the incomplete Preliminary Discourse on the Fall of the Primal Dynasty, a batch of official correspondences that was housed at the Hall of the Imperial Secretariat that were thought to have been destroyed during the burning of the palace by the Radiant army, and, most revealing of all, some personal writings of the two translators who worked on behalf of the emperor and the warlord. In addition, findings from a secret storehouse at the Temple to the Primordial Nothingness in Sundown Archipelago, relating to the events from the perspective of the advisors to the Great Sea Dragon, have provided support for the newly revealed narrative.

The mural of “Peace of Five Peaks Island” depicts some fifty people, most of whom can be identified as important personages whose presence at the event is verified in the historical records. Immediately behind the emperor are the high minister of military affairs and the chief imperial secretary, and at a little distance to their left is a noticeably tall official whose sharp-eyed attention is on the Great Sea Dragon, not his sovereign. While the red robes of all other officials are decorated with the insignias of a pair of cranes or a pair of turtles, his is the only one with a pair of flounders, marking him as a temporary appointee to a position at court. The figure represents the scholar given the honor name of Diviner Supreme, a grand master of learning at the Forest of Brushes Scholastic Academy who acted as the imperial translator and interpreter during the negotiations.

Diviner Supreme came from an illustrious family of scholar-officials, his father attaining the position of the high minister of rituals, but he was somewhat of a wayward younger son in his early life. He passed the civil examinations at a young age, but before he could receive a government appointment, he had to go into mourning period as his father died from falling off a horse. At its completion, he not only declined to pursue a career in officialdom but left West Capital to travel the world.

In the course of his many adventures, he proved to be a veritable genius in the learning of languages, as he ultimately mastered no less than twenty-four living tongues and the reading knowledge of twelve defunct ones. After wandering the world for over twenty years, he finally returned to his family home in West Capital barely alive, after suffering a near fatal wound in a pirate raid in Middle Ocean. He eventually recovered, but the permanent damage done to his right leg made him unfit for prolonged travel. He was subsequently appointed as a master at the Forest of Brushes, becoming the greatest scholar of languages and linguistics of his time.

Although the exact origin of the warlord known as the Great Sea Dragon is obscure, he spoke a dialect of the language of Sundown Archipelago used in the southernmost islands. He forced all the sea lords of his fleet to adopt the tongue, even those who did not come from the archipelago. When he achieved dominance in South Ocean, the obscurity of the language became a major problem for the imperials in trying to assess his threat. It turned out that in the entire officialdom of the Grand Circle, Diviner Supreme was the only one who had knowledge of the Sundown tongue from his sojourn on the islands. Consequently, when the negotiations on Five Peaks Island was set to begin, he was given a temporary appointment as the imperial translator and interpreter.

In the painting “Peace of Five Peaks Island,” standing to the right of the Great Sea Dragon, half hidden in shadow, is a slight figure in a nondescript gray robe, a young woman who is the one and only female figure in the picture. Despite the important role she played in the event as Diviner Supreme’s counterpart who interpreted for the warlord, very little can be affirmed about her identity due in great part to the deplorable lack of information about women from that particularly sexist era. Even her original name is unknown, as Upright Lotus is an amity cognomen given to her well after the event. What can be reasonably theorized from the historical context is that she was probably a member of a prominent merchant family of the south, one who likely worked as an assistant to her father or some other patriarch of the clan after demonstrating a talent for languages.

Due to the highly restricted nature of the imperial trading monopoly in the seas under the control of the Grand Circle, merchants of South Ocean were effectively shut out of the area. As they had little choice but to deal with intermediaries of Middle Ocean, few of them bothered to learn the imperial tongue. What must be remembered is that the Great Sea Dragon’s ascendance from the pirate captain of a single ship to the master of a fleet of ten thousand was remarkably fast, the speed with which he dominated South Ocean taking everyone by surprise. When he decided to take his fleet north, he had limited time to look for someone who could act as his interpreter and translator. It is unknown how Upright Lotus came to serve him, but the fact that she was one of precious few in the south who could speak the imperial tongue must have come to his attention under some particular circumstance.

What the newly unearthed documents reveal is that Diviner Supreme and Upright Lotus systematically mistranslated all essential communications between the imperial court and the leadership of the Great Sea Dragon’s fleet, and in all likelihood did the same in their interpretive work. The documents also show that this was not the result of ignorance or incompetence but a deliberate act, pointing to the remarkable fact that the two translators colluded in the production of unfaithful renderings. Some examples of such mistranslations follow.

In the True Records of the Pure Dynasty, in the entry to the fourth day of the fourth lunar month in the nineteenth year of the Sixth Emperor’s reign (Year of the Snake), it is written that on the occasion of the first round of negotiations on Five Peaks Island, the emperor sent a letter of admonishment to the Great Sea Dragon. While it is described as a “stern warning” to the warlord to refrain from challenging the Grand Circle and to submit himself to the authority of the emperor, its exact contents have been unknown until the recent discovery of a batch of imperial correspondences. What is immediately apparent from perusing the letter is that the Sixth Emperor did not assign the Office of the Imperial Secretariat to write an appropriate letter but rather composed it himself, as is apparent from his eccentric calligraphy in red ink. Far more than a “stern warning,” it was an insulting missive designed to provoke certain war, as the Great Sea Dragon is addressed throughout as Pirate Fish Stink. In addition, there is no way to describe its nature other than as the ravings of a madman. The Sixth Emperor promises not just defeat and annihilation in battle but the sexual violation of corpses, the magical tearing apart of souls, and the mass execution by extended torture of all the women and children of Sundown Archipelago as sacrifice to the god of war. He describes the entirety of South Ocean turned red with blood, the sinking of the southern islands by means of geomantically raised earthquakes, and the descent of all his defeated enemies into an underworld realm of eternal rape. The original letter was kept at the Hall of the Imperial Secretariat while a clean copy was sent to Five Peaks Island where it was delivered to the envoys of the Great Sea Dragon.

At the secret archive at the Temple to the Primordial Nothingness in Sundown Archipelago, a text has been discovered with a note indicating that it is the translation of that letter from imperial ideograms into the phonetic script of the south, rendered by the Great Sea Dragon’s interpreter Upright Lotus. While it contains the gist of the Sixth Emperor’s admonishment, it takes such liberties with the contents of the original that it can hardly be considered a proper translation. Its tone has been moderated and formalized to such an extent that the “stern warning” became more of a “respectful caution,” with no mention of the name Pirate Fish Stink. The crazed quasi-religious ravings have all been cut out, replaced with a reasoned discourse on the sheer military and logistical difficulties the Great Sea Dragon would have to face should he dare to attempt an invasion of the Grand Circle proper. What is especially striking about the text is the insertion of numerous references to and quotations of the Grand Strategists, from such classic works as Rules of Warfare, Expanded Rules of Warfare, and New Rules of Warfare, with detailed expositions on why victory would be practically impossible to achieve for the Great Sea Dragon, and how even if he managed to initially take over significant territory through a number of victories on the battlefield, he could not hope to hold on to it in the long run with the limited resources as his disposal. Since it is implausible that the daughter of a South Ocean merchant would be so familiar with such military texts, this almost certainly points to collaboration with an imperial official.

After the Sixth Emperor’s initial letter was dispatched, the Great Sea Dragon sent a number of his own missives to the imperial court, all of which have survived along with Diviner Supreme’s translations. The messages in the original southern phonetic are aggressive, confident, and proud, declaring the warlord’s intention to conquer the Grand Circle as he conquered the entirety of South Ocean. Diviner Supreme’s translations are generally faithful, except for a glaring and mysterious alteration that appears in almost every fifth or sixth sentence, which is the mention of the color green. The waves upon which the Great Sea Dragon’s fleet rides are described as green, the light emanating from his great curved sword is green, his green cape flies in the wind as he speeds forth toward the Grand Circle (he did not wear a green cape but a red one), and so on. He is even made to describe himself as the Great Green Sea Dragon and the Green Master of the Endless Green Waves who is destined to establish the Green dynasty after the downfall of the Primal. In the original letters, the word “green” does not occur once.

To give yet another significant example of such distortions, in the picture “The Peace on Five Peaks Island” the Great Sea Dragon holds the jade tablet of officialdom which he received from the Sixth Emperor, acknowledging his status as an imperial subject who rules over South Ocean in the name of the emperor. The color of the jade is red, which is the second to lowest of the six ranks of jade. Tablets in the two highest ranks, dark green and light green, were given on the extremely rare occasion that the emperor acknowledged a ruler to be his equal (tablet of brotherhood). For instance, the penultimate emperor of the Radiant dynasty gifted one to the Mountainous Father of the Golden Horsemen of the North in a futile effort to forestall their catastrophic invasion of the Grand Circle. Tablets in the next two ranks of jade, yellow and white, were given to rulers who were granted “subordinate but independent” status, kingdoms and lordly territories that were expected to pay tribute but whose internal autonomy was respected (tablet of honored lords). Tablets of the lowest jade ranks of red and black were granted to those whose dominion over certain territories were temporary, subject to review, and conditional upon pre-established imperial rules (tablet of officialdom). One who received such a tablet was expected to relinquish his power any time the emperor ordered him to.

During the final negotiation over the peace treaty, it is most certainly the case that Upright Lotus knowingly lied about the jade ranks. In the records of the Great Sea Dragon’s advisors, they express great pleasure after learning from the translator that the emperor has capitulated to their demand that he recognize their lord as his equal. The acknowledgement is to be affirmed through the granting of the highest rank of jade in red. In the imperial records, on the other hand, the ministers affirm that if the Great Sea Dragon acknowledges his subordinate status by accepting the tablet of officialdom, their sovereign will allow him to submit on his feet. In others words, through Upright Lotus’s lie, both sides came to regard the final outcome as a diplomatic victory.

There are many other examples of such deliberate mistranslations perpetrated by Diviner Supreme and Upright Lotus in apparent coordination with each other. They were able to do so without being discovered because Diviner Supreme was the only official in the Grand Circle who knew the language of Sundown Archipelago, and Upright Lotus was the only speaker of the imperial tongue in the leadership of the Great Sea Dragon’s fleet. No one, in other words, was capable of checking their work.

After the successful completion of the Peace on Five Peaks Island, the Sixth Emperor’s interpreter was granted the special honor name of Diviner Supreme, awarded with precious gifts, and offered a permanent position in the Imperial Secretariat. He humbly begged off officialdom with the respectable filial excuse that he had to take care of his ailing mother as his oldest brother was serving as the governor of the faraway province of Abundant Mountains and his second older brother had died in the previous year from an illness. Six months after, his mother passed away, and so he went into his mourning period. But after its completion, Diviner Supreme not only refused a position in the imperial court but he left the Forest of Brushes and West Capital, moving to a small town all the way in the southeastern plain, the last long journey he undertook. Not much is known about the life he led in this remote place, other than that he operated a school and produced some of the most important scholarly works on linguistics and cultural studies. For instance, his massive volume on his adopted homeland is still to this day the best source of information on the language, culture, and history of the region at the time. In particular, the record of his conversations with the survivors of the horrific massacre that was perpetrated on them by the Sixth Emperor in the early part of his reign provides a wholly plausible counter narrative to the official imperial account of the atrocity.

Toward the end of his life, he wrote what is his only known poem, a long narrative work in the neo-antique style, which may also have been his last writing. While many have marveled at the evocative beauty of its natural imageries, they have also found the work’s overall meaning utterly obscure. It tells the story of a traveler who is lost in a dark forest, who becomes prey to a fierce tiger on one path and a pack of wolves on another, while he is also chased by poisonous snakes. At his most dire moment, he comes across a pristine lotus flower of many changing colors that becomes personified as a beautiful young woman. The traveler and the lotus woman plot together to evade the beasts and to escape the forest. They employ a variety of magic spells and clever tricks to evade the tiger, wolves, and snakes. The woman then becomes luminous and lights their way as they walk out of the forest.

One scholar theorized that the poem is in the mode of the so-called “dark cloud lyrics” written by scholars during the time of the repressive Legalist Emperors. They employed coded language, especially in the use of specific imageries with hidden meanings, to communicate with one another under the scrutiny of the Imperial Censorate. That notion has been proven to be correct through the discovery of some letters at the site of Diviner Supreme’s final home. They were written in the southern phonetic script, on strips of bamboo that were tied together, sent to him by the interpreter for the Great Sea Dragon, to whom Diviner Supreme gave the amity name of Upright Lotus, which is also the title of his poem. The contents of the letters provide enough clues for decoding the work which reveals a remarkable account of what actually occurred on Five Peaks Island.

In the first days of negotiations on the island, the envoys of the Sixth Emperor and the Great Sea Dragon exchanged belligerent demands as both sides conducted their meeting as a prelude to war. Diviner Supreme, after spending an entire morning interpreting for the imperial officials, took a walk on a beach, filled with dread and melancholy at the prospect of the dark, violent times to come. There, he encountered Upright Lotus, who appeared to be in a similar mood. They walked together, spoke of each other’s lives, their work, and their concerns for the future. In the course of a single day, as the sun set and they rested at a beachside tavern to share liquor, Diviner Supreme fell in love with the southern woman. As he gazed at her luminous eyes that shone with sad intelligence, he could not bear the thought of never seeing her again after the conclusion of the fruitless meeting, and of her becoming lost in the bloody war that was coming. Without considering the matter, he found himself committing high treason by revealing to her vital information that would have given the Great Sea Dragon a crucial advantage if he became privy to it. Diviner Supreme told Upright Lotus that the Sixth Emperor was hopelessly insane.

For almost five years, the Lord of the Grand Circle had neglected the affairs of the state, spending his time running around the palace in bizarre costumes and raving endlessly at his appalled officials and servants. All those who tried to remonstrate with him to correct his behavior were dismissed from their positions, exiled, or executed, until none was left in court except for sycophants, cowards, and mediocrities. He sent his best generals on impossible military operations, and when they returned unsuccessful, he executed them all, leaving no experienced and competent commanders at the Ministry of Military Affairs. One day, he accused his queen and all twelve of his concubines of conspiring against him, and had them and all their attendant ladies strangled to death, their corpses mutilated, and their remains spread across the empire to be fed to pigs and dogs. He hardly slept, was drunk most of the time, and ate only the vital organs of rare animals. And he was anxious to go to war, to turn South Ocean red with the blood of Pirate Fish Stink and his people. The eunuchs who served under him would be much vilified later as the Fifty Half-Men who all but usurped the power of the throne, but recent revisionist historians have pointed out that they had little choice but to take charge of running the government in the mad ruler’s stead and actually did the best they could under the difficult circumstances. They were also successful in keeping the knowledge of their master’s lunacy within the palace, as they scrupulously and, in some cases, violently suppressed any possible leak of the information.

It was only after Diviner Supreme revealed this to Upright Lotus that he began to dread the consequences of having exposed the great secret. He knew that if the eunuchs found out what he had done, he would be immediately recalled to West Capital and executed. Three generations of his family would be eradicated as well, as was the punishment for a traitor to the throne. So he was both astonished and relieved when his counterpart returned his gesture by revealing crucial information as well. It was that despite the Great Sea Dragon’s bluster, he was wracked with doubt about the whole enterprise, as he had never conducted a major military campaign on land before. He was undoubtedly invincible on water, as he had never lost a naval battle since he took command of his own ship, but he had only lately begun to familiarize himself with the basics of large-scale warfare on land from mercenary officers whom he hired as advisors. He was as ambitious as ever and genuinely wanted to find out if he could be as good a strategist on land as he was on the waves, but that was not the main reason he was challenging the Grand Circle.

Once he successfully established dominion over South Ocean, he realized that many of his sea lords, fierce martial men who had known nothing but raiding and warring all their lives, were getting restless. In addition, those who did not come from Sundown Archipelago, which was most of them, had submitted to him out of necessity and calculation, but resented his authority over them. He knew that he had also exacerbated their discontent by ordering them to learn and use his native tongue, wear the costumes of his people, and follow the political and ritualistic ways of the archipelago. Many of them had been part of a loose confederation of pirates in which the highest leader was the first among equals, so they found it humiliating to kneel while paying fealty to the Great Sea Dragon as their supreme lord. He was certain, therefore, that they would conspire against him sooner or later, unless he directed their energy elsewhere, to an enterprise that was dauntingly difficult as well as long-lasting, but one that also promised rewards beyond measure at its successful completion. The invasion would also give him the opportunity to get rid of some of his most untrustworthy subordinates on dangerous missions. But all that would work only if he proved to be victorious, as failure would lead certainly to the loss of his authority.

Diviner Supreme realized that if the Great Sea Dragon knew of the Sixth Emperor’s madness and the empire’s current lack of competent commanders, his self-doubt would disappear and he would launch an all-out assault as soon as possible. It was Upright Lotus who first suggested that the two of them were the only people who could stop the war. And so the conspiracy of unfaithful translations was born.

When Upright Lotus received the Sixth Emperor’s raving letter to the Great Sea Dragon, she essentially rewrote the entire text as a polite warning from a calm and intelligent sovereign who was so supremely confident that he deigned to gently lecture the upstart on the foolishness of his course, providing a detailed and reasoned discourse on the many insurmountable difficulties he would face in taking on the Grand Circle. It was undoubtedly Diviner Supreme who provided her with the appropriate quotations from military classics. The profuse use of passages from the works was designed to intimidate the Great Sea Dragon by exposing his lack of knowledge on conducting a large-scale campaign on land, so further undermining his confidence. The letter gave the impression that the Sixth Emperor was surrounded by learned generals who provided him with such expertise, which they would deploy against the warlord in battle.

As for Diviner Supreme, the inclusion of the word “green” in his translations of the Great Sea Dragon’s letters was inspired by his knowledge of his sovereign’s early life. The emperor was born and raised in the northern frontier where his father, a member of a tertiary branch of the imperial family, was the lord commander of fortresses, a position his son inherited following his graduation from the Forest of Spears Military Academy. Given the large number of possible candidates to the throne, he had no expectation of attaining it when the sickly and impotent Fifth Emperor died without naming his successor. So he was taken completely by surprise when officials from the High State Council came to his headquarters to announce that they had designated him as the next ruler.

In that harsh region of frigid winds and rocky hills, there was a folk tradition about a figure who was called the Green Visitor. Parents of disobedient children would leave a window open for the creature, a macabre monster with rotting skin and bladed fingers, to come in at the darkest hour of the night. It would sneak over to the side of a sleeping child, rip off the skin on their face, and gobble it up. His coming was announced by the stench of fish, and he was sometimes depicted as having the head of a fish. Parents in the region corrected the behavior of recalcitrant children by threatening to invite the Green Visitor or by claiming to smell rotten fish in the air.

The Sixth Emperor was apparently subjected to such warnings during his childhood. With the onset of his madness, he became tormented by the recurring appearance of the Green Visitor in his dreams. The emperor became so terrified that he avoided sleeping as much as he could, so worsening his condition. He also banned fish from the palace, forbade the presence of green objects, and ordered that all things painted green be covered up with a different color. His reference to the Great Sea Dragon as Pirate Fish Stink made Diviner Supreme think that his sovereign harbored the suspicion that the warlord was the Green Visitor incarnate.

In the last letter Diviner Supreme translated with the numerous additions of the word “green” to frighten the Sixth Emperor, he added one original sentence at the end, promising that the Great Sea Dragon would go away without eating his skin if given the three gifts of title, jade, and liquor. The successful conclusion of a peace treaty with a foreign ruler usually ended with the emperor granting an official title, a jade tablet of the appropriate rank, and finally, precious liquor that they shared.

The Sixth Emperor surprised everyone with the order to offer the Great Sea Dragon peace. And they were surprised anew when the warlord agreed, on the condition that he was given the highest official title possible. A problem arose when the emperor refused to grant the jade tablet in the rank of green, as he would have nothing to do with something of that color. So his officials offered red jade, with room to negotiate up to white or yellow. The counter offer they received was that the Great Sea Dragon would accept red jade if he was allowed to submit standing up rather than having to prostrate himself on the ground, as was required of those receiving anything below the green. This was agreed upon. The negotiation over the jade color was entirely a play put on by the two translators. Diviner Supreme made it seem as if the Sixth Emperor got the better of the Great Sea Dragon by getting him to acknowledge his subordinate position in accepting the low grade of jade. Meanwhile, Upright Lotus told her master that the tablet of red jade was the mark of the highest recognition of equal status demanded by him, as demonstrated by the fact that he was to accept it on his feet.

And so the war was averted, with the Sixth Emperor relieved that he had appeased the Green Visitor, and the Great Sea Dragon thinking that he had avoided what was sure to be a disastrous land invasion against an able opponent. Within three years, both of them fell precipitously from power.

What the Great Sea Dragon thought was the Sixth Emperor’s recognition of his equal status brought him no honor among his sea lords and led to a crisis of confidence. As he had feared, many immediately conspired against him, as they considered the peace he had made with the Grand Circle an act of cowardice. In the ensuing war in South Ocean, his nephew, whom he was grooming to be his successor, was bribed by rebellious sea lords into assassinating him. The Great Sea Dragon managed to escape the attempt and kill his beloved nephew, but his spirit was broken. In the next naval battle, he jumped into an enemy vessel by himself and fought a multitude of soldiers until they brought him down. South Ocean then fell into bloody chaos for the next five years, until the Peace of the Sixteen Sea Lords brought a measure of order back.

At around the time of the Great Sea Dragon’s final battle, the Sixth Emperor expressed his desire to visit his original homeland in the northern frontier. He confided to one of his eunuchs that he did not fear going there to pay respects at the graves of his ancestors because the Green Visitor was no longer there. The monster had been pacified and sent far away, acting as his official in charge of South Ocean. It was also rumored that he meant to establish a North Capital and move his court there permanently. On the night after he arrived at the central fortress where he was born and raised, he used a secret passage to sneak out of his chamber in the middle of the night. He ventured outside and walked until he came to the house of a goatherd where he asked for directions to the path up a nearby mountain. When the goatherd suggested that he wait till daylight to travel, the emperor told him that he needed to get to the summit by dawn so that the first light of the new day would transform him into an immortal spirit. After he was shown the path, he granted the goatherd his cloak of radiant worm fabric and went on his way. He was never seen by anyone again.

The next day, when his eunuchs realized that he was missing, they kept it a secret at the fortress but mobilized the soldiers of a nearby garrison and sent them out in every direction to search for him. When the eunuchs were informed of the goatherd’s story, the soldiers were dispatched up the mountain, but they eventually returned without having found any sign of him. In their panic, the eunuchs fabricated an imperial order and activated the troops of the fortress to slaughter all the soldiers of the garrison as well as the goatherd and his family under the false charge of fomenting a rebellion. In what came to be called the Rule of the Fifty Half-Men, the eunuchs continued to run the state while hiding the emperor’s disappearance for almost a year, hoping in vain that he would show up somewhere.

They thought that they had killed every member of the goatherd’s family but one of the boys they had executed was actually a neighbor’s child who had come to the house to play. The real son was returning from an errand when he witnessed the killing of his family and hid inside a rotten tree. After the soldiers were gone, he begged all the way to the neighboring province where he was taken by some bandits and sold off as a slave. After a few months of working as a water carrier, he managed to escape and reach a town where an uncle on his mother’s side of the family lived. He told the uncle his story, and the uncle told a local official who brought the tale to the magistrate. It eventually reached the ear of the governor, who sent a letter to the Sixth Emperor’s nephew who was returning to West Capital from a pacifying expedition to the New Frontier of the far west where barbarians ate their food raw. He diverted his force to the town where he personally interrogated the goatherd’s son. Enraged by what he learned, he gathered more soldiers and marched to the north, where he arrested and executed the fifty eunuchs. Within a month he arrived at West Capital, got rid of the Sixth Emperor’s children by his murdered concubines, and ascended the throne as the Seventh Emperor. He also adopted the courageous and resourceful son of the goatherd, who went on to have an illustrious career as a military officer, eventually becoming the commandant of the Forest of Spears.

There is one last element of the secret history of the Peace of Five Peaks Island to be told, though it can only be related in a speculative manner. The recently discovered letters that Upright Lotus sent to Diviner Supreme show that in the aftermath of their conspiracy to manipulate events through deliberate mistranslations, they planned to reunite at some point in the future. They knew that they had to be extremely careful, since it would raise suspicion if they were seen together by someone who knew their identities. For that reason, Diviner Supreme planned to decline the offer of a position in the imperial court and leave West Capital as soon as possible to settle in some remote place in the southeast, as close to South Ocean as possible. But then his mother died and he had to go into mourning period during which he could neither receive nor send correspondences, which caused a delay in their plan. When he was finally able to leave the capital and establish a home far away from the scrutiny of government officials, it was Upright Lotus who met with difficulties as she tried to arrange a passage into the Grand Circle.

Despite the remoteness of Diviner Supreme’s last home, he did not lead the life of a hermit. He had his school, and many scholars who journeyed all the way there to meet and consult with the famed linguist reported that he led a rich social life surrounded by students and friends. The Seventh Emperor himself sent envoys to offer him a position in his court on no less than three occasions, but he declined each time, claiming to be too ill to travel, an apparent lie as he lived a very long life. It is most unfortunate that none of the visitors have written of the presence of Upright Lotus at his house. There is actually no reason to expect any of them to have done so, given the low status of women in this period. Men of the time would have hardly deigned to distinguish between a wife, a concubine, or a servant maiden who served them liquor and meals, but then withdrew to the women’s quarters. Consequently, we cannot know if Upright Lotus ever managed to make her way to him.

When he wrote the narrative poem Upright Lotus toward the end of his life, was it a celebration of how he came to first meet his beloved with whom he shared a long, happy life together? Or is it a work of melancholy remembrance, of the one who was never able to reach him, leaving him to lead the rest of his life in solitary longing? I confess that it pains me deeply that we will, in all probability, never know.

The great mural painting “Peace of Five Peaks Island” is indeed the kind of monument to peacemakers that the Grand Historian Silver Mirror dreamed of in a civilization that has reached the age of wisdom. Yet it was not the gloriously attired Sixth Emperor or the proudly standing Great Sea Dragon who were the true heroes of the event. What all people who value peace and humanity should celebrate is the secret but truly great achievement of their interpreters, barely visible in the background of the picture as well as of history itself, who quietly and subtly saved the lives of hundreds of thousands through the virtuous use of unfaithful translations.

• • • •

[Marginal Note: My true and dear beloved, how well you have weaved the story together from so many disparate documents across the ages, in different scripts and genres. How you have rendered the invisible visible, how you brought clarity to the obscure, and how you shed light on the hidden. Yet, I must express disappointment at one aspect of your narrative.

My true and dear beloved, could you really only have told the secret history of the unfaithful translators from the point of view of the man? I already know what your response to that will be. As you point out more than once, the events took place during a historical period that was a particularly low time for women, when they were subjugated, marginalized, and rendered invisible to such an extent that it is almost impossible for historians to gather much reliable information about their lives. This was true even for women of the highest status families, who were forbidden from learning, restricted to their quarters, and kept away from the social life of the larger community. Having made forays into research myself, I understand the difficulties involved.

But I must ask you, my true and dear beloved, have you tried hard enough? Or did your knowledge of the paucity of historical evidence on women of the Primal dynasty make you give up too quickly? Did you even attempt to read around the absence of information? To put it in another way, were you not bothered enough by the question of who Upright Lotus was to look further in search of her identity? Even her name is one that was given to her by a man.

For instance, you speculated that she might have been a member of a southern merchant family who worked as an assistant to her father. We know that indeed women played a greater role in South Ocean and its islands, a few even heading merchant concerns. Beyond merely theorizing about the origin of Upright Lotus, have you delved into that historical context? Even if you were not able to find any information about her before the Peace on Five Peaks Island, the research may have shed light on the life of such an intellectually gifted woman who worked for her family’s business and then for a powerful sea lord.

But, my true and dear beloved, what bothers me the most is your lack of a detailed analysis of the letters Upright Lotus sent to Diviner Supreme. You say that they provided the essential clues that allowed you to decode Diviner Supreme’s poem. How did they do so? Also, what exactly do the letters say, what is her writing style, what do they reveal about the character of the writer? You wrote, on that day on Five Peaks Island when Diviner Supreme fell in love with her, “he gazed at her luminous eyes that shone with sad intelligence.” How did he look to her? Did she also fall in love with him? Or did she have her own reasons for her actions? After they successfully averted war, did she really want to be with him? Would she have wanted to take the enormous risk of traveling by herself to the Grand Circle, just so she could live in a society where she would have to lead a restricted existence? Would she have indeed done all that just to be with him, or could she have made her own way and led her own life? Even if they were never reunited, leaving Diviner Supreme to lead a life of, as you say, “solitary longing,” that doesn’t necessarily make it a tragedy for Upright Lotus. She may have found happiness in a different world.

I assume, my true and dear beloved, that the letters do not provide direct answers to those questions, as otherwise you would have revealed them. But you must see how your neglect of their specific contents deprives the reader of what may turn out to be clues to another alternate view of the events. A secret history within the secret history of the Peace of Five Peaks Island, if you will.

You have done well, my true and dear beloved, but you can do better and you must do better. We all must, in our never-ending task of rendering the invisible visible, bringing clarity to the obscure, and shedding light on the hidden.

My true and dear beloved . . .]

©2019 by Minsoo Kang. Originally published in New Suns, edited by Nisi Shawl. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Minsoo Kang is a historian, fiction writer, and translator.  He is the author of the history books Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination and Invincible and Righteous Outlaw: The Korean Hero Hong Gildong in Literature, History, and Culture, the book of short stories Of Tales and Enigmas, and the translator of the Penguin Classics edition of the classic Korean novel The Story of Hong Gildong.  His stories have also appeared in F&SF, Strange Horizons, Azalea, Entropy, and five anthologies.  He is currently a professor of European history at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

Everquest

Naomi Kanakia | 3034 words

Gopal knew before he booted up the game—a Christmas present from his dad—that his character would be some form of elf or human, because the other races were all ugly, and he didn’t play games to be ugly. And he knew too, although he didn’t say it, that his character would be a girl. He always played girls online, although he’d be ashamed if anyone knew it, precisely because it played into the online belief that most girls in most games were “really” men, fat and acne-ridden, sitting in their underwear, hands down their pants, leering at that wood elf ass in those hot little leather shorts their avatars wore, and “catfishing” dudes online, pretending to be women to get some sick pleasure.

Gopal himself was a fat, acne-ridden dude, and in his last online game he’d gone out of his way to claim he was a girl in real life too (upping his age from thirteen to eighteen in the process). As a result he’d gotten “married” to another man—at least someone who said he was a man—and Gopal had hoped for some gross cybersexting thing to happen with his “husband,” for them to write each other about their quivering tits and cocks like in the sex stories he read online, but the sexting never came, and eventually the game grew stale and the husband disappeared.

Gopal never thought about whether this made him gay or straight or trans or bi. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that he needed to keep all of this, everything, from his mother. During his last game she’d come in once and seen his character, all dolled up in her sorceress’s garb, and she’d asked far too many questions, and a few weeks later had cancelled his account.

He simply booted up his game and created a wood elf thief named Gayatri, which name he chose not out of conscious remembrance of mythology, because he didn’t remember anything at all—didn’t remember Rama and Hanuman and Sita, didn’t remember Sikhandin, who was born as Amba, the princess who Bishma rejected, and who turned herself into a man so she could kill the man who’d humiliated her. All these things were lost to Gopal, lost like his home country, the nation where everybody looked like him, the nation he half-hated that year, the year of this game, because the internet in this country was so fucking slow that he couldn’t play for shit, and the food so rich and greasy and addictive that he gained thirty pounds, the year he attended a new school—which had girls, unlike his school in the U.S. which was all boys—a school that had girls whose creamy skin he longed to touch, and who he fantasized about in odd, flinching, sinister ways that he would learn to hate long before he learned what was really signified by all these desires.

He did not name his character Gayatri because of this country, did not name it those words because he retained some memory of his half-literate grandmother telling him stories about gods and goddesses and the many worlds they had fought for and saved and created.

He chose the name because it sounded pretty.

And during those hot nights when he could patch through to the servers, when things weren’t too slow, when the lag not too intense, Gayatri ran free through the elven forests. She backstabbed, she stole, she scammed. She joined a guild of other thieves, a guild dedicated not to advancement, but to merriment. Because of her lag issues Gayatri could never level much, she died too frequently, left corpses in half a hundred dungeons, and it grew to be a joke, resounding often over guild-chat, that Gayatri could in the middle of the safest city on the planet and manage to find the one wandering giant, or aggro the one lonely guard; that Gayatri was the only player who could in a fight glitch out and backstab herself; that even crossing a bridge was dangerous for Gayatri, that she had to think through every keystroke, because with her connection, she might stutter onwards forever, the lonely keystrokes doubling and redoubling in the long undersea cable between India and America, like the migration of some flock of butterflies where the parents inevitably died mid-journey and left their children to struggle onwards to home grounds they’d never seen.

Meanwhile, upstairs or in the next room, she heard her mom get up to go to the bathroom, and she held perfectly still, frantically keying the “lower brightness” button on the laptop until the screen turned off, and waited there, not responding to messages, dying repeatedly to mobs, until the rustling ended and the screen could be turned safely back on.

Despite all these difficulties, Gayatri had a certain cunning. She made friends. She cajoled. She scammed. People liked Gayatri; she remembered their names, remembered them for what they wanted to be remembered for; she remembered Tak’s midnight raid across the Heavens, when he aggro’ed the Sky-King and caused the whole world to die. She remembered Vakharov swooping in out of nowhere to killsteal the World-Dragon and ninja-loot his boots that appeared in only one in a hundred drops. She remembered the awesome hack, discovered by Sorpedon of their own guild, that let him delete the online banks of a thousand players, causing briefly a level of deflation that sent their server’s economy into a great depression from which, some said, it never recovered. Sorpedon, Vakharov, Tak, they were all banned for their exploits, while shy, nervous Gayatri waited in the corner and watched.

She joked sometimes, “You think I’m really a dude, don’t you?” And always the answer was “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t sound like one . . . Because you don’t wear revealing clothes, even when they have high stats . . . Because, I don’t know, you can just tell.”

And Gayatri reveled in this illusion and never ever allowed her mask to fall. But that was easy. People didn’t discuss real life in the game, because the game itself offered enough of a world that you could get lost in it. They discussed camping, they discussed stats, they discussed new zones and new strategies, they discussed hunts and griefing and player-killers and new drops. And they discussed each other. The highlights and lowlights of everyone in the guild: they discussed who was great, who was funny, who was useless in a raid, and who was just an overleveled noob.

Eventually Gayatri’s mom discovered the game. She didn’t forbid it, not outright, but she started coming around to the subject elliptically. “That game of yours is fun, in moderation, isn’t it?”

“Mmmhmmm.”

“It’s fun to pretend.”

“Yep.”

“I notice you always play girl characters . . .”

“Mom! It’s normal. Lots of guys do it.”

“I know, I know . . . but it’s not good to spend too much time in another world.”

The game grew large and great, while Gayatri, hampered by both lag and her parents’ watchfulness, stayed the same. Perpetually low-level Gayatri, who wore gear far outside her level range, who knew every mountain and every zone, and who had journeyed to all the Sky Levels and had found safe places in each to watch the epic raids conducted by her betters. She was Gayatri the Traveler, Gayatri the Schemer, Gayatri of the Tall Boots and Gayatri who wore Cerebral Armor not because it was good (it wasn’t) but because, although form-fitting, it was jet-black and didn’t display her body as lasciviously as did 95% of the outfits in the game. She was Gayatri who played in the wrong time-zone, and so was always on extremely late at night when others were drunk and high and barely made sense, and who whiled away the empty hours of the American morning by picking through the leavings of the day’s raids.

And she was Gayatri who simply disappeared one day, her account password changed. She tried everything to get in, assumed she was hacked, made frantic phone calls to customer support, wrote on the guild forums, and even had several of her friends offer to buy her a new account or let her share theirs.

When her mother got home, she found her son on the computer, sweating in the warm Mumbai night, and she took him into the kitchen and sat him down and said, “Son, we are worried about your grades. This is an important time. You are in high school now, and you should be focusing on the things that matter.”

Her parents had cancelled her account. Her characters would be deleted. Her computer access was limited. She went to school, and she studied, and eventually she got her computer back, but forever after when she asked for the account to be reinstated, they refused.

Now only Gopal remained. As he grew older, he turned against all forms of fantasy. He grew large and dark and odious; he spoke loudly about escapism and about wastes of time. He got into a good college, learned to code, and when the time came to get a job, he opted not to work in gaming—the numbers didn’t make sense, you didn’t make nearly enough money for all the work, and anyway he didn’t want to program games, he wanted to live them—instead he started a company of his own, then when that failed he started another. His body was an encumbrance; he didn’t think of it. And the complex sexual feelings of his youth were transmuted into heterosexuality of the grossest sort.

At first his mother pleaded, “Why are we not close, like we used to be?” and later grew angrier, “You are selfish. You never tell me anything about yourself.”

Meanwhile, the game got older and was superseded by others, but the company remained in existence. So long as a few hundred thousand were content to pay ten dollars a month, the company was willing to maintain the servers. But the world contracted. Servers were combined, one by one. And Gopal learned that canceled accounts never actually got deleted; instead they were suspended in perpetuity, waiting to be reactivated.

Then one day he got an email to his old hotmail account.

“Gayatri is waiting for you.”

He didn’t understand the email. When he googled it, he found nobody else had received one like it, only him. He assumed it was some sort of promotion, and he ignored it, but the emails kept coming: “Gayatri is waiting. Gayatri is waiting.”

Finally he clicked the links, was taken to a form that asked for money in order to reactivate his account. There was a moment of disappointment. He’d hoped, of course, that magic was real, and that the email had been some mystical call sent by the spirit of his youth. But at the same time, Gopal shrugged: whatever, it was a good marketing ploy on the company’s part—a way of juicing the fading revenues for an ancient game—and anyway he was a bit curious about what’d happened to the old stomping grounds after all these years. So he entered his credit card info and reactivated the account.

The graphics were jerky, the writing was moronic. Everything was tiny and stupid. He maneuvered that lithesome elf across a grainy tree-city, and he felt absolutely nothing, no sense of freedom, no sense of release. And when the fairy appeared and offered him a special quest to save the world, he clicked through the dialogue without paying attention. The lore had never truly interested him. He wasn’t actually sure what had.

But life these days was empty, and he had plenty of spare time, so he found himself playing through the quest, just to pass the time. His friends were gone. The world was lonely. When he queried the game for a player-list, he got a list of about a hundred active players, almost all of them extremely high in level. And they seemed to mostly be in Hub-City, a sky-world, added in one of the newer expansions, that had portals to all the end-game raid-zones.

Without any people, the rest of the game-world was luscious and overcrowded. The NPCs spawned continually and fought each other, leaving corpses filled with the best drops and rarest loot. Gayatri finished that quest, and it led into another. Slowly, with the benefit of a much faster internet connection, Gayatri gained a few levels. She took screenshots of the ogres running across the Desert of Ra, and of the flights of dragons in the sky-caverns above the Under-City. She observed the glitching of a hundred weather effects, creating the world-storms that wrecked servers, rearranging houses and teleporting players at random, shoving zones together willy-nilly in ways that were left unfixed, despite numerous bug reports from the players, until the next server reset put things back to rights.

She became an oracle and a seer, a witness not to the paltry lore of the game, but to its vitality, to the things within it that were not planned and that had come alive anyway. And unbeknownst to her, she became a legend to the few remaining players who lived above her. They traded sightings of Gayatri, of the wild woman who lived like an animal, far from merchants, far from traders, far from high-level trainers. The woman who spent time in the dead zones, the newb zones, and who had raised her affinity score, through strange rituals and quests, until she could walk unmolested through these fields of goblins and dark elves alike, until she could talk to every NPC and wear every armor and use every spell, regardless of faction.

Gopal’s mother called him every day, but the calls went unanswered, and when her and Gopal’s dad dropped by the apartment unexpectedly, she rapped on the door and, when it didn’t open, launched into a free-form anxiety-ridden monologue on the problems with her son and his life. “I’m just worried you’ve gotten back into that gaming. Please, come on, just speak to us. We only want to talk to you.”

“Arre, what can you do?” her husband interjected. “He’s a grown adult now. If he doesn’t want to come out, if he wants to reject his family and be some shut-in, then it is his choice!”

“When you’re not on the games, you’re so gentle and sweet. It truly is an addiction. I’ve been reading . . .”

One day, an administrator sent a notice to Gayatri, saying that because of some odd activity she was under suspicion of using third-party hacking tools, and as such a ban was being initiated.

But the character did not stop. She crept through the lattices of the game, undetectable by the servers, moving sidewise across zones and continents, waging a terrible and singular war that only she understood. The game needed her, and she needed the game.

And in a small apartment somewhere within a large city, a man was found dead in his home office with his computer still running in front of him.

From within the game, Gayatri viewed the laughing responses, the ugly news stories, the sensational details about the tied-off athletic socks full of fecal matter found in a duffle bag in the corner of his room—an image so bright and startling that it was turned into a meme and entered the lexicon: A “poop-socker” was a greasy nerd who had no life. Everything was reported in breathless detail, whether it was the mounds of old pizza boxes, complete with mice scuttling around searching for scraps, or the neighbors who had banged helplessly on his door, concerned about the smell, only to be threatened by him with legal action for violating his privacy. Not least of these attention-getting details was the fact, reported in every article, that his character had been a woman.

It only took a few months for a certain level of myth to accumulate around the dark, smelly body of that man who’d died, of dehydration and exhaustion, because he was too busy staring at the ass of his wood elf character. He became synonymous with everything that was dark and wrong about the internet, and in particular about men on the internet, and female characters in games across the net were now taunted with links to articles about Gopal’s sad end.

For her part, Gayatri perceived little change in her situation. Where once she had typed, now she exercised her own muscles. Where once her back had ached from hours in a chair, now it ached from running across the plains. In this world, she—the boy who had never exercised, never bathed, never showered, the catfish with his man-tits and distended belly—took quietly to the rustic life, living in a simple hut at the outskirts of a deserted city, hunting for her own food, mining and foraging for the resources to craft her own weapons, and embarking on occasional quests and explorations that always looped around to her cosy tree-top home. It is a quiet existence, interrupted only by occasional visits from curious players who’ve caught wind of the body of rumors that surround the humble wood elf, and it will probably continue until someday the company, due to a dwindling player population, withdraws support for the game, and between one breath and the next, Gayatri’s world disappears forever.

But between then and now, Gopal’s mother, not quite divorced but not quite married, grown sad and old, will respond to an anonymous message—“Gayatri is waiting.”

The messages will keep coming, until, driven to distraction, she pursues them down a pit of rumor and supposition that will lead her eventually to sit down at a computer, puzzle her way through the instructions, and install that old game. She will make her slow, careful way through the woodland hills, dying continuously from the newest and weakest of mobs, until finally she comes to a tree-top home, and there she and her daughter will sit down, next to a fire, and they will tell each other all the things that in life remained unsaid.

©2020 by Naomi Kanakia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Naomi Kanakia is the author of two contemporary young adult novels, Enter Title Here (Disney ’16) and We Are Totally Normal (HarperTeen, ’20), both published under the name Rahul Kanakia. Additionally, her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Lightspeed, The Indiana Review, and Nature. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and newborn daughter.

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

EXCERPT: Attack Surface (Tor Books)

Cory Doctorow | 5314 words

Cory Doctorow’s Attack Surface is a standalone novel set in the world of New York Times bestsellers Little Brother and Homeland.

Most days, Masha Maximow was sure she’d chosen the winning side.

In her day job as a counterterrorism wizard for a transnational cybersecurity firm, she made the hacks that allowed repressive regimes to spy on dissidents and manipulate their every move. The perks were fantastic, and the pay was obscene.

Just for fun, and to piss off her masters, Masha sometimes used her mad skills to help those same troublemakers evade detection, if their cause was just. It was a dangerous game and a hell of a rush. But seriously self-destructive. And unsustainable.

When her targets were strangers in faraway police states, it was easy to compartmentalize, to ignore the collateral damage of murder, rape, and torture. But when it hits close to home, and the hacks and exploits she’s devised are directed at her friends and family—including boy wonder Marcus Yallow, her old crush and archrival, and his entourage of naïve idealists—Masha realizes she has to choose.

And whatever choice she makes, someone is going to get hurt.

Coming 10/13/2020 from Tor Books.

That was why I loved technology: if you use it right, it gives you power—and takes away other peoples’ privacy. I was on my sixteenth straight hour at the main telcoms data-center for Bltz, the capital of Slovstakia. Those are both aliases, obviously. Unlike certain persons I could name, I keep my secrets.

Sixteen hours, for what my boss had assured the client—the Slovstakian Interior Ministry⁠—would be a three-hour job. You don’t get as high as she did in the Stasi without knowing how to be a tactical asshole when the situation demands it.

I just wish she’d let me recon the data-center before she handed down the work estimate. The thing is, the communications infrastructure of Slovstakia was built long before the Berlin Wall fell, and it consisted of copper wires wrapped in newspaper and dipped in gutta percha. After the Wall came down, responsibility for the telcoms had been transferred to the loving hands of Anton Tkachi, who had once been a top spook in Soviet Slovstakia. There are a lot of decades in which it would suck to have your telcoms run by an incompetent, greedy kleptocrat, but the 1990s represented a particularly poorly chosen decade to have sat out the normal cycle of telcoms upgrades. Because Internet.

After Tkachi was purged⁠—imprisoned 2005, hospitalized with “mental illness” in 2006, dead in 2007⁠—the Slovstakian Ministry of Communications cycled through a succession of contract operators—Swisscom, T-Mob, Vodaphone, Orange (God help us all)⁠—each of which billed the country for some of the jankiest telcoms gear you’ve ever seen, the thrice-brewed teabags of the telecommunications world, stuff that had been in war zones, leaving each layer of gear half-configured, half-secured, and half-documented.

The Internet in Slovstakia sucked monkey shit.

Anyway, my boss, Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, promised the Interior Ministry that I would only need three hours, and the Interior Ministry had called up the telecoms ministry and given them orders to be nice to the Americanski lady who was coming over to do top secret work for them, and give her everything she needed. I can tell that they laid it on thick, because when I first arrived at the country’s main data-center, a big old brutalist pile that I had to stop and take a picture of for my collection of Soviet Brutalist Buildings That They Used to Shoot You for Taking Pictures Of—hashtags are for losers who voluntarily submit to 280-character straitjackets (and sentences can too a preposition end with)—the guy on the desk sent me straight to the director of telcoms security.

His name was Litvinchuk and he was tightly wound. You could tell because he had his own force of telcoms cops dressed like Robocop standing guard outside his door with guns longer than their legs, reeking of garlic sausage and the sweat of a thousand layers of kevlar. Litvinchuk welcomed me cordially, gave me a long-ass speech about how excited he was to have some fresh foreign contractors in his data-center (again) and especially ones from a company as expensive as Xoth Intelligence.

“Wait, that’s not right word,” he said, in broad Yakov Smirnoff accent (he had a Masters from the London School of Economics and I’d watched him do a TedX talk where he sounded like a BBC World Service Newsreader). “Exclusive? Illustrious?” He looked to me—specifically, to my tits, which was where every Slovstakian official I’d met addressed his remarks. I didn’t cross my arms.

“Infamous,” I said.

He smirked. “I’m sure. Miss Maximow”—he pronounced the W as a V, as they always did as soon as I got east of France—“we are all very excited to have you at our premises. However, I’m sure you understand that we must be careful to keep records of which contractors work on our sensitive systems.” He slid a paperclipped form across his desk to me. I counted to seven—more efficient and just as effective as ten⁠—and picked it up. Nine pages, smudgily photocopied, full of questions like “List all NGOs and charitable organizations to which you have contributed, directly or indirectly.”

“No,” I said.

He gave me his best fish-face, which I’m sure was super-effective against the farm boys cosplaying Judge Dredd in the hallway. But I’d been glared at by Ilsa, She-Wolf of the Etc Etc, and had been inured to even the hairiest of eyeballs.

“I must insist,” he said.

“I don’t fill in this kind of form,” I said. “Company policy. Xoth has negotiated blanket permission to access your premises from the Interior Ministry for all its personnel.” This was true. I hated paperwork, and this kind of paperwork the most—the kind that asked you questions you could never fully or honestly answer, so that there’d always be an official crime to pin on you if you stepped on the wrong toes. Lucky for me, Xoth had a no-exceptions policy that techs were not allowed to fill in any official documentation at client sites. I’d take notes on my own work, but they’d go up the chain to my boss—Ilsa, She Wolf etc⁠—who’d sanitize them and pass them back to the Interior Ministry for their own logs, omitting key details so that we would be able to bill them for any future maintenance.

I did my best to look bored⁠—not hard, I was so bored my eyeballs ached—and stared at this post-Soviet phone commissar.

“I will fill it out for you,” he said.

I shrugged.

He worked quickly, pen dancing over the paper. Not his first paper-pushing rodeo. He passed it back to me. “Sign.” He smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile.

I looked down. It was all in Cyrillic.

“Nope,” I said.

He switched off the smile. “Madam.” He made it sound like missy. I could tell we weren’t going to get along. “You will not get into my data center until we have gathered basic information. That is our protocol.”

He stared at me, fishface plus plus, clearly waiting for me to lose my cool. Long before Ilsa began her regime of hardcore stoicism training, I had mastered situations like this. You don’t get far in the DHS if you don’t know how to bureaucracy. I turned boredom up by a notch. I tried to project the sense that I had more time to burn than he did.

He held out his hand. I’d assumed he’d be a short-fingered vulgarian, but he had pianist’s fingers, and a hell of a manicure, the kind of thing that made me feel self-conscious about my lack of girly cred. “ID.”

Xoth gives us fancy ID cards to wear on client sites, with RFIDs and sapphire-coated smart chips and holograms, props for impressing rubes. I could knock one up in an afternoon. I unclipped mine from my lanyard and handed it over.

The pen danced again at the bottom of the form, and he turned the paper to show me. He’d added “signed, per, Masha Maximow” to signature line. Good for you, Boris. You made a funny. What an asshole.

“We done?”

He carefully made a xerox on a desktop printer/scanner/copier—one that I knew five different exploits for, and could use to take over his whole network, if I wanted to—and handed it to me. “For your records.”

I folded it into quarters and stuck it in my back pocket. “Which way?”

He said something in Russki and one of the Stormtroopers struggled in under the weight of his body armor and escorted me to the data-center. I took one look at the racks and racks of hardware, zipped up my fleece against the icy wind of the chillers, and got to work. It was going to be a long three hours.

***

By the time I finally finished, I was freezing and swearing. My hoodie was totally inadequate and I suspected that my long-fingered vulgarian had ordered one of his Armored Borises to turn the thermostat down to sub-Arctic.

But it was done, and the test-cases ran, and so I got up off the folding chair I’d been hauling around the data-center’s corridors as I moved from one rack to another, tracing wires, untangling the hairball of grifty IT contractor shortcuts and fatfingering.

Surveying my work, I had a deep feeling of . . . Well, to be honest, a deep feeling of pointlessness. I’d labored for sixteen hours⁠—fifteen if you subtract meals and pee breaks—getting the Xoth Sectec network appliance installed, and all I had to show for my trouble was an inconspicuous black one-unit high server box, mounted on the bottom shelf of the furthest rack (this was Xoth policy⁠—put our gear in the most out-of-way place, just in case barbarian hordes topple our dictator clients and storm the gates, looking for mediagenic evidence of collaboration with evil surveillance contractors) (that would be me).

But now I got to celebrate. I looked over my shoulder and made sure I was alone—the robocops had made a point of standing behind me, watching my ass, as I dragged my chair around⁠—bent down and touched my toes, feeling the awesome stretch in my hamstrings and the unkinking of my neck and shoulders as my hair brushed the ground. Then I stood, cracked my knuckles, and plugged my laptop into my phone, and tunneled out to a network box I’d left in my hotel room that morning, making sure it was all charged up and successfully connected to the hotel’s wifi, which (see above) sucked monkey shit. I fired up a virtual machine on my laptop, choosing a container with a fully patched version of the latest freebie version of Windows, and used its browser to connect to Facebook.

The Slovstakian uprising hadn’t figured out that the only real use for Facebook in a revolution was as a place to teach people how to use something more secure than Facebook. All their communications were in a couple of groups that they accessed over Facebook’s Tor Hidden Service, good old https://facebookcorewwwi.onion, which was pretty good operational security (if I did say so myself).

Their problem was that they were way, way outgunned⁠—as of now, they were facing down the best Xoth had to offer (at least, the best Xoth had to offer in its middle-upper pricing tier). Things were about to get very, very bad for the plucky demonstrators of Slovstakia.

The virtual Windows box in my virtual machine connected through the hotel’s network to Tor—The Onion Router, a system that bounced network connections all over the world, separately encrypting each hop, making it much harder to trace, intercept, or modify its users’ packets—and to Facebook’s hidden service, a darknet site based in a much nicer data-center than this one, in an out-of-the-way corner of Oregon with remarkably low year-round temperatures (ambient chilling is the number one money-saver when it comes to running a building full of superheated computers).

I alt-tabbed into my monitor for the Sectec box beside me, using an untunnelled interface on my phone’s native network connection. That Sectec box could handle ten million simultaneous connections, combing through all their packet-streams using machine-learning models originally developed to recognize cancer cells on a microscope slide (fun fact!). Sure enough, it registered the existence of a stock Windows laptop in the Sofitel Bltz, communicating over Tor. It profiled the machine by fingerprinting its packets, did a quick lookup in Xoth’s customer-facing API to find a viable exploit against that configuration, and injected a redirect to the virtual machine on my laptop. I pinned the monitor window to the top of my desktop and flipped back to the VM, watching as the browser’s location bar flickered to an innocuous-seeming error message, and by flipping to a diagnostic view of the VM, I could see the payload strike home.

It used a zero-day for Tor Browser—always based on a slightly out-of-date version of Firefox and thus conveniently vulnerable to yesterday’s exploits—to bust out of the browser’s sandbox and into the OS. Then it deployed a higher-value exploit, one that attacked Windows, and inserted some persistent code that could bypass the bootloader’s integrity check, hooking into a module that loaded later in the process. In less than five seconds, it was done: the virtual machine was fully compromised, and it was already trying to hook into my webcam and mic; scouring my hard-drive for interesting files; snaffling up saved password files from my browser, and loading its keylogger. Since all that was happening in a virtual machine—not an actual computer, just a piece of software pretending to be a computer—none of that stuff really happened, thankfully.

Now it was time to really test it. Sectec has a mode where it can scour at all the traffic in and out of the network for specific email addresses and usernames, to locate specific people. I gave it Litvinchuk’s email address, and waited for his computer to make itself known. Took less than a minute—he was polling the ministry’s mail server every 60 seconds. Two minutes later, I controlled his computer and I was cataloguing his porn habits and downloading his search history. I have a useful script for this, it locates anything in my targets’ computers that make mention of me, because I am a nosy bitch and they should know better, really.

Litvinchuk was into some predictably gross porn⁠—why is it always being peed on?!—and had googled the shit out of me. He also had a covert agent who’d searched my room; they had put a location logger on my phone using a crufty network appliance I’d already discovered in my epic debugging session in the data center. I could have fed that logger false data, but I turned it off because fuck him sideways. I downloaded half a gig of videos of Litvinchuk in full-bore German heavy latex, gleaming with piss, then stood, stretched again, and shut my lid.

***

I’d started my adventure at 4PM the day before. Now it was 8AM and that meant that the demonstrations in the main square would be down to skeleton crews. Anyone interesting only came out after supper-time and worked the barricades in the dark, when the bad stuff always kicked off. That’s when the provocateurs and neofascists came out—often the same people—and the hardcore protesters had to work extra hard.

I called the Sofitel on the way back and ordered room service. All they had was breakfast and I wanted dinner, so I ordered triple, and gave up on explaining that I only needed one set of cutlery.

I arrived at the room’s door at the same time as the confused waiter. I waved at him and carded the door open, then followed him and his cart in. He was one of those order guys you saw around the hotel, someone who’d once had a job in Soviet brute-force heavy industry but ended up pushing room service trolleys when it all went to China. Those guys never spoke English, not like their strapping sons, who spoke gamer-international, the language of Let’s Play videos and image boards. “Dobre,” I said, “Pajalsta,” and took the folio from him and added a 10 euro tip—everything at the Sofitel was denominated in euros, ever since the local currency had collapsed. I hadn’t even bothered to change any cash on this trip, but I had bought a 10,000,000,000 dinar note from an enterprising street seller who’d been targeting the tourist trade. I liked the engraving of the opera house on the back, but the Boris on the front was a unibrowed thick-fingered vulgarian straight out of central casting. I kept forgetting to google him, but I was pretty sure he was being celebrated for something suitably terrible, purging Armenians or collaborating with Stalin.

My alarm went off four hours later. I found my bathing suit and underwater MP3 player and the hotel robe, made sure all my devices were powered down with their USB ports covered and headed for the pool.

Swimming—even with loud tunes—always churns my subconscious, boredom forcing it to look inward at its neglected corners. So somewhere around the fiftieth lap (it was a small pool), I remembered what was happening that day. I did the timezone calculation in my head and realized there was still time to do something about it. Fucketty shitbuckets. I hauled myself out of the pool and towards a towel.

I perched, dripping, on the room’s desk-chair and powered up my phone for a quick peek at the pictures of the screw-heads on my laptop. I had covered all the screws with glitter nail-polish and shot clear pics of each one, with a little label beside it, so that I could easily verify whether someone had unscrewed my laptop lid and done something sneaky, like inserting a hardware keylogger or, you know, some semtex and packing-nails. I used an open source astronomy package designed to match pictures with known constellations to verify two of the seven screws. The glitter patterns had become an old friend by this point, since I checked them every time I’d been out of sight of my computer before powering it up again.

I booted it, pulled the towel over my head (to defeat hidden cameras) and keyed in my passphrase while going “AAAAH” medium-loud, just to defeat anyone trying to guess my passphrase from the sounds of my fingers on the keys. Xoth had an airgap room for really sensitive stuff, walls shielded with Faraday cage, full of computers that undercover Xoth techs bought by walking into consumer electronics stores and buying computers off the shelf without ever letting them out of their site. After being flashed with a Xoth version of TAILS, a paranoid Linux distro, wifi cards and Bluetooth radios were ripped out with pliers. Their USB ports were covered with 3D printed snaps that couldn’t be removed without shattering them. You brought your encrypted data in on a thumb drive, requisitioned a machine, broke the seal, plugged in your USB stick and read the data, then handed the machine back to a tech to be flashed and re-sealed. Compared to that shit, I wasn’t all that paranoid.

Litvinchuk had been a busy Boris: my computer downloaded and sorted his own wiretap orders as he took the Sectec out for a spin. I looked through the list, and yup, I already knew a lot of those names. They were the people I was planning to meet for drinks in a few hours. I made a few quick revisions to my Cryptoparty slides.

It was getting to be time for lunch-ish or dinner-esque, whatever you call a 3PM meal. I was about to phone down for room service when my phone alarmed me, which isn’t something it does often, because I’ve turned off every notifier.

When that chirp goes off it is a pure sphincter-tightener.

“Wedding of Marcus Yallow and Ange Carvelli” and a shortened URL. Because livestreaming. Because Marcus. Because exhibitionist attention-whore. Because shithead.

God, he drove me crazy. I fired up the livestream. They’d made everyone they loved fly to Boston for the wedding, because of the girl’s grad school schedule, and they’d filled the hall with robots they borrowed from the MIT Media Lab to give it some nerd cred. Of course she didn’t wear white. Her dress was ribbed with EL-wire that pulsed in time with the music, and Marcus’s suit—Beatles black, with a narrow tie and drainpipe pants that made his legs look even scrawnier than usual⁠—was also wired up, but it only pulsed when they touched, moving bands of light across its surface from the point of contact.

OK, that was pretty cool.

The officiant was a prominent Cambridge hacker, one of the ones they’d hauled in when they were after Chelsea Manning. She’d been a kid then, but now she looked older, her wife holding their kids on her lap off to one side. She wore a colander on her head, because she was ordained in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which was frankly too much.

Marcus and his girly exchanged vows. Marcus promised to make her coffee, rub her feet (ugh), review her code and say sorry and mean it; she promised to back down when she was wrong, forgive him when he apologized, and love him “until the wheels come off” (double ugh). They kissed and received their applause. I gave it three minutes, making sure that the ceremony was well and truly done and the reception about to start. I’m not a monster.

Here’s the thing about Cambridge: they have drone delivery there. For a little extra, you can time the delivery to the minute. I checked the time in the corner of the screen. There was a big window right behind the officiant with a view of the Charles River and the snow and the tracks of students’ boots. I checked the time again.

The drone came right up to the window and rapped on it politely. It had four big rotors and a sensor package that fed me all kinds of telemetry on the activity in the room, from Bluetooth device IDs to lidar outlines of all the humans in the space. The wedding livestream showed it tapping on the window from the bride and groom’s PoV (the stream ran off about a dozen cameras and was smart enough to switch between them based on which one was capturing the most action); the stream from the drone showed me the opposite view, Marcus and his girl and all their nice nerdly friends and family gaping at the fisheye camera.

Marcus broke the tableau by opening the window and the drone daintily coasted into the room and deployed its box into his hands. He pulled the ripstrip on the plasticky wrapping and revealed the giftwrapped box within. She took the card out of the envelope and read it. I admit it gave me a shiver to hear her say my name.

When Marcus heard it, his face did a funny. That gave me a shiver, too—a different kind. He and I have complicated history. I rubbed my fingers, the ones he’d broken when I was only sixteen. He did it in order to steal my phone, because I had a video that exonerated him of being a terrorist. Complicated. Those fingers hurt whenever I thought of him.

He looked at the drone’s sensor package. “Thank you, Masha,” he said. “Wherever you are.” The usual was for this to be a recording that you could watch later, but if you were a creepy stalker chick (ahem), you could watch it in realtime. I emojied the drone and it bobbled a curtsey and gave me five seconds to commit another $50 to hold onto it for five more minutes, because it had other packages to deliver. I released it and its feed died.

On the livestream, I watched them unwrap my gift. I’d almost sent them a bag of kopi lowak, which is a kind of coffee bean that’s fed raw to a civet cat, then harvested from its poop and roasted, but then I’d read an animal welfare article about the treatment of civet cats. So I’d given them a Raspi Altair 8080: that is, a 1974 “personal computer” that you controlled with a row of faceplate switches and read using peanut-bulb blinkenlights, which had been painstakingly restored with a Raspberry Pi open source CPU inside it, giving it approximately eight bazillion times the computing power. Most of the interior was left empty by the refit, and the craftswoman who’d sold it to me had filled the empty space with a bunch of carved wooden automata that cranked a set of irregular gears around in whirring circles while the computer was operating, which you could see if you swapped in the optional transparent case.

Marcus knew exactly what it was (because I’d found it through his Twitter feed) and how much it cost (because he’d moaned about never being able to afford it, not in a million years), and he had a look of profoundly satisfying shock on his face. He told his girly all about it in that spittle-flecked hyperactive mode he slipped into when he was really, really excited. The expression that crossed her face was even more satisfying: a mix of jealousy and appreciation that I reveled in like the petty, terrible person I am.

I felt like the fairy who curses Sleeping Beauty out of spite when she thinks she hasn’t been invited to her Christening, except that this was a wedding and not a Christening. Oh, and they invited me, of course.

But I had work to do. Hey, I’d sent a thoughtful gift, even if I totally upstaged their stupid nerd chic wedding. Shoulda had a more nerdy wedding, if they didn’t want to get upstaged.

I was still hungry and now it was getting to be time to head out to the square. Room service at the Sofitel sucked anyway. I’d get a doner kebab. Hell, I’d get a sack of them and bring them along.

***

The vegan cafe where my pet revolutionary cell met was called the Danube Bar Resto, and they could always be found there before the night’s action, because fuck opsec, why not just make it easy for the secret police to round you all up somewhere far from a crowd? I despair.

Kriztina was already there, chowing down on something that had never had the chance to breathe and live and run and play. I cracked open the crumpled top on my sack of kebab and let her smell the meaty perfume. “Save room,” I said.

She laugh-choked and gave me a mouth-full thumbs-up as I sat down next to her. There were eight of them in Kriztina’s little cell, a couple of graphic designers, two webmonkeys, a poet (seriously), and the rest didn’t even pretend to be employed. Few under-30s in Slovstakia were, after all.

“You want drink?” Oksana always had spending money. I’d pegged her as a snitch when I first met her, but it turned out she just made good money working for a law firm that did a lot of western business and didn’t mind having a trans girl for a paralegal. Once I’d satisfied myself that she didn’t appear anywhere in Litvinchuk’s master-lists of turncoats, I’d come to like her. She reminded me of some of the women I’d known in the Middle East, brave fuckers who’d managed to look like a million bucks even as their cities were being pounded to gravel around their pretty shoulders, fearless beneath their hijabs and glamorous even when they were covered in dust and blood.

“Sure.” It would be something with wheatgrass and live microbes and probably twigs, but mostly orange juice and mango pulp. The guy who ran the place liked to talk about how the chlorophyll “oxygenated” your blood—of course chlorophyll only makes oxygen in the presence of sunlight, and if you’ve got sunlight in your colon, you’ve got big problems. Even if you could get grass to fill your back passage with oxygen, it’s not like your asshole has anyway to absorb it. I get my oxygen the old-fashioned way: I breathe.

“Tonight—” Kriztina started. I held up a hand.

“Batteries or bags,” I said. Everyone looked embarrassed. Those of us whose phones had removable batteries removed them. The rest of them put their phones into the Faraday bags I’d handed out when I first started hanging out with these amateurs.

“Before we talk about tonight, I want to walk you through some new precautions.” They groaned. I was such a buzzkill. “First: running Paranoid Android is no longer optional. You have to get the nightly build, every night, and you have to check the signatures, every single time.” The groans were louder. “I’m not fucking around, people. The Interior Ministry now has a network appliance that gets a fresh load of exploits three times a day. If you’re not fresh, you’re meat.

“Second, make sure your IMSI-catcher countermeasures are up to date. They just bought an update package for their fake cell towers and they’ll be capturing the unique IDs of every phone that answers a ping from them. The app your phone used last week to tell a fake tower from a real one? Useless now. Update, update, update. Check every signature, too.

“Third, make sure your smart-meters aren’t sneaking back online. After Minsk, the Interior Ministry’s really looking for a chance to pull the same trick, turn off heat in the middle of February for anyone they suspect of demonstrations.

“Finally, everyone has to wear dazzle, no exceptions.” Again with the groans, but I got the tubes out of my bag and passed them around. The dazzle was super-reflective in visible light and infrared and anyone who tried to take a picture of someone wearing it would just get a lens-flare and jitter from their camera’s overloaded sensors. It had been developed for paparazzi-haunted celebs, but the smell of the stuff and the greasy feel it left on your skin⁠—not to mention persistent rumors that it was a powerful carcinogen—had doomed it to an existence as a novelty item used only by teenagers on class picture day and surveillance-haunted weirdos.

I slurped the green juice Oksana had just handed me and was pleasantly surprised to discover that it tanged unmistakably of tequila. She winked at me. Oh, Oksana, you are a hero.

“Get to it,” I said. “Update before we leave. Remember, opsec is a team sport. Your mistake exposes all your friends.”

Copyright © 2020 by Cory Doctorow. Excerpted from Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. 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

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of Walkaway, a novel for adults, a YA graphic novel called In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother and novels for adults like Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Book Reviews: October 2020

Chris Kluwe | 1097 words

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Hey everyone, I hope you’re all doing okay in these increasingly turbulent times we find ourselves in. I’ll keep this intro short and sweet because there’s really only one thing left that’s important to say: Anyone can be a hero, not just the protagonists your favorite authors dream up, but it requires the conviction to act, even (and especially) when it seems like things are falling apart.

Americans, this is a link (vote.gov) to learn how to register to vote in your state. Please make sure you’re registered to vote, please make sure everyone you know is registered to vote, and then please make sure you actually vote. If we want to turn back the tide of anarchy, we need every last one of us to have the same passionate intensity that the worst currently find themselves filled with. Be a hero. Vote like it’s the last chance you’ll have to make a difference.

On to the reviews!

Beowulf
Maria Dahvana Headley
Paperback / Digital Audio / Ebook
ISBN: 9780374110031
MCD x FSG Originals, August 2020, 176 pages

Bro! So begins the latest translation of the epic poem Beowulf, that confused, confusing, malleable epic of poetic prose that has tormented schoolchildren and scholars alike across the years. For those who haven’t experienced Beowulf in one of its multiple incarnations, it is the story of a hero (eponymously named) doing heroic things like slaying monsters, accumulating treasures, and battling a dragon, all set in ye olde tymes Denmark and Sweden that bear passing resemblance to reality.

What makes Headley’s translation so interesting is that she keeps the traditional form of the epic (3182 lines of nameless narration) while making of it a contemporary piece, liberally utilizing modern day nomenclature and slang such that one can believe it a particularly long-winded drunken ramble at some mysterious smoke-shrouded bar where past and present rub shoulders unconcernedly. It is a translation that celebrates the fluidity of English language, reveling in the transitory ephemeralness of Internet slang even as it anchors itself on thousand-year old foundations.

If you were to ask, “Is this the definitive Beowulf translation?” then I would tell you no, because as Headley says in her foreword, “Every translator translates this poem differently. That’s part of its glory,” and I wholeheartedly agree. This version of Beowulf is of our particular time, a time where monsters and kings can be one and the same, where mead hall shouts are replaced by message board boasts, and not every hero has to be a man pricking something with his sword. Celebrate this translation, immerse yourself in its conjunction of the now and the then, because just like every Beowulf translation before it, there’s no telling when its time will end.

Read if: you enjoy the classics; you don’t mind some Hamilton with your Hamlet; you want to stick it to the stuffy gatekeepers of stasis.

Ballistic Kiss
Richard Kadrey
Hardcover / Digital Audio / Ebook
ISBN: 9780062672575
Harper Voyager, August 2020, 368 pages

For our other review, I’d like to direct your attention to Ballistic Kiss, by Richard Kadrey. Ballistic Kiss is the eleventh entry in the Sandman Slim series, a supernatural noir thriller featuring James Stark aka Sandman Slim, a tough talking, hoodoo slinging half-mortal for whom dying is just another bump in a long and rutted road.

I must confess, I hadn’t read a Sandman Slim book before Ballistic Kiss (I know, I know, but there are only so many hours in the day), and you would think this makes starting with the eleventh book in a series a weird experience. Happily, I can tell you this was not the case—Kadrey’s cast of characters are varied and have surely experienced adventures together that I have no idea about (and am looking forward to discovering), but everything in Ballistic Kiss is presented contextually in a way that allowed me to follow the story with ease, despite not reading the previous ten.

As far as the writing itself, Kadrey puts together an excellent style of gory, hard-boiled noir that turns Los Angeles from the city of angels into a sun-baked nightmarescape Sandman Slim must navigate using all his varied powers in order to solve a set of seemingly unrelated mysteries. Kadrey weaves together familiar landmarks in unfamiliar ways, and like all good noir novels, you know the protagonist will suffer through the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune on their way to the finale, but you’re never quite sure they’ll survive the ending.

Another thing I appreciated in Ballistic Kiss was the inclusion of a non-binary character and how Sandman Slim reacted to them throughout the course of the book. It’s clear Kadrey did his research and the interactions never felt forced or artificial—it’s just people being people, trying their best to figure out how to treat each other in ways that don’t cause each other pain (and when one of those people is a half-human murder machine called Sandman Slim, untying that particular knot can be thorny indeed). I may not have read any of the Sandman Slim series before Ballistic Kiss, but after reading it I can tell you I am quite excited to start from the beginning and read them all.

Read if: you like some mayhem in your mystery; you enjoy pissing off those who deserve it; you try to help others even when you can’t help yourself.

• • • •

And that’s it for me, folks. Remember to vote!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Media Review: October 2020

Aaron Duran | 1095 words

Star Trek Adventures
Core Rulebook
Modiphius Entertainment, 2018, 368 pages.

It would be easy and a tad hacky to go on and on about Star Trek’s influence over fifty years of broadcast. Everyone knows that. Which is probably why every fan, at some time or another, imagined themselves on the bridge of a ship, boldly going and all that jazz. If you were already someone who enjoyed the occasional or even regular pen-and-paper-style roleplaying game, a Star Trek RPG was a no-brainer. Which is why it is so staggering that it took until 2018 and Modiphius to make one that was actually playable—dare I say, even enjoyable. One of the hindrances of a Star Trek RPG was the very thing that inspired it: the show. Even if your group didn’t have a desire to roleplay as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, or any of the primary cast, you still wanted your role to matter. Which tended to create the “too many captains” issue, leaving one person to call all the shots and everyone else essentially playing second fiddle to them. It turned everyone into a Chakotay.

Star Trek Adventures doesn’t fully change that issue within the game, but it does find a creative way around that hurdle. In addition to creating your primary character, the game also encourages players and the gamemaster to generate secondary characters. So, while your dashing Andorian captain might make some of the big calls or beam down to an alien world, your secondary character makes sure you’re still involved when the GM shifts scenes. While running multiple characters in most RPGs makes for lackluster roleplaying opportunities, the exact opposite happens in Star Trek Adventures. The game creates a truly encompassing narrative that enriches every aspect of play and the actions of one of your characters influence everyone else.

Much of that narrative building happens within the deceptively simple character creation process. Like most games, the character creation process starts with simple concepts. Pick a species, an environment and background with which you grew up, a rank, and current assignment. These initial concepts help shape the path you will take during creation. And the game allows and even suggests playing against type. Want to play a Klingon who grew up in a Vulcan embassy? Fine, that might mean you aren’t as emotionally driven as your average Klingon, and it may also influence your view on the concept of honor and warfare as a necessary element to a society. Your rank will also influence how many points, Values, Focuses, and Talents you receive. While this generally means whoever plays a high-ranking character starts with a few more abilities, these abilities will also come with more baggage that can and will come into play in the game proper.

You learn quickly much of the game is story-, not stat-, driven. A prime example is the Values system. Rather than applying numbers to a specific set of skills, Star Trek Adventures presents a list of Values, which are abstract concepts like “Crew over command” or “My ship is my family” that can give you a bonus to an action or way to aid another. The same is said with Focus and Talents, with one playing towards personal interaction and the other often associated with tasks and missions. Again, both are based on concepts like “Cultural Understanding” or “Veteran” and require some creativity by both the player and GM during game play. It’s intimidating at first, especially to those new to roleplaying games. However, after only a few sessions, even the new players in my group are leaning into their characters and applying these elements, reflecting character growth within the show. The Attributes and Discipline statistics are the number-focused element of creation and creates the element of chance in the game.

While the die system is rather simple, it’s also the one place where the game has a small slip-up. To make any check in the game, you add up the corresponding Attribute (from a 1 to a 12) and the Discipline (from a 1 to a 5) and then roll two D20s and try to get under that number. Depending on the difficulty, the GM may require from one to three successes. The player may also have the ship help with certain checks, applying similar ship-based statistics to the roll. The game falters a bit in that many of the checks are based on what skills the GM thinks is needed. Scanning for Romulan life signs in that derelict ship? Well, the GM could ask for a Control+Science roll, but also maybe a Control+Medicine? There are few hard and fast rules on what kind of check is needed and that can leave some characters sticking to the bridge and making the bulk of the checks. The addition of Momentum and Threats does add a nice level of heroics or tension to the check. The players may spend Momentum to add a die to their roll or even expand upon the success of a roll, whereas the GM can burn Threats to add to the dramatic purpose or land a gut punch when appropriate. The Enterprise escaping the Genesis wave, but at the cost of Mr. Spock, is a rather dramatic but perfect example of the Momentum and Threat system in play.

So why would we review an RPG that is already over two years old? For one, Star Trek Adventures didn’t receive the debut fanfare it deserves, being a truly elegant system that finally gets Star Trek correct. But in this age of social distancing with all human interaction happening via video conferencing apps, Star Trek Adventures truly has a moment to shine. While the game has rules for battle maps and miniatures, it thrives within the mind’s eye. With only a couple of D20s, D6s, and readily available PDF copies, it’s easier than ever for you and your friends to boldly go. Even if you’ve never picked up an RPG, Star Trek Adventures will make your journey an easy and enjoyable one. More than that, there is something wholly wonderful and inspiring to watch your friends discuss and debate moral and ethical issues in the grandest of Star Trek traditions. We have always looked to the stars for inspiration and even now, physically isolated, Star Trek Adventures allows us to keep dreaming.

To forever explore the human condition.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aaron Duran is a writer in Portland, OR. He’s the founder and co-host of the popular podcast, Geek in the City Radio. Aaron is an author of multiple comic books for Image Comics and Acclaim Entertainment, including his creator-owned series The Pirates of Kadath, as well as the Forgotten Tyrs young adult horror series of novels. Aaron draws much of his literary inspiration from the creepy folktales told to him by his small but feisty abuela. When he isn’t writing, you can find Aaron in the kitchen, where he spends time coming up with tasty recipes and experimental beer and cider brewing for his incredibly supportive wife to enjoy.

Interview: C.L. Polk

Christian A. Coleman | 2083 words

C.L. Polk is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Witchmark, which was also nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Aurora, and Lambda Literary Awards. It was named one of the best books of 2018 according to NPR, Publishers Weekly, BuzzFeed, the Chicago Review, BookPage, and the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog. Her newest novel, The Midnight Bargain, is upcoming in 2020 from Erehwon Books. She lives in Alberta, Canada.

It’s Bargaining Season in the seaside town of Bendleton, where Beatrice Clayborn has to find a suitor to marry to save her family from mounting debts. But she’s a sorceress who wants to prove herself as a Mage before anyone can propose to her. Her mastery of magic will make marriage unnecessary. However, she finds herself falling in love with the handsome and wealthy Ianthe Lavan while practicing magic in secret with his sister, Ysbeta. How did the premise come together for you?

It started with me simply wanting to write about stuff that I loved and was fascinated by. The story, originally, was just a bunch of things that I liked: extravagant Georgian-era fashions, the London social season, the lingering admiration of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories. It was all very frothy and diverting, but it wasn’t a story until I saw what was happening in the news in the spring of 2019 with state after state passing legislation that technically didn’t violate Roe v. Wade. Then I found the thing that I really needed to turn all these pretty dresses and summoning rituals into a story—a thing that makes me angry.

I wondered if Beatrice’s struggle to free herself from the limited roles and expectations of women were a little bit old-fashioned to be considered feminist. But honestly, the fight continues to this day. Some women may have the ability to pursue a career and raise a family without sacrificing too much, but other women do not, and the fight is not over yet.

In Beatrice’s world, sorceresses who marry are locked into warding collars that cut off their powers to protect their unborn children. Thus, they carry the entire burden of preventing spiritually transmitted infestations during pregnancy. Otherwise, babies become spiritborn, hosts to spirits who take over their bodies after about two years. Men, on the other hand, aren’t inconvenienced at all, except that they have to marry and are privileged to ignore their wives as they practice magic. This looks analogous to today’s fight over reproductive rights.

I think that covers it pretty well. Alongside all the ever more restrictive state legislation over abortion that happened last spring was my discovery of an extensive thread by Gabrielle Blair on Twitter (@designmom), a woman with half a dozen children of her own, spitting fire about reproductive rights (bit.ly/2D5WQZ7). I was sometimes completely floored by the way she laid it all out there, and it informed the way I wrote about how people capable of birthing children with sorcerous gifts were expected to bear children with no consideration given to what they wanted, that all the burden was on them.

One thing that struck me was the difference in attitudes of Beatrice’s country, Chasland, and the Lavans’ country, Llanandras, toward family planning. Llanandras is less restrictive for women than Chasland is. Beatrice finds out that Ianthe and Ysbeta’s mother never had to wear a warding collar full-time after getting married, only during pregnancy. Yet her own mother has to. Since the Lavans are well off, I was wondering if a country with greater wealth allows women more freedom to practice magic. Beatrice’s family, after all, is swimming in debts.

Maybe a little. But it’s not uncommon for any woman of Llanandras to use birth control and plan their pregnancies. It’s not a matter of wealth at all. I think it’s more a reflection of the measure of respect each society had for all of its people, and not just some of them.

Your Kingston Cycle books are set in a world reminiscent of Edwardian England. In The Midnight Bargain, you turn to Regency England for aesthetic inspiration. What drew you to write Beatrice’s story in this era?

The simplest reason ever—the fashion and the magic. I wanted to write a story where I got to describe big, extravagant dresses. Then I started thinking about what kind of worldbuilding I would need to make those dresses possible, and started eliminating things I didn’t want. I didn’t want Imperialist violence or colonization, so I decided that the people of this world respected each other as people, respected the sovereignty of their own nations, and just wanted to know if you had any cool stuff to trade.

The magic was kind of the same thing. In the Kingston Cycle, magic is the act of imposing your will on reality directly. This time around, I wanted something more ceremonial, more complicated and dependent on making a deal with an entity that can impose its will on reality. I thought about the European tradition of high ceremonial magic, did a little digging backwards into the traditions they borrowed from, and based my decisions on that.

Doing away with Imperialist violence and colonization made for an inclusive approach to make this society multicultural. This is probably the most diverse novel situated in this time period I’ve seen. Typically, you read Jane Austen, take what you’re taught about English society from that era as a given, and imagine a pretty homogeneous population.

I think it’s a natural result of deciding that I wasn’t interested in writing stories where people sailed off to distant countries, possessed that nation with violence, exploited its people and resources, and basically looted that land dry. And so I thought: “What do you get if you don’t do that?”

The answer is a world of nations that trade with each other. Chasland is a little bit behind but catching up technologically with nations that are happy to share their knowledge and innovations. There’s a lot of cultural exchange, and people are better educated about each other’s nations and cultures than a world that just unthinkingly adopts the behavior and beliefs that justify imperialism and colonialism. I wanted a country that valued people from all over the world as citizens and neighbors, so I just wrote that.

What kind of research went into creating this historically flavored worldbuilding? So many great details made me feel like I was there: the elderflower punch at the parties, the lavish flowers in the Lavans’ garden, to name a few . . .

I relied on sources on the Internet and took out a few books in libraries, and convinced friends with access to academic journals to smuggle me an article or two. I had already done a lot of the research because of my interest in historical romances, fashion history, the western occult tradition, the industrial revolution, and popular novels of the time. There were a number of nineteenth-century novels that were fascinated by the lifestyles and activities of the wealthy that haven’t the same prominence of, say, Jane Austen’s work. There are Regency reenactors who host dances today. If you’re actually writing historical England, you can look up the Hansard and read the notes of parliamentary activities on any given date right online. There’s a ton of information out there for the curious.

Nadi, the luck spirit that Beatrice summons throughout the novel, becomes her impish sidekick character. Is this spirit based on one you came across in your research?

There are familiar spirits and demons and patron devils and all sorts of spirits present in the manuals and legends of European magic and witchcraft. I don’t think any one of those spirits was a particularly strong influence. I let myself decide what I wanted the orders of spirits to be like. I knew they wanted the experience of the physical world. I knew they were amoral and didn’t really have a conscience. And I knew they would be charming but dangerous. I put all that together—and then Nadi showed up and started stealing the show.

She sure did! She starts stealing the show as early as the Assembly Dance scene where Beatrice has her first kiss with Ianthe. I read that one of your favorite tropes is the first dance of the springtime social season of London. Tell us a little about what you like about it.

The First Dance is my favorite historical romance trope. A dance is the inciting incident and meet cute/meet ugly of Pride and Prejudice. Dances were a popular social mixer, and with the legend of Wednesday night dances at Almack’s and the popularity of dances at the Bath Assembly rooms in the Georgian era, starting bargaining season with a dance was practically demanded.

Other occasions didn’t offer anywhere near as many opportunities for the young people looking for spouses to mix together without the rules and etiquette surrounding introductions. And if you didn’t know enough people to start mixing, there were organizers who could introduce you to dance partners so you could meet new people.

The whole season is glamorous but ultimately socially demanding. It wasn’t all a bunch of happy young gentry getting along nicely. Beatrice comes very close to complete social failure at the Assembly Dance. She should have danced her little feet off and talked to a hundred people. She actually did it all wrong.

She did it all wrong, but with Nadi’s help, she began her friendship with Ysbeta as well as stealing a kiss with Ianthe. At first, I expected Beatrice and Ysbeta to become rivals because they’re after the same grimoire when they first meet in the bookstore at the start of the novel, and Ysbeta swindles it from her. But then they become allies precisely because they want the same thing—to prove themselves as Mages. Their friendship was a pleasant surprise. Was that intentional, to flip that potential rivalry into friendship?

I never once thought of Beatrice and Ysbeta being rivals for the whole book. That would be a very different story, I think, and it would be a story where the ending wouldn’t be a happy one. Besides, why wouldn’t they become friends? They share a common interest, they can help each other achieve what they want, they feel for each other’s situation. They need each other in order to succeed and then they wind up genuinely liking each other. And I love stories about ride-or-die friends.

In anticipation of the release of The Midnight Bargain, a Choose Your Own Adventure minigame went live online to introduce people to the world of Bendleton (bit.ly/3hAwspb). How did you and the team at Erewhon Books come up with this? That’s so cool!

I was just messing around with Twine. I wanted to figure something out about interactive story structure and so I downloaded Twine and said, “Hmm. What should I write about?” and the idea of an interactive prologue that illustrates how hollow and illusionary Beatrice’s choices are just happened. I thought, “Oh, this is neat,” and showed my editor, my agent, and my publicist, and they thought it was great, so we decided to share it with everyone.

This being your third published novel, have you found more resistance to centering romance in genre from the publishing side rather than from readers?

Neither, actually. My publishers have been really excited about my romance-centered stories and in bringing them to readers who enjoy the melding of the fantasy and romance genres. I have a lot of fun writing them, and I’m glad there are readers out there who enjoy them. And I hope I can continue playing around with stories that balance both genres and continue bringing them to bookshelves.

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: Todd McAulty

Laurel Amberdine | 679 words

Where does “The Ambient Intelligence” fit with your novels The Robots of Gotham and The Ghosts of Navy Pier?

“The Ambient Intelligence” occurs about two months after the events of The Robots of Gotham, but isn’t really connected to it, other than the fact that it shares a setting (and two characters).

It’s a self-contained tale of what happens when Zircon Border, a robot tasked with security at a hotel in downtown Chicago, asks his friend Barry Simcoe for help tracking down and disabling a sixty-ton killer robot hiding in a sunken shipwreck in Lake Michigan. It’s sort of a Lethal Weapon buddy comedy, if the Mel Gibson character were a robot.

In fact, I wanted to title it “Sixty-Ton Killer Robot,” but John Joseph Adams wouldn’t let me, because he’s all serious and editor-y. At least if the story flops, now I have a convenient scapegoat.

As a (former) Chicagoan I appreciated the setting, though it’s worrying how much I enjoy seeing Chicago destroyed in science fiction! In any case, what influenced your choice of setting? Has the city given you any surprises as you bring it into your fictional future?

Why is it so cool to blow Chicago up? I don’t know, it just is. This city is so filled with delicious nuggets of history and really interesting places. I love to put those places in my stories. And then blow them up.

Shortly after I moved here, a disaster occurred that gave me a fascinating window into Chicago history—the Great Chicago Flood (bit.ly/2QDKRoJ) of 1992. Workers were driving pilings into the Chicago River when a mysterious whirlpool formed right in the middle of the river. People gathered around to watch and wonder. What the heck was causing it?

They found out the next day when the same folks showed up for work in the Loop, and discovered their buildings were flooded and without power. The piling had breached an abandoned coal tunnel, part of an extensive network from the 1800s that ran for miles, connecting dozens of buildings. The city had to fix the breach and pump out 250 million gallons of water.

How could a major city have a hundred-year-old tunnel network running eighty feet under the surface, connecting its most famous buildings, yet virtually forgotten? I don’t know, but Chicago does. In fact, the coal tunnels are just one of several sets of ancient passages under Chicago—including old cable car, subway, and abandoned freight tunnels that interconnect in an unmapped maze deep underground.

I couldn’t resist putting that in my novel, of course. The Robots of Gotham includes a hidden group of robots under the city, because what’s the next coolest thing you can put in an abandoned tunnel, besides 250 million gallons of running water? A secret robot colony, naturally.

Do you consider yourself more of a short story writer or a novelist, or does that distinction not matter much to you? What is different in how you approach writing those formats?

I’m still more of a short story writer, I think. I wrote the first draft of The Robots of Gotham as a group of short stories with a shared setting. Later drafts expanded certain storylines and let others wither, which is what you have to do when you’re trying to stitch together a cohesive narrative at length.

This approach has its flaws. My next book, The Ghosts of Navy Pier, I’m approaching with much more of a plan, and much less of an episodic structure. So far it’s working out well.

What are you doing to keep busy (and sane) nowadays?

Playing a lot of video games, and reading a lot of classic SF, like Clifford D. Simak and Isaac Asimov. They’re two writers who keep me grounded.

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: P H Lee

Alex Puncekar | 1173 words

What was the inspiration behind this story?

This story comes out of two sources, one of which is that I’m absolutely obsessed with vampires (like so many people) and I think that the vast majority of cultural commentary on vampires gets them completely wrong, mostly because it’s focused on whether vampires are “over” (they’re not) and not on analyzing the emotional and narrative needs vampire stories are meeting for their readership.

The second was studying turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Hungary, in an effort to understand my grandmother’s life and circumstances. While doing that research, I began to realize what an amazing time the late nineteenth century was for Hungary, which is interestingly the same time that the novel Dracula was published.

A big part of the horror of Dracula for its original audience is that it’s “East invades West.” Dracula is this foreign invader who comes to conquer England in a way that mirrors what England had been doing to the rest of the world. But also Dracula is this ancient, pre-modern feudal monstrosity, invading a modern, bright, rationalized England that is not prepared for him. And this story is being written at exactly the same time that Hungary is industrializing and the dark feudal world portrayed in Dracula is vanishing forever, which is just fascinating timing and probably not coincidental.

I thought it would be interesting to locate that modernism vs. feudalism conflict within Hungary itself, to center the Hungarian experience rather than the English one. That conflict between modernity and feudalism, which is still playing out on a global level, is often part of the fantasy genre, albeit usually not from a side that is critical of feudalism. So the story is also an opportunity to add my thoughts into the wider genre conversation.

As an aside, you’ll notice that I talk about vampires both as a metaphor for feudalism and as a metaphor for exploitative personal relationships. They’re both, because feudalism is nothing more than exploitative interpersonal relationships empowered to the point where they form the basis of government.

We (myself included) love vampires. What do you think draws us to vampire hunters as well, to the Van Helsings and the Trevor Belmonts of the world? What’s so special about the relationship between the two, especially between your vampire and hero?

Vampires, to me, represent abusive and exploitative relationships, both the allure of them and also the manipulations that entrap us in them. Vampire hunters appeal because they cut through that tangle of justifications and half-truths and false obligations with a very simple “no, this is just wrong and it needs to stop.” That sort of moral clarity is a very compelling fantasy, particularly when you’re bogged down in toxic relationships yourself.

I think that, to the vampire, the hero and he are cut from the same cloth: misunderstood rescuers who make great sacrifices to save those who cannot save themselves, and yet are ultimately damned for it. He wants them to have a relationship, any relationship, because that way the hero can become ensnared in complex mutual obligations just like the villagers (and just like him.)

But to the hero, they have no more relationship than vermin and exterminator: he just wants to finish the job, get paid, and go home to his boyfriend.

“The village of Kovácspéter was plagued by a vampire, which was increasingly embarrassing” is such a killer opening. It’s one of those lines that immediately sets the tone for the story. I don’t have a question here, I just really liked the line.

Thank you!

Could you talk a little bit about the frame story narrative happening between the vampire and the hero? It’s such a fascinating way of seeing the antagonist justify his actions, while also seeing things from the side of the villagers. What was your thought process behind going into the vampire’s POV so he could tell his story?

The vampire is making a gambit to survive, and one that has likely worked for him before. The hero is dangerous to the vampire because the hero is an outsider and not connected to the obligations and relationships that the vampire uses to maintain his power and murder hundreds of young women. The vampire has no power over the hero, but if the vampire can establish some tie between them, some relationship, or even just some misbegotten sympathy, then the vampire can leverage that to gain control over him and thus survive.

Although this particular trope doesn’t appear in this story, I’ve always thought that this is why vampires want to be invited in: by inviting them, you create a relationship, which they can then use to control you.

Simultaneously, the vampire is making an argument for his own existence: that the murders he’s committing aren’t his fault, not really, and anyway he deserves to exist regardless. To anyone who’s ever been in an abusive or exploitative relationship, this is a really familiar refrain and one that can be very hard to argue with. These relationships trap us because we are sympathetic to the other party and because we want the relationship to continue. We do feel sympathetic to the vampire, reading his story. He was a jerk, but he was also trying to help. Or at least he is willing to make the case that he was trying to help.

But also none of that matters. The redemptive clarity of the hero is that he’s an outsider to both the culture and the community, and as an outsider can simply say “this is wrong” and take steps to end it. The determination of fault, the web of mutual obligations, the weight of habit and tradition are all less important than simply causing the murders to stop, which he does quite effectively not by winning the argument, but by killing the vampire.

Do you have any other projects coming out soon that you can talk about? Read/watch/play/listen to anything good lately?

I have a series of three (and counting) stories coming out in Lightspeed called Tales from the Great Sweet Sea, which are a set of traditional fairy tales from a fantasy world. I have loved fairy tales in all their versions since I was a young child, and it’s been great fun to dig into the building blocks of those stories and assemble entirely new works out of them.

Also, I’d love to introduce you to the writing of Tamara Jerée, whose recent story Our Souls to the Moon in Strange Horizons is beautiful and lyrical and astonishing. And there’s more to come. I don’t think that there’s any writer in the world right now that I’m more excited about than Tamara.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar is a writer, game designer, and editorial assistant for both Lightspeed and Nightmare. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine. He lives in Cinncinati, Ohio. Follow him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Author Spotlight: Jenny Rae Rappaport

Jude Griffin | 967 words

What’s better than a “tale of galactic war and love”? How did this story come about?

This is my “I got angry about Star Wars” story. I saw The Rise of Skywalker last December, and I was so annoyed with the movie, particularly with how it handled the romance between Kylo Ren and Rey. I like romances; I like happy endings. And the movie didn’t deliver that for me at all. So, I ended up writing an essay on Medium about how the movie could have done that better, which helped for a few days, but then I realized that I was angry still. (essay link: bit.ly/2YLzway)

At the same time, I saw Greta Gerwig’s version of Little Women, and there’s this great speech in there that Amy gives (speech link: youtu.be/i10aNmmXYsQ) all about how marriage, particularly for women, is an economic proposition. I’m not sure that I entirely agree with the character that “we have some power over who we love,” but the speech really resonated with me.

A few days later, the speech in the movie and my anger about Star Wars collided, and I ended up deciding that I was going to write my own galactic love story.

Can you talk about how you opened and closed this story?

I actually started with the frame story about the Lovers. I wanted it to be almost myth-like; about these larger-than-life figures, and everyone in the galaxy knows the story and it’s just one of those background elements of life that’s always been there.

When I started writing the story, I thought it was going to be just about Cali and Jere’s romance, and how it contrasted with the frame story in certain ways. But then I got part of the way through writing it, and I realized that I was writing a story that had three separate love stories in it: the mythical one, Cali and Jere and Arvin’s, and Hanna and Vela’s. And that the story of how these two women fell in love with each other—because of the connection their children had—and how they would never have met otherwise was the one that I was really telling.

As for the closing of the story, I like taking things in a circular manner. Since it started with a romance, it made sense to end with one. For the final scene in the hospital room, it was one of the rare endings that I realized halfway through writing; most of the time I don’t know what the ending of a story is until I get there. I knew what I was writing towards, which was an interesting change of pace.

What did you end up taking out of the story?

Pretty much nothing. I’m a picky writer in certain ways—if something doesn’t sound right to me, it’s hard for me to move forward in a narrative until I fix it. As a result, I tend to write pretty clean first drafts because I’m going back and forth and editing them on a sentence-level as I write them. I actually added a tiny bit more description into the story, but that was it.

What are some story tropes that make your Top Ten Writing Peeves?

I don’t have any Top Ten Writing Peeves about that. I like story tropes; I think it’s one of the most fun things that you can do as a writer, taking an existing trope and turning it upside down into something new. We all gravitate towards certain stories and character archetypes because they have emotional resonance for us.

When I went to the Odyssey Writing Workshop, one of the things we talked about was that you can have a story that has a normal frog in a strange garden or you can have a strange frog in a normal garden, but it’s almost impossible to have a strange frog in a strange garden, because there’s nothing there to ground the reader. And that’s what story tropes do—they ground readers in the familiar, and let the author introduce strangeness without confusion. I’ve been writing a lot of fairy tale retellings lately, and so, I’ve been having fun playing with all of this.

How has the pandemic impacted your writing and writing life? Any surprises?

I have three children under the age of ten, so my pandemic has been a crash course in remote learning and figuring out how to keep everyone happy when there’s nowhere that you can go. We’ve been exceedingly cautious as a family, so there’s been a lot of social isolation. The first few months of the pandemic, I ended up getting almost no writing done; I couldn’t concentrate enough on it in the scraps of time that I was able to find. Things got better in June, as the school year started to wind down, and I’ve been managing to do more writing.

I’m one of those writers who finds elements of their world showing up in their stories, because that’s one of the ways I process things. I have a tiny story that I wrote this spring, which started as a pandemic/alien invasion story, but is actually about a man grieving after his wife’s death. I’ve got another one half-started about remote learning and being a parent on Mars that I’ll get around to finishing eventually.

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: Naomi Kanakia

Gordon B. White | 1164 words

In the same way that every quest—online or not—has a beginning, could you take us back to the inspiration for this story? In particular, what drew you to exploring these themes of identity through the technological filter of an older, slightly outdated video game?

The story has many inspirations! The most proximate one is that I got frustrated with all the stories in prominent SFF magazines that’re heavy on lyricism and sentiment but don’t have much new to say. I was like, god, this is so simple: I am just gonna tell a mildly fantastic story in a singing lilt, and I’ll make it be about something really sentimental. Of course, ultimately the story didn’t end up being particularly lyrical—it’s just not my writing style—and although it does verge on the sentimental, I hope it’s not cheap.

As for the inspirations that fed into the story. Well . . . I played Everquest—a first-generation MMORPG—for a few years when I was in middle school and high school. And over the course of that time the game declined and became virtually empty, so that it started to feel like the few remaining players were the survivors of some apocalypse. Needless to say, I always played female characters, and I always maintained the illusion rigorously, insisting to all my online friends that, unlike all those other woman characters that were played by dudes, I was an “actual” woman. Oftentimes they were like, “Oh, of course, we knew that. We could tell.” Which would give me some very warm and fuzzy feelings. Although this isn’t my usual sort of story, it definitely tapped into something, and I’m pleased that I wrote it.

One element that comes through in this story is the power of names. It seems to be not merely a question of male or female—Gopal or Gayatri—but the choice seems to have the potential to hold other connotations and resonances, even if the characters aren’t consciously aware of it. Can you talk a little about that?

I don’t know. I’m still sorting out the naming thing myself. In the trans community, names have a totemistic feel. Oftentimes your name is the first thing you change—the first overt affirmation of your gender. To be honest, the whole thing is a little anglocentric. My birth name, Rahul, is a highly gendered name: in India, it would immediately be recognized as a male name. But in America, it doesn’t convey the same connotations.

It took me a long time to find a new name—it didn’t seem worthwhile to choose one that wouldn’t immediately be recognized as female, but at the same time I felt conflicted about giving up my Indian-ness. For this reason, half the Indian girls in America are named Tara, Maya, Nikita, Rita, or one of the handful of other Indian names that are recognizable female to white peoples’ ears. Anyway, it’s not important, and it has nothing to do with the story, but that’s my answer to the question!

There’s an interesting parallel in the way that the stories Gayatri participates in creating online have an almost mythical feel to them. From a far enough remove, a story about “Tak’s midnight raid across the Heavens, when he aggro’ed the Sky-King” might seem as if it fits alongside “Amba, the princess who Bishma rejected, and who turned herself into a man so she could kill the man who’d humiliated her.” However, even then, the fluid boundaries of identity that are acceptable in one aren’t necessarily in the other. Do you see a similarity between the myths collectively created through shared experiences in games and those that are passed down through generations? What kind of divide do you see?

Sure. I think there’s myth-making in games. I mean people still remember that guy who joined the guild in EVE Online and worked his way into the highest echelons so he could get access to their vault and steal everything they had. Or the person in Ultima Online who killed the CEO’s avatar, Lord British. Or, in Everquest, the team of players who killed the Sleeper, who was designed to be an unkillable monster. These stories are very mythic in character, and they all share one characteristic: they transgress the rules of the game. They’re about doing things you’re not supposed to do. You cannot become a myth by simply playing the game and doing the quests and collecting your rewards. You need to challenge the Gods (i.e. the designer).

In the end, there’s a fissure and a split more than there is a transformation—Gayatri goes on and Gopal does not. The split is perhaps not perfect, and it’s clearly finite, but it lets some part of our main character go on, rather than entirely waste away. Do you see a point in Gopal’s path things could have turned out differently, or were circumstances such that this ending split was inevitable? Is the future reconciliation between Gayatri and Gopal’s mother the best that could have happened given the characters?

I just added the reconciliation to make the story pay off better! Originally it wasn’t in there, and I’m still not sure it’s necessary. I always thought it was enough that Gayatri simply got to exist, even if it was only in an abbreviated form.

 Finally, what’s coming up next for you? In addition to your concrete plans or publications, are there any new and still uncharted areas of the map that you’re eager to explore?

Well, in addition to science fiction and fantasy, I write contemporary young adult novels. My second novel, We Are Totally Normal, just came out. It’s the story of a bro-y dude who hooks up with his nerdy male friend and starts to wonder if he might be gay. It’s provoked somewhat mixed reactions from the YA readership, which I think prefers its queer stories to be a little more straightforward. This has inspired me to look for a readership elsewhere. I have a contemporary literary novel (for adults) entitled The Lonely Years, that’s about a trans woman who’s always idealized female friendship but who wonders if maybe there’s something ineluctably creepy and male about herself that means she’s not a “real” woman, and I’m currently querying agents for it, so who knows? I’ve also written a contemporary thriller (tentatively entitled Death Trap) about a sexy trans woman assassin who runs foul of a league of woman assassins that’re mad at her for being just so darn sexy (they think she’s giving female assassins a bad name).

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Gordon B. White is the author of the collection As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions (Trepidatio Publishing 2020). A graduate of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, Gordon’s stories have appeared in dozens of venues, including The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 12 and the Bram Stoker Award® winning anthology Borderlands 6. He also contributes reviews and interviews to outlets including Nightmare, Lightspeed, Hellnotes, and The Outer Dark podcast. You can find him online at gordonbwhite.com.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 233 words

Coming up in November, in Lightspeed . . .

We’re breaking with our usual schedule to serialize a novelette called “Schrödinger’s Catastrophe” by Gene Doucette. You won’t want to miss either installment! We also have SF reprints by Dominica Phetteplace (“Seven Ways to Fall in Love with an Astronaut”) and Jake Kerr (“Three Speeches About Billy Granger”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kat Howard (“The Lachrymist”) and Rati Mehrotra (“Magnificent Maurice, or the Flowers of Immortality”), and fantasy reprints by Molly Tanzer (“Le Cygne Baiseur”) and Alberto Yáñez (“Burn the Ships”).

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 Caitlín R. Kiernan. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Andrew Dana Hudson and C.Y. Ballard, Phoebe Barton, Ashok K. Banker, Lizz Huerta, and An Owomoyela.

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

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

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

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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 (recently revived, other) 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.