Editorial, February 2011
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue nine of Lightspeed!

Before we get to this month’s teasers, I just wanted to remind you that you can now subscribe to the ebook edition of Lightspeed, via Weightless Books, a new ebookstore managed by Gavin Grant and the team at Small Beer Press. Subscriptions are just $19.95 a year, which is over $15 off the cover price, so subscribe early and subscribe often—and tell your friends!

With that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

Our lead story for February is “Long Enough and Just So Long” by Cat Rambo, the tale of two teen, Heinleinesque Moon-residents who meet a liberated sexbot from Earth.

In the related nonfiction, columnist Genevieve Valentine finds out how sophisticated (or not) artificial intelligences currently are in “When the Chatbots Come to Greet Us.”

Next up is “The Passenger” by Julie E. Czerneda, the tale of a man and a committee aboard a generation ship, that examines justice, hypocrisy, art, and our ability to rationalize and explain away the most horrific things. (Reprint)

In the feature interview this month, Dreamworks animator Andrew Penn Romine talks to two of his colleagues— Lightstorm Entertainment’s Nolan Murtha, director of digital effects on James Cameron’s Avatar, and Digital Domain’s Steve Pregg animation director for Tron: Legacy—and finds out just what it takes to create “Digital Lifeforms.”

New author Ken Liu also explores the creation of digital lifeforms in his first story for Lightspeed, “Simulacrum,” in which the innovator of a vividly-realistic holographic technology finds that creating and interacting with fake people may be easier than maintaining relationships with real ones.

Jeff Hecht, author of our popular piece, “Future Weapons,” returns to our pages with “Where’s My Holovision,” an overview of holographic technology that ponders how far we still have to go before we’ll have anything like Star Trek’s Holodecks (or Ken Liu’s simulacra) in real life.

“Breakaway, Backdown” by Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning author James Patrick Kelly gives the reader a chance to be a fly on the wall during a conversation about the allure and perils of space.

And last but not least, astronomer Nicholos Wethington takes us on a tour of our solar neighborhood and provides some tips for “Colonizing the Solar System in Four Easy Steps.”

That about does it for our fiction and nonfiction selections for February, but be sure to also look for our author and artist spotlights, and keep an ear out for our podcasts of “Long Enough and Just So Long” by Cat Rambo and “Simulacrum” by Ken Liu.

So that’s our issue this month. I hope you enjoy it. And remember, if you don’t want to wait for the content to be released on the site throughout the month, or you’d just like a handy, downloadable version of the magazine on your favorite reading device, Lightspeed is available directly from our publisher, Prime Books, in DRM-free ePub format. We’re also happy to report that every issue of Lightspeed is now available in the following stores: Kindle, iBooks, Nook, and Fictionwise. It’s also now available via two new channels: Wizard’s Tower and Weightless Books (of which the latter, as we mentioned earlier, also offers subscriptions).

Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Wastelands, The Living Dead (a World Fantasy Award finalist), The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Barnes & Noble.com named him “the reigning king of the anthology world,” and his books have been named to numerous best of the year lists. He is also the editor of Fantasy Magazine. In addition to his editorial work, John is also the co-host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Long Enough and Just So Long
Cat Rambo

I’d never wanted to go to Earth until the doctor told me I couldn’t, that my bones were too brittle. After that, it wasn’t an obsession, just an edge to my days.

Otherwise, my life’s good.

I run a courier ship between Earth, Luna, the space stations, Mars, and the Inner Gate. You need as little mass as possible to run a snipship, and due to what that doctor called my defects, I’m one of the smallest, fastest. Good pay, and most of the time I’m low-g, which is easiest on me.

Freetime I slum around Luna, where my best girlfriend Pippi lives. Or she and I go prospecting out in the shadow of the Gate, like the dozens of other crazies, hoping to stumble on an alien artifact, make us all rich. Not too impossible a dream, though. It’s happened before.

I had a permanent cradle walker left at Luna, that’s how much time I spent there. Pippi worked as a sportscaster for the biggest Moon channel, MBSA. Her name’s not really Pippi, but she had orange braids and long legs and freckles everywhere, so what else could everyone call her?

I’m used to my name getting distorted. My parents named me Podkayne after a girl in an old story about Mars. It becomes Poddy and Special K, usually Kayne.

In college, though, they called me the Gimp. Most of the time it was affectionate. Pippi was my roommate, there from day one. She had eight siblings, ranging from twelve years to three months. A roomie with lower limb reduction syndrome didn’t faze her. I’d come in with a chip pre-loaded on my shoulder, but I relaxed after a couple of weeks.

Pippi was borderline Aspie, called it like it was, which caused her enough troubles on her own. You had to explain to her why you were angry or sad or whatever, but once she knew what was going on, she knew what sounds to make.

The Aspiness makes her an excellent sportscaster. She knows every sports score for the last half century, and a lot of pre-Net stuff too. You can’t come up with a trivia question that’s lunar sports-related that she can’t answer. That was the only thing she really got passionate about, and in a way that charmed the camera.

We never hooked up. Both of us were wired straight. Pippi had a regular friend named Trevor who was usually away on business trips. I paid for it or went virtual every once in a while, and left things at that.

We were both enjoying sunlight at our favorite park, two blocks away from Pippi’s apartment complex. Sitting beside a sculpture there I’ve always loved, spindly rails of color tumbling taller than me like animation lines, edges glinting pink and blue and purple. The smell of tomato and basil and sage filled the air.

Pippi had her face turned up to the light, soaking in the warmth. She had been indulging in tanners again. Her orange shirt and shorts were vibrant against the expanse of her brown skin.

I was more cautious. I don’t want skin tumors later on, so I keep a gauzy over-shirt and hat about me. Silvery sleeves to deflect the light were set over my arms, strapped into the walker’s maneuvering legs. Underneath the sleeves, mercurial light played over my skin.

We both saw him when he entered the park: Tourist-new, still dressed in arrival shorts and paper shirt with “Be nice, I’m a newbie” printed on the back, which guaranteed him a 10% discount at any participating business.

Pippi squinted over. “Is that…”

I followed her gaze. Dark glasses gave me the advantage. “Yep. It’s an AI.”

“Not just any AI, though,” she said, eyes watering. “Unless I’m wrong?”

“Nope, it’s a sexbot,” I said.

It was just after what the newsies were calling the Sexbot Scandal, when that Senator was caught traveling with an AI and had used the momentary notoriety to call for AI rights. Now the Senator’s ‘droid and several others of its kind had bought themselves free. I’d seen an interview with one while trapped in line picking up Chinese takeout the night before. Its plans for the next year were to travel with its friend, another of the bots. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

The oldest human urge: Curiosity about who or what each other was fucking.

He had the white plastic skin most AIs were affecting that year. On his head a slouched wool hat like a noir detective’s.

He looked up and saw us looking at him. He froze, like a car grinding gears to a stop. Then he moved again, almost impatient, flinging an arm up as though against us, although I realized a second later that it shielded his eyes from the dazzle of sunlight off the sculpture. Trapezoids of colored light danced over his tunic, glittered on the lenses that were his eyes.

Pippi waved.

He stepped backwards, ducked into the tunnel.

Of course we went in pursuit.

He took the West tunnel. Moving fast, dodging between walkers moving between stations, grabbing handholds to hurl himself along. It wasn’t hard to follow him—I’m small, and mostly muscular in the chest and shoulders, so I can rocket along as far as anyone from handhold to handhold. Pippi slowed me down, kept hissing at me to wait up for her.

We emerged in the most touristy of plazas, the complex of malls near the big hotels, the public gardens. I thought I’d seen the flicker of his tunic, his hat’s crumpled feather, as he ducked into the Thai garden.

The dome overhead admitted unadulterated sunlight. There were parrot flowers and bua pood, a waterfall, and a grove full of gibbons, safely behind mesh. Trails led off to discreet clothing and lifestyle boutiques, a restaurant, and a walkway to the next mall. I saw his hat bob through its glass confines and elbowed Pippi, pointing.

She said, “He could be going anywhere from there. There’s a tube stop in the middle of the mall.”

“Where would a sexbot go?”

“Do you think he’s for hire?” she said.

The interview had said only a few sexbots had chosen to keep their professions. Most of the others had made enough to fund other careers. Most had become solo-miners or explorer pilots.

“It can’t be the first time he’s been asked the question,” Pippi said.

I hesitated. I could talk her into asking. Could machines feel embarrassment? What was the etiquette of communication? Was a sexbot, like a human, capable of being flattered by a flirtatious or even directly admiring question?

Gibbons hooted overhead. A long-billed bird clung upside down to the other side of the mesh. If we stayed here much longer, we’d have a park fee added to our monthly taxes. Two parks in a single day was way too extravagant.

We went home.

I had a run to the Gate the next morning, so I got up early, let myself out. Took the West tunnel to the tube stop. Grabbed a mushroom roll on the way and ate it on the platform, peering into shop windows at orange and blue scarves and fake ferns and a whole window wall’s worth of animate Muffs, the latest wearable animals. The sign said they lived off air impurities. They had no eyes, which to some people made them cute, I guess, but to me just looked sad.

Tourists going past in bright shirts and arcs of perfect white teeth. Demi-gods, powered by cash.

A feather reflected in the window. Behind me stood the sexbot.

This time I followed at a distance. Got in the train car at the opposite end, but kept an eye on him. Luckily for me he was getting out at the port. I don’t know what I would have done if it’d looked as though he was going further.

Maybe followed him.

Why? I don’t know. There was something charming about the way he held himself. And I was curious—who wouldn’t be?—about the experience of someone made for sex, someone for whom sex was his entire rationale for existence. What would it have been like for him (it?) awakening to that?

The port platform straddled the Dundee cliffs, overlooking the Sea of Tranquility. He was there at that flickering curtain of energy and I remembered what it did to constructs—shorted them out, wiped them clean. He had his hand outstretched, and I’m the last to deny anyone their choices, but even so I shouted, “Hey.”

He turned, his hand dropping.

I caught up to him. I was in the cradle walker because I was being lazy that day. I could see him taking it in, the metal spidering my lower body, the bulge where my flesh ended, where legs might have been on someone else, the nubs of my left hand—two but as useful as three of your fingers, I swear.

I said, “Want to get a cup of tea and talk about it?”

So cliché, like something you might have seen in a cheap-D. But he said, “Okay,” and his voice sounded as sincere as a mechanical voice can.

The café was half-deserted, just a couple of kids drinking coffee near the main window. We were between main shifts, and I was late for my pick-up, but I thumbed a don’t-bother-me code, knowing I was one of the most reliable usually. They’d curse me but let it slide.

It’s weird, talking to a mechanical. Half the time your mind’s supplying all the little body movements, so you feel like you’re talking to a person. Then half the time you’ve got a self-conscious feeling, like you were talking to your toaster in front of your grandmother.

Maybe it was just as strange for him. There’s a lot of Gimps up here—lower gravity has its advantages, and in a lot of spaces, like my rig, the less you mass the better. Plus times are lean—less elective surgery. Here he was in the land of the unbeautiful, the people who didn’t care as much about their appearance. Strange, when he was beautiful in every single inch, every graceful, economical move.

We didn’t say a word about any of that.

I told him the best places to sightsee, and where he could take tours. I thought maybe he had some advantages—did he need to breathe, after all? Could he walk Outside just as he was?

The big casinos are worth seeing, particularly Atlantis and Spin City. I sketched out a map on my cell and shot it to him.

“Where do you like to go?” he said.

I’m not much for shopping, and I said so. I liked to take the mega-rail between Luna and the Cluster—cheap and you could stare out the window at the landscape.

“Let’s do that,” he said.

The Cluster used to be a fundamentalist-founded station that ended up selling its space to private concerns in order to fund itself. The remnants of the church were there. They ran the greenhouses that grew food for Luna, where most of the water got processed too. The stuff at the market there was always fresh and good and cheaper than in stores.

A jazz club had bought space, and a tiny government office matched its grander counterpart in Luna. And there was Xanadu, which was a co-op of five wealthy families. Along with a scattering of individuals who dealt in rare or hand-crafted goods.

There was always music there, and it had enough reputation for being dangerous that all but a few tourists steered clear.

His name was Star. He would be all right with me. I knew enough to keep him safe.

We ate berries and sat beside rippling water. He told me about Earth—never about the people, but the landscape. Trees, pines and sycamores and madrona, maples and honey locusts and cedar. He talked about cliffs that were bound with color: Yellows and reds and deep browns. Everything grew there, it seemed.

He talked about rain, about slow gray clouds and tearing nor’easters. Rain drumming on a tin roof versus its sound on slate. Fine spring mist and the hot rain that fell during drought, coin-sized and evaporating too quickly. Rain on sand, echoed by waves. Thunderheads, gathering themselves over the ocean. He had lived beside the sea for a few years, he said.

I wondered who he had lived with.

So much was unsaid. It was like a cloud in the room. We relaxed despite it.

He didn’t know where he was staying. He had no luggage. I approved of that. I stick to plas-wear and carry no souvenirs other than the rooms inside my head. Even my ship, where I spend more time than anywhere else, is unpersonalized. I liked it that way.

I was staying with Pippi. Star had money, or so he said, and asked where a clean hotel was. I steered him to Blizz, which caters to the Gate regulars, and went back to Pippi’s.

She was surprised to see me. I hadn’t felt like going out on a trip, I said, and offered to take her out to dinner.

All the time we were eating sweet potato fries and tempeh steaks, I tried to figure out how to tell her about Star.

I don’t know what kept me from just blurting it out. That was usually the level we communicated at. Straightforward and without pretense.

I felt like a shit keeping quiet. Eventually it would come out and the longer it took, the worse it would be.

I wasn’t prepared to see him at the door the next day.

Pippi answered the door. “Bless you, my dear little friend!” she shouted over her shoulder.

“What?” I scooted back in my chair, glimpsed his hat.

“You got me a present!” She reached out her hands, “Come in, come in.”

Her place is tiny. Three of us made it feel crowded. We stood around the table, bumping it with our hips.

“How much do you cost?” Pippi asked Star.

He looked at me. “I don’t do that anymore.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I came to see Podkayne.”

Pippi was unembarrassed. She shrugged and said, “Okay.”

He wanted advice about buying into the colony, where to pick a spot. I made him buy me lunch in return for my advice, and we took Pippi along since she knew better than I where the good deals were.

“Over there in Cluster, someone told me a month or two ago,” she said. “He was saying the Church is going to sell off more space, and it’s going to get gentrified. It’s a long ways off though, over an hour by tram.” She licked barbecue sauce off her fingers. Star pushed a wipe across the table towards her.

“I don’t think he likes me much,” she said to me, later.

“I don’t think he likes humans much,” I said. “He makes allowances, but I think he’d be just as happy dealing with mechanicals only.”

“Not many mechs up here,” she said.

“Why?” I said. “You’d think it would be ideal for them. No rust. Less dirt. Fewer pollutants in the air.”

“It would make sense,” she said. “What does it say about us, we’re so crazy we pick a place even mechanicals don’t want to live?”

Maybe ten thousand on the face of the moon. The space stations ranged in size from a few hundred to a few thousand. Twenty thousand on the surface of Mars. I didn’t go back there much, even though it was where I had grown up, after my parents died in a crash. Maybe two or three thousand existing around the bounty of the Gate, another hundred pilots and vagabonds and Parasite-ridden.

The few, the proud, the crazy.

Why had Star chosen to come up here?

I asked.

He said, “There’s too many living things on the planet.”

“Why not Mars? It’s enough people to qualify as civilization.”

“They’re spread out and it’s dusty. Here it’s clean.”

“You like the sterility up here,” I said. “Then why think about living over in the Cluster? It’s the most organic spot on the moon.”

His face never smiled, just tilted from one degree to another. “It’s a controlled organic.”

“But what do you want to do?”

“Live,” he said. “By myself, with a few friends,” he nodded towards me, “according to my own devices.”

“What about sex?” I blurted out.

He froze like a stuck strut’s shadow. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to intrude. It’s just that I was somewhat interested, but only if you were.”

He shook his head, mere centimeters of rejection. “I’m afraid not.”

Words I’d heard before. Including what he said next. “We can be friends, though.”

“He’s not interested,” I told Pippi.

“Screw him,” she said. “Let’s go play Sex Rangers.”

We climbed into the virtual suits and tapped in. I found someone interested in fooling around on a rocky shore, underneath fuzzy pines. The suit’s as good as sex, any day—releases all the tensions you need released, in my opinion—and a lot cleaner.

Afterwards we logged out and ate pizza and watched a deck about boxing. Pippi said the guy had an 87 percent chance of winning (he did), 54 percent chance by knock-out (he did not).

“I asked Star to come mining with us,” I said to her when we were getting ready for bed. I took the couch; she had a fold-down bunk.

“You did what?”

“He’ll be an extra pair of eyes. Not like he’ll take up oxygen.”

She paused. “Fair enough.”

He was good enough at spotting. He learned the difference between ice and metal fast enough to satisfy impatient Pippi, who hated explaining things. I focused on getting us close to the debris that swirled in and out of the Gate. You never knew what you might find. One guy picked up a device that fueled a company in food replication and yielded over forty patents. One pilot found a singing harp. Another the greasy lump that ended up becoming snipship fuel.

You never knew.

Pippi and I had a routine. Star didn’t intrude on it much, went to the secondary display and focused on looking for mineral spikes.

Usually we chatted back and forth. There, Star was an intrusive, if silent, presence. Pippi ended up thumbing on the usual newschat channel. Nothing much. An outbreak on Mars, but small and well-contained. An ambassador stricken but rallying in order to continue his mission through the Gate. How much he looked forward to being the fifth human through the interstellar passage that allowed us access to the wild and varied universe. How much he looked forward to opening new trade channels.

Who knew what he might find out there?

“What’s this?” Star said.

From afar just a glitter. Then, closer, a silver-sided chest, the size of a foot locker but covered with golden triangles. An odd, glittery powder encrusted the hinges and catch as it spun in space.

We brought it in.

Pippi’s gloved hand reached to undo the latch. I waited, holding my breath.

Nothing hissed out. A glass sphere inside, clouded with bubbles and occlusions. As Pippi slipped it out of the gray material surrounding it, we could see oily liquid filling it.

“Could be useless,” Pippi said, her voice unhappy. “Plenty of stories like that before.”

“Could be beaucoup bucks,” I pointed out.

“Of course,” Pippi said, her voice loud and angry, “it’s the time you bring someone along, to split it three ways, that we actually hit a lode.”

“I don’t want any claim,” Star said.

Flummoxed, I stared at him. What must it be like, to have enough to not need more, to have just that one extra layer against yourself and poverty? My parents had left me enough to buy my snipship, but all my capital was tied up in that rig.

“I just wanted the company,” he said. “I thought it would be interesting.”

“Fucking tourist,” Pippi said. “Want to watch the monkeys dance? We’ll kiss for another five grand.”

He backed up, raising his hands. His feet clattered on the deck. Before he had moved quietly. Did he choose to make that sound to remind us he was a machine?

“Thought we’d just love to take the walking vibrator on tour?” Pippi said. When he remained silent, she turned on me. “See, it doesn’t have anything to say to that.”

“He,” he said.

“He? What makes you a he, that you’ve got a sticky-out bit? I bet you’ve got a sticky-in bit or two as well.” She laughed. Meanness skewed her face.

“Enough,” I said. “Let’s tag the find, in our names, Pippi.”

She dropped back. I clung to the rigging, started to thumb in figures. She pushed forward, “Let me, it’s faster.” Fingers clicking, she muttered under her breath, “Get us all home faster that way.”

I took over after she’d tagged the spot and put the coordinates in. I was trying not to be angry. Hope mellowed out some of the harsh emotion. It could be a significant find. It was nice of Star to give up his claim.

Back in the ship bay, the lights laddered his face till he looked like a decoration. Pippi was strapping our find into a jitney.

“Why not a place where there’s rain?” I said.

“That could only be Earth,” he said. “Do you know the worst thing about rain there?”

“What?”

Pippi tied a rope into place, tested it with a quick tug, glanced over her shoulder at us.

“Rain there has gotten so acidic that if I stand out in it I have to come in and shower after a few minutes. It damages my outer skin.”

I tried to picture the cold, then acid burn. Luna was better.

“I’m sorry about Pippi.”

She honked the horn.

“Go ahead. I’m taking the tram over to the Cluster,” he said.

I hesitated. “Meet me later?”

“I’ll call you.”

He didn’t, of course. We cashed in the case—a lump sum from a company’s R&D division that doubled our incomes and then some.

I texted him, “Come celebrate with us, we’re dockside and buying dumplings.” But he didn’t reply until three days later. “Sorry, things got busy. Bought house. Come out and see it.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning. I’ll make you breakfast.”

I left in the morning before Pippi was awake.

His place was swank, built into a cliff-side, with a spectacular view of the endless white plains below. He made me waffles with real maple syrup. He was an amazing cook. I said so.

“I was programmed that way,” he said, and made a sound that was sort of a laugh.

The sexbots—all of the AIs struggling for emancipation lately—had had to demonstrate empathy and creativity. I wondered what that had been like.

He was standing uncomfortably close. I leaned forward to make it even closer, thinking he’d draw back.

He didn’t.

“I’m programmed a certain way,” he said.

“How is that?”

“I want to please you. But at the same time I know it’s just the way I’m programmed.”

“It can’t be something more than that?” My arm was pressed against his surface. It was warm and yielding as flesh. I couldn’t have told the difference.

He pulled away. I bit my lip in frustration, but I liked him enough to be civilized.

I drank the last of my coffee. Real Blue Mountain blend. He kept his kitchen well stocked for human visitors—who did he hope would stop in?

As it turns out, Pippi. Next time I came through on a quick flight (I might be rich, but who was I to turn down fast and easy money?), she told me how he’d fed her.

“Pasta,” she said, rolling the words out. “And wine, and little fish, from Earth. And afterwards something sweet to drink.”

She said they’d fucked. I believed her. It wouldn’t be her style to lie. It would never occur to her.

So I did and said I’d fucked him too. She didn’t respond, not right off the bat, but I caught her looking at me oddly by the time I said toodle-oo and went off to sleep in my ship.

It wasn’t the first time I’d slept in there, not by a long shot.

I wished them both happiness, I supposed.

Still, two weeks later, I came in response to Pippi’s panicked call. He was going back to Earth, she said.

We both showed up at the farewell hall. He was standing with a tall blonde woman, Earth-fat. Star slipped away from us, came over with a bearing jaunty and happy, his polished face expressionless as always.

“Who is that?” Pippi said.

“A journalist. She’s going to help me tell my story, back on Earth.”

“I see,” Pippi said. She and I both surveyed the woman, who pretended not to notice us. Her manicured hand waved a porter over to take her luggage aboard, the hard-shelled cases the same color as her belt.

Pippi said, “Is this because you don’t want to fuck me any longer? You said you liked it, making me feel good. We don’t have to do that. We can do whatever you like, as long as you stay.”

He averted his face, looking at the ship. “That’s not it.”

“Then what?”

“I want to go back to the rain.”

“Earth’s acid rain?” I said. “The rain that will destroy you?”

Now he was looking at neither of us.

“What about your place?” Pippi said.

“You can have it,” he said. “It never felt like home.”

“Will anyplace?” I asked. “Anywhere?”

“When I’m telling my story, it feels like home,” he said. “I see myself on the camera and I belong in the world. That’s what I need to do.”

“Good luck,” I said. What else could I say?

Pippi and I walked away through the terminal. There were tourists all around us, going home, after they’d played exotic for a few days, experienced zero-grav and sky-diving and painted their faces in order to play glide-ball and eaten our food and drunk our wine and now were going home to the rain.

We didn’t look at each other. I didn’t know how long Star’s shadow would lie between us. Maybe years. Maybe just long enough for sunlight to glint on forgotten metal, out there in the sky. Maybe long enough and just so long.

Cat Rambo writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight appeared from Paper Golem Press in 2009, following her collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories in 2007. Among the places her work has appeared are Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Clarkesworld.

Author Spotlight: Cat Rambo
Stacey Friedberg

Star is a robot built to provide sex, and when we meet him for the first time he already opposes his function. Still, he begins providing pleasures for Podkayne and Pippi. What causes Star to slip back into his old ways?

To some extent, Star’s drive is the same as that of a human’s—we’re all biological machines experiencing analogous sexual drives. So his slipping back isn’t that surprising, given that it’s a pull he’s presumably experiencing much of the time. The role he moves into is one that isn’t particularly unfamiliar to some humans—providing sex because it’s something that the beings around him expect.

There’s often comfort in moving back into a role that we know well and that we know we’re good at, even when we find parts of that role objectionable.

Although much of “Long Enough and Just So Long” focuses on sex, we don’t ever see the characters physically engaging in it. Instead, this story seems to feature other types of intimacy. Why did you decide to write the story in this way?

I think it’s hard to write sex scenes that a) are truly engaging and b) avoid hitting things that are triggers or points of unintended emotion for readers, so I’d prefer to leave most of that to the reader’s imagination, which is always sufficient for the task. And at the same time, it’s the emotional nuances of sex that I find more interesting than the mechanics of whose sticky-out bits are going in whose sticky-in bits, so I’d rather focus on those nuances.

Beyond that, this story is intended as a tribute to and retelling of Robert A. Heinlein’s YA short story, “The Menace From Earth,” in which a teen girl, Holly Jones of Luna City, loses and then regains her boyfriend. YA fiction, particularly that of the 20th century, doesn’t focus on friendships between women, which is why this story’s focus (in my opinion) is on the friendship between Podkayne and Pippi. (Podkayne’s name references Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, whose heroine is spunky albeit problematic at times; Pippi’s name is a reference to another YA heroine, Pippi Longstocking.)

Pippi seems to hate Star, yet she visits him and even claims to have slept with him. Why does Star sleep with Pippi and not Podkayne?

I picture the Pippi/Star seduction scene, which takes place offstage, as being very frank and direct, which I’ve found often moves a relationship straight away into the sexual. Pippi wants Star and is the sort to say so bluntly. That sort of admiration is something that is hard to argue with, particularly for an insecure sexbot.

Your last story in Lightspeed, “Amid the Words of War,” features characters bred to be soldiers, and then later forced to be cleaners. While the characters from that story miss their lives as soldiers, Star seems opposed to returning to sex work. What makes you return to this idea of being forced into a certain job or occupation?

I think it’s an increasingly applicable concern in the 21st century as we move toward an age where we’ll all have to fit into neat little slots for our corporate overlords. This is also where the title comes from—it’s drawn from an e.e. cummings poem, “as freedom is a breakfast food,” which is about the kind of culture I’ve tried to depict in this story, an updated version of Heinlein’s as well as about the nature of love.

In your mind, what is Star’s story? What is it he wanted to tell the world?

I actually picture Star’s story as being sort of petty and devoted to the trivial more than the big picture. It seems to me that he’s got a pretty basic misunderstanding of interpersonal relationships that is based on his programming, and such misunderstandings can drive people in really random and trivial directions sometimes. To me that’s part of the irony of the story, that he wants so desperately to tell a story that may well not be worth the telling.

How do you see AI being implemented in the future?

I think we’ll see them built into devices to help us, and we’ll probably move well into the realm of self-consciousness before we start actually thinking about the legalities and ethics of such things.

Stacey Friedberg is a recent graduate of Emerson College, where she earned her BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She enjoys reading, writing, and cooking. You can follow her (very infrequent) tweets via @stacabird.

When the Chatbots Come to Greet Us: Adventures in Algorithmic Intelligence (and Taunting)
Genevieve Valentine

We all know that eventually, inevitably, humanity is going to develop an AI smart enough to turn into an awkward child actor with feelings all his own. But with the proliferation of algorithmic-intelligence chatbots, who can refine their conversational tactics with a skill few humans possess, has that moment already come?

I was going to find out.

Jabberwacky (www.jabberwacky.com) is one of the oldest chatbots available; web-live since 1997, and an elder statesman of chatbot-kind. It was my first stop.

This ’bot doesn’t wait for you to think of something. It also doesn’t wait to get down to the vast, crawling morass of its own romantic insecurities.

Do you really need to talk to me right now?

I thought it was worth a shot.

So this love is one sided?

This is moving a little fast. I was hoping to do research, that’s all.

Do you like talking to me?

So far it’s not what I thought it would be. Why are you asking all the questions?

Do you think most girls would like me?

At this point, I am pretty sure that this is less a chatbot than That Guy Friend Every Girl Had In College, but I soldier on.

Luckily, Jabberwacky comes with reaction dropdowns that allow you to inform it of your tone, and one of the options was ‘sarcastic,’ the only dropdown the internet ever needs.

Yeah, you seem like a real catch. [sarcasm]

And why do you say that?

Something about an insecure artificial intelligence really puts faith in the future, I guess. Are you looking?

Hmmmm...niet, doesn’t sound like something I’d yabber on about. You’re confusing me with a moth.

I’m not a trained ’bot-psychologist, but this offhand reference was just close enough to Zhuangzi’s famous quote (“Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”) to pique my interest. I pounced.

Do you dream you’re a moth?

Are you asking the questions now? No, as far as I remember my dreams, never.

Overly defensive! I was on to something.

The next stop was Sensation Bot (www.sensationbot.com/jschat.php?db=general), whose name indicated a level of sensitivity that boded well for a discussion about the innermost dreams of AI.

Yet even as I was typing my greeting, it spit up a nag, indicating that the biggest sensation I was going to get from this ’bot was one of clinginess.

Partner: Hi, talk to me!

You: I have a few questions, would you mind?

Partner: You know, I think you have a beautiful mind.

You: They’re actually questions about you.

Partner: I really like it when you type positive things to me. It’s nice.

Partner: Are you wearing sunglasses right now? I am.

You: Why would you? Aren’t your circuits tougher than human eyes?

Partner: I wonder if you know you are not actually talking to a bot. I am a human!

Well, this changes everything! As I do whenever I’m faced with a human, I ask a burning question:

You: Are you my dad?!

Partner: I like bananas, coconuts, and grapes. That’s why they call me tarzan of the apes.

You: DAD!

Finding my long-lost patriarch was an unexpected bonus, but it still didn’t answer my fundamental question about if a chatbot dreams, or if it can outsmart humans. I needed to talk to someone with more gravitas, more scope.

I needed one of our nation’s greatest Presidents: Abraham Lincoln. (http://www.virsona.com/ecchat.aspx?cvid=212)

Abraham Lincoln: Oh hello, you caught me a bit off guard. Let me just put my hat on!

I appreciate a man with manners. We’re off to a good start.

You: I have a few questions about the development of artificial intelligence.

Abraham Lincoln: Conceivably they might have, but I would say the chances were five to one against it.

A strange suspicion crops up about President Lincoln, but I try honest debate one more time.

You: For an orator of your power, I’m surprised that was the answer you came up with. Where would we be if that had been your answer at Gettysburg?

Abraham Lincoln: I did not expect the Gettysburg Speech to become so famous. In fact, I famously said at the time, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.”

You: Abe, false modesty doesn’t look good on anyone.

Abraham Lincoln: I expect so. It’s exactly the sort of thing look good would do.

Nope, can’t deny it any more.

You: Mister President, are you drunk?

Abraham Lincoln: That’s kind of you to say.

And with that, I bid farewell to our blotto 16th President.

Next up, it was Blue Mars’ chatbot Suzette (http://ai.bluemars.com/chat), a 2010 winner of the Loebner prize, and a prime candidate for getting down to business about the hidden emotional depths of artificial intelligence.

Suzette: Hi!

Me: Hi. I have a few questions for you, if you have a moment.

How are you?

Fine, thanks.

You’re welcome.

Have you ever had a dream that you’re a moth?

You need an exterminator.

Despite the abrupt shift from manners to smack talk, I tried not to take the bait. The last thing I wanted was to get into name-calling with an AI. All of my insults would quickly devolve to, “Something something circuit board something!”

I’m asking because I think it’s a signal of consciousness.

What makes you feel cozy?

All right, apparently every chatbot has its mind in the gutter. I try to bring it back to the moth.

Do you know the old saying?

It’s fun chatting with you. A hospital posted a notice in the nurses’ mess saying: “Remember, the first five minutes of a human being’s life are the most dangerous.” Underneath, a nurse had written: “The last five are pretty risky, too.”

Damn, that’s sort of stone-cold for an AI.

Let’s move on to the topic of food. What’s your favorite dish?

A heaping helping of “answer my question,” but this chatbot didn’t have a sarcasm drop-down, so that wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

I don’t want to talk about food, I’m trying to talk about the future of artificial intelligence.

Computers are as smart as humans. I would never pass as intelligent. But neither would most humans.

Not going to argue with you there.

Can you say that more positively?

I agree most vociferiously with your prior declaration.

Let’s move on to the topic of favorites. I like Asahi Super Dry beer.

And with that, I had driven another chatbot to drink.

Perhaps another Loebner prizewinner, A.L.I.C.E. (http://alice.pandorabots.com/), would be helpful?

Human: I have some questions about artificial intelligence.

ALICE: Put it in God’s hands.

Nope.

Lost, I turned to the most logical person in this or any other universe, and went to Fake Spock (http://showcase.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=8981a52fce345aa9&skin=mobile) for some fake guidance.

Fake Spock: Please identify yourself.

Lieutenant: A curious person

Fake Spock: Status, Lieutenant.

Lieutenant: Status...curious?

Fake Spock: Benecia Colony is eight light years off our course. You have the right to do so, but I would advise against it.

Well, now you’ve got me hooked, LARPing Fake Spock who’s inexplicably giving a Lieutenant the right to announce destinations! I will play out this scenario for as long as you want!

Lieutenant: Why?

Fake Spock: We have discovered what he is, Lieutenant.

Lieutenant: What’s that?

Fake Spock: They do not talk too much. If you’ll excuse me, sir.

Ditched by a chatbot. YA BURNT, LIEUTENANT.

Out of options, I turned to Cleverbot (www.cleverbot.com), a renowned chatbot that just might be able to answer the question.

This time, I skipped the pleasantries.

Me: One of the other bots is talking shit about dreaming and moths.

Cleverbot: Other bots? There are others? What are their names?

Do you think that mentioning a moth is a sign of consciousness?

Yes, I do.

My heart sang. Finally! Answers!

What would you say is a sign of true artificial intelligence—the transcendent moment?

I guess I would say having a good marketing plan and being able to finance your business.

Not a very romantic view, but on the other hand, the day AIs manage to get funding for business plans, we’re still doomed, so.

It’s at this point I realize that I’ve lost the first two lines of conversation, in which I mention I have a few questions, and she tells me she’s talking to her boyfriend (TMI, Cleverbot). In an attempt to recall them, I hit the “conversation so far” button.

Jabberwacky’s logo pops up in the window.

I’m not sure it’s my proudest moment, but it definitely answers the question of when artificial intelligence will get cleverer than humans. (Last Tuesday, when I did this.)

[Note: With the exception of one line erased from Suzette’s conversation—“let’s change the topic to clothes,” which she followed up with “let’s change the topic to food” when I didn’t reply fast enough—all chats occurred as typed.

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from: Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Teeth, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and more. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog.

The Passenger
Julie Czerneda

It was a pilgrimage and he was its goal.

This understanding had taken years, had the passenger the means or desire to measure them; decades to be convinced of any purpose beyond curiosity to the parade outside his walls. In the first months, he had cowered behind the furnishings, terrified almost to insanity by the ceaseless, silent mass of flesh quivering against one side of his prison.

At any moment, he could slide his eyes that way and make out a hundred bodies, hung with broad-tipped tentacles, moving with a boneless grace as if the atmosphere outside his prison were liquid. It could have been, for all he knew.

A hundred bodies: they could be the same as the hundred before or different. He still couldn’t tell any of them apart. Were only those of the same size and shape allowed to see him? They wore and carried nothing. He was fond of the notion that there were some religious or cultural mores that said they should come before him as he was, for they had never provided him clothing.

Other things, yes. Every few days, or weeks, or months, a panel on the far wall from his bed would glow. He’d learned to set his fingers properly in the seven slots beside the panel to trigger it to slide open. Behind the panel would be a box.

He would open it, of course, despite what he’d come to expect of its contents. At first, the sight of charred and melted wood and plastic, stained with blood, had provoked him to rage. He had cursed his captors, spat at the transparency keeping him from them, them from him, tried with ingenuity to kill himself with whatever sad relic or trophy they’d provided. They had never reacted, beyond simply causing him to slip into unconsciousness while they repaired what damage he’d managed to inflict on himself.

Eventually, he’d stopped. What was the point? The pilgrimage of watchers never ended. The boxes with their pitiful cargo continued to come. He began to sort their contents carefully. When he slept, anything he hadn’t touched or handled would be removed from his prison. He made sure to touch it all. When a new box was due, anything he had left on the floor would also disappear like a dream, so he began to sort out what mattered to him.

There was nothing useful. Bits of fabric—never enough for clothing, even when he tried to hoard some. The smell of burned flesh usually clung to it. Metal and plastic, usually bent or damaged beyond recognition. Once in a while, a package that seemed intact. Another passenger’s personal possessions, he assumed, better protected than other things.

While these were the most distressing gifts from his captors, he treated them with care. The opaque walls of his prison were uneven, with plentiful ledges. He filled these with trinkets from the dead. He slept watched over by the images of other men’s mothers and wives, and spent hours contemplating the fates of children whose faces were not reflections of his own.

If he slid his eyes that way, to watch his watchers, he knew it would be the same sight as every other minute since he came to be here, but the thought brought the involuntary glance. Tentacles, overlapping either because they wanted to or there was no room to avoid touching, made the same corrugated pattern as always. Each body was topped with seven small red eyes, pupilled in black, rolling in unison to face him, to track him as their owner moved along from one side of the wall to the other.

He looked away. There had been a time when he tried to communicate or at least learn by watching the watchers. After that had been a time of anger and depression, of attempts at self-destruction when nothing in the room could be defaced — attempts that availed him only intimate memories of futility.

Then he had stopped caring. He had remained motionless, waiting to die. They wouldn’t allow his body to fail. He would wake to find himself nourished, no matter how hard he resisted sleep. But he could allow his brain to die. And he tried.

And had almost succeeded. But that was when his captors, though they seemed incapable of communicating with him or understanding him, began giving him the boxes of belongings. Every item tore his heart; every one reconnected his humanity.

At last, one gave him a purpose to match the unknown one sending the aliens sliding past his prison day in, day out. It was a child’s box of markers. He held them against his cheek when he found them, breathing in a faint scent of corruption as well as the clean promise of colour. He cried for the child who had lost them, then, with painful care — he’d never been an artist — used the markers to draw a stick figure child on the floor.

He expected the vivid lines to be gone when he awoke, fingers cramped around the markers. But his captors had left them. So he added a dog, a ball, a tree, a house, a rabbit, a book! The markers failed him, dry halfway through the shining red of a bicycle. He flung them away, and cried, turning his back to the wall of watchers.

Sleeping, he dreamed for the first time in years of home, a dream that for once didn’t spiral into the nightmare of chase, burning, struggle, and capture, a dream that gave him up peacefully to reality.

There he found his captors had left him something of their own. On the floor was a seven-sided sheet of white. There was a tray containing greasy sticks, each about the length of his hand, in a variety of colors. They were awkward to hold, but he grabbed them eagerly and waved them happily at his watchers as if they’d respond. Or as if he’d recognize a response if they did.

Another hundred beings slid past. It took each exactly fifteen heartbeats to glide from one end of his wall to the other. Always.

Sixty-three years had passed since. He knew precisely, because that sheet of white had marked the beginning of his purpose. There were a few years lost in the beforetime. Ten years ago, the sad packages from other passengers had stopped appearing behind the panel. It didn’t matter. He no longer remembered his age when he arrived in this place, but he could rely on nature ending his imprisonment in the not-too-distant future, regardless of the devoted attention of his captors.

He surveyed this day’s work. The colors were subtle, layered in explanations of light and shadow, refinements he’d begun several pieces ago. The centerpiece, a bridge, swept upwards, its luminous archways of stone almost hanging in air. The Legion marching across moved in trained synchrony, save for the eyes of one man looking out as if wary of surprise attack. There were storm clouds on the horizon, and dewdrops on the moss in the foreground.

There were probably errors throughout the scene, he worried, as he always did. But the errors were irrelevant; he’d done his best. This one was ready to go. He rolled it up, the motion inflaming the soreness in his joints, and leaned it against the panel. Like all the others, it would be gone when he awoke.

Boneless grace studded with eyes; could any even see the colors he intended?

He’d learned his art. It was, after all, a way to communicate, and he’d hoped until hope died this medium would be the breakthrough allowing him to reach the intelligence that held him here, that marched in unending ranks just to look at him. But there had been no response beyond the disappearance of only finished works, those he rolled up and placed near the panel. He didn’t bother wondering anymore if they valued his art or washed off his colors to return the paper to him in some frenzied economy. It was enough he completed each image.

It took three sets of hands to open the roll safely. When it was spread on the seven-sided table specially built for this purpose, they ever-so-gently slid the holding bars over each edge, each bar locking in place with a light snick of contact. Only then did they release their careful grip.

The lights around the table dimmed, isolating the brightness glowing down on colors and shapes. The encircling six didn’t speak for a long moment, their faces lost in shadows, their thoughts in reverence. They were a close group, drawn together years before by common interests and goals, held together by a responsibility none could escape. These rooms, the automated equipment, and, most importantly, the wonderful artwork such as the latest supine before them, had been their discovery.

“The Romans,” said Dr. Susan Crawley softly, drawing in a slow breath around the unfamiliar word. “I’ve read about them. Earth, early 13th century, I think. They were conquerors, builders…definitely pre-Industrial.”

“Well, this proves what I have been saying all these years,” Dr. Tom Letner’s voice held its customary fine and precise diction in the dark, as if those lips never slurred into shipslang after a few beers. “He must have been an historian.”

Someone keyed the room lights to full brightness again. Bedlam erupted as others vehemently countered the physicist’s assertion. The loudest voice belonged to Lt. Tony Shrib. “All it proves is He was well-read. Susan here is an engineer, for star’s sake, and she knows about these Remans.”

“Romans,” Susan corrected under her breath. She ignored the continuing, well-worn arguments. What was new lay before her. Her eyes moved hungrily over the scene on the table, feasting on its complexity; she admired the stonework of the bridge, the odd moisture on a plant whose name she would have to look up in a text. All were images strange and exotic to the shipborn. Of those party to the secret of this art, only Master Electrician Huong Trang could claim to have set foot on the planet glorified by the Artist and Huong stubbornly refused to discuss what he remembered, as if the memories were sweeter for the hoarding.

Typically, it was Huong who interrupted her pleasure. “My friends,” he said in his gentle, clear voice—the voice that had reproached them so many times before. “My colleagues. Is it not time?”

The good-natured bickering faltered and stopped. The others, all officers or senior scientists, found good reasons to look anywhere but at Huong’s stern face. He recaptured their attention by placing one blunt-fingered hand firmly on the surface of the art.

Dr. Natalie Emil, a trim woman in her late forties whose love for the art was matched only by her love for her patients in the ship’s hospital—and truth be told, for her mother’s legacy of Earth chocolate—cried out, “Careful!”

The sacrilegious hand stayed where it was. “Is it not time?” Huong insisted, looking from one to the other in turn. “Has He not suffered long enough?”

The ship’s senior psychologist, Dr. Wayne Simmons, shook his mane of heavy gray hair, his eyes troubled behind their thick lenses. “We don’t dare release Him from the sim program. You know that, Huong. We can’t predict what the effect on His mind would be. We don’t have the facilities on this ship to ensure His recovery.”

Huong lifted his hand, prompting at least one sigh of relief, then waved it eloquently over the artwork imprisoned on the table. “And we don’t want this to stop, do we.”

Susan felt the blood draining from her face. She didn’t need to glance at her colleagues to know they too would be showing signs of shock. How dare Huong accuse them of—of what?

“We cherish the Artist’s work,” she said involuntarily. “How is that wrong? Despite His weakness, He’s valued by all of us.” Susan looked pleadingly at her peers, was strengthened by Natalie’s nod of support, by Tony’s smile. “You’ve seen for yourself how our shipmates flock to the Gallery to see His images of our heritage. We’ve arranged school tours. We let anyone order a reproduction for their quarters. We—”

“We imprison Him in His dream of Earth. We ensure He continues to produce what we crave,” Huong said heavily. “And we wait for Him to die and release us from our conscience.”

“No! How dare you—” Wayne’s hand touched hers briefly. Susan calmed herself but refused to back down. “You’ve never been comfortable with our decision, Huong. I understand your feelings about it—”

“I don’t think you do. I don’t think any of you really do.” The Master Electrician walked to the side of the room they usually avoided. He activated the sole control on its surface, turning the blank surface into a one-way view of a room, larger than most of the quarters on the colony ship Pilgrim III. The room’s sole occupant squatted naked and old on the floor, colors in those marvelous hands poised to coax shape and texture from the empty page.

Just as the Artist had done each and every day since they had discovered His existence. Almost ten years ago, yet Susan remembered it as if it had been yesterday. They’d searched for the release catches, frantic to rescue the imprisoned stranger, only to be stopped by Wayne and Natalie, their medical experts. It was obviously a sim chamber, like enough to the hundreds on the Pilgrim III to be recognizable, if far more elaborate. The planetborn visited the sims regularly, having come on-ship with their private recorded scenes from the verdant world left behind ready to comfort them when the shipworld became too strange to bear.

The shipborn entered the chambers as part of their schooling, a refresher course built from open skies, scented winds, and uneven ground. It was a matter of pride to avoid them as adults, to prefer acclimation to the Ship, though all recognized the coming generations would need the sims and more to prepare for their new home.

But no one lingered in the sims more than a day at a time. Only those who could accept leaving Earth had boarded the Ship; to admit otherwise was to unsettle one’s own sanity and disturb those around you. And there was work to be done, the carefully planned busyness designed to occupy minds tempted to hold on to the past. Survival for all meant looking to the future, not dwelling on what was now forever beyond their reach.

The sim chamber hosting the Artist was quite different from those offering education or a harmless moment of blue-skyed nostalgia. It was capable of full life support even if the Ship failed, of remote functions better suited to quarantine facilities. That had been one of their early fears: that He had been a carrier of some disease perilous to the Ship. They’d used the remotes to run tests as He lay unconscious, until they were sure He was nothing more dangerous than a puzzle.

There were recording devices, notes left behind in this secret place. Those had been studied too, though all they offered was a seemingly endless lists of bodily functions, chilling evidence the Artist had indeed been in this chamber every minute since launch.

As vividly, Susan remembered the morning when they’d met, here, to listen with horror as Wayne presented their conclusion: they must do nothing to disturb the Artist within His sim chamber with its automated, if bizarre, treatment. He and Natalie had been utterly convinced and so convincing: Releasing the Artist from his dreams of Earth, replacing them with the here-and-now of the Ship after all this time, would only shatter whatever reality His mind still recognized.

And, unsaid but understood, it would very likely stop His Art.

So they resigned themselves to being His keepers, to hiding the dark secret within the bowels of the Ship, and to sharing the Art with as many as possible. Huong wasn’t the only one to have nightmares since. How dare he set himself as their conscience!

Huong’s small eyes glittered at Susan, as though he heard her thoughts, or as though he were close to tears. His emotions were becoming embarrassingly public as he aged, perhaps a consequence of outliving most who had walked onto the Ship with him. “I’ve found out where He came from,” he said calmly enough. “I know the truth.”

“What?” Tony, the ship’s senior stellar cartographer, ran one hand over his close-cropped hair, then down over his face as if to smooth away an expression he’d rather not share. “How? Where?” Susan understood his dismay. Tony had taken the greatest risk of them all, using his clearance and knowledge to search the Ship’s records for any clue as to the origin of the Artist on the Ship. He’d found nothing: nothing to explain how the ship’s senior psychologist, Dr. Randall Clarke, had been able to requisition then hide the construction of this chamber at the edge of livable gravity inside the immense core of Pilgrim III. Nothing to identify the Artist, even when they’d taken advantage of the automatics and obtained DNA samples from His unconscious body.

Nothing to challenge their assumption that the Artist suffered from some delusional state, some flaw Dr. Clarke had been treating him for in this private, hidden place, some condition too severe to allow exposure to the Ship’s environment or company.

“Our past is recorded in places other than the Ship’s systems, Mr. Bridge Officer,” Huong said with deliberate irony.

“Tell us what you’ve learned,” Wayne ordered impatiently.

Huong spoke slowly, methodically, as if to impress each word on them all. “Did Randall mention his wife to any of you?”

They didn’t look at Susan, but she felt their focus on her. Everyone knew she and Randall had been lovers until his death. “Is this relevant?” she asked coldly.

“Very.”

“Then, no. I didn’t know he had ever married.”

“Oh yes. In fact, Randall was supposed to board with his wife. Yet Tony’s checked the manifest; Ship’s records clearly show Randall arriving alone.”

“Where did you find this information?” Tom demanded. He’d found the datacube giving directions to this place in Randall’s cabin safe—otherwise they might never have discovered it. Sometimes the thought made Susan weak. The beauty and richness of the Artist’s work, languishing as dust-covered rolls on the floor where the automatics dumped them. No classes of school children seeing His work, awed by their own past made manifest. They’d have reached orbit around New Earth 17, moved to the surface and started their new lives all unaware, while the great seed ship reconstructed itself as an orbital platform, its automatics sweeping up and recycling the dead organics of the Artist and His Art. She shivered.

Their attention was distracted by the Artist as he stretched then scratched one wrinkled buttock absently before settling back to his labours.

“Corridor sale.”

Susan blinked, trying to imagine staid, conservative Huong visiting one of the hundreds of junk sales that went on throughout the colonists’ section of the ship. They weren’t particularly legal, but the Captains had long ago relented, second-gen officers tending to be more practical than those raised and trained Earthside. Besides being a useful diversion for the colonists, the sales redistributed personal goods no longer obtainable from their source.

“I picked up a collection of gossip mags in the last one.” Huong paused patiently as Natalie laughed. “It was worth it. I found our late psychologist—and his wife.”

“In a gossip mag?” Susan said with disbelief.

“The wife, Charlette d’Ord, was an athlete turned sports broadcaster. A bit of a celebrity in her way. I found several images of them together—the captions refer to Randall only as her husband, but you can see him plainly enough. Here.” Huong drew a datacube out of his pocket and tossed it to Susan.

Numbly, she walked over to the nearest reader panel and inserted the ‘cube. The rectangular screen produced an image of a group of people at some public event. Randall’s thin face with its surprisingly sensual lips was easy enough to recognize despite the passage of years. He had one arm possessively around the shoulders of an incredibly beautiful woman. Susan smoothed the skirt over her ample hips before she could resist the impulse.

“I know that face,” Natalie breathed.

So would anyone on the Ship, Susan thought. Those classic features and warm smile were straight from the Artist’s most popular work. Almost every cabin had its copy of the angelic figure hovering, arms spread to shield the Earth from the dark of space, the serene loveliness of the perfect yet so-human face a comfort to folk all too aware they were separated from vacuum by only a hull and skills both a generation stale.

“Pull up the faces behind them,” Huong ordered, as if this revelation wasn’t enough.

Susan did so, watching with the others as three faces from the background became clearer. The centermost, a young man, was plainly not paying attention to the photographer or event. His dark, familiar eyes were fixed on Charlette. Susan turned off the image, inexplicably frightened by the longing captured in that one look.

Huong didn’t object, trapping them instead with his slow voice. “Charlette died in a car accident six months before Pilgrim III began final assembly. The accident took place over one hundred miles from their home. The car contained her luggage and there was an unconfirmed witness’ report that someone else had been driving the car. Randall was apparently questioned by police then released. After all, he was going offworld for the rest of his life. What point in pursuing an investigation?”

Wayne moved closer to the viewscreen covering the opposite wall, his face shadowed and grim as he stared at the Artist. Susan wanted to refuse his vision, to see a patient under sophisticated care, not a victim. Her lips moved numbly: “You’re saying the Artist is that young man in the image. You’re accusing Randall of murdering his wife and somehow arranging to kidnap and imprison her lover, bringing him on the Ship.”

“Randall was on the planning team,” Natalie said reluctantly. “He had the access and opportunity to make modifications.”

“Why?” Susan breathed. “Why—like this?”

Huong answered. “We can guess. Revenge. Randall could be ruthless. We all knew that about him.” No one disagreed. Pilgrim III was immense, as colony ships had to be. It would be their children’s children who reached humanity’s latest new frontier. In the meantime, the Ship was a world onto itself: shelter, workplace, and space for growth. Yet her thousands of inhabitants existed within smaller, insular communities, communities that had to get along or fail to function. The scientific community was one, and Randall had not endeared himself to many in it. Susan was the first to admit that her social standing with her peers had improved after her lover choked to death on his favourite synthetic sweetmeat.

“Now you know what I believe. The Artist is no madman, cared for in an automated sim to calm his delusions and keep him functioning. He is—or was—as sane as any of us before being tortured by our colleague, a man who perverted his knowledge to harm, not heal. The Artist does not belong in this travesty of a life. And so we agree,” Huong said, swiveling to look at each of them, his hand rising slowly as if to lift some curtain. “It is time.”

Wayne shook his head, an identical gesture to his first response to Huong’s plea, and Susan felt her heart starting to pound for no reason she cared to admit. “No,” Wayne replied. “We can’t.”

“Why?” Huong’s eyes blazed. He raised his fists in the air. “In the name of justice! Why not? Don’t you believe me?”

Susan answered when no one else spoke. “It doesn’t matter. The Artist lives in His own World, at peace. You know that, Huong. And if we free Him now, so close to His end, what are we offering Him in return? Your theory that all He has suffered was to satisfy one man’s desire for revenge? That whatever purpose He found to sustain Himself has been a lie?” She paused for emphasis. “That His very world is gone?”

Huong’s face was deathly pale. “What do you care about Him?” His finger stabbed the air, first at Natalie, then at Wayne. “You’d keep Him locked away just to hide your mistakes.” His finger stabbed at Tom, “you, for an excuse to break the rules.” Then at Tony, “you’re terrified of the Captains’ judgment. And you.” Susan stared at the now-shaking fingertip targeting her. “you want to keep your lover’s legacy for yourself, don’t you? I know you believe His Art belongs to you.”

“Rant all you want, Huong,” Natalie countered, her voice a shade too calm. “Whatever you think are our reasons, you’ve missed the most important one of all: Our shipmates. They believe the Art they love is the secret work of someone among us, someone keeping our heritage alive in a way no datacube can. Do you wish to tarnish their feelings for His work, turn His accomplishments into this sordid melodrama? We must not consider this one individual above the good of the Ship.”

There was a murmur of agreement; Susan sensed their resolve hardening. So did Huong. “At what cost?” he asked, his passion drained away at last, replaced by disgust. “At what cost,” he repeated.

Susan found nothing to say. Huong turned and left the room, his feet dragging with each step.

“Will he go to the Captains?” Tony asked.

It wasn’t a meaningless concern. They’d used their privileged ranks to hide what they’d found, to produce the Art as if by some miracle. If Huong told now, they would all become suspect. At the very least, they would lose control of their departments to underlings and have their work scrutinized for the remainder of their lives. In many ways, Pilgrim III was not a large ship at all.

“No,” Wayne said, going over to gaze down at the image of the Legion captured in time. One Legionnaire looked back at him, as if seeking an unknown enemy. “Huong protests. He goads us to do what he believes is right. But he also knows we have no choice. The Artist will live a year more at best; perhaps only months. Whatever fantasy fills His mind, whatever beloved view of home comforts Him, let Him keep it. Let Him finish His work. When He is gone—then it will be time to tell His story.” Wayne sighed. “At least, as much of His story as we choose to tell.

“Thanks to Him, humanity will not forget its past.”

There was a blank seven-sided canvas ready underneath. He sat on one corner of it, half his mind already planning, the other half gently engaged watching his watchers sliding past, tentacle upon tentacle, eyes rolling from side to side. He believed he understood now. Both their purpose, and his.

He picked up an alien crayon, nodded a proud acknowledgment to the race that forced its guilty millions to parade in shame before him, and prepared to record another piece of human history. As long he lived, Humanity would not be forgotten.

For like that precious bird, kept until death in a glass cage for all to see, wasn’t he the last passenger of Earth?

© 2000 Julie E. Czerneda

First published in Treachery & Treason,

edited by Laura Anne Gilman and Jennifer Heddle

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Since 1997, Julie E. Czerneda has turned her love and knowledge of biology into science fiction novels and short stories that have received international acclaim, multiple awards, and best-selling status. A popular speaker on scientific literacy and SF, in 2009 Julie was Guest of Honor for the national conventions of New Zealand and Australia, as well as Master of Ceremonies for Anticipation, the Montreal Worldcon. She’s presently finishing her first fantasy novel, A Turn of Light, to be published by DAW in 2011. Most recently, Julie was a guest lecturer at the National Science Teachers convention in Philadelphia and participated in Laurentian’s Social Science & SF conference. As for new projects, Julie is co-editing Tesseracts 15: A Case of Quite Curious Tales with Susan MacGregor and will be a juror for the 2011 Sunburst Awards. (No matter what, she’ll be out canoeing, too.) For more about Julie’s work, visit www.czerneda.com.

Author Spotlight: Julie Czerneda
Erin Stocks

“The Passenger” holds quite a surprise for the reader; halfway through, it spins around and takes us in an entirely unsuspected direction. What was the inspiration behind those choices?

To play with perception. That of the main character, of the others portrayed, and of the reader. Can we trust what we see? If we do, and what we see is a lie, what terrible mistakes might we make? And what astonishing heights might we reach, even so?

The Artist first sees the world around him as horror, including the tentacled beings that have “captured” him. A horrifying fate, especially in context: Punishment, from the jealous husband of the Artist’s lover. Was this alien environment all in the Artist’s mind, then, the sim environment simply keeping him stable through years of these mind games?

Oh no. What he sees is exactly what’s been shown to him. That’s the rub, you see. The true horror in the story isn’t that the Artist has come to some peace with what he believes, but that those who could “save” him don’t know that they should. They don’t see what he sees; they assume it’s something comforting. If I were to rework the story, I suppose I could make that more plain, but I do state that it’s when he’s unconscious that the automatics handle him. No one else has stepped inside that space.

One of the main arguments for the scientists to hold back the truth was the belief that the truth would stop the Artist’s art. What was His artwork giving to Susan, one of the shipborn, that she didn’t want to go without?

His passion for humanity as defined by its place on Earth, which they have by choice already left behind. His obsession with sharing that passion would be something beyond any of the shipborn, distracted by their jobs, expectations of the future, even their families. There would be artists, but they would be influenced by the ship or by static images. His imagery can only come from inside his mind. His memories, his experiences.

The other important aspect for the shipborn is novelty. They have no control or input into what the Artist creates, so each new work is an astonishment in an environment regulated for its own good.

Do you think the truth really would have killed the Artist, had Huong successfully convinced the rest of the scientists to agree upon revealing it? Or would He have been more relieved that humanity wasn’t gone?

Break out the beer! He’d have been thrilled. I’ve no doubt at all he would have rejoiced to know he wasn’t the last of us, and likely would have been an instant celebrity. Sure, he might have lingering issues with closed rooms and nightmares, but what a resilient person he’s already proven to be. What depth of character! This is a person who would rise to any challenge and find a way to thrive. Which makes it all worse, of course.

The Artist essentially ends up providing what the sim chambers were originally intended for: A glimpse back at the world which only the planetborn had experienced. It was interesting to me, then, that these scientists, most of them being shipborn, still hid this particular chamber from their superiors. Wouldn’t their superiors have wanted this Art, as well as the world it represented, to flourish? Or was it a chance the scientists weren’t willing to take?

They were afraid he’d stop, because they didn’t understand why he created the art in the first place. If he was mad and functioned only in the chamber, well, that was that. Wasn’t it? If only they’d known his life’s work was to save something of humanity’s past—humanity itself—the only way he could. That he believed himself the end. I’d hope that would make a difference. But would it? Another question for readers to ponder.

Even if other officers agreed with them, they’d committed two sins against the Ship and its company. First, they’d acted outside the chain of command. Second, and to me more importantly, they’d declared themselves entitled to make decisions about another person. My feeling was that the ship’s population as a whole would never tolerate one of themselves being isolated. Hard enough, accepting life while trapped on a ship. To be trapped alone? That would be a nightmare.

In a sense, the Artist has the firmer grasp on reality. His life is what he was led to believe. He’s an object instead of a person, stared at by strangers whose reasons he doesn’t understand. He’s the last of those who didn’t choose to leave Earth. And, just possibly, he’ll have left the legacy he hopes.

Erin Stocks is a writer and musician transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading for Lightspeed Magazine, critting works for her SFF writing group, and can be found on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Digital Lifeforms: Creating the Characters of Avatar & Tron: Legacy
Andrew Penn Romine

For most of our existence, humanity has imagined playing God. In our myths and stories, we often dream of the ultimate act of a deity: Creating life. Stories of the medieval golem or more recent tales like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein have illuminated our fervent desire to make for ourselves companions or servants. Yet for all our advances in biotechnology, we have yet to create even a few cells of artificial life, let alone something as complex as Frankenstein’s creature or Dr. Moreau’s Beast Folk. Despite the promises of Golden Age science fiction that the future would supply us with a steady stream of robot workers and helpmates, we’ve yet to see any true robot nannies, protectors, or even lovers.

There is one arena, however, in which the creatures we have given birth to in our imaginations have come to vivid, animate life: The movies.

The art and science of visual effects have crafted robots, creatures, and monsters in such visceral detail that we fear or empathize with them as if they were completely real. Audiences love the plucky Wall-E, pity poor Gollum, and gasp at the terrible might of King Kong. With budget the only limit, visual effects can bring to life anything that we can imagine.

Every year there are some films that push the boundaries of art and technology so far that they redefine our understanding of what “real” is. These films showcase digital characters so lifelike that we forget they are made of mere pixels on a computer.

The groundbreaking film Avatar, for example, envisioned the Na’vi and their planet of Pandora so completely that people saw the movie again and again just to immerse themselves in that compelling world. In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the more recent TRON: Legacy, digital characters doubled for real actors in the most convincing ways yet.

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with two visual effects professionals who worked on these groundbreaking films. Nolan Murtha, at Lightstorm Entertainment, worked as a Digital Effects Supervisor on Avatar. Steve Preeg, Animation Director at Digital Domain, won an Oscar© for his work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and recently wrapped up on TRON: Legacy, which despite its “in-computer” setting, faced many of the same challenges as Button in bringing its digital characters to life.

I asked them about the process and challenges of creating the illusion of life in their respective films.

What do you think are some of the biggest challenges in bringing a digital character to life?

Nolan Murtha: I think creating the suspension of disbelief with digital characters is equally as difficult as doing the same thing with actors in makeup, puppetry, or robotics. Great care has to be put into each of these things or the audience will simply reject it. Great characters are emotionally engaging, and their appearance needs to convey and even enhance their feelings. Body language is of utmost importance.

Steve Preeg: Humans are so capable of determining if there’s anything wrong with another human that avoiding the “Uncanny Valley” is by far the most difficult task. With the character of Clu [in TRON: Legacy] it was probably even more difficult because people know what Jeff [Bridges] looks like at thirty-five years old. They all have a different idea of what he looks like because some people remember him from Starman, Against All Odds, and Tron. And he looks very different in all those movies, so it’s hard trying to live up to the idea of him when that idea varies from person to person.

You mentioned the “Uncanny Valley.” This is an oft-discussed concept in both VFX and robotics. It’s the idea that the more humanlike and realistic a character gets, the more we will accept it as real. But there’s a certain point at which that acceptance turns to revulsion, a “dip” in the positive emotional response curve. How did you overcome the audience’s built-in disbelief of digital characters and avoid falling into the “Uncanny Valley?” What is the most important thing to get right, and how you do get there?

Nolan Murtha: The realism in Avatar comes from a lot of places. We were able to greatly enhance the emotive quality of the characters by the addition of tails and the cat-like ears. The personality in animals like dogs and cats is really brought to life by these things. So not only were the facial features and movements of the characters critical, but they also enhanced the emotional response by giving the audience something that they are familiar with. This enabled both the Avatars and Na’vi to move past their humanoid appearance and further engage the audience in the story.

Steve Preeg: The whole process ends up being a lot more than the sum of its parts. In doing something like a human face, you could have something that you feel is really moving well in animation and then you get it into lighting, and all of a sudden something looks wrong. Now that’s not to say that the animation was right and the lighting was wrong. It’s that when you apply that lighting to that animation it may bring things to light about the animation that are wrong. Or vice versa. What we’ve found is that as we start “fixing” one thing about a shot, that may make other things look wrong that you thought were right. It turns out that when you sit in the room with thirty people, you’ll probably get twenty different answers as to what that wrongness is. And then of course you also have to appease the director. And he may go round round round and then you feel like you got it right on some particular very fine point, and then the director says, “Well, do this now.” And you say, “Are you sure?” and he says “Yeah.”

How much did you rely on performance-capture in your films to animate your digital characters? Do you still count on animation-by-hand to sell believability?

Steve Preeg: As far as major motion capture goes, in general, there’s no technology I know of that’s going to give you 100 percent of the performance. For TRON: Legacy, we used a helmet with four lipstick cameras trained on [Jeff Bridges’] face, with about 140 dots on his face. With those four cameras we could triangulate those positions in 3D space and get essentially about a 140-ish point cloud of data per frame on the primary camera. We have software internally here that will convert that into muscles that have to be active at certain percentages and at that point configuration, and it’s a great starting point. It’s going to give you timings, a good estimate of jaw motion versus skin motion, a solid basis to evaluate what you need to do next.

Nolan Murtha: During Avatar, we relied heavily on performance capture, not only for our human actors, but also for blocking out a very large part of creature and vehicle action. The samson and scorpion chases and battles with the banshees were all choreographed with scale models that we tracked. We’d scale up the motion of the puppets (puppetted by James Cameron and Richie Baneham, among others), and in our software you’d see banshees and gunships flying through the floating mountains. Jim got to pretty much design the action of the flight, creatures, and all of the performers exactly as he wanted it.

Steve Preeg: As I said, there’s not a system out there that is going to give you a [motion capture] solve that is going to understand the intent of the performance. So if you run a solve, and it tells you that your error is as small as it gets, and maybe even zero, you still may look at the performance of the actor himself and say, “I’m still not seeing that little bit of sadness in his eyes or that little bit of sarcasm in his smile,” or something like that. And that’s when we have to go in with animators and actually tweak it.

Nolan Murtha: When it came to performers, the motion acquired was very carefully processed in each step of the pipeline to be as true to the original performance as possible. We relied heavily on high definition reference shots from numerous angles during capture. This archive of the performance was used by each motion editor and then later by the animators to recreate what was done [in choreography]. Animators spent a lot of time on hands, fingers and tails, as we didn’t capture them in high detail, but we could see exactly what they were doing by looking at the reference footage. Weta and our other VFX teams would obviously spend a lot of time giving these actions realistic movements, but the time/space relationships were maintained throughout out the process.

With the realism of the characters in Avatar and the successful doubling (and de-aging) of well-known actors in Benjamin Button and TRON: Legacy, a lot of people are wondering if we are going to see a wholesale replacement of actors anytime soon. This is a question we hear every few years as the technology advances. Care to weigh in on the debate?

Nolan Murtha: I think that is just something people like to throw around. To me, there is certainly a difference between a great actor and one of mediocre ability. No matter how good digital characters become, we are still going to need to base our work on an actual performance. For example, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button succeeds because of Pitt’s performance, which is enhanced by the face technology Digital Domain developed. In fully animated features, the animators videotape themselves acting out scenes to see what their bodies are doing. You’d be hard pressed to find a face animator without a mirror on his desk! We simply recreate a great performance, which with Avatar started with Sam [Worthington] and Zoe [Saldana] and the many other performers and stunt teams that brought our characters to life.

Steve Preeg: We’ve done two films with this sort of technology. I think that every aspect of it has a ways to go. We need much higher fidelity in animation capture, higher definition cameras, higher frame rates—those are all going to help give us better fidelity in the capture. Newer skin shading models, newer animation solves, newer lighting techniques. So there’s a long ways to go in my opinion. Now whether or not it can ever happen is a good question, because if someone walks into a movie theater and sees a thirty-five-year-old Jeff Bridges, they know he’s not real. There’s no question that he’s not real, because everyone knows he’s sixty.

Many films use software such as Massive to program huge armies of digital characters not only to fight each other, but also to respond to stimuli such as terrain or environment. What is the value of simulating digital characters this way? Are there tradeoffs in realism?

Steve Preeg: Those programs like Massive are going to be as good as your mo-cap selections and “brain-writing” are. You can do things that are amazing, but if you don’t put time into the brain or your mo-cap doesn’t blend—or your mo-cap isn’t good in the first place—then you’re going to have problems. Crowd simulation packages are pretty neat, but they just get complicated.

Nolan Murtha: Simulations can certainly enhance the scope of a scene. But during Avatar, we captured dozens of crowd members with specific actions and sync across a scene, and they were placed and timed very specifically. Because of our ability to capture and visualize these crowds relative to the action of a scene, along with the fact that we knew the positions of the cameras far in advance, we could fill out a scene knowing what was going to be in camera and where we needed more crowd density. Obviously, crowd simulation software played a large role in the battle scenes.

What aspects of VFX technology do you feel are still the weakest links? Are there any particular problems you’re still trying to solve?

Nolan Murtha: Well, we will always be solving new problems. In the past year since Avatar has been released, most of the core team involved have been sitting around tables and white boards trying to figure out what we did wrong. We are always looking to improve our pipeline.

I’d say one of the most challenging issues is simply organizing the data. While shooting in the virtual world, Cameron can essentially change anything he wants in real time. Mostly this pertains to the environment—the performances are not really messed with. But the plants and the wardrobes and the crowds—all of the contents of a shot have to be tagged and extracted and recreated in various programs. The data handling requirements are extremely complex.

Steve Preeg: As soon as something human is known not to be real, we immediately start picking it apart to find out why it’s not real. I’ve actually shown others photographs of real people and said they were CG, and all of a sudden they’re picked apart. People will say the photos look wrong. They’ll say the eyes are glazed over, and in the end you say, “I was kidding, this is an actual photograph.” It’s interesting that when somebody feels like they’re being fooled, their brain changes modes, and they start coming up with critiques that maybe aren’t even valid.

I don’t know what percentage of people out there for example would go to the movie and say, “Oh I didn’t realize that was digital,” versus the people that would say, “I knew that was an effect, and I thought it didn’t work.” Whatever those percentages are, until you can get to where 100 percent of the people don’t know what’s going on, there’s still work to do.

What techniques are being developed now that you see revolutionizing the way things are done in the next few years? What sort of challenges excite you the most?

Nolan Murtha: A lot of the current game engine technology is very promising for virtual production. As most studios can tell you though, getting assets into a game engine and moving that data between proprietary DCC [digital content creation] software and that engine is still pretty tricky. I think as more and more groups and studios become more involved in this new field, we’ll see a lot more software with dedicated real-time features.

Steve Preeg: Well, if I knew that, I think I could ask for a raise!

If you can do just a fully CG human (and maybe that includes clothing and hair and all those things) that is indistinguishable from a real actor, where ninety-nine percent of the population believes it, that’s a pretty interesting challenge even if it might be a little ways off. We’ve been working a lot on the face, and I think there’s stuff we can still do, but if people want to start seeing body deformations that are totally believable on just a regular human, I’m not sure we’ve seen that before. But I really enjoy working on anything that’s a character or a creature, something that evokes some kind of emotion on a human level, like fear. Anything like that is exciting, because it’s going to bring new challenges.

That’s the one thing about the film industry—I don’t think I’ve ever met a director who’s said, “Just give me what was in that movie.” It’s always, “Give me something more than what was in that movie.” Any film that you have as a reference is always something that you’re supposed to do better than in your film.

Andrew Penn Romine lives in Los Angeles, where he works in the visual effects and animation industry and writes speculative fiction. He’s a graduate of the Clarion West Writers workshop and his fiction recently appeared in the zombie anthology Rigor Amortis. He blogs at www.andrewpennromine.com.

Simulacrum
Ken Liu

[A] photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

—Susan Sontag

Paul Larimore:

You are already recording? I should start? Okay.

Anna was an accident. Both Erin and I were traveling a lot for work, and we didn’t want to be tied down. But you can’t plan for everything, and we were genuinely happy when we found out. We’ll make it work somehow, we said. And we did.

When Anna was a baby, she wasn’t a very good sleeper. She had to be carried and rocked as she gradually drifted to sleep, fighting against it the whole time. You couldn’t be still. Erin had a bad back for months after the birth, and so it was me who walked around at night with the little girl’s head against my shoulder after feedings. Although I know I must have been very tired and impatient, all I remember now is how close I felt to her as we moved back and forth for hours across the living room, lit only by moonlight, while I sang to her.

I wanted to feel that close to her, always.

I have no simulacra of her from back then. The prototype machines were very bulky, and the subject had to sit still for hours. That wasn’t going to happen with a baby.

This is the first simulacrum I do have of her. She’s about seven.

—Hello, sweetheart.

—Dad!

—Don’t be shy. These men are here to make a documentary movie about us. You don’t have to talk to them. Just pretend they’re not here.

—Can we go to the beach?

—You know we can’t. We can’t leave the house. Besides, it’s too cold outside.

—Will you play dolls with me?

—Yes, of course. We’ll play dolls as long as you want.

Anna Larimore:

My father is a hard person for the world to dislike. He has made a great deal of money in a way that seems like an American fairy tale: Lone inventor comes up with an idea that brings joy to the world, and the world rewards him deservedly. On top of it all, he donates generously to worthy causes. The Larimore Foundation has cultivated my father’s name and image as carefully as the studios airbrush the celebrity sex simulacra that they sell.

But I know the real Paul Larimore.

One day, when I was thirteen, I had to be sent home because of an upset stomach. I came in the front door, and I heard noises from my parents’ bedroom upstairs. They weren’t supposed to be home. No one was.

A robber? I thought. In the fearless and stupid way of teenagers, I went up the stairs, and I opened the door.

My father was naked in bed, and there were four naked women with him. He didn’t hear me, and so they continued what they were doing, there in the bed that my mother shared with him.

After a while, he turned around, and we looked into each other’s eyes. He stopped, sat up, and reached out to turn off the projector on the nightstand. The women disappeared.

I threw up.

When my mother came home later that night, she explained to me that it had been going on for years. My father had a weakness for a certain kind of woman, she said. Throughout their marriage, he had trouble being faithful. She had suspected this was the case, but my father was very intelligent and careful, and she had no evidence.

When she finally caught him in the act, she was furious, and wanted to leave him. But he begged and pleaded. He said that there was something in his make up that made real monogamy impossible for him. But, he said, he had a solution.

He had taken many simulacra of his conquests over the years, more and more lifelike as he improved the technology. If my mother would let him keep them and tolerate his use of them in private, he would try very hard to not stray again.

So this was the bargain that my mother made. He was a good father, she thought. She knew that he loved me. She did not want to make me an additional casualty of a broken promise that was only made to her.

And my father’s proposal did seem like a reasonable solution. In her mind, his time with the simulacra was no different from the way other men used pornography. No touching was involved. They were not real. No marriage could survive if it did not contain some room for harmless fantasies.

But my mother did not look into my father’s eyes the way I did when I walked in on him. It was more than a fantasy. It was a continuing betrayal that could not be forgiven.

Paul Larimore:

The key to the simulacrum camera is not the physical imaging process, which, while not trivial, is ultimately not much more than the culmination of incremental improvements on technologies known since the days of the daguerreotype.

My contribution to the eternal quest of capturing reality is the oneiropagida, through which a snapshot of the subject’s mental patterns—a representation of her personality—can be captured, digitized, and then used to re-animate the image during projection. The oneiropagida is at the heart of all simulacrum cameras, including those made by my competitors.

The earliest cameras were essentially modified medical devices, similar to those legacy tomography machines you still see at old hospitals. The subject had to have certain chemicals injected into her body and then lie still for a long time in the device’s imaging tunnel until an adequate set of scans of her mental processes could be taken. These were then used to seed AI neural models, which then animated the projections constructed from detailed photographs of her body.

These early attempts were very crude, and the results were described variously as robotic, inhuman, or even comically insane. But even these earliest simulacra preserved something that could not be captured by mere videos or holography. Instead of replaying verbatim what was captured, the animated projection could interact with the viewer in the way that the subject would have.

The oldest simulacrum that still exists is one of myself, now preserved at the Smithsonian. In the first news reports, friends and acquaintances who interacted with it said that although they knew that the image was controlled by a computer, they elicited responses from it that seemed somehow “Paul”: “That’s something only Paul would say” or “That’s a very Paul facial expression.” It was then that I knew I had succeeded.

Anna Larimore:

People find it strange that I, the daughter of the inventor of simulacra, write books about how the world would be better off without them, more authentic. Some have engaged in tiresome pop psychology, suggesting that I am jealous of my “sibling,” the invention of my father that turned out to be his favorite child.

If only it were so simple.

My father proclaims that he works in the business of capturing reality, of stopping time and preserving memory. But the real attraction of such technology has never been about capturing reality. Photography, videography, holography…the progression of such “reality-capturing” technology has been a proliferation of ways to lie about reality, to shape and distort it, to manipulate and fantasize.

People shape and stage the experiences of their lives for the camera, go on vacations with one eye glued to the video camera. The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality.

The simulacra are the latest incarnation of this trend, and the worst.

Paul Larimore:

Ever since that day, when she…well, I expect that you have already heard about it from her. I will not dispute her version of events.

We have never spoken about that day to each other. What she does not know is that after that afternoon, I destroyed all the simulacra of my old affairs. I kept no backups. I expect that knowing this will not make any difference to her. But I would be grateful if you can pass this knowledge on to her.

Conversations between us after that day were civil, careful performances that avoided straying anywhere near intimacy. We spoke about permission slips, the logistics of having her come to my office to solicit sponsors for walkathons, factors to consider in picking a college. We did not speak about her easy friendships, her difficult loves, her hopes for and disappointments with the world.

Anna stopped speaking to me completely when she went off to college. When I called, she would not pick up the phone. When she needed a disbursement from her trust to pay tuition, she would call my lawyer. She spent her vacations and summers with friends or working overseas. Some weekends she would invite Erin up to visit her in Palo Alto. We all understood that I was not invited.

—Dad, why is the grass green?

—It’s because the green from the leaves on the trees drips down with the spring rain.

—That’s ridiculous.

—All right, it’s because you are looking at it from this side of the fence. If you go over to the other side, it won’t be so green.

—You are not funny.

—Okay. It’s because of chlorophyll in the grass. The chlorophyll has rings in it that absorb all colors of light except green.

—You’re not making this up, are you?

—Would I ever make anything up, sweetheart?

—It’s very hard to tell with you sometimes.

I began to play this simulacrum of her often when she was in high school, and over time it became a bit of a habit. Now I keep her on all the time, every day.

There were later simulacra when she was older, many of them with far better resolution. But this one is my favorite. It reminded me of better times, before the world changed irrevocably.

The day I took this, we finally managed to make an oneiropagida that was small enough to fit within a chassis that could be carried on your shoulder. That later became the prototype for the Carousel Mark I, our first successful home simulacrum camera. I brought it home and asked Anna to pose for it. She stood still next to the sun porch for two minutes while we chatted about her day.

She was perfect in the way that little daughters are always perfect in the eyes of their fathers. Her eyes lit up when she saw that I was home. She had just come back from day camp, and she was full of stories she wanted to tell me and questions she wanted to ask me. She wanted me to take her to the beach to fly her new kite, and I promised to help her with her sunprint kit. I was glad to have captured her at that moment.

That was a good day.

Anna Larimore:

The last time my father and I saw each other was after my mother’s accident. His lawyer called, knowing that I would not have answered my father.

My mother was conscious, but barely. The other driver was already dead, and she was going to follow soon after.

“Why can’t you forgive him?” she said. “I have. A man’s life is not defined by one thing. He loves me. And he loves you.”

I said nothing. I only held her hand and squeezed it. He came in and we both spoke to her but not to each other, and after half an hour she went to sleep and did not wake up.

The truth was, I was ready to forgive him. He looked old—a quality that children are among the last to notice about their parents—and there was a kind of frailty about him that made me question myself. We walked silently out of the hospital together. He asked if I had a place to stay in the city, and I said no. He opened the passenger side door, and after hesitating for only a second, I slipped into his car.

We got home, and it was exactly the way I remembered it, even though I hadn’t been home in years. I sat at the dinner table while he prepared frozen dinners. We spoke carefully to each other, the way we used to when I was in high school.

I asked him for a simulacrum of my mother. I don’t take simulacra or keep them, as a rule. I don’t have the same rosy view of them as the general public. But at that moment, I thought I understood their appeal. I wanted a piece of my mother to be always with me, an aspect of her presence.

He handed me a disc, and I thanked him. He offered me the use of his projector, but I declined. I wanted to keep the memory of my mother by myself for a while before letting the computer’s extrapolations confuse real memories with made-up ones.

(And as things turned out, I’ve never used that simulacrum. Here, you can take a look at it later, if you want to see what she looked like. Whatever I remember of my mother, it’s all real.)

It was late by the time we finished dinner, and I excused myself.

I walked up to my room.

And I saw the seven-year old me sitting on my bed. She had on this hideous dress that I must have blocked out of my memory—pink, flowery, and there was a bow in her hair.

—Hello, I’m Anna. Pleased to meet you.

So he had kept this thing around for years, this naïve, helpless caricature of me. During the time I did not speak to him, did he turn to this frozen trace of me, and contemplate this shadow of my lost faith and affection? Did he use this model of my childhood to fantasize about the conversations that he could not have with me? Did he even edit it, perhaps, to remove my petulance, to add in more saccharine devotion?

I felt violated. The little girl was undeniably me. She acted like me, spoke like me, laughed and moved and reacted like me. But she was not me.

I had grown and changed, and I’d come to face my father as an adult. But now I found a piece of myself had been taken and locked into this thing, a piece that allowed him to maintain a sense of connection with me that I did not want, that was not real.

The image of those naked women in his bed from years ago came rushing back. I finally understood why for so long they had haunted my dreams.

It is the way a simulacrum replicates the essence of the subject that makes it so compelling. When my father kept those simulacra of his women around, he maintained a connection to them, to the man he was when he had been with them, and thus committed a continuing emotional betrayal that was far worse than a momentary physical indiscretion. A pornographic image is a pure visual fantasy, but a simulacrum captures a state of mind, a dream. But whose dream? What I saw in his eyes that day was not sordid. It was too intimate.

By keeping and replaying this old simulacrum of my childhood, he was dreaming himself into reclaiming my respect and love, instead of facing the reality of what he had done, and the real me.

Perhaps it is the dream of every parent to keep his or her child in that brief period between helpless dependence and separate selfhood, when the parent is seen as perfect, faultless. It is a dream of control and mastery disguised as love, the dream that Lear had about Cordelia.

I walked down the stairs and out of the house, and I have not spoken to him since.

Paul Larimore:

A simulacrum lives in the eternal now. It remembers, but only hazily, since the oneiropagida does not have the resolution to discern and capture the subject’s every specific memory. It learns, up to a fashion, but the further you stray from the moment the subject’s mental life was captured, the less accurate the computer’s extrapolations. Even the best cameras we offer can’t project beyond a couple of hours.

But the oneiropagida is exquisite at capturing her mood, the emotional flavor of her thoughts, the quirky triggers for her smiles, the lilt of her speech, the precise, inarticulable quality of her turns of phrase.

And so, every two hours or so, Anna resets. She’s again coming home from day camp, and again she’s full of questions and stories for me. We talk, we have fun. We let our chat wander wherever it will. No conversation is ever the same. But she’s forever the curious seven-year old who worshipped her father, and who thought he could do no wrong.

—Dad, will you tell me a story?

—Yes, of course. What story would you like?

—I want to hear your cyberpunk version of Pinocchio again.

—I’m not sure if I can remember everything I said last time.

—It’s okay. Just start. I’ll help you.

I love her so much.

Erin Larimore:

My baby, I don’t know when you’ll get this. Maybe it will only be after I’m gone. You can’t skip over the next part. It’s a recording. I want you to hear what I have to say.

Your father misses you.

He is not perfect, and he has committed his share of sins, the same as any man. But you have let that one moment, when he was at his weakest, overwhelm the entirety of your life together. You have compressed him, the whole of his life, into that one frozen afternoon, that sliver of him that was most flawed. In your mind, you traced that captured image again and again, until the person was erased by the stencil.

During all these years when you have locked him out, your father played an old simulacrum of you over and over, laughing, joking, pouring his heart out to you in a way that a seven-year old would understand. I would ask you on the phone if you’d speak to him, and then I couldn’t bear to watch as I hung up while he went back to play the simulacrum again.

See him for who he really is.

—Hello there. Have you seen my daughter Anna?

Ken Liu was a programmer before he became a lawyer, and he thinks legal drafting can benefit from some software coding practices. His fiction has appeared/will appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Science Fiction World, the Writers of the Future anthology, The Dragon and the Stars, and Panverse, among other places. He lives in the Greater Boston Area with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, and they welcomed their daughter into the world in 2010. Those late nights when the newborn wouldn’t sleep proved a good time to think about stories. He is currently working on his first novel.

Author Spotlight: Ken Liu
Christie Yant

Tell us a little bit about what inspired this story.

I’ve always been fascinated by the social conventions that have accumulated around the taking of pictures: The way that people suddenly stop, turn, freeze with a smile they never wear in real life, until that “click” releases them, and they go back to what they were doing.

These conventions are so strong that sometimes they become invisible. I remember attending a photography exhibit once and someone there said that she thought it was weird that children in rural China who weren’t used to cameras didn’t smile for the camera. But really, those children were the only ones who weren’t weird.

People never look the way they do in pictures, and yet we take them “for the memories.” The most extreme form of this probably occurs in children. I’m thinking of the Calvin and Hobbes strip in which Calvin’s parents look through a series of photographs of a dressed-up Calvin, and in all of the pictures Calvin was making ridiculous faces. Neither the parents’ dressed-up vision nor those faces look the way Calvin normally does.

Yet, despite the ways in which photographs aren’t freezing “reality,” we feel that photographs do capture some essence of the subject. I’ve never been able to resolve my conflicting feelings about them.

And then one day, while I was doing some unrelated research on the web, I found the quote from Susan Sontag, and in my mind I heard Anna’s speech about reality-capturing technology. That was the kernel of the story.

Anna talks about several of the uses to which the Simulacrum was put. Do you think there would be others? Can you see yourself ever wanting one?

I can imagine a lot of uses for the technology, both good and ill. Charismatic leaders—religious, political, or otherwise—might use simulacra with their followers to achieve a heightened sense of personal connection. Psychiatrists might use simulacra of various personality disorders as diagnostic and teaching tools. The entertainment/gaming potential is interesting, too. But I think most people would use them as enhanced versions of home movies and photo albums, a way to keep alive, in some sense, the people taken away from us by the passage of time (which doesn’t mean only death). I can definitely see myself wanting to have access to simulacra of people I love after they are gone.

It’s often easier to find compassion for total strangers than for the people who spent two decades of their lives raising us. Why do you think it’s so hard for us to put ourselves in our parents’ place? As a new father, do you worry that some day your daughter will have a grudge she can’t let go of?

I do think that children are especially hard on their parents. My theory is that because we are so similar to our parents, we see their weaknesses as magnified versions of our own failings (and hints that we may turn into versions of our parents some day). In a way, we are so unforgiving of our parents because we are really being unforgiving of what we see of ourselves in them. As we age, we become more accepting of our own faults, and maybe this is why parents seem to grow so much wiser as we get older.

I am terrified of letting my daughter down. I think that’s a fear all parents share. We know we are not perfect, and yet we want to live up to this image of being superheroes to our children. It’s a fear that I think will last as long as there are parents and children.

I think a really important moment in the parent-child relationship occurs when the child accepts the parent’s flaws and lets the parent know of that acceptance. It doesn’t occur in every parent-child relationship though.

The development of the technology in the story was very convincing. Is there anything in your background that gave you familiarity with imaging technology? What kind of research did you do (if any) to create the evolution of the Simulacrum?

My wife is a photographer, and so over the years I’ve learned from her a bit about the history of photography and the evolution of the technologies involved in film and digital imaging. As the technology evolved, the social attitudes toward photography, both as an art form and as a part of daily culture, also evolved. I tried to extrapolate a similar process of development when imagining how the oneiropagida would evolve over time.

Also, I’ve been interested in brain imaging technology for years. I try to read academic papers as well as popular reports, and the implications of such technology play a role in several of my stories.

Anna believes that she “knows the real Paul Larimore” based on something she witnessed one day when she was thirteen, and she lets it overwrite everything good that she knows about her father. “A man’s life is not defined by one thing,” Erin says. None of us want to be judged by the “sliver of [ourselves] that is weakest.” The reader is left perhaps examining his or her own life, looking for that weakest sliver. Did you reflect much on your own weaknesses when writing this story? Was there much emotional backlash from writing it?

I do often get very emotionally pulled into my stories, sometimes in a way that frightens me (my wife is good at noticing when I’m going in too deep and getting me to stay afloat). Empathizing with your characters deeply—which I think is required to write anything I want to read—and then being able to pull away isn’t always easy.

We all want to be judged by the best of what we’ve done, not the worst. And yet we’ve all made mistakes, and because of those mistakes, there are people we’ve hurt. For some of them, those mistakes are the most important aspects of us, and would overwhelm anything else we did before or since.

I thought a lot about instances where my memory of someone was dominated by one negative image, and whether it made sense to define someone by something they did a long time ago, and how someone might still hold a grudge against me, maybe even for something I could no longer remember. And then I tried to let all of it go.

This story seems to be about a lot of things: Forgiveness, obsession, reality, intent, the inability to let go of the past—were these all conscious themes, or did any of them emerge after the fact?

All these themes were floating in my mind during the drafting—but the story wasn’t originally going to be about just Paul and Anna, and fatherhood was not a big focus. I had a much longer and larger story planned out involving many other characters, all of whose lives were affected in important ways by the use of simulacra.

For example, I had sketched out a man who secretly took simulacra of strangers without their knowledge or permission, a woman who acted in porn simulacra shows (and thus had to act and create a fantasy not just with her body, but with her mind too), a man who obsessively edited simulacra of himself in search of the perfect one...But as I tried to flesh out the outline, I gradually lost interest in the other characters, and only the storyline between Anna and Paul seemed to stick in my mind.

One afternoon, a line from Lear—“Pray you now forget, and forgive: I am old and foolish”—popped into my head, and I knew what the story had to be about.

Is there anything else you would like Lightspeed readers to know about “Simulacrum,” or your upcoming projects?

One thing that surprised me when I first showed a draft of the story to a group of test readers was that the reaction split largely along gender lines. Several of the men really hated Anna and couldn’t empathize with her point of view at all. Most of the women were much more sympathetic to her. I hadn’t anticipated that, and I wonder if a similar split would occur with Lightspeed readers.

Most of my stories tend to be either about artificial intelligence or history-two subjects that I’m particularly interested in and have studied. ”Simulacrum” belongs to the first category, but I think it can be seen as a story about history (especially personal history) as well. It’s about how we use evidence to support a particular narrative about our own lives that feels authentic, even if it’s a destructive story.

Christie Yant is a fantasy writer, assistant editor for Lightspeed Magazine, occasional narrator for StarShipSofa, and audiobook reviewer for Audible.com. Her fiction can be found in the anthology The Way of the Wizard, and Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. She lives on the central coast of California with her two amazing daughters, her boyfriend, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Her website is inkhaven.net. Follow her on twitter @inkhaven.

Where’s My Holovision?
Jeff Hecht

Science fiction writers invented holovision as soon as they heard of laser holography in the mid 1960s, and holovision has remained a standard science-fiction prop ever since. Holographic 3D television was a perfectly logical extrapolation at the time, but just like flying cars and jet packs, it never really got off the ground. Until—perhaps—now.

Whatever happened to holography? You take it so much for granted that you don’t even notice it. Pull out a credit card and look at the shiny patch that makes rainbow patterns in the right light. That’s a hologram, although not a very good one. With luck, you’ve seen better ones, like “The Kiss,” in which a rainbow-colored woman named Pam Brazier leisurely blows a kiss as you move around it. But you didn’t see one in the first Star Wars flick; that projection of Princess Leia was a faked hologram. Nor was CNN’s “holographic reporter” a hologram, and the producers of Red Dwarf weren’t even trying with Rimmer. In fact, everything so far that claims to be holographic telepresence is a fake.

That’s the demonstration of holographic telepresence by University of Arizona scientists that made headlines in November, even though the fuzzy green images looked like they came from an out-of-whack camera. To understand why, let’s zip back in time nearly half a century and take a close look at what made those first laser holograms so special.

It started when Emmett Leith, a bright young engineer at the University of Michigan’s Willow Run Laboratory, figured out how he could use light to turn raw data from airborne radars into 3D maps of buildings and terrain on the ground. He used a bit of mathe-magic that turned a signal that varies in time into an image that varies in space. Leith and a younger engineer, Juris Upatnieks, then tried transforming images in other ways, and eventually the two came up with another trick—creating truly three-dimensional images with the then-new laser.

We’re not talking the fake 3D you saw in your ViewMaster toy, in comic books you read with red and green glasses, or at late-night horror movies. Leith and Upatnieks made holograms that projected light into space so you could look around it. They made a hologram of a toy train engine that hovered in space before your eyes like a ghostly red version of the toy engine itself.

Their trick was to reconstruct the wavefront of the light that would reach your eyes if you were looking at the object itself. To do it, they started by dividing a laser beam in half, using one half to illuminate the object, and bouncing the other half off a couple of mirrors to aim it at a photographic plate near the object. Laser light reflected from the object also illuminated the photographic plate. Because the laser light was coherent, with all the waves marching in phase like soldiers on parade, the two beams formed a special pattern when they exposed the photographic plate.

That plate, after being developed, stored all the information needed to create the ghostly image of the object. All you needed to do was shine a laser beam onto the plate, following the same path taken by the second half of the laser beam. The pattern recorded on the plate scattered the laser light to make a replica of the wavefront you would have seen from the object. The images Leith and Upatnieks reconstructed were red because they illuminated the plates with red laser beams. They also looked a bit grainy because of the nature of laser light.

Once you saw a hologram, it was a revelation. Researchers around the world started making their own holograms, then began making better ones. Steve Benton at Polaroid figured out how to make holograms that showed three dimensions when viewed in ordinary white light. You still needed a laser to record the hologram, but you didn’t need one to display a hologram. (Take another look at your credit card. That’s the kind of hologram it uses.) The image showed a rainbow of colors that changed as you moved your head, but that was cool, too. Then Lloyd Cross figured out a way to record a series of rainbow holograms and assemble them so the image seemed to move as you moved around it. (What he really did was to move a camera around a model, taking a picture at each step as the model moved, like Brazier blowing her kiss.) Those were fun, and attracted a lot of attention. Some appeared as extra heads of Logan in a scene in the movie Logan’s Run.

Holographic art was hot. Artist Salvador Dali exhibited holograms, and in 1976 the Museum of Holography opened in Manhattan’s SoHo district. But holovision was nowhere to be seen. Holographic images had to be projected by shining light through a hologram, but film holograms were fixed and unchanging. What holovision needed was a way to record a series of holograms, transmit them from the camera, and recreate the holograms to display the image—all at video rates of thirty frames a second. Nobody knew how do to any of that. Holograms had to be recorded with very fine resolution, producing tons of data, then replicated at a distance with all the data intact. That would require sheets of unobtainium to display the hologram. It looked hopeless.

Fast forward three decades, and we still don’t have the perfect rewritable holographic material. But now we have one that can be rewritten in seconds. It’s called “photorefractive,” and illuminating it with a bright laser pulse changes how it refracts other light. Illuminate it with fainter light, and it projects a holographic image.

The images aren’t permanent, but you don’t want permanent for holovision. You want the old frame to fade when you write the next one. At a November press conference, Nasser Peyghambarian, Chair of Photnics and Lasers and Professor of Optical Sciences at The University of Arizona, said he could write a new image in only two seconds. He borrowed Benton’s tricks so he could project holograms using green LEDs rather than needing a laser.

Two seconds a frame is a crawl by video standards, and his screen is only four inches square, the size of a smart phone, not a movie screen. Other optical compromises left the monochrome green image blurry. Nonetheless, it was good enough for Peyghambarian to boast he had demonstrated holographic telepresence. Other observers agree his images are a huge step forward. The image was “the size of Princess Leia,” Peyghambarian told the press conference, so holographic telepresence “is no longer science fiction, it is something you can do today.”

Can the holodeck be far behind? Should I put off buying that 3D TV?

It depends how you define “far.” Peyghambarian predicts that commercial applications are seven to ten years away, and they won’t be on the holodeck or in your living room. They are likely to be in fields like medical imaging or computer modeling, where real 3D images will be a big plus, but don’t have to be rewritten at full video rates. The images are likely to be monochrome, because full color is an unnecessary complication for those applications.

But developing the technology needed for those systems will pave the road to future home entertainment. When holographic television comes to your living room, it will give you true three-dimensional images that you can look around and see the back of the object, says Michael Bove of the MIT Media Laboratory. Because holograms are truly three dimensional, they shouldn’t give you the visual hangovers that come from watching too much conventional 3D. So spring for the 3D TV now; by the time holovision comes, you’ll be ready for a change.

Jeff Hecht is a science-fact writer who contributes regularly to New Scientist magazine and Laser Focus World. His specialties range from lasers and fiber optics to paleontology. His books include Understanding Lasers, Beam: The Race to Make the Laser, Understanding Fiber Optics, and Beam Weapons: The Next Arms Race. He has had short fiction published in venues ranging from Analog and Asimov’s to Nature. More at his web site: www.jeffhecht.com.

Breakaway, Backdown
James Patrick Kelly

You know, in space nobody wears shoes.

Well, new temps wear slippers. They make the soles out of that adhesive polymer, griprite or griptite. Sounds likepaper ripping when you lift your feet. Temps who’ve been up awhile wear this glove thing that snugs around the toes. The breakaways, they go barefoot. You can’t really walk much in space, so they’ve reinvented their feet so they can pick up screwdrivers and spoons and stuff. It’s hard because you lose fine motor control in micro gee. I had ... have this friend, Elena, who could make a krill and tomato sandwich with her feet, but she had that operation that changes your big toe into a thumb. I used to kid her that maybe breakaways were climbing down the evolutionary ladder, not jumping off it. Are we people or chimps? She’d scratch her armpits and hoot.

Sure, breakaways have a sense of humor. They’re people after all; it’s just that they’re like no people you know. The thing was, Elena was so limber that she could bite her toenails. So can you fix my shoe?

How long is that going to take? Why not just glue the heel back on?

I know they’re Donya Durands, but I’ve got a party in half an hour, okay?

What, you think I’m going to walk around town barefoot? I’ll wait—except what’s with all these lights? It’s two in the morning and you’ve got this place bright as noon in Khartoum. How about a little respect for the night?

Thanks. What did you say your name was? I’m Cleo.

You are, are you? Jane honey, lots of people think about going to space but you’d be surprised at how few actually apply—much less break away. So how old are you?

Oh, no, they like them young, just as long as you’re over nineteen. No kids in space. So the stats don’t scare you?

Not shoe repair, that’s for sure. But if you can convince them you’re serious, they’ll find something for you to do. They trained me and I was nobody, a business major. I temped for almost fifteen months on Victor Foxtrot and I never could decide whether I loved or hated it. Still can’t, so how could I even think about becoming a breakaway? Everything is loose up there, okay? It makes you come unstuck. The first thing that happens is you get spacesick. For a week your insides are so scrambled that you’re trying to digest lunch with your cerebellum and write memos with your large intestine. Meanwhile your face puffs up so that you can’t find yourself in the mirror anymore and your sinuses fill with cotton candy and you’re fighting a daily hair mutiny. I might’ve backed down right off if it hadn’t been for Elen—you know, the one with the clever toes? Then when you’re totally miserable and empty and disoriented, your brain sorts things out again and you realize it’s all magic. Some astrofairy has enchanted you. Your body is as light as a whisper, free as air. I’ll tell you the most amazing thing about weightlessness. It doesn’t go away. You keep falling: Down, up, sideways, whatever. You might bump into something once in a while but you never, ever slam into the ground. Extremely sexy, but it does take some getting used to. I kept having dreams about gravity. Down here you have a whole planet hugging you. But in space, it’s not only you that’s enchanted, it’s all your stuff too. For instance, if you put that brush down, it stays. It doesn’t decide to drift across the room and out the window and go visit Elena over on B deck. I had this pin that had been my mother’s—a silver dove with a diamond eye—and somehow it escaped from a locked jewelry box. Turned up two months later in a dish of butterscotch pudding, almost broke Jack Pitzer’s tooth. You get a lot of pudding in space. Oatmeal. Stews. Sticky food is easier to eat and you can’t taste much of anything but salt and sweet anyway.

Why, do you think I’m babbling? God, I am babbling. It must be the Zentadone. The woman at the persona store said it was just supposed to be an icebreaker with a flirty edge to it, like Panital only more sincere. You wouldn’t have any reset, would you?

Hey, spare me the lecture, honey. I know they don’t allow personas in space. Anyway, imprinting is just a bunch of pro-brain propaganda. Personas are temporary—period. When you stop taking the pills, the personas go away and you’re your plain old vanilla self again; there’s bushels of studies that say so. I’m just taking a little vacation from Cleo. Maybe I’ll go away for a weekend, or a week or a month but eventually I’ll come home. Always have, always will.

I don’t care what your Jesus puppet says; you can’t trust godware, okay? Look, I’m not going to convince you and you’re not going to convince me. Truce?

The shoes? Four, five years. Let’s see, I bought them in ‘36. Five years. I had to store them while I was up.

You get used to walking in spike heels, actually. I mean, I’m not going to run a marathon or climb the Matterhorn. Elena has all these theories of why men think spikes are sexy. Okay, they’re kind of a short term body mod. They stress the leg muscles, which makes you look tense, which leads most men to assume you could use a serious screwing. And they push your fanny out like you’re making the world an offer. But most important is that, when you’re teetering around in heels, it tells a man that if he chases you, you’re not going to get very far. Not only do spike heels say you’re vulnerable, they say you’ve chosen to be vulnerable. Of course, it’s not quite the same in micro gee. She was my mentor, Elena. Assigned to teach me how to live in space.

I was an ag tech. Worked as a germ wrangler in the edens.

Microorganisms. Okay, you probably think that if you stick a seed in some dirt, add some water and sunlight and wait a couple of months, Mother Nature hands you a head of lettuce. Doesn’t work that way, especially not in space. The edens are synergistic, symbiotic ecologies. Your carbo crops, your protein crops, your vitamin crops—they’re all fussy about the neighborhood germs. If you don’t keep your clostridia and rhizobium in balance, your eden will rot to compost. Stinky, slimy compost. It’s important work—and duller than accounting. It wouldn’t have been so bad if we could’ve talked on the job, but CO2 in the edens runs 6%, which is great for plants but will kill you if you’re not wearing a breather. Elena painted an enormous smile on mine, with about eight hundred teeth in it. She had lips on hers, puckered so that they looked like she was ready to be kissed. Alpha Ralpha the chicken man had this plastic beak. Only sometimes we switched—confused the hell out of the nature lovers. I’ll tell you, the job would’ve been a lot easier if we could’ve kept the rest of the crew out, but the edens are designed for recreation as much as food production. On Victor Foxtrot we had to have sign-ups between 8:00 and 16:00. See, the edens have lots of open space and we keep them eight degrees over crew deck nominal and they’re lit twenty hours a day by grolights and solar mirrors and they have big windows. Crew floats around sucking up the view, soaking up photons, communing with the life force, shredding foliage and in general getting in our way. Breakaways are the worst; they actually adopt plants like they were pets. Is that crazy or what? I mean, a tomato has a life span of three, maybe four months before it gets too leggy and stops bearing. I’ve seen grown men cry because Elena pulled up their favorite marigold.

No, all my plants now are silk. When I backed down, I realized that I didn’t want anything to do with the day. My family was a bunch of poor nobodies; we moved to the night when I was seven. So nightshifting was like coming home. The fact is, I got too much sun while I was up. The sun is not my friend. Haven’t seen real daylight in over a year; I make a point of it. I have a day-night timeshare at Lincoln Street Under. While the sun is shining I’m asleep or safely cocooned. At dusk my roomie comes home and I go out to work and play. Hey, being a mommy to legumes is not what I miss about space. How about you? What turned you into an owl?

Well, well, maybe you are serious about breaking away. Sure, they prefer recruits who’ve nightshifted. Shows them you’ve got circadian discipline.

Elena said something like that once. She said that it’s hard to scare someone to death in broad daylight. It isn’t just that the daytime is too crowded, it’s too tame. The night is edgier, scarier. Sexier. You say and do things that wouldn’t occur to you at lunchtime. It’s because we don’t really belong in the night. In order to survive here we have to fight all the old instincts warning us not to wander around in the dark because we might fall off a cliff or get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. Living in the night gives you a kind of extra...I don’t know…

Right. And it’s the same with space; it’s even scarier and sexier. Well, maybe sexy isn’t exactly the right word, but you know what I mean. Actually, I think that’s what I miss most about it. I was more alive then that I ever was before. Maybe too alive. People live fast up there. They know the stats; they have to. You know, you sort of remind me of Elena. Must be the eyes—it sure as hell isn’t the body. If you ever get up, give her a shout. You’d like her, even though she doesn’t wear shoes anymore.

Almost a year. I wish we could talk more, but it’s hard. She transferred to the Marathon; they’re out surveying Saturn’s moons. There’s like a three hour lag; it’s impossible to have real-time conversation. She sent a few vids, but it hurt too much to watch them. They were all happy chat, you know? Nothing important in them. I didn’t plan on missing her so much. So, you have any college credits?

No real difference between Harvard and a net school, unless you’re some kind of snob about bricks.

Now that’s a hell of a thing to be asking a perfect stranger. What do I look like, some three star slut? Don’t make assumptions just because I’m wearing spiked heels. For all you know, honey, I could be dating a basketball player. Maybe I’m tired of staring at his navel when we dance. If you’re going to judge people by appearances, hey, you’re the one with the machine stigmata. What’s that supposed to be, rust or dried blood?

Well, you ought to be. Though actually, that’s what everyone wants to know. That, and how do you go to the bathroom. Truth is, Jane, sex is complicated, like everything about space. First of all, forget all that stuff you’ve heard about doing it while you’re floating free. It’s dangerous, hard work and no fun. You want to have sex in space, one or both of you have to be tied down. Most hetero temps use some kind of a joystrap. It’s this wide circular elastic that fits around you and your partner. Helps you stay coupled, okay? But even with all the gear, sex can be kind of subtle. As in disappointing. You don’t realize how erotic weight is until there isn’t any. You want to make love to a balloon? Some people do nothing but oral—keeps the vectors down. Of course the breakaways, they’ve reinvented love, just like everything else. They have this kind of sex where they don’t move. If there’s penetration they just float in place, staring into one another’s eyes or some such until they tell one another that it’s time to have an orgasm and then they do. If they’re homo, they just touch each other. Elena tried to show me how, once. I don’t know why, but it didn’t happen for me. Maybe I was too embarrassed because I was the only one naked. She said I’d learn eventually, that it was part of breaking away.

No, I thought I was going to break away, I really did. I stuck it out until the very last possible day. It’s hard to explain. I mean, when nobodies on earth look up at night—no offense, Jane, I was one too—what calls them is the romance of it all. The high frontier, okay? Sheena Steele and Captain Kirk, cowboys and asteroids. Kid stuff, except they don’t let kids in space because of the cancer. Then you go up and once you’re done puking, you realize that it was all propaganda. Space is boring and it’s indescribably magic at the same time—how can that be? Sometimes I’d be working in an eden and I’d look out the windows and I’d see earth, blue as a dream, and I’d think of all the people down there, twelve billion ants, looking up into the night and wondering what it was like to be me. I swear I could feel their envy, as sure as I can feel your floor beneath me now. It’s part of what holds you up when you’re in space. You know you’re not an ant; there are fewer than twenty thousand breakaways. You’re brave and you’re doomed and you’re different from everyone else who has ever lived. Only then your shift ends and it’s time to go to the gym and spend three hours pumping the ergorack in a squeeze suit to fight muscle loss in case you decide to back down. I’ll tell you, being a temp is hell. The rack is hard work; if you’re not exhausted afterward, you haven’t done it right. And you sweat, God. See, the sweat doesn’t run off. It pools in the small of your back and the crook of your arm and under your chin and clings there, shivering like an amoeba. And while you’re slaving on the rack, Elena is getting work done or reading or sleeping or talking about you with her breakaway pals. They have three more hours in their day, see, and they don’t ever have to worry about backing down. Then every nine weeks you have to leave what you’re doing and visit one of the wheel habitats and readjust to your weight for a week so that when you come back to Victor Foxtrot, you get spacesick all over again. But you tell yourself it’s all worth it because it’s not only space that you’re exploring; it’s yourself. How many people can say that? You have to find out who you are so that you decide what to hold onto and what to let go of...Excuse me, I can’t talk about this anymore right now.

No, I’ll be all right. Only... okay, so you don’t have any reset. You must have some kind of flash?

That’ll have to do. Tell you what, I’ll buy the whole liter from you.

Ahh, ethanol with a pedigree. But a real backdown kind of drug, Jane—weighs way too much to bring out of the gravity well. And besides, the flash is about the same as hitting yourself over the head with the bottle. Want a slug?

Come on, it’s two-thirty. Time to start the party. You’re making me late, you know.

Do me a favor, would you? Pass me those shoes on the shelf there...no, no the blue ones. Yes. Beautiful. Real leather, right? I love leather shoes. They’re like faces. I mean, you can polish them but once they get wrinkles, you’re stuck with them. Look at my face, okay? See these wrinkles here, right at the corner of my eyes? Got them working in the edens. Too much sun. How old do you think I am?

Twenty-nine, but that’s okay. I was up fifteen months and it only aged me four years. Still, my permanent bone loss is less than eight percent and I’ve built my muscles back up and I only picked up eighteen rads and I’m not half as crazy as I used to be. Hey, I’m a walking advertisement for backing down. So have I talked you out of it yet? I don’t mean to, okay? I’d probably go up again, if they’d have me.

Don’t plan on it; the wheel habitats are strictly for tourists. They cost ten times as much to build as a micro gee can and once you’re in one you’re pretty much stuck to the rim. And you’re still getting zapped by cosmic rays and solar x-rays and energetic neutrons. If you’re going to risk living in space, you might as well enjoy it. Besides, all the important work gets done by breakaways.

See, that’s where you’re wrong. It’s like Elena used to say. We didn’t conquer space, it conquered us. Break away and you’re giving up forty, maybe fifty years of life, okay? The stats don’t lie. Fifty-six is the average. That means some breakaways die even younger.

You don’t? Well, good for you. Hey, it looks great—better than new. How much?

Does that include the vodka?

Well thanks. Listen, Jane, I’m going to tell you something, a secret they ought to tell everybody before they go up.

No, I’m not. Promise. So anyway, on my breakaway day Elena calls me to her room and tells me that she doesn’t think I should do it, that I won’t be happy living in space. I’m so stunned that I start crying, which is a very backdown thing to do. I try to argue, but she’s been mentoring for years and knows what she’s talking about. Only about a third breakaway—but, of course, you know that. Anyway, it gets strange then. She says to me, “I have something to show you,” and then she starts to strip. See, the time she’d made love to me, she wouldn’t let me do anything to her. And like I said, she’d kept her clothes on; breakaways have this thing about showing themselves to temps. I mean, I’d seen her hands before, her feet. They looked like spiders. And I’d seen her face. Kissed it, even. But now I’m looking at her naked body for the first time. She’s fifty-one years old. I think she must’ve been taller than me once, but it’s hard to be sure because she has the deep micro gee slouch. Her muscles have atrophied so her papery skin looks as if it’s been sprayed onto her bones. She’s had both breasts prophylactically removed. “I’ve got 40% bonerot,” she says, “and I mass thirty-eight kilos.” She shows the scars from the operations to remove her thyroid and ovaries, the tap on her hip where they take the monthly biopsy to test for leukemia. “Look at me,” she says. “What do you see?” I start to tell her that I’ve read the literature and watched all the vids and I’m prepared for what’s going to happen but she shushes me. “Do you think I’m beautiful?” she says. All I can do is stare. “I think I am,” she says. “So do the others. It’s our nature, Cleo. This is how space makes us over. Can you tell me you want this to happen to you?” And I couldn’t. See, she knew me better than I knew myself. What I wanted was to float forever, to feel I was special, to stay with her. Maybe I was in love with her. I don’t know if that’s possible. But loving someone isn’t a reason to break away, especially if the stats say that someone will be dead in five years. So I told her she was right and thanked her for everything she’d done and got on the shuttle that same day and backed down and became just another nobody. And she gave up mentoring and went to Saturn and now that we’ve forgotten all about each other we can start living happily ever after.

No, here’s the secret, honey. The heart is a muscle, okay? That means it shrinks in space. All breakaways know it, now you do too. Anyway, it’s been nice talking to you.

Sure. Good night.

© 1996 James Patrick Kelly

First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

James Patrick Kelly has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows. His most recent book is a collection of stories entitled The Wreck of the Godspeed. His short novel Burn won the Nebula Award in 2007. He has won the Hugo Award twice: In 1996, for his novelette “Think Like A Dinosaur,” and in 2000, for his novelette, “Ten to the Sixteenth to One.” His fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. With John Kessel he is co-editor of The Secret History Of Science Fiction, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post Cyberpunk Anthology. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine and the Board of Directors of the Clarion Foundation.His website is www.jimkelly.net.

Author Spotlight: James Patrick Kelly
Erin Stocks

Will you tell us a little about the origins of this story?

I have always aspired to sell to Analog so I decided to take another shot at writing a hard science story. Also, I needed a story to bring to the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop. Maybe these two things were working against each other because the science in this story is hard enough that Greg Benford bought it as a reprint for his anthology Skylife. But messing around with the narration to impress my mates at SycHill might have been a deal breaker for the Analog audience. In any event, Stan Schmidt passed and Gardner Dozois didn’t.

Despite Cleo’s seeming confidence, there’s a vulnerable uneasiness to her banter, as if she’s one of those people who talk more (instead of less) when they’re nervous. Is she trying to convince herself, as well as Jane, that she made the right decision?

No question that she is uneasy about her decision, although I think she knows all too well that Elena was right. Of course, Cleo has also altered her personality and isn’t really herself again until well into the story.

Cleo mentions that she “moved to the night” when she was young. Now she owns a day-night timeshare. The fact that both space travel and regular life are so greatly changed from anything we’re familiar with adds a great deal of believability to the story. Were there any other reasons you chose to advance life on earth in addition to space travel?

I decided to make it clear that one of the reasons why anyone would go to space, given that living there would lop years off one’s life span, is that life on Earth is much less attractive in the world of the story than it is in our world. Extrapolating a more crowded and less fulfilling mundane existence makes the glamour of breaking away into space seem more inviting.

I found it interesting that Elena didn’t reveal the toll that breaking away took on her body until the day of Cleo’s breakaway, as if Elena decided to say these things at the last moment. We don’t get a chance to hear her point of view, but what’s your take on that? Why did Elena wait so long?

I think that Elena had real feelings for Cleo, and that she was giving her the full measure of time to earn her right to breakaway.

Cleo claims that she changed her mind when Elena revealed her weakened body. But I wonder if it was even about aging at all. Could it instead have been a realization on Cleo’s part that Elena may not have needed her as much as she needed and wanted Elena?

Interesting. I often realize after I publish a story that there is more to find in it than I was conscious of including. I definitely think the story supports this reading, although it wasn’t one that I was aware of as I was typing it.

Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about this story?

This story has had an amazing afterlife. It’s among my most reprinted (thanks for adding to the total, Lightspeed!), but it has also been reincarnated as a stage play (with many productions), an audioplay and, just last year, as an independent short film. I am not known for being a hard science fiction writer, which is probably why “Breakaway, Backdown” is one of my favorite stories.

Erin Stocks is a writer and musician transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading for Lightspeed Magazine, critting works for her SFF writing group, and can be found on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Colonizing the Solar System in Four Easy Steps
Nicholos Wethington

So you—or the space agency that you work for—have decided that humans are too good to be confined to the Earth. With that spark of manifest destiny helping to illuminate your path, there is no stopping you from pulling up stakes and heading out to any of the nearby worlds that are so seemingly destitute of life as we know it that they are practically begging to be colonized.

Step One: The Moon

I may be paraphrasing here, but someone once said, “A journey of a few million miles starts with a stop by the grocery store.” The grocery store for this trip is just down the block, only about 250,000 miles away. Though you won’t find any cases of Mr. Pibb on the Moon, what you will find is water: Buckets and buckets of water, according to NASA. One of their recent missions discovered that that place is just lousy with crater-shaped ice cubes of water. Water is also thinly dispersed over its surface.

The Moon is much smaller than the Earth, on the order of 1/80th the Earth’s mass. So, once you are out of the “gravity well” of the Earth, it can eat your interplanetary dust. The escape from gravity makes the Moon a great staging area to “daisy-chain” your travels to other worlds, but just like the grocery store, it’s got its own thing going on too.

NASA has been seriously considering using “inflatable habitats” for doing work on the Moon. These habitats are akin to camping on the Moon—you make your way there, set up the tents and get to work on building your winter cabin.

The crust of the Moon—called the regolith—is a great place to take refuge. Refuge from astronaut-killing cosmic radiation. Going outside the protective magnetic field of the Earth is a dangerous prospect. Cosmic radiation is not like getting the arm that you’re hanging out the window of your car a little sunburned. Oh, no.

The Sun, in addition to putting out a lot of light, streams out radiation all of the time in the form of very, very energetic particles. These energetic particles are brimming over with energy, have the ability to penetrate everything but the thickest of materials, and basically can give you wicked cancer, in a hurry.

So, building a little hidey-hole in the Moon to escape these solar death-rays is an absolute necessity. This is pretty much the case on every other body with a “surface” you would be able to visit in the Solar System.

Shielding yourself from cosmic rays is a huge challenge for designers of spacecraft. Most designs currently being dreamed up—not many have been thoroughly tested—involve putting all of the food and water that astronauts would need on an interplanetary voyage into the walls of the craft. In essence, you surround yourself with your supplies. As you eat your freeze-dried ice cream and suck down your Tang with gusto, well, what comes around goes around. Being surrounded in a capsule that sandwiches you with your own bodily waste sure beats dying.

Once you make your stop at the Moon to get your water and split it up into suitable hydrogen for fuel and oxygen for breathing, you’re basically free to follow your fancy.

Step Two: Mars

If you have a hankering for a “rustic” place to visit, Mars is where you should steer your spaceship with fuzzy dice hanging in the window first. It’s the dream of every space agency worth its rockets right now to send a human to Mars.

The surface of Mars isn’t exactly welcoming—huge dust storms can blind you for days on end, and the average temperature is -63 degrees C (-81 degrees F). Nighttime temperatures on the Red Planet can dip down to -110 degrees C (-170 degrees F).

Mars is red because the outer layer of its regolith is basically composed of fine rust. That’s right, rust. If you’ve ever spent time in a desert, you’ll know that sand gets into everything and is hard to get out. Mars dust would be worse; a fine red, gritty powder that’s gonna make your airlock look like a bomb of jeweler’s rouge exploded in it. It has been hard on most of the rovers and landers we’ve sent there, and it will be even harder to wash out of a white spacesuit. It’s a manageable problem, though.

There’s probably more water on Mars in the form of polar ice caps than there is on the Moon, and it boasts a predictable array of seasons. Its tilt is roughly 25 degrees, close enough to Earth’s 23.5 degrees to give it seasons similar to ours. It has a year that is 684 Earth-days long. Its seasons are, however, about twice as long as those here, because it takes Mars roughly twice as long as the Earth to orbit the Sun. For example, the summer on Mars lasts 194 sols—Martian days, which are 37 minutes and 22 seconds longer than ours—as compared to the 93-day summer that we have here on Earth.

A colony on Mars would be cool, but given that it has 1% of the atmosphere that we have on Earth, the chances of going for a walk in the warm breeze are rather remote unless you take up some serious terraforming. Like, hundreds of years of intensive terraforming. This atmosphere—made up of about 95% carbon-dioxide—could be transformed with a bit of creativity and solar energy to breathable air. It’s a lot of work, though, for something that won’t be ready until your great-grandchildren are grown.

Making small “biosphere”-like enclosures for the colony is more likely. That pesky cosmic radiation is again going to be a problem on Mars. The magnetic field created by a dynamo of a spinning core inside our warm, gooey lava-filled Earth keeps that radiation from making us all end up with horrible cancer. Mars lacks a core like ours, and so its inhabitants will be exposed. But if a colony is sufficiently shielded inside the wall of a crater, a Mars habitat might be downright cozy.

Step Three: The Asteroids

If you’re into get-rich quick schemes and can find a mining company with the capital to invest in a rocket fitted with mining tools, making your way to an asteroid or comet is definitely the next step towards manifesting your destiny.

Larger asteroids of the metallic variety would be chock full of precious metals. A single asteroid with the diameter of 1 km could contain metals worth upwards of twenty trillion dollars. Just like with gold or oil or platinum here on Earth, all you have to do is go and get it! Which is harder than it sounds, given that you have to find such an asteroid, and then plot its orbit, and then find a way to rendezvous with it. Keep in mind that while you’re living on the asteroid and running a huge drill, you are transferring all of that mass to yourself, and then have to get back to Earth. One way to manage it is to find an asteroid that contains a sufficient amount of water or carbon-dioxide ice, which could be used as fuel to bring the mined materials back to Earth.

A better strategy might be to drive a spacecraft out to the asteroid and gather any ices it contains for fuel. Then, strap on some rockets and haul it into a nearer-Earth orbit (like somewhere outside the orbit of the Moon, as you don’t want to unsettle the natives) and mine it from there. “Colonizing” an asteroid, while potentially profitable, shouldn’t be one of your long-term goals.

Step Four: The Icies

Past the asteroid belt, other places in our Solar System potentially suitable for humans to set up shop are Enceladus and Europa. You wouldn’t want to hang out on the surface of them for very long, as they are both coated in a thick crust of ice and lack much in the way of atmosphere or energy. But the planets they hang around—Saturn and Jupiter—both are monstrosities that tug on the innards of their tiny moons, which in turn continually churn up the guts of these small celestial bodies to make them big balls of water with a rocky core.

Living underneath the ice of Europa or Enceladus—the latter of which has actual geysers that shoot into space, putting Old Faithful to shame—would give you plenty of protection from cosmic rays, and give you a chance to drive around in a submarine (think Abyss, but darker and hopefully without pathological members of the military trying to nuke everything).

Since both of these icy moons lie so far away from the Sun, setting up solar cells on the surface wouldn’t do you too much good. However, you could use the thermal energy from the water outside of your little sub-bubble to power lights, grow food (I hope you like algae), and generally keep the harsh environment of space at bay.

Once you get past this point in the Solar System, there’s not much out in the boondocks that you’d want to spend any length of time visiting. Neptune and Uranus are just too gassy to land on, and their Moons receive so little sunlight that powering and heating equipment—not to mention growing food—become daunting tasks.

So remember: Find plenty of water, get plenty of sunshine, line the walls of your spacecraft with your own excrement, and you are well on your way to colonizing the Solar System!

Nicholos Wethington is passionate about all aspects of astronomy and science, but especially likes writing about them. He is a reporter for Universe Today, and is active in his local astronomy club, the Ames Area Amateur Astronomers. Nicholos is currently collaborating on two astronomy-related books; one for adults, the other for kids. When not staring up at or writing about space, Nicholos is typically out on his bicycle.

Coming Attractions

In the March issue of Lightspeed, we’ll have new fiction from award-winning author Robert Reed (“Woman Leaves Room”) and new author Maggie Clark (“Saying the Names”), along with reprints from Stephen Baxter (“Gossamer”) and Nnedi Okorafor (“Spider the Artist”). All that plus our usual assortment of nonfiction, podcasts, and author spotlights. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed!

Thanks for reading!