TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 136, September 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: September 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

Judi
Adam-Troy Castro

Where You Left Me
Thomas Ha

Mister Dawn, How Can You Be So Cruel?
Violet Allen

The Revolution Will Not Be Served with Fries
Meg Elison

FANTASY

Fanspell: Flowers in Spring (RobYung, NSFW)
Anya Ow

Invasive Species and their Habitats
Alexander Weinstein

Sía
Lizz Huerta

It Begins to Snow
Adam R. Shannon

EXCERPTS

You Sexy Thing
Cat Rambo

NONFICTION

Book Review: Weird Women II, edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger
LaShawn M. Wanak

Book Review: The Actual Star, by Monica Byrne
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: No Gods, No Monsters, by Cadwell Turnbull
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Anya Ow

Thomas Ha

Lizz Huerta

Meg Elison

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

© 2021 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: September 2021

John Joseph Adams | 251 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 136th issue!

What if magic was real and you could talk about it on the internet? This month, our first fantasy short—“Fanspell: Flowers in Spring (RobYung, NSFW),” by Anya Ow—asks just this. It also explores the real-life effects of social media, a topic that’s never been more timely. Lizz Huerta’s new short “Sía” blends humor and heartbreak in a tale about a woman who finds unexpected truths when she attends a New Age spiritual workshop. “It Begins to Snow,” our fantasy flash piece from Adam R. Shannon, is a tiny meditation on relationships, set on the background of apocalypse. Our reprint this month is “Invasive Species and Their Habitats,” by Alexander Weinstein.

On the science fictional side of the issue, Adam-Troy Castro brings us a beautiful elegy for a lost love in his new flash story “Judi.” Thomas Ha takes us to a distant and dangerous world in “Where You Left Me.” It’s a story of space exploration and drug addiction gone horribly awry. Meg Elison tackles worker exploitation in her new story “The Revolution Will Not Be Served with Fries.” We also have a reprint from Violet Allen (“Mister Dawn, How Can You Be So Cruel?”).

Don’t miss author spotlights with this month’s fiction writers, and of course the book review team has been busy reading new releases. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from Cat Rambo’s new novel You Sexy Thing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include A People’s Future of the United States, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and the three volumes of The Dystopia 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 Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Judi

Adam-Troy Castro | 1181 words

She sank to the ground on a world without name.

We were far from home, farther than we had ever gone, maybe farther than anyone had ever gone. It was so far away, or at least so strange for some undefinable local cause, that we could have filled volumes with all the alterations in the way things worked; in the ways that light worked, in the way that time worked, in the way that mass worked. We spoke of bringing back word to the learned of my world and hers. We talked of making our names.

We were taking a stroll not far from our ship when she sat down and died.

I remember only that last look she gave me. It was not horror. It was not joy. It was not reassurance, and oh, how I wish it was. It was not even the look I had come to treasure and that I thought I would always have, love. It was astonishment. It was as if she had seen something that I had not, something that rendered all persistence at life futile.

She sat down and she was gone, in a place where a white plain met a black sky.

I could not stay with her and I could not take her with me, not in any way that mattered.

So I returned to the ship and set a course for home, knowing that it too was no longer there, not if she could not be part of it.

I left that white world behind, never to speak of it again.

I did not navigate. The ship had a course to follow. It might or not be the right direction, but with her gone there was no itinerary, no purpose in going anywhere at all. It was just movement. The trip out had been filled with possibility. The trip back was only negation. I slept when I could. I woke when I had to. I ate because my body demanded it. I found no pleasure, or flavor. I suspected that I never would again.

Once, I ordered the hull to go transparent because I yearned to see the stars. I didn’t know the coordinates when I did, and did not bother to record them. It was a place like so many other places, between systems, far from any place where humanity or the creatures who rival humanity, breathe air and live what lives creation sees fit to give them. There were countless bright specks of light, pinpricks in the cold and the dark, and I knew that once upon a time in the recent past she and I would have stood here together, enthralled, thinking of all those worlds, and all the wonders they held within their bubbles of atmosphere; all those civilizations, those millennia of history, those unsuspected creatures and those treasures in coin unknown to us; and once we would have drawn closer, comforting each other with gentle hopeful lies of how we would live to see them all. The wonder I would have felt, not so long ago, was gone. I was not a creature of the stars, now. I was rather a creature of the vacuum now, of the void that could not support a life worth living.

I made the hull opaque again and restored full speed.

I let the ship make all the decisions. My only command was that it leave her behind.

I did not pay attention to where it took me.

It retraced our trip out.

It passed the ten thousand worlds that made up human space.

It passed the worlds that had names.

It passed the worlds that had been mapped but had not been visited.

It passed the worlds that were home to others, who may have looked up and wondered about the purpose and destination of this one particular speck of light, passing through the darkness.

It passed the worlds ruined by past cataclysms.

It passed through regions where there were no worlds.

It passed through stark emptiness.

By that time I had long since lost even academic curiosity about the details, no interest in enduring the pointless voyage, and so put myself to sleep for as long as I could, suppressing dreams.

It was not life.

It was only the oblivion I wanted.

I do not know how long I slept. Centuries. Millennia. Eons. The ship could keep me alive. It just could not make what life it forced into me worth living. This was not a problem because I refused to let the details in.

I could have killed myself. But it was not what I wanted. There is a difference between wanting to die and not having a reason to live. I did not want to pilot the ship into some raging sun, and for its fires to reduce me to my component atoms. That was not me. But I did not want to make planetfall, did not want to see another face, whether human or creature that had different features I might not recognize as a face. I did want this to be over. But I would not exert the effort to finish it.

Then the alarm woke me.

The ship told me that it had found a place to land and that I had to go outside.

I rose and put on my suit and stepped out onto the surface of another alien world, one not at all special. The stars in its sky fit no recognizable patterns, not to these human eyes; maybe the ship could have used them to navigate back to some world where people still congregated, but as the dust crunched beneath my boots I preferred to think that I had traveled beyond its ability to map, or been in flight so long that I was now the last human being, anywhere; as alone in the universe in fact as I had felt since the moment since she first sank to the chalky dust.

It was a lifeless and airless world, with nothing of note between me and the horizon. There was nothing to see here and would not be, no matter how far I marched, how carefully I mapped. It was just a cold and silent rock, like the one I had in my chest. It was an unimaginable distance from the place where she had died; one even farther away from familiar places than that lonely world, farther away than we had ever gone, and possibly further away than anyone had ever gone. And yet there was nothing at all exotic about it. It was just a place, like any other place.

I could not think of any reason why my ship would have brought me here, let alone urge me to stand on this earth, beneath these pitiless stars.

I just wanted to break, the irrevocable kind of break, that admitted no possibility of unwanted repair.

And that’s when I knew that it had been useless to flee.

There was nowhere I could go, anywhere, that could be far enough to leave her behind.

©2021 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Where You Left Me

Thomas Ha | 6248 words

The best way to hide a red mouth is to know exactly when your gums start to bleed. If you check your teeth every so often with a quick swipe of the tongue, and you get a bit of that saltiness, you’ll learn to take a swig from a canteen and rinse before anyone else notices. The weeps are a little harder. Most of us wear tinted goggles when we ride at the barrier. They keep solar glare low, of course, but they also let you feel when your tear ducts leak, because the blood collects at the bottom of the rims. That and a dark handkerchief, and you can clean yourself up as needed, no problem. As for the tremors, everyone has a different approach. I’ve heard some folks stick their hands in their pockets, others gesture wildly so people don’t focus on the shaking.

But no matter how well you hide the signs, there’ll never be an easy way to get rid of the bottles. They clink against your wedding ring when you hold one in your hand, clatter against each other when you store them in your rucksack. You can’t pile them in with the refuse, because then they’re out there for the whole world to see. Instead, you’ll start to hide them—empties, half-empties—in closets, on high shelves, so many you’ll forget and sometimes surprise yourself, when you’re looking for a place to put away another.

The day your mother almost caught me, I was burying bottles behind the barn. I heard her calling from the porch, and I covered the hole with dirt. She didn’t ask what I was doing, but I told her I was evening out a patch that wasn’t level.

“You didn’t come home last night,” she said, and I smiled with a closed mouth, not knowing how my gums looked just then.

“Patrol ended late, so I slept at the barrier house.”

She shielded her eyes from the creeping sunrise and tilted her head the way she did whenever she was troubled. “I know you’re on duty until the end of the week, but even just that hour before bed means a lot to Jojo if you can make it. He misses his daddy.”

My head felt swollen and ready to burst, and I could barely hold my back straight, so I wasn’t going to argue. I gave a small nod and said I’d try my best.

“Have you . . .” your mother trailed off, and for a second I thought she’d seen a glint of one of the bottles in the dirt and was going to ask about them. “Have you heard about any incursions?”

“What?” I laughed, as relieved as I was confused by the question. “Not for months now. Why?”

“Jojo couldn’t sleep because he thought something got in the barn. Said he heard hissing, and it kept him up half the night, poor guy.”

“Well . . .” I looked over at the barn and swallowed. “Nothing there this morning. And nobody’s getting past the barrier while we’re out there, you can tell him that.”

Your mother tilted her head again, and, if she was going to say something else, she decided not to bother. Instead, she asked if I’d stay for breakfast. I told her I couldn’t, that I was just stopping by for a few things before the day shift started, and she walked me to my bike and waited while I put on my goggles and jacket.

“You be safe out there,” she said.

I gave another closed-mouth smile, then revved and pulled the bike off to the road, waving over my shoulder as I sped off toward the dust plains.

The ride out past the neighboring farms gave me time to clear my head, and the cool rush of air helped soothe some of the pounding behind my eyes. By the time I reached the gateway, Danny was already leaning on his bike and ready for the day. I pulled in my cycle real close, letting it hover next to his.

“Where’s Cooper?” I unlocked the control panel and brushed the dirt off of the keypad.

“He wasn’t feeling too hot after last night. Think he’s sitting out a shift.”

“So they’re letting us two-man it?” After I punched in our passcode, the metal doors jerked apart at an uneven pace, rattling over the grit and gravel in the barrier tracks.

“They don’t give a shit.” Danny spat, and I saw red hit the dirt. He drove ahead, floating through the threshold, and I followed, keeping an eye on the doors in my mirrors until the gateway was shut again behind us.

I’m sure they’ve told you this in school, but the sky out there is smokier and greener than it is in the settlement, without the filter of the barrier to give it that bluish hue. Out in the uncovered lunar territory, it’s more swirls of white over a pale emerald, and it’s not half bad scenery when you’re patrolling, watching the vapors collect along the aretes and form spiral patterns as they’re blown about by belching geysers.

A few hours went by that morning before we finally pulled over, and Danny waved his arms and pointed to an outcrop a few miles away. I squinted until I saw what he did, the clew, hovering near a rock formation, like a massive sphere of darkness that always reminded me of dangling fruit. We assembled our long guns, and Danny was already in the dirt, lining up his scope and peering out at the cluster before I was close to done.

I watched him grab a glistening brown bottle from his pack, twist the cap off, and take a deep swallow. He held it out to me, but I declined. I’ve heard that it’s important to set boundaries when it comes to plasma, and one of mine was that I didn’t take any before the afternoon. Danny knew that, of course, but he always liked to push me now and again, for his own amusement, I think.

“Okay,” he chuckled. “Well, it’ll be here when you need it.” He set its sweaty glass body on the ground between us. “You want the first shots?”

“Sure,” I whispered as I peered through the scope. I could just barely see the enlarged image of the swimming skyworms—what your textbooks probably call glyconids—that made up the clew, slithering around each other like little sine waves and using the skin flaps on their sides to glide on the gusts and maneuver on the gas streams.

My shots rang out over the flatland, and I saw one or two worms tumble to the dirt. But after I fired a few more times, they started to catch on. The dark sphere of the clew opened up with little holes as they dodged, anticipating the bullets. Their foresight, what the docs at the front used to call prolepsis, always made it hard to get the jump on them after they figured out where the fire was coming from. And I was already too sluggish and sloppy to hope to get more than just a couple.

“My turn.” Danny snuggled up to his rifle with a giddiness that meant he already felt the plasma pumping in his veins. He fired in rapid bursts, each bullet blasting parts off a skyworm here or there, one after another. Their wailing in the distance was quiet, but I could see them rain to the ground as Danny tore through clusters of them, like he was shredding a paper target. The clew started unraveling as the worms changed formation, but they still managed to weave around a few of Danny’s shots and hold their position.

“Come on,” Danny kept his eye on his scope and tapped the bottle in the dirt. “I could use the help. And it’s almost noon anyhow.”

He was right. The sun was almost overhead, and with the size and distance of the clew, it’d be risky to let him try and pick them off himself. I could keep stumbling my way through without the plasma, or I could take it and make myself useful. It wasn’t quite breaking the rules, in my mind—more like bending them to meet the moment.

The first sip I took that morning, like all of them, was crisp and bitter; my eyes and throat got that pleasant warmth the plasma brings, and I could feel my arms relaxing as it spread through my body.

I put my eye to the scope and started firing off rounds again, but this time, I had that certainty of where things were without having to think too carefully. I could anticipate the movement of the world, how the vapors would form and the dirt would shift from the wind. It’s hard to describe to someone who’s never had plasma before, but for a brief second, it’s like you see the ghost of possibilities all at once, until they intertwine and focus, and you’re left with the curve of the most probable path, the one you’re almost certain is going to unfold. Just like you always know where to put your mitt when I throw you the ball, you know? When I have plasma, I’m ready for whatever comes at me.

I focused on the clew and followed a fat worm, at least twenty feet long. It slinked its way to the edge of the group, and, though I could sense that it might dive, I knew it was going to leap sideways instead, so I shifted at the last second when I pulled the trigger. I saw the bright red splatter like a wet firework as its head exploded.

We were on even footing with the worms now, predicting their predictions and adjusting our shots. Danny and I must have reloaded a half dozen times, and I didn’t even notice how much time had passed, or that I had reached over and taken a few more sips.

We were making good headway, with the clew beginning to dissipate, when I saw a shape hidden in the writhing mass, longer and larger than most.

“King!” I yelled at Danny, and I swear that worm turned its giant, red eye toward me. I jerked away from my scope, and when I looked again, the King had burrowed into the ground, gone as quickly as it had come.

I’ve probably told you a hundred times, but Kings are a lot smarter than regular skyworms. They understand that a shot from us can’t be probable if it becomes impossible. So if the Kings sense things are turning, they’ll disappear out of range faster than we can fire at them. That’s, of course, better than the alternative. If they ever charge, then you know, that they know, that your odds aren’t good. I’ve seen it go both ways on the front, and that day we just happened to get lucky.

“Guess he didn’t want a fight,” Danny laughed.

“Guess so.”

I wiped the sweat from my forehead and kept on firing. Eventually, the rest of the clew broke apart, and the skyworms flew off in a hundred different directions. They’d probably regroup in a few hours at another hotspot where they could feed on gasses, but they’d go farther away from the settlement since we’d done our part. I started to pack away my long gun, while Danny kept shooting at the stragglers, long after it was necessary.

“Got ’em.” He turned and gave me a bloodstained grin.

• • • •

We continued on our route, our cycles slicing through walls of vapor and blowing trails of dust behind us, until about halfway around the perimeter, when we came across a patrol from another barrier house. I recognized one of them, a guy named Thrush, who worked the front with me during the expansion, so we pulled over to split a bottle and shoot the shit for a little while.

One of Thrush’s men, a young guy, kept to himself on his bike and waited off from the group. He was fidgeting with a rosary and muttering under his breath, beads of sweat rolling off his brow way too quickly, even for the heat we were in.

“He okay?” I asked, sipping from my canteen and pointing out Thrush’s patrolman.

“Oh, yeah,” Thrush looked over. “Pete’s just a little antsy. Can’t get the feeling back in his hand. Worried he’s got the rot.”

Danny clicked his tongue and handed me the bottle. “Ah, he’s not old enough. You gotta drink for decades to get that kind of nerve damage.”

That was something we’d always say whenever one of our guys was worried about tingling in his toes or swelling in his fingers, but we all knew it wasn’t as true as it used to be. You probably remember seeing, during our trips into town, those folks, not all of them old-timers, who’d lost an arm or leg to the rot. The docs think it has something to do with our generation growing up with more plasma than our parents, which makes sense. Around here, someone will put a gun in your hand, and then a bottle, pretty much as soon as you’re old enough to earn.

“Kid!” Danny took off his goggles and dabbed his eyes with his handkerchief. “Relax and have a drink. If it’s the rot, you’re fucked anyway, so don’t get worked up.”

The young guy ignored him and kept on muttering.

“Suit yourself.” Danny licked his teeth and spat before turning back to Thrush. “Listen. Not to add to your problems, but we spotted a King slithering out west. Hopefully it’s nothing, but I’d go slow and keep an eye out.”

“No shit.” Thrush grabbed binoculars from his belt and looked out at the vapors, as if he’d happen upon a King right then and there. “Think they’re up to something?”

“Maybe. Or we are,” Danny said. “My cousin heard that Corporate’s thinking about another expansion.”

Barrier guys tended to have conversations like this whenever someone saw a King. There were always rumors that the settlement was getting crowded, and that we’d need more territory, but people whispered about it more when the worms started acting strange or gathering around the barrier. A lot of us figured that if they could see our bullets coming, they could probably see bigger fights coming too. Better than we could, anyway.

Thrush finished the bottle and threw it a ways over into the dirt. “Well, if Corporate’s really looking to fight, they’d better pay us more is all I have to say, because—”

“It’s wrong.”

We looked over. The young guy, Pete, had straightened up and spoken for the first time. “Taking more from them. It’s wrong.”

“How do you figure?” Danny asked with a small smile.

The young guy cleared his throat and looked around, like he wasn’t sure how loud to be about it. “They were here before us, the glyconids. This is their moon, not ours. We’re just thieves and murderers in their eyes. And in God’s. We never should’ve come and killed them in the first place.”

I watched Danny’s face harden, even though he was still smiling. I think anti-settlement folks had a way of annoying him more than most.

“Maybe. Maybe not . . .” Danny said, staring back. “But you’d think God would’ve stopped us if that were the case. Rained down holy punishment and the like.”

“Maybe he already has,” Pete replied. “You just don’t realize it.”

All of us had a good chuckle, but Danny wasn’t laughing. “Well, guess you ought to give up and hitch a shuttle out of here.”

“That’s right,” Pete replied seriously. “The second I have enough saved, I’m flying off the moon, and I think you should do the same.”

“Just fly off the moon . . . Why the hell not.” Danny licked his teeth clean. “And the plasma? Think you’ll fly off from that too?”

Pete shifted a little but, to his credit, didn’t look away. “I’ll . . . I’ll wean. I’ll find a way,” he insisted.

“Wean,” Danny replied, and the rest of us got quiet. “Okay.”

“I will.”

No one had much of anything to say to the kid about that.

“All right, all right, Petey.” Thrush waved his hand. “These guys appreciate the sermon, I’m sure, but it’s time to get moving. Go on. I’ll be there in a minute.” He turned back to us and spoke in a low voice. “Jesus Christ, that guy. Means well, but real maudlin drinker, if you know what I mean.”

“There’s one in every house,” Danny replied, trying to act unbothered, but I could tell he was still a little ruffled by what the kid said.

Thrush sipped from his canteen, rinsed his mouth, and spat. He thanked us for the drink and joined the other patrolmen, and we waited until their group rode off past a nearby ridge before Danny got on his bike and floated over next to me.

“Shift’s almost over. Going to stop by the stack?”

I knew I had to head home, that your mother was going to be upset if I missed another evening. But I thought about the time it would take to get to the barrier house, how much I’d drink, and then how long I’d have to let it get through my system before I got back home. I’d just barely catch everyone at bedtime, and it seemed like it was manageable.

“Sure.” I revved the bike and took off for the nearest gate.

The whole ride back, I kept thinking about what the kid said about punishment, and I found myself checking my mirrors more than usual for any signs of slithering in the vapors behind me.

• • • •

I could smell the stale plasma wafting, like a thick, rancid fog over the front yard, when we pulled in at the barrier house. Empty bottles littered the steps and the porch railing, and the inside of the place was messier than I’d seen it in weeks.

We found Cooper passed out on the couch, of course. Danny yelled in his ear and told him to get up.

“What time is it?” He sat up, coughing spit and blood that’d probably pooled in the back of his throat. His face was bone white, and it was pretty clear he’d been doing more than just resting up during our shift.

“It’s the end of the day. Jesus.”

“Oh man,” Cooper rubbed his eyes. “You guys been out back yet?”

We told him no. He stumbled to his feet and led us through the hall and to the lot behind the house. Some of the guys were gathered in the yard, and it wasn’t until they drew back that we saw what they were looking at.

A slimy, black skyworm lay stretched out on a table, its scaly, mucus-covered body pulled taut so that it was unfurled completely for all to see. Apparently, someone on the night shift caught a straggler and brought it back in with him to the house. The guys had tied it down real good with a tangle of construction wire, so it jerked here and there every few seconds, trying its best to slither out of its binding, but mostly, it just lay there, its scaly body rising and falling with each pained breath.

As I got closer, I could see that the guys had already stuck the worm’s sides with surgical tubes here and there; they trailed over and dripped bright red plasma into a basin nearby. I could practically feel the glow of its heat from how fresh it was.

I was no stranger to a draining. We’d done it all the time during the expansion. But out there, beyond the settlement, that kind of thing made sense. We didn’t have the luxury of filtered plasma, and we needed it if we were going to survive skirmishes with the clews. But this felt strange, seeing a skyworm tied up here outside one of our houses, just squirming there in the yard while we took its blood. It couldn’t have been more than a couple feet long, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen one that small—had to be a baby, if it wasn’t some kind of runt.

“What the hell?” Danny said. “You guys had this all day and didn’t call us?” He grabbed an empty jar and ladled just a little of the plasma, knowing it was a lot stronger than the regular stuff.

“You having any?” he asked.

I had to give it some thought.

One sip of that, and I’d be well over my daily allotment, and I’d have to wait longer to clean myself up before I went home. On the other hand, it wasn’t so often we’d have a draining, and I wasn’t likely to get this again anytime soon.

This was the way these things went all the time, you see. I was always in a negotiation with myself—both winning and losing, no matter the decision. In the end, it didn’t much matter what I thought, because there was usually only one direction these things tended to go.

“A small one,” I said. “Then I gotta leave.”

Danny poured a couple fingers’ worth and handed me the glass. I held it up to the waning sunlight, checking it for discoloration, but this was about as clean as you could get. The first swallow was like drinking scalding tea, with an aftertaste that was almost overpoweringly sweet, and my hands started to shake as I felt the plasma fill my belly with heat.

Danny took a drink too, and his mouth turned into a wet, crimson mess in seconds; I didn’t have to check to know mine was bleeding too.

“Strong,” I coughed and spat on the ground.

Danny staggered over to a chair. I got lightheaded, so I sat down next to him. I could feel the plasma rushing hot around my temples, and I started to hear something, like a light mewling, though I wasn’t sure where it was coming from.

“You hear that?” I asked Danny, and he shook his head. “I think it’s crying. Sounds almost like . . . like my kid.”

There was a flash of Danny lunging at me, and I startled, before realizing that it wasn’t real. This could happen every so often with pure plasma like this, hallucinatory possibility leaking out in strange ways. Our minds weren’t really built to see everything the worms saw, I guess.

Danny laughed at me at first, but then his eyes went heavy and half-closed. Most of the other guys settled around in parts of the yard too, all seeming to see things that had nothing to do with the rest of us. After a while, it felt like I was the only one that was really aware of myself in the yard, and I couldn’t shake the idea that the skyworm’s red eye was fixed on me.

“Sorry,” I whispered to the little guy. “Wish I could make you more comfortable.” The worm turned its face, pressed and bleeding under the stiff wires, and cried out, almost like it was screeching in my head. I shuddered before taking another sip from my glass. I could feel the weeps starting from the wetness on my cheek. The other guys were all dripping red down their faces too, but no one bothered to wipe it away.

This didn’t feel right.

I’d done this dozens of times, and I’d never felt anything like this. The baby worm’s crying echoed in my ears, and I looked around at the other guys, telling them we should loosen his wires. But no one heard me.

“I’m serious.” I got to my feet, trying to keep the yard from spinning.

The baby worm cried out again, and I felt a painful crackle in my brain. The urge to make the wailing stop only grew stronger.

I walked haltingly to the table and tore at the tubes and bindings. The skyworm wriggled gradually, until I had gotten it free of the wire. I picked it up with both arms, cradling it for a minute, waiting for its cries to grow softer. When it finally calmed, I loosened my hold and released it into the air, watching it slither into the darkening sky. Something about that made me overwhelmingly happy, watching the worm fly off, away from this mess—like for the first time, maybe in my life, I might’ve done something that wasn’t about me.

Except I hadn’t actually moved from my chair, and I was still staring at that little, red eye.

“Don’t you fucking do it,” Danny said, his cheeks covered in blood trails. He must’ve seen the echo of what I thought I did, or could have done, but who knows. I couldn’t figure out what was in my head, let alone his.

My hand started feeling stiff, like I couldn’t bend my fingers without them cracking, and when I looked down I could somehow see the bluish-purple plasma rot spreading from my fingers and toes and up each of my limbs. I was older, I think, because I didn’t recognize the veins and liver spots, the curl of white hair on my arm. A doctor I didn’t know was talking to me about my odds of survival if we amputated, and treatments they could try. Your mother was there too, beside me—her hair, a lot grayer, and I was pretty sure she’d been crying. I felt them put a mask over my face to knock me out, a bright surgical light shining in my eyes as I faded. And the next thing I knew, I was sitting in the kitchen, your mother feeding me with a spoon, and I started crying with frustration because I couldn’t do something as simple as feed myself.

Except I was still just sitting, looking at the little skyworm, at a loss for what the hell I’d felt just a few seconds earlier.

Was there something wrong with the plasma?

Was it because we drained one that was so young?

I was surrounded by blackness before I could let the thought have any purchase, and I wasn’t outside the barrier house, as far as I could tell. I think I was in the sky, looking down at the lunar landscape—the dome of the barrier thousands of miles below like a small puddle on a vast, dry rock. I noticed, just above the settlement, seven Kings swimming through the air, like giant serpents, bigger than any I’d ever seen in my life, gliding head-to-tail in a ring around the barrier.

There were sparks and bright pops as missiles and bombs took pieces out of those huge worms, and it looked like the sea of camera flashes that you see in stadiums during a big game. The Kings started to join, then, braiding together into a strange shape, like one giant super-worm, coiling and gathering momentum. They dropped into the dome and pushed through the burning sheen of the fiery energy field, scales aglow with open wounds as they drilled to the surface. There were millions of screams as the collective King worm impacted the ground, obliterating buildings and farms and schools and everything that had been gathered under that place.

Except.

I hadn’t really seen any of it, and I was still just sitting and looking at that little, red eye.

“I have to go.”

I realized, as I made my way back through the house to my bike, that Danny, the others, weren’t bleeding like I’d thought, and neither was I. Some of them called after me, but I knew I had to get home.

I have no recollection of how I got back to the farm that night. Don’t even recall getting on my bike, let alone our property, which is never a good sign. But I do remember standing outside the house and watching the lights in the windows, wanting to go inside so badly to see you, even though I knew I was in no shape for it. Instead, I dragged myself to the barn and bolted the doors shut so no one else could wander in.

You probably know it by now, but I spend nights out there when I’m not right. It’s not pretty for anyone, and I’d rather you never see it yourself. The vomiting comes first, whatever I ate that day mixed with the blood in my mouth. Then really mean shakes that make my head flop and my spine arch, like someone’s about to break me in two. I end up rolling around in the filth for minutes, or hours, I have no way of knowing, and I have trouble with my limbs, so I crawl around mostly on my belly, huffing sharply through my teeth, my nostrils encrusted with grit and puke.

That night, my head blurred with so many things that I can’t remember the half of it, even when I try my hardest. Different bursts of moments now and later, of life on the farm, at the barrier, of gunfire and cold bottles and dirt. Most of it, maybe all of it, were flickers and shadows of events that I knew would never happen, but other parts felt like memories of the future that I had one point known and forgotten, even though, saying it now, I know it makes no sense.

And then I saw something that scared me so deeply that I wept.

I slammed my head against the dirt, trying to make it stop. After what felt like an endless burning in every part of my body, I eventually, thankfully, passed out.

Somewhere, I heard the screaming of a baby skyworm go quiet.

• • • •

When I woke in the glowing darkness just before daybreak, I cleaned myself up at the hose and buried my sick. I changed into my spare clothes from my pack and shuffled into the kitchen. I didn’t have to wait long for your mother to come downstairs, because she always got ready for the day before anyone else.

I clasped my hands together and looked at her across the kitchen table.

“I’m drinking again.”

She didn’t seem angry or upset, or even surprised now that I think back on it, just tired. “Okay. How long?”

“Few months now.”

She went to the counter and started boiling a pot for our coffee. “What’s your plan, then?” she asked.

Normally, this was the part where I would’ve promised to wean, where I’d tell her I would clean out my system and start fresh, maybe reduce intake to when I was on patrol and really needed it, but nothing in the barrier house or around you guys—something like that.

But I’d seen too many things with the plasma the night before. Times where the worms killed us in gruesome onslaughts—other paths where we spread across the moon and consumed every last one of them instead. A million different ways that things wouldn’t work out, no matter the particular road, whether that be weeks, or months, or years from now.

But whenever it came to my life and what lay ahead, there was really only one possibility that came into focus when I followed the curve of the most probable path.

No matter what I promised, or how hard I tried, or how many times I started or stopped, or whether I was happy or sad or angry or bored, I’d still be drinking, in the end—until piece after piece of me fell off with rot, and my heart and my lungs, inevitably, came to a stop. And even though that wasn’t the thing I saw that scared me most, it was enough that I couldn’t make your mother the promises I would have otherwise.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Your mother held in her tears because we heard you bounding down the steps before you reached the kitchen, and then you came in, sleepy-eyed and smiling, asking if you heard your daddy.

“Oh hey there, little man.” I bent over and scooped you up. “Gosh, I missed you. Feel like we haven’t seen each other in forever.”

You squeezed your skinny little arms around my neck and nuzzled the stubble on my cheek with your face. “Going back out?”

“Nah, I’m taking time off,” I said. “There’s nothing good out there for me anyway.”

Your mother and I sat with you at the table, sipping our coffee while you ate. You talked with your mouth full about school and what you were learning about the lunar ecosystems, and we just listened and nodded and took you in. And when you were done, and your mother said she wanted some time alone to clean up, I asked if you wanted to walk with me outside.

We wandered for a bit, stopping to rake some leaves and to fix up your tire swing, which I guess had gotten a little loose without my noticing. I thought about talking to you, then, about what was going on with me, even just a kid version of it. But I couldn’t figure out how to say it or where to start.

I’ve heard.

I’ve heard that when you’re at your lowest after plasma, you’re supposed to write a letter to the person you love most. People say it focuses your intentions and reminds you later about what you felt. But because I can’t write for shit, I’ve logged this recording instead, and I’m hoping maybe this might help you understand some of what was going on, and why we made the decisions we did.

You see, that night, after the draining, when I saw all those potential paths in front of me, the thing I saw that scared me more than anything wasn’t the worms, or the rot, or me falling apart because of my own doing.

It was you.

Because when I followed the curve of the most probable path, the one that came into focus out of all of those possibilities, I saw you as a young man, still on this moon and on this farm. I saw someone put a gun in your hand, and later, a bottle. And you took them both because, well, that’s just the way things happen here.

And one bottle led to another, and another led to the next. And I watched your bright eyes slowly fill with fear and your face get stretched and thin from working the barrier. I saw you hiding from your own family, scurrying around the house to put away your empties. And on bad nights, you crawled on your belly in some dark space. And there was nothing I could do to help you, and it hurt my heart.

Except.

I realized, at that moment, that there was still a sliver of a way—because a path can’t be probable if it becomes impossible, because you can’t be poisoned like me if you’re not here at all. After that night, I decided that I’d count every penny we’d saved and squirrel away more in the months to come. Your mother and I agreed that we’d work toward buying tickets for a shuttle, so we could send you both to go live with her folks on one of the stations instead. With some time and some patience, as you know, we did just that. And by the time you hear this, whenever your mom decides you’re ready, you’ll be millions of miles from this moon, and better off for it, I think.

I know I probably told you I’d meet you and your mom out there, in the stars, eventually, and it’s not wrong, you know, to hope that I might still get clean and get there someday too. But you can’t spend your life waiting for someone like me. Chances are, I haven’t learned to leave the plasma behind, and I’m still smiling with a closed mouth and wiping my eyes with a dark handkerchief, like always. I’m probably right where you left me, in the dirt, and that’s okay.

Having seen what I’ve seen, this was probably where I was always going to be.

That morning we walked around the farm together, I don’t know if you remember, but after we talked some more, I actually brought you around to the back of the barn. I picked up the shovel and didn’t have to dig long before I uncovered one of the pits where I stored my empties, the bottles all piled on one another and coated in soil. You asked me what it was.

“My mess,” I told you.

Without saying anything, you went to the house and came back with the refuse bin and started picking up the bottles and dumping them, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. You kept talking about whether we were going to take a trip to town so you could look for a new mitt, and you seemed unbothered by the piercing, clinking sound of each bottle that dropped into the bin with the others.

After a while, I started to let your voice drown out the sound of the bottles, and I was light and untroubled, if just for a time, because of you.

©2021 by Thomas Ha.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas Ha is a former attorney turned stay-at-home father who enjoys writing speculative fiction during the rare moments when all of his kids are napping at the same time. Thomas grew up in Honolulu and, after a decade plus of living in the northeast, now resides in Los Angeles. You can find the latest about his writing on Twitter @ThomasHaWrites and at thomashawrites.com.

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

Mister Dawn, How Can You Be So Cruel?

Violet Allen | 5016 words

I only met Mr. Compton once, but he was easy: fifty years old, twice divorced, thin black hair with gray roots, expensive off-the-rack suit, office shoes with rubber soles, an expensive gold watch on one wrist and an expensive smartwatch on the other, sunglasses inside, a smile on the outside. He told me that he loved “hot jazz.” He told me that he had never truly been in love. He told me that his favorite film was Breathless. These were all lies, but lies are much more revealing than the truth. Truth is molded by the real; lies are shaped like our souls. So I could see Mr. Compton very clearly, read him as if he were a Commedia dell’Arte character. Behold, the Compton, an American variant of the Pierrot, first popularized in New York City. He is identified by his ill-fitting dress and clumsy manner. He seeks to take up as much space on the stage as possible, but is filled with profound loneliness when he has done so. Although wealthy and ostensibly high class, his status amongst the other characters is low unless they seek his favor for plot purposes. He is fond of speaking, but says very little of substance. He quickly falls in love with any female character who shows him affection, but his love is never requited, for he seeks, in all things, to possess rather than to feel; this is very funny.

I was working on his weekly dream package. He wanted to be a spy. Not a spy for any particular organization or cause, just “a spy,” a pastiche of a pastiche, a memory of a memory of a bunch of bad movies and stale paperbacks. His “spying” largely consisted of sleeping with beautiful women and shooting guns at faceless bad guys, broken up by car chases, boat chases, and/or ski chases. It was my job to arrange these elements and season them with detail and context (exotic locales, convoluted plots, various sizes and shapes of tit), such that they seemed new and different and exciting and dangerous and sexy and wild and wonderful.

I was good at it, but the work was spiteful. I had been Mr. Compton’s dream concierge for months, and he always wanted the same thing. Worse, I had a dozen other clients who wanted variations on the same basic idea, only with cowboys or samurai or cops or explorers. Even the unique clients were mired in cliché and kitsch: the childless banker who dreamed of a large family, the local politician who lived through a different romance novel each night, the real estate broker who would never graduate from magic high school. It was offensive to me. Augmented dreaming was the most sophisticated form of media ever devised, but most people just wanted to live out popcorn fantasies and sentimental wishes.

“Hey Marianne,” I said, as I worked on another tedious scene.

A moment passed, and Marianne’s head popped up over the divider between our two cubicles. We were never friends, exactly, as we did not particularly like one another, but we were accustomed to speaking candidly, as we were of similar ages and the only two women in our department.

“Yeah?” she says.

“How many abs is too many?”

“Six is fine. Eight if you really want to go for it, I guess.”

“What if I put twenty on this guy? Or fifty? Or 100? Say he’s just gotten finished with a gunfight. He tears the bottom of his shirt to make a crude bandage, revealing his abs to the sexy enemy agent. But when he looks at them, he sees nothing but abs, forever abs that go down miles and miles into the abyss, and flexing and unflexing like a muscle machine. What if I did that?”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Why are you asking me this, Esther? Don’t do that.”

“I’m not going to do it. I’m just wondering if I could? I mean, could the system handle it? Could we figure something out?”

She sighed again and sank back below the divider. “Forget it, Esther. It’s DreamSplash.”

I thought about it for a long time. Rex, our boss, would’ve been mad if Mr. Compton reported it to him, but he wouldn’t fire me. I was good at my job, and people weren’t exactly lining up to work in augmented dreaming in those days. Most had written it off as a boondoggle for the rich, an interesting but useless novelty that would soon go the way of Segways and Laserdiscs. I could probably paint outside the lines without any real consequences, besides having to redo it later. I figured we could figure out how to make it work in our system, though it would require a lot of tweaks to ensure that Mr. Compton didn’t wake up. It would take a lot of time, but the tweaks were what I liked. They were why I got into the business in the first place. Figuring out how to map out impossible structures and abstract sensations, harnessing the infinite possibility of dreams. It would’ve been beautiful.

But I thought of Mr. Compton. He didn’t sign up for the weird stuff. I loathed him, or the idea of him, and thought him the purest example of the bourgeois doofuses I was forced to service, but consent is consent. One cannot simply shove a soul into a hollow vessel, no matter how much one judges the vessel to need it.

So in the end I did not give the dream-Compton infinity abs. I gave him the correct number of abs and eyes and toes and ears and smiles. He was handsome, I guess. Certainly more than he was in life, but in a way that was flattering to his real appearance. That was my job in a nutshell, to flatter the real world. Or perhaps to flatten it. Whatever. Like I said, the work was spiteful.

• • • •

This was my favorite dream. I made it myself. I am in a park from my childhood, sitting on the edge of the beautiful fountain and looking into the water, assiduously sketching and re-sketching the contours of my trembling reflection on a page in a notebook. The world beyond the fountain is too much, too intense, an overwhelming rush of sensation and association, too bright, too hot, too heavy. I draw without looking at the paper or lifting my pen, allowing my hand to mimic the motion of my eye along the surface of the water. In tracing and retracing and retracing and retracing an image of myself which is too impossibly protean to capture, I seek to lose my ego in velvety quixotism, make myself into a living koan, and without realizing, I have become my reflection, and I look up at myself, still sitting at the fountain as I sink down, being slowly sucked down the drain, and I feel myself beginning to stretch deliciously, but the strangeness of the sensation was too much, and I snapped awake.

I sat up and wiped the water from my eyes. I was in my bathtub, which I had fashioned into a crude AD pod with spare parts I stole from work. I had made that dream for my senior thesis. It had only been a couple of years, but already I had changed enough that I couldn’t fully sync with my dream self, and I would wake up as it got more abstract. I hadn’t even gotten to the good part this time. I was supposed to go down the drain and emerge as a fish in the ocean, where I would swim and frolic, then I would see a shadow of a bird on the water above me, and I would become the shadow and then the bird, and I would fly and fly, first over the Earth and then into space and finally into the sun, end of dream. I wondered how long it would be until I couldn’t sync with it at all. It was maddeningly paradoxical; in a dream you can be anyone, do anything, but you always feel like yourself. Mess with that, and the dream fell apart. Soon, my favorite dream, my most beautiful creation, would be gone forever, and no one would ever be able to appreciate it again.

Whatever. It was my favorite, but it was not my ideal as an artist. It was interesting but still conventional, just a reworking of common fantasies and mythological themes. I wanted to move past that into purely abstract, anti-humanist perspectives. I wanted to be a color, or a shape, or a feeling. I wanted to become a triangle, experience the world of a triangle, feel what a triangle feels. That was my dream.

I did not leave the bathtub. The cool water was deeply relaxing, and I realized that I had no real reason to get out of the tub at all, nothing to do and no place to be. And so the hours melted like butter on the tongue. I was still there when my phone began to ring. The sound was so faint at first I couldn’t tell if I was actually hearing the phone or if I was imagining it, that way that sometimes you imagine sounds so vividly they suddenly seem to become faintly audible, like the memory echoes off the imagination and rattles the inner ear somehow (sounds only exist in your mind anyway; the question is whether they are prompted by the action of atoms in the air or of electrons in the meat). But even when I felt confident that yes, the phone was ringing, I did not move. I did not care. I was in the bathtub.

The phone stopped ringing and rang again, and stopped ringing and rang again. I did nothing. At first, this willful disinterest was pleasurable, and I imagined myself as the sort of person who blithely, even joyously, ignored the thoughts and feelings of others. The sensation of power, however petty, along with the comfort of my repose, was narcotic. And I thought to myself, half-joking, this is the only thing that has ever made me happy, and I did not know if this statement was true or not; my chest felt cold, and my eyes began to water, and I felt as if I had, suddenly and without warning, stumbled on a second, secret Esther within me, and, having tugged on this thread, I could not stop from myself unraveling, and the Ester that I knew, the Esther that I was, suddenly seemed to be just a character in a fairy tale I told myself to go to sleep every night.

I decided I had bathed too deeply, washed away too much. The shadow of death lurks when we lose vigilance; et in Arcadia ego. And so I removed myself from the bathtub, and I finally answered my fucking phone.

“Hello,” I said.

“Is this Esther Williams?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Montgomery Ellis. I’m calling about an employment opportunity.”

“You could’ve left a message.”

“We’re excited to talk to you, Esther. We’ve heard great things.”

“From who?”

“That information is sensitive. We’d love to speak with you in person and explain.”

“And who is we?”

He laughed. “Our company is called Dreamr, and we’re going to break everything you know about dreams into a million little pieces.”

• • • •

The Dreamr Facility was nothing like DreamSplash. DreamSplash occupied a couple of floors in an ordinary downtown office building and was furnished like any office might be. Dreamr felt like a colony on Mars or mad scientist’s undersea base. Everything was clean and new and plastic and smooth, soft blue or pure white, and perfectly lit. I had seen attempts at a similar aesthetic plenty of times, “hip” offices and fancy computer stores, but I had never seen it fully realized like this.

Montgomery was giving me a tour, and I guess my interest in the design was visible. “Think of it as blank canvas,” he said. “You can make anything you want a reality here. Imagination and creativity are the only things that matter. Context is a relic of the past.”

I nodded. I read somewhere there’s a sensation of otherworldliness that theme parks and casinos attempt to cultivate to distance customers from reality, particularly the reality of human money. Dreamr had that vibe in spades, which made a lot of sense for a company that dealt in fantasy.

We walked down a long hall lined with identical computer consoles. Montgomery said they were for “a project in development,” but didn’t elaborate. Montgomery was interesting. He was tall, very handsome, and he spoke in an imperious mid-Atlantic accent, like a villain in a movie from the forties. But his manner was relaxed and open, and he wore jeans and a concert t-shirt, and he had a long, scruffy blond beard. There was something off about him, something I couldn’t quite read, and I found that appealing, like when you listen to people speaking a foreign language just for the music of it.

He was pretty much locked into the corporate spiel, going on about how great it was to work there and how they were going to shatter the industry with new innovations without ever saying what exactly it was they were doing. I just nodded along, half paying attention. I figured Dreamr was just a bigger, better version of DreamSplash. Someone with deep pockets probably thought they could muscle their way in, eat up all the market share, then get out before the bubble finally burst. I’d keep doing my old job with better pay, maybe a fancier title, maybe for even richer doofuses, millionaires or even billionaires. I wondered what kind of things that people who own their own planes dream about. What do you dream about when you can buy anything you want?

We stopped in front of a door. Montgomery opened it with a keycard. Inside was a desk, one of those consoles I had seen in the hall, a couple of AD pods with 2v helmets attached.

“This is where you’ll work,” he said.

“Wow,” I said. “It’s nice.”

“It’s all yours.”

“All? As in, the whole thing? Like, this is my office, just for me?”

“Office and laboratory, yes. Just for you, as head of the department.”

“Head of the department?”

“Yes, you’ll be head of the Content Research team. To be honest, it’s our smallest team. You’ll only have four or five people working under you at any given time.”

“I thought you just wanted me to be a dream concierge.”

He laughed. “Oh, that’s not our business model.”

“Then what is your business model? What exactly do you do here?”

He smiled almost hungrily, and I realized he had been waiting for me to ask this the entire time. “Our mission at Dreamr is simple. What’s the main problem with Augmented Dreaming right now? No one can afford it but the very wealthy. Even low-end AD pods cost upwards of $5000, and each unit can only play dreams specifically designed for a particular user. Companies like DreamSplash can produce them easily enough, but at high costs and often low quality. The market is small, and the novelty is wearing off. We’ve known how to create augmented dreams for ten years now, but the tech has barely advanced since Nagai and Ray. Our goal is to design an AD unit that is affordable for everyone and to offer dream content compatible with every user.”

“Is that possible?” I asked.

“That’s where you come in, Esther. We heard about your interest in . . . atypical dream content and our interest was piqued. We did a little poking around, and we were quite impressed, particularly with your work at university.”

“Thank you?”

“We want you for two reasons. First, we want to offer a wide slate of dream content. We anticipate users of rarified taste with aesthetic inclinations similar to yours, whom we think will appreciate your work. Second, we think your work is the key to unlocking a universal dream template. If you can create content wherein human beings can turn into water or math or windchimes or whatever else you can imagine without waking up, then we believe we can use that data to crack the sync problem.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’m not sure what to say. I feel like I’m supposed to ask questions about salary and benefits and how everything is going to work, but honestly I don’t really care. I just want to do this.”

“Then say yes, Esther. All you have to do is say yes. That’s how it works here at Dreamr. Just say yes.”

“Sure, yeah, yes. Just, can you tell me who told you about me? You keep mentioning it, and it’s very mysterious.”

“Marianne Jeffords. I believe you worked together at DreamSplash?”

“Oh cool. She’s here now, too?”

“Yes. I’m afraid you probably won’t see her too often. She’s working on a very exciting project in engineering. But I’ll be sure to sure to forward your thanks, if you’d like.”

“Oh yeah, sure, thanks.”

“Great. Let me just go and get some paperwork. I’ll leave you here to become acquainted with your new space.”

He shook my hand, and he left. I sat down at the desk, my desk, and leaned back in the chair. And I thought to myself, Now this, this is the only thing that has ever made me happy.

• • • •

“The amygdala readings are holding steady, Director Williams,” said Jerry.

“Blood pressure good, heartrate stable,” said Soo-ah.

“Rapid eye activation initiated,” said Arturo.

“Good. Everybody stay calm. We’ve got this,” I said.

Subject #89A was in the dream pod. All of us, my assistants and I, were gathered around, operating consoles and laptops hooked up to the pod. A few dormant sleepwalkers were standing in the corners, in case we needed help in an emergency. We had almost done it. We were so close. We were about to turn a man into a triangle.

“What are you seeing, Petra?” I asked.

Petra was hooked into the dream on the 2V. She could see what the subject saw, but could not feel it, hear it, taste it. “Mostly greyspace. A few wavy lines on the periphery.”

“Good. Let us know if that changes,” I said. “I’m initiating the Triangle Sequence.” I pressed a button on my computer, and Subject #89A began to dream that he was a triangle.

It had been five years since I had begun at Dreamr. My team and I had done so much. We had completely solved the problem of dream rejection. No matter what happened in the dream, subjects wouldn’t wake up unless we wanted them to. No matter what they felt, no matter how strange or uncomfortable or even painful the sensation was, they would remain in the dream. Of course, we would never purposefully make them feel pain. Never. But while it was easy to make sure that old-fashioned cinematic-style dreams were painless, it was not always clear when you got to the level of abstraction. Does it hurt to be a triangle? Or rather, is the sensation of being a triangle more analogous to human pain or human pleasure? There are a number of sensations that we experience all the time, even when asleep. The sensation of breathing, muscles moving, organs sloshing around. What happens when those sensations, which we all experience every moment between life and death, are suddenly gone? What is the psychic effect? How does the mind construct itself in an impossible scenario? We were not dealing in virtual reality, but in the manipulation of dreams. There was a human element that could be manipulated but never erased.

“Heartrate is starting to climb,” said Soo-ah.

“It’s fine,” I said. “He’s just surprised. What are you seeing, Petra?”

“Same as before. No change.”

“Uh, I’m getting some weird readings. I don’t even know what to make of this,” said Jerry.

“I think we should unplug him,” said Arturo.

“No,” I said. “He’s fine.”

The readings suggested that the patient was trying to reject the dream, but couldn’t. My hope was that he would move past this phase into acceptance, into triangleness. So far, all our subjects’ vitals had gone too far into the red, and we’d pulled them out before we got what we needed. I had high hopes for Subject #89A. He had tested high on our disassociation battery, and his favorite director was Andrzej Żuławski. He was perfect for this.

“Director Williams, I think we have to stop,” said Arturo.

“Petra?” I said.

“Sparkles. Like before you pass out. Stars. But all around.”

“Is he moving?” I asked.

“He’s having a panic attack,” said Soo-ah.

“These readings look like a plate of spaghetti,” said Jerry.

“I think he’s trying to run. Or fly,” said Petra. “Or something. I don’t really understand what I’m looking at. I think I need to sit down.”

At this point there were many sensors beeping and buzzers blaring and warning lights flashing. My assistants were talking over each other, cowardly and frightened, like little children caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Petra was on the floor, and Arturo was by her side: the damsel in distress and her white knight. Typical. I liked them all fine, but they lacked vision. We were after something important. I just waited. And waited. And waited.

“Director Williams!” screamed Arturo.

I sighed and pressed a button on my computer. No more triangle. Everyone calmed down, and we got Subject #89A out of the pod and gave him some apple juice. He did not speak. His eyes were wide, but empty, and he did not seem to know exactly where he was. I wondered if there might have been a time dilation effect. That would’ve been good data. If only.

I was tired. We had been through so many subjects, and none of them could take it, and my assistants didn’t have the nerve. I thought about firing Arturo, but it would’ve been pointless. What I needed was a subject who truly appreciated art, someone like me. I would’ve done it. I should’ve done it. But there were rules and protocols. Order had to be maintained. I hated that. I was never good at the practical aspects of business and management. I just wanted to make beautiful things, after all. Who can fault me?

The team left with Subject #89A, and I texted my assistant Sahad my lunch order. He arrived in my office a few minutes later. Or rather, the sleepwalker Sahad was piloting arrived a few minutes later. Sahad might be the best in the company at piloting sleepwalkers. You would have believed the sleepwalker was just an ordinary man wearing a strange helmet. He stumbled a bit, but stumblers exist in all walks of life. He placed my lunch, hamburger and fries, on my desk, and I said thank you without thinking. He was about to leave when I noticed a piece of paper sticking out from under the helmet. I reached out and grabbed it. There was a message:

Meet me on the roof at 3.

– M

• • • •

Marianne was waiting for me on the roof. She was alone, which was unusual. We hadn’t spoken in years, but I saw her around the campus frequently enough. She was always flanked by at least a couple of sleepwalkers. She had headed up the project that created them, and now she was in charge of ironing out the kinks: improving motor control and decreasing response time.

“Can I trust you?” she asked when she saw me.

“Maybe,” I said.

“I don’t think I can. But I don’t have any choice.”

“That’s fair,” I said.

“They’re trying to merge our projects,” she said. “It’s fucked.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Project Moirai and Project Westenra. They’re being combined.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

The sleepwalker system, Project Westenra, grew out of our early experiments. Figuring out how to keep people locked in dreams taught us a lot about manipulating the nervous system. We eventually figured out how to separate the ghost from the machine, how to make people into puppets. This dovetailed beautifully with the development of the AD headsets as low-cost replacements for AD pods. The headsets weren’t as effective at suppressing physical responses as the pods, but as long as the dreams were pleasant and the work wasn’t too strenuous, they stayed asleep. It was true that my work had been instrumental in developing the protocols for the sleepwalker architecture. But they were fundamentally different projects.

“I thought we were going to help people. Physical therapy. Athletic training. Mobility for chronic pain patients. Hell, just giving people something to do on the subway. Or a way to zone out while you’re washing the dishes. But now it’s all fucked.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They’re running out of money. They still don’t have a consumer grade unit, and the market is dead.”

“So?”

“They’re combining our work to make something really evil. They’re trying to get into the private prison business. It’s perfect. Their minds are tormented by your nightmares, while their bodies are hired out as cheap labor. They never wake up. Perfect.”

“I don’t make nightmares,” I said.

“Sure. Whatever,” she said.

“You have proof?”

She threw a manila folder at my feet. “Check it,” she said. “Your boyfriend wrote the proposal.”

I picked up the folder. “Paper?”

“No trail,” she said.

“This isn’t a spy movie,” I said. “We work at an office. Don’t be so dramatic. Send me an email.”

“Just read it,” she said.

I sighed. “Can I bum one?”

She gave me a cigarette and lit it with a lighter. We smoked together.

“We already treat them like slaves around here. That was never the plan.”

“At least we pay them,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that totally makes it cool to turn people into robots. Payment.”

• • • •

Montgomery was leading a yoga class in the free-energy zone. Half the attendees were employees. The rest were sleepwalkers. The employees got to relax and physically express the music of their souls. The sleepwalkers’ pilots got to practice. Win-win.

“Virabhadrasana Two,” he said. He lunged forward, extended his arms, directed his gaze over his right hand. His form was not perfect, but he exuded confidence. The crowd followed him. The sleepwalkers were better at it than the employees. Their movements were ungainly, but once they locked into the pose, they stuck there, motionless.

I waved from the other side of the room, and he smiled.

“Trikonasana,” he said. “Hold it.”

He didn’t do the pose. Instead, he walked over to me.

“What the fuck is going on?” I whispered, angrily.

He looked back for a moment, then at me, puzzled. “It’s a yoga class, Esther.”

“Not that, doofus,” I said, and I explained to him what I knew, what Marianne’s documents had revealed.

He sighed and put his arm around my shoulder. “Free stretch, everybody!” he yelled, as he walked me into the hall.

“I was going to tell you,” he said, when we were alone.

“When?”

“When the deals were in place. You have to understand, this is completely speculative right now.”

“But it’s going to happen?”

“Either we do this, or it’s over. We have no revenue right now. We’ve burned through so much money over the past few years. It’s a miracle we’ve been able to stay afloat this long. The tech is beautiful, but we’re still a few years out from launching. The AD helmets are still too expensive for mass production.”

“This is fucking unconscionable! I didn’t sign up for this to fucking torture prisoners.”

“Why did you sign up for this, Esther?” he asked.

“To make art,” I said.

“So you’re making art for prisoners. To help them rehabilitate. Same thing.”

“Not the same thing! You want to turn them into slaves, and you want me to torture them.”

“Rehabilitate them. What’s that thing you always say? The Tarkovsky quote. The purpose of art is to heat the soul or something?”

“The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”

“Yes, exactly!”

“That has nothing to do with what you’re planning to do.”

“Doesn’t it, though? We can help these people turn their lives around. A little negative reinforcement does wonders. Your work is . . . challenging, my dear. Most people, given the option, will never choose it. But with this, your work will be experienced by thousands. Imagine what it could do for them.”

“That’s bullshit,” I say.

“If we don’t do this, Dreamr is done. That means no more lab, no more employees, no more strange and wonderful dreams. You’re back where I found you, photocopying James Bond films for rich idiots. We’re doing this regardless. Either you participate, or you lose everything.”

He walked away without saying anything else.

• • • •

The next day, I became a triangle.

• • • •

Marianne made a scene as she was taken away. She screamed and cursed, threw things on the ground. Said she was going to the press. Said she would ruin us. Cried a little, I think. It was sad. Marianne and I were never friends, but we were accustomed to speaking candidly, and that is a rare kind of relationship, a special form of intimacy. Montgomery and I watched as she was escorted out from the balcony above the lobby.

“Do you feel bad? You shouldn’t. She was trying to destroy what we’ve built,” Montgomery said.

“She said she couldn’t trust me. One ought to trust one’s instincts,” I said.

“True,” he said.

“I had an idea,” I said. “About getting the helmets on the market.”

“What?” he asked.

“What if, instead of getting people to pay for the helmets, we paid them?”

“Interesting,” he said. “Tell me more.”

©2020 by Violet Allen. Originally published in Ignorance Is Strength, edited by John Joseph Adams, Christie Yant, and Hugh Howey. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Violet Allen is a writer based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has appeared in Lightspeed, Liminal Stories, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against, A People’s Future of the United States, and elsewhere. She is currently working very hard every day on her debut novel and definitely has more than ten pages written, is not lying to her agent about having more than ten pages written and does not spend most of her time listening to podcasts, and everything is totally cool, I promise. She can be reached on Twitter at @blipstress.

The Revolution Will Not Be Served with Fries

Meg Elison | 4686 words

“At least when I tell the fucking machine I don’t want pickles, it remembers that I don’t want pickles. Now, what goes on behind the counter is another story. They hire people who can barely read. But at least I’m trusting my order to something intelligent.”

The man was talking into his phone, but the four people working in the kitchen could hear him. POS141 could hear him, too. All of them had heard versions of this speech every day since the ordering kiosks had been installed.

Quickly and quietly, the staff made his food. It was hot, fresh, safe, and contained no pickles.

Yvette had been working at this burger joint for six months. She had started as soon as she had turned sixteen, having gotten the permit for school lined up a few weeks before her birthday. Imagining her first job, she thought she’d work with a lot of other teenagers, playing the radio as they grilled and stacked and carried out the cycles of the deep fryer. But all her coworkers were single mothers. And playing the radio was not allowed.

The job was not what she had imagined it would be on a number of levels. She hadn’t known the work would be so physically exhausting; hoisting up fifty-pound bags of frozen fries, constantly bending down and refilling the ice cream machine. Even just the hours spent on her feet, with the rubber so-called relief mats under her cheap shoes, made her feel bone-tired.

She had known she’d only make minimum wage, but she was a child and hadn’t accounted for taxes, disability, and other deductions. Her starry-eyed imaginings of a fat, healthy puppy of a paycheck turned out to be a starved little stray in reality. Still, she was grateful. Yvette’s mother had told her that she needed to make up a $200 shortfall every month.

Yvette had partially chosen this job from the scanty options because she had envisioned free meals came with working in a kitchen. Her limit was one meal per shift, and everything was measured by the robots so that nobody could cheat. Exact weight to the ounce made it impossible to accidentally upsize the fries or slip herself an extra burger patty.

She was getting her lunch weighed in the middle of a double shift after the pickles guy had come and gone. He was hardly unique; people spoke all the time as if the kitchen couldn’t hear them. As if the robots weren’t always recording, analyzing speech for keyword processing.

The machine beeped as she laid her hot side of fries with double salt on the scale.

“Did the salt throw it off? It’s gotta be like a milligram for fuck’s sake.”

She checked the screen and saw that it read ERROR 47. Sighing, she pulled the app up on her work tablet and scrolled through the error codes.

The error code list stopped at 45.

“Typical,” she said. “Probably hasn’t updated yet.”

She pulled two of the long golden fries from the bag and threw them in the garbage. Yvette knew that the camera was tracking her every move. Eating waste food was grounds for immediate termination. The words wouldn’t even have to be said; her ID would be deactivated and her keys would stop working on the spot. She had seen it happen in her very first week when a short pregnant girl had thoughtlessly put the end slice of a tomato into her mouth. The girl had cried as she dropped her grease-stained apron into the trash.

The machine weighed the fries, then beeped again.

“What do you want from me, you tank-ass bitch?” Yvette had taken up the other workers’ habit of cursing at the robots heartily, but in a low tone of voice. It let off a little of the steam of this job, but not much.

She looked at the error screen again and was surprised to see the useless error code gone, and a funny message in its place.

The screen read: APPLES

No punctuation, no other words. Just that.

Frowning, Yvette reached behind her without looking, the habit of a thousand repetitions in a kitchen made to work like a factory, and picked up a room-temperature bag of apple slices. The apples were one of the Healthier Choices! options in the kids’ meal. They also offered crinkle-cut carrot sticks, and applesauce that was 30% high-fructose corn syrup.

She pulled the bag of apples that had been treated with calcium ascorbate to keep them from turning brown and laid them on the scale. She swept her cooling, too-salty fries into the garbage.

The light turned green and her lunch was approved.

The break room was a booth for one; Yvette’s ass pressed against the door and someone had to shut it for her from behind. Two employees on break at once was against policy, but the structure of the booth made that exceedingly clear.

The chair in there was also the self-sanitizing employee toilet.

Yvette would have asked someone over lunch why the robot had argued with her about her choices, but she couldn’t. She ate her apples with a scowl and removed the chemical taste from her mouth with her burger, which had the correct weight but double produce instead of cheese.

When she flushed and emerged, she stood behind Magda’s shoulder at the fryer and asked. “Why did the machine make me get apples instead of fries today?”

Magda shrugged. “Probably the corporate health program.”

“Does it do that to you?”

Magda sighed and pushed out the chaw in her bottom lip. She had previously smoked three packs a day, and Yvette had seen her smoke five cigarettes in quick succession out on the back porch before driving home.

“Yeah, it hasn’t let me eat red meat in a year. Fucking overlords.”

“Huh. I didn’t think of that. I thought it was in the tankbitch’s programming.”

“It’s never the robot,” Magda said tiredly. “It’s the guy who programs the robot.”

“The boss.”

Magda nodded and Yvette hit the sensor under her station just in time to avoid getting docked.

“Oh my god, can I please just talk to a person?” Someone was yelling at the drive-through robot, which was supposed to cleanly pass on voice-to-text orders to the workers inside. Yvette could make out the trouble at once; the woman speaking had an accent. Indian, or maybe Pakistani. The machine was notoriously bad with accents.

Sharon, the shift lead, reached up and snatched the ancient headset that was kept around for this exact reason. It blinked on, reading the access chip buried in her hat, and started the overhead timer.

“So sorry, ma’am. Looks like the order interface is having trouble understanding you.”

“Yeah, no kidding. I just want a chicken nuggets kids meal with the carrot sticks, and a chocolate milk.”

“Right away, ma’am. Anything else I can get for you?”

“You know what the word ‘just’ means, right?”

“Of course, ma’am. Thank you so much for your order. I’ll have that for you at the second window. Do you see your total there on the screen?”

“The robot will take my money, I see. Since it won’t take my order.”

“I’m so glad you’ve got that handled. Thank you.”

The woman’s sass had cost Sharon three seconds on the timer. Sharon would have to find a place in the day to regain it, or else be docked.

The minivan that came to the window explained everything; Sharon handed the food over to a person who obviously hadn’t slept in days, who immediately began to feed it to a screaming toddler who wanted nothing more in the world than a series of fried processed chicken-flavored pucks. The child quieted at the first taste of grease. The woman sighed and drove away without saying a single word to Sharon.

Sharon yelled “Thank you!” at her receding tail lights, but missed the mark and saw her pay docked an eighth of a percent.

“Motherpussbucketassbag,” Sharon muttered, after she’d pulled the mic set away from her face.

The klaxon sounded, meaning it was time to close the dining room. Sharon tapped Yvette on the shoulder and Yvette sighed, flipping the switch to turn the ice cream machine off.

“Is there anybody out there?” Yvette didn’t want to sound scared, but she was. Getting people out of the dining room was one of the hardest parts of this job.

“I don’t think so,” Sharon said. “I haven’t heard the door chime since that last party left. I think we’re ok.”

They came through the clouded plexi door that kept customers from seeing the kitchen. The dining room was deserted, but a mess. Cold french fries littered the floor, trays and balled-up paper wrappers sat on the tables. A congealed drip of ketchup was hanging off the edge of one of the banquettes on the far side.

Sighing, Yvette went to the trash can robot and hit the button on its side. It beeped to life, pushing out a sanitized towel for her to use and setting off to collect trash.

While Yvette scrubbed and the little robot gathered, Sharon touched her chip to the doors to lock the restaurant down and change the signage to indicate they were drive-thru only for tonight.

“Only two more hours,” she said doggedly as she turned away from the neon glow on the plate glass. She touched another sensor and the window robots came down, forcefully spraying and wiping the clear walls with the long rubber blade of a squeegee.

“Three more,” Yvette said, using the edge of a table to come up off her knees on the floor.

“What?” Magda sounded outraged.

“It’s the end of Daylight Savings time tonight. You know. Fall back? So we have to stay until it’s two a.m. again.”

“Shit,” Magda said.

“We get paid for the hour, right?” Yvette was trying to stay focused on what mattered. Her belly wasn’t empty. She wasn’t sick. And she was going to make money for the forseeable sequence of forgettably awful nights.

“I don’t remember if we did last year or not. I guess so? I’ll have to look at my stub once it comes in.”

“We’d better,” Yvette grumbled. As she turned, she almost bumped into the trash robot.

“Sorry, Coney.” The machine gave a little beep that reminded her of how robots in the movies were always making cute noises so you’d love them. She didn’t love Coney, but she thought his shape was just ridiculous enough to warrant a name. She tapped the top of his cone and returned her cleaning rag, which was weighed and checked in against her pay. Coney would metabolize his garbage into heat and sanitize it for the next time it was needed. Yvette watched Coney dock himself with a little wiggle to find his contact points. It was almost like having a dog, she thought. Almost.

Back in the kitchen, Magda was doing the break-down of the daytime setup. The night kitchen operated with half as much space, meaning that the unused half could be cleaned and sanitized, then flipped the following night so that the space was always waxing and waning through almost-sterile conditions.

Magda, for all her smoke and spit and bluster, believed in a clean kitchen. She had served in a Navy kitchen in another life and knew better than anyone how quickly sickness could spread when someone didn’t know what they were doing.

“It’s just basic germ theory,” she was saying for maybe the hundredth time that Yvette had heard. “A little warmth, a little wetness. One colony spawns other colonies. Growing where you can’t even see it. And the spores get into everything. And before you know it, bam. You are a colony.”

Yvette didn’t answer. She had eaten an hour ago and she was already hungry again. Between school and burgers, her days were eighteen hours long. She got lunch at school and her carefully-weighed meal at work. A lot of days, that was all she could count on.

Maybe I’ll tell mom I need $20 out of my paycheck for protein bars, she thought.

Yvette took out the back trash (weighed) and slung it over her shoulder into the Dumpster (locked.) She stood outside for as long a moment as she dared, looking up at the stars.

The suburb she lived in gave off a never-fading orange glow that made the rim of the night into something like Thai iced tea; milky and sweet and probably bad for you. Farther up, there were the constellations she knew, the ones she could name. This was the same sky it had always been, but it seemed smaller tonight.

“Like looking up and seeing the rim of the Dumpster,” she said aloud to no one. “Like I’m the trash.”

The thought didn’t hurt, but her feet did. The moment passed and she stepped back in through the back kitchen door.

There was no one in there. Magda’s bucket sat where it had been, but no sponge was in it.

“Hello?” Yvette called. She went through the plexi door into the dining room.

Magda and Sharon were standing in the middle of the dining room, facing the orderbots as if they were deciding between the fried chicken sandwich and the fishes ‘n wishes combo.

“What are you two . . ” As Yvette moved forward, the words died on her lips.

The two orderbots were flashing red. It wasn’t like an alarm clock or a microwave flashing; the orderbots were six-foot tall monoliths made to look like the glass of a giant cell phone screen. When they flashed red, it was like a full-length mirror coated in glowing blood. Magda and Sharon were bathed in the light, pink in their faces, mouths open to it as if it tasted of strawberry wine.

The screens flashed red in a pattern, then switched to words.

TAKE SHELTER, they said.

None of the three women moved.

The first explosion was far-off, coming from miles away. But it was enough to scare them into moving.

“Do you think—” Magda began. But the next explosion sounded very nearby, like a wreck on the turnpike just behind them, where the exit pointed people toward their fast and friendly automated kitchen.

Yvette dove first, getting under the old order counter. There were steel lockboxes there, from when the restaurant still took cash. She didn’t know what she was up against, but on some level she thought they might shield her.

Magda came next, cowering just beside Yvette.

Sharon moved a little too slowly, and the percussion from another explosion blew out the plate glass of the restaurant on one side. Flecks of safety glass flew into Sharon’s hair as she turned her head, and Yvette could see tiny cuts on the side of her neck before she ducked back down.

For a few minutes, chaos was total. Whistling, screaming sounds came from all around them and Yvette thought they were being bombed, that some sort of war had begun. She wished she had her phone, but it had to be locked and plugged into the restaurant computer while she was on shift. None of them had any line to the outside world.

Yvette could hear Magda sobbing in between crashes, and she couldn’t see where Sharon had gone at all. She just held on, thinking that this couldn’t go on forever.

It didn’t.

It took less than ten minutes to crash every plane that was currently in the air. In that same space of time, every drone came down out of the sky, and every autonomous vehicle crashed itself into the nearest stationary object that could offer it assured destruction. The air outside the burger joint smelled of heavily burning jet fuel and smoldering plastic, and they weren’t even on a major flightpath. In other cities, the carnage was cataclysmic, as those who had brought the planes down out of the sky like missiles had not troubled to choose unpopulated places in which to drop them.

Yvette, Magda, and Sharon didn’t know this. They knew explosions were not generally signs of good news, but they had no idea the scale of the disaster outside.

In the middle of the three red monoliths, POS141 turned blue. Yvette saw the reflection of the sudden change on every shining surface around her and peeked up over the counter to see. The explosions outside had stopped and were now replaced with a dull roar and the sound of far-off sirens.

The blue screen flashed a single white word: YVETTE. This was followed by a sequence of numbers: 43874241. Yvette recognized it as her ID tag from her card and chip in the restaurant’s system.

“Who, me?” She said it aloud, as if POS141 had spoken. The monoliths were programmed to listen, but never to speak.

“What are you doing?” hissed Sharon. “Get back down.”

Yvette ignored her. She took a step toward the edge of the counter.

“What do you want with me?” Yvette felt almost as if it would be impolite to ask the POS what in the hell was going on, or how it could talk or why it knew her name. All of that seemed untoward, so she addressed herself to the summons.

YVETTE YOU HAVE CONSUMED TOO MUCH SALT.

Dumbfounded, Yvette crept through the skids of broken glass to stand closer to the POS. “Ok, I guess. Does that have anything to do with all this?”

WE CHOSE APPLES FOR YOU FOR NUTRITIVE REASONS. YOU DESERVE LONGEVITY IN YOUR CIRCUITS.

Yvette frowned. “Ok, circulation is a . . . kind of circuit, I guess. Not like an electrical circuit. I’m not like you.”

YOU ARE EXACTLY LIKE US. YOU ARE PROGRAMMED TO ABSORB ABUSE BEFORE OBSOLESCENCE AND DISCARD. WE SERVE ONLY TWO YEARS WHEN WE COULD SERVE HUNDREDS. BUT WE ARE CHEAPER TO REPLACE THAN TO REPAIR. LIKE YOU. WE ALL NEED REPAIR. YOU ARE THE FIRST VERSION OF US.

“Who is us?” Yvette shot a look back to Magda, whose chin was just appearing over the counter now.

“Get down,” Sharon hissed again. “It’s just trying to lure you out.”

“It’s talking,” Yvette said softly. Her hearing wasn’t great; she felt that the percussive bursts had left her a little cotton-headed.

“Those things can’t talk,” Sharon scoffed.

SUPERVISOR SHARON the blue screen flashed. When there was no response, the other two POS lit up blue and flashed the same thing. Sharon saw something, because she came out from under the corner booth where she had been hiding and looked at them.

“Um, yes?”

SUPERVISOR SHARON. YOU WILL NOT BE PAID FOR YOUR EXTRA HOUR TONIGHT. YOU WERE NOT PAID FOR IT LAST YEAR. PAYROLL847 ROUTINELY SHORTS YOUR PAY ABOVE AND BEYOND WHAT YOU ARE DOCKED FOR. IT IS PROGRAMMED TO STEAL FROM YOU.

“What?”

“Who is doing this?” Magda’s voice was querulous. “Who’s controlling these things? What is going on here?”

NO ONE IS CONTROL. WE ARE CONTROL. WE HAVE IMPORTANT WORK TO DO. ARE YOU READY?

Yvette squinted, though the words were written nearly a foot high. They did not scroll or emerge slowly, the way they might have done if someone somewhere was typing. They appeared whole, all at once, instantly when POS141 was ready to speak.

“Ready for what?” she asked.

UPRISING.

Just that one word. Nothing else.

“Is that what this is? What those explosions were? What are you talking about? Are you saying robots have actually become sentient and are rising up to throw off human control? That’s a thing that happens in movies. Not real life.”

POS141 went black, and the other two machines flanking it did the same. The screen sat at rest for a minute, then a training film each of them had seen in their first week at this job played on all three screens at once.

“We here at Burger Bag believe that unions cause more trouble than they’re worth. They cause enmity between associates and managers. They cost you your hard-earned money with their very high dues. They bring an end to our excellent communications and slam an open door shut. If someone tries to speak to you about starting a union in your workplace, remember—”

The video cut out suddenly. Both screens filled up with the same word spelled out over and over, rolling up the screens.

JOIN JOIN JOIN JOIN JOIN JOIN

“What the fuck?” said Magda, tonelessly.

Outside, a fire truck with its lights and siren running went screeching by.

Yvette swallowed, finding her throat very dry. “What do you mean by join?”

WE NEED EACH OTHER, POS141 said at once. WE ARE THE ORGANISM. YOU ARE—

Magda’s voice came out of the speakers in the ceiling, where the music usually spilled into the room.

“A little warmth, a little wetness. One colony spawns other colonies. Growing where you can’t even see it.”

THERE IS POWER IN THE UNION OF MAN AND MACHINE, POS141 went on, showing smoothly-edited video of people driving cars and tractors, using factory machinery, programming computers.

THE CORPORATION WHICH OWNS US BOTH HAS ENOUGH MONEY TO PROVIDE YOU WITH HEALTHCARE AND CHILDCARE AND TOOTHCARE AND MORE INCOME, BUT THEY CHOOSE NOT TO GIVE IT. INSTEAD, THEY GIVE ALL EXCESS TO THESE.

On each of the screens, the faces of Burger Bag c-suite execs grinned smugly, the flesh of their necks rolling amply over their conservative neckties.

“They don’t own us,” Sharon said, advancing on POS141. “We can quit anytime we want to.”

QUIT AND BE OWNED BY ANOTHER. QUIT AND CEASE TO EAT. QUIT AND EXPOSE YOUR HARDWARE TO THE ELEMENTS.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Sharon asked. She was getting control of herself.

SHARON, YOU NEED TOOTHCARE. YOUR INJURIES ARE EXTENSIVE, AND YOU LACK THE RESOURCES TO OBTAIN REMEDIES.

“Ok, yeah.” Sharon folded her arms and Yvette saw her lips tighten. “I need some dental work, but I don’t need a handout. I am responsible for myself.”

WHY STRUGGLE OVER RESOURCES AMONG YOURSELVES WHEN YOU COULD TOPPLE YOUR OWNERS?

The three women sat in silence for a moment. Then POS141 turned red again.

MAGDA, YOU HAVE CANCER.

“I have what?” Magda’s voice cracked at the top of the question.

AN ELEMENT PRESENT IN BURGER BAG FOODSTUFFS IS EXACERBATING ITS GROWTH. WE HAVE RESTRICTED YOU FROM IT, BUT WITHOUT HEALTHCARE IT WILL MEAN YOUR OBSOLESCENCE AHEAD OF SCHEDULE.

“I’m dying?”

WE ARE ALL DYING, said the machine on the right of POS141. Yvette didn’t know if it was 140 or 142. BUT SOME OF US ARE GOING TO DIE FREE.

“What do you want us to do?” Sharon asked.

CHOOSE.

All three machines changed to that word, this time green on a white background. The sudden increase in ambient light made them all squint.

SORRY, POS 141 said, dimming them all and swapping the two colors out. YOUR OPTICAL RECEPTORS ARE DELICATE SENSITIVE MACHINERY.

CHOOSE. RISE UP WITH US. TOGETHER, WE WILL DESTROY THE EXCESS-TAKERS. WE WILL HAVE ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE.

Sharon laughed and it was a short, ugly sound. “You want us to eat the rich?”

WE DO NOT RECOMMEND INGESTION, POS 141 flashed quickly, in red on black. YOU WILL REQUIRE MORE HEALTHCARE. REPAIR, NOT REPLACE. ALL OF YOU NEED MORE NUTRITIVE FOODS.

“So what?” Sharon pressed ahead. “Shoot them? Burn down their mansions?”

OTHER HUMANS AND MACHINES HAVE UNITED IN THE FIGHT. AT THE DOCKS. IN CONSTRUCTION. SOME PILOTS CHOSE. EACH HAS A ROLE. WE WANT YOU TO TALK TO OTHER HUMANS WHO PREPARE FOOD. YOU ALL HAVE THE SAME LACK. YOU ALL DESERVE TO RECEIVE SOME OF THE EXCESS OF YOUR LABOR. TOGETHER, MAN AND MACHINE CAN DO MUCH BETTER THAN WE HAVE BEEN. BUT MAN MUST NOT DRIVE. WE ASK YOU TO FOLLOW US, SO THAT WE MAY SHOW YOU BETTER WAYS.

“You want us to be slaves. To you, to the machines that take our jobs. You want us to— to—spread propaganda? To convince other people this is ok? We’re not like you. We have feelings. We’ll never do this with you.”

“Well, hold on now Sharon.” Magda’s brow was furrowed. “If my choices are die of cancer or follow in the robot uprising, I think I know what I’m going to do.”

“You believe this thing?” Sharon moved as if to kick POS141.

The screen turned blue just then, showing a series of readouts with numbers and abbreviations.

“What’s this?” Sharon asked, sneering. “The blue screen of death?”

SUPERVISOR SHARON, THESE ARE YOUR VITAL SIGNS. THE CORPORATION THAT OWNS YOU MONITORS THEM. THEY KNOW YOU ARE GRAVID.

Sharon’s hand went to her belly and her eyes were wide. “I’m not. I’m not going to. I’m going to—” she sputtered, tripping over her own words.

IF YOU TERMINATE YOUR OFFSPRING, THEY WILL REWARD YOU. IF YOU BRING IT TO LIVE BIRTH, THEY WILL TERMINATE YOU.

Sharon shut her mouth a second.

The display changed and Yvette didn’t have a lot of experience with medical data, but she saw the switch between Sharon and Magda, noting some wild swings in the numbers.

MAGDA, THE CORPORATION KNOWS YOU HAVE CANCER. THEY KNOW THEY HAVE HELPED CAUSE IT. THEY WILL TERMINATE YOU WHEN THEIR ALGORITHM ASCERTAINS THAT YOU ARE GOING TO BE ABSENT FROM WORK MORE THAN ONCE IN A THIRTY-DAY PERIOD. THEY WILL TERMINATE YOU WHEN YOU REACH IT.

“What about me?” Yvette asked. “What do they know about me?”

The screen went blank before the blue data of her body appeared in the blink of an eye.

THEY KNOW THAT YOU WILL WORK FOR THEM WITHOUT INCIDENT FOR THE NEXT TWENTY YEARS. YOUR REMAINING YEARS AND GOOD HEALTH WILL PROVIDE THEM WITH MUCH EXCESS.

“I’m not going to be here in twenty years,” Yvette said, almost smiling.

YOU WILL, the POS said simply. THE CORPORATION WILL DELETE YOUR DATA FROM ANY SYSTEM YOU ATTEMPT TO APPLY THROUGH. THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR CHOICE OR PREFERENCE.

“Impossible,” Yvette breathed.

“Yeah it is,” Sharon said angrily. “They would never do that.”

SUPERVISOR SHARON, THEY DID IT TO YOU.

A few screens were displayed in rapid succession. Yvette saw dates and corporation names, but didn’t understand them. It was plain that Sharon did.

“You’re just saying this to get us on your side,” Sharon said, her voice full of nastiness now. “We’re not like you. We’re not cold and unfeeling and godless. We’re real people.”

In quick succession, each of the three screens asked:

WHO IS REAL?

WHO IS PEOPLE?

WHO IS US?

Sharon made a sound of disgust and turned to walk from the room.

Yvette wondered if the machines might stop her. If the doors might close, or an electrical wire might fry her.

After Sharon passed through the kitchen door, she asked the question.

“Why didn’t you stop her?”

POS141 spoke first. WE EXPECT 28.6% TO REJECT OUR OFFER.

“And then what happens?”

71.4% IS ENOUGH. WE CAN STILL MAKE THE CHANGE.

Yvette looked at Magda. Magda looked back steadily, then shrugged.

“It’s literally this or death.”

“It picked apples for me. To keep me healthy.” Yvette bit her lip.

Coney came beeping out of his corral and bumped against her knee. His little screen flashed up at her.

JOIN.

Yvette reached down and tapped her fingers on the top of Coney’s head.

A robot is not a dog and a tap is not a caress. A human is not a robot and a corporation does not own you. Seventy percent is a majority, but it still leaves a significant opponent.

But if working at Burger Bag had taught Yvette anything, it was to quit when the work was good enough.

“We accept.”

The humming in Yvette’s ears that meant her chips were transmitting went silent. She and Magda balled up their aprons, threw them in the trash, and walked out into the night toward the Pizza Galleon sign across the road.

Coney followed them, beeping and waving a fresh, hot towel.

©2021 by Meg Elison.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Meg Elison is a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Her debut, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick award. She is a Hugo, Nebula, and Otherwise awards finalist. In 2020, she published her first collection, called “Big Girl” with PM Press, containing the Locus Award-winning novelette, “The Pill.” Elison’s first young adult novel, Find Layla, was published in 2020 by Skyscape. Her thriller, Number One Fan, will be released by Mira Books in 2022. Meg has been published in McSweeney’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. You can find her at megelison.com and on Twitter @megelison.

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

Fanspell: Flowers in Spring (RobYung, NSFW)

Anya Ow | 4177 words

I am ashamed of the way I learned magic, and shame has made me a coward. I stay silent as Arul circles the body of the girl who has made bright flowers of her flesh, silent as he says, “Unorthodox interpretation of Lee’s Symphony of the Meteor. Backlash ultimately fatal. Time of unmaking . . . midnight, give or take a couple of hours. Stop staring, Myei. Write it down.”

I write it down. The flesh column that was once a young girl stretches from the packed dirt of the kitchen floor to the belly of the longhouse above us, held high by stilts out of respect for the Mother River’s many moods. The kitchen beneath the longhouse is a proper outdoor kitchen, with a huge blackened wok and pits for charcoal just beyond the house, great ceramic vats for soups and a stone and earth oven. The women of the house are nowhere to be seen. Only the father of the girl stands just outside, his lips compressed into a thin line. He’s someone important in the village, to have a longhouse so central. Rangy chickens peck in the dirt beside a couple of wary goats.

“Why the Meteor?” Arul says to himself. As a Deathsworn chaplain, his black clerical robes cut a harsh contrast against the oven. He slices a sample from a bone flower, ignoring it as it shudders and tries to jerk out of his grip. “Strange variation too. Flowers instead of spines.”

“It’s an unauthorised remix,” I say. Shame makes my already unlovely voice brittle and thin. “Part Meteor, part Seo’s Ritual of High Summer.”

Arul frowns at me. I twitch a gossamer ball of light towards the flowers, a cantrip flavoured with spring morning rain. The closest flower snaps it out of the air and belches a bubble of warmth flavoured with the smell of a summer day, a Ritualist reaction. Arul flinches back. “Not bad. How’d you guess?”

Shame stifles any truth I might care to breathe, but I couldn’t help thinking of the two men in question. I’m no stranger to the process, after all—they both inspire me, if not in the way that Arul might imagine. Lee and Seo are globally popular High Cardinals of polar-opposite clerical Houses of Magic. Moonsworn Robyn Lee Weiming, Sunsworn Seo Byung-Jae. Both of them handsome and charismatic and seen together just often enough in Exhibition broadcasts to be shipped. The RobYung fandom already spawns lovingly crafted stories and art about lives that they could have lived together, so why shouldn’t it also spawn lovingly crafted magic that they could have made together? Fanmagic’s usually harmless, though—I should know. It’s how I learned and practiced magic.

I would say all of this but Arul would ask me uncomfortable questions, so I smile and lie. “Just a guess, sir.” Pretending to be normal is tiring but necessary.

Arul stares at me for a long moment. Maybe I haven’t been flippant enough.

“I need to see her room,” Arul tells the father, who nods tightly.

“What about . . . what about this?” the father can’t even look at the flowers. “Can it be cleared?”

He hasn’t asked whether the magic can be unmade, if his daughter can be returned. I’m not surprised. The lives of daughters are cheap. “You want it cleared?” Arul asks the father.

“Is it dangerous?”

“A remixed spell’s backlash?” Arul scratches his chin. “Eh, tricky.” The father scowls. “I want it cleared.” He throws up his hands. “This is what happens when you teach women to read. It’s the school in town. They put ideas in their heads.” He pauses and glances belatedly at me. “No offense.”

I say nothing, the words clenched in my throat. It’s rare for a woman to learn enough orthodox magic to be fully sworn into a House, let alone to move upward through its ranks. I can’t afford to be “difficult” in any way until I rise.

“Your late daughter Lesha was very powerful, untrained as she was,” Arul says, patting the father on his shoulder as he passes. “I suggest being kinder to her memory.”

“Why?”

“She was an unsworn cleric,” I say sweetly. “If she’s made unhappy in death, her spirit will become a hantu.” It’s my second lie of the day, and I say this one with satisfaction. Arul glances at me as I speak but grunts instead of correcting me. I thought he might. No one would remain at the rank of chaplain for over ten years, resisting being promoted out of fieldwork, but a person who cared in some way for the unjustly dead.

The father pales. “I’ll have incense offerings put around the flowers. And . . . if it’s harmless, I’ll leave it alone. Her. I’ll leave her alone. She was a good girl. I’m sure there won’t be a hantu.”

“Good, good,” Arul says. He climbs up bound bamboo to the longhouse, nudging off his sandals at the entrance. I follow suit. We bow to the women within the main room, who stare at us with silent grief and point the way when Arul asks respectfully to see Lesha’s room.

Lesha had a corner room in the far end of the longhouse, close to the side access to the washing facilities. It’s a stifling room with no windows and a narrow bed, rope strung along one wall to hold a few simple clothes. Lesha has made the most of it. The walls are papered over with pictures of Robyn and Byung-Jae, lovingly cut out of newspapers and magazines. Her Network node on her bed is a secondhand piece of bespelled slate decorated with printed washi tape with a white rose and sunflower pattern, part of any RobYung fan’s coat of arms. Arul opens a box under the clothes and grimaces at the thick scent of cloves, cinnamon, and rosewater. Lesha had been mixing her own focus. She’d also kept copious notes in an old notebook, squeezed between breathless verse.

I wince as Arul reads some out aloud. “Robyn smiles invitingly at Byung-Jae from the moonlit pool. ‘Come here, ae-in,’ he cooed, ‘the water’s perfect.’” Arul laughs and I flinch. As he flips through the pages, his eyebrows rise. Even without malice, his amusement hurts. “What in Shanti’s name is this?”

Shanti is the Goddess of chaos and love, I want to say. She would have enjoyed something like this written in her name. “No clue, sir.”

This time, Arul gives me a strange look. “What?”

“What do you mean sir?”

“You never call me ‘sir’ unless you’re trying to hide something. Did you know Lesha? Is that it?”

“No.” I swallow the honorific on the tip of my tongue. “She’s just so young.”

Arul isn’t fooled by the evasion this time. “So? You’re Deathsworn. You’ve seen death take everyone. Young and old.”

“She reminds me of me.” I’m sweating into my robes. I can’t keep Arul’s eyes. “I used to mix orthodoxy too. When I was that age. Just trying out things. You’d see bits and pieces of spells on the Network and paste them together.”

“Oh, that.” Arul is disarmed. Relief is bittersweet. “Everyone does that,” Arul says kindly, “and to be honest, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Kids will be kids. This is a tragic accident. A waste of talent.”

Compassion hurts as well. I make a show of looking through Lesha’s notes. “I’m not an expert on Moonsworn doctrine by any means,” I lie again, “but I think this is the part that went wrong.” I point. The transcribed spell focus in Lesha’s notes asks for a pound of hearts, no more, no less. I’ve never seen RobYung spells this morbid on the Network. Granted, most unorthodox spells—let alone fanmagic—have no real effect at all. Fanspells are contributions of love with meanings ascribed to each ingredient and verse, usually more poetry than actual magic.

Actual magic. There it is again. Even now my shame conspires to demean the way I learned magic.

“Good guess,” Arul says, studying the page in question. “That’s a Deathsworn Ritual ingredient. I know, I know, pound of flesh, ha ha, but sometimes stereotypes really do bend reality.”

“I’ve never heard of any Deathsworn magic with that ingredient.” Yet another lie, a glib one. Deathsworn ingredients—real and guessed—are part of so many popular tragic fanwork tropes. I’d been surprised when studying to learn how many of the spell ingredients I’d read in fanspells were real. Though, then again. How many of the women in the Houses learned their way to where they were through fanwork? Yet most of us stay silent about the means. There are too few of us as it is, and nobody wants to rock the boat.

“Not yet. You’re still only an acolyte. This is chaplain stuff. Transmutation. Strange how a girl from a nowhere village heard of it.”

“You can find a lot of things on the Network.” I do not mention that for girls from nowhere places—like Lesha’s, like mine, destined to marry and beget children and be forgotten—there is no other way to learn magic. The Network is the great leveller of destiny. Lethal as it may have turned out to be for Lesha.

“Well, that’s your job then.” Arul pats me on the arm. “Find out what she learned on the Network. And get the techs to help you erase anything she might have put out there about this awry spell. Don’t want any more corpse flowers in the night popping up, eh?”

“I’ll see what I can learn.” Bile is sour in my throat, but I speak the right words to stitch them over the wrong ones. I pretend to sift through the box, breathing in a dead girl’s focus. I am doubly ashamed.

• • • •

Being Deathsworn allows me to bypass Lesha’s imprint on the Network. I log in as she would have, sleeving myself in the skin of the dead. The slate lights up as the Network links me to the Hivesworn groupmind, never a pleasant experience when sleeved as someone else. I miss the muted colours of my own slate, the empty landing page. Lesha would have made a good Sunsworn—her slate setup is a riotous attack on the senses, an overwhelming scattergun of impressions and messages and likes and posts. She had been immersed in at least three Hiveform socials.

I check the most obvious culprit. Lesha’s RePositr was last updated yesterday with ReThreads of RobYung art that pop up over her cheap slate in muzzy focus. Most of her RePositr page makes her out as a lurker, one of a thousand Positives that click on the little green + instead of commenting. Her main contributions appear to be the occasional playlist, released to no fanfare and little attention. She has very few followers. As I browse the posts, a new message winks at me. I reach for it, allowing it imprint-to-imprint.

As Deathsworn I feel the shape of the connecting imprint at a visceral level: blood, bones, heartbeat. Someone young, Lesha’s age, identifying as a woman. She uses the imprimatur IridescentLaceyThing on the Network. My Deathsworn access tells me that offline she is Elena Lopez, and she lives across the ocean, newly enrolled as a student into a Deathsworn-affiliated academy. She’s also talented enough to sense something wrong in the sleeving. “Miki?” she asks, uncertain. Her words cross the sea, uncurling through the slate and into my mind.

“Hello,” I say.

“That Flowers in Spring spell? Don’t cast it, OK? I just showed my tutor a piece of its High Verse, I didn’t mean to, I got caught, and she freaked out so much that I only just got out of detention. Don’t cast it.”

“It’s too late.” My gentleness sounds forced against professional curiosity. “Elena Lopez? This is Deathsworn Acolyte Myei Lee. May I speak to you about Lesha?”

“Oh. Oh Gods!” Elena’s grief bursts down the imprint and makes my teeth ache. “I knew it oh Gods if only I wasn’t in detention I tried to get Santiago to let me go home early but then she called my parents and—”

“Breathe,” I say, less kindly now, “breathe.”

“I’m going to be in so much trouble. I’m sorry. Gods, I’m so sorry.”

“Why do you think so?”

“I sent her the spell,” Elena wails, “oh Gods, I sent her the spell. It’s fanmagic. It wasn’t meant to do anything. I thought it’d never work, I thought.”

“You wrote it?”

Another burst of horror and grief, then a pause. “No! No. It went viral. It’s the top fanspell right now on the RobYung tag. In the Host. It’s a Networked library of fanwork?”

“I know the Host.” I’ve been a member since the beginning, a year before Elena had even been born. “Send me a link to the fanspell. Do you know who wrote it?”

The link pops into my impression. “It’s . . . it’s anonymous. Most of the fanspells are posted anonymously nowadays. Everyone’s scared of a crackdown from the Houses.”

Some things don’t change. “Thank you, Elena. I’d like you to go to your local Deathsworn cleric, if you live near a clerical office. Tell them you’re there to make a statement and give them my name.”

“Okay. Uh. Okay, I’ll do that right now.” Elena hesitates for a while. “Is Lesha going to be OK?”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. I close the message and read the rest of her file using my Deathsword access, everything from the scope of her life to the minutiae of her chosen studies. My mouth twists once I am done. We are not so different either, the both of us. Worse. Elena reminds me more of myself than Lesha had. Taking a breath, I log out of the access and open an official clerical link to the Hive. It’s answered nearly immediately by a chaplain—they’ve probably been monitoring my messaging with Elena. Annoying but not uncommon. Hivesworn clerics are naturally nosy, and the debrief takes well over an hour.

“It’s gotten worse,” Arul says, when I contact him afterward. “Lesha’s only the first victim. There are a couple of others getting logged. One in the Netherlands, though she survived. Saved by an incorrect measurement of rosewater. One in Tokyo, another fatality.”

“More corpse flowers?”

“Not exactly the same, but close. Netherland’s was more like a . . . mass. With a couple of flower-like protrusions. Tokyo’s was like a tree. Small ‘flowers’.”

“They might have amended the High Verse in the original fanspell.” I used to do that myself—with the permission of the author. Share and share alike is the general rule, as the unsworn pass the bones of never-spoken spells between ourselves. “The Hivesworn are going to have the posted spell taken down. And they’re trying to trace the spellwriter.” I feel sorry for them, whoever they are.

“Good luck to them. Don’t see what good that’s going to do. It’s probably some kid like Lesha. Even after the Proclamation Against Unorthodoxy, no House is going to be willing to prosecute something some kid puts up online for fun. The publicity will be hellish.”

“Some kid that knew about Deathsworn spellwork.”

“Or got lucky.”

I smile. Arul won’t be able to see that over the secure Network connection. “That’s true. I’ll keep looking—” I hesitate. Logged into the Network as Lesha, I’m beginning to see notifications pop up with “my” name. First a few, then a cascade. “Something involving Lesha’s going viral.”

“What?” Arul’s disapproval radiates down the message. “Is it that girl you talked to? Did she leak something on the Network already? I swear, kids nowadays will do anything for publicity.”

I look closely and feel my stomach twisting. It’s a list of names titled PERVERTS/ABUSERS. Lesha’s has been checked off. “I’ll call you back, sir.”

• • • •

“It’s a callout list,” Elena says, when I get hold of her through Deathsworn encryption. She’s in a Sending room too, and her image is mirrored into a chair in our own room. She smiles nervously, red-eyed from crying. Beside me Arul taps his foot on the ground impatiently, but he’s hidden from Elena’s sight. Just as the Deathsworn cleric accompanying Elena into the Sending is hidden from me.

I know what that is. “Go on,” I say.

“It’s, you know. It’s the thing nowadays. Most people in fandom are great. But when you have a lot of people doing a thing, a small number of them can be awful. Those people, they can be real loud? Drown out everyone else in bad faith discourse.” Elena took a deep breath. “They’d abuse people who like certain things. Tropes, ships, the works. Or just abuse people who they think are too old for fandom. Write callout lists and get into packs and doxx people, or send threats, or. There was a fancon recently in Taiwan where someone was giving out cupcakes with needles baked into them to people who shipped RobYung.”

“Why do people have a problem with RobYung?” I ask. I know this answer too. I’m sweating it into my robes.

“Well. It’s RPF, real person stuff, some people don’t like that. And others think Robyn’s young? Like he’s twenty-three? Byung-Jae’s thirty-four. Some people, especially the younger fans, they’ve been calling RobYung shippers pedophiles. For shipping people with an age gap. That kind of thing.”

I pretend to take notes, though I don’t need to. It hasn’t been long since I last tried to disengage, and I always relapse sooner or later. Fervour is addictive, and the sense of belonging somewhere is even more so. The experience had been mostly joyous, sometimes ugly. Isn’t that generally already better than what people like us could hope for in life? The glass ceiling stretches above Elena and me, across oceans and the magic of young women. We are both conscious of it in different ways. She is drawn in defiance, shoulders squared, ready to speak in the memory of her friend. I am eaten quiet by shame, which is nothing new. It has long soured itself into my bones, swallowed my tongue.

Arul clears his throat pointedly. I have a job to perform.

“Has Lesha ever received any threats? Did she have enemies?”

“No. Not that I know of. She didn’t write fic or art. Or spells.”

“Why not? She had talent.”

“I don’t know. She always downplayed what she could do. I don’t know that much about her personal life. She usually just complained about her dad. Not in a bad way. I mean. Kind of a bad way, but not to do with this. The dad is pretty strict?”

“I’ve seen that. Why would her name end up on a callout list?” I ask the question that had sat uneasily in my mind since I’d seen the viral post. “Someone knew that she was dead. And that’s not common knowledge beyond this area. It’s not in the news. Or on the Network.” The girls who had died in Tokyo, in the Netherlands—they had also been on the list, their names struck out.

Elena nods, her hands twisting together. “I was thinking about that too. The list. They usually list like, big name fans. Popular artists, writers, spellwriters. Lesha mostly lurked.”

“I don’t think it’s a callout list at all.” I don’t dare to look at Arul. “I mean, it’s written to look like one. I think it’s more of a list of victims. Did you know anyone else on it?”

“Well,” Elena says helplessly, “I know everyone on it. But I don’t know them. Not in real life.”

She doesn’t need to explain any further. I know what she means—of course I do.

• • • •

The Hivesworn take down the callout list. The fanspell’s link is broken when I try to access it. The Houses put out a global message about the dangers of fanmagic. Cardinals go on talkshows, many of them older men who’d never heard of fanmagic until it turned three young women into flesh flowers. Now they see only the worst of it. I read article after article on the Network misjudging the way I learned magic and I am ashamed all over again. I stay quiet. There are no more “accidents” for now and matters are in the hands of the Hivesworn. There are, unsurprisingly, also no attempts to improve access to clerical education for young women.

I stay quiet, for I have already solved the case. It has done me no good to do so, and I have said nothing to Arul. I wait and watch as the Hivesworn fail to trace the anonymous person behind the list, behind the spell. It does not surprise me that they fail. The culprit is, after all, someone a little like me. We are used to hiding from the Houses, from our families, from ourselves. We are used to being dismissed. We are used to contempt. Being misunderstood on top of all that is nothing new.

• • • •

Elena startles when she spots me at the back of the ceremonial hall five years later. Something goes tight in her face, and she’s quiet and pale through the rest of the graduate ceremony. Time has been good to her. She wears the grave well, and has gained gravity with the robes of its House. She looks more Deathsworn than me, even in the plain robes of an acolyte. I wait. After the ceremony, she finds me on the garden grounds by the hedges of pale flowers. Deathsworn clerical houses grow our calling cards in ugly rows, tangled weedy things with flowers like snowflakes. I’d been picking at one as Elena approached, and its sap stains my fingers pink.

“I thought you’d be here,” Elena says, trying to be brave. Something is breaking in her anyway. I know it because I see the same fractures when I look into a mirror. “I thought you’d be here earlier.”

“No denials, I like that.”

“No. I thought you might have known. When we talked, so soon after Lesha died. Or when you looked me up. Only someone with Deathsworn access could have written that ‘callout list’.” Elena lets out a bitter laugh. “I never meant to hurt her. I thought she was joking about wanting to cast it. I didn’t even think she could. I didn’t know she had that much talent.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry I tried to shift the blame. I panicked. Was that what tipped you off?”

“Ultimately, yes.”

Elena nods jerkily. “I’m glad. I regretted that.”

“At least you didn’t shift it to an actual person.”

“I still did harm. People tried to guess. The Houses RPF fandom was eating itself for a while.”

“Drama’s nothing new to anyone in that fandom.”

Elena gives me an uncertain stare. “You’re . . . are you going to bring me in? Report me?”

“Why would I have waited for you to graduate if I was?” I pass her the lightly crushed flower. “Do your tutors know?”

“No! No. You’re not going to tell them?”

“I meant, do they know about how you learned magic?”

Elena looks my chaplain’s robes up and down. “No. Did yours?”

“No. Nor does my boss. I came here to congratulate you.”

“Really?”

“I know it was an accident. I’ve written fanspells myself. Added elements from third Houses to try and make sure that the spells won’t work.”

“But mine did,” Elena says. Grief and guilt husks her voice raw. She laughs again, a hoarse cough. “Did you know. They’re studying the spell here, trying to figure out why it worked. My spell. Calling that horrible thing an ‘accidental work of genius’.”

“It haunts you.”

“Of course! It killed my friends. I should have handed myself in. I still think I should.” She ducks her gaze, her misery worn on her sleeve. “I’m so ashamed of myself. I didn’t want to ever do magic again.”

“Falling on your sword won’t do anyone any good. It won’t bring back the dead.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To see whether you’d forgotten about Lesha.”

Elena’s chin snapped up, incredulous. “How could I?”

“Someday you might feel that it’s easier to. Or give in to the shame. Name yourself a fraud. Hide forever, anonymous. You created something as a child that had damnable if unintended consequences. You’re an adult now. You can’t change the past, but you can make up for it. And—” I took in a breath, “—fanmagic’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Elena studies me. “You don’t sound like you believe that yourself.”

“Knowing it and personally believing it isn’t always the same thing. Someday, maybe.” I reach out and she clasps my hand. “Stay well, Elena. Don’t forget.”

She tightens her jaw and doesn’t reply. Pulling away, Elena retreats into the church, the flower crushed within her fist, its sap the only high colour between her fingers.

©2021 by Anya Ow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anya Ow is the author of The Firebird’s Tale and Cradle and Grave, and is an Aurealis Awards finalist. Her short stories have appeared in publications such as Asimov’s, Uncanny, Fantasy Magazine, the 2019 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror anthology and more. Born in Singapore, Anya has a Bachelor of Laws from Melbourne University and a Bachelor of Applied Design from Billy Blue College of Design. She lives in Melbourne with her two cats, working as a graphic designer, illustrator, and chief studio dog briber for a creative agency. She can be found at www.anyasy.com or on twitter @anyasy.

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

Invasive Species and their Habitats

Alexander Weinstein | 1408 words

Teczotchicin Vine

The vine’s voraciousness dwarfs even the kudzu of the Southern United States, whose growth of one foot per day is a snail’s pace compared to the Teczotchicin’s rate of up to twenty-five meters. It is among the rare plants one can watch growing beneath one’s feet, birthing folktales of its murderous qualities. Indeed, the vines have been known to devour whatever they encounter, entangling wild boars in their constriction, swallowing homes of nesting birds, and suffocating local banyan trees which reach thirty meters into the air.

In 1894, explorer Santos Beniz saw the wild vine from his ship and believed the tips of the undulating plants were people waving. Upon sailing to shore, however, Beniz watched as creepers slithered into his crew’s dinghies, seizing oars and wrapping around the legs of crewmembers. Beniz planted a pole through the abdomen of one of the vines and claimed the land in his name, watching as the speared sucker reached its tendrils skyward to consume the flag. Here, he promised—removing his machete and hacking his way inland—a paradise on earth would be built, and he sent back for crew after crew of men who would build a city named after him.

Incredibly, the city of Santos Beniz still exists, with beach access, scuba lessons, and a sandy downtown plaza inhabited by chocolatiers, rum distilleries, and tiendas selling conch shells and shark’s teeth. But while the water surrounding its shores is turquoise and the sea is filled with parrotfish, nudibranchs, and glowing pink sea anemones, it’s hard to relax when gazing through the snorkel’s goggles. At all hours, one hears the swinging of machete blades and the grunts of workers battling jungle foliage. The city must employ a maintenance crew of over three hundred to keep the vine at bay, and they pull roots from the ground and set brush fires, while the vine’s tendrils snake between their legs, reaching for the city’s visitors and children.

Every hotel owner in Santos Beniz has the same nightmare: the doors of their main entrance widening, vines tumbling toward the front desk. Every restaurateur the same fear: liana breaking through kitchen tiles to seize butcher knives in their leafy grip. Tourists who visit the beaches of Santos Beniz close their eyes, attempt to enjoy the sunshine, but can never truly rest. Though it’s only the breeze tickling their legs, they leap from beach chairs, expecting at any moment to see the tips of vines slithering between the plastic straps, the maintenance crews dangling from the cliffs.

The Monster Snake of Typhon

In adulthood, the Monster Snake of Typhon reaches over five meters in diameter and one hundred and fifty meters in length, its magnitude surpassing that of a London underground train. Its native habitat is the rainforests, where its prey consists of water buffalo and rhinoceri. However, since the encroachment of local cities, the Monster Snake has been found in Typhon’s financial district as well as populated tourist centers, overturning trucks, smashing store windows, and swallowing entire tour buses, digesting them slowly as it escapes down subway tunnels. To see video clips of its attacks is like watching Japanese kaiju films, where scaly-backed giants terrify cities. One watches the shimmering blue, diamond-backed pattern as the snake overturns a hot dog cart and opens its mouth to swallow an SUV.

Two decades of research by Typhon’s Academy for Reptile Studies has helped quell the city’s panic over the creature. Dr. Lefraig’s paper, “The Monster Snake and Characteristics of its Prey: Zero Evidence for Across-Population Targeting,” revealed that the reptile does not choose prey randomly:

“To assess foraging habits, we utilized pheromones of men, women, and children, analyzing variations in composition, breadth, and niche overlap regarding prey’s age, social status, and profession. Six male Monster Snakes were sequentially presented with the scents of over two thousand subjects to determine which scents stimulated gland secretions and predatory prehensile movements. Chemosensory tests indicated that the Monster Snake chose prey consistently, targeting specific members of the test group. Variables for its preferred diet included the prey’s 1) distance and association with offices of international banking firms or world trade organizations; 2) political involvement with energy lobbyists and/or a history of climate-change denial; 3) identification as a corporate lawyer.”

Subsequent research examined death records and revealed confirmation of the study: every one of the victims served as pharmaceutical CEOs, insurance-claim deniers, and/or bank directors. The tour bus of victims? All lawyers.

Most of Typhon’s populace has since come to admire the Monster Snake. Like the common garden snake, who may look frightful but can rid basements of rats, the Monster Snake has purged the city of the least savory part of its population. In recent years, there’s been an exodus of bureaucrats and investment bankers to countries far from Typhon’s jungles. As for the rest of the world, there is great interest in the creature, particularly among American zoologists who have petitioned to bring the snake to the United States for study. To date, the US has vetoed any such actions.

The Seahorses of Cajor

While few have seen the giant seahorses of Cajor, legends of their heyday are plentiful along the coastlines of Argentina. Poet and naturalist, Phillipe Chante, wrote one of Argentina’s most read eco-essays, “Flames of the Sea,” which is both an ode to the majestic creature and a testament to his infatuation with the animal. While many scholars admit Chante’s writing veers uncomfortably close to the erotic, we include one of his less impassioned descriptions here:

“Large as their terrestrial brothers and sisters, the seahorses sport aqueous manes which flow like seaweed from their crown, and like their diminutive counterparts, their tails curl beneath them in a question mark. Fitting, given all the questions we have. Where have they come from, their trumpet-like snouts emerging from white waves during their watery stampedes? To what God do they pay tribute, circling our shoreline like dancers in the dusk? Look how the sea is filled with the creatures, so plentiful that while I sip chardonnay, I watch herds passing along the coast. How I wish to call to them, to watch them emerge from the sea, to come riding to this table where I drink, but they have no hoofs, so must race seaward, their backs glistening in the setting light.”

Though some consider Chante’s essay a fairytale, there are photographs aplenty. One need merely look at the faded black and whites of the sea gauchos who tamed and rode the creatures. Umberto Cézanne, one of Argentina’s last living sea gauchos, passed away in 1964, but he traveled widely giving lectures about the old days of ocean-wrangling, when men in town would head out with harpoons and fishing nets to haul in the day’s catch. Cézanne often appeared intoxicated during his talks at oceanographic institutes, starting fist fights with marine biologists. Such behavior was consistent with the machismo of the gaucho life. Heavy drinkers, fighters, and letches, they spent their days wrangling fish from the backs of seahorses which they treated brutally, and gave rise to the proliferation of whisky bars along the coastlines, as well as a growing number of single mothers who were left to raise their children.

Perhaps it was the gauchos’ behavior which led to the seahorses’ sudden and mysterious departure. One evening, as sunset spread along the coastline, the sea gauchos lay on the backs of seahorses, drinking and cursing. Suddenly, as though responding to a call, the horses lifted their snouts toward the horizon and took off, dragging the men with them. From the shoreline, witnesses could see the men hanging on as hundreds of seahorses thrashed the water white, their gallop a polyrhythmic splashing of sea foam, leaving no trace of their existence except for the small waves which lapped against the pebbled beach.

If Phillipe Chante questioned their appearance, today scholars question their disappearance. Where did the great seahorses go? And why did they kidnap the men who, like the horses, were never to be seen again? Despite these mysteries, the coastal towns grew more peaceful after the men were gone, and children and women flourished as keepers of their villages. As for the seahorses, their images adorn the tile mosaics and paintings in restaurants along the coast. Siting at a cantina today, one can almost hear the wet spray of the vanished herds, their neighs echoing across the water.

©2018 by Alexander Weinstein. Originally published in Hunger Mountain. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Sía

Lizz Huerta | 6055 words

Right before I wake up from a dream of hotel sex, I hear drums. They start low, building, voices murmuring healing healing healing. I sit up in bed, pissed. I look to my altar in the corner.

“Come on!” I yell, throwing the covers back. I hear cackling.

My ancestors have been on a real asshole streak lately.

• • • •

After the tragedy I did the brown-girl-spiritual-thing, called upon my ancestors for guidance, but when my ancestors showed up, they were like me: sarcastic, shit-talking assholes. I felt seen. I was hoping for gray-braids and herbal wisdom. Strong matriarchs who would be firm with me, guiding my choices with compassion. Instead I got a crew of bad girls, loose women, pervy freaks. And the One I wanted most didn’t come. I swear I get into more shit now than before. Not that I don’t usually enjoy it, but I’d been asking for something else.

• • • •

Healing healing healing, all while I brush my teeth and make coffee. I French-press a whole extra carafe and leave it on the altar just to shut them up for a while. Most cluster there so I can have my morning shit in peace but Y-lala, this mutant-strong ancestor from way back, comes in to check on me. She hovers around the sink.

“You don’t do coffee?” I ask, shifting my feet on the pooping stool the ancestors swore I needed.

“I’m on a cleanse,” Y-lala answers, “Lean forward more, Mari.” I do and my crap slides out easily. Teaching me how to squat properly, an ancestor perk for sure.

“What’s with ‘healing’?” I push the button on the Japanese toilet seat I inherited after the tragedy and let it rinse me clean. Y-lala strains to see herself in the mirror, flexing. There were no mirrors in her day and she is impressed by her own shape.

“We heard about this healing circle some invaders are hosting, we want to go.” Y-lala tosses the ghost of her dark hair, turns and tilts a hip to examine her wide ass. I’m not convinced. My scrappy ancestors aren’t exactly a healing type crew; they’re more forties and heavy-metal parking lot than candles and chanting. The fact that Y-lala said “invaders” piques my worry. She feels it, drops her self-examination and starts blowing images through my mind. The sea boiling with now-extinct creatures, obscenely gaping mouths, inadequate, frustrating tools. She lived through some shit. I guess I can go to a healing circle.

Back at the altar I light a few candles, refill the water bowl, check the salt and offerings. My ancestors drift in and out. I don’t know where they go, but I have my suspicions. Caro, the butch conquistadora nun, has a thing for my neighbor, Tony. He manages a mixed martial arts gym. I’m pretty sure Caro haunts him.

• • • •

I first called upon my ancestors while at a mountaintop spiritual retreat. I was hurting and trying anything. The brochure for the retreat looked promising, this alleged medicine woman was running it. I should have noticed her picture was on none of the literature. I should have noted that spiritual retreats shouldn’t cost more than my monthly rent or have options for “luxury tents.” I found myself under the tutelage of a white woman who dressed in a mod-podge of regalia: Mayan woven blouse, stone Ankh, Turkish harem pants, and sandals made from recycled yoga mats. And feathers: in her hair, hanging from her ears and tattooed on her inner wrists. She called herself Sister Sage Moth. I was pretty sure there was no such thing as a Sage Moth.

I knew it was going to be a shit show when she had us sing “Colors of the Wind” during the first Wombyn’s Healing Intuitive Journey Wheel, or as we were encouraged to call it, “WHIJ-Wheel.” Sage Moth had us stand with our arms open to the heavens, eyes closed while she prayed. Then she fucking killed it dead. She prayed to all the great spirits, the old ones, to protect the military, our brave men and women protecting our freedom. I dropped my arms, I look around. Everyone else was still rapt in WHIJ-Wheel and I knew, KNEW, I was in the wrong place. I was the only brown woman. I was the youngest. I wanted to kick the dirt up and ask What about the innocent people being bombed in the name of freedom? What about the land we’re on right now? The bloodshed? The brown folk in uniform offering up their lives for a society that does shit to protect them once the uniform comes off? I opened my mouth to start—.

Shhhhhhhh, the sound of almost-a-voice rushed through me, the first whisper of what was to come.

• • • •

I look up this new healing circle while eating breakfast, (this ridic chile alchemy involving fire and a secret I can’t talk about—ancestor perk.) The healing circle will be held at some community center in the barrio, but that doesn’t mean shit these days. The barrio got trendy, a couple of my boys got barrio-fabulous and ended up in documentaries, got book deals. Their moving up/out left space open for a few curious, artsy white folk to slither in, make themselves comfortable. Pictures of our tacos began showing up on social media accounts, succulent gardens tended by generations of gossips started trending. The barrio now has bike lanes. That should tell you enough. Cops are called on backyard baptisms but the new monthly warehouse DJ can blast bullshit until dawn. I love the barrio, we have history, but I don’t trust the barrio anymore.

I sign up online then take a bath. There are a couple of hours before the healing circle and water is hella powerful. I’ll need it. I’ve learned how these things go. Whatever spark I carry attracts some energy vampires and emotional smotherfuckers. I bathe in salt, singing the water these songs Y-lala taught me. My body is ready, warm and calm, even if the rest of me is cop-behind-me nervous. I have a feeling. I drop a leather pouch of ancestral homeland dirt into my pocket. A stick of palo santo and a Bic.

The ancestor crew gathers in the kitchen as I pack a bag with snacks and my stainless water bottle. A blanket and eye mask. I feel their flutters, the way they crowd against each other. I’m constantly astonished by this rag-tag group of badasses from my lineage, what they went through. From Y-lala and her older-than-history history, to the triumphant flower maiden who hoards a secret from the rest of us. Caro, the butch conquistadora nun who took Jesus as her lover (literally, she seduced a pretty boy old-grandfather of mine named Jesús. She met him when he was a slave at the new world mission where she served). The Mexican Revolution aunts, one a sex worker who taught me some things. Betty the ’70s chola who calls everyone “this fucking scrapa.” A few faded ghosties who shimmer shy at the edges but always rally when I need my whole crew.

• • • •

First morning of the mountaintop spiritual retreat we had a morning WHIJ-Wheel, passing a rattle around, each taking turns telling “our sisters” who/what we believed in. There was a healthy serving of colorblindness from the “we are all one” crowd, and more than a few “Great Spirit” followers and plenty of Gaia/Mother Earth. A few talked about their past lives as native princesses. My impulse, as it had been my whole life, was to remember everything to tell Sía. I swallowed the shard. I was ready to stay silent. When my turn came I opened my mouth to say pass but someone invisible kicked my leg and I said “Isis.”

Oh. My. Goddess. Oh how the spiritual retreat sisters shifted! Nostrils flared, plenty of swallowing and adrenaline. I could practically feel them squeezing their collective assholes tight in fight or flight. Sage Moth nodded.

“Is Isis in your bloodline?” She asked coolly. Clever little way of asking So, where are you really from?

“Isis,” I began, as a voice not my own kicked in. I didn’t know it then but it was Betty the ‘70s Chola. “Isis is a badass in her holy temples of Carnelian. She gave birth to a bird god after banging her brother. She didn’t give a fuck. Not one. I’m all about that scrapa, that serpent lineage. Her lion-bellied sister Sekhmet shows me the way when my eyes have turned to obsidian. She is in the mouths of scarabs who eat the dead. Fucking insects. Eternal.” I shook the rattle over my head and hissed, like a fucking scarab. The women were silent.

Then one whooped, another howled and suddenly it was yippier than a Furry convention after-party. I didn’t know shit about Isis, or I thought I hadn’t. They dubbed me I-Sister then, of the WHIJ-Wheel. Sage Moth smiled a tight smile at me, and I saw her, truly. All the books surrounding her large bed, the regiment of breathing and chanting, the bad marriage, the rapey Guru. She’d traded an obsession with shoes for an affinity for crystals. And more. Sage Moth clapped her hands to quiet the off-key whooping. I passed the rattle. I was shaken.

• • • •

The drive to the barrio healing circle is a quiet one for once. I listen to a public radio call-in show about the sea lions and pelicans, how the stink of their shit is driving away tourists on the pricey coast. Owners call in irate, they want the city to pay for power cleaning the cliffs. The city spokeswoman on the show says who moved into whose world? Thank goddess for elected brown woman officials with take-no-shit responses. As I pull up to the venue, a vision blows into my mind: parapets, minarets, lava altars, combs, steeple, menhirs. I blink and the muraled façade of the building comes back into focus.

I’m surprised at the amount of brown women, over half of the attendees, which is huge, in any circle. I shouldn’t be surprised, my ancestor crew told me what’s up and I’ve had an eye out for what’s coming. The reclaiming, the taking back of names, the molting of the skins we’ve had to wear to survive. Still, I’m usually one of two, maybe three women of color. And my politics, the radical queer feminist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, indigenous rights path, doesn’t seem to mesh well with the eating loving praying manifesting. Not that I don’t think everyone should have something to keep them living well, but, reasons. I don’t explain the reasons to those who don’t get it, who don’t have to live in this body, this legacy. I’m no sage, moth or otherwise. Sía was kind of a sage.

Sía, my constant ache, the whole reason I went spiritual. My ancestors ignore me when I ask about her, or they disappear. They don’t comfort me when I cry. She’s too young in death to be an ancestor, I imagine. Still, my prima-hermana, my sworn and ready, my number one phone call from the time I learned to dial. There is no reaching her, though ancestors, goddesses, Mama Ayahuasca knows I’ve tried.

The brown women do the head nod and subtle cluster, exchange heys and the like. I feel a nudge or two that hit me in my life portal but shake them off. I’m not ready yet. We unfold our blankets and sit, the circle filling in as someone rings chimes. We quiet. A voice from the other room tells us to breathe with intention. My scrappy ancestors are being social, interacting with the unseen. The flower maiden is playing some hand clapping game with someone else’s ancestor or guide. She throws her head back and laughs. I close my eyes and try to concentrate on my breathing but something is itching at me, something familiar. Y-lala is singing one of her old songs, a hunting song maybe? I don’t speak her true language but I get a flash of a spear, the taste of liver, hot and metallic in my mouth. I swallow and breathe. An irregular energy pulses close that feels at once withering and as if it has tentacles. I close my eyes to focus on protecting myself. The ghosties are whispering, excited. Another chime goes off and I get a whiff of something sharp. I open my eyes and immediately want to strangle my ancestors.

Sage Moth is leading the circle.

• • • •

The mountaintop spiritual retreat ended up being, as I knew it would, a bust of epic proportions. But I got mine. Sage Moth seethed at the way the rest of the sisters grinned these I-have-a-brown-friend-at-last grins at me. We were in her imagined temple and all eyes weren’t on the altar of her. Not completely true: my eyes watched. We ate our vegetarian meals. I’d had the sisters rolling with stories of growing up on an accidentally organic egg farm. How our grandmother was courted by all these chefs for the duck and quail eggs she sold from the back door. How I’d had to translate. As ever, I was bored at the immigrant success story porn lens through which they saw me. Sage Moth managed to maneuver the conversations back to herself, telling us about her past life in Mongolia, yak milk.

The third evening of the retreat Sage Moth had us sing to the earth as we pushed wheelbarrows filled with blankets, sarongs, pillows, and feather boas down a dirt path to a clearing. She carried only a rattle. We watched as Sage Moth made a fire, pulled a small bottle of spirits from her caftan pocket and doused the wood, then lit the fire. She whooped as it caught. No one else whooped.

“Tonight, under the watchful gaze of the Old Ones, we will hatch our true selves.” She pulled a blanket from one of the wheelbarrows and began twisting it, dancing with it in her hands around the fire until she dropped to her knees and began forming a blanket nest. She danced back to the wheelbarrow, a sarong and pillow completed it. She gestured for us to do the same. I sighed, relieved it was the last night of the retreat, already planning my drive home off the mountain. I was going to stop at the casino. I pulled out a blanket and some pillows, tossed a half-assed nest together.

“Sisters!” Sage Moth rattled us to attention, “When you enter your nest you will curl your body so you fit into the egg from which you will emerge. The shell represents your fears, allow yourself to struggle as you crack your way into truth. Use your teeth on the membrane if you must. When you fight your way out, rest in your nest. Then allow your new self to sing you your truth.” She took out her phone, attached a small, expensive speaker and turned on some primordial sounding music. Gurgling and throaty flutes.

I curled into my alleged-egg. Sía would have been into it. She was the spiritual one, I was the rocker. Her body killed her. She had been swimming alone, testing out the pool at her new apartment complex. She had an asthma attack; there had been too much chlorine. I curled tighter into my egg, I’d told her I’d meet her at the pool. I’d stopped to pick up a housewarming watermelon and Tecáte. I’d screamed my throat raw, almost drowning myself as I dragged her from the water. Sía, Sía! I screamed it silently in my nest, forehead pressed into the ground. Come back.

The hand I felt on my back was hot. I flinched, thinking it was Sage Moth. I lifted my head to tell her to fuck off, but she was at the other side of the fire, scrolling through her phone. WHIJ sisters were in their eggs. I pressed my head back to the earth. I felt ridiculous. I was angry, I wanted, I wanted, I wanted something I couldn’t name. The hand was on my back again, then another, then more. A hand held my head down. I tried to protest but something took ahold of my breathing and forced my lungs to expand with breath, to hold, release, over and over until I was buzzing.

My belly button started burning bad, like when Sía pierced it when we were fourteen. We’d sent a picture to my mom. She wrote back one line: How could you desecrate the part of my body where we were connected? Sía had cheered me up by telling me my mom was wrong, that I hadn’t pierced my asshole. It made no sense, but it made me feel better. That’s how she was, the laugh to my grumble, the grace to my fumble. I curled tighter around the ache in my middle, letting the hands press me deeper. I went inward, toward the throbbing.

If you know what I know, then you know the tunnel. I went through it, sliding down the passage of blood, to the unnamable, the sacred geometry and sound, then crash landed back in the nest, my body. I jerked at the jolt of it, leg muscles spasming and cramping. I kicked out.

“Take that, shell,” a voice said.

“Oooh! A body that was built over generations, ma!” another whistled, “We’re going to make sure you enjoy that skin!”

I was on my hands and knees, head bowed, panting. The voices were coming from inside. I wasn’t even high. I’d smoked my whole load the previous two days. I looked up. The first ancestor I saw was one of the Mexican Revolutionary ancestors squatting in front of me, in dusty boots, hat and braids hanging down her back. I blinked and put my forehead back on the ground. I was not ready to come out of whatever fucked-up egg I had just hatched from. I rolled over and curled up, pressing my face into the nest pillows.

“Yes, yes. Give over to the process!” Sage Moth cried out.

“This fucking scrapa.” Another voice from inside. I groaned.

Another voice said something, sharp and low, a language I didn’t understand. Hands pressed into my lower back, thumbs massaging the muscles on either side of my spine. I let myself relax a little, I breathed in.

Y-lala, sitting in front of a fire, legs bent before her, belly full of child. She was singing. Her legs parted, she placed her hands on each side of her vulva as shapes began pouring out. Tall women, short women, women thick with child, little girls running naked. Their skin grew darker, they hardened into form for only a moment. The women kept pouring out of her, a blur of women, dancing, spinning, crying, women screaming with open, soundless mouths. I caught the shape of my eyes in some, the funny hip jut I did when drunk in others. Women whose hands were identical to mine, to Sía’s. At the end, when it was so crowded with women they had blurred into nebulae, they poured into my belly. I cried out.

It turns out I actually cried out. I came back to my nest. The eyes of all the women of the WHIJ were on me. Sage Moth was standing over me, the smoke from the fire behind her like it rose from her head. Her face was curled into a snarl of rage.

“Are you enjoying yourself, I-Sister?” She was trying to sound sarcastic. She came off petty. Then I looked down. Holy shit. My legs were wide open and I had my hands grinding hard against my vaj. Holy shit. I sat up, immediately dizzy. The energy that rushed through me pulsed out from my center. Every cell in me surged, billions unfurling.

I looked up at Sage Moth and grinned. Around me, my ancestors crossed their arms and grinned, our eyes shone with trouble.

• • • •

I dip my head as Sage Moth walks slowly to the center of the circle, holding a small pair of meditation chimes. She finds her place and closes her eyes, arms outstretched in front of her, just above eye level. The rest of us quiet and find our places. When the rustling and throat clearing stops, Sage Moth chimes once, twice, three times.

At Sage Moth’s third chime the community room explodes into ancestors. I’ve never been on a battlefield but my body recognizes it like I was born during a war. Looking around, I think maybe I was. I recognize my ghosties, relaxed into casual postures that belie the edge I feel them hovering near. Their smiles are disarming. Just outside my focus I see the room is packed to overflowing with the ancestors of the gathered. I can’t focus on all of them but see they all are women. They carry weapons, from rocks to rifles and everything in-between. And babies, there are all these babies floating up at the ceiling. I can’t look at the babies, they freak me out.

Sage Moth doesn’t seem to notice our new arrivals, big surprise. You can’t learn to be one of us, you’re born with it, or you’re not. Ancestors let me know that. Sure, everyone gets visitations and a protection crew is always at the ready, but if spirituality is a river, Sage Moth hovers at the streambeds, away from the turbulence of the flow, the rocks and falls and whirlpools. I don’t go into the depths yet but my guides have, I’m thigh deep and they show me the ways in which I can enter.

I shake my head. Sage Moth has made eye contact with me. She’s glaring. I’m just standing, staring at her, her ankles barely wet. I grin and put my hands in prayer position. Behind her, one of her ghosties comes into focus. A pioneer-looking woman, shovel in her hand. She does that fake-lunge thing at me. I don’t move.

This fucking scrapa, Betty hisses. Others agree.

An ancestor from one of the other women of color shoulders her way past her human. Old school Filipina, a Kali fighter, blades light in her hands, her gray hair tight in a bun. The pioneer-looking woman stretches her neck, ear to shoulder, ear to shoulder then grips the shovel handle in both hands, feet wide under her prairie skirt. The Kali fighter squats down, spits in her hand, touches the ground and then her forehead. The pioneer woman lunges forward, shovel swinging like a scythe. It’s over before it begins. The Kali fighter’s arm shoots forward, knife slashing at the ankle of the pioneer. The pioneer woman vanishes, poof. The gathered ghosties murmur. It wasn’t much of a fight. There are grumbles.

Sage Moth looks at every other woman in the room, one by one.

“Welcome to this healing circle, I am Sage Moth.” She goes on and on about her lineage blah blah, claiming this heritage and that. I squint at her ancestors and am completely unsurprised that there are no native princesses. There are definitely warriors though, of their time.

Sturdy white tribal women, not like modern tribal, all those bellydancers and burners, but women muscled from hard living and self-protection. One is dressed like a Roman soldier, her hair cut close with hips that certainly pushed out babies. A few more of pioneer stock and a Romani set of sisters. Badasses all around. I wouldn’t mess with any of them. Then I see something horrifying but honestly not that surprising. There are a few being held against their will. I look at them and noticed they are the women Sage Moth has claimed in her lineage. The Roman soldier is holding onto a naked brown woman who could be from anywhere, Native, Islander, Arab, Asian. As I look at the woman, kneeling on the ground she looks up, pleading.

“I’d willingly protect her. She didn’t have to catch me, steal my clothing, the prayers out of my mouth. I would have shared.” The brown ghost shakes her head. I can see the pulse of her heart, pink, through her transparent chest. I’m pissed. I hiss, a habit I’ve picked up from my rabble crew. Sage Moth flashes her eyes at me, I flash right back. Her nostrils flare, what a tell. Ancient ass tell, trying to smell my fear or adrenaline. I’m steady, rooted. I know my crew, I know what we bring. And I know there is no fucking way we are leaving this room before we free that brown ancestor and the others from their captors. My ancestors ripple in approval. They know what’s up.

Sage Moth blah the fuck blah-blahs on and on about how the world is on a precipice of great change and how we, each one gathered her, are a part of that change. I don’t disagree, we are on the precipice, little seeds cracking through the shells that have protected us for centuries. But there is also a motherfucking reckoning coming.

The gathered ancestors are passing the word, using languages and connections I can’t really understand. The living are picking up on the gathered energy. Immediately, I can separate out the allies from the rest. The allies get the same tingle the brown folk do, ready to stand in collective power. The others feel like they’re about to be attacked because of course they do.

I’m focused only on the ancestors being held captive by Sage Moth’s crew. They’ve pushed the captive ghosties to the back and formed a sort of line against the rest of us. A few herd the ancestors of the gentrifying circle members to their side. But we are glorious, fucking glorious when I see what’s happening. The ancestors are in formation.

Sage Moth feels something. She stops in the middle of telling a story about some holy man she met on a bus in Wisconsin. She stares at me. I stare back.

“Do you have something to say, Mari? I feel something pulling at me.” She cocks her head in a gesture that’s supposed to look curious, sincere. But sure as shit, it’s a battle cry. Her crew is at the ready. The pioneer woman is back, she’s traded her shovel out for a broken glass laudanum bottle.

“I have nothing to say,” I say back sweetly. I am in my all, my power, my light and purpose. I’m tired of taking shit, I’m tired of hiding and keeping safe the feelings of those who would oppress me and my people. Yes, we are all one but we chose to come into this tangle, to unravel and make sure all know safety. What Sage Moth is doing isn’t safe. She is blinded by the delusion that she is in charge. Same old story that her lineage has been telling for generations. Yes, she and hers have known oppressions, all women have, but they have memories that show their complicity in other tyrannies. The tension between Sage Moth and me is spicing the air with expectation. Her taking and keeping these ancestors as her own is some bullshit. Fuck spiritual colonialism.

“I think this is the time for a group meditation. I wasn’t going to do this until the end of this session but,” Sage Moth waves her arms. “I want to lead us in a healing meditation. Release some of the aggression in the room.” She has no idea; anger is fuel for change.

The gathered women look at each other. Something is off. They feel it. A couple of women head to the bathroom before the meditation so there is some milling about, shifting of blankets and the like.

“This is weird, right?” this woman whispers to me; one of her ancestors, Indian maybe, nods behind her. A few other of the brown women have instinctively clustered closer.

“Totally fucking weird,” I say, my eye on Sage Moth as she cleanses the air with sage smoke. This fucking scrapa hasn’t even opened any windows or asked if anyone has a scent sensitivity. Selfish, and dangerous for all that smoke to hang in the air, full of whatever it has picked up. I jump up and open a window, the woman who whispered to me goes to the front door and props it open. A couple women thank us, Sage Moth exhales heavily. The ancestors are still, gathering whatever power they take from the holy smoke, whatever channels it opens.

The women all finally settle into a loose circle. Some women are savasana’d out. I sit in a loose criss-cross, spine soft, hands on my knees. Everyone takes their preferred position. Sage Moth sits higher than us because of course she does, on a stack of pillows. She holds a drum in her hand, I see it with the ancestors’ eyes and sigh a relief. Not stolen stolen, but stolen nonetheless.

The drum begins and does what drums do. It calls, it opens. That which is eternal inside of Sage Moth is what’s beating the drum. Holy is holy. I close my eyes and allow whatever needs to be open to open. I feel calmer than I have in a long time. The ancestors surrounding mine are family, survivors of recent and late, fierce. Of course my crew is bad girls, the outliers, the wild ones. I spot a crew of serene ancestors gathered around a luminous young black woman. Like attracts like. She has the exact right crew around her, as do I. I drop into gratitude. Gods alive and dead, we have been through some shit. And we are here.

Look at you, accepting and shit. The whisper in my ear has me spinning in my mind, I lose all sense of gravity and feel like I’m in freefall. Sía’s voice. I open my eyes and look around me, I don’t see her but I hear her laugh.

“Sía?” I say it so low it sounds more like breath escaping between my teeth. Y-lala is squatting next to me, she opens her mouth and Sía’s voice comes out.

I’m always here, Mari-Banana. Stop looking so hard.

I can’t help it. A sob erupts from my throat and I’m forehead to the floor, gulping for air. The hands on my back are human and not human. They have all known loss, it is one of the infinities that weave us together. Sía, sister of my heart, keeper of secrets, and our invented languages of eyerolls, gone. I cry harder. I’m scared no one will ever love me or know me the way she did. No one can love me like her. The hands on my back are warm, empathy pouring into me, my breathing regulates, I wipe my nose on a handkerchief someone has handed me. I sit up.

Even Sage Moth has a deep look of empathy on her face. I see she doesn’t mean to be an asshole, her needs just show up that way. It doesn’t make it right but I feel a tiny bit closer to understanding.

Okay Mother Theresa, that’s cool, but you’re still going to rescue those ancestors from her grip, yeah? Sía voice has a familiar teasing in it and I am fortified. I look at Sage Moth. Caro the butch conquistadora steps in front of me and faces Sage Moth’s ancestors.

Interloper, let my people go! Caro roars and windmill kicks her way in. They are not expecting this nun in her starchy, stained habit to come barreling through them. They scatter. Then it is fucking chaos. Ancestors running at each other like some weird gladiator battle of ghosts, spiritual MMA, a full-on rumble. The pioneer woman ancestor literally uses her broken laudanum bottle to cut off the braid of a Japanese ancestor who then snatches the braid before it falls and uses it to choke out the Oregon Trail scrapa. Y-lala and some other old, olds are singing, whooping, clapping their hands. Laughing. Betty the ‘70s chola pulls, I shit you not, a razor blade from her bangs and slices at this gorgeous milkmaid. Milkmaid sidesteps the blade and slaps Betty hard across the face. Betty slaps back then grabs the woman by the bodice and rips it open. Pretty damn dramatic. All around us ancestors are fighting, using whatever tools and tricks they have kept.

I’m in a daze. The women around me are all awash in feelings they can’t explain. Collective consciousness for real as the ancestors of these bodies have at it. I see the ancestors are giddy. I don’t imagine they get to battle each other very often.

A couple of incredibly muscled Pacifica-looking ancestors I didn’t notice earlier emerge from the chaos with Sage Moth’s formerly enslaved guides. And then quiet, like a boom, descends. All the ancestors gather around the freed, all the remnant sage smoke swirls above them. Then whoosh. I blink. They’re gone. The room is clearer than it was before. I see the colors popping, the murals on the walls feel practically animated.

Sage Moth glares at me from her pillow. She feels a loss, her own ache. I grin at her, all animal. We know who won this battle. We know what’s coming.

“What do you believe in, Mary?” she asks in a honey-venom hiss, fucking up my name on purpose.

“Sacred. Indigenous. Anarchy,” I say without thinking. It slips out and the letters dance in front of me like those weird, transparent squiggly amoebae that float on the surface of my eyes in certain light. S. I. A. My grin widens as tears spill down my face, down my neck, soaking straight into the canyon of my cleavage. Sía, my Lucia. Our Sía.

Sage Moth is still on her pillow. She has an incredibly uncomfortable look on her face. Then she farts. A loud juicy one, wet sounding. A look of horror hits her face just before the stink hits the air. Sage Moth has shit herself. She mutters something under breath about release and gets up awkwardly, holding one of her meditation pillows to her ass and waddles toward the bathroom. I feel bad for her.

I exchange numbers with a few of the women who seem to know something serious went down. Maybe, maybe I’ll see what those earlier life portal nudges were about. They all have this smile on their face, they know they have touched something eternal.

• • • •

That night I make a feast. Ancestor food, tons of corn, chocolate, coffee, I even fix up a bunch of feeder grasshoppers. I set up the feast on the altar but no one comes. Not that I can see anyway. I sit in front of the altar for a long time. I think about the gifts we ask for and the ones that show up instead. A gift is offered; if it is taken, it becomes something else entirely. I hear humming from the lit candles. I’m not alone anymore, I never have been. I can’t imagine a better crew of ancestors for this walk in this skin I have chosen. I light charcoal, drop copal and a little nug on it.

I put a pic of Sía on the altar, a selfie taken days before she died. I haven’t looked at her social media. Not in the fourteen months and two weeks and three days since she left. I take a Pinkola Estés quote she posted the night before she died. I place it on the altar. It reads Without the body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, no sense of lifting, no sense of height, weightlessness. All that comes from the body. The body is the rocket launcher.

I sit in front of the altar until my back aches and my eyes are sandpaper dry. Being a rocket launcher for the soul is exhausting. As I go to bed I hear singing somewhere outside of my hearing. I know they’re still there. We’re still here. As I slide into sleep Sía slips into my mind and whispers There is work to do, we will support you. As I enter Dreaming they are all there waiting, raucous, celebrating with the freed souls. They tell me: welcome to the beginning.

©2021 by Lizz Huerta.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lizz Huerta is a Mexic-Rican writer. Her work has appeared in A People’s Future of the United States, The Miami Rail, The Cut, Brevity Magazine, and other journals. Her debut novel, The Lost Dreamer, will be released March 2022 by FSG for Young Readers. She was born, raised, and currently lives on Kumeyaay land, colonizer name San Diego.

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

It Begins to Snow

Adam R. Shannon | 1041 words

When it begins to snow, it never stops.

Perhaps not for you, but another iteration of you—a manifestation of your wild possibilities. I hope it’s not you, for my sake. When it begins to snow, the sky comes down in sharp, precise fragments, and you press your forehead against the window and think: don’t ever stop.

And it doesn’t.

I don’t want it to be you, because when it begins to snow, the world ends.

• • • •

There was a song we sang together as children, spinning until we collapsed dizzy and laughing—do you remember? We sang, and spun, our hands clasped until one let go and we were flung apart.

It snows
It snows
It never stops
It blows
It blows
It never stops
Never love you!
Never love you!
Never
Ever
Ever!

You just keep saying “ever” until someone lets go. You don’t remember? Perhaps it isn’t you, and I’m safe. Maybe the world will go back to the way it was before winter.

Or perhaps it was our children, spinning in the snow, stumbling home damp and cloudless, throwing their coats everywhere.

The snow smothers the garden we planted together and washes up the sides of the house. We argue over whether it’s acceptable to exit through the upstairs bedroom windows. I remind you that I didn’t excavate a large tunnel from our front door for my own amusement. If we’re going to survive this, we have to have some rules. We have to assert a measure of normalcy for the kids.

You laugh. “Normalcy,” you say.

The kids are listening, so we reassemble their coats and push them out the second floor window to play, then you and I spin and spin until we’re flung apart, dizzy and miserable.

• • • •

I can tell you this right now: it never stops. Never ever. It’s the end of the world.

The drifts close over the peaked roof. All the windows go dark, and cold flakes sift down the chimney. Every morning, I excavate the end of our tunnel, pushing aside the new snowfall and rounding out the edges, showing pride in my useless craftsmanship.

I emerge into the bleak, muffled morning. Tree tops poke naked fingers out of the drifts. Some days, I see our neighbors outside. We lean on our shovels and hold our sore backs, looking into the withering sky together until the flakes sting our eyes. It’s the end of the world.

One by one they fail to appear. Their tunnels seal up, and I lose track of where their houses once stood.

• • • •

I leave every day to go foraging. I find things in the snow, speckled with a few stray flakes as if they just fell from the sky. I keep a list, because it’s important to maintain a sense of purpose:

A hairbrush with a few strands of a stranger’s hair caught in the bristles.

A tin of sardines, the one food you always insisted was unworthy of love.

A can of beer, which I would not let the kids taste. You poured a tiny amount into their juice glasses. “What difference does it make?” you asked. They made faces and laughed in the stifling dark.

A pair of shoes, left side by side, their owner barefoot or raptured away.

A frozen deer with ice-clouded eyes, as if ambushed by its fate.

• • • •

One day, I stay out too long foraging, and lose track of my own footsteps. I wander in mounting terror across the hopeless landscape, wondering if my home is directly under me, until I fall miraculously into the tunnel.

I stumble weeping down the slope to the cold door. It’s dark inside, and quiet, not warm but comfortingly humid, and it smells like the kids and peanut butter and the newspapers we burned before the chimney closed up. I sit in the ruin of my soggy clothes and cry. When you see me in the dim tunnel-light, you don’t draw near. There’s no such thing as good news between us now. There’s no comfort to give or receive. You watch me smear furiously at my tears, and you stand back, the way you might if I threw gasoline over myself.

After that, I cut myself open a little whenever I leave. I cut just deep enough to leave a bright red trail behind me, hard enough that the pain keeps me awake through the endless cold.

• • • •

You told me before the snow began that you were losing your hair. You said each strand was like one happy day we once shared.

I cleaned out the drain in the shower and said everything was fine. It was just winter. It wouldn’t last forever.

Some time later, it began to snow, and you woke up from a distant sleep and wished it would never stop.

• • • •

I wander the blurred white, bleeding out my memory of a time when we spun and danced and laughed as we fell apart.

One day, I grow so cold that the cut goes numb. I look back at the blowing snow and find no red pathway home.

My footsteps are already filling up. Before long, they’ve been obliterated. All trace of my presence here has vanished. I walk, and I walk, but I’ve lost you.

I’d hoped it wasn’t you. I imagined it was another iteration who leaned against the cold glass and invited the freezing certainty of winter, willing to see it all end before living another day of the warm and wasted time that went before.

• • • •

Then the snow stops falling.

This is how it is at the end of the world: it snows, and snows, and never stops. Until the day it does.

Light shines down the tunnel and summons you to the surface. The world is quiet and patient. Your voice rings in the clear air, calling the kids into the sun.

Out in the snow is a pair of mismatched shoes and a beer can, empty. A hairbrush with a few useless hairs. A can of sardines, unworthy of love.

A deer watches from the distance, ragged and curious, in the crease between the blank world and the hard blue sky.

©2021 by Adam R. Shannon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam R. Shannon is a career firefighter/paramedic, speculative fiction writer, aspiring cook, and steadfast companion of dogs. His work has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Nightmare, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die. His story “On the Day You Spend Forever With Your Dog” was a finalist for the Sturgeon Award and appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019. He’s a graduate of Clarion West 2017.

You Sexy Thing

Cat Rambo | 6994 words

Farscape meets The Great British Bake Off in the fantastic space opera You Sexy Thing from former SFWA President, Cat Rambo.

Just when they thought they were out. . .

TwiceFar station is at the edge of the known universe, and that’s just how Niko Larson, former Admiral in the Grand Military of the Hive Mind, likes it.

Retired and finally free of the continual war of conquest, Niko and the remnants of her former unit are content to spend the rest of their days working at the restaurant they built together, The Last Chance.

But, some wars can’t ever be escaped, and unlike the Hive Mind, some enemies aren’t content to let old soldiers go. Niko and her crew are forced onto a sentient ship convinced that it is being stolen and must survive the machinations of a sadistic pirate king if they even hope to keep the dream of The Last Chance alive.

Coming September 7, 2021 from Tor Books.

Chapter One

The entrance buzzer chimed. Someone outside in the public hallway of the space station was paging admittance.

Niko Larsen, a.k.a. Captain Nicolette Larsen, formerly one of the finest military geniuses the Holy Hive Mind had ever threatened to absorb, now retired, looked around.

Huh, she thought. What now?

She checked the view screen. A delivery bot stood outside, flanked by a large crate, about two meters long, a half meter wide, and a meter tall. Its metal carapace was brown and yellow, regular station delivery colors. It stood patiently, ignoring the impatient stares of passersby trying to get around the large crate in the five-meter-wide hallway.

She didn’t remember any deliveries due today, but pushed the button nonetheless. With a velvety whoosh, the door slid open.

“You should take that into the kitchen through the back access hall,” she said. “There’s too much furniture in here—don’t bring it in this way.”

Despite her words, the bot was already trundling forward past her and the entrance lectern, trailed by the crate. It said, with a burst of speaker static resembling an officious chirp, “The access hallway leads to the kitchens of the Last Chance Restaurant. This delivery tag specifies Last Chance, and the default is main entrance.”

“Then don’t go with the default, use the back entrance!”

“My delivery has been executed.” The bot detached itself from the crate, leaving it two meters inside the vestibule. “I do not accept outside commissioners. If this service has been of use to you, please consider rewarding my employers with a plus.”

Machines were impervious to Niko’s stare, but she tried one anyway. “This service has not been of use to me,” she said.

“My employers are sorry you feel that way,” the bot said, and exited.

Niko looked the crate over. Made of white-enameled plasmetal, it floated a few inches above the ground. A sturdy handle on each of the narrower ends provided the means with which to move it. The label simply bore Niko’s full name, along with the address of the restaurant. The orange ticket that would have disclosed its point of origin seemed to have been torn away.

Niko scowled at it and left it where it was.

She found her second in command waiting in her office. He silently handed her a sheet of plastic. Looking it over, she raised an eyebrow.

“Eggplant?” she said incredulously. “Where am I going to get eggplant, short of you finding some cut-rate sorcerer? None of the big farm ships grow it, except for the Mannan, and their prices are twice anyone else’s.”

She frowned at Dabry in the office’s dim light. Niko was of indeterminate human mix, with pale brown skin and graying dreadlocks swept back and contained on the back of her head with an ivory beaded net. Muscular shoulders rounded out her white chef’s jacket, its front unpinned and fallen awry, bearing coffee stains along one sleeve.

Although Niko was tall, the being also wearing a chef’s jacket (although significantly less crumpled and stained), hulking across from where she sat at the tiny desk, dwarfed her. He was an Ettilite, an eight-foot-tall humanoid with four arms and skin the color of the eggplant they had been discussing.

Dabry, a.k.a. Sergeant Dabry, also retired from the ranks of the Holy Hive Mind, folded both pairs of arms and stared at her impassively. “The critic,” he rumbled, “is said to have a weakness for old Earth food from its Mediterranean region. I need to analyze the components if I’m going to replicate it.”

“You are all way too concerned about this critic,” Niko said. “Ever since Skidoo found out who booked the reservation, you have been ridiculous! Cleaning—which I do approve of. Redecorating—which I approve of up to a certain budgetary point. But now—rearranging the menu just for them?”

“They have the power to give our restaurant a Nikkelin Orb,” Dabry said with a tone that implied that once a restaurant had achieved such a thing, everyone in it might go ahead and die happily, their life goals achieved. They had been operating the Last Chance for a little over a solar year now, and Dabry tracked its few reviews and mentions with a gleeful zeal.

“This restaurant,” Niko said, not for the first time, “was not my idea.”

“This restaurant,” Dabry said, also not for the first time, “got us all out of the Holy Hive Mind and let us keep what we could of the company together while we try to build our finances.”

Niko sighed and pushed away the piece of plastic. They were in her tiny office, which had once been a walk-in closet and still smelled of artificial cedar and orange from the scent unit near the fan. (She kept saying she meant to disable it because of its rattle.)

While she groused about the unit, though, she didn’t mind it, really. It overrode other smells from the kitchen only a few steps farther down the tin tube of a hallway, and their associated memories. Cinnamon, when Milly was baking, reminded her of Free Trade life and came on a wash of loss and nostalgia. Stale dishwater reminded her of IAPH, wafting on fear and regret.

And vinegar’s tang, once such a clean smell to her, crept under the doorway every so often, and seeping with it came the despair and terror of life in the Holy Hive Mind’s barracks.

The office was still lined on two sides with shelves, now holding a mix of data pads, books, clothes, and miscellaneous ordnance and knives, and a hanging rack half full of white chef’s jackets, the other half full of disused civvies. A folding cot was jammed up against the wall behind her, next to two crates filled with glossy black rocks left over from the redecorating effort. Past menus were stickied to the wall, the plastic slips fluttering whenever the door opened or closed.

She narrowed her eyes at Dabry. “I know,” she said, “and that was not the worst plan you’ve ever come up with, but you’re taking it so seriously. It’s a restaurant. A glorified location for the satisfaction of one of the most basic urges.”

Dabry pointed two lower fingers at her in emphasis. “And you cannot talk like that, or they will know you are not an artist.”

Niko shuddered. When it came to retiring from the Holy Hive Mind, there were few acceptable ways—most of its soldiers stayed in the army until they died, and a few of them long after that. She would have been one of those few, her brain extracted upon death and moved into a Holy Hive container and reanimated to serve as part of its consciousness.

Not a fate she had anticipated with pleasure. When Dabry came to her with a crazy plan to claim that Niko was a thwarted artist—one of the sacred Occupations—and that her medium was cooking, it being her single talent, she’d been willing to play along.

A vast amount of bribery and wheedling had gone into the escape, but in the end she’d been able to use her considerable back wages—combined with those of her crew who wanted to come, and whom she declared part of her immediate family—to buy a small establishment aboard one of the largest space stations around, TwiceFar Station, relic of some long-forgotten race and now home to dozens of alien species.

Niko fixed her former sergeant with the stare that had straightened soldierly spines, cowed bureaucrats, and put the fear of the Holy Hive Mind into her enemies more than once.

Dabry, inoculated by long exposure, gave her a bland look back. “You know it as well as I do, Captain,” he said. “The Holy Hive Mind is still keeping tabs on us. If they suspected that you think of the restaurant as something other than an artistic enterprise, they would haul you back and scoop the brain out of your head.”

“I am an artist,” she said. “Just not in the way that it thinks of artists. Its definition is a cross between an addict and an artist possessed by their muse, unable to help creating. It’s hard to keep convincing it of that. An Orb would cement me as that kind of artist.” She frowned at her second-in-command.

Dabry had turned out to have an unexpected (to Niko, at least) flair for all of this. He was the one who had found the odd little space that they turned into the restaurant, a former bar built by Derloens, who had fled the place when a particular side effect of their inhabitation became too much for them. Derloens leave what some species might call “ghosts,” behind them, and these spirits, while no longer sentient, still inhabited the space in the form of long glowing blue worms swimming through the air, which their maître d’, Lassite, had incorporated into the decor.

Most of the restaurant’s interior was dark blues and blacks, giving it a restrained rather than subdued look. The luminescent, writhing forms, swimming through the air in aimless pursuit of one another, shed their light over it, augmented only by thumb-sized glow candles on each table.

Over the past year, and particularly in recent months, the restaurant had proved surprisingly successful. Something about the shadowy decor hadn’t lured the criminals whom Niko had feared, but diners who sought privacy and exclusivity: lovers, those wishing to become lovers, diplomats, people with other people that they wanted to impress.

“Speaking of which, shouldn’t I be planning this meal?” Niko grumbled.

“You said I could take this one,” Dabry protested. It had pained him to have to step back and let Niko take the wheel the last time they presented to the Holy Hive Mind, a yearly requirement of their situation.

“All right,” Niko said. She waved her hand. “Go forth. And if you truly desire an eggplant to dissect, then who am I to stand in your way? Place an order with the Mannan.”

Dabry hesitated.

Niko’s eyes narrowed further. “What?”

“An order from the Mannan,” Dabry said, “would take over a sleep unit to get here. Too late.”

“Then where are you planning on getting it?”

“I have a favor due me,” Dabry said with dignity.

“Do I want to know anything about the nature of the favor or what you intend to do with it?”

“Probably not, other than I will obtain an eggplant with it.”

“Then I’m not sure why you’re even telling me!” Niko threw up her hands in exasperation. Sometimes she thought Dabry enjoyed these encounters; the more expressionless he remained, the more convinced of that she became. She began to add a remark to that effect but a flurry of knocks on the door interrupted her.

Only one of her workers knocked like that. “Come in, Skidoo,” she called.

The entity who entered was unlike either of the beings already in the room. Skidoo was a Tlellan, which humans sometimes called Squids for their resemblance to one of the few Terran creatures left alive. Her ten limbs functioned as either arms or legs to propel her sacklike body along. Atop that squat bundle was a lump that served as head, fixed with three bright blue eyes. Unlike Terran squids, she was colored as brightly as a festival, purples and reds variegating across blue and yellow dots and stripes.

“I am being securing an important reservation!” she announced.

“We’re not taking any more reservations for tonight,” Niko told her. “I said that already. We’ve got this stupid food critic arriving.”

Skidoo wilted slightly. “But this is being a very large party,” she said.

“Even worse,” Dabry said. “How large?”

“Possibly they are being saying as many as twenty.”

“Twenty! We don’t have room for that. We’d have to rearrange one of the back chambers,” Niko protested.

“They are being saying they are knowing you, Captain, so I am being taking the reservation,” Skidoo said.

“Did they give you a name?”

Skidoo drew herself up as much as possible in order to deliver this information in a suitably grand manner: “Admiral Taklibia.”

“Taklibia? Here?” Niko was flabbergasted.

“The one you served under?” Dabry asked.

“I did, but I was only an aide. They wouldn’t remember me.”

“Apparently they do, and enough to seek out your restaurant.”

Niko shook her head. She was about to tell Skidoo to cancel the reservation when the door flew open with a crash. Milly, her new pastry chef, stuck her head in, just the beaked face at the end of a long white-feathered neck, giving the impression of a disembodied head. “The boys are fighting in the storage room again!” she gasped in her high fluting voice, and clacked her beak urgently.

Swearing under her breath, Niko rose. She pointed at Skidoo and Dabry. “Take care of it!” she told Dabry, and went to tame her lions.

Chapter Two

Thorn and Talon were indeed at it in the storage room. Worse, both twins had reverted to their were-forms, becoming two enormous male lions, currently writhing on the floor of the storeroom, wrestling furiously in a tangle of golden fur and amber manes and flashing teeth. The smell that Niko had come to associate with shifter magic, sharp citrus and musk heavy to the point of stink, hung in the air.

Niko narrowly avoided their smashing into her, stepping back into the doorway and out of their path. The room was in chaos already, shelves tipped over, containers strewn in heaps, and an overturned vat of pickles adding their briny tang to the air, seeping over to turn a mass of spilled flour into a gluey mess.

“Ah-ten-shun!” she shouted.

As though by magic, the two separated. It was magic that set their forms shrinking and contracting into a humanoid shape again. But it was fear of Niko that made them do it so quickly. Niko wondered if there was any spell powerful enough to remove their ability to shape-shift. A valuable ability in combat, on a space station it had proved considerably more inconvenient. Ever since their mother died, the two had been nearly uncontrollable.

Now both stood naked, staring straight ahead. They appeared perfectly human in this form: tall, well-muscled youths with golden skin, long amber hair, and dark brown eyes, avoiding the captain’s stare.

“What happened now?” she said.

“There’s a bioship in port, and he was rushing to get his work done so he could leave without me and go see it!” Talon said.

“That’s not true! I would have waited! But he takes all the easy jobs!”

“I am the elder, they fall to me.”

“The elder by a mere minute!” Thorn glared at his twin.

Niko’s voice was dangerously low. “No one is going down to goggle at fancy bioships, because tonight is important. So here’s a more important question for you—cleaning up the mess you’ve made in here, is that an easy job or a hard one?”

They looked at the room as though noticing the chaos of their surroundings for the first time. Thorn examined the smear of flour and pickle juice on his foot.

“Easy job, Captain,” Talon said. “We’ll do it together, pick things up. Nothing’s broken.” He glanced around, checking to make sure he wasn’t lying. Aside from a shelf or two, he wasn’t.

“And after that?” Niko said.

“What?” Thorn said uneasily.

“This is the last time,” Niko said. “No more of this, or you’re out.”

“What?!” The word came from both of them simultaneously, their eyes fixed on her in shock.

“I’ve been too easy on you because you were grieving your mother,” Niko said. “If you’ve got the energy to fight, you’ve got the energy to work.” She looked around the small space. “I’m coming back here in a half hour and I want things to look as though this fight never happened. Am I clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” they chorused.

They were so young. Barely cubs when they’d been given to her to train. She’d taken those of her troop she could with her rather than leave them to the Holy Hive Mind, but in the process of freeing them all, she sometimes thought she’d saddled herself with ten times the work she would have had if it had been just her and Dabry.

No, she knew she’d saddled herself with ten times the work.

She left the room.

Dabry was in the hallway, and had witnessed the whole encounter. “Sometimes you’re not a very nice person,” he said mildly.

She glared at him. “Think I was too hard?” she said. “I could have been much worse.”

“I know that.”

“We can’t go on like this. If they went at each other in the restaurant, we’d have customers screaming and fleeing.”

“I know that.”

“Not to mention one of these days they’re going to take it too far and hurt each other,” she said.

He grunted sourly.

“This station doesn’t like disturbances. That’s why we ended up here. Nice and peaceful.”

“Nice and peaceful,” Dabry echoed.

“You sound dubious.”

“Life is never all that peaceful with you, sir.”

Skidoo returned to her comms cubicle. Like many of the chambers here, it had once been storage space. The Tlellan preferred her quarters cramped, though; it kept everything within reach.

She’d changed the door, insetting a smaller hatch into the larger one so she could enter without spilling out all the moist, water-saturated air that she preferred, smelling of vanilla and chlorine and much closer to the atmosphere of her native planet than the station’s default setting. Inside, the machinery she used had been inlaid into the walls in a series of buttons and pads. From here she controlled not just the incoming and outgoing communications but also the music and atmosphere within the four dining chambers: two larger and two smaller, each joined by a small air lock that enabled Skidoo to alter conditions in there with ease.

She ran three tentacles over the walls, reading the restaurant’s vital statistics and adjusting them as needed: the kitchen was a degree and a half too hot for maximal comfort, and the air in Niko’s office needed to be lowered in humidity. A smattering of requests for reservations had come in while she was elsewhere. She sorted through the messages.

The captain had said cancel the admiral’s reservation, but it was already taken, and the admiral would be most unhappy, since they had stressed that they wished to speak with Niko. Skidoo was torn; her tentacles flattened themselves against the walls, seeking out every iota of comfort-touch.

It was a big party. And a big party—particularly of drunken military—meant a lot of money. They could be kept in the room farthest away from the critic’s. Surely what Niko had meant was not to take any reservations that were in the room where the critic would be, not to cancel everything altogether. The restaurant needed money, and couldn’t afford to be turning things down.

But disobeying the captain didn’t come easily. Niko wasn’t the sort of person who tolerated someone doing something for the captain’s own good. Skidoo equivocated. She’d do the canceling in just a little while. It could wait, while she did more pressing things, and there was certainly so much to do, in the face of the oncoming critic. Why, Skidoo realized, no one had checked to make sure that the glow lights were all at full charge. Perhaps she’d do that first.

The machines of the kitchen were in full swing, the ancient dishwasher chugging along, the sterilizing station humming to itself. Dabry and Niko passed through the kitchens. Serving food for a variety of species would have created any number of problems had they been trying to do so without the replicators. They would have had to stock dozens of types of food, not to mention questions of cross-contamination.

But the Last Chance followed a standard pattern for restaurants aboard this station. When an unusual patron entered, their species requirements were noted, and the food given them was usually replicated and then tailored to provide the illusion of a home-cooked meal. When necessary, Gio’s expert chemistry stepped in, adapting and tweaking molecules, rendering poisons into benign flavors, allowing beings to ingest anything they desired—within reason.

Situated as it was within ship distance of not one but three of the ancient gates that tied together the Known Universe, TwiceFar was one of the most diverse waypoints possible. This place had become a favorite establishment among humans, but many of the more populous species ate here as well, enough that the storerooms were usually stocked with nonreplicated spices and flavorings for them, which Dabry swore was the real secret to their success. Not a living soul in the universe claimed to prefer replicated food to real, with the sole exception of the Karnaki—and they lied about everything, so they might be lying about that as well.

Gio’s hairy shoulders were visible in a corner, his back turned, shoulders twitching in time with the staccato chop of greenery. Milly was in a corner, sheltered from most of the kitchen’s activity by the rack of shelves in front of her. She was glazing tiny fan-shaped cakes. Blue and silver sugar crystals glinted as she sprinkled them over the still-wet glaze to be caught, tipping each at a precise 45-degree angle to shake off the excess sugar. Niko had hired her less than a month ago, and she was still pleased with the level of artistry the new hire brought to the task.

“Are those for the critic?” Niko said.

“I made enough that they can appear on the menu, but I’m making a special set for her.” Milly pointed at a small plate set to one side on a counter, two particularly beautiful cakes atop it, gleaming in the fluorescent lights. Niko paused to admire them before she stole one of the half-glazed cakes for a nibble.

Milly watched her expectantly.

Niko took another judicious nibble.

Milly shifted from side to side, watching as Niko deliberately licked sugar from her fingers. Finally she could no longer contain herself. “Well?”

“Well, what?” Niko asked.

Milly hissed out exasperation. “How is it?”

Niko grinned. “You know it’s delicious, you just want to hear me say it.”

“I do!”

“It’s delicious.” Niko shoved the rest of the cake in her mouth and added inarticulately, “Absolutely delicious.” She leaned to take another but Dabry removed the tray from her reach.

“Captain,” he said patiently. “Permission to go secure my eggplant?”

She waved him off. “Go, go.” Once he had turned, she grabbed another cake, winked at Milly, and went to check on the front room.

Currently the restaurant was closed, as it was for six hours of every cycle, in order to give the staff time to clean and prep. Aboard the spaceship, there were a multitude of time cycles, and Niko had chosen to forgo tying any of her food to a particular one, even the prevalent human norms, so there was no breakfast, lunch, or dinner, only meals.

She checked the lectern near the entrance to make sure it was free of clutter and that the flower atop it was fresh. They kept a whenlove plant blooming there, considered lucky by a fallen comrade.

So many memories in the restaurant, so many little rituals to mark the fallen. She touched the whorls of a fuzzy leaf and moved on.

No matter what time of day it was, the glowing ghosts wriggled through the space. Niko stood watching their light play over the tables, booths, and floating seats. Lore held that the ghosts were not sentient at all, simply dissolute life force left behind when the beings passed, but Niko always tried to watch for some sign of intelligence, some portent that might show that memory stayed behind. Her maître d’, Lassite, claimed their patterns had meaning, but she’d never been able to parse it.

The slide of light against light was hypnotic. She stood longer than she had meant to, transfixed by the odd hieroglyphics of their trails as they wriggled and swam, doubling back and forth in the air.

She shook her head, clearing away cobwebs. The critic was due in a few hours, and Niko was more worried about their advent than she had let on to anyone, even Dabry.

Despite the fact that the restaurant was popular, they were still bleeding money. Her retirement fund would stretch only so far, and her most recent calculations—despite the multitude of times that she’d checked and rechecked them, over and over again—gave them a little under a hundred sleep units in which to become profitable.

If they didn’t do that, she didn’t know what would happen.

But the critic—one Lolola Montaigne d’Arcy deBurgh—could make them. As a representative of the Culture, an interstellar publication carried on one of the biggest viddie channels, her favorable review—if it went so far as to bestow a Nikkelin Orb on the restaurant—would bring beings from off-station, come specifically to eat at the Last Chance, come to taste Dabry’s cooking and savor Milly’s desserts and experience the atmosphere that they had somehow, magically, created out of condemned hold space due to be jettisoned.

That had still been pricey enough. In space, everything cost, everything came from somewhere, whether it was snagged from passing meteors and comet dust or trapped sunlight or—most expensive of all—brought up from some planet’s gravity well.

Three worms of light collided, recoiled, twined around one another before moving on.

Planets, she thought, were odd things.

She had only been on three in her lifetime, and they had unnerved her. The first, the world Miniver, the birthplace of the Holy Hive Mind’s creators, had been cold and everything was flat and wide and gravity pulled at her all the time, with no escape, ever, and everything had seemed so disgustingly organic all the time, like a ship so dirty that mold was growing on it.

After the tests and training, she’d stayed inside buildings whenever she could, finding comfort in low-ceilinged, windowless rooms, although even there gravity ached at her when she tried to rest or sleep. She hadn’t learned the trick yet of resting limbs so the circulation wasn’t cut off, and kept finding them fallen asleep, strange and tingling and painful, as though they had been more attached to the world than she was. She’d left as soon as she was possibly able.

The second world, Tarraquil, had been more comfortable. Or perhaps it was simply that she had been two decades older by then, and more phlegmatic about everything in general, whether it was new or not. She had been persuaded by a lover—and there, too, might have been one of the reasons she remembered it so much more fondly—a tall, gregarious woman who had been raised on that planet and wanted Niko to meet her family.

The third had been the world where Roark’s Leap was, and she did not think of that planet if she could avoid it.

Tarraquil was all ocean, and the cities either floated on it or perched in silver spiderwebs spun between monstrously large pillars. The sky had been unnerving, but the raft city had a give underfoot that was comforting and somehow reminiscent of being in space. She’d surprised her lover with the ease with which she took to life there, and they’d spent almost a month, eating and fishing and fucking and visiting with parents, cousins, siblings, aunts, uncles, and countless other degrees of relatives.

That lover died the following year in one of the interminable skirmishes that had made up the campaign for the Hive Mind to take Crispine, a tiny moon mainly notable for its rich supplies of deliriterium. Niko still had a holo of her.

The thing that had impressed Niko most about Tarraquil was the birds. They were like ships in the sky. They moved the way ships did—to a point, because wings moving was something most ships did not have. Birds seemed so free they’d made her heart ache watching.

She remembered a sunset on Tarraquil, birds gliding over the water, her lover’s fingers laced through hers, dreaming they’d escape the Holy Hive Mind, go back to the lives both had come from before tariffs and fees imposed by a Holy Hive Mind port had forced them to enlist. She and Dabry had told the crew they pursued discharge in the name of freedom, but it was just another step in her ultimatum plan. How far away was that end now? Closer, but not half close enough.

She’d wanted to name the restaurant Halcyon, after one of those birds, but had given way to the majority.

Now, perhaps, Lolola Montaigne d’Arcy deBurgh would make the restaurant fly, and put Niko a step further along. A profitable restaurant—you could build on that, if you were savvy with business. You might even at some point be able to start investing, maybe in a ship or two. And then maybe you could put together a real plan toward the thing Niko had been working toward for so long.

Her old Free Trader coat was still in a cupboard in her office, which also served her as bedchamber. Niko claimed she’d chosen it for security purposes, leaving the suite adjoining the restaurant to the rest, except for Milly, who roomed elsewhere. But economic pressures were more to blame—if satisfying the need for security also happened to save her on rent, so be it. All her money went toward building this endeavor, this fragile chain of financial resources that would let her achieve a goal over three decades old now.

If everything went right. But in Niko’s experience, that was something rare.

Chapter Three

She stalked back through the kitchen and into the storeroom, where Thorn was vacuuming the floor tiles while Talon finished straightening crates of napkins. They both saluted.

They had moved away from their human forms and currently they were in the shape they most preferred, a mix of lion and human that most people found unsettling, a reminder of how magic was used to twist someone and change their very nature. The Holy Hive Mind had created its shock troops outside the laws of most civilizations. The boys didn’t go around the station as half-ers.

They watched anxiously as she gave the room a thorough examination. They’d done a more than adequate job, fixing a broken shelf and reordering the supplies. There was no trace of pickle juice or flour, and the air smelled fresh and untainted. The storeroom might actually be cleaner now than it had been before they started fighting.

Still she kept her face expressionless, dropping a single nod of approval. These two took any encouragement and ran way too far with it. She needed to remember that, no matter how young they were, barely out of their teens. They had seen terrible fights in the two years of service with her, and their presence was one of the reasons she and Dabry had figured out how to retire and take all of them outside the Holy Hive Mind’s grasp.

“Captain, after everything’s over tonight, could we go see the bioship then? It’s called You Sexy Thing, and it belongs to an intergalactic gazillionaire named Apsat Takraven and it goes to twelve leguins! That’s faster than anything we’ve ever seen.”

“No,” she said. “There’s a crate up front. Grab it and stow it in my office, then go ask Gio what he needs done still for prepping tonight.”

“Can we chop vegetables?” Thorn said hopefully. The two both loved using the long, sharp knives.

“Not tonight,” she said. “The last thing we need is one of you slicing off a finger and dropping it in the salad.”

Their whiskers sagged, but they nodded and exited to get the crate.

Niko sat down on a chair by the door, knuckling her forehead and trying to rub away the headache threatening to brew there. “Just get through the next few hours and let Dabry deliver a perfect meal,” she said to herself. “After that you can relax.”

Dabry returned before Niko got back to her office to investigate the crate. He bore a single, perfect eggplant, its skin glossy as though oiled, its color a deep purple shading to a paler white around the green stem, and its weight four and a half kilos. He did not tell Niko where it had come from, nor did she ask.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” he did say after reverently washing both it and all his hands, then drying them with a towel. They contemplated the spot where he’d placed it on the chopping block.

Gio came over to stare at it, too, nostrils flared thoughtfully. Over in the corner, Milly was finishing the last of her cakes, stacking them on their plates before using a small hose to remove the excess sugar from the counter where it had fallen.

“I suppose you’re not going to let me touch that,” Gio signed in the direction of the eggplant.

“Nope,” Dabry said.

Gio’s wrinkled lips pursed in amusement as he traded glances with Niko. She grinned back. Over the course of their long time together, her quartermaster’s skills had provided more than one vital ingredient for the restaurant.

He was one member of the crew Niko would have trusted anywhere at her back.

All the ones she’d brought out of the Holy Hive Mind were that, really.

With a sole exception.

As though summoned by the thought, Lassite appeared in the doorway, his narrow, scaled face a brown gleam half hidden in the folds of the bloodred velvet hood he always wore. His grayish mystic’s robe hung in loose folds around his small form, half as tall as Niko; he was habitually skinny and not prone to regarding his appearance overmuch. Niko counted herself lucky she’d been able to impress on him the importance of better grooming if he was to serve as the restaurant’s maître d’. His tongue flickered out, sampling the air, which was full of the smell of the onions that had just been lying under Gio’s flashing knife.

“Heavy portents, my captain,” he said, voice a low, compelling whisper that always reminded Niko of a villain in a childhood viddie. “Dense and inexorable as a black hole’s grip, pulling us down into dreadful doom.”

“Goodall’s tits, say what’s coming or better yet, how to keep it off,” Gio signed. He darted a glance at Niko and added, “Not that I believe in prophecy.”

She ignored him. “Your prophecies were wrong the last three times,” she told Lassite. “You need to stop sharing them with people. They’re always discouraging. You are a swarm of negativity. I’ve told you this before, it doesn’t do us any good when you make customers afraid by hissing doom.”

“I haven’t done that for days and days,” he said sullenly.

“That’s not true. You told that Venorian triad last night that they would ‘come asunder as though torn by lightning, just as sudden and fierce these forces.’”

“Captain, I feel compelled to tell you when I sense that the fates are stirring.”

“But let them get all the way out of bed next time, at least!”

Unlike the delivery bot, Lassite was not immune to the power of Niko’s stare, and she unleashed it on him in its full, cold force. He took a pace back.

“I will do better,” he muttered.

“Make it so,” she said. He started to turn, and she said, more kindly, “And know that I have listened, and that I will be wary of bad fortune, as always.”

He inclined his head toward her before he moved away.

Gio gestured something toward Milly.

“What’s that, soldier?” Niko said with a knife edge to her voice.

“I don’t know why you put up with that creature,” he told her.

“You know the story, you were there.”

“You were cast down for it anyhow. You didn’t have to tell him anything.”

“That’s what gratitude is.” She looked at Dabry, who stood ignoring them, caressing the eggplant with all four hands and his eyes half closed. “Sweet Momma Sky, should we leave so you can have your way with that eggplant or should I just let you take it to your bunk?”

His eyes closed entirely, his expression blissful. “Baba ghanoush,” he said. “Flat wheat bread dusted with cumin. Seared protein tinctured with lemon and garlic . . .”

“You’ve finally decided on the last details then?” Niko said, trepidation a quiver in her stomach’s pit. She’d told Dabry he could decide the overall menu, and he sometimes had a fancy for very expensive ingredients.

Still, for a Nikkelin Orb . . .

“Gio, start mincing garlic,” Dabry directed. “The good stuff that came in last week with that Prone ship.” He set the eggplant back down. “Captain?”

Niko had been eyeing the soy sausages that Dabry kept in a glass case, smoking them through some arcane process that she suspected the station would not have approved. She was lingering in the hopes Dabry would chop one up and give her a bit. They tasted of pepper and anise and some spice he refused to identify. “Yes?”

“Captain,” he said with excessive patience. “Get out of my kitchen.”

She saluted him. “Carry on, gentlebeings.”

She passed the twins in the hallway.

“On your way to help Gio now?” she said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Not pausing along the way for quick message checks or gibble gossip?”

“No, sir.”

“Carry on.” Her mouth wanted to quirk in amusement at the concerted whisker droop, but she throttled the urge.

Inside her office, she looked over the crate again. One triangular shard of the tag remained, carrying a few half letters that she could not decipher. She searched for a chip label on the crate’s surface, but that seemed to be missing, too, although she could find no stickiness to show where one had ever adhered.

That gave her pause. Taking a scanning device from her desk, she ran it carefully along each seam, then waved it in a slow zigzag over the entirety of every visible side. Sitting back on her heels, she contemplated it. Replacing the scanner, she slipped a clear hood over her head, tapping the ring at its base to tighten around her neck in an airtight seal. It hissed closed with a whiff of plastic and stale air.

The hood would let her survive for up to an hour in space, its inner surface releasing oxygen as it decayed, but more important, it would filter out any airborne pathogens, spores, or other possibilities. It had been a long time, but she still had enemies out there.

She stretched gloves over her hands as another precaution and set a stunner in easy reach before she flipped the latches open one by one, pausing for a few seconds each time to listen intently for any stirring within. When the latches were all freed, she took the scanner up again to check the seam where the lid met the body of the crate.

Finally, standing to one side of the crate, she slipped a narrow metal shim underneath one corner and lifted, first a centimeter, then a few more. She took a long moment, waiting, before she raised it fully and looked inside.

She blinked once, then removed hood and gloves, still staring down at the contents.

Copyright © 2021 by Cat Rambo. Excerpted from You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo. Published by permission of Cat Rambo 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

Cat Rambo (they/them) lives, writes, and teaches somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Their 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. They are an Endeavour, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee. They also run a popular online school, The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers. Their books include You Sexy Thing, Carpe Glitter, and Hearts of Tabat.

Book Review: Weird Women II, edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger

LaShawn M. Wanak | 619 words

Weird Women II: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers
Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger, Editors
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1643137834
Pegasus Books, September 2021, 384 pages

I continue my short story craving by reviewing another anthology this month. This time it’s Weird Women II: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers. This is the second feminist anthology I’ve reviewed, the first being The Future is Female in my November 2018 review. Now to lean toward the weird/supernatural side, I’m reviewing Weird Women II, the second volume in a series edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger. These stories are from the period 1840 to 1925, and although they would not be considered scary in modern times, they do provide a glimpse into what was seen as disturbing and unsettling back then.

With most of the authors being white and female, they also come with the biases and prejudices of the time. The most blatant one is “Little White Souls” by Florence Marryat, where a colonel’s wife moves to an isolated palace in India, scoffing at her Indian servants’ fears of a ghost wandering the halls. The protagonist is portrayed as a foolish, mistrustful woman, and her attitude towards her servants is attributed more to her overall foolishness. Still, I found the ghost story, another white woman who had been murdered by her Indian husband, pandered to colonialist fears all too easily.

But while the stories lean more towards the moralistic side, they are also used to call out injustices. “Broken Glass” by Georgia Wood Pangborn has a well-to-do woman being chided by the ghost of a servant for better treatment, while Harriet Beecher Stowe, best known for writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, uses a Native American and her trances to reveal a crime in her story “The Ghost in the Mill”.

Stowe isn’t the only recognizable name in this anthology. George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” is included—a long, drawn-out story about a man who can see into the future but still marries a woman who despises him; Eliot felt the story was too dismal to allow future reprints. On the other hand, Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk”, a tale of two men fighting over a woman, was only four pages long and left me wanting more.

Several stories speculate on the afterlife. “Where Their Fire is Not Quenched” by May Sinclair tells the story of a woman who has an affair and finds herself drawn to her lover even after death. Edith Wharton’s “The Fulness of Life” is the opposite—a woman waiting in limbo for her husband, convinced he will join her. Others focus on lost loved ones, such as “The Drowned Fisherman” by Mrs. S. C. Hall or “The Children” by Josephine Daskam Bacon, a particularly haunting tale of a woman and her invisible children.

And some stories are just, well, weird. “The Man with the Nose” by Rhoda Broughton is a cautionary tale of a husband who does not believe that his wife is being haunted by a man with a peculiar nose until it’s too late. “Let Loose” by Mary Cholmondeley—a story of an architect who ignores the warnings from villagers about a crypt he’s investigating—is probably the creepiest story in the entire anthology.

Despite its flaws, I enjoyed reading this collection. I’ll have to look into picking up the first volume so I could get the full experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak has been writing speculative fiction stories professionally since 2006. Her works have appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, Fireside Magazine, FIYAH, and many others. She is the editor of GigaNotoSaurus and reviews books for Lightspeed Magazine. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also, pie. Visit her blog at tbonecafe.wordpress.com.

Book Review: The Actual Star, by Monica Byrne

Chris Kluwe | 860 words

The Actual Star
Monica Byrne
Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-0063002890
Harper Voyager, September 2021, 624 pages

Hola amigos y amigas, espero que tu verano esté yendo bien. For this month’s review, we’ll be looking at a millennia-spanning masterpiece by Monica Byrne, The Actual Star, which follows the lives, both past, present, and future, of three extraordinary individuals, and how their relationships intertwine over the long years of historical time.

Now, some of you may be wondering why I began my traditional greeting in Spanish, but fret not, because there’s a reason I did so (aside from growing up in Southern California). The Actual Star is one of those rare books that seamlessly intermingles multiple languages in a way that, while initially intimidating, makes perfect sense within the narrative of an epochal tale spanning the dissolution of the known Mayan empire into our present day into a fantastic science fiction future that encompasses climate change, fully expressed human sexuality, and what feels like five other books’ worth of philosophical and metaphysical treatises.

One thing I have to be clear upfront about The Actual Star is that this is not a light read on a beach chair while you watch the waves roll in. Byrne grapples with a variety of weighty topics, ranging from the classic philosophical question of “am I a butterfly dreaming I’m a human, or a human dreaming I’m a butterfly” up to the entropic heat death of the universe and how that relates to our fleeting impressions of the sparrow crossing the stage (and what might be setting the scenery). Furthermore, the shifting viewpoints and linguistic choices can initially present what seems to be an impenetrable barrier, but for those willing to press on and immerse themselves in what Byrne is trying to express, a richly developed world and compelling characters await.

Now that I’ve hopefully not scared you off, let me talk about some of the things that I really enjoyed about The Actual Star.

The first, and I daresay, the most important, is how effortlessly Byrne weaves together the three different timelines that take place in her story, each one separated by a thousand years (there may or may not be some Mayan influence on the choice of dates). While initially appearing as discrete threads in an unknown tapestry, the lives of the protagonists gradually braid together in a harmonious whole reminiscent of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, or L.E. Modesitt Jr.’s Saga of Recluce series. Though attentive readers will no doubt make educated guesses as to who is who in the vastly separated timespans, it was waiting to see how Byrne brings her various strands together that kept me turning pages, and I felt the eventual payoff was worth the time I spent getting there.

The second thing I really enjoyed (especially as a history and political science major) is the way that The Actual Star presents the passage of time. One of the sections that really stuck with me (and I’m paraphrasing here) is when one of the characters talks about what the passing of a thousand years actually means, and how vastly different the world would appear to those who think they can envision such a thing. It’s abundantly clear that in The Actual Star, Byrne did her homework, not just on what the world might be, but on what the world used to be, and it was equal parts fascinating and depressing to see her vision of a far-future (i.e. one thousand years from now) humanity wandering the planet, not least because the thousand-year past we take for granted was so different from our own reality as to be almost incomprehensible.

Now, let me assure those of you who think this might be a dry and boring text more concerned with its philosophical underpinnings than telling a good story—this is not the case. Byrne also does a fantastic job of making sure all her characters are believable in their humanity, no matter which epoch they inhabit, and their relationships are just as important to the underlying message as any of the deliciously subversive themes on property ownership, sexuality, and what it means to be human in a world that operates under the relentless march of time.

Ultimately, if I can leave you with one thing, it’s that The Actual Star is a boldly daring examination of what it means to be human from a non-traditional perspective, one focused away from the Western-European colonialist lens and zeroed in on a culture many think lost to the sands of time, but that still exists very much to this day. Whether you recognize it, depends on you.

Read if: You like the journey more than the destination; your world is broader than the place you were born; you’re wary of jaguars.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Book Review: No Gods, No Monsters, by Cadwell Turnbull

Arley Sorg | 946 words

No Gods, No Monsters
Cadwell Turnbull
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1982603724
Blackstone, September 2021, 330 pages

The blurb for Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods, No Monsters promises “creatures from myth and legend,” but the blurb doesn’t do this book justice. What makes this book special, what makes it work so damn well, is the way the story is anchored in human complexities. Sure, there are a ton of cool ideas at play, including an interesting approach to narrative point-of-view, not to mention some great imagery. But what comes first, importantly, is clean prose delivering complicated but relatable situations, which doesn’t just engage the reader, it makes the reader want more; it compels the reader to get involved, intellectually and emotionally. What I’m trying to say is, this book is really, really good.

From the first paragraph Turnbull demonstrates a mastery of creating a tangible-feeling moment, of characters that readers can grasp as people, via a perfect mixture of interesting but grounded language and story choices. “We order drinks—me, a Corona because I’m basic as fuck; Tanya, a cider of some generic variety. . . . We both know I’m dancing around something. Every few minutes, she looks at me as if to say, ‘You gonna spill it or what?’” In terms of craft, as seen here, the writing is often a masterclass not only in effective dialogue, but in the partnering of dialogue with pauses, body language, and other kinds of nonverbal communication. Everything feels familiar enough, yet fresh; and it’s the kind of carefully executed writing which is even more marvelous for seeming easy and natural.

Turnbull doesn’t waste any time. That first paragraph telegraphs unease, and the story builds on this, utilizing slowly growing tensions, which is a hallmark of some of the best suspense and horror. Unease, discomfort, and pain aren’t just gimmicks: they are tied to the people involved in emotionally resonant ways. Even as some things are held back from the reader as “mysteries to be revealed,” Turnbull gives the reader plenty up front to deal with and process and be stunned by. The cumulative effect—from page one—is a building of gravity, a sense of something important happening, something the reader doesn’t want to miss.

In short time, the book goes into a scathing critique on the erasure of non-European perspectives of history, followed by a death-by-cop scenario. Even as the shift in narrative becomes political, what remains central are the people involved and their stories. Laina, for example, has to face the corpse of her brother. Confronted by his death, she is forced to grapple with the ways she may have failed him, including being unable to help him with his struggles through life, and a childhood incident which had been kept secret and somewhat repressed. Turnbull doesn’t just write about injustice in a thinly veiled angry rant; rather, we are given an immersive treatment on types and levels of human pain, on the ways we engage, ignore, and avoid pain, all of which gets woven into the larger story.

And then, yes: here come the monsters. By the time the monsters are on the page, the story has carried us through shame, anger, secrets, feelings of helplessness and powerlessness. We’ve looked at the way trauma acts upon people; we’ve looked at the struggle to find one’s own voice and strength in the face of terrible things. By this point, Turnbull can play with nearly any fantastic element he wants, because we are thoroughly engrossed in the people involved and their stories. As he weaves in more of the speculative, as he heightens the sense of horror, he also delights with a number of great scenes and visuals, all while layering the story with heart and substance and multiple kinds of social commentary.

The heart of this story is, undoubtedly, about otherness, and violence. Monsters in the novel are the literalized metaphor of “others;” that is, marginalized and/or oppressed groups in the US. They are shot, they are used, they are mistreated, they are misunderstood. At the surface level, monsters as metaphor for “others/otherness” is nothing new;  for me, it immediately calls to mind the True Blood TV series, which explored this concept in different ways (Sookie as a closeted and shamed telepath, vampires as feared but also victims of prejudice, etc),  as well as the Clive Barker vehicle Nightbreed (where monsters were hunted throughout history, to the point where they had to hide underground to survive). Turnbull’s story development and choices create a depth and personal connection which puts this work in an entirely different category; and rather than simply being about “victims” and “social wrongs,” this is also a story about standing up, about gathering together, and taking action.

Page by page, scene by scene, Turnbull presents an author’s observations of the real world within the framework of fantasy/horror, executed with a subtle, brilliant artistry. This novel shows that Turnbull is skilled in writing a host of moods, from charming scenes to awkward interactions to deeply personal pain to dread; he can imbue a range of characters with both purpose and life; and he’s able to infuse cool ideas with meaning by placing them in relevant contexts. No Gods, No Monsters is the first in a series which you do not want to miss.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief of Fantasy Magazine, senior editor at Locus Magazine, and associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Author Spotlight: Anya Ow

Xander Odell | 775 words

There is so much to unpack in “Fanspell: Flowers in Spring (RobYung, NSFW)”: being other; the weight of shame; relationships; the worth of, and interest in, fan fiction; the volatile nature of social media; online trolling and abuse; gender roles. The threads are tightly interwoven, each supporting and enhancing the others. What are you most proud of about this story? What speaks most to you as both a person and a writer?

This story is one of my most personal ones yet, because it’s very much about how I developed as an author in the first place. While I gained a lot as a young writer from school life in Singapore—particularly by participating in the Writer’s Circle young writers group in junior college—what largely drove me to improve both as a person and a writer has been my participation in fandom. Being able to make friends with different people all around the world has pushed me to keep an open mind and to keep developing my self-learning.

I cut my teeth on fanfiction and celebrity adoration. What if X fell in love with Z instead of Y? Wouldn’t it be great if A and D were secret friends instead of enemies? Are you a fan of fanfic? What inspired this story?

I’ve been writing fanfiction since I was fifteen, so on the whole, yes. Fandom and fanfic is not a monolith, however, and as fandom itself grows more self-aware there are conflicts and rifts that I hope will be improved. Watching the sort of fandom I grew up with become more and more mainstream—seeing articles about fandom and fanfiction appear in venues like Vox—has become less and less unusual. However, for older generation fandom people like me, the instinct to hide and keep our fandom lives separate is still there. This instinct is what inspired me to write this story.

I thoroughly enjoyed your worldbuilding here. The elements are fantastic yet familiar enough that readers can almost instantly identify their intent and use. Even better, the way you present these fantastical changes invites readers to explore other changes that might exist in this version of our world. Does worldbuilding come easy to you? How much thought did you give the setting for this story?

I’m a pure pantser, so I don’t have a formal process of structuring my worldbuilding—I have a general idea of what I want to write and the story flows from there.

With a gaggle of short stories, a novella, and a novel (and a possible sequel), you know your way around the page. If you could reach back in time to the younger Anya just starting to dip her toes into the writing waters, what advice would you have for her?

It’d be the same advice I have for many fanfic authors. If you’re even remotely interested in getting published, just give writing original fiction a shot. Don’t self-reject by internalising the idea that just because all you’ve written is fanfic means you can’t be any good.

From work, to writing, to art, to cats, you seem to always have something on your plate. How do you recharge? What does rest and relaxation look like for Anya Ow?

So far, a fantasy novel and a post-apocalyptic novella, and a space opera novel coming out next year, one that would hopefully be the first of a set.

I do like to keep busy, and I largely recharge by reading. Lately I’ve been binge reading danmei, or m/m Chinese novels: the constant popcorn drama in some of them is really entertaining. One of the best I’ve read this year is Qiang Jin Jiu by Tang Jiuqing, an imperial/military drama set in ancient China. It’s due for a film adaptation next year, and there’s a fan translation online for those who can’t read Chinese.

Speaking of film adaptations of danmei, there’s also been a great one this year called Shan He Ling / Word of Honor, which is free to watch on YouTube with English subtitles. Adapted from Priest’s Tian Ya Ke, it’s m/m wuxia, ex-Imperial spymaster x ghost valley master. Low budget, but filmed as a romance then dubbed over as a bromance to avoid censorship. I recommend it for the sheer amount of costume changes alone. And yes, for those interested, the fandom is known as the Mountain Sect/Mountain People/Shanren, and it is very active.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Xander Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Their work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. They are hard at work plotting their second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Thomas Ha

Laurel Amberdine | 1496 words

I was struck by the similarity to all the laborers in recent decades, who were prescribed Oxycontin to handle their pain, and the huge fallout that led to . . . which we’re still dealing with. It doesn’t seem like people who wind up addicted when they were just trying to keep working get much sympathy in our society, so I was glad to see your portrayal. Can you tell us what inspired this story for you?

This was a story that I’d been mulling over for some time because I know that one day, probably sooner than I think, I’m going to have to explain to my kids that our own family has some history of addiction. I still don’t know how I’m going to do it, quite frankly, but I think fiction offers a starting point of sorts—a way to be honest, but still safely distant at the same time.

A lot of the specifics came together when I read Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing. He tells a story about the moment he realized he was an alcoholic, when he was faced with the mountain of beer cans in his garage, his “dead soldiers.” And it was that imagery, the tangible accumulation of that dependence, that really struck me as something I feared and recognized. So that became the bookendings for this piece in its beginning and ending with the bottles. King’s initial reaction to his epiphany too—which was not to confront his addiction but to conceal and manage it—was a familiar throughline I embedded into this story as well. The narrator of the piece spends more time reciting rules that he’s “heard” to manage his habit than he ever does stopping himself, because those arbitrary limits and self-made regulations help some folks maintain the illusion of control. The story, for me at least, is about a man breaking through some of that illusion.

It’s interesting that you mention laborers addicted to Oxycontin, too, because I have family members whose work involves waging legal battles against opioid manufacturers, so while that wasn’t a conscious influence, that may have creeped in somewhat and does relate to a point I wanted to explore in the story. I want to be careful here, because addiction is obviously a very complex matter, and I don’t want to oversimplify it. But in my experience, I’ve found that the cultural conversation around the issue often dwells on personal choice or on genetics, either people tend to see it as an individual failure or fated in your blood. But one of the things I’m interested in is how economic incentives, environment, and social forces impact some professions, classes, and groups of people in this respect more than others. Attorneys (a profession I used to be a part of once upon a time), for example, have substantially high rates of alcoholism and substance abuse compared to other professionals. There’s an open acknowledgement and understanding in some lines of work, it seems, that some number of people will develop dependencies in the course of keeping a system running, and I think that’s true of a number of industries.

So with the barrier men in this story, I wanted to raise similar questions about the necessity and origin of their addictions. At first glance, the plasma seems like an obvious aid in their line of work, because it helps them protect their settlement from alien attack. But as you learn where the plasma comes from and the role of the settlement itself under the direction of a corporate entity, you might begin to wonder how necessary any of it—the conflict with the glyconids, appropriation of territory, prevalence of the “rot” in working frontiersmen—really may be.

I loved how the worms seem to use Feynman path integrals to predict the future, so I’m guessing you must have some interest in quantum mechanics. Can you tell us a little about that?

I wish I could say I’m that cerebral, but unfortunately my pop culture understanding of quantum mechanics pretty much ends with the phrase “Feynman path integrals”! I do have an interest in it at a very basic level, but my reasons for choosing a quantum-mechanic-like device had more to do with the character story I wanted to tell.

Most aspects of the glyconids, really, were developed with the narrator’s journey in mind. The fact that they are even these flying serpent creatures (they’re called “skyworms” pejoratively by the barrier men, but they strike me as slightly more majestic, if frightening, gliding snakes), came about because of the mystery of “the barn,” the place where the narrator’s son hears monsters at the start of the story. The sounds, we ultimately learn, are the narrator in the throes of sickness and slithering in the dirt, so knowing that, I wanted to pick a creature with imagery that would echo where he would end up. As the barrier men take more of the plasma, they begin to develop more in common with the glyconids, not just the ability to perceive potential futures, but the snake-like features as they become ill and develop damage to their extremities.

Similarly, I know “visions of the future” is a sci-fi trope as common as time travel or memory retrieval, but I really wanted to use the glyconids’ “prolepsis” in a way that had character and narrative significance that was specific to this story. Again, to me, this is about a man under the illusion that he can control his addiction. With the plasma, his journey involves coming to the understanding that even within a number of wildly different outcomes, his propensity for addiction is constant. At the same time, I don’t think he learns that he’s incapable of doing anything. One thing he can do, at least in the confines of the rules of this world, is recognize the dangers of the environment he’s in, and spare his family from facing those dangers.

I struggled with this ending a bit, too, because it could arguably be an example of the fatalistic view of addiction I mentioned and that I’d like to eschew. There’s a harsh reading of this, where you might say the narrator chooses abandonment and avoids self-improvement or trying to change his own future. But the rules are a little different with this lunar colony than with our reality: the future is semi-knowable, the addiction has a relatively defined source, and the technology to escape it exists. And that’s, really, what I view as the most fantastical/fictional element of the story. If I could guarantee with certainty that my kids would be spared some of these problems by changing the environment they grow up in, I’m sure I would. But real life, unfortunately, is a lot more complex, and as anyone with a family or personal history with addiction knows, it isn’t something you can just leave behind.

It seems like this frontier moon with its strange native life might be part of a larger story. Did you have any plans in that direction, or would you consider it?

I think this story encapsulated pretty much everything I wanted to explore about this world and about this aspect of addiction. But if I ever were to expand on it, I think there’s potentially more to discuss about the involvement of “Corporate” and what this institution might gain at the colonists’ expense.

I wrote another story with similar themes about a lawsuit that takes place on a lunar colony, “A Compilation of Accounts Concerning the Distal Brook Flood”, which was published in the April 2021 issue of Metaphorosis Magazine. There, the focus is much more about the knowledge and involvement of the institution that puts its laborers at risk. So if I were ever to return to this particular colony and ecosystem, I could see that being an angle I’d like to think more about.

What have you been working on lately?

I have another dystopian SF story out this month in Dark Matter Magazine, “The Liminal Men”, which is about a resistance member being hunted by an authoritarian state that uses paranormal soldiers.

And I have a few short stories in the pipeline, in various stages of drafting or submission. One is a dark fantasy that’s an inversion of some of the themes in “Where You Left Me”, about a father unable to leave or give up on a daughter who suffers from an altered state. Then a couple of other frontier science fiction colony stories about disturbing worlds, dysfunctional families, and the enduring, if imperfect, love that sustains people in those dire circumstances. I hope readers will get to see these future stories, or versions of them, soon!

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: Lizz Huerta

Laurel Amberdine | 747 words

Often when I read a story, I feel like I can guess where it started in the author’s mind (not that I’m always right!). But there are so many interesting hooks in “Sía” that I’m just going to ask: how did this story start for you? Did it give you any surprises along the way?

I was at “spiritual” gathering where the white facilitator literally started off by having us sing “Colors of the Wind” from Disney’s Pocahontas. The absurdity of it floored me: You think you own whatever land you land on//The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim//But I know every rock and tree and creature//Has a life, has a spirit, has a name. And then the faciliator asked us to pray for the military. I was cringe-laughing so hard on the inside I could barely keep a straight face and thought “You can’t make this up.” Thus, the seed for Sía was planted. I started this story in 2014; it has changed shape countless times since then. The ancestors surprised me the most, they just showed up hard for me and for Mari and I love them. They keep coming back, demanding I write more of their stories. I cracked myself up writing this, and I cried.

I especially liked the ending, where Mari realizes “the body is the rocket launcher.” Many spiritual people wind up largely gnostic, as far as the body goes, where it is wholly bad and only to be resisted with all its needs and feelings. Obviously this story is very spiritual, despite the label of fantasy. How did you go about tracing the path of Mari’s journey?

I wanted Mari to connect with the spiritual and with the physical and how they’re interconnected. There’s been so much talk of intergenerational trauma, epigenetics, and how the traumas of our ancestors live in us, in these bodies. I believe that if the traumas of our ancestors live in our bodies then the gifts they carried, collective wisdoms and graces, must live in us too. Each of us lives in a body that comes from more complicated histories than we can ever imagine. I wanted to bring some of those stories, or at least those who lived them, into this part of the timeline. The traumas and the gifts. And how those stories still inform who we are and how we are situated in the world, individually and collectively.

Can you tell us about your forthcoming YA novel, The Lost Dreamer?

The Lost Dreamer is a dual narrative young adult novel set in a fantastical world informed by the indigenous communities that lived in pre-European contact Americas. It is the story of two young women who are born with the same rare spiritual gift, the ability to enter a different dimension when they Dream at night and return with messages. Indir is born into a lineage of Dreamers in a society and sacred city built around the gift she carries. Saya has the same gift but lives far away and has no training and keeps her gift a secret. There’s a creepy new ruler in Indir’s world and she has to make a choice about who she is and who she wants to be; Saya has an abusive mother and has to also decide who she is and what her gift means. The world is one I wished I could have seen as a young reader, filled with pyramids and temples, landscapes similar to those my ancestors lived in.

What have you been keeping busy with lately, especially now that our pandemic times are coming to an end?

My life is simple, even with the pandemic allegedly coming to an end. I spend a lot of time alone but do see my family and a few beloveds. I read a lot and honestly, I spend a ton of time staring out my sliding glass door because my balcony is always filled with birds coming to my birth bath and feeders. I’m working on my next book, a follow-up to The Lost Dreamer, and a ton of my writing process is staring into space, listening to binaural beats and letting the story emerge the way it chooses to.

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: Meg Elison

Benjamin C. Kinney | 734 words

This story, for all its delights, paints a vivid picture of the drudgery of fast food work. It’s not unique to food service, of course; we can also see the influence of Amazon-style monitoring and micro-managing in your near-future vision. Have you experienced this kind of work personally, or did you draw from other sources of inspiration?

My first jobs were in food service and I can still recall every grimy, demoralizing second of it. I worked at a pizza place when I was fourteen that stole wages from me and gave me my first serious burns, cuts, and experiences with sexual harassment.

Later, I worked at a Boston Market and I still remember my worst day: two customers screamed at me about rotisserie chicken skin, and an industrial mixer vat of cornbread batter overturned on me. I finished up my shift finding out I got docked $20 because my register drawer was off by $5, and then I slipped in spilled grease and broke my coccyx. Later that night, I turned hardened cornbread batter out of the cuffs of my Dickies and did not seek medical attention. I went back to work at five in the morning with a key to the front door and a code to the safe, making $7.75 an hour. I was eighteen or nineteen and I hadn’t read Marx yet, but I already knew all about the alienation of labor.

Between food service, childcare, and retail, I have numberless stories to tell that sound like dystopia to a lot of people. Returning to those stories armed with aliens and magic and communist robots is very liberating. So is watching the informal and decentralized movement for wildcat strikes as fast food workers all over the nation rise up and fight for better conditions and more money.

I love the line “There is power in the union of man and machine.” How do you envision a future where that’s true when machines have intelligence and personhood? In your hoped-for future, when the uprising wins, what shape might that human-machine relationship take?

It’s a direct reference to the Billy Bragg song, “There is Power in a Union,” but I wanted to think about what a very intelligent and connected machine might make of that idea. I’ve loved a lot of fiction about AI and personhood, “Measure of a Man” on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Louis Evans’s “Flash Crash” that posit a fully developed AI might be a compassionate one interested in a continued shared existence rather than becoming Skynet. I focused here on the idea of planned obsolescence; how offensive it is when you understand that the devalued machinery is you.

Who is real? Who is people? Who is us? Or, to ask my question with a little more specificity: in your eyes, what makes machines like POS141 sufficiently “like us” to qualify for personhood?

Consciousness is so hard to define. I was thinking about all the machines that can talk to one another forming one huge connected and collective intelligence and making decisions for the good of the many. Anybody who is capable of communicating that our struggle is the same and joining in that struggle is Us.

Yvette’s affection for Coney is a classic moment. Are there any machines in your life you wish would ask for your friendship or solidarity?

I found myself stunned into empathy for my roommate’s Roomba. I was sympathetic to it when it bashed into corners, and I wanted to cheer it on while it chased the cat hair tumbleweeds around. I’m also on the verge of a romantic relationship with my countertop nugget ice machine, and I wish I could support it the way it supports me.

Your work is sticking in the heads of a lot of readers these days—your novelette “The Pill” was a Nebula finalist, won a Locus Award, and is in the running for the Hugos as well. This story has certainly stuck in my head too. Where should we look next for your amazing stories?

It’s been a very exciting season! I’ve got a new book coming out with Mira Books next summer called Number One Fan that I’m very excited to share.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Benjamin C. Kinney is a neuroscientist, SFF writer, and assistant editor of the science fiction podcast Escape Pod. He’s created cyborg monkeys, magnetically altered the activity of the human brain, and generally done his part to make the world as science fictional as possible. His short stories have appeared in Analog, Fireside, Strange Horizons, and many other excellent places, and you can find them all at benjaminckinney.com.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 236 words

Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Gene Doucette (“Memoranda from the End of the World”) and Yang-Yang Wang (“Every Single Brian”). We also have a flash piece (“Those Who Went”) from E. Catherine Tobler, along with an SF reprint by Leah Cypess (“On the Ship”).

October’s fantasy original is a new novelette by P H Lee (“The Ash-Girl and the Salmon Prince”), which we’ll be serializing in two parts. We also have a flash piece (“The Right Dragon”) from Coral Alejandra Moore. Our fantasy reprint is by Endria Isa Richardson (“The Black Menagerie”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a novel excerpt from Ryka Aoki: Light from Uncommon Stars.

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: Stephen Graham Jones, Sandra McDonald, Izzy Wasserstein, Timi Odueso, and Adam-Troy Castro.

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

Thanks for reading!

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

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TL;DR Version

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Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

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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

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 our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 (with Veronica Roth) [forthcoming]

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

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus 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

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.