Editorial, August 2011
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue fifteen of Lightspeed!

Good news, everyone! “Arvies” by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed, August 2010) has won the Million Writers Award! So congratulations to Adam-Troy, and many thanks to everyone who voted for the story. (Earlier this year, Lightspeed itself was named the winner of the Million Writers Award for best new online magazine.)

One more quick announcement before we get to this month’s teasers, in case you missed the news last month: The Lightspeed: Year One anthology, collecting all of the fiction we published in our first year (from June 2010-May 2011), will be published by Prime Books in November (pre-order now!). But never fear—all of our content will still be available on lightspeedmagazine.com; this will just be yet another way for readers to find and discover Lightspeed.

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

“Defenders” by Will McIntosh explores an isolated nation and culture of created beings, who invite their creators for a visit twenty-eight years later.

Then, in the related nonfiction, Jeremiah Tolbert teaches us “Five Ways to End an Alien Invasion.”

In John Varley’s “Just Another Perfect Day,” Varley attempts to convince us that we’ll be just fine . . . despite the panic, the amnesia, and the Martians.

Neurotopia’s Evil Monkey is back to talk memory once again in “Forget Everything You Already Know About Amnesia.”

Genevieve Valentine returns to the fiction section of Lightspeed with “The Nearest Thing,” a future in which emotional entanglement in the work place is even more complicated than we know it now.

Then, Graeme McMillan details the “Four Milestones in the Evolution of Artificial Intelligence” that lead artificial intelligence science to where it is today.

Connie Willis lets us tag along on a tour of possibility in “Non-Stop to Portales.”

And in our feature interview this month, we interview actor and newly minted author Simon Pegg, about his memoir, his movies, and growing up as a nerd.

So that’s our issue this month. Thanks for reading!

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a 2011 Hugo Award-nominee for Best Editor (Short Form), his books have been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com. John is also the co-host of io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Defenders
Will McIntosh

In an eyeblink, Lila lost all contact with the rest of the world. The silence was shocking, the sense of isolation unnerving, partly because she knew it meant the jet had penetrated the Defenders’ cloak and entered Australian airspace. For a moment she stared blankly at the stray tufts of gray hair visible over the seat back in front of her. That would be Gayatri Nadal, the Ambassador from India. Then she thought to look out the window

There was nothing to see yet; they were still above the smoky cloud-cover. It was hard to believe Australia was down there. Over the past twenty-eight years it had taken on almost mythical dimensions in Lila’s mind, and knowing she would see it any moment, see what it had become, set her heart pounding.

The Spanish ambassador, in the seat next to Lila, turned, as if noticing her for the first time. “Nervous?”

She nodded. The word didn’t begin to describe the shades and layers of what Lila was feeling, but it would do as a rough approximation.

The Spaniard’s white eyebrows pinched. “Were you even alive when the Luyten invaded?” Bolibar: His name came to her as he spoke. “Have you ever seen a Defender?”

Lila laughed, not sure if he was trying to flatter her, or if he really thought she was still in her twenties. “Oh, I’ve seen Defenders. And Luyten.” She closed her mouth. That was all she wanted to say on that topic. The last thing she wanted, given that she was the youngest ambassador on the plane, was to seem immature by getting upset on the flight in.

“Ah. I’m sorry,” he said, reading her face. “You were a young girl? I’m sorry.”

The second apology was for bringing up the painful topic, no doubt. It was impolite to bring up the Luyten invasion if you weren’t sure the person you were speaking to was amenable to the topic.

“No worries. Who doesn’t have invasion memories?” She forced a smile, turned back to the window, but it was too late. As they surged toward Australia, and humanity’s first contact with their saviors in twenty-eight years, Lila’s memories reeled out. She saw the Luyten, like enormous starfish falling from the sky, twirling in one direction and then the other, deadly flashes bursting from the tips of their five or six or seven stunted appendages. Lila squeezed the armrest, trying to let the memory be, let it play out if it needed to. She’d learned that if she resisted it would only pull her in deeper, turn into a full-fledged flashback, and if she went into PTSD mode the embassy might just pull her at the first opportunity.

She focused on her breathing, kept it smooth and even as she saw her seven-year-old self rushing into the shelter of the high school as the ground shook from explosions and the air crackled with the Luytens’ electric fire, which stank like burning sweat.

Where are they? Where are the Defenders? someone had said as they huddled in the cafeteria, watching human soldiers set up defenses outside. The soldiers had pointed their weapons this way and that, knowing that no matter what they did the Luyten would be one step ahead of them.

Then, that first glimpse of a Luyten up close: Much bigger than Lila had expected, galloping out of the trees on three arms, barreling over swings and slides, its free arms pointed forward; the blinding flash, the screams of burning soldiers who’d mostly been facing the other way, because how do you fight an enemy who knows your every thought?

Lila had squeezed her eyes shut as a half-dozen more Luyten broke from the woods. She’d tried to think of something happy—The Mermaid Frolly Show, her favorite television program. She’d resolved to keep her eyes closed and think only of the show until it was over.

Then: Her father, rushing outside with other parents to fight the Luyten, because the soldiers were all dead and the Luyten were coming. The parents trying to reach the makeshift bunker where the dead soldiers’ weapons lay amidst their toasted bodies. She remembered Mr. Suchy, her social studies teacher, swinging a fire ax at a charging Luyten, who cut him in two at the chest with a whip of its cilia.

Then: The warm wash of pee down her thighs when that watery voice—that impossible accent—called from outside: Over soon. Think of Mermaid Frolly. All over soon.

Lila’s mother covering her eyes, her trembling fingers not doing a thorough enough job, because Lila saw between the slats of Mommy’s fingers, saw Daddy’s shoulder socket when the Luyton pulled his arm off. Their stubby, fingerless appendages were deceptive, because the cilia on the end worked like long, powerful fingers.

Then: Cheering, as two Defenders leaped from the roof of the school, impossibly tall on three knobby, bone-white legs, their built-in automatic weapons blasting the Luyten with bullets the size of cannonballs, their razor sharp exoskeletons slashing the Luyton wide open as they grappled, spilling their steaming green goo insides onto the playground. The cheering redoubled when the surviving Luyton fled, with the Defenders in pursuit.

Lila took a deep, sighing breath. It had been four or five years since her last full-blown flashback, but it was inevitable. Seeing Defenders, actually standing before the massive things and talking to them, was bound to bring the memories back. It was worth it, though, to be one of the first to see how the Defenders lived, to see what sort of society they had built, and to have the opportunity to finally thank them personally.

“What are you anticipating from them?” Lila asked Bolibar.

Bolibar grunted. “That’s the big mystery, no?” He unsealed a pouch of dried fruit, offered it to Lila before helping himself. “I’m sure you sat through as many strategy meetings in your country as I did in mine, trying to anticipate why they suddenly want to reestablish ties.” He stuck out his lower lip, shook his head. “My guess is their focus is technology—they want to exchange ideas. They’re part machine, after all, and they’ve clearly made advances of their own since they segregated themselves.” Bolibar waved the air over his head, alluding to the cloak the Defenders had developed that repelled all attempts at surveillance and attacks.

Not that humanity had contemplated attacking the Defenders. No one could forget the debt owed them, even if their silent presence was unnerving. By necessity, they’d been designed to be powerful enough to fight off the Luyten, and intelligent enough to plan and execute the war without any human intervention. Once the war was over, though, what do you do with seventeen million A.I.s who are stronger and smarter than you? You give them what they want—Australia—and you hope they’re satisfied.

“That makes as much sense as anything, I guess,” Lila said. Everything seemed to make as much sense as anything else. The Defenders’ brains had been developed hastily; even the bioengineers responsible admitted they had little idea what the hodgepodge of neurological tissue and circuitry really added up to, beyond its military capability, and the Defenders retreated into self-imposed exile before anyone had a chance to find out.

Lila lifted her hand from the armrest, felt more weight than had been there a moment earlier. They were descending back into the atmosphere. She ran her hands over her thighs, wiping perspiration. Twenty-eight years of wondering and speculating, and in a few minutes they’d have their answers.

People were leaving their seats, crowding around the windows, seeking a first glimpse of Sydney. The cabin was hushed as the jet broke through the clouds and a city took shape below.

“Oh,” someone said, clearly disappointed.

The city hadn’t changed much. Visible below were skyscrapers, roads, vehicles. The jet descended, dropping far too quickly below the tops of the skyscrapers.

“Oh,” someone else said, his tone laced with surprise and disbelief. The skyscrapers were immense. Their jet was a toy that would easily fit through an office window. The Defenders had retained the look of the city, but had rebuilt it to scale to reflect their size.

“Of course,” Lila said softly. She meant it as a personal aside, but several other ambassadors looked at her, waiting for her to elaborate. “They’re brand new beings—their only point of reference is how humans do things.”

The landing gear ground into place beneath them, and the Fasten Seat Belts sign chimed. Reluctantly, the ambassadors returned to their seats. It was quiet as the jet descended.

A Defender met them on the tarmac. They’d always reminded Lila of the massive statues on Easter Island, if those statues were stretched, and stood on three legs, and were made of what looked like enormous shards of broken glass. Their faces were chiseled and angular, set on a long, neckless cylinder.

“Thank you for coming,” the Defender said as Lila stepped off the jet. He repeated this as each ambassador stepped through the door, which meant he repeated the same phrase sixty-four times. When they had all disembarked, the Defender grimaced (or perhaps it was meant as a smile) and said, “You must be hungry after your flight.”

The flight had been less than two hours, and they’d been served a meal, but Lila nodded politely, a tight smile frozen on her face as the Defender gestured to their left.

Something even larger than a Defender squeezed out of a hangar.

Even from a hundred meters, even after twenty-eight years, there was no mistaking the thing that rushed at them.

When Lila was next aware of her surroundings she was sprinting down the runway, her terror given voice by a tight squeal on each outbreath. A Luyten. It had been a Luyten that broke from the hangar and charged. One of the other ambassadors passed Lila, his arms pumping, his loose, old cheeks flapping, his eyes round with fear.

“There is no danger. No danger,” the Defender called, and as before, with “Thank you for coming,” it repeated the words over and over. Lila glanced over her shoulder and saw she hadn’t been mistaken: It was a Luyten, but it wasn’t chasing them. It stood beside the Defender on four legs, something balanced on its fifth.

A silver tray. With food on it.

Lila slowed, stopped. The Defender continued to shout, “No danger.”

“What the hell is going on?” It was Bolibar.

“Is it a . . . I don’t know, a reproduction of some kind?” Lila asked.

“It doesn’t look like a reproduction,” Bolibar said. He took a few tentative steps toward the thing. Lila followed. When the Luyten didn’t move they took a few more. Soon most of the ambassadors were standing in a loose circle, thirty meters out from the Defender and the Luyten.

“I am profoundly sorry,” the Defender said, bowing its head. “This was meant as a surprise, but not a cruel one. I will find out whose idea it was and surely he will be killed.” He gestured toward the Luyten. “But please, eat. It won’t harm you.”

No one moved. In the stunned silence the same question had to be running through every ambassador’s head: What was a Luyten doing here, alive? Hadn’t they all been hunted down and killed, their ship (which had hidden behind the moon during the invasion) destroyed? The moment stretched as the Defender held its gesture of invitation, its prominent brow leaving its sunken eyes hidden in a swatch of shadow.

Lila wanted to get as far from the Luyten as she could; the hair on her arms was prickling, her heart drumming.

Bolibar finally broke the circle. The Luyten extended the enormous tray toward him as he approached. There were a hundred delicacies on the tray, from caviar to a whole, steaming roast turkey. Bolibar was right—too much was riding on this to refuse a gesture of hospitality. Lila tried to followed suit, but her feet wouldn’t move. She kept seeing that Luyten breaking from the trees and charging at her school.

It must be reading her thoughts, this very moment. The thought horrified her, that this creature was in her head, knew that she was afraid, felt her repulsion.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, focused on turning her fear into searing hatred. Let the thing read that. Striding into the circle, Lila plucked a croissant from the edge of the tray, held her smile and took a bite, resisting a desperate urge to flee from under the shadow of the massive beast.

Some of the other ambassadors followed suit. The Defender’s mouth stretched into a long, straight line of satisfaction.

Lila couldn’t take her eyes off the Luyten. Few had ever seen one from this distance and lived. Its skin had a stony, mottled texture, and there were bristles protruding at evenly-spaced intervals across it. The cilia protruding from the tips of its appendages was as thick as nautical rope, and transparent. A half-dozen randomly-placed apertures contracted and expanded like giant anuses. They were interchangeable, Lila knew—each could be used for eating, breathing, excreting, mating, speaking.

“I don’t understand,” someone said. “What is a Luyten doing here? Weren’t they all killed?”

“Most were killed. Some were kept.” The Defender lifted one of its legs and worked its claw. “Our manual dexterity is limited. Our fathers built us to fight, not to live afterward. Luyten perform tasks we can’t. Or don’t want to.”

Lila looked to her left and right. The other ambassadors looked as stunned and incredulous as she felt.

“How many of them have you . . . kept?” Bolivar asked.

The Defender wobbled its free leg. “Several million.”

“Several million?” the ambassador from China said. He sounded very far away. Lila’s vision went gray, and she was afraid she might pass out. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths, tried to clear her spinning head.

Suddenly, the lack of contact with the outside world seemed enormous. Through all of their strategy sessions no one ever brought up this possibility. Lila needed guidance. Several million?

After they finished choking down a few anxious bites of the feast, the ambassadors were whisked off to a limo the size of a house. Lifts took them to seats retrofitted to human size.

“Please relax and enjoy the sights,” their Defender guide said. He’d finally given his name as Walter. Lila had a hard time thinking of one of these towering figures as Walter. “I’ll show you our city, then I have a surprise for you that is very thoughtful of us.”

“I’m sure it will be,” the U.S. ambassador said, ever the diplomat.

The city was bustling—it was downright packed with Defenders. They were wearing clothes: Massive three-legged jeans, business suits with ties like tarpaulins. Luyten were also plentiful, following deferentially behind Defenders, repairing vehicles, cleaning the streets with steaming, high-pressured water.

When the tour ended they were taken to a play. The marquis outside announced Richard II, in a limited engagement.

“I don’t believe this,” Bolibar whispered, sidling up to Lila as they were led down the aisle past hundreds of Defenders already seated for the performance, to the front row, where special seats had been reserved for them. Lila only nodded, afraid to be overheard. Her mind was reeling; this was beyond bizarre. She could see Luyten scrambling in the wings, working the lighting, handling props. The Prime Minister and her staff weren’t going to believe Lila’s report.

The Defender playing King Richard wore a long white robe with gold inlay, and a crown the size of a bathtub, but if the Defenders were attempting to act, it was not apparent to Lila. They recited their lines as if reading, moved about the stage perfunctorily, and as often as not looked at the audience rather than the character they were speaking to.

“You must have mixed feelings about the Defenders, being from Australia,” Bolibar whispered to her as the performance dragged on. He made it sound casual, but was probably more interested than he let on.

Lila felt uncomfortable speaking during the performance, even in a whisper, but it would be rude to shush Bolibar, or ignore him. She kept her answer brief. “No. I’m so grateful to them that sometimes I feel like I’m going to bust. I cry when they show those Victory Day tributes on TV. Giving up my homeland was so small a price to pay that it barely registers.” She could have elaborated, explained how Defenders had saved her life in a very personal manner, but their whispering was causing people nearby to glance their way.

Bolibar tilted his head in a very European gesture. “And the Americans and Canadians were kind enough to provide you a new home?”

He left it a question instead of a statement. The flat, cold region running from North Dakota to Saskatoon that was now New Australia was not prime real estate.

“Spain didn’t offer us anything, as I recall,” she whispered into his hairy ear. “There are degrees of stinginess.”

He laughed, loud enough to make Lila flinch and nudge his arm. “How very true,” he whispered. “We’re a stingy people, the Spanish.”

The Defender playing Richard stopped mid-stanza. He came to the edge of the stage. “Why are you laughing? Does this seem like a comedy to you? Maybe you think you can do better?”

Embarrassed, Bolibar shook his head. “I’m—”

Almost casually, the Defender reached out and slashed Bolibar with its front leg. “We’ve worked hard to get this right for you. And you’re laughing at us.”

Lila sat frozen as Bolibar’s insides slid out. His mouth hung open, his eyes wide with surprise as he slowly tipped forward.

“Uncalled for,” Walter shouted as he leaped onto the stage, whipping two arms around. “Deeply uncalled for.” A dozen other Defenders followed, roaring. Some attacked Richard, others leapt to defend him. One of Richard’s legs was torn, or bitten, or cut off, and it fell into the seats, landing on a fleeing ambassador and slicing him open. A few ambassadors crowded around Bolibar, crying out for medical attention as he bled out onto the seat and polished floor. In the seats behind them, Defenders roared and jostled. Lila could do nothing but stare at Bolibar.

One of the Defenders on stage fell into the seats, his nose hanging loose and nearly-severed, blood pouring from the gash in his face. He landed on the Tunisian Ambassador; Lila could hear his back snap before he disappeared under the massive Defender.

The fighting raged on until, by some silent assent, the surviving combatants broke off.

Walter, who was mostly unharmed, motioned to Luyten at the back of the theater. The Luyten scrambled to clean up the carnage. They dragged away Defenders and pieces of Defenders. One reached across half a dozen aisles and plucked the limp mess that was Bolibar. Lila stumbled to her knees and crawled out of the way.

She joined the rest of the surviving ambassadors at the back of the theater as pools of oily blood were mopped by the Luyten.

As the last of the dead were being carried off, Walter waved his arms at the murmuring crowd and said, “Please. Quiet, please. Please, sit. Let us continue.”

Lila was sure she’d misunderstood. Continue? As in, continue the play?

The lights dimmed and the actors returned to the stage. Not knowing what else to do, dazed ambassadors began shuffling down the aisles. Lila looked around, seeking—. She didn’t know what she was seeking. The real Defenders, maybe—the ones who charged over her school and saved her life.

Lila was sure there was no way she could make it through the rest of the performance. Surely she would faint, or be unable to stifle her overwhelming urge to bolt. The seats around Bolibar’s bloodstained one were empty; ambassadors were glancing around, eyes wide, afraid to move or speak. Lila risked a glance back at the section where Defenders were seated. They were watching the performance as if nothing had happened.

The next morning they boarded a hyper-rail to the summit. The ambassadors were given no explanation for why they were directed to land in Sydney if the summit was to be held in Adelaide, four hundred miles away.

As the rail whisked them through the exurbs of Sydney and into the countryside, the Defenders’ motive became clear. They passed factory after factory, surrounded by mile after mile of weapons. Aircraft, ships, heat cannons, guerilla craft. Lila’s insides felt liquid as she surveyed the sea of shining metal. They must have a weapon for every Defender alive. Unless they were making more Defenders as well.

Were they capable of that? Certainly they hadn’t been engineered with enough intellect to accomplish that.

Overhead, Defender fighter aircraft, as big as skyscrapers, flew drills. They were the same models human engineers had designed for them to battle the Luyten.

“Look at those—they look like Luyten technology.”

Lila followed the British ambassador’s gaze. Row upon row of assault sleeves, similar to the ones the Luyten had used to drop from the sky, filled a valley paved in concrete. Hushed whispers shot about the cabin. Since they had Luyten slaves, it seemed they had access to their technological knowledge.

Another thought occurred to her: If the Defenders had Luyten slaves, the Luyten could tell them what the ambassadors were thinking. “Oh, shit,” Lila whispered. She closed her eyes, tried to calm herself. There was no indication the Defenders intended the rest of the world harm. They were paranoid, yes. Unstable, yes. That didn’t mean they were gearing up for war.

The Defenders didn’t have a leader—they had a triumvirate. All three were on a dais, sitting in enormous plush seats that looked suspiciously like thrones.

The triumvirate didn’t speak. Walter did the talking. Lila had become more relaxed as Walter talked of their admiration for humans, their recognition that without humans, they would not exist.

“We wanted this time of solitude to decide who we were, what life suited us,” Walter was saying. “We realize that we don’t want to be separate. We want to be part of the world, to learn from our mothers and fathers, to engage with them in athletics, to study in their universities.”

Engage them in athletics? Lila tried to picture a Defender playing tight end for the Dakota Bulls.

“Of course, to do so, we require some accommodations.” Walter stepped off the stage, squatted over the one vacant human-sized chair, pretending to sit. A few ambassadors laughed politely at the attempt at humor. Lila couldn’t bring herself to smile, even insincerely. The empty chair was Bolibar’s. “We are not designed for human structures. We cannot be dignified if we must squat and crawl through spaces not built for us.”

A map of the world materialized behind Walter. Some areas, highlighted in orange, were pulsing. “To successfully integrate we will require places of our own. Certain blocks, towns, states, and provinces. We have mapped out those places.”

New Orleans. The San Francisco Bay area. France. A large swath of central China. What looked to be much of Nigeria and Cameroon. There were dozens of separate spots, maybe a hundred. Was that Jerusalem? It was as if they’d purposely chosen locations that were crucial to humans for one reason or another.

“You want us to give you these places?” the Indian ambassador asked, her tone measured.

“We welcome humans to live in the areas we will control, but they will be refashioned to accommodate us.”

Lila wondered if Walter’s phrasing was intentional: The areas we will control, not the areas we would control. It could be his inexperience with the nuances of language, or it could be meant to convey that he was telling us them how things would be, not opening negotiations. Lila weighed the danger of asking directly, decided it was worth the risk.

“Are these locations negotiable?” she asked.

Lila half-expected Walter to look to the triumvirate for guidance, but he simply closed his eyes for a moment, as if searching for words, or patience. “Our cartographers worked very hard on this map.” He sounded almost hurt.

The huge door swung open and a Luyton padded in carrying refreshments. If the Defenders got what they wanted, there would be Luyten crawling around everywhere.

“After you’ve had something to eat, please, take some time to contact your respective governments and tell them the good news,” Walter said. “We have lifted the communications cloak for the evening.”

Lila burst into her gymnasium-sized room and lit up her com. She’d almost finished setting up a secure connection when she noticed the Luyten. It was pressed into a corner of the room, like a crayfish backed between two river rocks.

She inhaled to scream.

“If you cry out, I will be killed,” the Luyten said.

Its bizarre accent made her shudder. Its speech was full of hissing air and background sounds like water draining. She inched toward the door. The only clear thought she could form was to get away.

“Please.” It dropped to a prone position, three appendages on the floor, three folded. “We must speak.”

Lila paused. She didn’t want to speak to this thing, but this was not about her. She was an emissary. “Then speak.”

The Luyten returned to a standing position. It towered over her. “You hate us, yes, but you feel sympathy as well. You know what is being done to us is abominable.”

“Don’t tell me what I think,” Lila said.

“There’s no need for you to speak. Propriety demands I wait while you form words, but it slows our exchange.”

She opened her mouth to tell it to stay out of her head, then considered her situation. She was alone with it; it could pull her limbs off in an instant. Unbidden, an image her father being dismembered flashed through her mind.

“I have no reason to hurt you,” it said. “We’re not like the Defenders. Violence is not our default response.”

Tell me what you came to say, she thought.

“They are breeding us by force, ignoring our affiliative patterns. It is intolerable.”

I’m sorry, she thought, grudgingly, because it was the diplomatic thing to think. They had invaded, murdered, terrorized, and now they wanted her to feel sympathy for their plight?

“We had no choice but to invade. Your species would have done the same.”

“No choice?” she said aloud. “You—”

“We’d been searching for a habitable planet for four hundred generations. Finally we found one. We heard your thoughts, we knew before asking what your answer would be. You would never allow us to immigrate—you would fight. Why ask aloud when you already have your answer?”

So you opted for genocide, rather than go on looking? How noble. She thought, and left it at that. There was no excuse for killing except self-defense. It was the clearest moral distinction, the closest Lila knew to a line that separated good from evil.

“That line is an illusion,” the Luyten said.

She kept forgetting the Luyten could read every thought she formed, not simply those she wanted it to hear. It was a staggering advantage, as her species had discovered when they invaded. Lila wondered how far into her mind the thing could reach. It had said she felt sympathy as well as hatred for them, but she didn’t remember a moment wasted feeling sorry for the Luyten.

“We hear layer upon layer. Your brains are compartmentalized; there are always a few lines of dialogue, often contradictory.”

“What is it you want to say to me?” Lila asked. She wanted this thing away from her. She found herself monitoring her own thoughts as she reeled them out, then monitoring the thoughts of the monitor. It was a maddening loop.

“I’m sorry. I’ll state my message. The Defenders are a grave danger. You see that now. They will seize territory from you until you are in no better position than we are.” It took a step toward her; she tensed, resisting the urge to step back. “If you will attack, we will aid you. We can serve as ground forces. As soon as your commanders know what they want from us, we’ll know, and we’ll comply—”

“Don’t be shocked.” The Luyten interrupted itself as waves of shock tore through Lila.

You’re proposing we ally with you against the Defenders? And if we did? What would keep you from turning on us once the Defenders were gone? It was an insane notion. Yet what did the Luyten have to lose by proposing it?

“There will not be many of us left, after such a war. Maybe none. And as I said, violence is not our default; we prefer reason and compromise. Unlike the Defenders.” Its voice shifted, suddenly came from a different orifice, as if the first had grown fatigued. “They are crazy. You made them too quickly.”

Lila barked a bitter laugh. “Yes, well, we were in a hurry.”

“I know. I’m sorry. We’re sorry.”

Lila couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. “Why did you choose me? Why not the U.S. ambassador, or India? They’re the ones with the military firepower.”

If she hadn’t known it was impossible, Lila might have suspected the Luyten hadn’t heard her. “Well?” she finally added.

“Mermaid Frolly,” it said. “All over soon.”

Lila yelped, like she’d been goosed. How could it know . . . then she remembered it could read her thoughts, even the ones deep down. She composed herself. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I chose you because we have that connection.”

“What connection?”

There was another long pause. Lila waited.

“I once spoke those words to you. Long ago.”

Lila dropped her com and sank to the edge of her bed. “You once . . . ” Barely a day had gone by in her life when she didn’t hear those words, the twisted attempt to console her with words spit from the hole of a monster coming to tear her to pieces. She looked at the massive thing standing over her. “You, personally?”

“Yes.”

“Did—” She could hardly get the words out. “Did you kill my father?”

“I don’t know,” it said, and maybe the extra draining sound it made then, like water down a flushed toilet, was to them a sound of regret, or apology.

“You traumatized me. You may have killed my father. You think that’s a connection worth exploiting?”

The Luyten deflated noticeably. Maybe it was exhaling, or sighing. “It was the only connection I had. We are desperate. Perhaps it was a mistake.”

Lila didn’t know where to begin. Everything bad, all of the suffering in her life could be reduced to this Luyten.

“As I said, if you cry out I will be killed. You can choose this. I would understand.”

She pressed her hands against the sides of her head, trying to stop the room from reeling. “I don’t need your permission. Or your apology, if that’s what you’re offering.”

“No. But you need what we’re offering.” The Luyten raised two of its appendages and took another tentative step toward Lila. “The Defenders were designed to kill, and they will go on killing until there is no life left.”

“Do you feel remorse for the people you killed?” She wasn’t ready to move back to business. She might never have another chance to speak to her father’s killer.

It settled on the floor like a giant Labrador. “It’s difficult to kill when you can hear your enemies’ fear. It’s more difficult still to hear your pain, all these years later. We feel more remorse for killing you than you can even imagine.”

Anger rose in Lila at the suggestion. They dropped out of the sky with their guns blazing, tearing little girls’ fathers to pieces.

“Fair enough,” the Luyten said. “Perhaps one day we can begin to make it up to you.” It rose, and moved toward the door.

“Don’t you want to know if I’m going to pass on your proposal?” Lila called, then realized how stupid the question was. It knew she would pass along everything it said, whether she wanted to or not.

The eighth ambassador to be killed, Laban Ogego of Kenya, happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Two Defenders got into an argument over the placement of a chair alongside a parade route, and one of them fell on Ogego before he could flee. Skipping such invitations was not an option, as Francisca Villagran, Ambassador from Guatemala, had discovered when she accidentally drowned hours after reneging on a promise to attend a Luyten footrace with a Defender named Baxter. Ambassadors were celebrities— highly sought-after (and fought over) as guests or escorts.

“Any word?” Faruk whispered to Lila as they were leaving Ogego’s funeral.

Lila shook her head. “There won’t be. Either it’ll happen or it won’t.” They speculated in coded whispers; everyone had an opinion, but no one knew for sure. Meanwhile the Defenders were busy making plans for their diaspora.

Lila said goodbye to Faruk as he headed toward whatever event was awaiting him next. Lila had a free hour, and decided to walk in Victory Park.

The ambassadors were split on whether invading Australia would be a good thing. A quick strike while the Defenders were still contained, aided by millions of Luyten, might be their best chance. On the other hand, the ambassadors would all be killed as soon as the Defenders detected the invasion.

Lila spotted a glint of green plastic buried in fallen leaves. She kicked it loose: A flattened Lido Lemonade bottle. She chuckled. “Bits of us are still here, even twenty-eight years later.”

A Luyten burst out of the brush just ahead. Lila nearly shrieked, still not completely accustomed to the sight of them.

“Hurry,” it said, rushing at Lila. “Your people are coming. The first will reach the shore in minutes. You’re in great danger.”

Lila gaped at the thing as adrenaline coursed through her.

The Luyten gestured at Lila. “Come, Mermaid Frolly, it’s time for me to make amends.”

She hadn’t recognized it, of course. They all looked the same.

A shrieking beat the air, on and off in two-second bursts. A warning system to scramble the troops, which probably consisted of every Defender.

Lila stepped toward the Luyten. “Where can I go?”

“We’ve set up an underground bunker. You must stay hidden until we reach it.”

Lila tried to think of something the Luyten could carry her in—a crate, a rug.

“No Luyten would be carrying a crate or a rug during an invasion. Here.” One of the Luyten’s apertures expanded. “Here I can keep you safe.”

She didn’t understand what it wanted. Why was it opening its mouth/anus/womb?

“Get in,” it said.

Lila almost laughed. “You want me—”

“There’s no time. Yes.” After a moment it added, “It won’t be comfortable for me, either.”

In the distance, the sound of snapping trees joined the din of the siren.

The Luyten waited, its sphincter still pushed open.

“No.” She’d rather die.

“No you wouldn’t. Half of you is screaming at the other half to move. Listen to the sane half, the half that your Defenders did not inherit. Hurry.”

A hundred yards into the wooded area to her right, a tree crashed down, then two more. They would kill her as soon as they saw her. They would slice her open without a second thought, just as they’d done to Bolibar.

Lila approached the Luyten.

“Remove your shoes, please,” it said.

She pulled off her shoes, leaned one palm against the Luyten’s marbled skin. It was thick and warm, and gave under her hand like a soufflé. She inserted a foot into the thing’s mouth. It felt moist, warm bordering on hot. Her leg sunk to the thigh, lubricated by slime. Still steadying herself with one hand she swung her other leg up and in, unable to suppress mewls of disgust as she sunk to the waist. The muscles around her spasmed—tight, loose, tight again.

“Arms,” the Luyten said, speaking from another hole. It did not sound comfortable.

Lila pulled her arms in, whimpered as she slid further, to her neck. She felt the muscles clench around her, squeezing to keep her from falling further and suffocating.

Then the Luyten was hurtling down the path, perpendicular to the coming Defenders. It cut into the trees and squatted, motionless, not even breathing. Lila heard the Defenders pass, their feet crunching brush.

When the noise receded, the Luyten released an enormous puff of air, then rose and continued.

This time it was humans who dropped from the sky, jet-booting rather than spinning. They dropped out of compact fighters flying low beneath the Defenders’ cloak.

Lila watched, her heart in her throat, as hundreds of Luyten swarmed into the street to surround the soldiers as soon as they landed, leading them to cover.

A half-dozen Defenders in guerilla fliers appeared over the rooftops, circling above. They fired canonbursts at a scrum of Luyten and soldiers. Bodies exploded; pieces flew in every direction as her Luyten hugged the walls, moving on two appendages.

Above, a lone Luyten flew into view, clinging to the outside of a guerilla fighter not designed to accommodate its size and shape. It steered into one of the flying Defenders. There was a blinding flash, like a sudden burst of fireworks.

“We’re almost there,” her Luyten said. “Almost safe.”

An explosion tore at her eardrums; not ten yards away, the wall exploded, spitting bricks and glass. An instant later, she was struck deaf, as the world flipped upside-down. They hurtled end-over-end, heat scorching Lila’s face, flames, rooftops, shouts closing in from all sides.

She hit the ground with a tooth-rattling jolt, and she and her Luyten lay still.

Lila tried to lift her head, but it dropped back to the pavement. Feet rushed by.

“Come on,” she called to the Luyten. She was confused about what had happened, where they were, but it was clear they weren’t in the bunker. She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them again. The world came into better focus.

Two of the Luyten’s appendages were gone. Its blood was pinwheeled across the pavement and up the side of a storefront. Puffs of hot air pushed past Lila as the Luyten’s center rose and fell, rose and fell.

“This way!” Ambassador Nadal waved frantically to her from a swing-up steel door in the sidewalk.

Lila scrabbled at the pavement, trying to pull free. She came out a few inches, then slid back. She pulled harder, groaning with effort, and felt a rippling in the Luyten’s muscles around her waist and feet. She spilled partway onto the pavement, spit out by the Luyten.

“Thank you,” she said. The Luyten was still, its center no longer puffing.

Lila ran, bent at the waist, to the safety of the door. On the third step down to the cellar she paused, turned to look at the Luyten for a moment. A Defender lay close by, dead, its face caved in, its legs smoking.

There was no way for her to make sense of what she was feeling, so she didn’t try. She climbed down to join the other ambassadors who had made it. There were about a dozen so far. As Ambassador Nadal swung the door shut and they were plunged into near-darkness to wait out the assault, Lila wiped tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, roughly, as if they had no business being there.

Will McIntosh is a Hugo award winner and Nebula finalist whose short stories have appeared in Asimov’s (where he won the 2010 Reader’s Award for short story), Strange Horizons, and Science Fiction and Fantasy: Best of the Year, and others. His debut novel, Soft Apocalypse, based on a 2005 short story that was nominated for both the British Science Fiction Association and the British Fantasy Society awards, has just been released. His story “Followed,” which was published in John Joseph Adams’ anthology The Living Dead, is currently being produced as a short film. A New Yorker transplanted to the rural south, Will is a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University, where he studies Internet dating, and how people’s TV, music, and movie choices are affected by recession and terrorist threat. In 2008 he became the father of twins.

Author Spotlight: Will McIntosh
by Erin Stocks

Will you tell us about the origins of the Luyten and the Defenders?

I’ve always found starfish kind of creepy. They just don’t seem like they could be alive, given their appearance. So when I wanted to create an alien race that would be repulsive to Lila, starfish came to mind. I got the name of their species—Luyten—from a star chart. I wanted a name that didn’t seem made up, so I looked at names of stars until I found one that had the right ring to it.

The Defenders came from the statues of Easter Island. The thought of one of those statues coming at you seemed intimidating, but they needed legs, so I gave them three long ones to ramp up the strangeness factor.

Why do you think Lila became an ambassador?

She idolized the Defenders. They saved her, personally, from a terrible fate. In her childhood eyes they were superheroes come to life. So the opportunity to represent humanity when the Defenders reopened communication was to her the ultimate honor.

Did evolution play a role in the lives of the Defenders, perhaps in those twenty-eight years of their self-imposed exile?

I don’t know if I’d say evolution so much as seeking a reason to exist, seeking an identity. I envisioned this newly formed species standing around, not knowing what to value, how to go about creating their own culture and norms after their mission was complete. It’s a bit like several million Frankensteins left to their own devices once Victor was through with them.

In a way, it almost seems like the Defenders had taken on more human characteristics than they might have realized; gloating, manipulation, etc. Was that why they invited the ambassadors down to Australia in the first place?

They’re looking for some standard with which to compare their accomplishments. Having been left with a void after the Luyten are defeated, they’ve been trying to forge an identity, but they’re not terribly self-aware and find themselves with no way to judge if they’ve done well. As their creators, they hold humans in awe to a certain extent (although mixed with a seething unconscious rage at the haphazard way they were created).

While the ending is satisfying in terms of Lila’s emotional journey regarding the Luyten, the war between man and Luyten against the Defenders has just begun. Why did you choose to end the story at this point?

I didn’t think it mattered much who actually won. At least, as I wrote it didn’t matter much to me. There were two levels of the story that interested me. First, Lila trying to come to terms with having to look at a species she grew up utterly despising and fearing—the ultimate boogeymen who haunted her every waking (and sleeping) moment—as her allies and saviors. And conversely learning that her childhood saviors are in actuality psychopaths. Second, I was interested in the larger idea of developing a weapon out of desperation, then not knowing what to do with it when you’re finished fighting. It came out of stories I’ve read of some community that releases mongooses (or whatever) to fight their snake (or whatever) problem, but when the snakes are all killed the mongooses keep multiplying. In this case the human race had no choice but to release the mongooses, but that doesn’t make the problem any less difficult.

Your novel Soft Apocalypse was just released. Based on your biography, (and this story not withstanding), you seem to have a fondness for apocalypses (which most of us here at Lightspeed appreciate!). How did that come to be?

I’m not sure. I’ve always been fascinated with old, broken-down things. The thought of a junkyard filled with old buses, jalopies, appliances gives me chills of delight. Exploring old abandoned buildings is my idea of a fabulous afternoon. I love New York City because so many of the buildings are ancient, and have those water towers on them that are a hundred years old. That’s where it starts for me—I’m fascinated by wreckage. It’s funny, because my sister shares my fascination with apocalypses. She’s not a science fiction fan, only a fan of end-of-the-world stories. It must be something lost in our personal history.

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks’s fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth (upcoming), Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading for her SFF writing group, and can be found on erinstocks.com.

Five Ways to End an Alien Invasion
Jeremiah Tolbert

They strike from the heavens and rain down fiery death. They infiltrate us secretly, replacing us with doppelgängers. Their evil plants strangle our children and livestock. They impregnate our women with creepy telepathic children. Their terrible death machines burn our cities into ash. They affix to our brain stems and control us like meat puppets. They practice terrifying experimentation on their captured human slaves, transplanting Sarah Jessica Parker’s head onto the body of a poor, innocent Chihuahua. Their methods are many. Nearly the only common element between the alien invasions depicted in our films, books, and video games is that humanity appears doomed from the start.

After all, they come to us. We barely have the means to leave low-Earth orbit, but these would-be conquerors have traveled light years with the express purpose of pressing us into human-flavored cider. You can usually assume that if they are here, they are more advanced than us technologically.

In truth, there are not five distinct ways to win a battle against an alien invasion. There are barely five documented and proven methods to end them. When you think about it, it’s amazing we poorly-evolved apes ever survive their superior onslaught at all.

Not only are their methods manifold—aliens also have diverse reasons and goals when it comes to bending the human race to their vast and unsympathetic wills. For some, we’re mostly liquid bags of precious nutrients—we’re basically walking, talking Capri Suns. To others, we are fleshy shells in which to live or ride upon, or work to death as slaves. Then there are the aliens to whom we are merely an inconvenience to be crushed before tapping into our sweet, sweet natural resources.

Despite the odds, our incompetence, and their obvious technical superiority, we often succeed in putting a stop to their aggression.

Sometimes, we even win.

1. Sneeze On Them

“But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow.” — War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

In the most common method of ending an alien invasion, humans don’t get any of the credit. It is our “microscopic allies” that manage to break down the alien defenses, leaving only decaying piles of bodies for our surviving sanitation workers to dispose of.

Plenty of movies are focused more on the results than the methods. Whether it’s the fact that old-lady yodel-music causes their brain tissues to explode or their spaceships run on operating systems compatible with MacOS, we don’t win because of our ingenuity or determination. We survive for the same reason we have often survived extinction—dumb luck.

2. Make Super Soldiers

“You want to make me the best soldier possible. Go down and look at the standings. Look at the all-time standings. So far you’re doing an excellent job with me. Congratulations. Now when are you going to put me up against a good army?” — Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Humanity au naturale is just wimpy compared to most aliens in invasion scenarios. Not only do the aliens have superior firepower—they’re often stronger, faster, and smarter than us.

But we’re adaptable, and we can improve ourselves with genetics, cybernetics, and other-etics technologies we haven’t even conceived of yet. If humanity isn’t good enough to win, well, we make ourselves good enough to win.

In Ender’s Game, this takes the form of turning child geniuses into xenocidal generals. In the blockbuster video game Halo, humans created a group of super soldiers called the Spartans—initially to deal with human uprisings—but ultimately, they become crucial in the ongoing war with the Covenant, an alliance of multiple alien races. A single Spartan known as Master Chief mows down thousands of Covenant forces in the three Halo titles released so far.

3. Outsmart Them

“What you have brought into the world may be utterly alien, it may share none of your desires or hopes, it may look upon your greatest achievements as childish toys—yet it is something wonderful, and you will have created it.” — Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

This is perhaps the most difficult method to swallow. The aliens must fundamentally have more advanced technology than us if they have traveled from their world to ours, given that we still have technical difficulties driving down to the corner store for a gallon of milk. Still, intelligent people are perfectly capable of being perfectly stupid under the right circumstances.

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, a classic according to most distinguished readers of the subgenre, involves an alien invasion by the Overlords. These are aliens of a different sort—less “devour our young” and more of the “I’m grounding you to your room for your own good.” Sure, they end wars and bring about a utopian golden age, but at the cost of human creativity. When the aliens finally reveal themselves, they resemble Tim Curry’s demonic character in Legend. Humans attempt to rebel against the Overlords and found a hippie commune, which ends like most communes tend to—total nuclear annihilation, but not before a bunch of psychic children are born. They evolve into a super-consciousness and become one with the Overmind, thus effectively ending the need for the occupation for the Overlords who all this time have been shepherding humanity towards this goal.

Luckily for the blood-thirsty reader, not all invasions are so benign.

4. All-Out War!

“We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!” — President Thomas Whitmore, Independence Day

In the waning days of the American Empire, it’s been popular to depict alien invasions defeated by our conventional military hardware—perhaps with a little assistance from our devious scientists working behind enemy lines, but mostly in the “War!” scenarios, we win because we’re vicious bastards with a whole hell of a lot of explosive Made-In-U.S. ordinance.

The recent Battle: Los Angeles doesn’t depict an ultimate victory against the full alien forces, but it does feature ordinary military grunts out-fighting and out-thinking an overwhelming force of alien attackers—mostly with lots of shouted lines like “Look out!” and “Eat this!” against a backdrop of satisfying explosions tearing up the Los Angeles skyline.

Battle: Los Angeles is so far unique from other “Our military owns!” scenarios in that it depicts extraterrestrials with dirty technology that is not so obviously superior to ours. Their ships are loud and ramshackle. It doesn’t address how such patchwork methods of transportation survive in interstellar flight, but their decidedly lower-tech appearance lends some credence to the notion that we could beat them with the primitive tools we have.

5. Surrender or Assimilate

“One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords.” — Kent Brockman, The Simpsons: “Deep Space Homer”

When faced with the choice of turning over our planet or being atomized, sometimes the best thing to do is to turn it over and live to fight another day. We humans have an independent streak—we rarely seem content to let alien invaders actually rule us for any length of time. Even in Battlefield Earth, primitive cave people eventually rise up and throw off the shackles of alien oppression. In the film version, they do it by learning to fly thousand-year-old Harrier jets—which takes an admirable amount of mule-headed determination when you still associate the sound of thunder with “GODS AAAANGRRY!”

Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy takes human-alien assimilation to the extreme of literally combining species. Rather than fighting the alien Oankali, who arrive after a nuclear war that has nearly wiped out humanity, the survivors are genetically-engineered to cross-breed with the aliens, creating new alien-human hybrids (leading to some hot alien-on-human tentacle sex). In the final book Imago, one of the hybrids convinces the Oankali to reverse their sterilization of the remaining humans and allow them to go colonize Mars (and no doubt screw that planet up, too).

So there you have five solid plans of action in the event of a hostile alien invasion. Whether you choose to fight back with nuclear missiles, engineer an army of Master Chiefs, hope they catch the flu, or resign the species to an existence of laboring in their sugar mines, you can rest easy knowing you are prepared to deal with their inevitable arrival.

That is, assuming they don’t just throw asteroids at us from orbit until we’ve been reduced to an evenly distributed, thin layer of pink paste.

Jeremiah Tolbert is a writer, photographer, and web developer living in the foothills of Northern Colorado. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in places such as Interzone, Polyphony, Way of the Wizard edited by John Joseph Adams, and the new ebook fanzine b0t edited by Grant Stone.

Just Another Perfect Day
John Varley

Don’t Worry.

Everything is under control.

I know how you’re feeling. You wake up alone in a strange room, you get up, you look around, you soon discover that both doors are locked from the outside. It’s enough to unsettle anybody, especially when you try and try and try to recall how you got here and you just can’t do it.

But beyond that . . . there’s this feeling. I know you’re feeling it right now. I know a lot of things—and I’ll reveal them all as we go along.

One of the things I know it this:

If you will sit down, put this message back on the table where you found it, and take slow, deep breaths while counting to one hundred, you’ll feel a lot better.

I promise you will.

Do that now.

See what I mean? You do feel a lot better.

That feeling won’t last for long, I’m sorry to say.

I wish there was an easier way to do this, but there isn’t, and believe me, many ways have been tried. So here we go:

This is not 1986.

You are not twenty-five years old.

The date is

January February March April May June

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

2006 2007 2008

A lot of things have happened in

twentytwenty-onetwenty-two

years, and I’ll tell you all you need to know about that in good time.

For now . . . Don’t Worry.

Slow, deep breaths. Close your eyes. Count to a hundred.

You’ll feel better.

I promise.

If you’ll get up now, you’ll find that the bathroom door will open. There’s a mirror in there. Take a look in it, get to know the

forty-fiveforty-sixforty-seven

-year old who will be in there, looking back at you. . . 

And Don’t Worry.

Take deep breaths, and so forth.

I’ll tell you more when you get back.

Well.

I know how rough that was. I know you’re trembling. I know you’re feeling confusion, fear, anger . . . a thousand emotions.

And I know you have a thousand questions. They will all be answered, every one of them, at the proper time.

Here are some ground rules.

I will never lie to you. You can’t imagine how much care and anguish has gone into the composition of this letter. For now, you must take my word that things will be revealed to you in the most useful order, and in the easiest way that can be devised. You must appreciate that not all your questions can be answered at once. It may be harder for you to accept that some questions cannot be answered at all until a proper background has been prepared. These answers would mean nothing to you at this point.

You would like someone—anyone—to be with you right now, so you could ask these questions. That has been tried, and the results were needlessly chaotic and confusing. Trust me; this is the best way.

Any why should you trust me? For a very good reason.

I am you. You wrote—in a manner of speaking—every word in this letter, to help yourself through this agonizing moment.

Deep breaths, please.

Stay seated; it helps a little.

And Don’t Worry.

So now we’re past bombshell #2. There are more to come, but they will be easier to take, simply because your capacity to be surprised is just about at its peak right now. A certain numbness will set in. You should be thankful for that.

And now, back to your questions.

Top of the list: What happened?

Briefly (and it must be brief—more on that later):

In 1989 you had an accident. It involved a motorcycle which you don’t remember owning because you didn’t buy it until 1988, and a city bus. You had a difference of opinion concerning the right of way, and the bus won.

Feel your scalp with your fingertips. Don’t be queasy; it healed long ago—as much as it’s going to. Under those great knots of scar tissue are the useless results of the labors of the best neurosurgeons in the country. In the end, they just had to scoop out a lot of grey matter and close you back up, shaking their heads sagely and opining that you would probably feel right at home under glass on a salad bar.

But you fooled them. You woke up, and there was much rejoicing, even though you couldn’t remember anything after the summer of ’86. You were conscious a few hours, long enough for the doctors to determine that your intelligence didn’t seem to be impaired. You could talk, read, speak, see, hear. Then you went back to sleep.

The next day you woke up, and couldn’t remember anything after the summer of ’86. No one was too worried. They told you again what had happened. You were awake most of the day, and again you fell asleep.

The next day you woke up, and couldn’t remember anything after the summer of ’86. Some consternation was expressed.

The next day you woke up, and couldn’t remember anything after the summer of ’86. Professorial heads were scratched, seven-syllable Latin words intoned, and deep mumbles were mumbled.

The next day you woke up, and couldn’t remember anything after the summer of ’86.

And the next day

And the next day

And the day after that.

This morning you woke up and couldn’t remember anything after the summer of ’86, and I know this is getting old, but I had to make the point in this way, because it is

200620072008

and we’ve begun to think a pattern is established.

No, no, don’t breathe deeply, don’t count to one hundred, face this one head on. It’ll be good for you.

Back under control?

I knew you could do it.

What you have is called Progressive Narco-Catalepti-Amnesiac Syndrome (PNCAS, or Pinkus in conversation), and you should be proud of yourself, because they made up the term to describe your condition and at least a half-dozen papers have been written proving it can’t happen. What seems to happen, in spite of the papers, is that you store and retrieve memories just fine as long as you have a continuous thread of consciousness. But the sleep center somehow activates an erase mechanism in your head, so that all you experienced during the day is lost to you when you wake up again. The old memories are intact and vivid; the new ones are ephemeral, like they were recorded on a continuous tape loop.

Most amnesias of this type behave rather differently. Retrograde amnesia is seen fairly frequently, whereby you gradually lose even the old memories and become as an infant. And progressive amnesias are not unknown, but those poor people can’t remember what happened to them as little as five minutes ago. Try to imagine what life would be like in those circumstances before you start crying in your beer.

Yeah, great, I hear you whine. And what’s so great about this?

Well, nothing, at first glance. I’ll certainly be the last one to argue about that. My own re-awakening is too fresh in my mind, having happened only fifteen hours ago. And, in a sense, I will soon be dead, snatched back from this mayfly existence by the greedy arms of Morpheus. When I sleep tonight, most of what I feel makes me me will vanish. I will awake, an older and less wise man, to confusion, will read this letter, will breathe deeply, count to one hundred, stare into the mirror at a stranger. I will be you.

And yet, now, as I scan rapidly through this letter for the second time today (I said I wrote it, but only in a sense; it was written by a thousand mayflies), they are asking me if there is anything I wish to change. If I want a change, Marian will see that it is made. Is there anything I would like to do differently tomorrow? Is there something I want to tell you, my successor in this body, to beware of, to disbelieve? Are there any warnings I would issue?

The answer is no.

I will let this letter stand, in its entirety.

There are things still for you to learn that will convince you, against all common sense, that you have a wonderful life/day ahead of you.

But you need a rest. You need time to think.

Do this for me. Go back to the date. Mark out the last number and write in the next. If it’s a new month, change that, too.

Now you will find the other door will open. Please go into the next room, where you will find breakfast, and an envelope containing the next part of this letter.

Don’t open it yet. Eat your breakfast.

Think it over.

But don’t take too long. Your time is short, and you won’t want to waste it.

That was refreshing, wasn’t it?

It shouldn’t surprise you that all your favorite breakfast foods were on the table. You eat the same meal every morning, and never get tired of it.

And I’m sorry if that statement took some of the pleasure out of the meal, but it is necessary for me to keep reminding you of your circumstances, to prevent a cycle of denial getting started.

Here is the thing you must bear in mind.

Today is the rest of your life.

Because that life will be so short, it is essential that you waste none of it. In this letter I have sometimes stated the obvious, written out conclusions you have already reached—in a sense, wasted your time. Each time it was done—and each time it will yet be done in the rest of this letter—was for a purpose. Points must be driven home, sometimes brutally, sometimes repetitiously. I promise you this sort of thing will be kept to an absolute minimum.

So here comes a few paragraphs that might be a waste of time, but really aren’t, as they dispose neatly of several thousand of the most burning questions in your mind. The questions can be summed up as “What has happened in twenty years?”

The answer is: You don’t care.

You can’t afford to care. Even a brief synopsis of recent events would take hours to read, and would be the sheerest foolishness. You don’t care who the President is. The price of gasoline doesn’t concern you, nor does the victor in the ‘98 World Series. Why learn this trivia when you would only have to re-learn it tomorrow?

You don’t care which books and movies are currently popular. You have read your last book, seen your last movie.

Luckily, you are an orphan with no siblings or other close relatives. (It is lucky; think about it.) The girl you were going with at the time of your accident has forgotten all about you—and you don’t care, because you didn’t love her.

There are things that have happened which you need to know about; I’ll speak of them very soon.

In the meantime. . . 

How do you like the room? Not at all like a hospital, is it? Comfortable and pleasant—yet it has no windows, and the only other door was locked when you tried it.

Try it again. It will open now.

And remember . . .

Don’t Worry.

Don’t Worry. Don’t Worry. Don’t Worry.

You will have stopped crying by now. I know you desperately need someone to talk to, a human face to look into. You will have that very soon now, but for another few minutes I still must reach out to you from your recent past.

Incidentally, the reason the breathing exercises and the counting are so effective is a post-hypnotic suggestion left in your mind. When you see the words Don’t Worry, it relaxes you. It seems that some part of your mind retains shadows of memory that you can’t reach—which may also account for why you believe all this apparent rubbish.

Are the tears dry? It did the same thing to me. Even seeing my own face aged in the mirror didn’t affect me like seeing the view from my windows. Then it became real.

You are on one of the top floors of the Chrysler Building. Your view to the north included many, many buildings that were not there in 1986, and jumbled among them were many familiar buildings, distinctive as fingerprints. This is New York, and it is a new century, and that view is impossible to deny and as real as a fist. That’s why you wept.

Not too many more bombshells to go now. But the next one is a doozy. Let’s creep up on it, shall we?

You’ve already looked at the three photographs on the table beside your breakfast. Consider them now, in order.

The big, bluff, hearty-looking fellow is Ian MacIntyre, who you’ll meet in a few minutes. He will be your counselor/companion today, and he is the head of a very important project in which you are involved. It’s impossible not to like him, though you, like me, will try to resist at first. But he is too wise push it, and you’ve always liked people, anyway. Besides, he has a lot of experience in winning your friendship, having done so every day for eight years.

On to the second picture.

Looks almost human, doesn’t he? If the offspring of Gumby and E.T. could be considered human. He is humanoid: two eyes, nose, mouth, two arms and two legs, and that goofy grin. The green skin you’ll get used to quickly enough.

What he is, is a Martian.

See, fifteen years ago the Martians landed and took over the planet Earth. We still don’t know what they plan to do with it, but some of the theories are not good news for Homo sapiens.

Don’t Worry.

Take a few deep breaths. I’ll wait.

That last thought is unworthy of you and unjust. I would not waste your time with a practical joke. You must realize I can back up what I say.

To illustrate, I want you to go to the south windows of your apartment. Go through the billiard room into the spa, turn left at the gym, and open the door beside the Picasso, the one that didn’t open before. You’ll find yourself in an area with a view of the Narrows, and I’m sure I won’t need to direct you beyond that.

Take a look, and come right back.

All right, you just had to prove you could do things your own way, didn’t you? I don’t care that you brought the letter with you, but your having done so provides one last bit of proof that I know you pretty well, doesn’t it?

Now, back to the bloody Martians.

It’s amazing how on-target Steven Spielberg was, isn’t it? That way that ship floats out there . . . and it’s bigger than the mother ship in Close Encounters. That sucker is over thirty miles across. At its lowest point it is two miles in the air. The upper parts reach into space. It has floated out there for fifteen years and not budged one inch. People call it The Saucer. There are fifteen others just like it, hovering near other major cities.

And you think you have detected a flaw, don’t you? How would you have seen it, you ask, if it had been a cloudy day? If it had been just a normal New York smoggy day, for that matter. Then you’d be reading this, scratching your head, wondering what the hell I’m talking about.

The answer will illustrate everyone’s concern. There are no more cloudy days in New York. The Martians don’t seem to like rain, so they don’t let it happen here. As for the smog . . . they told us to stop it, and we did. Wouldn’t you, with that thing floating out there?

About the name, Martians . . .

We first detected their ships in the neighborhood of Mars. I know you’d have found it easier to swallow, in a perverse way, had I told you they came from Alpha Centauri or the Andromeda Galaxy or the planet Tralfamadore. But people got to calling them Martians because that’s what they were called on television.

We don’t think they’re really from Mars.

We don’t know where they’re from, but it’s probably not from around here. And by that, I mean not just another galaxy, but another universe. We think our own universe exists sort of as a shadow to them.

This will be hard to explain. Take it slowly.

Do you remember Flatland, and Mr. A Square? He lived in a two-dimensional universe. There was no up or down, just right and left, forward and backward. He could not conceive the notion of up or down. Mr. Square was visited by a three-dimensional being, a sphere, who drifted down through the world of Flatland. Square perceived the sphere as a circle that gradually grew, and then shrank. All he could see at any one moment was a cross-section of the sphere, while the sphere, god-like, could look down into Mr. Square’s world, even touch inside Square’s body without going through the skin.

It was all just an interesting intellectual exercise, until the Martians arrived. Now we think they’re like the sphere, and we are Mr. Square. They live in another dimension, and they don’t perceive time and space like we do.

An example:

You saw they appeared humanoid. We don’t think they really are.

We think they simply allow us to see a portion of their bodies which they project into our three-dimensional world and cause to appear humanoid. Their real shape must be vastly complex.

Consider your hand. If you thrust your fingers into Flatland Mr. Square would see four circles and not imagine them to be connected. Putting your hand in further, he would see the circles merge into an oblong. Or an even better analogy is the shadow-play. By suitably entwining your two hands in front of a light, you can cast a shadow on a wall that resembles a bird, or a bull, or an elephant, or even a man. What we see of the Martians is no more real than a Kermit the Frog hand puppet.

The ship is the same way. We see merely a three-dimensional cross-section of a much larger and more complex structure.

At least we think so.

Communication with the Martians is very frustrating, nearly impossible. They are so foreign to us. They never tell us anything that makes sense, never say the same thing twice. We assume it would make sense if we could think the way they do.

And it is important.

They are very powerful. Weather control is just a parlor trick. When they invaded, they invaded all at once—and I hope I can explain this to you, as I’m far from sure I understand it myself, after a full day with Martians.

They invaded fifteen years ago . . . but they also invaded in 1854, and in 1520, and several other times in the “past.” The past seems to be merely another direction to them, like up or down. You’ll be shown books, old books, with woodcuts and drawings and contemporary accounts of how the Martians arrived, what they did, when they left . . . and don’t be concerned that you don’t remember these momentous events from your high school history class, because no one else does, either.

Do you begin to understand? It seems that, from the moment they arrived here, in the late part of the twentieth century, they changed the past so that they had already arrived several times before. We have the history books to prove that they did. The fact that no one remembers these stories being in the history books before they arrived this time must be seen as an object lesson. One assumes they could have changed our memories of events as easily as the events themselves. That they did not do so means they meant us to be impressed. Had they changed both the events and our memories of them, no one would be the wiser; we would all assume history had always been that way, because that’s the way we remembered it.

The whole idea of history books must be a tremendous joke to them, since they don’t experience time consecutively.

Had enough? There’s more.

They can do more than add things to our history. They can take things away. Things like the World Trade Center. That’s right, go look for it. It’s not out there, and we didn’t tear it down. It never existed in this world, except in our memories. It’s like a big, shared illusion.

Other things have turned up missing as well. Things like Knoxville, Tennessee, Lake Huron, the Presidency of William McKinley, the Presbyterian Church, the rhinoceros (including the fossil record of its ancestors), Jack the Ripper (and all the literary works written about him), the letter Q, and Ecuador.

Presbyterians still remember their faith and have built new churches to replace the ones that were never built. Who needed the goddamn rhino, anyway? Another man served McKinley’s term (and was also assassinated). Seeing book after book where “kw” replaces “q” is only amusing—and very kweer. But the people of Knoxville—and a dozen other towns around the world—never existed. They are still trying to sort out the real estate around where Lake Huron used to be. And you can search the world’s atlases in vain for any sight of Ecuador.

The best wisdom is that the Martians could do even more, if they wanted to. Such as wiping out the element oxygen, the charge on the electron, or, of course, the planet Earth.

They invaded, and they won quite easily.

And their weapon is very much like an editor’s blue pencil. Rather than destroy our world, they re-write it.

So what does all this have to do with me, I hear you cry.

Why couldn’t I have lived out my one day on Earth without worrying about this?

Well . . . who do you think is paying for this fabulous apartment?

The grateful taxpayers, that’s who. You didn’t think you’d get original Picassos on the walls if you were nothing more than a brain-damaged geek, did you?

And why are the taxpayers grateful?

Because anything that keeps the Martians happy, keeps the taxpayers happy. The Martians scare hell out of everyone . . . and you are their fair-haired boy.

Why?

Because you don’t experience time like the rest of humanity does.

You start fresh every day. You haven’t had fifteen years to think about the Martians, you haven’t developed any prejudice toward them or their way of thinking.

Maybe.

Most of that could be bullshit. We don’t know if prejudice has anything to do with it . . . but you do see time differently. The fact is, the best mathematicians and physicists in the world have tried to deal with the Martians, and the Martians aren’t interested. Every day they come to talk to you.

Most days, nothing is accomplished. They spend an hour, then go wherever it is they go, in whatever manner they do it. One day out of hundred, you get an insight. Everything I’ve told you so far is the result of those insights being compiled—

—along with the work of others. There are a few hundred of you, around the world. No other man or woman has your peculiar affliction; all are what most people would call mentally limited. There are the progressive amnesiacs I mentioned earlier. There are people with split-brain disorders, people with almost unbelievable perceptual aberrations, such as the woman who has lost the concept of “right.” Left is the only direction that exists in her brain.

The Martians spend time with these people, people like you.

So we tentatively conclude this about the Martians:

They want to teach us something.

It is painfully obvious they could have destroyed us any time they wished to do so. They have enslaved us, in the sense that we are pathetically eager to do anything we even suspect they might want us to do. But they don’t seem to want to do anything with us. They’ve made no move to breed us for meat animals, conscript us into slave labor camps, or rape our women. They have simply arrived, demonstrated their powers, and started talking to people like you.

No one knows if we can learn what they are trying to teach us. But it behooves us to try, wouldn’t you think?

Again, you say: Why me?

Or even more to the point: Why should I care?

I know your bitterness, and I understand it. Why should you spend even an hour of your precious time on problems you don’t really care about, when it would be much easier and more satisfying spending your sixteen hours of awareness gnawing on yourself, wallowing in self-pity, and in general being a one-man soap-opera.

There are two reasons.

One: You were never that kind of person. You’ve just about exhausted your store of self-pity during the process of reading this letter. If you have only one day—though it hurts like hell . . . so be it! You will spend that day doing something useful.

Reason number two . . .

You’ve been looking at the third picture off and on since you first picked it up, haven’t you? (Come on, you can’t lie to me.)

She’s very pretty, isn’t she?

And that thought is unworthy of you, since you know where this letter is coming from. She would not be offered to you as a bribe. The project managers know you well enough to avoid offering you a piece of ass to get your cooperation.

Her name is Marian.

Let us speak of love for a moment.

You were in love once before. You remember how it was, if you’ll allow yourself. You remember the pain . . . but that came later, didn’t it? When she rejected you. Do you remember what it felt like the day you fell in love? Think back, you can get it.

The simple fact is, it’s why the world spins. Just the possibility of love has kept you going in the three years since Karen.

Well, let me tell you. Marian is in love with you, and before the day is over, you will be in love with her. You can believe that or not, as you choose, but I, at the end of my life here this day, can take as one of my few consolations that I/you will have, tomorrow/today, the exquisite pleasure of falling in love with Marian.

I envy you, you skeptical bastard.

And since it’s just you and me, I’ll add this. Even with a girl you don’t love, “the first time” is always pretty damn interesting, isn’t it?

For you, it’s always the first time . . . except when it’s the second time, just before sleep . . . which Marian seems to be suggesting this very moment.

As usual, I have anticipated all your objections.

You think it might be tough for her? You think she’s suffering?

Okay. Admitted, the first few hours are what you might call repetitive for her. You gotta figure she’s bored, by now, at your invariant behavior when you first wake up. But it is a cross she bears willingly for the pleasure of your company during the rest of the day.

She is a healthy, energetic girl, one who is aware that no woman ever had such an attentive, energetic lover. She loves a man who is endlessly fascinated by her, body and soul, who sees her with new eyes each and every day.

She loves your perpetual enthusiasm, your renewable infatuation.

There isn’t time to fall out of love.

Anything more I could say would be wasting your time, and believe me, when you see what today is going to be like, you’d hate me for it.

We could wish things were different. It is not fair that we have only one day. I, who am at the end of it, can feel the pain you only sense. I have my wonderful memories . . . which will soon be gone. And I have Marian, for a few more minutes.

But I swear to you, I feel like an old, old man who has lived a full life, who has no regrets for anything he ever did, who accomplished something in his life, who loved, and was loved in return.

Can many “normal” people die saying that?

In just a few seconds that one, last locked door will open, and your new life and future love will come through it. I guarantee it will be interesting.

I love you, and I now leave you . . .

Have a nice day.

© 1989 by John Varley.

Originally appeared in Twilight Zone

Reprinted by permission of the author.

John Varley was born and raised in Texas, but corrected that mistake as soon as he could. He is the winner of three Hugo and two Nebula awards, and the author of the classic Gaea Trilogy of Titan, Wizard, and Demon. He is currently at work on Dark Lightning, the fourth and final book in the series Red Thunder, Red Lightning, and Rolling Thunder.

Author Spotlight: John Varley
Stacey Friedberg

“Just Another Perfect Day” was originally published in 1989. What inspired you to write the story?

I was reading a book by Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. It was about the odd and horrible things that can happen to people with brain damage. One man, for instance, was convinced that his leg didn’t belong to him. He kept trying to throw it out of the hospital bed, and of course he would go with it. Other people no longer recognized their family members. They look like Mom and Dad, but they are imposters. Another was about anterograde amnesia, where someone can no longer form new memories. This idea was later explored in the movies Memento and Fifty First Dates.

You studied physics in college. Did your studies influence the science behind this story?

Well, I studied physics for about one semester, and realized it was too hard for me. But there’s no physics that I can see in this story. And I didn’t want to do any medical research, either, in case my idea of losing all your memories when you went to sleep turned out not to be possible. Turns out it is possible, which is a relief.

In your opinion, why do the Martians love the narrator so much? Is it because of his perception of time? Or is it a different reason that isn’t stated?

That’s the mystery. When you posit an alien that is beyond human understanding because it lives in an extra dimension from what we can sense, you can’t really know, can you?

Why have the Martians come to earth? Are they, as the narrator suggests, trying to teach humans something?

As I said, I don’t know. You just have to make up your own explanation, or be happy with no answer, like I am. It’s like an Arthur C. Clarke story (I hope), in that something wonderful is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?

In keeping with the nature of the narrator’s life, the language here is very repetitive. The author of the letter keeps telling the reader “Don’t Worry,” and to breathe deeply while counting to one hundred. From a stylistic point of view, why did you choose to do this?

It seems pretty clear that a man waking up in these circumstances, learning that he’s lost years, and seeing the Mother Ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind hovering over the city . . . well, wouldn’t you need some reassurance? And remember, he is the one who has honed this message over the years, like the man in Memento tattooing critical information on his body. He knows what works best, because he’s lived it.

Reading this, one can see the echoes of other classic sci-fi stories. What authors and writings would you say most influence your work?

Clarke, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Niven . . . Sheckley, Kuttner, Simak . . . all the Golden Age writers of the ’40s and ’50s, whom I grew up reading.

Stacey Friedberg is an editorial assistant at Penguin Books for Young Readers. She enjoys reading, writing, and cooking. You can follow her (very infrequent) tweets via @stacabird.

Forget Everything You’ve Ever Known About Amnesia
The Evil Monkey

When we think of “amnesia,” we think of the classic soap opera example. A character endures some sort of emotionally traumatizing situation or blow to the head. Critical details about the character’s entire life are forgotten, but total recall usually occurs at a crucial moment for maximal dramatic tension. The character retains all the necessary skills to survive: they don’t forget how to talk, eat, get dressed, do math, use an ATM, drive a car, etc. However, the amnesiac can’t recall any details whatsoever of their childhood. They don’t recognize friends and family. They don’t remember what they did for a living. Occasionally a skill or memory may come to them in a disjointed flash.

In most storylines, the person will end up with fully restored memories, only to find that they are a completely different person than they were before the triggering event, and that they like their new selves better. Irrespective of the damage done by the head injury, you can count on the person never, ever losing their ability to organize their lives and plan for the future.

Amnesia Comes in More Than One Flavor

In the real world, even the types of amnesia are not as simple as the Hollywood portrayal suggests. First off, we can categorize the types of amnesia by their temporal effects. Let’s say that you, dear reader, unfortunately had a nasty fall down the stairs and hit your head. If you forget things that happened to you before the injury (for example, you forget about your first day in kindergarten), this is called retrograde amnesia, retrograde meaning the memory came before the injury. If, on the other hand, you find it difficult to form new memories (you keep forgetting where you left your car whereas it was never a problem before the injury), this is called anterograde amnesia.

The type of memory that has been lost can also be differentiated. There are two main divisions; declarative memory and nondeclarative memory. Declarative memories are those you show you learned by telling people. They’re a narrative. Say you lose all memories for specific events, or episodes, in your life; you can’t remember going to school, learning to play basketball, your first kiss, your first job, all that autobiographical knowledge. You’ve lost your episodic memory. In this specific case, since those things happened before the injury, you have retrograde episodic memory loss. You can have anterograde episodic memory impairments too, if you can’t make new autobiographical memories. There’s also semantic memory, which means general knowledge about the world. Think of it as more like trivia. What’s the capital of Rhode Island? What’s two plus two? Those sorts of things are considered semantic. Both semantic and episodic memories are considered to be declarative.

Nondeclarative memories are things you show you learned by actually doing: Procedural memories. Procedures are skills that you perform. I show you I know how to ride a bike by actually riding a bike. No amount of semantic knowledge is going to convince you otherwise. I can tell you how bikes are ridden until I’m blue in the face, but you won’t necessarily believe me until I get on one and start pedaling.

Note that we’ve uncoupled the skill (riding) from the semantic (describing how bikes are ridden) and the episodic (when you learned to ride). Your fall down the stairs may take away the memory for an event (e.g. when your dad taught you to ride a bike), but leave intact the skill of actually riding a bike. You may have absolutely no idea that you know how to do it! As you can guess, this is difficult for an amnesiac to cope with, but it gives rise to those tantalizing moments in movies when the character suddenly remembers they can beat up several prison guards or sing an opera.

How Physical Damage Makes Mental Trauma

Depending on the type of injury and how widespread it is, you may find that you’re unable to remember things from the past, or to make new memories after the incident, depending on where the brain is damaged. The type of memory that is lost is also dependent upon what brain areas are affected.

How do we know what brain areas account for which types of memories? Consider three famous cases of amnesia patients and their histories; Henry Molaison, Clive Wearing, and another patient known as KC. All three of these individuals share common features of memory loss, but their deficits came about very differently; Henry Molaison suffered from intractable epileptic seizures and required surgery to stop them, Clive Wearing suffered from a viral infection known as Herpes simplex encephalitis that affected his brain, and KC was involved in a traumatic motorcycle accident that caused massive subdural hemorrhaging that required extensive surgery to treat.

Three very different patients, but some common features emerge. All three of them show damage to the temporal lobes, including structures that help form new memories. Henry Molaison had his large chunks of hippocampus, amygdala, and medial temporal cortex removed to prevent his seizures. The patient KC also had extensive damage to his medial temporal cortex and hippocampus, but showed much more widespread damage to other cortical areas around the occipital and temporal lobes. These areas are thought to be involved with producing visual imagery. Clive Wearing’s brain inflammation from Herpes simplex encephalitis wiped out his hippocampus and put pressure on much of his cortex throughout his brain. Right away we can see some similarities. All three of these famous cases have damage to the hippocampus and the surrounding medial temporal cortex, the central part of the brain, and all three of them simply cannot form new episodic or semantic memories. They are essentially trapped in a moment; they have normal short term memory (seconds to minutes), but none of that can actually be stored anywhere; it gets dumped, lost forever. All three of them can have a short conversation with you, but will have forgotten how the conversation began. Leave the room and come back in 10 seconds later, they’ll have forgotten ever having met you.

A Post-Amnesia Life

There are some stark differences between the cases. Only Henry Molaison had his damage restricted to the temporal lobe. In him alone, we find relatively minor retrograde memory impairments. He could remember going to the doctor and being told he would have a surgery to treat his seizures, although he doesn’t remember much from the weeks leading up to the surgery. Remote memories from his early life are more or less intact. On the other hand, Clive and KC have severe retrograde memory loss and can only remember vagaries of their lives before their respective brain damage. Clive, for example, remembers that he is married but cannot recall the date or the event. Both of them are severely lacking in the autobiographical department. Clive has it particularly hard because he cannot even remember being aware that he was conscious five minutes before! His journal is full of statements like—

10:47 am I am aware for the first time.

10:53 am for the first time, I am conscious.

11:02 am I am truly and fully aware for the first time!

Clive is cognizant of the fact that he cannot recall things, and it makes him very angry. He crosses out journal entries as he thinks someone else wrote them in his handwriting. However, he has intact skill memories. He is a renowned conductor and choral master and his professional skills are unimpaired. He can conduct an orchestra without incident.

KC is similarly without autobiographical knowledge, but is also unable to picture himself in future situations. He literally cannot conceive of himself in a problem-solving situation or doing something specific in the future. Clive’s and KC’s more widespread deficits likely are due to the fact that many more cortical regions, where remote memories are stored, have been compromised.

Hollywood can get parts of amnesia right, but as always it puts its own spin on reality. Procedural memories and basic skills are generally unimpaired in amnesiacs. They can pop up out of nowhere, and can be a mechanism for some minimal new learning. But leave it to the movies and television to tack on a happy ending to any situation. Spontaneous recovery, a common plot device, is not likely to happen when a patient has severe damage, especially as both retrograde and anterograde memories become compromised. The hope of recovery is virtually nil.

Often the best anyone can hope for is the inability to understand how bad they have it.

The Evil Monkey has a Ph.D. in the neurosciences and used to study memory in primates for a living. He now resides in the Midwest and spends his professional time teaching at the local state university and community college. When not teaching, he is often engaged in an endless cycle of home repair or playing with his stepkids or writing his irreverent neuroscience blog Neurotopia.

The Nearest Thing
Genevieve Valentine

CALENDAR REMINDER: STOCKHOLDER DINNER, 8PM.

THIS MESSAGE SENT FROM MORI: LOOKING TO THE FUTURE, LOOKING OUT FOR YOU.

The Mori Annual Stockholder Dinner is a little slice of hell that employees are encouraged to attend, for morale.

Mori’s made Mason rich enough that he owns a bespoke tux and drives to the Dinner in a car whose property tax is more than his father made in a year; of course he goes.

(He skipped one year because he was sick, and two Officers from HR came to his door with a company doctor to confirm it. He hasn’t missed a party since.)

He’s done enough high-profile work that Mori wants him to actually mingle, and he spends the cocktail hour being pushed from one group to another, shaking hands, telling the same three inoffensive anecdotes over and over.

They go fine; he’s been practicing.

People chuckle politely just before he finishes the punch line.

Memorial dolls take a second longer, because they have to process the little cognitive disconnect of humor, and because they’re programmed to think that interrupting is rude.

(He’ll hand it to the Aesthetics department—it’s getting harder to tell the difference between people with plastic surgery and the dolls.)

“I hear you’re starting a new project,” says Harris. He hugs Mrs. Harris closer, and after too long, she smiles.

(Mason will never know why anyone brings their doll out in public like this. The point is to ease the grieving process, not to provide arm candy. It’s embarrassing. He wishes stockholders were a little less enthusiastic about showing support for the company.)

This new project is news to him, too, but he doesn’t think stockholders want to hear that.

“I might be,” he says. “I obviously can’t say, but—”

Mr. Harris grins. “Paul Whitcover already told us—” (Mason thinks, Who?) “—and it sounds like a marvelous idea. I hope it does great things for the company; it’s been a while since we had a new version.”

Mason’s heart stutters that he’s been picked to spearhead a new version.

It sinks when he remembers Whitcover. He’s one of the second-generation creative guys who gets his picture taken with some starlet on his arm, as newscasters talk about what good news it would be for Mori’s stock if he were to marry a studio-contracted actress.

Mrs. Harris is smiling into middle space, waiting to be addressed, or for a keyword to come up.

Mason met Mrs. Harris several Dinners ago. She had more to say than this, and he worked on some of the conversation software in her generation; she can handle a party. Harris must have turned her cognitives down to keep her pleasant.

There’s a burst of laughter across the room, and when Mason looks over it’s some guy in a motorcycle jacket, surrounded by tuxes and gowns.

“Who’s that?” he asks, but he knows, he knows, this is how his life goes, and he’s already sighing when Mr. Harris says, “Paul.”

Since he got Compliance Contracted to Mori at fifteen, Mason has come to terms with a lot of things.

He’s come to terms with the fact that, for the money he makes, he can’t make noise about his purpose. He worked for a year on an impact-sensor chip for Mori’s downmarket Prosthetic Division; you go where you’re told.

(He’s come to terms with the fact that the more Annual Stockholder Dinners you attend, the less time you spend in a cubicle in Prosthetics.)

He has come to terms with the fact that sometimes you will hate the people you work with, and there is nothing you can do.

(Mason suspects he hates everyone, and that the reasons why are the only things that change.)

The thing is, Mason doesn’t hate Paul because Paul is a Creative heading an R&D project. Mason will write what they tell him to, under whatever creative-team asshole they send him. He’s not picky.

Sure, he resents someone who introduces himself to other adults as, “Just Paul, don’t worry about it, good to meet you,” and he resents someone whose dad was a Creative Consultant and who’s never once gone hungry, and he resents the adoring looks from stockholders as Paul claims Mori is really Going Places This Year, but things like this don’t keep him up at night, either.

He’s pretty sure he starts to hate Paul the moment Paul introduces him to Nadia.

At Mori, we know you care.

We know you love your family. We know you worry about leaving them behind. And we know you’ve asked for more information about us, which means you’re thinking about giving your family the greatest gift of all:

You.

Medical studies have shown the devastating impact grief has on family bonds and mental health. The departure of someone beloved is a tragedy without a proper name.

Could you let the people you love live without you?

A memorial doll from Mori maps the most important aspects of your memory, your speech patterns, and even your personality into a synthetic reproduction.

The process is painstaking—our technology is exceeded only by our artistry—and it leaves behind a version of you that, while it can never replace you, can comfort those who have lost you.

Imagine knowing your parents never have to say goodbye. Imagine knowing you can still read bedtime stories to your children, no matter what may happen.

A memorial doll from Mori is a gift you give to everyone who loves you.

Nadia holds perfectly still.

Her nametag reads “Aesthetic Consultant,” which means Paul brought his model girlfriend to the meeting.

She’s pretty, in a cat’s-eye way, but Mason doesn’t give her much thought. It takes a lot for Mason to really notice a woman, and she’s nowhere near the actresses Paul dates.

(Mason’s been reading up. He doesn’t think much of Paul, but the man can find a camera at a hundred paces.)

Paul brings Nadia to the first brainstorming meeting for the Vestige project. He introduces her to Mason and the two guys from Marketing (“Just Nadia, don’t worry about it”), and they’re ten minutes into the meeting before Mason realizes she had never said a word.

It takes Mason until then to realize how still she is. Only her eyes move—to him, with a hard expression like she can read his mind and doesn’t like what she sees.

Not that he cares. He just wonders where she came from, suddenly.

“So we have to think about a new market,” Paul is saying. “There’s a diminishing return on memorial dolls, unless we want to drop the price point to expand opportunities and popularize the brand—”

The two Marketing guys make appalled sounds at the idea of Mori going downmarket.

“—or, we develop something that will redefine the company,” Paul finishes. “Something new. Something we build in-house from the ground up.”

A Marketing guy says, “What do you have in mind?”

“A memorial that can conquer Death itself,” says Paul.

(Nadia’s eyes slide to Paul, never move.)

“How so?” asks the other marketing guy.

Paul grins, leans forward; Mason sees the switch flip.

Then Paul is magic.

He uses every catchphrase Mason’s ever heard in a pitch, and some phrases he swears are from Mori’s own pamphlets. Paul makes a lot of eye contact, frowns soulfully. The Marketing guys get glassy and slack-jawed, like they’re watching a swimming pool fill up with doubloons. Paul smiles, one fist clenched to keep his amazing ideas from flying away.

Mason waits for a single concept concrete enough to hang some code on. He waits a long time.

(The nice thing about programs is that you deal in absolutes—yes, or no.)

“We’ll be working together,” and Paul encompasses Mason in his gesture. “Andrew Mason has a reputation for out-thinking computers. Together, we’ll give the Vestige model a self-sustaining critical-thinking initiative no other developer has tried—and no consumer base has ever seen. It won’t be human, but it will be the nearest thing.”

The Marketing guys light up.

“Self-sustaining critical-thinking” triggers ideas about circuit maps and command-decision algorithms, and for a second Mason is absorbed in the idea.

He comes back when Paul says, “Oh, he definitely has ideas.” He flashes a smile at the Marketing guys—it wobbles when he looks at Nadia, but he recovers well enough that the smile is back by the time it gets to Mason.

“Mason, want to give us tech dummies a rundown of what you’ve been brainstorming?”

Mason glances back from Nadia to Paul, doesn’t answer.

Paul frowns. “Do you have questions about the project?”

Mason shrugs. “I just think maybe we shouldn’t be discussing confidential R&D with some stranger in the room.”

(Compliance sets up stings sometimes, just to make sure employees are serious about confidentiality. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t said a thing.)

Nadia actually turns her head to look at him (her eyes skittering past Paul), and Paul drops the act and snaps, “She’s not some stranger,” like she saved him from an assassination attempt.

It’s the wrong thing to say.

It makes Mason wonder what the relationship between Paul and Nadia really is.

That afternoon, Officer Wilcox from HR stops by Mason’s office.

“This is just a random check,” she says. “Your happiness is important to the company.”

What she means is, Paul ratted him out, and they’re making sure he’s not thinking of leaking information about the kind of project you build a market-wide stock repurchase on.

“I’m very happy here,” Mason says, and it’s what you always say to HR, but it’s true enough; they pulled him from that shitty school and gave him a future. Now he has more money than he knows what to do with, and the company dentist isn’t half bad.

He likes his work, and they leave him alone, and things have always been fine, until now.

(He imagines Paul, his face a mask of concern, saying, “It’s not that I think he’s up to anything, it’s just he seems so unhappy, and he wouldn’t answer me when I asked him something.”)

“Will Nadia be part of the development team?” Mason asks, for no real reason.

“Undetermined,” says Officer Wilcox. “Have a good weekend. Come back rested and ready to work on Vestige.”

She hands him a coupon for a social club where dinner costs a week’s pay and private hostesses are twice that.

She says, “The company really appreciates your work.”

He goes home, opens his personal program.

Most of it is still just illustrations from old maps, but places he’s been are recreated as close as he can get. Buildings, animals, dirt, people.

They’re customizable down to fingerprints; he recreated his home city with people he remembers, and calibrated their personality traits as much as possible. It’s a nice reminder of home, when he needs it.

(He needs it less and less; home is far away.)

This game has been his work since the first non-Mori computer he bought—with cash, on the black market, so he had something to use that was his alone.

Now there are real-time personality components and physical impossibility safeguards so you can’t pull nonsense. It’s not connected to a network, to keep Mori from prying. It stands alone, and he’s prouder of it than anything he’s done.

(The Memento model is a pale shadow of this; this is what Paul wants for Vestige, if Mason feels like sharing.)

He builds Nadia in minutes—he must have been watching her more than he thought—and gives her the personality traits he knows she has (self-possessed, grudging, uncomfortable), her relationship with Paul, how long he’s known her.

He doesn’t make any guesses about what he doesn’t know for sure. It hurts the game to guess.

He puts Nadia in the Mori offices. (He can’t put her in his apartment, because a self-possessed, grudging, uncomfortable person who hasn’t known him long wouldn’t go. His game is strict.) He makes them both tired from a long night of work.

He inputs Paul, too, finally—the scene won’t start until he does, given what it knows about her—and is pleased to see Paul in his own office, sleeping under his motorcycle jacket, useless and out of the way.

Nadia tries every locked door in R&D systematically. Then she goes into the library, stands in place.

Mason watches his avatar working on invisible code so long he starts to drift off.

When he opens his eyes, Nadia’s avatar is in the doorway of his office, where his avatar has rested his head in his hands, looking tired and upset and wishing he was the kind of person who could give up on something.

(His program is spooky, when he does it right.)

He holds his breath until Nadia’s avatar turns around.

She finds the open door to Paul’s office (of course it’s open), stands and looks at him, too.

He wonders if her avatar wants to kiss Paul’s.

Nadia’s avatar leaves Paul’s doorway, too, goes to the balcony overlooking the impressive lobby. She stands at the railing for a while, like his avatars used to do before he had perfected their physical limits so they wouldn’t keep trying to walk through walls.

Then she jumps.

He blanks out for a second.

He restarts.

(It’s not how life goes, it’s a cheat, but without it he’d never have been able to understand a thing about how people work.)

He starts again, again.

She jumps every time.

His observations are faulty, he decides. There’s not enough to go on, since he knows so little about her. His own fault for putting her into the system too soon.

He closes up shop; his hands are shaking.

Then he takes the Mori coupon off his dining table.

The hostess is pretty, in a cat-eye way.

She makes small talk, pours expensive wine. He lets her because he’s done this rarely enough that it’s still awkward, and because Mori is picking up the tab, and because something is scraping at him that he can’t define.

Later she asks him, “What can I do for you?”

He says, “Hold as still as you can.”

It must be a creepy request; she freezes.

It’s very still. It’s as still as Nadia holds.

Monday morning, Paul shows up in his office.

“Okay,” Paul says, rubbing his hands together like he’s about to carve a bird, “let’s brainstorm how we can get these dolls to brainstorm for themselves.”

“Where’s Nadia?” Mason asks.

Paul says, “Don’t worry about it.”

Mason hates Paul.

The first week is mostly Mason trying to get Paul to tell him what they’re doing (“What you’re doing now,” Paul says, “just bigger and better, we’ll figure things out, don’t worry about it.”) and how much money they have to work with.

(“Forget the budget,” Paul says, “we’re just thinking about software, the prototype is taken care of.”

Mason wonders how long Paul has been working on this, acquiring entire prototypes off the record, keeping under the radar of a company that taps your phones, and the hair on his neck stands up.)

“I have a baseline ready for implantation,” Paul admits on Thursday, and it feels like a victory for Mason. “We can use that as a jumping-off point to test things, if you don’t want to use simulators.”

“You don’t use simulators until you have a mock-up ready. The baseline is unimportant while we’re still working on components.” Then he thinks about it. “Where did you get a baseline with no R&D approval?”

Paul grins. “Black market,” he says.

It’s the first time Mason’s ever suspected Paul might actually care about what they’re doing.

It changes a lot of things.

On Friday, Mason brings in a few of his program’s parameters for structuring a sympathy algorithm, and when Paul shows up he says, “I had some ideas.”

Paul bends to look, his motorcycle jacket squeaking against Mason’s chair, his face tinted blue by the screen.

Mason watches Paul skim it twice. He’s a quick reader.

“Fantastic,” Paul says, in a way that makes Mason wonder if Paul knows more about specifics than he’d admit. “See what you can build me from this.”

“I can build whatever you need,” Mason says.

Paul looks down at him; his grin fills Mason’s vision.

Monday morning, Paul brings Nadia.

She sits in the back of the office, reading a book, glancing up when Mason says something that’s either on the right track or particularly stupid.

(When he catches her doing it her eyes are deep and dark, and she’s always just shy of pulling a face.)

Paul never says why he brought her, but Mason is pretty sure Nadia’s not a plant—not even Paul could risk that. More likely she’s his girlfriend. (Maybe she is an actress. He should start watching the news.)

Most of the time she has her nose in a book, so steady that Mason knows when she’s looking at them if it’s been too long between page-turns.

Once when they’re arguing about infinite loops Paul turns and asks her, “Would that really be a problem?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” she says.

It’s the first time she’s spoken, and Mason twists to look at her.

She hasn’t glanced up from her book, hasn’t moved at all, but still Mason watches, waiting for something, until Paul catches his eye.

For someone who brings his girlfriend the unofficial consultant to the office every day, Paul seems unhappy about Mason looking.

Nadia doesn’t seem to notice; her reflection in Mason’s monitor doesn’t look up, not once.

(Not that it matters if she does or not. He has no idea what he was waiting for.)

Mason figures out what they’re doing pretty quickly. Not that Paul told him, but when Mason said, “Are we trying to create emotional capacity?” Paul said, “Don’t worry about it,” grinning like he had at Mason’s first lines of code, and that was Mason’s answer.

There’s only one reason you create algorithms for this level of critical thinking, and it’s not for use as secretaries.

Mason is making an A.I. that can understand as well as respond, an A.I. that can grow an organic personality beyond its programming, that has an imagination; one that can really live.

(Sometimes, when he’s too tired to help it, he gets romantic about work.)

For a second-gen creative guy, Paul picks up fast.

“But by basing preference on a pre-programmed moral scale, they’ll always prefer people who make the right decisions on a binary,” Mason says. “Stockholders might not like free will that favors the morally upstanding.”

Paul nods, thinks it over.

“See if you can make an algorithm that develops a preference based on the reliability of someone’s responses to problems,” Paul says. “People are easy to predict. Easier than making them moral.”

There’s no reason for Paul to look at Nadia right then, but he does, and for a second his whole face falters.

For a second, Nadia’s does, too.

Mason can’t sleep that night, thinking about it.

TO: ANDREW MASON

FROM: HR—HEALTH/WELFARE

Your caffeine intake from the cafeteria today is 40% above normal. Your health is of great importance to us.

If you would like to renegotiate a project timeline, please contact Management to arrange a meeting. If you are physically fatigued, please contact a company doctor. If there is a personal issue, a company therapist is standing by for consult.

If any of these apply, please let us know what actions you have taken, so we may update your records.

If this is a dietary anomaly, please disregard.

The company appreciates your work.

They test some of the components on a simulator.

(Mason tells Paul they’re marking signs of understanding. Really, he wants to see if the simulation prefers one of them without a logical basis. That’s what humans do.)

He pulls up a baseline, several traits mixed at random from reoccurring types in the Archives, just to keep you from using someone’s remnant. (The company frowns on that.)

Under the ID field, Mason types in GALATEA.

“Acronym?” Paul asks.

“Allusion,” says Nadia.

Her reflection is looking at the main monitor, her brows drawn in an expression too stricken to be a frown.

Galatea runs diagnostics (a long wait—the text-interface version passed four sentience screenings in anonymous testing last month, and something that sophisticated takes a lot of code). She recognizes the camera, nodding at Mason and Paul in turn.

Then her eyes go flat, refocus to find Nadia.

It makes sense, Nadia’s further away, but Mason still gets the creeps. Someone needs to work on the naturalism of these simulators. This isn’t some second-rate date booth; they have a reputation to uphold.

“Be charming,” Mason says.

Paul cracks up.

“Okay,” he says, “Galatea, good to meet you, I’m Paul, and I’ll try to be charming tonight.”

Galatea prefers Paul in under ten minutes.

Mason would burn the place down if he wasn’t so proud of himself.

“Galatea,” Mason asks, “what is the content of Paul’s last sentence?”

“That his work is going well.”

It wasn’t what Paul really said—it had as little content as most of Paul’s sentences that aren’t about code—which means Galatea was inferring the best meaning, because she favored him.

“Read this,” Mason says, scrawls a note.

Paul reads, “During a shift in market paradigms, it’s imperative that we leverage our synergy to re-evaluate paradigm structure.”

It’s some line of shit Paul gave him the first day they worked together. Paul doesn’t even have the shame to recognize it.

“Galatea, act on that sentence,” Mason says.

“I cannot,” Galatea says, but her camera lens is focused square on Paul’s face, which is Mason’s real answer.

“Installing this software has compromised your baseline personality system and altered your preferences,” he says. “Can you identify the overwrites?”

There’s a tiny pause.

“No,” she says, sounds surprised.

He looks up at Paul, grinning, but Paul’s jaw is set like a guilty man, and his eyes are focused on the wall ahead of him, his hands in fists on the desk.

(Reflected in his monitor: Nadia, her book abandoned, sitting a little forward in her chair, lips parted, watching it all like she’s seen a ghost.)

At the holiday party, Paul and Nadia show up together.

Paul has his arm around her, and after months of seeing them together Mason still can’t decide if they’re dating.

(He only sees how Paul holds out his hand to her as they leave every day, how she looks at him too long before she takes it, the story he’s already telling her, his smile of someone desperate to please.)

The way Paul manages a party is supernatural. His tux is artfully rumpled, his hand on Nadia’s waist, and he looks right at everyone he meets.

It’s too smooth to be instinctive; his father must have trained him up young.

Maybe that’s it—maybe they’re like brother and sister, if you ignore the way Paul looks at her sometimes when she’s in profile, like he wouldn’t mind a shot but he’s not holding his breath.

(He envies Paul his shot with her; he envies them both for having someone to be a sibling with.)

“Why do you keep watching me?”

She’s not coy, either, he thinks as he turns, and something about her makes him feel like being honest.

He says, “I find you interesting.”

“Because of how I look.” Delivered like the conclusion of a scientific paper whose results surprised everyone.

“Because of how you look at everyone else.”

It must shake her; she tilts her head, and for an instant her eyes go empty and flat as she pulls her face into a different expression.

It’s so fast that most people wouldn’t notice, but Mason is suspicious enough by now to be watching for some small tic that marks her as other than human.

Now he knows why she looks so steadily into her book, if that’s what happens every time someone surprises her.

Doesn’t stop him from going cold.

(He can’t process it. It’s one thing to be suspicious, another thing to know.)

It must show on his face; she looks at him like she doesn’t know what he’s going to do.

It’s not how she used to look at him.

He goes colder.

Her eyes go terrified, as terrified as any human eyes.

She’s the most beautiful machine he’s ever seen.

He opens his mouth.

“Don’t,” she starts.

Then Paul is there, smiling, asking, “You remember how to dance, right?”, lacing his fingers in her fingers and pulling her with him a fraction too fast to be casual.

She watches Mason over her shoulder all the way to the dance floor.

He stands where he is a long time, watching the golden boy of Mori dancing with his handmade Vestige prototype.

He spends the weekend wondering if he has a friend in Aesthetics who could tell him where Nadia’s face really came from, or one in Archives who would back him up about a personality Paul Whitcover’s been saving for a special occasion.

It’s tempting. It wouldn’t stop the project, but it would certainly shut Paul up, and with something that big he might be able to renegotiate his contract right up to Freelance. (No one taps your home network when you’re Freelance.)

He needs to tell someone, soon. If he doesn’t, and someone finds out down the line they were keeping secrets, Mason will end up in Quality Control for the rest of his life, monitored 24/7 and living in the subterranean company apartments.

If he doesn’t tell, and Paul does, Paul will get Freelance and Mason will just be put down.

He has to make the call. He has to tell Compliance.

But whenever he’s on the verge of doing something, he remembers her face after he’d found her out and she feared the worst from him, how she’d let Paul take her hand, but watched him over her shoulder as long as she dared.

It’s not a very flattering memory, but somehow it keeps him from making a move.

(Just as well; turns out he doesn’t have a lot of friends.)

Monday morning Paul comes in alone, shuts the door behind him, and doesn’t say a word.

It’s such a delightful change that Mason savors the quiet for a while before he turns around.

Paul has his arms crossed, his face a set of wary lines. (He looks like Nadia.)

Mason says, “Who is she?”

He’s hardly slept all weekend, thinking about it. He’d imagined tragic first love, or some unattainable socialite Paul was just praying would get personality-mapped.
Once or twice he imagined Paul had tried to reincarnate Daddy, but that was too weird even for him.

Paul shakes his head, tightly. “No one.”

“Come on,” says Mason, “if I haven’t called HR by now I’m not going to. Who?”

Paul sits down, rakes his hair back with his hands.

“I didn’t want to get in trouble if they found out I was making one,” he says. “It’s one thing to fuck around with some company components, but if you take a customer’s remnant--” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t risk it. I had them put in a standard template for her.”

Mason thinks about Paul’s black-market baseline, wonders how Paul would have known what was there before he installed the chip and woke her.

“She’s not standard any more,” he settles on.

Nadia should be here; Mason would really feel better about this whole conversation if she were here.

(But Paul wouldn’t be talking about it if she were; he knows that much about Paul by now.)

“No,” says Paul, a sad smile crossing his face. “I tried a couple of our early patches, before we were working on the full. I couldn’t believe how well they took.”

Of course they did, thinks Mason, they’re mine, but he keeps his mouth shut.

Paul looks as close to wonderment as guys like him can get. “When we announce Vestige, it’s going to change the world. You know that, right?”

He knows. It’s one of the reasons he can’t sleep.

“What happens to Nadia, then?” he asks.

(That’s the other reason he can’t sleep.)

“I don’t know,” Paul says, shaking his head. “She knows what she is—I mean, she knows she’s A.I.—she understands what might happen. I told her that from the very beginning. At first I thought we could use her as a tester. I had no idea how much I would—” he falters as his feelings get the better of him.

“Not human, but the nearest thing?” Mason says, and it comes out vicious.

Paul has the decency to flinch, but it doesn’t last.

“She knows I care about her,” he goes on. “I’m planning for better things. Hopefully Mori will be so impressed by the product that they’ll let me—that they’ll be all right with Nadia.”

He means, That they’ll let me keep her.

“What if they want her as the prototype?”

“I haven’t lied to her,” Paul says. “Not ever. She knows she might have to get the upgrade to preserve herself, that she might end up belonging to the company. She accepts it. I thought I had, too, but I didn’t think she’d be so—I mean, I didn’t think I would come to—in the beginning, she really was no one.”

Mason remembers the first time Nadia ever looked at him; he knows it isn’t true.

They sit quietly for a long time, Paul looking wracked as to how he fell in love with something he made, like someone who never thought to look up Galatea.

She’s waiting in the library, and it surprises him before he admits that of course he’d look for her here; he had a map.

He doesn’t make any noise, and she doesn’t look up from her console, but after a second she says, “Some of these have never even been accessed.” A castigation.

He says, “These are just reference books.” He doesn’t say, I don’t need them. He needs to try not being an asshole sometimes.

She glances up, then. (He looks for code behind her eyes, feels worse than Paul.)

“I love books,” she says. “At first I didn’t, but now I understand them better. Now I love them.”

(She means, Are you going to give me away?)

He wonders if this is just her, or if this is his algorithm working, and something new is trying to get out.

“I have a library at home,” he says. (He means, No.)

She blinks, relaxes. “What do you read?”

“Pulp, mostly,” he says, thinks about his collection of detective novels, wonders if she thinks that’s poor taste.

She says, “They’re all pulp.”

It’s a sly joke (he doesn’t think it’s anything of his), and she has such a smile he gets distracted, and when he pulls himself together she’s leaving.

“I’ll walk you somewhere,” he says. “Paul and I won’t be done for a while.”

Clearly Paul told her not to trust him before he went in to spill his guts, but after a second she says, “Tell me more about your books,” and he falls into step beside her.

He tells her about the library that used to be the guest bedroom before he realized he didn’t have guests and there was no point in it. He explains why there are no windows and special light bulbs and a fancy dehumidifier to make sure mold doesn’t get into the books.

(It’s also lined in lead, which keeps Mori from getting a look at his computer. Some things are private.)

Her expression keeps changing, so subtle he’d swear she was human if he didn’t know better.

She talks about the library at Alexandria, an odd combination of a machine programmed to access information and someone with enough imagination she might as well have been there.

(Maybe this is immortality, as far as it goes.)

She mentions the Dewey Decimal system, and he says, “That’s how I shelve mine.”

“That explains your code,” she says. When he raises his eyebrows, she says, “It’s . . . thorough.”

(Diplomacy. Also not his.)

“It has to be,” he says. “I want Vestige to be perfect.”

He doesn’t say, You.

“I know,” she says, in a way he doesn’t like, but by then they’re standing in front of Paul’s office, and she’s closing the door.

This floor has a balcony overlooking the atrium.

He sticks close to the wall all the way back.

He goes home and erases her avatar from his program.

(Not like he cares what she thinks, but there’s no harm in cleaning house.)

Marketing calls them in for a meeting about the press announcement.

They talk a lot about advertising and luxury markets and consumer interest and the company’s planned stock reissue and how the Patents team is standing by any time they want to hand over code.

“Aesthetics has done some really amazing work,” Marketing says, and Mason fakes polite interest as hard as he can so he doesn’t stare at the photo.

(It’s not quite Nadia; it’s close enough that Mason’s throat goes tight, but it’s a polished, prettier version, the kind of body you’d use if you wanted to immortalize your greyhound in a way society would accept.)

“Gorgeous,” Paul says, and then with a smile, “is she single?” and the Marketing guys crack up.

(One of them says, “Now now, Paul, we’re still hoping you can make a studio match—HR would be pleased,” and Paul looks admirably amenable for a guy who’s in love with a woman he thinks he made.)

It’s only Paul on the schedule to present, of course—Mason’s not a guy you put in front of a camera—and it’s far enough away that they’ll have time to polish the code.

“Naturally, you should have the prototype presentable ASAP,” the Marketing VP says. “We need a pretty face for the ads, and we need her to have her personality installed by then. Aesthetics seems to think it’s already in place, in some form?”

The VP’s face is just bland enough not to mean anything by it, if their consciences don’t get the better of them.

Don’t you dare, Mason thinks, don’t you dare tell them for a chance to keep her, second-gen or not, it’s a trap, not one word, think about what will happen to her.

(She’s still a doll, he thinks, deeper, ruthlessly; something will happen to her eventually.)

“I don’t know a thing about the particulars, I’m afraid,” Paul says, and having thus absolved himself he throws a casual look at Mason.

Mason thinks, You asshole. He thinks, Here’s where I rat him out.

He grits his teeth and smiles.

“We’ve been running tests,” he says. “Would you like to see Galatea?” Then, in his best Paul impression, “She has a crush on Paul, of course.”

The Marketing guys laugh, and Mason pulls up Galatea on his pad, and as the lights go down he catches Paul glancing gratefully in his direction.

He hates how strange it feels to have someone be grateful to him; he hates that it’s Paul.

Paul walks out with the Marketing guys, grinning and charming and empty, and from the plans they’re making for the announcement and the new projects they’re already asking him about, Mason suspects that’s the last time he’ll ever see Paul.

It’s so lonely in his office he thinks about turning on Galatea, just for company.

(He’s no better than some.)

LiveScribe: MORI PRESS CONFERENCE—VESTIGE, PT 1.

SEARCH PARAMETERS—BEGIN: 10:05:27, END: 10:08:43

PAUL WHITCOVER: From the company that brought you Memento, which has not only pioneered the Alpha series real-time response interface, but has also brought comfort to grieving families across the world.

It’s this focus on the humanity behind the technology that is Mori’s greatest achievement, and it is what has made possible what I am about to show you. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present: Galatea.

[MORIVESTIGE00001.img available through LiveSketch link]

[APPLAUSE, CALLS, SHOUTS]

PAUL WHITCOVER: Galatea isn’t human, but she’s the nearest thing. She’s the prototype of our Vestige model, which shifts the paradigm of robotics in ways we have only begun to guess—if you can tear your eyes away from her long enough.

[LAUGHER, APPLAUSE]

PAUL WHITCOVER: Each Vestige features critical-thinking initiatives so advanced it not only sustains the initial personality, but allows the processor to learn from new stimuli, to form attachments—to grow in the same way the human mind does. This Vestige is built on a donor actress—anonymous, for now, though I suspect some in the audience will know who she is as soon as you talk to her.

[LAUGHER]

In seriousness, I would like to honor everyone at Mori who participated in the development of such a remarkable thing. The stock market will tell you that this is an achievement of great technical merit, and that’s true. However, those who have honored loved ones with a Memento doll will tell you that this is a triumph over the grieving heart, and it’s this that means the most to Mori.

Understandably, due to the difficulty of crafting each doll, the Vestige is a very limited product. However, our engineers are already developing alternate uses for this technology that you will soon see more of—and that might yet change your world.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being here today. It is not only my honor, but my privilege.

[APPLAUSE]

Small-group interviews with Vestige will be offered to members of the press. Check your entrance ticket. Thank you again, everyone, really, this is such a thrill, I’m glad you could be here. If you’d—

The phone call comes from some internal extension he’s never seen, but he’s too distracted by the streaming press-conference footage to screen it.

Paul is made for television; he can practically see the HR people arranging for his transfer to Public Relations.

(He can’t believe Paul carried through with Nadia the Aesthetic Consultant. He can absolutely believe Paul named her Galatea.)

“This is Mason.”

There’s nothing on the other end, but he knows it’s her.

He hangs up, runs for the elevator.

Nadia’s on the floor in the library, twitching like she got fifty thousand volts, and he drops to his knees and pulls the connecting cable out of her skull.

“We have to get you to a hospital,” he says, which is the stupidest thing that’s ever come out of his mouth (he watches too many movies). What she needs is an antivirus screen in one of the SysTech labs.

Maybe it’s for her sake he says it, so they can keep pretending she’s real until she tells him otherwise.

“It’s the baseline,” she says, and he can’t imagine what she was doing in there.

He says, “I’ll get you to an Anti-V, hang on.”

“No,” she manages.

Then her eyes go blank and flat, and something inside her makes an awful little click.

He scoops her up without thinking, moves to the elevator as fast as he can.

He has to get her home.

He makes it in seven minutes (he’ll be paying a lot of tickets later), carries her through the loft. She’s stopped twitching, and he doesn’t know if that’s better or worse.

He assumes she’s tougher than she looks—God knows how many upgrades Paul’s put her through—but you never know. She’s light enough in his arms that he wonders how she was ever expected to last.

He sets her on one of the chaises the Mori designer insisted mimicked the lines of the living room, drags it through the doorway to his study.

He finds the socket (behind one ear), the same place as Memento; rich people don’t care for visible flaws.

He plugs her into his program.

It feels slimy, like he’s showing her into his bedroom, but at least Mori won’t monitor the process.

Her head is limp, her eyes half-lidded and unseeing.

“Hold on,” he says, like some asshole, pulls up his program.

(Now he’s sorry he deleted her avatar; he could help her faster if he had any framework ready to go.)

The code scans. Some of it is over his head—some parts of her baseline Paul got from the black market. (Black-market programmers can do amazing work. If he gets out of this alive, he might join up with them.)

He recognizes a few lines of his own code that have integrated, feels prouder than he should.

He recognizes some ID stamps that make his whole chest go tight, and his eyes ache.

Paul’s an idiot, he thinks, wants to punch something.

Then he sees the first corruption, and his work begins.

He’s never worked with a whole system. It’s always been lines of code sent to points unknown; Galatea was the first time he’d worked with anything close to a final product.

Now Nadia is staring at the ceiling with those awful empty eyes, and his fingers shake.

If he thinks of this as surgery he’s going to be ill. He turns so he can’t see her.

After a while he hits a stride; it takes him back to being twelve, recreating their apartment in a few thousand lines of code, down to the squeak in the hall.

(“That’s very . . . specific,” his mother said, and that was when he began to suspect his imagination was wanting.)

When he finishes the last line, the code flickers, and he’s terrified that it will be nothing but a string of zeros like a flatline.

But it cycles again, faster than he can read it, and then there’s a boot file like Galatea’s, and he thinks, Fuck, I did it.

Then her irises stutter, and she wakes up.

She makes an awful, hollow noise, and he reaches for her hand, stops—maybe that’s the last thing you need when you’re having a panic reboot.

She looks at him, focuses.

“You should check the code,” he says. “I’m not sure if I got it all.”

There’s a brief pause.

“You did,” she says, and when her eyes close he realizes she’s gone to sleep and not shorted out.

After some debate he carries her to the bed, feeling like a total idiot. He didn’t realize they slept.

(Maybe it was Paul’s doing, to make her more human; he had planned for better things.)

He sits in front of his computer for a long time, looking at the code with his finger on the Save button, deciding what kind of guy he is.

(That’s the nice thing about programs, he always thought; you only ever deal in absolutes—yes, or no.)

When he finally turns in his chair, she’s in the doorway, watching him.

“I erased it,” he says.

She says, “I know,” in a tone that makes him wonder how long she’s been standing there.

She sits on the edge of the chaise, rolls one shoulder like she’s human and it hurts.

“Were you trying to kill yourself?” he asks.

She pulls a face.

He flushes. “No, not that I want—I just, have a game I play, and in the game you jumped. I’ve always been worried.”

It sounds exactly as creepy as it is, and he’s grateful she looks as his computer and doesn’t ask what else he did with her besides watch her jump.

I would have jumped if I were you and knew what I was in for, he thinks, but some people take the easy way out.

Nadia sits like a human gathering her thoughts. Mason watches her face (can’t help it), wonders how long she has.

The prototype is live; pretty soon, someone at Mori will realize how much Vestige acts like Nadia.

Maybe they won’t deactivate her. Paul’s smart enough to leverage his success for some lenience; he can get what he wants out of them, maybe.

(To keep her, Mason thinks, wonders why there’s no way for Nadia to win.)

“Galatea doesn’t remember her baseline,” Nadia says, after a long time. “She thinks that’s who she always was. Paul said I started with a random template, like her, and I thought I had kept track of what you changed.”

Mason thinks about her fondness for libraries; he thinks how she sat in his office for months, listening to them talk about what was going to happen to her next.

She pauses where a human would take a breath. She’s the most beautiful machine in the world.

“But the new Vestige prototype was based on a remnant,” she says. “All the others will be based on just one person. I had to know if I started as someone else.”

Mason’s heart is in his throat. “And?”

She looks at him. “I didn’t get that far.”

She means, You must have.

He shrugs. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” he says. “I’m not Paul.”

“I didn’t call Paul,” she says.

(She had called him; she knew how he would respond to a problem. People are easy to predict.

It’s how you build preferences.)

If he were a worse man, he’d take it as a declaration of love.

Instead he says, “Paul thought you were standard. He got your baseline from the black market, to keep Mori out, and they told him it was.”

He stops, wonders how to go on.

“Who was I?” she says, finally.

“They didn’t use a real name for her,” he says. “There’s no knowing.”

(The black-market programmer was also a sucker for stories; he’d tagged her remnant “Galatea.”

Mason will take that with him to the grave.)

She looks at him.

He thinks about the first look she ever gave him, wary and hard in an expression he never saw again, and the way she looked as Galatea fell in love with Paul, realizing she had lost herself but with no way of knowing how much.

He thinks about her avatar leaping over the balcony and disappearing.

He’d leave with her tonight, take his chances working on the black market, if she wanted him to. He’d cover for her as long as he could, if she wanted to go alone.

(God, he wants her to live.)

“I can erase what we did,” he says. “Leave you the way you were when Paul woke you.”

(Paul won’t notice; he loves her too much to see her at all.)

Her whole body looks betrayed; her eyes are fixed in middle space, and she curls her fingers around the edge of the chair like she’s bracing for the worst, like at any moment she’ll give in.

He’s reminded for a second of Kim Parker, who followed him to the Spanish Steps one morning during the Mori Academy study trip to Rome when he was fifteen. He sat beside her for a long time, waiting for a sign to kiss her that never came.

He’d felt stupid that whole time, and lonely, and exhilarated, and the whole time they were sitting together part of him was memorizing all the color codes he would need to build the Steps back, later, in his program.

Nadia is blinking from time to time, thinking it over.

The room is quiet—only one of them is breathing—and it’s the loneliest he’s felt in a long time, but he’ll wait as long as it takes.

He knows how to wait for a yes or a no; people like them deal in absolutes.

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, was published by Prime Books in May. Her short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from: Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed, 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, genevievevalentine.com.

Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine
Stacey Friedberg

The world in which Mason lives, from his career to the people he knows, feels incredibly real. Where did you find the inspiration for it?

I’ve always been a sucker for a near-future identity crisis, and the story grew pretty organically from putting these characters in an uneasy alliance within a corporate setting that became an increasingly strong presence in the narrative.

Paul is such an interesting character in that he clearly loves Nadia, yet doesn’t seem to care about her in the way that Mason does. How do you imagine Paul and Nadia’s relationship started? What plans did Paul have for their future?

The first question is definitely something I’d be interested in exploring more someday in another story about these characters, though I must say that, given Paul’s actions throughout this story, while his heart might be in the right place, I’m not sure long-range planning is Paul’s strong suit.

Why would Paul risk creating the Vestige model if it meant Nadia possibly getting deactivated?

For businessmen of vision, a great final product often involves a body count, so to speak. The Vestige model is, on a corporate level, just a piece of sophisticated software. The danger to Nadia is the same as the danger to excess code or abandoned chassis designs; it might be disposed of, but it might linger in some archive. It’s a risk Paul, as a businessman of vision, was willing to take.

Mason’s personal program is able to immediately detect that something is wrong with Nadia. How is it able to do so with only the bare minimum of information? What clues give Nadia away?

In the context of the story, one hopes that Mason’s personal computer is savvy enough to parse volumes of information quickly. Otherwise the black market sold him a dud.

In your opinion, where does Nadia’s baseline come from? Who is she really?

That’s actually something I intentionally leave unanswered. When Nadia is confronted with this in the story, she has to make her big decision blindly, without knowing anything that could help her pick and choose the best path, the same way many of us have to enter a point of crucial decision.

Arguably, Mori is also a character in this story, perhaps even a villain. How did you come up with a company with such micro-managing tendencies?

Oh, my guess is that most people who have held down a day job in a corporate atmosphere will recognize something of Mori with very little trouble. There’s a sort of comfort in the corporate dystopia, because it functions as a monster all its own.

Your other story published in Lightspeed, “The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball,” also deals with man’s inventions perhaps going too far and spinning out of control. What keeps bringing you back to this idea?

Actually, I’d argue that in both those stories the technology does exactly what its meant to do, and it’s just that society is more than happy to let individuals be collateral damage so long as the trains run on time. I think it’s a theme well worth exploring because it’s a real-world mindset one encounters remarkably often.

In your mind, what does Nadia ultimately decide to do at the end of the story?

So much of the story has brought her to this point and hangs in the balance, but by the same token, this is the first decision she gets to make wholly on her own. I guess in the end, the answer she gives is something for the reader to decide, at least for now; the day may come when I want to revisit these characters (I certainly enjoyed them), and at that point I’ll have to decide which way she chose, but until that time comes, she’s Schrödinger’s cyborg.

Stacey Friedberg is an editorial assistant at Penguin Books for Young Readers. She enjoys reading, writing, and cooking. You can follow her (very infrequent) tweets via @stacabird.

Four Milestones in the Evolution of Artificial Intelligence
Graeme McMillan

Even though we live in an era in which we rely so much on iPhones, laptops, and the internet just to get through the day, there’s something about the phrase “Artificial Intelligence” that still seems curiously like science fiction instead of science fact. But the truth is, A.I. has been a very real thing in the world for more than a century. A.I.s have made for skilled chess players, therapists, and the most curiously compelling week of Jeopardy! ever broadcast. Here are four highlights from the history of our future robot overlords.

EL AJEDRECISTA: A Remarkable Automatic Device

In English, El Ajedrecista is “The Chess Player”—but, let’s be honest, “El Ajedrecista” sounds so much better. The machine astonished the world at the Paris World Fair of 1914 by using magnets and math to play an endgame of chess against a human opponent. The machine originally had mechanical arms to move the pieces, before the much less terrifying electromagnet solution was introduced.

El Ajedrecista may not have been the first time someone claimed to have invented a chess-playing automaton, but it was the first time that reality lived up to the hype; in 1769, Wolfgang von Kempelen’s “The Turk,” which made similar claims to El Ajedrecista, was later revealed as a hoax when a human player was discovered inside the machine. In contrast, El Ajedrecista was not only the first publicly displayed artificially-intelligent automaton, but it can also make a claim to being the world’s first computer game.

It’s fair to say that the results of each game were somewhat stacked in El Ajedrecista’s favor from the start. The machine does not play a full game of chess. It only works its way through an endgame, pitting its king and rook against the human opponent’s king, each starting from pre-set positions. The algorithm it uses cannot be beaten by any legal maneuver at that point in the game. Essentially, its creators just reverse-engineered the set-up, starting with checkmate and backing up to the last point at which the game becomes unwinnable unless the machine makes a mistake. (There’s no rule that robots have to have a sense of fair play.) El Ajedrecista is still on show—and still playable—in Madrid, and has never failed to defeat its opponent.

ELIZA: Mommy to a Million Chatbots

Considered the forerunner to the modern-day chatbot, ELIZA (created 1964) was the creation of Joseph Weizenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and ended up turning Weizenbaum from an early advocate of artificial intelligence into one of its harshest critics.

What was the problem? Well, ELIZA turned out to be too real for its (her?) own good.

ELIZA was created to act as a simulation of a psychotherapist by reacting to keywords in teletyped conversations with a human subject, offering follow-up questions pattern-matched to the previous statement. “My mother hates me,” for example, would be followed with “Who else in your family hates you?” Weizenbaum described ELIZA initially as a parody of this type of therapist, but he became appalled when test subjects began to genuinely open up to the machine, revealing emotionally sensitive information about themselves as if talking to a real person. Weizenbaum became so disturbed by the connections he saw people form with the automated therapist that he went on to write the infamous screed Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (1976), in which he argued against the anthropomorphization of machines with human characteristics.

ELIZA made history not only as the first successful attempt for a computer to mimic human-human interaction (as opposed to straight human-computer interaction), but also as a forerunner for early computer programming languages and the basis for the original computer role-playing games. So, gamers, you have a (robotic) therapist to thank for losing so many hours of your lives.

SHAKEY THE ROBOT: Problems? Solved

Named, it seems, by someone with a strong sense of humor, “Shakey” was built in 1966 by California’s celebrated Stanford Research Institute as the first A.I. able to handle both logical reasoning and the ability to move by itself. When put like that, Shakey sounds like the beginning of some Terminator-esque dystopian future, but the reality was far more mundane.

Shakey, whose short career saw upgrades and developments from ‘66 through 1972 before being “retired from active duty,” had minimal mobility. He could move across floors (as long as they were flat enough for him to wheel around without falling over) and turn light switches on and off.

Remarkably, he could understand basic commands like “Push the block off the platform,” but also parse them into separate tasks, such as “Find the platform, find the block, push the block off the platform.” It might not sound like much compared with your average Cylon, but compared with anything that had come before, Shakey was the first small step—well, wheel trundle—into a brave new world. Instead of simply responding in a programmed way to a specific command, he was able to make plans, figuring out each small step in a command and stringing them together. This showed an understanding of the context and meaning of every command.

WATSON: Alex Trebek’s Worst Nightmare

Game show addicts and tech geeks the world over are familiar with Watson, the IBM supercomputer that thoroughly defeated two former champions on Jeopardy earlier this year. Not only did the computer—who, like the human competitors, wasn’t connected to any outside network during the contest—outperform the bones and red meat competition, but in doing so, it raised a million dollars for charity. Who says that computers have no compassion?

Watson’s week of Jeopardy! wins wasn’t just a ratings stunt, but the culmination of seven years’ worth of planning and development on behalf of the team that created him, including five years of test runs before his television debut. IBM developers weren’t the only ones who worked on the project; Carnegie Mellon University, University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, and MIT were amongst the schools that offered expertise of faculty and students to help with Watson’s particular education, creating a leap forward in computers’ abilities to not only parse meaning from complex questions but also supply useful answers in so short a time that it can beat two well-known game show winners. If you think that sounds like a lot of work simply to build a better game show contestant, you’re right; IBM foresees a future for multiple next-generation Watsons as consultant machines in fields as varied as medicine, tech support, and business analytics.

From chess to Jeopardy!, parody psychotherapy to problem solving on the go, the field of artificial intelligence takes its leaps forward wherever it can find them, each one demonstrating that what might start as entertainment can end up changing the world, one robotic step at a time.

Graeme McMillan lives, writes, and is currently learning to bake in Portland, Oregon. His writing has appeared throughout the internet on sites like Time Magazine’s Techland blog, io9.com, and Comic Book Resources, and if pressed, he’ll admit that he tries to use his powers for good.

Nonstop to Portales
Connie Willis

Every town’s got a claim to fame. No town is too little and dried out to have some kind of tourist attraction. John Garfield’s grave, Willa Cather’s house, the dahlia capital of America. And if they don’t have a house or a grave or a Pony Express station, they make something up. Sasquatch footprints in Oregon. The Martha lights in Texas. Elvis sightings. Something.

Except, apparently, Portales, New Mexico.

“Sights?” the cute Hispanic girl at the desk of the Portales Inn said when I asked what there was to see. “There’s Billy the Kid’s grave over in Fort Sumner. It’s about seventy miles.”

I’d just driven all the way from Bisbee, Arizona. The last thing I wanted to do was get back in a car and drive a hundred and sixty miles round trip to see a crooked wooden tombstone with the name worn off.

“Isn’t there anything famous to see in town?”

“In Portales?” she said, and it was obvious from her tone there wasn’t.

“There’s Blackwater Draw Museum on the way up to Clovis,” she said finally. “You take Highway 70 north about eight miles and it’s on your right. It’s an archaeological dig. Or you could drive out west of town and see the peanut fields.”

Great. Bones and dirt.

“Thanks,” I said and went back up to my room.

It was my own fault. Cross wasn’t going to be back till tomorrow, but I’d decided to come to Portales a day early to “take a look around” before I talked to him, but that was no excuse. I’d been in little towns all over the west for the last five years. I knew how long it took to look around. About fifteen minutes. And five to see it had dead end written all over it. So here I was in Sightless Portales on a Sunday with nothing to do for a whole day but think about Cross’s offer and try to come up with a reason not to take it.

“It’s a good, steady job,” my friend Denny’d said when he called to tell me Cross needed somebody. “Portales is a nice town. And it’s got to be better than spending your life in a car. Driving all over kingdom come trying to sell inventions to people who don’t want them. What kind of future is there in that?”

No future at all. The farmers weren’t interested in solar-powered irrigation equipment or water conservation devices. And lately Hammond, the guy I worked for, hadn’t seemed very interested in them either.

My room didn’t have air-conditioning. I cranked the window open and turned the TV on. It didn’t have cable either. I watched five minutes of a sermon and then called Hammond.

“It’s Carter Stewart,” I said as if I was in the habit of calling him on Sundays. “I’m in Portales. I got here earlier than I thought, and the guy I’m supposed to see isn’t here till tomorrow. You got any other customers you want me to look up?”

“In Portales?” he said, sounding barely interested. “Who were you supposed to see there?”

“Hudd at Southwest Agricultural Supply. I’ve got an appointment with him at eleven.” And an appointment with Cross at ten, I thought. “I got in last night. Bisbee didn’t take as long as I thought it would.”

“Hudd’s our only contact in Portales,” he said.

“Anybody in Clovis? Or Tucumcari?”

“No,” he said, too fast to have looked them up. “There’s nobody much in that part of the state.”

“They’re big into peanuts here. You want me to try and talk to some peanut farmers?”

“Why don’t you just take the day off?” he said.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, and hung up and went back downstairs.

There was a dried-up old guy at the desk now, but the word must have spread. “You wanna see something really interesting?” he said. “Down in Roswell’s where the Air Force has got that space alien they won’t let anybody see. You take Highway 70 south—”

“Didn’t anybody famous ever live here in Portales?” I asked. “A vice-president? Billy the Kid’s cousin?”

He shook his head.

“What about buildings? A railroad station? A courthouse?”

“There’s a courthouse, but it’s closed on Sundays. The Air Force claims it wasn’t a spaceship, that it was some kind of spy plane, but I know a guy who saw it coming down. He said it was shaped like a big long cigar and had lights all over it.”

“Highway 70?” I said, to get away from him. “Thanks,” and went out into the parking lot.

I could see the top of the courthouse over the dry-looking treetops, only a couple of blocks away. It was closed on Sundays, but it was better than sitting in my room watching Falwell and thinking about the job I was going to have to take unless something happened between now and tomorrow morning. And better than getting back in the car to go see something Roswell had made up so it’d have a tourist attraction. And maybe I’d get lucky, and the courthouse would turn out to be the site of the last hanging in New Mexico. Or the first peace march. I walked downtown.

The streets around the courthouse looked like your typical small-town post-Wal-Mart business district. No drugstore, no grocery store, no dimestore. There was an Anthony’s standing empty and a restaurant that would be in another six months, a Western clothing store with a dusty denim shirt and two concho belts in the window, a bank with a sign in the window saying “New Location.”

The courthouse was red brick and looked like every other courthouse from Nelson, Nebraska, to Tyler, Texas. It stood in a square of grass and trees. I walked around it twice, looking at the war memorial and the flagpole and trying not to think about Hammond and Bisbee. It hadn’t taken as long as I’d thought because I hadn’t even been able to get in to see the buyer, and Hammond hadn’t cared enough to even ask how it had gone. Or to bother to look up his contacts in Tucumcari. And it wasn’t just that it was Sunday. He’d sounded that way the last two times I’d called him. Like a man getting ready to give up, to pull out.

Which meant I should take Cross’s job offer and be grateful. “It’s a forty-hour week,” he’d said. “You’ll have time to work on your inventions.”

Right. Or else settle into a routine and forget about them. Five years ago when I’d taken the job with Hammond, Denny’d said, “You’ll be able to see the sights. The Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone.” Yeah, well, I’d seen them. Cave of the Winds, Amazing Mystery House, Indian curios, Genuine Live Jackalope.

I walked around the courthouse square again and then went down to the railroad tracks to look at the grain elevator and walked back to the courthouse again. The whole thing took ten minutes. I thought about walking over to the university, but it was getting hot. In another half hour the grass would start browning and the streets getting soft, and it would be even hotter out here than in my room. I started back to the Portales Inn.

The street I was on was shady, with white wooden houses, the kind I’d probably live in if I took Cross’s job, the kind I’d work on my inventions in. If I could get the parts for them at Southwest Agricultural Supply. Or Wal-Mart. If I really did work on them. If I didn’t just give up after awhile.

I turned down a side street. And ran into a dead end. Which was pretty appropriate, under the circumstances. “At least this would be a real job, not a dead end like the one you’re in now,” Denny’d said. “You’ve got to think about the future.”

Yeah, well, I was the only one. Nobody else was doing it. They kept on using oil like it was water, kept on using water like the Ogalala Aquifer was going to last forever, kept planting and polluting and populating. I’d already thought about the future, and I knew what it was going to be. Another dead end. Another Dust Bowl. The land used up, the oil wells and the water table pumped dry, Bisbee and Clovis and Tucumcari turned into ghost towns. The Great American Desert all over again, with nobody but a few Indians left on it, waiting in their casinos for customers that weren’t going to come. And me, sitting in Portales, working a forty-hour-a-week job.

I backtracked and went the other way. I didn’t run into any other dead ends, or any sights either, and by l0:15 I was back at the Portales Inn, with only twenty-four hours to kill and Billy the Kid’s grave looking better by the minute.

There was a tour bus in the Inn’s parking lot. Nonstop Tours, it said in red and gray letters, and a long line of people was getting on it. A young woman was standing by the door of the bus, ticking off names on a clipboard. She was cute, with short yellow hair and a nice figure. She was wearing a light blue T-shirt and a short denim skirt.

An older couple in Bermuda shorts and Disney World T-shirts were climbing the stairs onto the bus, slowing up the line.

“Hi,” I said to the tour guide. “What’s going on?”

She looked up from her list at me, startled, and the old couple froze halfway up the steps. The tour guide looked down at her clipboard and then back up at me, and the startled look was gone, but her cheeks were as red as the letters on the side of the bus.

“We’re taking a tour of the local sights,” she said.

She motioned to the next person in line, a fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt, and the old couple went on up the steps and into the bus.

“I didn’t think there were any,” I said. “Local sights.”

The fat guy was gaping at me.

“Name?” the tour guide said.

“Giles H. Paul,” he said, still staring at me. She motioned him onto the bus.

“Name?” I said, and she looked startled all over again.

“What’s your name? It’s probably on that clipboard in case you’ve forgotten it.”

She smiled. “Tonia Randall.”

“So, Tonia, where’s this tour headed?”

“We’re going out to the ranch.”

“The ranch?”

“Where he grew up,” she said, her cheeks flaming again. She motioned to the next person in line. “Where he got his start.”

Where who started to what? I wanted to ask, but she was busy with a tall man who moved almost as stiffly as the old couple, and anyway, it was obvious everybody in line knew who she was talking about. They couldn’t wait to get on the bus, and the young couple who were last in line kept pointing things out to their little kid—the courthouse, the Portales Inn sign, a big tree on the other side of the street.

“Is it private? Your tour?” I said. “Can anybody pay to go on it?” And what was I doing? I’d taken a tour in the Black Hills one time, when I’d had my job about a month and still wanted to see the sights, and it was even more depressing than thinking about the future. Looking out blue-tinted windows while the tour guide tells memorized facts and unfunny jokes. Trooping off the bus to look at Wild Bill Hickok’s grave for five minutes, trooping back on. Listening to bawling kids and complaining wives. I didn’t want to go on this tour.

But when Tonia blushed and said, “No, I’m sorry,” I felt a rush of disappointment at not seeing her again.

“Sure,” I said, because I didn’t want her to see it. “Just wondering. Well, have a nice time,” and started for the front door of the Inn.

“Wait,” she said, leaving the couple and their kid standing there and coming over to me. “Do you live here in Portales?”

“No,” I said, and realized I’d decided not to take the job. “Just passing through. I came to town to see a guy. I got here early, and there’s nothing to do. That ever happen to you?”

She smiled, as if I’d said something funny. “So you don’t know anyone here?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you know the person you’ve got the appointment with?”

I shook my head, wondering what that had to do with anything.

She consulted her clipboard again. “It seems a pity for you to miss seeing it . . . ” she said, “ . . . and if you’re just passing through . . . Just a minute.” She walked back to the bus, stepped up inside, and said something to the driver. They consulted a few minutes, and then she came back down the steps. The couple and their kid came up to her, and she stopped a minute and checked their names off and waved them onto the bus, and then came back over to me. “The bus is full. Do you mind standing?”

Bawling kids, videocams, and no place to sit to go see the ranch where somebody I’d probably never heard of got his start. At least I’d heard of Billy the Kid, and if I drove over to Ft. Sumner I could take as long as I wanted to looking at his grave. “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind.” I pulled out my wallet. “Maybe I better ask before we go any farther, how much is the tour?”

She looked startled again. “No charge. Because the tour’s already full.”

“Great,” I said. “I’d like to go.”

She smiled and motioned me on board with her clipboard. Inside, it looked more like a city bus than a tour bus—the front and back seats were sideways along the walls, and there were straps for hanging onto. There was even a cord for signaling your stop, which might come in handy if the tour turned out to be as bad as the Wild Bill Hickok tour. I grabbed hold of a strap near the front.

The bus was packed with people of all ages. A white-haired man older than the Disney World couple, middle-aged people, teenagers, kids. I counted at least four under age five. I wondered if I should yank the cord right now.

Tonia counted heads and nodded to the driver. The door whooshed shut, and the bus lumbered out of the parking lot and slowly through a neighborhood of trees and tract houses. The Disney World couple were sitting in the front seat. They scooted over to make room for me, and I gestured to Tonia, but she motioned me to sit down.

She put down her clipboard and held onto the pole just behind the driver’s seat. “The first stop on today’s tour,” she said, “will be the house. He did the greater part of his work here,” and I began to wonder if I was going to go the whole tour without ever finding out who the tour was about. When she’d said “the ranch,” I’d assumed it was some Old West figure, but these houses had all been built in the thirties and forties.

“He moved into this house with his wife Blanche shortly after they were married.”

The bus ground down its gears and stopped next to a white house with a porch on a corner lot.

“He lived here from l947 to . . . ” she paused and looked sideways at me. “ . . . the present. It was while he was living here that he wrote Seetee Ship and The Black Sun and came up with the idea of genetic engineering.”

He was a writer, which narrowed it down some, but none of the titles she’d mentioned rang a bell. But he was famous enough to fill a tour bus, so his books must have been turned into movies. Tom Clancy? Stephen King? I’d have expected both of them to have a lot fancier houses.

“The windows in front are the living room,” Tonia said. “You can’t see his study from here. It’s on the south side of the house. That’s where he keeps his Grand Master Nebula Award, right above where he works.” That didn’t ring a bell either, but everybody looked impressed and the couple with the kid got out of their seats to peer out the tinted windows. “The two rear windows are the kitchen, where he read the paper and watched TV at breakfast before going to work. He used a typewriter and then in later years a personal computer. He’s not at home this weekend. He’s out of town at a science fiction convention.”

Which was probably a good thing. I wondered how he felt about tour buses parking out front, whoever he was. A science fiction writer. Isaac Asimov, maybe.

The driver put the bus in gear and pulled away from the curb. “As we drive past the front of the house,” Tonia said, “you’ll be able to see his easy chair, where he did most of his reading.”

The bus ground up through the gears and started winding through more neighborhood streets. “Jack Williamson worked on the Portales News-Tribune from l947 to l948 and then, with the publication of Darker Than You Think , quit journalism to write full-time,” she said, pausing and glancing at me again, but if she was expecting me to be looking as impressed as everybody else, I wasn’t. I’d read a lot of paperbacks in a lot of un-air-conditioned motel rooms the last five years, but the name Jack Williamson didn’t ring a bell at all.

“From l960 to l977, Jack Williamson was a professor at Eastern New Mexico University, which we’re coming up on now,” Tonia said. The bus pulled into the college’s parking lot and everybody looked eagerly out the windows, even though the campus looked just like every other western college’s, brick and glass and not enough trees, sprinklers watering the brownish grass.

“This is the Campus Union,” she said, pointing. The bus made a slow circuit of the parking lot. “And this is Becky Sharp Auditorium, where the annual Lecture in his honor is held every spring. It’s the week of April twelfth this year.”

It struck me that they hadn’t planned very well. They’d managed to miss not only their hero but the annual week in his honor, too.

“Over there is the building where he teaches a science fiction class with Patrice Caldwell,” she said, pointing, “and that, of course, is Golden Library, where the Williamson Collection of his works and awards is housed.” Everyone nodded in recognition.

I expected the driver to open the doors and everybody to pile out to look at the library, but the bus picked up speed and headed out of town.

“We aren’t going to the library?” I said.

She shook her head. “Not this tour. At this time the collection’s still very small.”

The bus geared up and headed west and south out of town on a two-lane road. New Mexico State Highway 18, a sign read. “Out your windows you can see the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains,” Tonia said. “They were named, as Jack Williamson says in his autobiography, Wonder’s Child, for the stakes Coronado used to mark his way across the plain. Jack Williamson’s family moved here in a covered wagon in l9l5 to a homestead claim in the sandhills. Here Jack did farm chores, hauled water, collected firewood, and read Treasure Island and David Copperfield.”

At least I’d heard of those books. And Jack had to be at least seventy-nine years old.

“The farm was very poor, with poor soil and almost no water, and after three years the family was forced to move off it and onto a series of sharecrop farms to make ends meet. During this time Jack went to school at Richland and at Center, where he met Blanche Slaten, his future wife. Any questions?”

This had the Deadwood tour all beat for boring, but a bunch of hands went up, and she went down the aisle to answer them, leaning over their seats and pointing out the tinted windows. The old couple got up and went back to talk to the fat guy, holding onto the straps above his seat and gesturing excitedly.

I looked out the window. The Spanish should have named it the Llano Flatto. There wasn’t a bump or a dip in it all the way to the horizon.

Everybody, including the kids, was looking out the windows, even though there wasn’t anything much to look at. A plowed field of red dirt, a few bored-looking cows, green rows of sprouting green that must be the peanuts, another plowed field. I was getting to see the dirt after all.

Tonia came back to the front and sat down beside me. “Enjoying the tour so far?” she said.

I couldn’t think of a good answer to that. “How far is the ranch?” I said.

“Twenty miles. There used to be a town named Pep, but now there’s just the ranch . . . ” She paused and then said, “What’s your name? You didn’t tell me.”

“Carter Stewart,” I said.

“Really?” She smiled at the funniest things. “Are you named after Carter Leigh in ‘Nonstop to Mars?’“

I didn’t know what that was. One of Jack Williamson’s books, apparently. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I’m named after Tonia Andros in ‘Dead Star Station.’ And the driver’s named after Giles Habibula.”

The tall guy had his hand up again. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and hurried down the aisle.

The fat guy’s name had been Giles, too, which wasn’t exactly a common name, and I’d seen the name “Lethonee” on Tonia’s clipboard, which had to be out of a book. But how could somebody I’d never even heard of be so famous people were named after his characters?

They must be a fan club, the kind that makes pilgrimages to Graceland and names their kids Paul and Ringo. They didn’t look the part, though. They should be wearing Jack Williamson T-shirts and Spock ears, not Disney World T-shirts. The elderly couple came back and sat down next to me. They smiled and started looking out the window.

They didn’t act the part either. The fans I’d met had always had a certain defensiveness, an attitude of “I know you think I’m crazy to like this stuff, and maybe I am,” and they always insisted on explaining how they got to be fans and why you should be one, too. These people had none of that. They acted like coming out here was the most normal thing in the world, even Tonia. And if they were science fiction fans, why weren’t they touring Isaac Asimov’s ranch? Or William Shatner’s?

Tonia came back again and stood over me, holding onto a hanging strap. “You said you were in Portales to see somebody?” she said.

“Yeah. He’s supposed to offer me a job.”

“In Portales?” she said, making that sound exciting. “Are you going to take it?”

I’d made up my mind back there in that dead end, but I said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s a desk job, a steady paycheck, and I wouldn’t have to do all the driving I’m doing now.” I found myself telling her about Hammond and the things I wanted to invent and how I was afraid the job would be a dead end.

“‘I had no future,’“ she said. “Jack Williamson said that at this year’s Williamson Lecture. ‘I had no future. I was a poor kid in the middle of the Depression, without education, without money, without prospects.’“

“It’s not the Depression, but otherwise I know how he felt. If I don’t take Cross’s job, I may not have one. And if I do take it—” I shrugged. “Either way I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh, but to have a chance to live in the same town with Jack Williamson,” Tonia said. “To run into him at the supermarket, and maybe even get to take one of his classes.”

“Maybe you should take Cross’s job offer,” I said.

“I can’t.” Her cheeks went bright red again. “I’ve already got a job.” She straightened up and addressed the tour group. “We’ll be coming to the turnoff to the ranch soon,” she said. “Jack Williamson lived here with his family from l9l5 till World War II, when he joined the army, and again after the war until he married Blanche.”

The bus slowed almost to a stop and turned onto a dirt road hardly as wide as the bus was that led off between two fields of fenced pastureland.

“The farm was originally a homestead,” Tonia said, and everyone murmured appreciatively and looked out the windows at more dirt and a couple of clumps of yucca.

“He was living here when he read his first issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly,” she said, “and when he submitted his first story to Amazing. That was ‘The Metal Man,’ which, as you remember from yesterday, he saw in the window of the drugstore.”

“I see it!” the tall man shouted, leaning forward over the back of the driver’s seat. “I see it!” Everyone craned forward, trying to see, and we pulled up in front of some outbuildings and stopped.

The driver whooshed the doors open, and everyone filed off the bus and stood in the rutted dirt road, looking excitedly at the unpainted sheds and the water trough. A black heifer looked up incuriously and then went back to chewing on the side of one of the sheds.

Tonia assembled everyone in the road with her clipboard. “That’s the ranch house over there,” she said, pointing at a low green house with a fenced yard and a willow tree. “Jack Williamson lived here with his parents, his brother Jim, and his sisters Jo and Katie. It was here that Jack Williamson wrote ‘The Girl from Mars’ and The Legion of Space, working at the kitchen table. His uncle had given him a basket-model Remington typewriter with a dim purple ribbon, and he typed his stories on it after everyone had gone to bed. Jack Williamson’s brother Jim . . . ” she paused and glanced at me, “owns the ranch at this time. He and his wife are in Arizona this weekend.”

Amazing. They’d managed to miss them all, but nobody seemed to mind, and it struck me suddenly what was unusual about this tour. Nobody complained. That’s all they’d done on the Wild Bill Hickok tour. Half of them hadn’t known who he was, and the other half had complained that it was too expensive, too hot, too far, the windows on the bus didn’t open, the gift shop didn’t sell Coke. If their tour guide had announced the wax museum was closed, he’d have had a riot on his hands.

“It was difficult for him to write in the midst of the family,” she said, leading off away from the house toward a pasture. “There were frequent interruptions and too much noise, so in l934 he built a separate cabin. Be careful,” she said, skirting around a clump of sagebrush. “There are sometimes rattlesnakes.”

That apparently didn’t bother anybody either. They trooped after her across a field of dry, spiny grass and gathered around a weathered gray shack.

“This is the actual cabin he wrote in,” Tonia said.

I wouldn’t have called it a cabin. It hardly even qualified as a shack. When I’d first seen it as we pulled up, I’d thought it was an abandoned outhouse. Four gray wood-slat walls, half falling down, a sagging gray shelf, some rusted cans. When Tonia started talking, a farm cat leaped down from where it had been sleeping under what was left of the roof and took off like a shot across the field.

“It had a desk, files, bookshelves, and later a separate bedroom,” Tonia said.

It didn’t look big enough for a typewriter, let alone a bed, but this was obviously what all these people had come to see. They stood reverently before it in the spiky grass, like it was the Washington Monument or something, and gazed at the weathered boards and rusted cans, not saying anything.

“He installed electric lights,” Tonia said, “which were run by a small windmill, and a bath. He still had occasional interruptions—from snakes and once from a skunk who took up residence under the cabin. He wrote ‘Dead Star Station’ here, and ‘The Meteor Girl,’ his first story to include time travel. ‘If the field were strong enough,’ he said in the story, ‘we could bring physical objects through space-time instead of mere visual images.’“

They all found that amusing for no reason I could see and then stood there some more, looking reverent. Tonia came over to me. “Well, what do you think?” she said, smiling.

“Tell me about him seeing ‘The Metal Man’ in the drugstore,” I said.

“Oh, I forgot you weren’t with us at the drugstore,” she said. “Jack Williamson sent his first story to Amazing Stories in l928 and then never heard anything back. In the fall of that year he was shopping for groceries, and he looked in the window of a drugstore and saw a magazine with a picture on the cover that looked like it could be his story, and when he went in, he was so excited to see his story in print, he bought all three copies of the magazine and went off without the groceries he’d been carrying.”

“So then he had prospects?”

She said seriously, “He said, ‘I had no future. And then I looked in a drugstore window and saw Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, and it gave me a future.’“

“I wish somebody would give me a future,” I said.

“‘No one can predict the future, he can only point the way.’ He said that, too.”

She went over to the shack and addressed the group. “He also wrote ‘Nonstop to Mars,’ my favorite story, in this cabin,” she said to the group, “and it was right here that he proposed the idea of colonizing Mars and . . . ” She paused, but this time it was the stiff tall man she glanced at, “ . . . invented the idea of androids.”

They continued to look. All of them walked around the shack two or three times, pointing at loose boards and tin cans, stepping back to get a better look, walking around it again. None of them seemed to be in any hurry to go. The Deadwood tour had lasted all of ten minutes at Mount Moriah Cemetery, with one of the kids whining, “Can’t we go now?” the whole time, but this group acted like they could stay here all day. One of them got out a notebook and started writing things down. The couple with the kid took her over to the heifer, and all three of them patted her gingerly.

After a while Tonia and the driver passed out paper bags and everybody sat down in the pasture, rattlesnakes and all, and had lunch. Stale sandwiches, cardboard cookies, cans of lukewarm Coke, but nobody complained. Or left any litter.

They neatly packed everything back in the bags and then walked around the shack some more, looking in the empty windows and scaring a couple more farm cats, or just sat and looked at it. A couple of them went over to the fence and gazed longingly over it at the ranchhouse.

“It’s too bad there’s nobody around to show them the house,” I said. “People don’t usually go off and leave a ranch with nobody to look after the animals. I wonder if there’s somebody around. Whoever it is would probably give you a tour of the ranchhouse.”

“It’s Jack’s niece Betty,” Tonia said promptly. “She had to go up to Clovis today to get a part for the water pump. She won’t be back till four.” She stood up, brushing dead grass and dirt off her skirt. “All right, everybody. It’s time to go.”

There was a discontented murmuring, and one of the kids said, “Do we have to go already?”, but everybody picked up their lunch bags and Coke cans and started for the bus. Tonia ticked off their names on her clipboard as they got on like she was afraid one of them might jump ship and take up residence among the rattlesnakes.

“Carter Stewart,” I told her. “Where to next? The drugstore?”

She shook her head. “We went there yesterday. Where’s Underhill?” She started across the road again, with me following her.

The tall man was standing silently in front of the shack, looking in at the empty room. He stood absolutely motionless, his eyes fixed on the gray weathered boards, and when Tonia said, “Underhill? I’m afraid we need to go,” he continued to stand there for a long minute, like he was trying to store up the memory. Then he turned and walked stiffly past us and back to the bus.

Tonia counted heads again, and the bus made a slow circle past the ranchhouse, turning around, and started back along the dirt road. Nobody said anything, and when we got to the highway, everyone turned around in their seats for a last look. The old couple dabbed at their eyes, and one of the kids stood up on the rear seat and waved goodbye. The tall man was sitting with his head buried in his hands.

“The cabin you’ve just seen was where it all started,” Tonia said, “with a copy of a pulp magazine and a lot of imagination.” She told how Jack Williamson had become a meteorologist and a college professor, as well as a science fiction writer, travelled to Italy, Mexico, the Great Wall of China, all of which must have been impossible for him to imagine, sitting all alone in that poor excuse for a shack, typing on an old typewriter with a faded ribbon.

I was only half listening. I was thinking about the tall guy, Underhill, and trying to figure out what was wrong about him. It wasn’t his stiffness—I’d been at least that stiff after a day in the car. It was something else. I thought about him standing there, looking at the shack, so fixed, like he was trying to carry the image away with him.

He probably just forgot his camera, I thought, and realized what had been nagging at me. Nobody had a camera. Tourists always have cameras. The Wild Bill Hickok gang had all had cameras, even the kids. And videocams. One guy had kept a videocam glued to his face the whole time and never seen a thing. They’d spent the whole tour snapping Wild Bill’s tombstone, snapping the figures in the wax museum even though there were signs that said, “No pictures,” snapping each other in front of the saloon, in front of the cemetery, in front of the bus. And then buying up slides and postcards in the gift shop in case the pictures didn’t turn out.

No cameras. No gift shop. No littering or trespassing or whining. What kind of tour is this? I thought.

“He predicted ‘a new Golden Age of fair cities, of new laws and new machines,’“ Tonia was saying, “‘of human capabilities undreamed of, of a civilization that has conquered matter and Nature, distance and time, disease and death.’“

He’d imagined the same kind of future I’d imagined. I wondered if he’d ever tried selling his ideas to farmers. Which brought me back to the job, which I’d managed to avoid thinking about almost all day.

Tonia came and stood across from me, holding onto the center pole. “‘A poor country kid, poorly educated, unhappy with his whole environment, longing for something else,’“ she said. “That’s how Jack Williamson described himself in l928.” She looked at me. “You’re not going to take the job, are you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t know.”

She looked out the window at the fields and cows, looking disappointed. “When he first moved here, this was all sagebrush and drought and dust. He couldn’t imagine what was going to happen any more than you can right now.”

“And the answer’s in a drugstore window?”

“The answer was inside him,” she said. She stood up and addressed the group. “We’ll be coming into Portales in a minute,” she said. “In l928, Jack Williamson wrote, ‘Science is the doorway to the future, scientification, the golden key. It goes ahead and lights the way. And when science sees the things made real in the author’s mind, it makes them real indeed.’“

The tour group applauded, and the bus pulled into the parking lot of the Portales Inn. I waited for the rush, but nobody moved. “We’re not staying here,” Tonia explained.

“Oh,” I said, getting up. “You didn’t have to give me door-to-door service. You could have let me out at wherever you’re staying, and I could have walked over.”

“That’s all right,” Tonia said, smiling.

“Well,” I said, unwilling to say goodbye. “Thanks for a really interesting tour. Can I take you to dinner or something? To thank you for letting me come?”

“I can’t,” she said. “I have to check everybody in and everything.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well . . . ”

Giles the driver opened the door with a whoosh of air.

“Thanks,” I said. I nodded to the old couple. “Thanks for sharing your seat,” and stepped down off the bus.

“Why don’t you come with us tomorrow?” she said. “We’re going to go see Number 55l6.”

Number 5516 sounded like a county highway and probably was, the road Jack Williamson walked to school along or something, complete with peanuts and dirt, at which the group would gaze reverently and not take pictures. “I’ve got an appointment tomorrow,” I said, and realized I didn’t want to say goodbye to her. “Next time. When’s your next tour?”

“I thought you were just passing through.”

“Like you said, a lot of nice people live around here. Do you bring a lot of tours through here?”

“Now and then,” she said, her cheeks bright red.

I watched the bus pull out of the parking lot and down the street. I looked at my watch. 4:45. At least an hour till I could justify dinner. At least five hours till I could justify bed. I went in the Inn and then changed my mind and went back out to the car and drove out to see where Cross’s office was so I wouldn’t have trouble in the morning, in case it was hard to find.

It wasn’t. It was on the south edge of town on Highway 70, a little past the Motel Super 8. The tour bus wasn’t in the parking lot of the Super 8, or at the Hillcrest, or the Sands Motel. They must have gone to Roswell or Tucumcari for the night. I looked at my watch again. It was 5:05.

I drove back through town, looking for someplace to eat. McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger King. There’s nothing wrong with fast food, except that it’s fast. I needed a place where it took half an hour to get a menu and another twenty minutes before they took your order.

I ended up eating at Pizza Hut (personal pan pizza in under five minutes or your money back.) “Do you get a lot of tour bus business?” I asked the waitress.

“In Portales? You have to be kidding,” she said. “In case you haven’t noticed, Portales is right on the road to nowhere. Do you want a box for the rest of that pizza?”

The box was a good idea. It took her ten minutes to bring it, which meant it was nearly six by the time I left. Only four hours left to kill. I filled up the car at Allsup’s and bought a sixpack of Coke. Next to the magazines was a rack of paperbacks.

“Any Jack Williamson books?” I asked the kid at the counter.

“Who?” he said.

I spun the rack around slowly. John Grisham. Danielle Steel. Stephen King’s latest thousand page effort. No Jack Williamson. “Is there a bookstore in town?” I asked the kid.

“Huh?”

He’d never heard of that either. “A place where I can buy a book?”

“Alco has books, I think,” he said. “But they closed at five.”

“How about a drugstore?” I said, thinking of that copy of Amazing Stories.

Still blank. I gave up, paid him for the gas and the sixpack, and started out to the car.

“You mean a drugstore like aspirin and stuff?” the kid said. “There’s Van Winkle’s.”

“When do they close?” I asked, and got directions.

Van Winkle’s was a grocery store. It had two aisles of “aspirin and stuff” and half an aisle of paperbacks. More Grisham. Jurassic Park. Tom Clancy. And The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson. It looked like it had been there awhile. It had a faded fifties-style cover and dog-eared edges.

I took it up to the check-out. “What’s it like having a famous writer living here?” I asked the middle-aged clerk.

She picked up the book. “The guy who wrote this lives in Portales?” she said. “Really?”

Which brought us up to 6:22. But at least now I had something to read. I went back to the Portales Inn and up to my room, opened a can of Coke and all the windows, and sat down to read The Legion of Time, which was about a girl who’d travelled back in time to tell the hero about the future.

“The future has been held to be as real as the past,” the book said, and the girl in the book was able to travel between one and the other has easily as the tour had travelled down New Mexico Highway l8.

I closed the book and thought about the tour. They didn’t have a single camera, and they weren’t afraid of rattlesnakes. And they’d looked out at the Llano Flatto like they’d never seen a field or a cow before. And they all knew who Jack Williamson was, unlike the kid at Allsup’s or the clerk at Van Winkle’s. They were all willing to spend two days looking at abandoned shacks and dirt roads—no, wait, three days. Tonia’d said they’d gone to the drugstore yesterday.

I had an idea. I opened the drawer of the nightstand, looking for a phone book. There wasn’t one. I went downstairs to the lobby and asked for one. The blue-haired lady at the desk handed me one about the size of The Legion of Time, and I flipped to the Yellow Pages.

There was a Thrifty Drug, which was a chain, and a couple that sounded locally owned but weren’t downtown. “Where’s B. and J. Drug?” I asked. “Is it close to downtown?”

“A couple of blocks,” the old lady said.

“How long has it been in business?”

“Let’s see,” she said. “It was there when Nora was little because I remember buying medicine that time she had the croup. She would have been six, or was that when she had the measles? No, the measles were the summer she . . . ”

I’d have to ask B. and J. “I’ve got another question,” I said, and hoped I wouldn’t get an answer like the last one. “What time does the university library open tomorrow?”

She gave me a brochure. The library opened at eight and the Williamson Collection at 9:30. I went back up to the room and tried B. and J. Drugs. They weren’t open.

It was getting dark. I closed the curtains over the open windows and opened the book again. “The world is a long corridor, and time is a lantern carried steadily along the hall,” it said, and, a few pages later, “If time were simply an extension of the universe, was tomorrow as real as yesterday? If one could leap forward—”

Or back, I thought. “Jack Williamson lived in this house from l947 to—” Tonia’d said and paused and then said, “the present,” and I’d thought the sideways glance was to see my reaction to his name, but what if she’d intended to say, “from l947 to l998”? Or “2015”?

What if that was why she kept pausing when she talked, because she had to remember to say “Jack Williamson is” instead of “Jack Williamson was”, “does most of his writing” instead of “did most of his writing,” had to remember what year it was and what hadn’t happened yet?

“ ‘If the field were strong enough,’ ” I remembered Tonia saying out at the ranch, “ ‘we could bring physical objects through space-time instead of mere visual images.’ ” And the tour group had all smiled.

What if they were the physical objects? What if the tour had travelled through time instead of space? But that didn’t make any sense. If they could travel through time they could have come on a weekend Jack Williamson was home, or during the week of the Williamson Lectureship.

I read on, looking for explanations. The book talked about quantum mechanics and probability, about how changing one thing in the past could affect the whole future. Maybe that was why they had to come when Jack Williamson was out of town, to avoid doing something to him that might change the future.

Or maybe Nonstop Tours was just incompetent and they’d come on the wrong weekend. And the reason they didn’t have cameras was because they all forgot them. And they were all really tourists, and The Legion of Time was just a science fiction book and I was making up crackpot theories to avoid thinking about Cross and the job.

But if they were ordinary tourists, what were they doing spending a day staring at a tumbledown shack in the middle of nowhere? Even if they were tourists from the future, there was no reason to travel back in time to see a science fiction writer when they could see presidents or rock stars.

Unless they lived in a future where all the things he’d predicted in his stories had come true. What if they had genetic engineering and androids and spaceships? What if in their world they’d terraformed planets and gone to Mars and explored the galaxy? That would make Jack Williamson their forefather, their founder. And they’d want to come back and see where it all started.

The next morning, I left my stuff at the Portales Inn and went over to the library. Checkout wasn’t till noon, and I wanted to wait till I’d found out a few things before I made up my mind whether to take the job or not. On the way there I drove past B. and J. Drugs and then College Drug. Neither of them were open, and I couldn’t tell from their outsides how old they were.

The library opened at eight and the room with the Williamson collection in it at nine-thirty, which was cutting it close. I was there at 9:15, looking in through the glass at the books. There was a bronze plaque on the wall and a big mobile of the planets.

Tonia had said the collection “isn’t very big at this point,” but from what I could see, it looked pretty big to me. Rows and rows of books, filing cabinets, boxes, photographs.

A young guy in chinos and wire-rimmed glasses unlocked the door to let me in. “Wow! Lined up and waiting to get in! This is a first,” he said, which answered my first question.

I asked it anyway. “Do you get many visitors?”

“A few,” he said. “Not as many as I think there should be for a man who practically invented the future. Androids, terraforming, antimatter, he imagined them all. We’ll have more visitors in two weeks. That’s when the Williamson Lectureship week is. We get quite a few visitors then. The writers who are speaking usually drop in.”

He switched on the lights. “Let me show you around,” he said. “We’re adding to the collection all the time.” He took down a long flat box. “This is the comic strip Jack did, Beyond Mars. And here is where we keep his original manuscripts.” He opened one of the filing cabinets and pulled out a sheaf of typed yellow sheets. “Have you ever met Jack?”

“No,” I said, looking at an oil painting of a white-haired man with a long, pleasant-looking face. “What’s he like?”

“Oh, the nicest man you’ve ever met. It’s hard to believe he’s one of the founders of science fiction. He’s in here all the time. Wonderful guy. He’w working on a new book, The Black Sun. He’s out of town this weekend, or I’d take you over and introduce you. He’s always delighted to meet his fans. Is there anything specific you wanted to know about him?”

“Yes,” I said. “Somebody told me about him seeing the magazine with his first story in it in a drugstore. Which drugstore was that?”

“It was one in Canyon, Texas. He and his sister were going to school down there.”

“Do you know the name of the drugstore?” I said. “I’d like to go see it.”

“Oh, it went out of business years ago,” he said. “I think it was torn down.”

“We went there yesterday,” Tonia had said, and what day exactly was that? The day Jack saw it and bought all three copies and forgot his groceries? And what were they wearing that day? Print dresses and double-breasted suits and hats?

“I’ve got the issue here,” he said, taking a crumbling magazine out of a plastic slipcover. It had a garish picture of a man being pulled up out of a crater by a brilliant crystal. “December, l928. Too bad the drugstore’s not there anymore. You can see the cabin where he wrote his first stories, though. It’s still out on the ranch his brother owns. You go out west of town and turn south on State Highway 18. Just ask Betty to show you around.”

“Have you ever had a tour group in here?” I interrupted.

“A tour group?” he said, and then must have decided I was kidding. “He’s not quite that famous.”

Yet, I thought, and wondered when Nonstop Tours visited the library. Ten years from now? A hundred? And what were they wearing that day?

I looked at my watch. It was 9:45. “I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment.” I started out and then turned back. “This person who told me about the drugstore, they mentioned something about Number 5516. Is that one of his books?”

“5516? No, that’s the asteroid they’re naming after him. How’d you know about that? It’s supposed to be a surprise. They’re giving him the plaque Lectureship week.”

“An asteroid,” I said. I started out again.

“Thanks for coming in,” the librarian said. “Are you just visiting or do you live here?”

“I live here,” I said.

“Well, then, come again.”

I went down the stairs and out to the car. It was 9:50. Just enough time to get to Cross’s and tell him I’d take the job.

I went out to the parking lot. There weren’t any tour buses driving through it, which must mean Jack Williamson was back from his convention. After my meeting with Cross I was going to go over to his house and introduce myself. “I know how you felt when you saw that Amazing Stories in the drugstore,” I’d tell him. “I’m interested in the future, too. I liked what you said about it, about science fiction lighting the way and science making the future real.”

I got in the car and drove through town to Highway 70. An asteroid. I should have gone with them. “It’ll be fun,” Tonia said. It certainly would be.

Next time, I thought. Only I want to see some of this terraforming. I want to go to Mars.

I turned south on Highway 70 towards Cross’s office. “Roswell 92 miles,” the sign said.

“Come again,” I said, leaning out the window and looking up. “Come again!”

© 1996 by Connie Willis.

Originally published in The Williamson Effect, edited by Roger Zelazny.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Connie Willis is the author of the Nebula Award-winning diptych Blackout/All Clear and dozens of other novels, including: Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Passage. Her short fiction, which frequently appears in Asimov’s, has been collected in Fire Watch, Impossible Things, Even the Queen and Other Short Stories, Miracle and Other Christmas Stories, and, most recently, The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories. She is the winner of ten Hugo Awards, ten Locus Awards, and seven Nebula Awards.

Feature Interview: Simon Pegg
John Joseph Adams & David Barr Kirtley

Simon Pegg co-wrote and starred in the British TV series Spaced and the movies Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Run Fatboy Run, and Paul. He also appeared in Mission: Impossible III and J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek. He just released his first book, a memoir called Nerd Do Well, which focuses on the childhood passions that made him into the nerd celebrity he is today.

This interview first appeared in io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Visit io9.com/tag/geeksguide to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

The inside cover of Nerd Do Well features doodles that you did as a kid and includes references to Velvet Thunder and Planet Pegg. Are there any stories behind those doodles?

Velvet Thunder was, weirdly, an idea that Nick Frost and me came up with very early on in our relationship. It might have been our first collaborative effort, because it dates back to about 1994 or 1995. We were thinking of making a film, but only on video, what would, these days, be like a YouTube clip about two cops. One of them was called something like Dave Velvet, and Big Daddy Thunder or something, and together they were Velvet Thunder. And I think the first adventure that we were thinking of was actually a zombie outbreak, which is interesting considering the idea in some respects is like a combination of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead. It’s like we dissected our first ever idea and then sent it into two other movies with Edgar Wright. But that was Velvet Thunder. Planet Pegg I think was probably just me on the phone to somebody and imagining a world that was entirely made of me.

The book contains a fictional account of you as a super spy with a robot butler. Why did you decide to include those sections?

I’d started developing that character on blogs and stuff and with my web mistress Harmony at peggster.net, and I’ve used it a couple of times. But I really like the idea of writing myself as this incredibly self-involved bombastic superhero with a robot butler in the most florid prose possible because it’s just enormous fun to be bad on purpose. And with the book it felt like an interesting device to kind of undermine the notion of writing a memoir, because in a sense writing a memoir is an act of incredible self-indulgence, and I think that by slipping those chapters of fiction in I was kind of saying to the readership, “Yeah, I get it. I know this is as ridiculous as this story is—but I’m going to do it anyway.” It was a kind of like a “Don’t worry, everything’s okay, it hasn’t all gone to my head,” kind of gesture. The fact is, the memoir was suggested to me by a publisher who we were having talks to write a book with, and it was not something I had really set out to do; it wasn’t my intention, and the idea was kind of sold to me, and I found an angle that I thought would make it worthwhile, which was to try and track the ironies of being a fan and then becoming part of the world I was a fan of, and I thought it was a neat little circularity there that could be quite entertaining, if you like that sort of thing.

You mentioned that it’s written in this sort of over-the-top pulp style. Did that voice come naturally, or did you have to work at it to make it that over-the-top?

No, it comes naturally, completely. That’s my default, sort of—that’s how I want to write. It makes me laugh to be so overly descriptive and to be quite dumb about it. There’s something amusing to me about dumb fiction and people who wield literature like it’s a machine gun. I had great fun in trying to come up with different ways of saying “he said.” You know, that’s always one to try and vary so much that there’s never the repetition of the same word on the same page. He seethed, he mumbled, he communicated, he croaked. It’s all that kind of stuff which I find enormous fun.

Have you written much prose fiction other than that, and do you think you might write more in the future?

I’d like to write an entire novel of Simon Pegg Super Hero, actually, or at least perhaps a graphic novel. The memoir element I think I’ve definitely exhausted; I wrote everything I wanted to write, there’s nothing more I really want to share. But the adventures of Simon Pegg and Canterbury could go on and on, and it was just too much fun not to do. I would see those chapters as like a break. It would be like I’ve written three chapters about my childhood, it’s time to have a rest, and I’ll write two-thousand five hundred words about my riad in Marrakech. It was almost a relief. So to write an entire book of that would surely be fun. Maybe I’ll write a fiction story and then slip in odd chapters about my childhood to offset it.

For a nerd memoir, this book seems fairly light on tales of you being bullied and ostracized. Was your childhood relatively free of that, or did you just choose to focus on other things?

I had the same sort of altercations with other kids as most people do, and I do include a couple of them in there, only because they stick in the memory; those things always, always stay in your memory. But no, I had a fairly happy childhood. It wasn’t going to be a story of woe anyway; I didn’t really want to talk about stuff that upset me as a kid or was particularly difficult to talk about. It’s the kind of stuff that you’d speak about in the pub with your mates. It’s stories that you’d relate that are easy to give away because they’re just experiences that people can relate to. I didn’t really want to write a book that’s just about difficulty and pain. I don’t think I’ve had enough to do that in the first place.

You talk about how the movie E.T. was a big influence on you and it was obviously a big influence on your movie Paul. As a kid, was there ever a time when you believed that aliens were real and that the government was hiding the truth?

I had a lot of interest in the unexplained when I was young. I loved the mysteries of the unexplained, the paranormal, In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy. And there was a magazine we had in the UK called The Unexplained and that fascinated me. I was definitely drawn in by it. I hadn’t intellectualized it at that time; as a child you’re much more susceptible to fantasy. It’s not until you get older that you realize essentially everything you’ve been told as a child was a lie. But now, as an adult, I believe thoroughly that there is life on other planets. I just don’t believe that they come visiting in saucer-shaped spacecraft and don’t tell us—that they come across eons of time just to finger us. It seems like a waste of time. And also, when you start thinking—the human race is very egotistical, so we kind of assume that we are somehow important and worth visiting, or that our tiny little flash of existence is significant enough in the universe to merit being visited. There might be billions of other civilizations that have existed at different times for us, we think of the world in terms of the way we perceive time which is just like milliseconds galactically. So I’m sure there’s other life out there, I just don’t think they come visiting with us.

Is it true that you wrote your undergraduate thesis on a Marxist overview of popular 1970s cinema and hegemonic discourses?

I did. The piece was actually called Base and Super Sucker which was a play on the phrase “Basic Super Structure”, which is a Marxist proposition, hegemony and consent in Star Wars and related works. Basically I was using Marxist modes of critical theory to address Star Wars. And the main thrust of it was that if you watch any kind of television or theatre or film that has certain kind of themes or opinions and you don’t critically recognize them, then you consent with them. So very simply put, if you watch a racist comedian and you laugh, then you are a racist. And there are various preoccupations and concerns that flow through popular cinema that reflect things that are going on in society, certain ideas and certain fears. The thesis suggested that by watching films like those you are participating in those fears and preoccupations.

What aspects of Star Wars did you apply that to?

Well, for instance at the time, in the late seventies and mid-eighties we were in the height of nuclear paranoia and we were feeling that we could be bombed at any second by the Russians, and a lot of films at the time reflect that sense of ill-ease, particularly Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. All those films are riddled with bomb paranoia and also with justifications for having bombs like that. So you have weapons like the Genesis Project in Star Trek, you have the Death Star, the Force, you have the Ark of the Covenant, all of which are fine in the hands of good people. Like the Ark is fine if it’s owned by the Americans, the Genesis Project is fine if it’s with the Federation, but with the Klingons it’s a weapon; the Death Star is a bad thing because bad people shouldn’t have big bombs. It was basically kind of saying that ultimate power is okay as long as it’s in the hands of the righteous. So yes we’re allowed to wield nuclear bombs, but they aren’t, that kind of thing. And also Raiders of the Lost Ark is the most brilliant one in that it’s saying “If you don’t look at it, it can’t hurt you.” Almost kind of like, leave it to us or leave it to the government. And Spielberg wasn’t saying that, but these things just float to the surface—these preoccupations that maybe if we don’t look at it it’ll go away. That’s how Indy and Marion survived all those avenging angels in the end of Raiders: they just closed their eyes. It’s indicative of how society was feeling at the time.

In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun is initially unperturbed about the prospect of killing his zombie stepdad. Did you ever worry about how your actual stepdad would react to that?

No, not at all. I think he probably would have known that I don’t want to kill him. Because that was fiction; it wasn’t me saying anything to him, it was just an interesting thing. I played out the politics of a step-relationship and it was a fairly fruitful thing to draw from as a writer because there are certain dynamics of a step-relationship which are dramatically interesting. You know, you’ve got a certain vying for a mother’s attention and you have the strangeness of having a new father and, there are faults and weaknesses on both sides. In the film, Shaun doesn’t like his stepdad at all, and they don’t get on, but in the final moments, when his stepdad is going to die, they reconcile and their true feelings sort of come out. I thought that was really interesting in terms of the sort of stag element of two guys sort of facing off. That they would behave that way towards each other even though deep down they actually have respect and love for each other. That wasn’t really my relationship with my stepdad, but I could see how that could exist. And there were certainly elements of that in real life, which I drew on, but he knows I don’t want to kill him. We get on just fine.

Shaun of the Dead seems to have a completely happy ending, but in your book you make it sound as if you see the ending in kind of a more sinister way. Could you talk about that issue of whether or not the movie has a happy ending?

I think the movie does have a happy ending. Edgar and I wrote that ending way before we’d written the main body of the film. We loved the idea . . . the details of it are obviously quite tragic, but in actual fact the status quo that has been established is actually beneficial to everybody involved. A certain character doesn’t have to worry about having a job anymore, or all he has to do is everything he always enjoyed doing, and Shaun gets the girl, so it was kind of idyllic; it was like a utopia after everything that had happened. But I also like the idea that maybe it’s left ambiguous whether or not Liz is in on it or whether or not Shaun is just still hanging onto his past in the way that had always held him back before. The thrust of Shaun of the Dead is that it’s about a guy who has to let go in order to become a human; he has to fight a horde of zombies to become an adult human male. And there is a slight indication at the end that maybe he’s still clinging to the past, but that’s just because that’s more interesting than a completely happy ending. Like in Hot Fuzz, the ending is quite idyllic: it’s Danny and Angel and they’re partners and friends, but there’s just a very faint fascist overtone to the whole thing, whereby you might just think it’s just one regime has replaced another regime. Yes, the NWA has been thwarted but at the same time what’s replaced it? You know, it’s two guys that would go and beat up some hippies.

Since Shaun of the Dead came out, there’s been an absolute avalanche of zombie stories. What do you make of this phenomenon, and what have been some of your favorite recent examples of zombie books and movies?

It’s interesting. I think we were part of a movement that occurred in the early part of this decade, when Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later came out—which wasn’t a zombie film and nor has Danny ever claimed it was, but it certainly drew on certain themes from zombie films. It owed a debt to Romero and John Wyndham. And then the Dawn of the Dead remake came out right about the same time. As far as we knew when we went into production with Shaun of the Dead, we were the only zombie film out there. We thought, “Wow, we’re so ahead of the curve here. We’re literally resurrecting a dead genre and we’re going to be the only ones,” and then suddenly we weren’t. But we were quite pleased because Dawn of the Dead opted to sort of like soup it all up a little bit, and it’s a great script. I really like [the screenwriter] James Gunn. The opening fifteen minutes particularly is excellent. But I think it really deserves to have its own identity. I think it was a shame that it was called Dawn of the Dead not least because it could have stood on its own as a new film; it didn’t have to be related to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. It was a shame that George has never been given the recognition he deserves for those films; even though he’s very lauded among our circles, he’s never really made that much money from those films, when he actually created an entire subgenre by himself. We were very, very slavishly respectful to his vision. We took his whole mythology that he invented—the sort of cannibalistic zombie that doesn’t just eat brains but eats the whole body—all his rules we adopted and transplanted to North London and our sort of hapless hero.

The subsequent iterations of the story have been related to video games. The fast zombie has kind of seemed to have come to the fore, which for me isn’t as interesting or as effective, so I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to my zombies. But I really enjoyed Isaac Marion’s book Warm Bodies, which is a sort of romance, really, with a zombie, and has wrongly been called “Twilight with zombies,” which it so is not. But it’s a very interesting evolution of the zombie myth which kind of moves Romero’s vision forward in a way that I thought I might not like but I actually did. There’s been some great zombie fiction. The two Living Dead [anthologies]: very, very good. The games have been good—Left 4 Dead is great, and those zombies run. I like the way that you kind of have your cake and eat it in that game; if they don’t see you, they’re just sort of stumbling around puking up and leaning against walls which I kind of like, but then they all start screaming and running. I think my problem with that is simply that without the motivation, when they’re just stripped of will, they’re very interesting because they’re quite tragic but when they start running . . . it’s like they’re in a bad mood and suddenly there are motivations projected onto them and they just come across as less interesting.

You and Nick Frost will be appearing as the Thompson Twins in the upcoming Tintin movie. Are you a fan of the Tintin comics and if so what are some of your favorite moments from the books?

I was a fan growing up. There was an animated series of it that I used to watch when I was young. I can’t say I read the comics particularly, but I certainly knew who Tintin was. . . But it wasn’t until I started working on it that I actually got in and read The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and what have you. But I felt I knew it already. I knew the Thompson Twins, and everyone knows who Captain Haddock is. There seems to be this odd sort of negativism about it in certain circles at the moment because people don’t know it. That’s partly because brand recognition has become such an important thing in Hollywood. It’s like marketing people are so desperate for people to have heard of the film before they’ve seen it, films are being made of fucking Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots. Pirates of the Caribbean alone is—whatever you think of those films—based on a ride in a theme park because people have heard of the ride. It’s a very cynical way of getting people into the theatre. I think the thing with Tintin is that nobody knew Indiana Jones before Raiders, but nobody was worried that Raiders wouldn’t do well because Indiana Jones was—God forbid—a new character, someone we hadn’t heard of before, so I think that’s an odd sort of criticism about Tintin. It’s just bizarre and bone-headed, I think. It’s Steven Spielberg for Christ’s sake.

Can you say what kind of differences we can expect from the comics to the movie?

First and foremost, it’s interesting that Steven Spielberg went after Tintin way back in the ’80s, after Raiders, when he was told by European fans that Indiana Jones bore a certain similarity to Tintin in terms of being a globe-trotting sort of adventurer. Steven was fascinated because he hadn’t heard of Tintin and so pursued it and got involved with the Hergé estate. The Hergé estate have been thoroughly involved with the movies so they’ve been there for approval and stuff. I think it was very important to Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson—who was also very much a Tintin fan—that the film be true to the original comics. But there are elements of the original comic which wouldn’t translate to modern day. It’s faintly racist at times, but that’s not going to be in the film.

The marvelous thing about this movie is that Steven and Peter were right to wait until performance capture gave them the opportunity to essentially bring Hergé’s vision to life on screen in 3D; the film is extremely beautiful because it is the architecture of Hergé but done in 3D—and I’m not talking about 3D, the gimmick used to tempt people into buying more expensive cinema tickets. To do it with actors would be to see people trying to look like cartoons, whereas with performance capture you’re able to make people look like cartoons and have them look thoroughly real and solid. And so, from what I’ve seen of it, and I haven’t seen much, but it’s a remarkable achievement. I think basically the comic books are comic books and have had to be turned into films; formats aren’t transferable. People often assume that they are. People think comic books can just be films and films can just be video games and video games can be films, and that’s not true. Each one of those media has criteria of its own and doesn’t necessarily translate to the other.

So [Hergé’s] stories have been embellished, obviously, to fill time that’s required for the cinematic acting, but I think everything that’s been done to do that has been done with great care and attention to the traditions of Hergé.

One thing that’s interesting about the motion capture is that you and Nick Frost can play twins in the movie. How does that work, like if you have actors who are different sizes than their characters? Does the computer just work all that out?

Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. When Nick and I put on our motion capture suits, on the monitor we would look like the Thompson Twins. It’s kind of slightly crude 64-bit rendering of what we would look like, but nevertheless we would be reduced to these two—or maybe enhanced! —to these two bumbling detectives, and it’s amazing that when I watch the film, the bits that I’ve seen of the film, I can see it’s me and Nick even though we both look exactly the same. I can tell who’s who, and physically and facially it’s apparent. That was kind of weird. It’s hard to explain.

Your role in the upcoming film Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol involved filming in Dubai. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

I was training mainly when I was there. I think I only did about three or four days shooting in Dubai. But I got to see Tom [Cruise] hanging off the Burj Khalifa and that was amazing. You weren’t allowed to approach the window pane that had been taken out with the Burj Khalifa anymore than like twenty-five feet. Everyone within twenty-five feet of the hole in the skyscraper had to wear a harness. But Tom Cruise was just so up for it, he just sort of looked outside and then looked back inside at all of us and then just grinned like a maniac. I’m glad those pictures of him got out, on the Burj Khalifa, because it means that people will know that he actually did it, and there is genuine jeopardy there; it’s not a digital effect. That’s something that’s missing from a lot of contemporary film. You can watch amazing action scenes and you’re not going to be particularly thrilled by them because you know no one was ever in any danger. You can see some girl leaping through the air to attack a giant robot and just think “Eh, whatever,” no matter how amazing it is because she never did it. She was hanging off some strings in a green room. Whereas, you know, in the case of MI4, or Ghost Protocol, as we call it, Tom was a hair’s breadth away from death, and that’s got to be more interesting.

In the book, you describe that when you met with George Lucas he gave you some advice which was basically: Don’t be making the same movie 30 years from now. Is repeating yourself something that you worry about, and have you given any thought to where you’d like to be in 30 years?

It does in some respects. I constantly get asked about making a Shaun of the Dead sequel and it drives me insane. I understand why, but a slight moment of critical thought would point out the fact that it’s a stupid idea. Why just go back and do the same thing again? I mean, that story ends; it has an end. And I think to kind of go back to it would possibly retroactively hurt the original. I don’t see any point to making a sequel for the sake of it. I mean, I’d love to make another Paul, if only to recreate the experience of making the first one, but I wouldn’t do that without an amazing story. I think if a story deserves to be elongated, fine, but I’m not really interested in doing the same thing over and over again; that’s why I got out of television.

And, so, finally, are there just any other recent or upcoming projects that you’d like to mention?

I’m just about to start shooting a movie called A Fantastic Fear of Everything, which is based on a Bruce Robinson short story. It’s about a writer who is essentially paranoid and is forced to go to a laundromat. It’s a really, really amazing script, very, very funny, but also very different from anything I’ve done before. I’m really looking forward to doing that. That’s going to start shooting in the UK pretty much as soon as I get back home next week, so that’ll be the last thing I do before I start the next Star Trek, which we’re all told should be happening in the fall, which could be any time in the next six months.

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a 2011 Hugo Award-nominee for Best Editor (Short Form), his books have been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com. John is also the co-host of io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers, and is the other co-host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. He lives in New York.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in September in Lightspeed, we have original fiction from new writers Liz Coleman (“Join”) and D. Thomas Minton (“Thief of Futures”), along with reprints by bestselling, award-winning authors Ursula K. Le Guin (“The Island of the Immortals”) and David Brin (“Bubbles”). All that plus our usual assortment of nonfiction 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!