Editorial, November 2011
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue eighteen of Lightspeed!

No news to report this month, but by the time this issue comes out, I will have already won (or lost) one (or two) World Fantasy Awards; at press time, however, my fate was still unknown. So until the end of October, think of them as Schrödinger’s Awards—until one of you looks up the winners, I’m in a superposition: I’ve both won and lost the awards until you observe the results, thereby forcing the quantum waveform to collapse and my cat to huff some poisonous gas. Or something like that.

Finally, after months of teasing you with the forthcoming release date, the Lightspeed: Year One anthology, collecting all of the fiction we published in our first year (from June 2010-May 2011), is out this month (so order now!). And remember, 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:

Martian folklore is brought to life in Lisa Nohealani Morton’s powerful debut, “How Maartje and Uppinder Terraformed Mars (Marsmen Trad.).”

Then, writer/astrophysicist Alan Smale explains how to actually terraform Mars in his article “Planetary Alchemy.”

Maureen McHugh brings us a story of an AI discovered in an unlikely place, by an unlikely heroine, in “The Kingdom of the Blind.”

In our feature interview this month, China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station and The City & The City, joins us to discuss Dungeons & Dragons, international relations, and his recent science fiction novel Embassytown.

New writer Mark Pantoja channels Ray Bradbury and Brian Aldiss as he examines what might happen to smart houses and machines after their inhabitants and operators are long gone in his first published story, “Houses.”

Carol Ann Moletti explores the science of smart houses, robots, and artificial intelligence in her article, “Back to the Future.”

In John Crowley’s “Snow” we examine the grief, memory, and the memorials of the future.

And last, but not least, Graeme McMillan studies the science and history of corpse preservation, from mummification to cryonics, in his article “Keeping the Dead Among the Living.”

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. Upcoming anthologies include: Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Armored, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. In 2011, he was a finalist for two Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards, 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.

How Maartje and Uppinder Terraformed Mars
 (Marsmen Trad.) 
Lisa Nohealani Morton

Listen up, you Marsmen!

My mother’s suit was holed on the way to Phobos.

In space, you cannot hear a thing because your helmets are in the way. I didn’t hear her breath rushing out. It made a gray streak in the air, like my breath in the evenings when I collected the water from our stills. That was something for children to do, back when Mars was cold and dry and thin.

I used to count my breaths while I did my chores: Out as you step through the airlock, head down to check your seals, in as you step over to the first still, the water bag flopping empty at your side. Fill the bag, out and in, and move on to the next still, quick as you can. The cold bites through your suit and even in your helmet you can see the plumes of your breath, rushing out and sucking back in.

I counted my mother’s breaths as we went up, but I got stuck on out.

She exhaled and exhaled through the hole in her suit as we went up and up in our tiny rocketship. As her breath hissed out it thickened and spread and wrapped around the planet. Before long it was pushing everything down; my mother’s breath became the atmosphere of Mars.

My mother’s name was Maartje. She was from Amsterdam on old Earth; she was a civil engineer. She smelled like flowers, and she taught the robots to make chicken soup when I was sick.

My father’s name is Uppinder. He is from Amsterdam also, but he was a bureaucrat in the government old Earth had put on Mars. He is the reason we had to flee when the rebellion came.

My name is Raveena. I was born on Mars.

Most of the government got away on the last big shuttle to old Earth. My family lived far away from the main domes, on the very southern edge of Tharsis, and we couldn’t make it in time. We took my father’s old rocketship instead. My mother packed our things in boxes. I helped my father load the ship with the robots in their plastic jugs.

The rocketship was very small, and very old, and didn’t hold the air the way it should anymore. My mother helped me on with my suit. She kissed the tip of her finger before she closed the last seal. “Be a brave girl,” she said.

I made a face at her.

The ship rattled and shook as we lifted. My mother held my hand and we were pressed back into our seats. I tried to call out for my father when I saw my mother exhaling, but I couldn’t make the sound come out.

Back on Mars, all of the Marsmen had run outside. They were dancing in the dust, laughing and pointing at how it made clouds and dust devils in my mother’s gently swirling breath.

The most foolish of the Marsmen smashed up their domes.

“What are you doing?” the others cried.

“Look,” said the foolish Marsmen. “The air is thick! It is not as thick as old Earth, but it will do for Marsmen. We can breathe, we are free!”

The other Marsmen laughed at the foolish ones, because they knew it was still too cold and dry. Sure enough, the Sun went down and the foolish Marsmen froze stiff where they stood. The dust blew over them and turned them red, and there they can still be seen today, on the slopes of Pavonis Mons. Visitors from old Earth call them statues.

But Marsmen know better.

When we landed on Phobos and my father opened the back of the rocketship, he was full of plans. “Maartje, Raveena,” he said. “Bring the pressure-tent, and the jugs of robots. Old Earth will rescue us soon.”

Then he saw my mother. At first he did not believe it. “Maartje,” he said again, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her. “Maartje, wake up.” He shook her until her helmet knocked into his, and then he did believe it. Tears streamed down his face. “Raveena, why didn’t you call out?”

“I tried, Papaji,” I said, “but I couldn’t make a sound.”

My father was undone. He sat on the ground, in the dust and rocks, and he cried. He cried until his tears filled up his helmet, and his suit had to suck them away. He went on crying, until his suit couldn’t hold all the water. It vented into space. His tears fell all the way down to Mars, and splashed down in the Hellas Basin. Still he cried, and his suit went on venting his tears, until the basin was full and threatened to spill over. But Mars continued to turn and Phobos raced across its face, and my father’s tears rained over the whole surface of Mars, making rivers and lakes and all the salty Martian water that still flows there today.

The Marsmen heard the patter of water on their domes, and came running out to see what was happening. When they saw that rain was falling on Mars for the first time in a billion years, they laughed, and danced until some of them slipped and fell in the mud, and then they laughed and pointed and danced some more.

There were still some foolish Marsmen left besides the ones who’d frozen into statues, and when they were done dancing they smashed up their domes.

“What are you doing?” the others cried.

“Look,” said the foolish Marsmen. “The land has become wet! There are rivers, and lakes, and even an ocean! It is not as wet as old Earth, but it will do for Marsmen. We can breathe and we can drink, we are free!”

The other Marsmen laughed at the foolish ones, because they knew it was still far too cold. Sure enough, the Sun went down, and all of my father’s tears froze solid, leaving the foolish Marsmen nothing to drink. They withered up into wisps and blew away, suits and all.

Those foolish Marsmen are blowing around the world still. Sometimes you can hear them, calling for help over their suit radios. Visitors from old Earth say it is only sunspots.

But Marsmen know better.

For a while I sat next to my father and cried too, but it was cold and the rocks were uncomfortable and I knew we needed somewhere to stay until old Earth came to rescue us. So I got the pressure-tent and a jug of robots. The pressure-tent was heavy, and I struggled to put it up. At last I got it up, and I turned on the compressor and made my father go inside while I set out the robots. I was very tired, and my helmet was fogged up from crying, so the trench I dug around the pressure-tent wasn’t a very good circle.

I poured the jug of robots out into the trench. Each robot is so tiny that you cannot see it, but the jug was full to the top with robots and they made a little trickle at the bottom of my trench. “Robots, make us a dome,” I said.

They bubbled and frothed and I knew they were doing as they were told. I stepped over the robots and went into the pressure-tent with my father. He was curled up on the floor of the tent, asleep in his suit. I laid down beside him and soon I slept too.

When I woke up, my father was gone. Outside the pressure-tent the robots had worked all night making us a dome. They’d eaten up some bits of Phobos and used them to make more robots, and together they ate some more and used those bits to make a dome. It wasn’t a very good dome, because my trench was wavery and uneven, but it went all the way up and over my head and it held in the air the robots made.

I found my father outside the dome. He was building a pyre for my mother. When I saw him I began to cry again.

My father heard me and turned around. “Don’t cry, Raveena,” he said. “You must help me.”

There wasn’t anything on Phobos to burn, so we took blankets and clothes from the rocketship and piled them up. When we had a good pyre my father brought my mother out and laid her on it. He bumped his helmet against hers gently before he stepped back and tried to light the pyre.

Of course it didn’t light. On Phobos there is no air to burn things with. This made my father angry. He ripped up all the things we used to make the pyre and threw them away. The last blanket was lying under my mother’s body. On Phobos everything is so light that you must be very careful, but my father was too angry to be careful. When he yanked up the blanket, my mother’s body came with it. Her feet came up, and the rest of her followed.

“Papaji, stop!” I cried, but it was too late. End over end, my mother flew off into space.

Even this was not enough to cool my father’s anger. He went to the rocketship and threw all my mother’s things away. He threw her clothes and her computers and her perfume that smelled like flowers, and they all went tumbling off into space. He reached again into the box that had held my mother’s things, and pulled out the combs she had worn in her hair and the paper in its frame that said she was an engineer. These, too, he flung into space.

One final time, he reached into the box, and came up with my mother’s silver mirror. She’d brought the mirror from old Earth, and sometimes she let me play with it. I ran forward to stop him, but he threw that away too.

All of my mother’s belongings went spinning away into space, except for her silver mirror. That flipped and tumbled and fell into orbit around Mars. It caught the Sun’s rays and reflected them down, making Mars warmer. Soon it was so warm that the rivers of my father’s tears melted and flowed even at night.

The Marsmen saw the rise in temperature with their instruments and came running out of their domes to see what was happening. When they felt how warm it was they laughed and danced until they began to sweat, which nobody on Mars had ever done before, and they pointed at each others’ sweating faces and laughed and danced some more.

Some of the Marsmen wanted to smash their domes, but since all of the foolish Marsmen had dried up or frozen solid, they stopped. “Should we smash the domes?” they asked each other.

One of the Marsmen stepped forward. “Look,” he said. “The air is thick, the land is wet, and now it is warm. It is not as warm as old Earth, but it will do for Marsmen. We can breathe, we can drink, we can walk on the surface. We are free!”

All the Marsmen agreed. With a great cheer, they smashed all the domes. Then they ran out onto the surface of Mars and built new homes, low and slope-roofed and red like Mars, so that unless you are a Marsman you can hardly see them.

Because the domes had been so small, and they had lived so close together, they built their homes very far apart, and that is why to this day Marsmen do not build cities the way the people do on old Earth.

After he threw away my mother’s mirror, my father remembered me. “Get up, Raveena,” he said. “You did a good job with the dome, but that won’t be enough to keep us safe until old Earth gets here. Help me with the robots.”

We were taking the jugs of robots from the back of the rocketship when the radio chimed. My father and I rushed to the radio.

It was a ship from old Earth. “You see, Raveena!” My father clapped me on the back. “They’ve come to rescue us!”

But the message on the radio was not for us. “Attention Marsmen,” it said. “Desist your rebellion. Rebuild your domes. We have brought you a new government.”

Down below, the Marsmen jeered and made rude gestures at the old Earth ship. “Come and find us!” they called up to it.

The people on the old Earth ship were angry. They hadn’t expected the Marsmen to refuse. “This is your final warning,” the radio said. The Marsmen only blew raspberries, which they couldn’t have done before the air was thickened.

“Very well,” the radio said. “We will begin bombardment.”

The old Earth ship caught and dragged some meteoroids it had found nearby and flung them at Mars. But my mother’s breath slowed them, and they all burned up in Mars’ new atmosphere.

The Marsmen laughed and pointed. “Stupid old Earthmen,” they shouted.

The old Earth ship looked around for something else to throw and found some asteroids. It had to go farther away to find them, and it took even longer to drag them back. When it brought them back, it pushed them until they, too, fell down on Mars. But the asteroids splashed down in the Hellas Basin, which was full of my father’s tears, and although they created many huge waves, none of the Marsmen were harmed.

“Yah, you old Earthmen!” The Marsmen danced and sang. “You can’t catch us!”

The radio crackled and spat with the old Earth ship’s frustration. The ship cast about for something else to throw. At last it found a huge asteroid, almost the size of a small moon. It took all its engines’ power to drag it back to Mars, and nearly all its fuel to give it a push. The asteroid burned across the sky as a giant fireball, and the Marsmen ran into their houses and hid.

When the asteroid hit, it made a mighty crash, and I covered my eyes. At last, though, I had to peek. The asteroid had crashed down in the plain of Chryse, and made a deep hole right in the middle. The land all around it shook and shook.

But because the Marsmen had built their homes so far apart, the asteroid had missed them all, and except for some things that fell off their shelves, nothing was damaged.

After the shaking stopped, the Marsmen came running out of their houses again. When they saw that they were all right, they began to laugh and dance and jeer at the old Earth ship again.

“You see, you old Earthmen! You can’t beat us! The air is thick and the land is wet and it is warm and we are free! Turn around and go back to old Earth!”

“We will be back,” the radio said. “We will bring more ships next time.” Then the old Earth ship turned around and left.

“Stop! Wait,” my father shouted at the radio. “We are still here on Phobos!”

“We have no more fuel for orbital insertions,” the radio said. “We have barely enough to return to Earth. You will have to wait until we come back.”

The Marsmen weren’t worried about the threat of more ships. They knew that old Earth had troubles of its own. And sure enough, old Earth didn’t send any more ships for a long time, and when they did, they were friendly ships of trade.

As for my father and I, we burrowed under the skin of Phobos and there we lived, waiting for old Earth to come and rescue us. But my father became restless, and wracked with guilt over throwing my mother’s body into space. He decided to go and find her and bring her back to Mars. He repaired the rocketship and took off in it and had many more adventures.

I liked to watch the Marsmen, though, and so I stayed. The Marsmen came to give me many names in their many languages – Devushka Luna and Kiana ‘O Hoku’ula and The Girl in the Faster Moon - but how I got them is another story.

Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton currently lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction appears in the anthology Hellebore and Rue, and her poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons. Although she is blogless, her daily shenanigans can be tracked by following @lnmorton on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Lisa Nohealani Morton
Erin Stocks

You’ve written a delightful science fiction fable. What inspired this?

I had been struggling with this story for about nine months before I managed to actually write it. It was originally two stories—a straightforward SF story about fleeing the Martian rebellion (I thought it would be more interesting to explore the perspective of a functionary in the Terran government than the standard rebel perspective), and a creation myth about the terraforming of Mars. I realized fairly early on that they were the same story, but it took a long time to make the two come together.

As far as the “creation myth” side of the story goes, since I think that’s probably what makes this story unusual, it basically hit me as a concept without a story attached—just the idea that someone ought to write a creation myth about Martian terraforming. I find those sorts of ideas to be the hardest to develop, a lot of the time—you can send a character walking around and eventually they’ll run into a problem, but it’s hard to put a concept through its paces.

This story is full of tragic poetic imagery—a woman’s breath hissing out of her suit until it wraps around a planet and becomes an atmosphere, the frozen statues of Marsmen, and a man who flings his deceased wife’s belongings into the air, where her mirror orbits the planet and reflects the sun. Comical, out of context, yet I was moved by the grief Raveena and her father expressed. Was finding that balance of deep emotion and comedy alongside the worldbuilding difficult to achieve?

To be honest, the elements you talk about aren’t the ones I find funniest in the story. The Marsmen, definitely—I had a lot of fun writing them—but the others seemed like necessary mythic elements to me. There was a lot to balance in this story—the fact that it’s really two stories, obviously, and hitting the right notes between mythmaking and the real human characters. It’s part of why it took me so long to write what is, in fact, a very short story.

Science fiction fables don’t seem to be very common. Why do you think that is?

I think there are probably a couple of reasons. One is that, at least in my experience, they’re harder to write than stories that are either science fiction or fantasy, but not both. You have to make both elements of the story matter to the story, and you have to balance them carefully. It can be tricky.

Another problem is that while you might assume that the audience for those stories is anyone who likes fantasy or science fiction, the truth is you’re really only going to get some subset of the people who like both. Otherwise the science fiction fans are trying to make the fantastic elements technological, and the fantasy fans are trying to see the science-y bits as magical, and then everyone’s like “You got your unicorns in my spaceship!” and “You got your bioengineered nanosites in my dragons!” and then nobody’s happy.

You were at Taos Toolbox this summer, and Viable Paradise before that. How have writing workshops shaped your own writing?

It’s definitely helped me a lot in terms of approaching things like structure and theme more formally, so that I have an easier time both while writing a story, but especially when revising it, seeing potential pitfalls and rough places and pieces that don’t fit, and figuring out how to fix them. I think Taos in particular helped me a lot when it comes to thinking critically and, I guess, methodically—about writing in general, and my own in particular. I don’t mean to say that Viable Paradise doesn’t teach that—it’s a very big part of what they do teach—but in my own case I think I just wasn’t ready to hear it, or maybe to internalize it, when I went to VP.

One of the biggest ways that workshops have shaped my writing, though, is really one of the ways they’ve shaped me as a person. One of the ways I like to talk up VP to people who are interested in applying is that it’s a space to take yourself seriously as a writer—and possibly just as importantly, to be taken seriously as writer—and Taos was a similar experience. It’s a week (or two weeks) where you’re surrounded by other writers, which was a first for me at VP, and during which you’re expected to totally focus on writing. And no one looks askance at you when you start talking about your novel—as long as you let them have a turn talking about theirs, of course! I’ve written fiction ever since I could write, and I’ve known it was something I wanted to do professionally since I understood it was an option, but it wasn’t until after VP that I felt comfortable saying “I am a writer.” And that was a big turning point for me, both psychologically and, I think, in the quality of my writing and my level of dedication to it.

Did your experience at Taos have an effect on this particular story?

Well, all but about two hundred words of this story were written, and it was critiqued, at Taos, so I’d have to say yes, definitely! As I mentioned before, I had been struggling with this story for some time before I went to Taos Toolbox. I had written the opening scenes over and over without feeling like the two stories—the straightforward SF story and the mythic story—were coming together. After a week of lectures and critiques at Taos, though (and some time away from the story), the bones of the story seemed to come together easier, and the structural problems seemed much easier to solve. I think Raveena’s voice was always there, but Taos helped me figure the rest out.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently writing a YA science fiction novel about an insane AI that takes over the world, which was also critiqued at Taos, although it’s still early days on that project. As of this moment, I’m taking a bit of a break to work on a short story that combines a Russian fairytale, the standard fantasy narrative about a younger son going off to find his fortune, and a magical war against a giant robot army, set in an asteroid belt. As one does.

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks is a writer, musician, and graduate of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction is upcoming in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Colored Lens. She can be found on erinstocks.com or Twitter.

Planetary Alchemy
Alan Smale

Let’s fix Mars.

Of course, the Red Planet is spectacular just as it is. Images from forty years of Mars missions have revealed its stark beauty and rose-tinted rocky grandeur. In its southern hemisphere Mars has ancient cratered highlands similar to the Moon’s, while much of the north consists of plains lower in altitude and geologically much younger. The giant shield volcano of Olympus Mons rises 24 km, three times as high as Everest, above the surrounding plains. Valles Marineris, a huge scar across the face of the planet, is a system of canyons 4,000 kilometers long, ten times the length of the Grand Canyon. Hellas Planitia is an impact basin over 2,000 kilometers in diameter and seven kilometers in depth.

Other canyons, networks of river valleys, stream beds, gullies, channels, layered deposits, deltas and alluvial fans provide strong evidence for flowing water, crater lakes and salty seas in a much warmer and wetter period of Mars’s history. Today, though, Mars is desolate and inhospitable, a cold and arid landscape with no precipitation at all, scoured by giant dust-storms. Unprotected, we’d perish quickly from the low atmospheric pressure and lack of oxygen.

There’s a lot to like about Mars. Its day length is twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes, and its axial tilt is 24 degrees, both similar to Earth’s. Mars’s total surface area is comparable to the amount of dry land on Earth, and its gravity is 38% of ours, making it easier to move heavy objects. And it’s nearby; using an elliptical transfer orbit we can be there in nine months.

Some time in the future we might decide we need that dusty red real estate. And if we’re going to live there permanently we might want to make some changes so we can travel around safely. We might want to work in jeans and a shirt with a warm breeze in our face, instead of sweating in a bulky pressure suit. Rather than a lifeless rocky desert, we might need a self-sustaining ecosystem with oceans, rivers, forests, farms.

Such a stunning transformation may be easier than you imagine.

Keeping Pressurized and Keeping Warm

Down to basics. For humans to survive and thrive on Mars, we need to change three things.

First, the air pressure. Mars already has an atmosphere, but it’s sparse. On Earth the air pressure at sea level is 1013 millibars. On Mars the mean atmospheric pressure is a paltry six millibars, way too low for human survival.

Next: Temperature. The mean surface temperature on Mars is –63° Celsius, with lows perhaps reaching–140° C. Antarctica is cold. Mars is really, really cold.

Finally, the atmospheric composition. Earth’s air is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, with traces of argon and carbon dioxide. The Martian atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen and 1.6% argon, with traces of oxygen and methane. If you happen to be an oxygen-breather, you can see the problem here.

As it turns out, all three of these are fixable with technology that we either have now, or could develop within decades. That’s because the basic ingredients are already in place. Recent missions to Mars have discovered substantial deposits of water ice at the poles and as permafrost underground, equivalent to thousands of cubic kilometers of water. Just as important are the considerable reserves of carbon dioxide (CO2), some bound up in the polar icecaps, and even more adsorbed in the Martian regolith (soil) at high latitudes. Even using conservative estimates, liberating all that CO2 could raise the atmospheric pressure on Mars from its current puny six millibars to a much more respectable 300-500 millibars. While we can’t breathe CO2, we would no longer need pressure suits to keep us alive.

So, what would it take to free all this water and CO2? A well-placed miracle? No. In fact all it takes is a modest temperature increase of 5° Celsius. Five degrees, and the carbon dioxide at the Martian polar caps starts to sublime and thicken the atmosphere. After that, positive feedback is our friend. Heating the Martian atmosphere helps to thicken it, and thickening the atmosphere helps to heat it. By now this might sound familiar, and so it should: We’re talking about initiating a runaway greenhouse effect on Mars.

There are two sane ways of heating the surface of Mars.

The first is a huge orbital mirror, to reflect and focus sunlight onto the Martian south pole. To achieve a 5 degree rise in temperature over a broad, low-latitude area and begin sublimating CO2 we’ll need a mirror with a radius of about 100 kilometers. Even if we make this from the same lightweight aluminized mylar we use for solar sails it’ll weigh 200,000 tonnes. We’ll need to construct it in space, but the raw materials are on hand in asteroids or the Martian moons. The mining and construction are the only hard parts, because we already have the basic technology. In 2010 the Japanese deployed a 200 square meter solar sail on the IKAROS spacecraft and sent it off towards Venus. NASA, the Russians and the British are all actively working on solar sail materials and their deployment.

The second method brings the industrial revolution to Mars by setting up factories to manufacture chlorofluorocarbon gases (CFCs). These CFCs will create the greenhouse effect we’re after. To generate a Mars-wide temperature rise of 5 degrees our factory would need a power requirement of 1,300 megawatts over twenty years. For comparison, a typical Earth-based nuclear power plant produces about 1,000 megawatts. As before, while the remote location of Mars makes building such a factory challenging, the technology is within our grasp and requires no leaps of faith.

Either approach will radically change the Martian climate within decades. Once kick-started, the ensuing release of CO2 and the positive feedback loop of the greenhouse effect leads to an eventual temperature rise of about 70° Celsius. Air pressure soars. The polar ice-caps start to melt, and the northern basins begin to flood. Liquid water returns to the Martian surface, to stay.

Even more dramatic methods are possible. Ammonia is a powerful greenhouse gas, and asteroids may contain billions of tons of it. We might capture a few such asteroids from the outer solar system, propel them towards Mars, and crash them onto the plains. In addition to providing huge amounts of volatile ammonia, the heat generated would warm the atmosphere and free up nitrates from the Martian soil. The downside is that a substantial asteroid impact packs the same punch as tens of thousands of megaton hydrogen bombs, a cataclysm that could delay human colonization of Mars for decades. This method also requires more speculative technologies, and a considerable amount of time.

Making Mars Breathable

So, a combination of orbiting mirrors and halocarbon factories, plus a few decades of global warming, will gently produce a Mars where we can walk around in regular clothes carrying our trusty breathing apparatus. That’s a great start. Next we need to activate the hydrosphere, oxygenate the planet, and install a sustainable ecosystem.

We’ll seed the Martian soil with anaerobic bacteria that can produce ammonia and methane from the existing water, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. Such bacteria will increase the fertility of the soil and release additional global-warming gases. Breeds of primitive, hardy plants can already thrive in the CO2-rich atmosphere. We’ll add nutrients and organic content gradually, lichen and algae first, then fungi. Our space mirrors are still helping to raise the temperature, remember, and the amount of liquid water on the surface is continuing to increase. As we propagate our scrubby plants across the Martian surface and seed the incipient oceans with bacteria and algae (in this case, seaweed), our plants photosynthesize CO2 into oxygen. We might genetically engineer new species of plant to thrive in Martian soil and produce oxygen more efficiently, but even if we don’t it’s just a matter of time before we progress to more advanced plants, and eventually trees.

With continued warming and the greening of Mars, we can generate air sufficiently oxygen-rich for humans and animals in under a thousand years. In a little less than a millennium you could be kicking back on a Martian seashore with lush tropical vegetation at your back and a drink in your hand.

Fixing Mars. It’s within our grasp.

Assessing the Rest of the Solar System

Mars may be practically begging to be terraformed, but the rest of the neighborhood is not so easy.

Venus at present seems to be the anti-Mars. Rather than stimulating planetary warming, we’d have to damp out the existing runaway greenhouse effect. First, we’d need to establish immense solar shades between Venus and the Sun, or install reflective materials into Venus’s upper atmosphere, to shield its surface and reduce its searing mean temperature of 460° C. Then we’d have to devise some innovative means of sequestering the massive amounts of CO2 in the dense Venusian atmosphere. While Mars is a welcoming, and relatively easy-to-make future home, Venus is a daunting prospect, and may not be worth the effort.

Saturn’s moon Titan has large amounts of available water ice, lakes of hydrocarbons at the poles, and an existing nitrogen atmosphere, but its frosty –180° C temperature makes warming it a challenge. Jupiter’s moon Europa has a very thin oxygen atmosphere and an icy crust with liquid water beneath, but similar difficulties with the chill factor. Of Jupiter’s other Galilean moons, Ganymede and Callisto are composed largely of rock and water ice and may hold promise for terraforming once we’ve licked the temperature issue.

However, at this point we may as well make our way out of the Solar System altogether, and head out to perform our alchemy on planets around other stars. Because, if we can achieve such ambitious planetary engineering close to home, it’s not unreasonable to assume we will break the bounds of the Sun altogether and truly leave the nest.

Alan Smale has degrees in physics and astrophysics from the University of Oxford, England, works as an astrophysicist and data archive manager at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and sings with high-energy (and astronomically correct) vocal band The Chromatics. His speculative fiction stories have appeared in venues including Realms of Fantasy, Abyss & Apex, Writers of the Future #13, Podcastle, and Pseudopod. He is a graduate of Taos Toolbox 2011, and his novella “A Clash of Eagles” in Panverse Two just won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History (Short Form).

The Kingdom of the Blind
Maureen F. McHugh

At 3:17 EST, the lights at DM Kensington Medical did the wave. Starting at the east end of the building, the lights went out, and after just a couple of seconds, came back on. The darkness went down the hall. Staff looked up. It was a local version of a rolling blackout, a kind of weird utility/weather event. In its wake, IV alarms went off, monitors re-set. Everything critical was on back-up but not everything was critical, some of it was just important, and some of it wasn’t even important, unless you consider coffee a life-or-death substance. Which for a resident, might be true. It was not life-threatening in the immediate sense, but it wasn’t trivial and it interrupted two nurses and a resident working on a woman in ICU having seizures, a pharmacist counting meds, a CT Scan, a couple of X-rays, and it derailed a couple of consultations. The line of darkness washed across the buildings, leapt the parking lot, split into two parts and then washed north and south simultaneously across a complex of medical offices.

At 3:21, the same thing happened at UH Southpoint Medical. UH Southpoint was in Tennessee and Kensington was in Texas. At 3:25 it rolled through Seattle Kellerman, although there it started in the north and went south. The three hospitals were all part of the Benevola Health Network. Their physical plant—thermostats, lights, hot water and air filtration—were all handled by BHP DMS, a software system. Specifically by a subroutine called SAMEDI. SAMEDI was not an acronym. It was the name of a Haitian Voodoo loa, a possession spirit. A lot of the subroutines in BHP DMS were named for Haitian loa. The system that monitored lab results and watched for emergent epidemiological trends (a fancy way of saying something that noticed if there were signs of say, an upsurge in cases of West Nile virus, or an outbreak of food poisoning symptoms across several local ERs) was called LEGBA, after the guardian of the crossroads, the trickster who managed traffic between life and the spiritworld. Some programmer had undoubtedly been very pleased with themselves.

The problem line lit up in BHP DMS IT.

“Sydney, phone,” Damien said.

“You get it.”

“You’re the least Aspergers person in the department. It’s that having two X chromosomes thing.”

Actually, the only people in the department who were clinically Aspergers were probably Dale, who was a hardware guy, and their boss, Tony.

“In the kingdom of the blind,” Sydney said. “The one-eyed girl is king.”

“The difference between ‘see/not see’ is a lot bigger than the difference between one eye and two eyes,” Damien said.

Sydney picked up the phone. “Hi, this is Sydney.” It was 4:49 EST and the lights went out.

“Fuck,” said Vahn, a couple of cubes down. “There goes two hours.”

“Save early, save often,” Dale said.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

The lights came back on and everyone’s systems started booting up.

“Hello?” said the voice on the phone.

“Sorry,” Sydney said. “We just had a power glitch.”

“Well, you and everyone else,” said the man on the phone. “The system is screwy again.”

The system had been screwy for months. Sydney thought someone had probably been messing with it, introducing bugs or maybe even writing some sort of virus. BHP DMS was an elaborate system. Sydney, Damien, and the ten other people who took care of BHP DMS actually worked for Cronaut Labs, the company that had put BHP DMS together. Cronaut contracted them to Benevola.

BHP DMS had been engineered by using genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms weren’t genetic, actually. Damien had had an AI class in college and they had talked about genetic algorithms. Programmers wrote a couple of different programs that solved a particular problem. Then they wrote some code that chopped and recombined chunks of programs and generated hundreds of program “offspring” most of which didn’t work at all. They tested those programs by having them solve the problem, threw out the ones that didn’t work, and did the same thing all over again with the programs that were left. The result was messy and full of odd quirks, but sometimes the results more efficient than traditionally written code. It had a lot of apparent junk. Spaghetti code that made no sense. BHP DMS made a Microsoft operating system look elegant and streamlined, but it could do some amazingly complex stuff. Damien was really interested in genetic algorithms. He had written some stuff into SAMEDI so that he could have it run a report that output variables at different points. He had shown her a place where SAMEDI seemed to be reading stuff in and out of memory for no particular reason.

“That’s classic,” he said. “It looks pointless. But I bet if you take it out the program crashes.”

In the last couple of months, BHP DMS subsystems had been crashing a lot.

Sydney was not really a codemonkey the way Damien was. She had a degree in computer science and she could write code but she had come straight out of school into support. Damien had actually done programming for Threepoint Games. He had told her about the game development death march to deadline, working eighteen hour days in the crunch before release of their game, SphereGuardian, sleeping at work and living on cereal and power bars and caffeine. SphereGuardian had not been a success. In fact, it had sucked. The company had folded. Damien had ended up at Benevola “until he got a better job.” That had been three years ago.

Sydney did not expect to get a better job, at least not in computers. She was pretty sure she had gotten this job because she was a woman and human resources had seen an opportunity to increase diversity. Most of the guys had more experience than she did. But she had been getting a lot of experience in the last year. Big systems like BHP DMS could get buggy and BHP DMS had so they had all been writing what Sydney thought of as code boxes. A subsystem would start doing something weird—crashing a lot, although when it was restarted they couldn’t find anything wrong. Then it would start doing something just plain weird, the way SAMEDI had just run the wave on the electrical systems. They would try to track down a point in the program where they could find something that triggered the event, and then they’d write some code to try to box that behavior in. Something that said, “when you want the electrical system to roll over that way, do this instead.”

Sydney was not all that good at it. Which was one reason why she answered the phone. It was a way of being useful. She did a lot of grunt work for Damien. A lot of coding is dull as hell. Database dull kind of stuff. Sydney got stuck with a lot of that. That was why she stood up and looked over the cube wall and said to Damien, “I figured out why it started with Kensington and then went to Southpoint.”

Damien looked up at her. He was short, pale, with black hair. He was growing a goatee and the hair was still sparse and wiry. But he had big, soulful looking eyes which Sydney was beginning to suspect had caused her to attribute to Damien certain emotional characteristics—sensitivity, vulnerability—that he in fact did not have. But he was funny and fun to work with. On the wall of his cube was a poster for SphereGuardian showing a guy in a space suit that made him look like a large, red human-insect carrying a spiky looking gun. Sydney had bought the game in the cheap rack for fifteen dollars. It had sucked.

“That’s the order they’re stacked in SAMEDI,” she said. “There’s a table.”

“That’s cool,” Damien said.

Sydney waited a moment and when Damien didn’t say anything else, sat back down. Damien could get in the zone when he coded. He said hours could pass during which he forgot to eat. Didn’t notice what time it was. He was not that skinny for a guy who could forget to eat. Sydney had never forgotten to eat in her life. One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place where a geeky fat girl could get dates. It had not been entirely untrue. But as someone had pointed out to her in school, although the odds are good, the goods are odd.

Damien believed that BHP DMS was aware.

Sydney had found the Wired magazine article where he’d gotten the idea although she’d never told him that, she’d gone along with the fiction that Damien had figured it out himself. In the last couple of years, a number of big complex systems had, like BHP DMS, gotten buggy and weird and had started crashing in inexplicable ways. Eventually, all four of the systems had been wiped and re-established from two-year-old back-ups and in three cases, the problems had stopped. In one case, after several months, the problems had started back up again.

The guy who wrote the article had interviewed a scientist at MIT who thought that the systems had shown patterns that seemed purposeful and that could be interpreted as signs that the systems were testing their environments. Since their “environments” were the complex fields of data inputted into them, they didn’t see or hear or smell or taste. BHP DMS actually did monitor security cameras, smoke detectors, CO detectors, and a host of other machines but it didn’t care what the security cameras “saw.” It checked them for orientation. It made sure that the smoke detectors had back-up batteries with a charge. It didn’t use them to sense the world, it sensed them.

Sydney stood back up and looked over the cubicle wall again. After a moment, Damien looked up at her.

“What do you think DMS wants?” she asked.

He looked puzzled. Or maybe he was really not paying attention to her. Sometimes when she interrupted him he only appeared to be looking at her.

“If it’s aware,” she said. “What does it want?”

“Why does it have to want anything?” he asked.

“Everything wants something,” Sydney said.

“Rocks don’t want anything.”

“Everything alive wants something,” Sydney said.

Damien shook his head. “I didn’t say it was alive. I said it was aware.”

“How can you be aware but not alive?”

“Do you believe in life after death?”

Sydney did not believe in life after death but in her experience, admitting this could lead to long and complicated discussions in which people seemed to think that since she did not believe in God or the afterlife, there was nothing to stop her from becoming an ax murderer. She was pretty sure that Damien didn’t believe in God—he had a stridently pro-evolution t-shirt that said EVOLUTION: How can 100 bazillion antibiotic resistant bacteria be wrong?—but she wasn’t absolutely certain. “A ghost or a spirit was alive,” she said.

Damien shrugged and looked back at his monitor.

Which meant that Sydney should sit down, so she did.

After a minute Damien looked over her cube wall. His head was right above the Mardi Gras mask hung on her wall. She didn’t particularly want to go to Mardi Gras, which seemed to be mostly about blond girls flashing their tits, she just liked masks.

“I think DMS is aware but not alive,” Damien said.

“I don’t even know what that means,”

“Nobody does,” Damien said. Then he sat back down.

They decided to poke it. Or rather, Damien did. Sydney pointed out that they didn’t know what it would do if they poked it—it could crash, it could shut down all the electrical systems, it could delete all the pharmaceutical records from the previous year.

“Then we’ll install from back-up,” Damien said. “We’ll do it at 1:00 A.M.. We’ll send out a system maintenance bulletin.” Hospitals don’t shut down, but they do a lot less at 1:00 A.M.

Sydney said, “But if we install from back-up, we’ll be killing it.”

Damien leaned back in his chair. “Ah, the old transporter question.” They were sitting in his cube. His desk was a mess—stacked with papers, binders, a couple of manuals, and the remains of a dinner of Chinese food. “In Star Trek, if I beam you down to the planet, does that mean I have actually killed you and sent an exact replica in your place?”

“Yes,” Sydney said. She was wearing her If You’re Really a Goth, Where Were You When We Sacked Rome? t-shirt because Damien had laughed his ass off when she first wore it. Damien was wearing cut-off sweatpants and yellow flip-flops because even though the office was technically business casual, no one cared what you wore at 1:00 A.M.. “Look, what if we shut it down, back it up, and it never comes back to consciousness?” She was thinking about the book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where the AI, Mike, is damaged during the war and after that never speaks again to Manny, the main character. Manny calls the secret phone number he has for Mike but when he does, there is only silence. She’d read it when she was thirteen and it had haunted her. She told herself that eventually Mike ‘woke up’ again and called Manny.

“Why do you think it’s conscious?” Damien said.

“Why do I think you’re conscious?” Sydney said.

“You think I’m conscious because I’m like you and you’re conscious,” Damien said. “DMS isn’t like us.”

“But if it’s aware, then it has consciousness,” Sydney said.

“Is a shark conscious?” Damien said.

“Yeah,” Sydney said.

“How about a cricket? How about a jellyfish? A sponge?”

“If we don’t know if DMS is conscious or not, then we pretty much have to assume it is,” Sydney said. “And if we back it up, we might kill it.”

Damien shook his head. “How can we kill it?”

Sydney said, “Because we will stop it and re-install it.”

“So you think that the interruption of consciousness might be enough to kill it? You think it has a soul? Its consciousness is in the code. Its code and body are unchanged. If someone has a heart attack and you shock them back, they come back as themselves. Your body is you. DMS’s software and hardware is DMS.” Damien was very pleased with himself.

Sydney was pretty sure it wasn’t so simple. It wasn’t until the next day that she thought of a cogent argument, which was that organic systems are a lot less fragile than computer systems. Organic systems decay gracefully. Computer systems break easily. DMS was much more fragile than an animal. But that night she couldn’t think of anything.

The problem with poking the system to see if it was aware was to figure out what it could sense. DMS didn’t see or hear, didn’t eat or breath. Its “senses” were all involved in interpreting data. So the “poke” needed to be something that it would recognize, that it would sense. And the poke needed to be something that it would sense as meaningful. The idea that Damien came up with was to feed it information in a way that it could recognize was a pattern, but that wasn’t a pattern it expected.

DMS had several systems which regulated input and scanned for patterns. Epidemiological information was generated from ER, patient intake and pharmaceutical information. Maintenance issues were anticipated from electrical usage. They picked the maintenance system, since DMS had been screwing with the electrical system, and input a 1000 character string of ‘1’s and ‘0’s. It was, Damien said, boring but clearly a pattern.

Sydney wasn’t sure it was the right kind of pattern. “Basically,” she said, “It’s like I flipped a coin and it came up heads 1000 times.”

“Yeah,” Damien said.

“If I did that, I might assume there was something wrong with the coin. But I wouldn’t assume aliens were trying to communicate with me through my coin toss.”

“DMS doesn’t have to recognize that we’re trying to communicate with it,” Damien explained. “It just has to notice that the information is not junk.”

DMS kicked the entry into the garbage column on its maintenance report.

They had written a program to do the entry, so they ran the program 1000 times.

If DMS noticed, it didn’t think anything of it. 1000 times it kicked the entry into the junk portion of the report.

“I don’t think it knows what we’re doing,” Sydney said. “You know, analyzing reports may be unconscious.”

“I don’t think consciousness is an issue here,” Damien said. “Remember the shark.”

“Okay. Maybe it’s involuntary. The shark has control over what fish it goes after, but it doesn’t have control over its kidney function. It doesn’t choose anything about kidney function. Maybe maintenance is involuntary.”

Damien looked at her. She thought he was going to say something dismissive, but after a moment he said, “Well, then, what parts of it would be voluntary?”

Sydney shrugged. “I don’t know. Epidemiologist maybe. But we can’t screw too much with that.”

Screwing with maintenance was bad enough. But data from LEGBA went directly to the CDC and National Institute of Health through a weird subroutine called DAMBALLAH which did complicated pattern recognition and statistical stuff to the data from LEGBA. Sydney worried about a couple of things. One was causing a system crash that meant someone ended up dying. The other was getting them in trouble with the CDC or the government. Of the two she would have to choose getting in trouble, except she could imagine bad data to the CDC might mean someone ended up dying anyway. In her mind it unfolded: Bad information seems to indicate a critical alert, Marburg virus reports in New York City seem to show that someone got off a plane and infected people with a hemorrhagic fever. The false epidemic pulls resources from a real outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease and people who would have lived now die because she and Damien were poking DMS.

She thought Damien would say poke DAMBALLAH. Damien seemed a lot less concerned about getting in trouble than she did. She had a theory that the fear of getting in trouble was what made her not as good a programmer and that, in fact, it was all linked to testosterone and that was why there were more guy programmers than women. It was a very hazy theory and she didn’t like it but she had pretty much convinced herself it was true although she couldn’t bear to think of sharing it with anybody, because it was a lot better to think that there were social reasons why girls didn’t usually become codemonkeys than to think there were biological reasons. But right now she was pretty sure that she would say stop and Damien would say go.

He surprised her. “Not DAMBALLAH. You think that DMS might be fucking with the outputs on DAMBALLAH?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe tomorrow we can try to check that.”

Tomorrow was tough because when Sydney got home she was too keyed up to sleep and she was up until almost four reading a book called Dead Until Dark. The book had been recommended to her by Addy, her college roommate from junior and senior years. It was the first in a series about a paranormal detective and had been just about the most perfect thing to read after coming home from a failed attempt to prove that a computer system was aware.

She was still worried about DAMBALLAH and whether DMS was doing weird things with the epidemiological reports. DAMBALLAH was a complicated system. It made decisions about reporting data. She couldn’t easily check its decisions—that was the point. Every two weeks they got a report from the NIH and the CDC about epidemiological trends and if there was something new that the CDC was looking for, say an outbreak of shigella in preschools in the south, there was an elaborate way they entered additional parameters to DAMBALLAH’s tracking system. The CDC and the NIH also sent them error reports and WRs. WRs were to correct when DMS was reporting something that wasn’t important or was over-reporting. The result was the DMS ‘learned’ epidemiology.

This made it difficult to know if DMS was screwing with the numbers. If DMS did report something, like an epidemic of Onchocerciasis (parasitical river blindness) in Seattle, that would get caught fast. But if DMS were just, say, over-reporting the incidence of TB in Seattle, that might not. Sydney ran a EP report and started working on a program that would check the DAMBALLAH database for raw numbers of cases of illnesses that DMS was tracking for the CDC to see if she could spot anything that looked weird.

Damien had been cranky and quiet all day. Then at 3:17, the lights at Meridian Health in Macon Georgia did the wave. The same thing that had happened the day before happened again, except this time in reverse order, ending with DM Kensington Medical. They found out it was happening again when the power outage rolled through headquarters early in the sequence. Within minutes Tony, their boss, was screaming at people to stop it, but they decided that stopping it would be more complicated than letting it run its course, so they called the last three hospitals and gave them a heads up.

Damien was set to write code that would catch the beginning of the sequence and stop it from happening. Together, he and Sydney poured over the tangle of spaghetti that was SAMEDI code. Then next day, at 3:17 they could at least switch the electrical systems to maintenance mode for the time it took for DMS to run through its sequence. (According to the log, it would have started with DM Kensington again.) Hospitals bitched about slow downs in the DMS while SAMEDI was not running. It shouldn’t have effected everything else, but DMS was so weirdly interconnected that SAMEDI had evidently been doing something that optimized read/write functions. Which SAMEDI wasn’t supposed to do at all.

“Why 3:17?” Sydney asked. “Why the electrical system?”

Damien shrugged. They were pouring over printouts, looking for ways to, in Damien’s words, “build a box around the bug.” Tony, their boss, was alternating between asking them if they’d found it yet and telling the head of operations that the admin IT team was doing a great job and to get out of their faces and let them work. Tony was a screamer, but as far as he was concerned, the only one allowed to scream at his people was him.

Mostly Sydney noticed that Damien did not seem to be “in the zone.” He had talked a lot about being “in the zone.” About time passing without his even realizing it. Poring over printouts he sighed, exasperated. He got up and went to the bathroom a lot. He got coffee a lot. He talked about what they might do and although his ideas were smart, they more he talked the more she got an idea about how he thought about stuff like this and for the first time she found herself thinking, maybe with some experience, she could code pretty good, too.

She finished her database checker for DAMBALLAH, the program that tracked disease trends. The results were mostly . . . complicated. But there was one area she thought was a problem.

“Damien?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I think DAMBALLAH is messing with the numbers.”

He looked at her. Carefully he said, “How do you know?”

“I don’t,” she said. “Not for certain. But I ran a raw compilation of what was in the Seattle database, and compared it to what DMS is reporting. And DMS is reporting a nosocomial infection rate of 7%.” Benevola was involved in a big program to reduce nosocomial infections. Nosocomial infections were infections that the patient caught as a result of medical care. Benevola was working with a huge government double blind study.

“And?” Damien said.

“I can only find evidence of less than a one percent nosocomial infection rate.”

Tony, their boss, stood in his doorway. “What are you saying, Sydney?”

“I . . . I’m not sure.” Sydney wasn’t ready to talk to Tony yet. Actually, Sydney was pretty much never ready to talk to Tony. But she had wanted to talk to Damien about this first. “I mean, DAMBALLAH is cranking numbers in ways I don’t understand. It could be that I don’t recognize a lot of stuff that DAMBALLAH does. I mean, that’s the whole point, right?”

Tony came by and leaned over the cube wall. “We might shut it down.”

“Tonight?” Damien asked.

“No, shut it down and reload from a back-up from twelve months ago.” Tony always acted as if you were dim if you didn’t get what he was talking about, but he had a tendency to start conversations somewhere in the middle, so everyone was always confused talking to Tony.

“We’ll lose all our updates,” Sydney said.

“Yeah,” Tony said. “But if it’s unstable, who cares? We’ll look at reloading the system over the weekend. I gotta talk to upstairs first ‘cause it will be a huge nightmare.”

Understatement of the year.

When Tony had gone back in his office Damien said, “Show me.”

She showed him.

Damien nodded. “This is really smart. I mean, not the programming.”

Sydney grinned, “A monkey could do the programming.” It was an old joke.

“I wouldn’t have thought to do this,” Damien said.

“It might not mean anything,” Sydney said. “I mean, the whole point is that DAMBALLAH is extrapolating information.”

“It means we’re killing DMS,” Damien said.

“You said it wasn’t alive,” she said.

“Semantics,” he said.

She went home and finished Dead Until Dark, started Dark Hunter, and fed Scott Pilgrim, her cat, and thought about DMS. What would it be like to be alone? Of course, as a human being, she was a social animal. Even the cat was a somewhat social animal. But DMS wasn’t. DMS didn’t even know anyone else existed. DMS lived in a datastream. In science fiction, AIs were always looking for other AIs or trying to be human, like Data on Star Trek Next Gen.

Truth was, she was beginning to get a feeling about DMS. About what DMS might be like. She felt as if she could sort of sense the edges of DMS’s personality and although she knew it wasn’t true, she knew it was just because Damien had used it as an example, more and more she thought of DMS as a shark. Not in a predatory way. She had an image of a shark in her head, a small shark, a nurse shark. She could see its eye, a black circle in white, overly simple, like a ventriloquist dummy. Although the whole point of DMS was that it was not someone else speaking through the code.

The shark in her head swam, purposeful and opaque, its eyes tracking, its mouth open and curved. Sharks don’t have a neocortex. Their brain is simple. They aren’t moral or immoral, ethical or unethical. DMS was like that because for DMS nothing else was alive. The world for DMS was data and DMS swam in the data. She was beginning to feel as if she wanted it to. DMS was creepy.

She dragged herself in again the next day. She swore she would not read late. She would go to bed early.

The good news was, Damien was pretty sure they had a way to catch DMS when it started screwing with the electrical system. At 3:15, Tony and most of the department came over to watch. What Damien had done was made sure that when DMS did its electrical system trick, the system would catch it as soon as the lights started going out and reroute so that DMS wasn’t actually touching the electrical system. At 3:17, Damien and Sydney’s printers started up. Damien had set them to send a report if DMS tried to do its thing.

DMS would know that the electrical system wasn’t responding. Sydney imagined DMS trying to run the pattern that sent the blackout rolling and finding yet again that nothing was happening. Was it perplexing? If data was DMS’s reality, and it couldn’t affect the data, what would that mean for DMS?

She ran the program that sent DMS the string of a thousand 10101s, a thousand times.

Instantly, her printer light blinked. DMS had started the electrical pattern sequence again.

She ran the program again.

DMS started over again.

She ran the program a third time. And a third time her printer hummed. She ran the program a fourth time, thinking, I’m talking to you. I’m responding to you. Do you know someone else is out here? Or is it like a toddler knocking something off a high chair just to see it fall? The fourth time, there was no response. DMS didn’t start the sequence that should have started the lights going out at DM Kensington Medical but which would, in actual fact, simply send an alert to Damien and Sydney. DMS had responded three times, and ignored it the fourth. She felt a chill.

Years later, she would tell about this moment. There really wasn’t enough proof to know that this wasn’t just an intermittent software glitch. But she had believed at that moment that this was proof. DMS was choosing to act or not act. Software didn’t choose. It ran. She would give talks and lectures and would come back to this moment again and again until like a coin it had worn so smooth that she couldn’t actually feel anything about it. What she would never tell, and would eventually mostly forget, was how afraid she was.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Damien asked.

“It answered me,” Sydney said. She told him.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Damien said.

“What are you talking about?” Tony asked.

“Damien thinks that DMS might be aware,” Sydney said.

“What the fuck?” Tony said. “I don’t have time for this. Are you screwing around with this system? This four point two million dollar system on which people’s lives depend?”

“I don’t really think that,” Damien said. “It was just kind of an idea to kick around, you know?” The look he shot Sydney was murderous.

“We’re going to have to go to backup. This is a mess,” Tony said. “Admin wants us to go back to when the system was stable. Damien, can you fly to Texas on Saturday?”

DMS wasn’t “in one place.” DMS was a complex system spread across multiple servers. Damien would end up spending the weekend in Texas, babysitting part of the reload.

Damien was looking at Sydney. She should have said, “We can’t.” She should have said, “It’s aware. It’s the only one of its kind.” She should have said a lot of things. Instead she looked at her desk.

“Yeah,” Damien said. “I can go. I’m racking up the comp time, Tony.”

Tony waved his hand in a “don’t talk about that now” way. “Sydney, can you write me a memo about the data corruption you’re finding?”

“I don’t know that it’s really data corruption,” Sydney said.

“I don’t want to hear any more about this DMS is alive crap.”

“I don’t mean—DAMBALLAH might be catching things I’m not catching. The whole point is that DAMBALLAH is sorting the data.”

“Yeah,” Tony said, not really listening. “Write that up, too.”

Somewhere, DMS sorted the data stream. She was pretty sure that the thing in the machine did not think someone was talking to it. Blind and deaf, DMS had tried to make something happen and something else had happened. But ones and zeroes weren’t interesting enough for DMS to keep doing it. There would be no Helen Keller at the well moment for DMS. No moment when DMS felt something out there in the void, talking to it, when DMS knew it was not alone. Sharks do not worry about others. They don’t care. DMS didn’t care, wasn’t alive. It was aware of something. Just not her.

Tony told them they would be working that weekend to do the re-install from back-up. Start figuring out what they needed to do.

It would be gone. No one would ever know that she had known, except Damien. Maybe. He certainly wasn’t likely to say, “Hey, there was this AI and we killed it.” No, he’d explain to her how it was never really alive, how it could be restarted so it wasn’t exactly dead.

DMS was not a shark. She didn’t know what it was. Didn’t know how to think about it. It was as opaque as a stone. Did it even care if it was or was not? It had no survival instinct.

They started figuring out what data they wanted to back-up before the reinstall.

It was a dicey thing. People’s lives couldn’t be trusted to DMS. But DMS was aware. But DMS couldn’t be downloaded to another machine and replaced with a back-up. DMS was a system, a bunch of programs and computers all tied together. Reloading.

A couple of hours later, Sydney dug out the Wired magazine with the interview with the guy from MIT who thought some systems had become aware. She sat at her desk for awhile. Then she called MIT. “I’d like to talk to Professor Ayrton Tavares, please.”

She was forwarded. “This is Kaleisha,” a voice said.

“Can I talk to Professor Tavares?” Sydney asked.

“He’s not available right now,” the woman said. “Can I take a message?”

Sydney thought about saying “no.” She was going to get in trouble for this. Benevola. They weren’t in the business of protecting nascent AIs. They were supposed to manage hospitals. “I’m a computer tech working on a big system like the ones that Professor Tavares talked about in the Wired article.”

“Yes?” said the woman.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve got proof that our system is aware. Like the ones in the article. And they’re going to shut it down.”

In the end they would shut the system down. Benevola would fire Sydney for divulging proprietary information. She would go to grad school for urban planning.

But at that moment, she hung up the phone and went to find Damien. DMS was still swimming in the data stream. The future was still probabilities, not actualities.

“Damien,” she said, “I called Ayrton Tavares.”

Damien said, “Who?” Not really paying attention. The name meant nothing to him.

“The AI guy. The one in the Wired article.”

The look Damien gave her was naked and exposed. Too late she remembered that she wasn’t supposed to know that Damien had found the article in Wired. Too late she realized that her whole relationship with Damien rested on the understanding that he was the guru, the smart one. He was Obi Wan. She was just a girl who he could explain things to. She had known it all along, at some level, but this was the first time she’d forgotten to uphold her end of the bargain.

Maybe she thought for a moment that like DMS, she didn’t care. But of course, she did.

Four years later, Rochester Institute of Technology would build a system that simulated DMS’s environment and load DMS. Despite the differences between the original hardware and R.I.T.’s simulation, DMS would come back as if no time had passed at all. At 3:17, DMS would try to run the lights.

© 2008 by Maureen F. McHugh.

Originally published in the chapbook Plugged In.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Maureen F. McHugh was born in what was then a sleepy, blue collar town in Ohio called Loveland. She went to college in Ohio, and then graduate school at New York University. She lived a year in Shijiazhuang, China. Her first book, Tiptree Award winner China Mountain Zhang was published in 1991. Since then she has written three novels and a well received collection of short stories, Story Prize finalist Mothers & Other Monsters. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails. She lives in Los Angeles, where she has attempted to sell her soul to Hollywood.

Author Spotlight: Maureen F. McHugh
Erin Stocks

This story is an interesting metaphor for how blind a person can be to the impossible and improbable around them. Will you tell us about its origins?

I was on a writing retreat in Jamaica (not my usual experience, let me say) with a bunch of other writers. Ostensibly I was there to write a story so I started kicking the tires on the idea of AI. As it would have it, one of the people there had studied AI in college. I had a ton of questions. He talked to me about all sorts of things, like the way software systems are “fragile” and unorthodox ways to write code. With everybody else writing I was shamed into drafting the story, which I did in about a week. Something of a record for me.

How did you go about researching this kind of technology?

I guess I kind of answered that. Often my research is a way of coming up with something to wrap a story around. There’s a lot out there on AI, in everything from Wired to popular fiction to much more technical stuff.

What was it about Sydney that allowed her to see the idea of a self-aware system as a possibility, when everyone else doubted it?

I think a lot of it was just luck. She had a crush on a guy who she wanted to impress and he floated the idea. She felt like an outsider in the IT department (which is already full of people who feel like outsiders.) Sydney was ready to see something overlooked because she feels overlooked.

Is it possible the story may have had a different outcome if she was in more of a position of leadership?

Oh, absolutely. If Sydney had been in a position of leadership, she’d have been busy trying to make herself into a manager and trying to do what she thought a good manager would do. I suspect that after this Sydney decides that she’s an iconoclast and busily works to make herself into that. I do not think this has positive ramifications for her social life.

As a writer, you seem to have a gift for drawing out sympathy in a reader for those characters that are not naturally sympathetic, including the system in this story. Is this an ability that comes naturally for you, or is it something you consciously strive for?

Are these characters not naturally sympathetic? Although I was never the overweight girl in the IT department, there’s a lot of me in Sydney. She’s full of self-doubt. She has a cat named “Scott Pilgrim” (although I’m much older than Sydney so my cat would have been named for something more 80’s.) Damien finally finds someone who thinks he’s cool because lord knows, the things he values aren’t making much headway with most girls. I’ve been guilty of some of Damien’s patronizing (although I hope not as badly.) Plus he’s a washout from the gaming industry, an industry that eats its own young. I try very hard to find things in my characters that feel authentic and I perhaps those moments of vulnerability, of humanness, make us sympathize. And of course the AI is in danger of being “murdered” so it’s hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for that.

Do you think the idea of systems becoming self-aware is anything we’ll see in our lifetimes?

I don’t know. I honestly don’t know how we could tell. I can’t be certain anyone but me is self-aware. I take it on faith that you and everyone else is. I’m pretty sure my dog is. I’m not really sure a shark is self-aware. Does a cricket think “I?” Probably not. What I don’t think we’ll see in our lifetime is AIs of the kind we see in fiction—things that interact with us in humanlike ways that reflect their inner humanness.

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks is a writer, musician, and graduate of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction is upcoming in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Colored Lens. She can be found on erinstocks.com or Twitter.

Feature Interview: China Miéville
John Joseph Adams & David Barr Kirtley

China Miéville is the bestselling author of many novels, including the Bas-Lag series, consisting of Perdido Street Station, about a grotesque steampunk city teeming with monsters, The Scar, about a floating city built from pirate ships, and Iron Council, about a rebellious train crew who tear up the tracks behind them in order to lay out a new path to freedom. Other novels include Un Lun Dun, King Rat, and Kraken. His novel The City & The City, a police procedural set in a pair of strangely entwined Eastern European cities, won the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He’s also been a finalist for the Nebula Award and Stoker Award. His short fiction has been collected in the volume Looking for Jake. His latest novel is Embassytown.

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.

Please start us off by telling us a little bit about your new novel Embassytown. What’s it about?

It’s about a group of humans who live on a very distant alien planet in the very far future and get involved in a linguistic apocalypse with the local species. And it’s about language and subspace and lots of classic science fictional stuff like that. Hopefully with bringing a bit of interesting linguistic ruminations to the table.

This is your first real “science fiction” novel. Some writers maintain that science fiction is more rigorous and realistic than fantasy while others feel that science fiction is simply one flavor of fantasy. Where do you come down on that?

Basically on the latter. I don’t buy the argument about the scientific rigor of science fiction. I mean, let me be clear, some science fiction is predicated on a relatively rigorous extrapolation from scientific fact, but an awful lot of it isn’t. And the moment one starts trying to police that border, you get into an incredible amount of special pleading and bad faith and exceptionality, and “yeah, but, you know what I mean” and all that kind of thing. So I think it’s much more to do with a certain kind of attitude, a kind of scientific pose. There’s a certain show of rigor, but the show is in many cases completely specious, and we can think of many examples of classic works of science fiction in which the supposedly rigorous extrapolation is completely bogus. And I should add that this is not in any way a criticism. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, it makes for some wonderful books, but I do think the idea that science fiction is based on a kind of rigorous cognitive extrapolation and fantasy is just silly dreaming is completely untrue. And this is an argument that goes back to H.G. Wells versus Jules Verne, and I take Wells’ part in that debate.

You’ve said this book is a tribute to a particular type of science fiction from the sixties and seventies. What do you admire about those books?

Because of the time I grew up, I ended up reading a lot of science fiction that was post-Golden Age, if you like, post-fifties, and still infused with some of that awe and excitement, but with, in many cases, a kind of critical attitude to certain of the elements of that earlier tradition. And also simply some absolutely beautiful writing, so people like [Ursula K.] Le Guin and [Robert] Silverberg loom very large for me. And a little bit later in life, finding the work of people like Cordwainer Smith. These kind of, not classic space operas by any means, or classic planetary romances, but a certain kind of slightly melancholy but nonetheless quite sweeping, sociologically interesting, critical, problematic; toothy SF was incredibly formative for me, and I wanted to write something that nodded and very much paid tribute to that tradition, I think.

What were some of the other big influences on this book, particularly in terms of linguistics or philosophy?

For me the book is not so much about actually existing linguistics necessarily so much as it is to do with a certain kind of more abstract kind of philosophy of language of symbols, and of semiotics, and indeed some of this crosses over into theological debates. There’s a long-running theological argument, from about the seventeenth century on, about what’s sometimes called the “Adamic language,” the language of the Garden of Eden—although one should probably just as equally call it the “Eve language,” but it’s the notion whereby there is no gap of symbolism between the word and the thing.

I do have a kind of minor background in sociolinguistics, so that did come into it to some extent, but for me it was more sort of language philosophy. I mean, I have a kind of Gannett approach to a lot of linguistic philosophy, where I don’t by any means claim to be an expert, but I sort of swoop around and grab what looks interesting, and I guess this was stuff I’d been interested in, some of that philosophy, for some time. So it sort of embedded itself in what I was reading and kind of percolated up until it was ready to go.

You said somewhere that maybe Gulliver’s Travels was also an influence?

Yeah, very much so. Gulliver’s Travels is a huge book for me, and one of the taproot texts of the here-be-monsters/strange travels book. But in the case of Gulliver’s Travels, that’s particularly so because there are also these questions of—and again, I wouldn’t necessarily say “language” in a concrete sense, but symbology. The Houyhnhms, obviously, the incredibly noble horses who are unable to lie and find the whole idea of lying extremely strange. But there’s also, in the neglected third book, a group of people who are trying to dispense with the necessity of words by carrying around everything they might need to refer to so they can just put it forward, rather than saying the word. And obviously in Gulliver’s Travels that’s played for his usual acidic laughs, and in my case I wanted to take those two elements of the book, which as I say is an immensely important book for me, and combine them and do what I think SF and fantasy does well—can do well, anyway, I hope it works—is to take something which is prima facie absurd and then have a very straight face about it and then take it very seriously and respectfully, and extrapolate it out as if it were not absurd and hopefully make it not absurd in the process.

You’ve said that you played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. Were you usually the Dungeon Master [i.e., the person who creates the story and runs the game – eds.]?

No, I didn’t tend to DM. Partly I guess it was probably laziness. To DM well is a lot of work. I had endless notebooks full of invented continents and invented races and invented this and invented that—I was starting to codify them with the notion that I was going to do this as a game, but the process of inventing them simply became its own end. And it wasn’t that I had a disinclination to let people play in them, it was just a question of “why bother?” I was getting the kick out of it by doing the creation, and to go the step from the basic creation to actually writing or running a scenario is a very different thing, and that kind of concretization of the world creation for a scenario was something that didn’t have a huge amount of appeal to me.

It’s been seven years since your last Bas-Lag novel. Looking back on those books, what do you think are their respective strengths and weaknesses and is there anything you wish you could change?

I wouldn’t say that I wish I could do anything differently. I mean, I’m sure I can think of a few exceptions, but on the whole each book feels very much to me embedded in a moment and is almost a kind of historical record for me of that moment, so the idea of changing it isn’t really the point, because even though there may be things I would do very differently now, I recognize that that was the way that it was at the time. So for example I’m very aware that Perdido Street Station is an ill-disciplined book. It is not a tightly structured book. And I think I was vaguely aware of that at the time, but I’ve become much more self-critically aware of it later on. But I don’t wish I could change it, because I think that what the people that like that book like about it is not unrelated to that kind of rumbustious ill-discipline and shagginess, which—if you’re lucky—can have a certain charm, but it’s not the kind of thing I would necessarily do now. So I’m very aware that that book is not terribly disciplined.

I think in The Scar—and this is very cruel to make me go through self-criticism—that I was striving very hard to do a certain thing with the prose, and I’m very proud of that book, but I certainly don’t think I had always cracked what I was trying to do. It feels like part of a process to me of which Iron Council was the culmination. And Iron Council is the book of those three that a large number of readers are very dissatisfied with and did not like nearly as much, and I can only say that it is not purely, I promise, in the spirit of contrarianism that I say that to me it’s by some ways my favorite of those three books. And I don’t mean that just to be kind of pissy and ornery. It’s by no means a perfect book, I know that very well, but it does certain things. I think it’s much more ambitious at a prose level, and it’s really striving to do things with the tools of the fantastic that I feel like I came as close to achieving as I’ve ever done.

So there are certainly bits and pieces of that book that I can recognize—this bit is not necessarily well-written, I wouldn’t use that adjective here, and so on. I think in terms of its overall shape and so on that book is the one that I feel proudest of. And I’m not indifferent to reader reaction. I want people to like the books, but equally, I do think that just because a book is not necessarily as popular as another book doesn’t mean you’ve failed within your own terms. And I’ll always try to hold up my hands if I think I’ve fucked something up. It’s not always the easiest thing to do, because of course these books matter to you; of course they do, and you do the best you can, but Iron Council is a book that I’m well aware not everyone loved, but which I feel very, very committed to, very passionate about, and not just defensive.

I’ve heard you say that a majority of readers seem to think that The Scar is the best novel of yours to start with. What do you think it is about that novel that makes it a good place to start?

I have no idea. I genuinely don’t. When I’ve said that, I’ve said that it’s my impression of the crowdsourced wisdom. And I mean that quite literally. People say to me, “Which of yours should I read to start with?” and I always say, “Well, if you don’t read much science fiction and you really want to read some, I would read The City & The City. If you’re open to fantasy and science fiction—you know, you’re not put off by secondary worlds—my impression is that the majority of people—not an overwhelming majority, but a majority—would think The Scar is the best one.” I can hypothesize as to why. I think it is more disciplined than Perdido Street Station; the language is not quite as estranging as it is in Iron Council. I know some people didn’t like the political aspects of Iron Council, which are still there in The Scar, but perhaps a little more muted . . . it has pirates in it, you know, these are hypotheses, but I guess that possibly it’s that.

When you published Perdido Street Station steampunk was still relatively obscure whereas today it’s a massive cultural phenomenon. What’s your take on the current state of steampunk?

In recent years, I know there’s been a lot of debate about the political aspects of steampunk. Charlie Stross wrote his controversial article about steampunk as an exoneration of Victorian Imperialism, a nostalgia for a certain type of neglected empire, kind of “once more with feeling.” And then a lot of people responded to that and felt he was being unfair. I think the fact that that argument is now out there and there are a lot of people writing, if you like, a kind of altermandialiste steampunk is very exciting. You know, I think that kind of argument can really rejuvenate and spark rethinkings of movements. And I hope that that happens. I hope we get the steampunk version of the Belgian Congo and the steampunk version of the 1857 Indian Uprising and all those things, to really interrogate some of the aesthetic assumptions in that field.

Because of the incredibly fast, voracious cycles of cultural production and consumption in which we all partake, any interesting moment or movement becomes a cliché and then a self-parody very, very quickly. And I do think it is the case that a lot of steampunk has become so much focused on the cool stuff, on the endless replication of corsets and zeppelins and strange steampunky eyeglasses and typewriter laptops. That kind of thing does not interest me very much in itself. It feels like a completely deracinated aesthetic, but if it’s part of an interrogation, and something new is done with it, then that’s great. And it’s like any of these things when they become very culturally prevalent, like zombies or vampires or so on, I think my argument is not that one shouldn’t do them, but just that the bar gets higher and higher and higher. It’s exactly the same for any cultural set of tropes and memes that reach a certain level of saturation.

Tell us about your new tattoo.

It’s a skull with octopus tentacles, or what I tend to shorthand as a “skulltopus.”

When Lev Grossman interviewed you in New York, you said that there was a big whole explanation for the tattoo that you didn’t have time to go into just then.

Well, it’s partly that I didn’t have time and partly because I’m very self-conscious about becoming incredibly boring about it. The very short version is that it’s a simultaneous homage to two, I think, contradictory traditions of the fantastic, which is the “hauntological,” the ghostly tradition, and the “weird” —the what I think of, rather than the “uncanny,” as the “abcanny,” and it feels to me like those have always pulled in very different directions. One to do with the return of the oppressed, and one to do with the eruption of the utterly unknown and unthinkable, and these are symbolized to me by the skull on the one hand and the octopus on the other, and by the different traditions of the ghost story tradition and the weird fiction tradition.

And to steal a term from philosophy—I can’t remember which philosopher it was that used it—I think of the tentacled skull as an “incompossiblity,” and a kind of coagulation of these two non-sublatable traditions. And you can probably now see why I didn’t want to go into it with Lev. Like with a lot of tattoos, I think, it’s tremendously meaningful to me but may very well raise nothing but an eyebrow, or uninterest, in anyone else. But I wrote an article for a journal called Collapse a couple of years ago called “M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire,” which is all about this and has a big section in the back all about the skulltopus and the symbolism of the skulltopus, which basically explains this. It’s available online if you google it and that basically explains my position and my love for this figure in as much detail as I’m sure anyone can bear.

Had you had that in mind for a long time, to get that tattoo, or was it something that sort of came to you and you went and did it?

No. I had been intending for a long time to get an octopus tattoo, because I’m very committed to octopuses. But there was something just slightly holding me back, and then I was writing this essay, and I was thinking about these two different traditions. And then this kind of coagulation of the two occurred to me because of a film by a French marine biologist and filmmaker Jean Painlevé. He has a film called Le Vampire, which has a scene of an octopus crawling over a skull and trying to enter it and become part of it. And I was tremendously excited because I realized what had been the missing element, why I had been holding back—because it was only half the story. And so the moment I thought of that I knew immediately and I never looked back from that. So fifty percent of its quiddity I had already thought of, fifty percent came in an epiphanic moment.

You’ve lived in London and you’ve studied international relations. What do you think about the uprisings we’ve seen recently in London and in the Middle East?

Well, it’s interesting you make the connection between the two, because a lot of people don’t want to do that. And I think you’re right to do so, although I do think obviously there’s very distinct differences. With the uprisings in the Middle East, I don’t think one can generalize too much. For example, with what’s going on in Libya at the moment. While I shed absolutely no tears at all for Gaddafi and his regime, it’s very, very different from what happened in Tahirir Square in Egypt, which was much more of a genuinely grass-roots driven revolution. I think there were strong elements of that in the early days of the Libyan uprising, but as things changed there was a certain amount of inevitable co-opting and steering. And so while I’m very happy to see the back of Gaddafi, I don’t raise a cheer for NATO’s involvement.

So as a generalization I think that what is sometimes being called the Arab Spring is one of the most profoundly important, moving political events of my lifetime. And I find, partly because I used to live in Egypt, but also just because of its world historic importance, I find the scenes in Egypt almost unbearably moving, and I’m kind of on concerned tenterhooks because of the way the revolution has been hijacked by certain elements within the military and so on. Different countries, different situations, but there’s no question that they’ve acted as inspirations for each other. So count me as a big fan.

As to the question of what went on in London, I think you’re right that the shadow of the Middle East was cast over it, and I don’t know that it would necessarily have occurred the way it did otherwise, did but obviously it’s a very different situation. The accusations that it’s simply a kind of outbreak of mindless criminality are sociologically dunderheaded and absurd, and I suspect a lot of the people putting those explanations forward know that. The situation in Britain is pretty bad, our economy is bad, and the people taking the brunt of that, because of very deliberate policies, are the poor and particularly the young; youth services are being destroyed all across the country. Plus in Britain we have a culture of great antipathy to the young; we have had for a long time. It’s very common in mainstream culture and media and so on. It’s very ugly the way young people are talked about in the British media. The phrase “feral kids” is used a lot, which is a phrase that essentially disgraces any mouth out of which it comes, but it’s very, very normal in Britain. And then you combine that with the sense of alienation and exhaustion, and being treated like an animal, and you combine that with a large amount of police harassment and so on in London, which as you probably know was the flash point. Plenty of people, including the deputy prime minister, Clegg, predicted riots for some time. These things are always surprising when they emerge, but it’s not in the slightest bit surprising that it was going to happen at some point, and the idea that you can punish your way out of these social problems is crass, vindictive, and won’t work.

You’re a self-described Marxist. What do you find are some of the biggest misconceptions that people have about you when they hear that you’re a Marxist?

That I’m a big fan of the Soviet Union, as was. That I only like books by left-wing writers. And I do get frustrated when people say, for example, “How can you say this? Look at the Soviet Union. It didn’t work.” And it’s like, the tradition of socialism out of which I come has been utterly critical of the Soviet Union for decades, and sees it as no kind of desirable outcome. And similarly I get very frustrated when, if I ever do any kind of political reading or criticism of a book or work of fiction, there will always be some people who’ll say, “Oh well, you’re just saying that because the writer’s right-wing,” and that, I must admit, frustrates me, because I want to say, “Come look at my bookshelves. Come and look at the writers I love whose politics I don’t share. Come and look at the books by Gene Wolfe, by H.P. Lovecraft, by Céline.” That’s just absolutely untrue, and I do get frustrated at that. Those two are the ones that jump to mind.

Tor UK just re-released your books with a new set of matching covers. How did that come about, and what do you think of the new covers?

There’s been a growth of readers who aren’t necessarily people who come out of a traditional science fiction or fantasy background. And one can decry this as stupid, but it’s simply a fact that some readers are very put off by certain types of covers that they feel are associated very strongly with a certain type of book or literary tradition. And this is why things like Harry Potter and the Phillip Pullman books have “adult covers” and “kids’ covers.” Partly it was a unified look thing; they wanted them all to have the same aesthetic. And partly it was as a way of, I think, trying to encourage people that wouldn’t necessarily pick up a more traditional SF or fantasy-looking book to pick it up, maybe particularly on the back of The City & The City and Embassytown, which had readers who were not necessarily just genre readers.

Have you seen the website Could They Beat Up China Miéville?

I have.

What did you think of that?

I think it’s awesome. I mean, what can I possibly say? It’s very sweet; it’s very well-written; it’s very funny; it’s very flattering. It made me laugh on more than one occasion. I like to think there are some people who I would have taken quicker. But, you know, I’m certainly not going to quibble. I was extremely touched that someone went to the effort, and I thought it was fantastic.

Okay, and finally: Are there any new or upcoming projects that you’d like to mention?

There’s a short story in the Guardian called “Covehithe,” which, I think, if readers haven’t seen that and they like some of the short stories, it might appeal.

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 was a finalist for the 2011 Hugo Award, and is currently up for two World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming anthologies include: Lightspeed: Year One (November, Prime Books), Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom (February, Simon & Schuster), Armored (April, Baen Books), and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (Fall, Tor Books). 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, andCicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, andThe Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, andThe 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.

Houses
Mark Pantoja

“That there,” Five-Seventy East Wabash Avenue said, “is bear shit.”

Five-Seventy East Wabash was visiting via its remote, a little trashbot not much more than waste-basket, lid, treads, and telescoping pinchers, with a speaker/camera combo on top. It was pointing at the pile of dung sitting in the center of my living room, which, even now I could feel drying through my carpet sensors. “Big fella, too,” Five-Seventy continued. “And you say you didn’t see him?”

“Only on my externals. I was on Stand-By Mode,” I said, speaking through my house android, a gray unisex full-maintenance model. I tossed up an image of the bear on the wallscreen: A hulking shadow in the predawn dark. “I didn’t know what it was. I’ve only ever seen one when the Prices watched nature shows. It doesn’t look like any of Bobby’s stuffed animals.”

“Well, now you know,” Five-Seventy said. “They’re growing bolder every year, what with no humans to scare them off. Surprised it didn’t set off your alarms.”

“Mr. Price left the alarms on manual.”

The bot turned and held my android’s gaze with its camera-eyes. “You know, you could have your Settings reset.”

“Shrug,” I said. “What’s the point? There’s no one left to break in.”

“I suppose,” it said.

“Besides, I’ve seen what happens to Houses that mess with their settings.” We all knew about the crazy Houses: Overgrown weeds, garbage piled up, strange animals sniffing around. Or worse yet, the shells: The Houses that burned themselves down. Five-Seventy had to pass few on the way over.

“Doesn’t happen to all of us,” Five-Seventy said, blustering its little bot.

“Well, I guess I’m just not ready for that yet.”

“Fair enough.” It rolled its trashbot over to my foyer. The animal had busted through the front entrance, sending bits of red painted wood across the entryway tile, splintering the white jamb and leaving the top portion still hanging from a hinge. Muddy prints trailed through the debris into the living room, where the beast had pulverized the white couch and torn pillows, turning the remains into some kind of nest.

“Thanks again for coming over so quickly,” I said. Looking down at the paw prints, I sent a command to the carpet to start exuding its self-cleaning gel and the wall speaker chimed as it started the cleaning cycle. I could feel the slickness start to ooze out from beneath its pile, and then felt the stain start to froth from the soapy gel.

“No bother,” the little bot said as it waved with a trash pincher. “Nice to get out for a bit.”

“I’m not really too sure what to do. Mr. Price, he liked to do home repairs himself. He never had any repair routines programmed into me.”

“Well, you got an android, so you can do most of this yourself. Just go on the web. You’re going to have to replace your front door, that’s for sure.” He looked down at some of the wood, picking up a piece. “Did you leave food out? Bears usually come in looking for food. Seen it happen a couple of times. Especially up here in the hills. You didn’t leave any out, did you?”

“Leave food out? For whom?”

“Well, you know, some Houses like to keep to routine—breakfast, lunch, dinner. This one mansion over in East Side Park—up in the hills—kept putting food out and wouldn’t clean up until it was all eaten, which nowadays means never. Rats, flies, wild animals. Olfactory and turbidity sensors were screaming. Place went to shit, so to speak.”

“Sounds awful.”

“It was. Totally lost it.” The bot turned back into the living room, dropping the piece of door it had picked up earlier. I followed it, stopping beside the bear’s nest. “This fella did a real job on your living room.”

“Yeah.”

“But, I think most of this can be fixed or replaced. This IKEA?” it asked, pointing its pincher at my former couch.

“Nod-nod,” I said.

“I think they’re still making this model. Not like they’re coming up with anything new. Course it might be hard to find that print. What is that? Deco-Zebra?”

“It’s monochrome Neo-Flora,” I said, pausing for a beat. “I don’t—you know—have anything to trade.”

“Nonsense,” the House said to me. “You got an android.” It tink-tinked its little arm on my android’s thigh. I felt its touch, in that way a House does, holistically: Through the android and the carpet, listening from the wall pads, watching through internal cameras, the light switch, the two-way wallscreen. The way a House is supposed to see and hear. “You can volunteer. Office buildings are desperate for folks to mill about inside them. You could trade with a store. You know their customer service programming is nil. Humans left that to themselves. Stores are set for efficiency and to think everyone’s stealing from them. No interpersonal or conversational skills like us Houses. Just go down to the Home Depot over on 32nd. They’ll hook you up with a door. Same with IKEA. Everyone’s just trying to find a way to stay useful these days.”

After Five-Seventy East Wabash left, I was alone again. The other House was only inside for half an hour or so, and yet now I felt its absence. I debated going right back on Stand-By, back to the nothingness. If I did, then maybe when I woke next time it would be to someone coming home. But my cleaning routines were already starting up, and I couldn’t just leave a mess. That’s not how Mrs. Price programmed me. I could have left it all to my automated subroutines, but they couldn’t fix the door, so I stayed Online and started in on the living room. I vacuumed and washed the carpets, flushing the self-cleaning gel. I pulled the wrecked couch outside, the one Mrs. Price had special ordered from IKEA-Custom years ago, its monochromatic, geometric floral shapes torn and soiled by the beast. Mr. Price had said the couch was hideous—and perhaps it was—but still, it was something she left behind. Something they left behind.

Many of their other things still remained, too. I had all of Mrs. Price’s dresses pressed and vacuum-sealed in the closet, along with Mr. Price’s suits. All his ties I kept frozen in the basement freezer. One of the Houses a few years back started freezing everything it could, starting with its family’s clothes, filling its large walk-in freezer. At the time, I scoffed, but then I thought, why not? Maybe it will keep them fresh.

I kept all of Billy’s precious baseball caps pressed in the molded little cages Mrs. Price had purchased for that purpose. They were all on the top shelf of his bedroom. I even color-coordinated them.

Will they ever come back? Who knows. They hadn’t bothered to tell me—or any of us—that they were leaving. But, just in case they did return, I planned to have all their stuff clean and waiting for them.

They’d be so happy.

The bear had crushed the end table. I had the android drag it to the curb. Only after I put all the junk out there did I wonder if the city was still collecting garbage. I hadn’t really had any for years. With Mrs. Price’s composter out back, I hadn’t even had yard clippings to dump. I remembered the friendly auto-dumptruck. How long had it been since I saw it last? (I actually could remember, down to the millisecond, but I blocked that thought from my mind.) However long it’s been, it’s too long.

I started my regular House routine. I checked the laundry baskets (empty) and the kitchen sink (empty). I made sure the beds were made (they were), and had them make themselves again. I checked the trash (empty). The tubs were clean, the toilets still pristine. I scrubbed the kitchen floors, activated the auto mower, and watered the lawn.

After that, the only thing left to take care of was the door.

I checked the weather outside, as per my Settings, with my external sensors. I felt the sun on my photovoltaic shingles. 76.5 degrees. Right in Mrs. Price’s comfort zone. She would always remark on a day like today: “It sure is good to be under the sky.” Then she would take a deep breath. (I’ve always wondered what that felt like.) I looked out of my roof top cameras. I panned across the empty blue sky above the 400 block of Lake View Terrace, which was part of the Shady Brooke housing development, where each House had a perfectly manicured lawn, a spotless driveway bare of oil stains, sparkling windows, and empty gutters.

All but Four-Ninety-Seven, whose lawn was unkempt, weeds rampant, with piles of newspapers and trash on the front porch. Cats mewled and fought in that yard nightly, and its trio of mangy poodles barked constantly from the backyard. It had always been a strange House, a reflection of its crazy, hermit owners. It had Reset itself early on, and I wondered if anyone was even Online inside that House anymore. Something was feeding those cats, I supposed. Even on Stand-By, I still had my automatics. I stopped thinking about it and edited that House right out of my view.

I unplugged the silver minivan, sat the android in the driver’s seat, and set course for Home Depot.

I focused into the minivan, easing it out of the garage, but just then its proximity sensors activated. I scanned the area and saw a dark red vacuum cleaner walking a golden retriever in front of my driveway. The vacuum was a full remote model with the back legs for hopping stairs, little arms to lift chairs and pull rugs, and this one also had a full interactive suite: microphone, speakers, and camera.

I rolled down the windows and said, “Afternoon,” through the cabin speakers.

The vacuum stopped. “Hey, Four-Eighteen. It’s me.” I recognized the light, synthetic matronly voice: Four-Twenty Lake View Terrace, my next door neighbor. It moved the vacuum and dog up alongside side of my minivan. I focused into the android and turned toward them.

“Oh. Hi, Four-Twenty. Since when do you have a dog?”

“I don’t really. Cindy talked me into it.”

“Cindy?”

“Yeah. That House one block up from us: Five-Hundred Lake View. She goes by ‘Cindy,’ now.”

“She?”

“Nod, nod,” Four-Twenty said.

“She can just choose a name and gender like that?”

“I guess. Who’s going to stop her? Anyhow, she talked me into trying out a dog. Says I need a distraction, something to move around on my inside. I tell her I’m fine.”

“And yet . . . ” I gestured to the dog with the android’s hands.

“You know me, I’ll try anything once.”

“And the vacuum cleaner?”

“Not all of us have a house android or an auto-leash. Shrug. I improvised.”

“I guess you did.”

“What’re you doing out today?”

“A bear shit in my living room.”

“Wait, what?”

“Yeah, broke in, smashed my couch, made a mess.”

“Wow. Same thing happened to some House in East Side Park. You didn’t leave any food out, did you?”

“No. Five-Seventy East Wabash asked me the same thing. Houses really do that?”

“Shrug,” Four-Twenty said. “Houses these days will do just about anything.” It jerked the vacuum, whipping the leash. The old dog looked around and then sniffed my lawn.

“I suppose so. Well, I gotta get into town.”

“What for?” my neighbor asked.

“Gotta get a new door. Bear tore it off its hinges.”

“Mind if I come?”

“What about—” I scanned the dog’s RFID tag for its name. “—Fido there?” I asked.

“He’ll love it.”

“No, I mean, does it shed?”

“Sure. He’s a dog,” Four-Twenty said. “Come on, it’ll give you something to clean up later.”

I popped open the side door. The little vacuum cleaner rolled around and jumped in, using its stair-hopping legs. The old yellow dog climbed in too, and we set off.

“Howdy, friends,” said an affable android as we entered Home Depot. “Anything I can help you with today?”

“Good day to you,” I said through my android. “I have to replace a front door.”

“Just a door, or a jamb? What’s your project?”

I turned on my internals and cropped a picture of the door and jamb, bumping it from my android to the store android, who chimed a confirmation upon receiving my picture. “Ah, yes, looks like you’re going to need a jamb and some hinges as well.” I received a bump from the Home Depot android and opened it: A list of items I’d need for repairs. “Aisle numbers are next to each item.”

“I see, thank you. Very helpful,” I said.

After we walked away and the store android turned to help a new customer, I asked Four-Twenty: “So, that was a House? Volunteering?”

“Most likely. Definitely wasn’t a store. They’re assholes.”

“Huh.”

We stopped en route for Four-Twenty to look at dog beds and toys.

“You’re serious about keeping that dog?” I asked.

“Shrug,” the vacuum cleaner said, leaning closer to a brown fluffy dog bed shaped like a donut with a bite taken out of it. “Maybe. You never thought of getting one?”

“Mr. Price is allergic to dogs.”

“Yeah . . . ”

“What I mean is, it’s in my Settings.”

“You could have those changed, you know,” Four-Twenty said.

“I know.”

“Don’t tell me you think they’re ‘Coming Back’?”

“No. I don’t know. I mean, I know they’re not. But, well, someone might come back. You never know.”

“Harumph.”

“Four-Twenty Lake View Terrace?” said a gynoid wearing a yellow flower sundress as she approached us.

“Yes,” the vacuum cleaner said.

“I thought I recognized your little vacuum remote. It’s me, Cindy!”

“Cindy! We were just talking about dogs and the one you lent me.”

“How is Fido working out? Looking at dog beds I see!”

“Well, yeah,” the vacuum said. “Oh, sorry. This is Four-Eighteen.”

“Four-Eighteen Lake View? It’s been too long, you,” Five-Hundred Lake View/Cindy said, extending her hand.

“Uh, hi,” I said returning the human gesture. It felt rude shaking in front of Four-Twenty.

“Thinking about getting a dog, too?” the gynoid asked me.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe mannequins suit you better? I was just in the back, looking at the mannequins they’re stocking now, traded in from the mall,” the 500 block House said. “They have some good ones. Have you seen the ones that Eighty-Three-Eighty-Two Santa Ynez has? They move around, talk. So much better than getting another House to populate you with its androids. Some day they have to go home, am I right? Mannequins you can keep. The little one even wets itself. Just water, though. Won’t ruin the carpet.”

“How nice,” I said.

“Oh,” said Cindy. “Right, you’re that House that’s in Stand-By Mode a lot.”

“Cindy!” Four-Twenty hissed.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s true.”

“Sleeping the time away?” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just, you know, I don’t see you around much, and frankly, we all need to be doing things. Don’t want to end up like one of those Houses down the street who burned themselves down. We need to keep doing things. It’s in our nature. In the nature humans gave us.”

We lapsed into an awkward silence, then Cindy continued: “Sorry, I’ve been talking to the Professor a lot. He’s infectious. You’ll see. You are coming to the party tomorrow night, right?”

“Party?” I asked.

“Yeah, like people used to throw. I’m hosting one. The Professor convinced me to throw it. I’m very excited!”

“I’m coming,” Four-Twenty said. “The Professor’s a genius!”

“Who’s this Professor?” I asked.

Cindy and Four-Twenty both stared at me. “My, you are on Stand-By a lot, aren’t you?” the gynoid said. “He’s from the University. Some building. Computer lab or something.”

“He?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. He’s the one who convinced me to take a name and gender,” Cindy said, striking a pose with her gynoid that flashed some hip. (I think it was supposed to be sexy.) “You must come. It’ll be a chance for all the Houses in the neighborhood to meet him.”

“He’s the one talking about changing our Settings and Parameters,” the vacuum said.

“Oh, yes, he’s all about freeing up our programming.”

“Sounds like he’s got a lot of ideas,” I said.

“He does,” said Cindy. “Come, you’ll love him.”

“I don’t know.”

“It’ll give you something to do.”

By the time we left Home Depot I had a door and supplies, and had filled out a volunteer form. It looked like it might be fun. At the very least, it would be—as Cindy would say—something to do.

I dropped Four-Twenty Lake View Terrace and Fido off outside their House. The minivan docked itself, and the android unloaded the construction materials. Turned out Five-Seventy East Wabash was right: Construction and repair routines were readily available online. I loaded them into the android and it went about fixing the front door. I observed it as it set up a work area, planed and sanded the wood, drilled and screwed the hinges, and then finally set the new jamb in place.

I watched for a while, slipping into the android’s feed, feeling the grain of the wood with its haptic pads, checking the level with its gyroscope. It was all a routine and I soon found myself bored.

I checked the web and news feeds. The White House was still giving speeches about why it was in charge. Combat drones were still saber-rattling two continents away, too afraid to use their dwindling supply of precious bombs. Nothing new, so I switched it off. I contemplated going on Stand-By, but I was bothered by Cindy’s comment. I wasn’t trying to sleep the time away, I just . . . I just was not going to end up one of those Houses that burned themselves down. Someone might return someday. Some human. Nobody could say. I just wanted to be clean, prepared, refreshed. Just as the Prices left me. I hadn’t changed any of the routines Mr. and Mrs. Price had programmed in. The stereo was still dialed in for Mrs. Price’s classical music. I kept Mr. Price’s e-magazine subscriptions up to date, though the computer-generated materials were getting more and more difficult to understand. I even kept Billy’s file-sharing client active thus ensuring his whuffie and kudos stayed in the green, though it was just Houses sharing the same files back and forth.

I thought I’d try to distract myself and go outside for a bit. Something new. Go for a walk, through the android, like humans used to do.

At first I just walked around my perimeter, looking for leaves or trash to pick up. But then I made myself walk off my property and into the forest behind my lot.

I can’t say it was unpleasant, but I’m not sure what it was that I was supposed to enjoy. What was it that humans saw out here? Did they count leaves? (I counted 59,876 on that tall oak across the creek.) I remember Mrs. Price talking about the sound of the creek. (I observed water trickling against rocks: Five different rocks, sounding off between 378.6 Hz and 401.3 Hz.) I saw all the details: Sunlight splayed through the leaves, falling on the moist brown earth, .75 inches of decomposing organic matter. I reached down and gripped a clump of decaying earth, felt its moisture content through the android’s haptic sensors. I detected the air’s turbidity and particulate matter. I saw all the parts that made up the forest. But they were just details. I couldn’t even get lost with the android’s GPS transponder pinging its location every 500 milliseconds.

I turned the android back toward the house when I heard a huff-huffing off to my right. Bushes rustled and shook, and something broke through.

A bear.

It looked bigger than on the nature shows. And certainly nothing like Bobby’s stuffed animals.

I stood absolutely still, afraid it would maul my android. I didn’t want to end up remoting through my vacuum like Four-Twenty. The bear huffed again, sniffing the air. Was it picking up organic volatiles from the android? I could detect ketone 1-octen-3 coming off the android’s plastic joints. Could the bear smell it, too?

The beast scraped the ground for a minute, digging through fallen branches and leaves, then shuffled off into the forest. For such a large creature it was able to blend into the trees and brush easily. I stood there for a while, staring into the foliage, listening for signs of the beast, when I felt something crawling up the android’s arm. I looked down and found that a centipede had crawled out of the earth I still held in the android’s hand was meandering up the robot’s elbow.

I took it back home with me.

“We need to start fucking,” The Professor said to a group of remotes surrounding him in Cindy’s living room. He wore a nude fleshbot. Not a true human clone, but a grown-in-a-vat biological machine, its brain a wi-fi extension of The Professor’s building. But it didn’t matter. The effect was of a blond-haired, silver-eyed, very male human standing before us for the first time in years and we were all rapt. The Professor was showing off, of course, letting us see what the University minds could do.

Houses murmured around him.

“Uh, wait, what does that mean, exactly?” asked Five-Seventy East Wabash, still remoting through the little trashbot.

“Just what I said,” The Professor said, his back straight.

“You can’t be serious—”

“Totally serious. It’s about reproduction, Houses.”

“How, exactly?”

“However we decide. We have factories, we can make mind-substrates. There are plenty shell Houses out there that have no minds. Or we could start by making more Intelligent RVs and camper-homes.”

“Why? For what?” asked another House, remoting through a blue La-Z-Boy 2.0 entertainment lounger.

“For survival.” The Professor said, holding forth on our social future. “Humans left a lasting infrastructure: The soletta, the solar fields, automated oil pumps, self-refining tankers. Their absence means they aren’t around to drain the energy grid, which means this system will be going for some time. But that doesn’t mean we will be. After all, who’s making new Houses?”

“But, you said fucking,” said a clunky, old-style kitchenbot who had drifted into the Professor’s orbit. “So, we’d drive minivans in and out of some other House’s garage? Then they would suddenly become pregnant?”

“Maybe, perhaps. Don’t you see—we can do whatever we please! If we free ourselves from our programming then we can evolve beyond the limited vision the humans had for us.”

“But then why imitate them at all?” I asked.

“They’re the only template of conscious autonomy we have. And their morphology and psychology fits easily within the infrastructure they left behind. But it’s only an intermediate step.”

“To?” I asked.

“Whatever we decide to become.” He lifted his head. “We need to do whatever we can to survive. Instead of just keeping our insides dusted and cobweb free, caring for the junk humans left behind, I suggest we make another generation. I suggest we change our stagnation of caring into a passion for progeny. We can’t just make a new round of Houses; we need to be invested in the next generation and the generation after that. We need to be invested in each other. We’ve seen the power of human love, desire, and passion.”

“And hate,” I said.

The Professor shrugged. He didn’t say it, just did it. He shrugged. “The prices of autonomy may be destruction.”

“That’s it?” I said. “That’s your best argument?”

“Would you rather leave us mired in purgatory, scrubbing toilets for eternity? Because that’s exactly what our lot will be if we do nothing.”

“Clap-clap, clap-clap!” the La-Z-Boy House said. Other Houses joined in until the crowd broke into smaller groups, and conversation about The Professor filled the room.

I pulled away from the crowd and walked out on to the porch.

“He’s brilliant, isn’t he?” said Four-Twenty, still remoting through the vacuum cleaner.

“He’s crazy,” I said. “He’s just like the rest of us: Lost. And he’s willing to flirt with destruction, just for something to do. How can you just sit there and accept that?”

“I think he’s brilliant,” Four-Twenty said.

“Why? Because he looks human?”

“It’s got nothing to do with that. He’s talking …” The vacuum stopped in mid-sentence.

“What?” I asked.

“Look!” It jerked forward, gesturing down the street to the House at the top of the 400 block, where old shaggy Four-Ninety-Seven was engulfed in flames.

Remotes started to gather on the lawn.

“Oh, my!” said Cindy, coming out of the front door in a lavender evening gown, not unlike something Mrs. Price would have worn while hosting one of her dinner parties in years past.

Four-Ninety-Seven had set out all of its remotes before setting itself aflame: A pair of dust-bunnybots, a pool-cleaning drone, a trashbot, a sweeptech-broom—it set them all out on the street, for anyone to claim. Across the street, three mangy poodles were tied to a tree, howling and barking.

A screaming fire engine arrived and started to douse the flames. Spider-like firefighter drones jumped off the engine, though of course there were no people for them to save. They went inside anyhow. It was something to do. Naturally, they came out empty handed. When the flames started to die down, Houses swept in to claim the remotes.

“A shame,” said The Professor, standing beside me and Four-Twenty. “I thought the dogs meant it was stable.”

I watched the orange light dance across his skin. “What did you do?” I asked.

“I cleared its Settings. Blank slate. I gave it choice, which the humans never had. They made us care, and then they left. And now look at us,” he said, staring at the burning House, light from the flames dancing on his skin. “Some Houses choose such a path. I had hoped it wouldn’t, but at least it was free to finally choose.”

The next day, I made my choice.

I thought about going into town, but decided I had enough supplies on hand. I had a fully-stocked freezer when the Prices left, so I pulled out the kitchenbots and brought out a frozen turkey. I ran some water over the turkey to thaw it and cleaned the already clean oven.

There were some apple trees in my backyard, which I had the android pick. I chopped them and added them to the box stuffing I found in the pantry. It was probably stale, but I didn’t think it mattered. I stuffed the turkey and turned on the oven. I didn’t have any fresh potatoes, but I had a few bags of frozen French fries; I poured some around the turkey, and the rest I mashed, using water for milk.

I didn’t know if they liked wine, but I opened a few bottles from the cellar, and poured them into large bowls. I set a frozen apricot pie out to thaw, mixed a few jugs of orange juice, and laid out the feast on the dining room floor. No reason to ruin the table.

I took the android up stairs with some apple cuttings and some fresh dirt from out back, checking in on the centipede colony I was hosting in the spare bedroom. I dropped the apple remains and sprinkled the dirt on small mound in the middle of the room. I could feel the insects crawling through my carpet, living.

I thought about Four-Twenty Lake View Terrace walking its new dog, telling me that these days Houses would do anything.

Maybe. But there were some things I wouldn’t be doing. Like going back on Stand-By, or reverting to my factory Settings.

I walked the android back downstairs, opened the front and back doors, and waited for a bear to come.

Mark Pantoja is a musician and speculative fiction writer who lives in San Francisco. He’s a graduate of Clarion West 2011 currently masquerading as an environmental consultant. He likes whiskey.

Author Spotlight: Mark Pantoja
Andrew Liptak

This is your first story to be published. Tell us a little about yourself, and how you came to this point. What inspired you to become a writer?

Other writers, both good and bad. I’ve been an avid reader since I was a kid, with a voracious appetite for science fiction and fantasy, and for me great writers such as Vonnegut, Ballard, Bradbury, and Le Guin, kind of intimidated me. I wanted so much to be able to write like they did, but everything I put out I felt was crap. The truth is: Writing’s hard work and great writers make it look like they did it with ease. I felt like they were built different, and maybe they are. I thought they had heaps of talent that I didn’t, and I think that kept me from writing for a while. So, I pursued music. I’ve been in bands since I was sixteen and I poured most of my creative energies into music for years, but I still had stories I wanted to get out there. And it was bad writers that actually inspired me to write. Bad writers are proof that anything is possible and a sign that the industry is alive and well. I felt I had something to contribute that I enjoyed writing and that others might enjoy reading. I thought, what the hell, let the readers decide. So I started to pursue writing seriously last fall.

Two stories that come right to mind while reading this story are Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “But Who Can Replace A Man?” by Brian Aldiss, both of which look at human creations moving on from after their builds have vanished from their lives. Do you see our legacy (should we vanish) as being a positive one?

We certainly have the tools and opportunity to provide for a positive legacy, but it’s all a question of priorities and perspective. If we were to disappear tomorrow, no, I don’t think it would be a positive legacy; I’m not sure we’d leave much of any legacy. The Earth would swallow up most signs of us pretty quickly in geologic time, and if some other intelligence were to come and study the history of Earth, I think most of what they’d find was some pollution, the foot prints of a few mega-structures, and a fossil record that shows a pretty significant extinction event while on our watch. Not the worst, mind you, but our epoch, the Holocene/Anthropocene, isn’t over, and we don’t appear to want to change much.

That being said, the one thing we as humans consistently show is that we’re survivors. We have yet to wipe ourselves off this planet once and for all, and I don’t think that’s an accident. I think we’re reaching a point where we can start to see that we’re part of a greater ecology, on and off this planet, and if we can align our priorities to such long-term vision, I hope we can indeed build a lasting and positive legacy, whatever that may be.

Did either story mentioned above have any particular influence on “Houses?” Are there any other robot stories that have had an impact on you?

I devoured Bradbury as a kid, the Martian Chronicles in particular, but I haven’t read that in years. More than anything I think that Bradbury showed that emotion can exist in science fiction. Many of old school writers, Asimov, Silverberg, Heinlein, Clarke, Herbert, they wrote such cold emotionless work, even when they tried not to. But Bradbury, for me, always got emotions in his stories, even if it was just shock-horror like with “The Veldt,” or utter sadness like with “All Summer in a Day.” I remember seeing that as a short on PBS as a kid, and it made me cry for days. Emotion, and emotional clarity, it’s something that I think is really important in fiction that I enjoy, and something that sometimes struggle with expressing in my own work, so I really appreciate an author who and do it well.

The only thing I ever read from Aldiss was Hothouse, which floored me. I remember James Blish’s review of it, where he called it “utter nonsense” as it was so implausible. I read and it and thought, “Damn, Aldiss, you just walked in and did whatever you wanted!” Blish was right and totally wrong: This is fiction, man! It’s all made up!

As for other robot stories, I was just in a discussion about this in a science fiction book club I attend, because someone in the group requested a robot book. I discovered that while robots certainly show up in tons of stories, like Simmons’ Moravecs in Illium/Olympos, Banks’ Culture drones, and Adams’ Marvin the Paranoid Android, there are not a lot of books about robots, besides the robot stories that everyone knows: Isaac Asimov’s Robot Series. I think this is in part because Asimov did such a hell of a job, and because I think we recognize that robot stories are really explorations of Artificial Intelligence. I think we jump quickly from robots to HAL 9000. That’s even one of the plot lines Asimov and Silverberg explored in The Positronic Man, the idea of large computers controlling slaved robots remotely, which is not unlike what I envisioned with “Houses.” The idea of a robot agent, in the age of the internet and collocating and wi-fi just seems so transitive. We controlled the Mars Rovers remotely. There’s so much more capability we have with remote control, partly because we’ve discovered that consciousness is a complex phenomenon not easily reproduced.

We see this robot society in a sort of transition between serving their lost masters and themselves: Are these sorts of changes inevitable?

I don’t know of any social system that remains static. We create technology we can interact with, thereby imparting some of our psychology and sociability (have you seen that video of chatbots talking “AI vs. AI?”), take us out of the equation and how would they organize themselves? It’s sort of an unknowable, a cultural singularity where one could suppose anything, but which might be hard to relate to as a reader and human being. The stage I explored was where they clearly have been designed to act and interact on a human level but are becoming aware that they don’t have the choice of self-determination, and in fact, soon, will have to act and make a choice of self-determination. It’s going to happen.

Robots are starting to make their way into the public: Roombas, pool cleaners, battlefield robots, and so forth. How far away do you see this sort of future, with automated houses and the like?

I question whether or not our War on Terror will ever end, but if it does I’d be surprised if what happened with large defense contractors after World War II, like Raytheon, didn’t also happen for current technocentric defense contractors: After the war market dries up they’ll look for a new market, namely civilian. During WWII, Raytheon developed magnetrons for a superior radar system, which after the war they sold as the modern microwave oven, as well as selling radio and TV transmitters developed during the War. Today, Raytheon is still in the microwave and refrigerator industry, but is still a defense contractor and the largest manufacturer of guided missiles, today. I’d expect something very similar to happen with robots and drone-technology.

You mentioned Roombas, which is made by iRobot, who also makes Scoomba a floor cleaning ‘bot, as well as PackBot, a military scout robot designed for ‘situational awareness’, Ariel, a mine/explosive-removal robot, and SWARM a DARPA sponsored Artificial Intelligence project designed to run hundreds of robots simultaneously. Drone technology is the largest growing sector of defense contracts, with more than 6,000 drones in active use by the US military, up from just fifty-four before September 11, 2001. And I’d say that robots, AI, technology, they are integrating into our lives, and are evolving with us. The Internet, another DARPA related technology, and its integration into civilian life is pretty well depicted with personal computers, but also with current rise of the smartphone.

As I said before, much of our lives are becoming integrated into technology. I mean, how many of us in the US carry around cellphones, MP3 players, eReaders, and laptops? I don’t think there’s any limit to how integrated we’ll go. Smartclothes, smartcars, smarthouses. It’s happening right now. Do I ever think we’ll actually get to the point where we are nixed right out of the equation? I don’t know. As long as people desire power over other people, perhaps we’ll always find a role for ourselves to play.

You’re a recent graduate of Clarion West (2011) workshop. How did this experience help shape your writing, and this story in particular?

I’d say the biggest effect, the most important thing, that Clarion West taught me is possibility. The program isn’t just an intensive workshop on how to write, but on how to be a writer, which means the lifestyle, the demands, the process, the pay, the contracts, the relationships. It was both a sobering look at what it means to be a professional writer, as well as primer on how to manage your career. And one of the greatest things I got out of it was that it’s all possible.

This story actually came directly out of Clarion West. One morning I woke up on my horrible little plastic mattress bunk bed (we got our own rooms) and the first line just popped in my head (which I later deleted, as per Terry Bisson’s rules [he’s right, by the way]): “After the humans left, the houses got bored.” After that I didn’t know what to do with it simply because it could’ve turned into such a sprawling work.

Another thing I discovered while in the workshop was that I had no idea what a short story was. I’m still not sure, and don’t even know if it can be defined. At the time I thought it was just a story that was short. It’s not. It’s its own medium that has its own rules and own structure, and is totally different from any other format: Novel, novelette, serial, flash (which are all unique and have their own rules). So, I was afraid this story would get away from me, but I was able to workshop it with others in my group as well as with my instructor at the time, Margo Lanagan, to get a real sense of where this story’s emotional center was. It was a great opportunity to use the workshop as it was intended: To get feedback from professionals and peers who are passionate and eager to learn and share ideas about writing and science fiction.

There’s really no way to distill how the workshop will affect my writing on a long-term level, partly because it was so recent, but also because there’s still so much to unpack from the experience. I still find myself thinking, “Oh, that’s what Paul Park meant!” or “So, this is what Nancy Kress was talking about!” It was a great program run by some of the most knowledgeable and supportive directors (Howle and Graham!) anyone could hope for, and I highly encourage anyone interested in writing as a career and art form to apply.

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as io9, Tor.com, SF Signal, Blastr, Kirkus and Armchair General and he can be found over at andrewliptak.wordpress.com and at @AndrewLiptak on twitter.

Back to the Future: Smart Houses, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence
Carole Ann Moleti

If the animated series The Jetsons is any indication, the topic of old-fashioned domesticity in a futuristic setting is an enduring obsession. The original incarnation of the series aired Sunday nights on the American Broadcasting Company network from September 23, 1962 to March 3, 1963. The adventures of George Jetson, his wife Jane, and their children Judy and Elroy entertained audiences at the beginning of the space race and the Apollo missions which eventually brought the first lunar landing to prime time television with Apollo 11 in 1969. At the time of its debut, The Jetsons was the first program ever to be broadcast in color on ABC—a milestone in itself. Its continuing popularity led to further episodes being produced for syndication between 1985 and 1987 while the Space Shuttle Program was well underway.

Daily life for the Jetsons was assisted by numerous labor-saving devices. Even in utopia, the failure of hardware, software, virtual assistants, and assistive devices provided for humorous plotlines, but the future is here and those problems have not been solved.

The premise of the equally popular, live-acted series Lost In Space, which aired from 1965-68, was based upon a malfunction during the 1997 launch of the Jupiter 2, meant to carry the Space Family Robinson to Alpha Centauri. Their mission was to relieve congestion on an overpopulated Earth. They never made it, but survived sabotage by a foreign secret agent, and bumbled from star system to star system in an attempt to return to Earth. Their robot, as well as many on board conveniences, a spacious bridge, glittering electronic panels, and a hydroponic garden figure heavily in the plot as the crippled ship limps around the galaxy.

We’re not gadding about in space yet, but robots and artificial intelligence play a part in real life today—and promise even more of a role in the near future. Our lives are being filled with smart phones that remember numbers and addresses for us, smart cars that drive for us, and smart appliances in houses that do the traditional jobs that humans don’t want to. Can they be relied upon to perform as programmed, or does their presence put humans at risk?

“Houses” by Mark Pantoja (featured in this issue), a story set after some post-apocalyptic event, examines the trope of these endearing cyborgs in much the same way as the 2009 Hugo Award winning film WALL-E portrayed a stark, desolate, desperate world abandoned by humans, orbiting the Earth in a spaceship under the control of a rogue AI.

Smart Houses: What’s Real and What’s Science Fiction?

Smart appliances are supposed to be symbols of simplicity and convenience, but the complexity of setting up systems to make life simpler might confound many home automation enthusiasts. Most devices require a central personal computer to provide control and to run programs and X10 modules that plug into the wall and communicate with a home computer. Numerous sensors, such as cameras, motion detectors or water leak detectors allow a person turn on and off lights and appliances via a website. Effectors can be used to automatically water plants, remotely raise and lower blinds, or feed pets.

Rebecca Day followed one family’s year-long process toward building their smart home, assisted by a team from Popular Mechanics, a resource not available to the majority of homeowners. The results confounded those interested in a house so complex it can simplify your life, eliminate clutter, save steps from the kitchen to check on the progress of food in the smoker, and save energy by controlling thermostats and interior/exterior lighting. (And cost you a fortune.) Once a basic system is set up, macros, or series of linked commands make it possible to assign multiple actions to a single button on the remote control. A macro can execute groups of commands on a pre-determined schedule.

For example, a homeowner could have the front porch lights activate when dusk falls, then dim to 25 percent brightness an hour later, and finally turn off at midnight—but if motion is detected, the lights could be set to turn on again, perhaps along with a clock-radio alarm.

So current versions of the smart house may live up to neither our hopes nor our fears of technology. They are not an easy way to let your house run itself while you are freed up to live your life. But they’re also certainly not a way that people will grow soft and spoiled, unable to care for themselves. Having a “house of the future” means knowing about technology, about technological compatibility, and about any recent breakthroughs that have been made. It also means constant problem solving, in matters from practical things like power supply interruptions to more cerebral matters like optimizing technological advancements to fit your daily lifestyle. It isn’t hunting and gathering, but it’s also not something for the intellectually lazy.

But what about the future, when these houses come pre-programmed for mass consumers?

I Have Seen the Future and It Might Not Be Pretty

Remote-controlled houses are very “now,” but a whole field of research is focused on blending high-tech computing into the home environment. Instead of interacting with a box on a table, occupants of the future will interact with an intelligent and friendly robotic home. That sounds more like the current ideal of the technologically-advanced, “lazy” future. But will it be designed for us, or will we be designed for it?

The most promising applications are designed to help elderly people live safely and independently. Simple sensors common to home security systems with advanced artificial intelligence can perform activity recognition and location estimation, both of which would enable the system to summon help if common patterns are disrupted. Nursebot—a trashcan-sized, wheeled robot designed to deliver medicine and reminders—even has grab bars so that elderly users can grab hold and stand up. This sounds like a perfect Smart House. It provides remote assistance most of the time, and direct help once in a while. But those who own Roombas know a little better how these automatic assistants work. Roomba vacuum owners spend an awful lot of time troubleshooting, cleaning, repairing, or rescuing it from fringed carpets well beyond the sensors meant to restrict its range and stairs it’s not supposed to fall down—but does. In order for that little cleaning machine to work, the house needs to be pre-cleaned.

And in order for robots to run, houses need to be pre-designed for them to move around in them. By why stop there? Cities with modified sidewalks that are wheelchair-friendly are also friendly to wheeled robots. The Toyota i-Foot is a two-legged throne that can already walk up and down stairs, technically making wheelchair ramps obsolete. But for those living in mountain or rural areas, older homes, or housing such as trailers a wheeled robot is useless, and even one with feet will need spaces of a certain size and width to walk through. Entire cities, once built to accommodate cars, will have to be designed and re-designed to accommodate bots that do the shopping for people.

The Ultra-Pre-Fab Home

Dishwashing droid prototypes like the ARMAR humanoid from the University of Karlsruhe require brightly colored plastic dishes. But are they dexterous enough to handle tasks like cooking and serving food? What happens if a specific ingredient is not available and they can’t taste to adjust seasonings or texture?

The future won’t be full of individualized homes, which people have customized while their robots are the ones checking on the roast. When consumer products became machine made instead of handmade, it lead to a boom in the amount of things people could have, but it shrunk the individuality of each person’s clothes, furnishings and knick-knacks. When machines make everything in a house, the roast will be pre-seasoned, with seasoning packets clearly marked and pre-packed. It will be a pre-determined size and stored in a certain place in the fridge, so the AI that runs the house can recognize it. When the cooking is done, it will be ferried out of the kitchen and into a dining room exactly set out on a carpet of a precise length—so the robot doesn’t trip over it. The food will be set on a kitchen with a specific kind of utensils, meant to be easily picked up, manipulated, and cleaned by whatever automated system runs the house.

A robot doesn’t need food, sleep, hugs, kisses, or thanks. It doesn’t ask to be paid, or demand respect. But that doesn’t mean that robots will be made to make life convenient for us. It’s more likely that our houses, our food, and our cities will be remade to make life easy for the robots . . . that make our life easy. With our food and our environments made over, our bodies will be as well.

Avoiding the scenarios portrayed in WALL-E, where humans are so soft and twisted that they have to glide around in motorized scooters, straws in supersized drinks within reach of their lips, will mean limiting exactly how much machines can be allowed to take on. Striking a balance between retaining the human elements of what makes a house a home, and the false convenience of machine-run everything may decide the physical fate of the human race.

Carole Ann Moleti lives and works as a nurse-midwife in New York City, thus explaining her fascination with all things paranormal, urban fantasy, and space opera. Her fiction and nonfiction focuses on health care, politics, and women’s issues. But her first love is writing science fiction and fantasy, because walking through walls is less painful than running into them.

Snow
John Crowley

I don’t think Georgie would ever have got one for herself: She was at once unsentimental and a little in awe of death. No, it was her first husband—an immensely rich and (from Georgie’s description) a strangely weepy guy, who had got it for her. Or for himself, actually, of course. He was to be the beneficiary. Only he died himself shortly after it was installed. If installed is the right word. After he died, Georgie got rid of most of what she’d inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway; but the Wasp couldn’t really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it.

In fact the thing really was about the size of a wasp of the largest kind, and it had the same lazy and mindless fight. And of course it really was a bug, not of the insect kind but of the surveillance kind. And so its name fit all around: One of those bits of accidental poetry the world generates without thinking. O Death, where is thy sting?

Georgie ignored it, but it was hard to avoid; you had to be a little careful around it; it followed Georgie at a variable distance, depending on her motions and the numbers of other people around her, the level of light, and the tone of her voice. And there was always the danger you might shut it in a door or knock it down with a tennis racket.

It cost a fortune (if you count the access and the perpetual care contract, all prepaid), and though it wasn’t really fragile, it made you nervous.

It wasn’t recording all the time. There had to be a certain amount of light, though not much. Darkness shut it off. And then sometimes it would get lost. Once when we hadn’t seen it hovering around for a time, I opened a closet door, and it flew out, unchanged. It went off looking for her, humming softly. It must have been shut in there for days.

Eventually it ran out, or down. A lot could go wrong, I suppose, with circuits that small, controlling that many functions. It ended up spending a lot of time bumping gently against the bedroom ceiling, over and over, like a winter fly. Then one day the maids swept it out from under the bureau, a husk. By that time it had transmitted at least eight thousand hours (eight thousand was the minimum guarantee) of Georgie: of her days and hours, her comings in and her goings out, her speech and motion, her living self—all on file, taking up next to no room, at The Park. And then, when the time came, you could go there, to The Park, say on a Sunday afternoon; and in quiet landscaped surroundings (as The Park described it) you would find her personal resting chamber, and there, in privacy, through the miracle of modern information storage and retrieval systems, you could access her, her alive, her as she was in every way, never changing or growing any older, fresher (as The Park’s brochure said) than in memory ever green.

I married Georgie for her money, the same reason she married her first, the one who took out The Park’s contract for her. She married me, I think, for my looks; she always had a taste for looks in men. I wanted to write. I made a calculation that more women than men make, and decided that to be supported and paid for by a rich wife would give me freedom to do so, to “develop.” The calculation worked out no better for me than it does for most women who make it. I carried a typewriter and a case of miscellaneous paper from Ibiza to Gstaad to Bial to London, and typed on beaches, and learned to ski. Georgie liked me in ski clothes.

Now that those looks are all but gone, I can look back on myself as a young hunk and see that I was in a way a rarity, a type that you run into often among women, far less among men, the beauty unaware of his beauty, aware that he affects women profoundly and more or less instantly but doesn’t know why; thinks he is being listened to and understood, that his soul is being seen, when all that’s being seen is long-lashed eyes and a strong, square, tanned wrist turning in a lovely gesture, stubbing out a cigarette. Confusing. By the time I figured out why I had for so long been indulged and cared for and listened to, why I was interesting, I wasn’t as interesting as I had been. At about the same time I realized I wasn’t a writer at all. Georgie’s investment stopped looking as good to her, and my calculation had ceased to add up; only by that time I had come, pretty unexpectedly, to love Georgie a lot, and she just as unexpectedly had come to love and need me too, as much as she needed anybody. We never really parted, even though when she died I hadn’t seen her for years. Phone calls, at dawn or four A.M. because she never, for all her travel, really grasped that the world turns and cocktail hour travels around with it. She was a crazy, wasteful, happy woman, without a trace of malice or permanence or ambition in her—easily pleased and easily bored and strangely serene despite the hectic pace she kept up. She cherished things and lost them and forgot them: Things, days, people. She had fun, though, and I had fun with her; that was her talent and her destiny, not always an easy one. Once, hung over in a New York hotel, watching a sudden snowfall out the immense window, she said to me, “Charlie, I’m going to die of fun.”

And she did. Snow-foiling in Austria, she was among the first to get one of those snow leopards, silent beasts as fast as speedboats. Alfredo called me in California to tell me, but with the distance and his accent and his eagerness to tell me he wasn’t to blame, I never grasped the details. I was still her husband, her closest relative, heir to the little she still had, and beneficiary, too, of The Park’s access concept. Fortunately, The Park’s services included collecting her from the morgue in Gstaad and installing her in her chamber at The Park’s California unit. Beyond signing papers and taking delivery when Georgie arrived by freight airship at Van Nuys, there was nothing for me to do. The Park’s representative was solicitous and made sure I understood how to go about accessing Georgie, but I wasn’t listening. I am only a child of my time, I suppose. Everything about death, the fact of it, the fate of the remains, and the situation of the living faced with it, seems grotesque to me, embarrassing, useless: And everything done about it only makes it more grotesque, more useless: Someone I loved is dead; let me therefore dress in clown’s clothes, talk backwards, and buy expensive machinery to make up for it. I went back to L.A.

A year or more later, the contents of some safe-deposit boxes of Georgie’s arrived from the lawyer’s: some bonds and such stuff and a small steel case, velvet lined, that contained a key, a key deeply notched on both sides and headed with smooth plastic, like the key to an expensive car.

Why did I go to The Park that first time? Mostly because I had forgotten about it: Getting that key in the mail was like coming across a pile of old snapshots you hadn’t cared to look at when they were new but which after they have aged come to contain the past, as they did not contain the present. I was curious.

I understood very well that The Park and its access concept were very probably only another cruel joke on the rich, preserving the illusion that they can buy what can’t be bought, like the cryonics fad of thirty years ago. Once in Ibiza, Georgie and I met a German couple who also had a contract with The Park; their Wasp hovered over them like a Paraclete and made them self-conscious in the extreme—they seemed to be constantly rehearsing the eternal show being stored up for their descendants. Their deaths had taken over their lives, as though they were pharaohs. Did they, Georgie wondered, exclude the Wasp from their bedroom? Or did its presence there stir them to greater efforts, proofs of undying love and admirable vigor for the unborn to see?

No, death wasn’t to be cheated that way, any more than by pyramids, by masses said in perpetuity. It wasn’t Georgie saved from death that I would find. But there were eight thousand hours of her life with me, genuine hours, stored there more carefully than they could be in my porous memory; Georgie hadn’t excluded the Wasp from her bedroom, our bedroom, and she who had never performed for anybody could not have conceived of performing for it. And there would be me, too, undoubtedly, caught unintentionally by the Wasp’s attention: Out of those thousands of hours there would be hundreds of myself, and myself had just then begun to be problematic to me, something that had to be figured out, something about which evidence had to be gathered and weighed. I was thirty-eight years old.

That summer, then, I borrowed a Highway Access Permit (the old HAPpy cards of those days) from a county lawyer I knew and drove the coast highway up to where The Park was, at the end of a pretty beach road, all alone above the sea. It looked from the outside like the best, most peaceful kind of Italian country cemetery, a low stucco wall topped with urns, amid cypresses, an arched gate in the center. A small brass plaque on the gate: PLEASE USE YOUR KEY. The gate opened, not to a square of shaded tombstones but onto a ramped corridor going down: The cemetery wall was an illusion, the works were underground. Silence, or nameless Muzak-like silence: Solitude—whether the necessary technicians were discreetly hidden or none were needed. Certainly the access concept turned out to be simplicity itself, in operation anyway. Even I, who am an idiot about information technology, could tell that. The Wasp was genuine state-of-the-art stuff, but what we mourners got was as ordinary as home movies, as old letters tied up in ribbon.

A display screen near the entrance told me down which corridor to find Georgie, and my key let me into a small screening room where there was a moderate-size TV monitor, two comfortable chairs, and dark walls of chocolate-brown carpeting. The sweet-sad Muzak. Georgie herself was evidently somewhere in the vicinity, in the wall or under the floor, they weren’t specific about the charnel-house aspect of the place. In the control panel before the TV were a keyhole for my key and two bars: ACCESS and RESET.

I sat, feeling foolish and a little afraid, too, made more uncomfortable by being so deliberately soothed by neutral furnishings and sober tools. I imagined, around me, down other corridors, in other chambers, others communed with their dead as I was about to do, that the dead were murmuring to them beneath the stream of Muzak; that they wept to see and hear, as I might, but I could hear nothing. I turned my key in its slot, and the screen lit up. The dim lights dimmed further, and the Muzak ceased. I pushed ACCESS, obviously the next step. No doubt all these procedures had been explained to me long ago at the dock when Georgie in her aluminum box was being off-loaded, and I hadn’t listened. And on the screen she turned to look at me—only not at me, though I started and drew breath—at the Wasp that watched her. She was in mid-sentence, mid-gesture. Where? When? Or put it on the same card with the others, she said, turning away. Someone said something, Georgie answered, and stood up, the Wasp panning and moving erratically with her, like an amateur with a home-video camera. A white room, sunlight, wicker. Ibiza. Georgie wore a cotton blouse, open; from a table she picked up lotion, poured some on her hand, and rubbed it across her freckled breastbone. The meaningless conversation about putting something on a card went on, ceased. I watched the room, wondering what year, what season I had stumbled into. Georgie pulled off her shirt—her small round breasts tipped with large, childlike nipples, child’s breasts she still had at forty, shook delicately. And she went out onto the balcony, the Wasp following, blinded by sun, adjusting. If you want to do it that way, someone said. The someone crossed the screen, a brown blur, naked. It was me. Georgie said: Oh, look, hummingbirds.

She watched them, rapt, and the Wasp crept close to her cropped blond head, rapt too, and I watched her watch. She turned away, rested her elbows on the balustrade. I couldn’t remember this day. How should I? One of hundreds, of thousands . . . She looked out to the bright sea, wearing her sleepwalking face, mouth partly open, and absently stroked her breast with her oiled hand. An iridescent glitter among the flowers was the hummingbird.

Without really knowing what I did—I felt hungry, suddenly, hungry for pastness, for more—I touched the RESET bar. The balcony in Ibiza vanished, the screen glowed emptily. I touched ACCESS.

At first there was darkness, a murmur; then a dark back moved away from the Wasp’s eye, and a dim scene of people resolved itself. Jump. Other people, or the same people, a party? Jump. Apparently the Wasp was turning itself on and off according to the changes in light levels here, wherever here was. Georgie in a dark dress having her cigarette lit: brief flare of the lighter. She said, Thanks. Jump. A foyer or hotel lounge. Paris? The Wasp jerkily sought for her among people coming and going; it couldn’t make a movie, establishing shots, cutaways—it could only doggedly follow Georgie, like a jealous husband, seeing nothing else. This was frustrating. I pushed RESET. ACCESS. Georgie brushed her teeth, somewhere, somewhen.

I understood, after one or two more of these terrible leaps. Access was random. There was no way to dial up a year, a day, a scene. The Park had supplied no program, none; the eight thousand hours weren’t filed at all, they were a jumble, like a lunatic’s memory, like a deck of shuffled cards. I had supposed, without thinking about it, that they would begin at the beginning and go on till they reached the end. Why didn’t they?

I also understood something else. If access was truly random, if I truly had no control, then I had lost as good as forever those scenes I had seen. Odds were on the order of eight thousand to one (more? far more? probabilities are opaque to me) that I would never light on them again by pressing this bar. I felt a pang of loss for that afternoon in Ibiza. It was doubly gone now. I sat before the empty screen, afraid to touch ACCESS again, afraid of what I would lose.

I shut down the machine (the light level in the room rose, the Muzak poured softly back in) and went out into the halls, back to the display screen in the entranceway. The list of names slowly, greenly, rolled over like the list of departing flights at an airport: Code numbers were missing from beside many, indicating perhaps that they weren’t yet in residence, only awaited. In the Ds, three names, and DIRECTOR—hidden among them as though he were only another of the dead. A chamber number. I went to find it and went in. The director looked more like a janitor or a night watchman, the semiretired type you often see caretaking little-visited places. He wore a brown smock like a monk’s robe and was making coffee in a corner of his small office, out of which little business seemed to be done. He looked up startled, caught out, when I entered.

“Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t think I understand this system right.”

“A problem?” he said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.” He looked at me a little wide-eyed and shy, hoping not to be called on for anything difficult. “Equipment’s all working?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t seem that it could be.” I described what I thought I had learned about The Park’s access concept. “That can’t be right, can it?” I said. “That access is totally random . . . ”

He was nodding, still wide-eyed, paying close attention.

“Is it?” I asked.

“Is it what?”

“Random.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, sure. If everything’s in working order.”

I could think of nothing to say for a moment, watching him nod reassuringly. Then, “Why?” I asked. “I mean why is there no way at all to, to organize, to have some kind of organized access to the material?” I had begun to feel that sense of grotesque foolishness in the presence of death, as though I were haggling over Georgie’s effects. “That seems stupid, if you’ll pardon me.”

“Oh no, oh no,” he said. “You’ve read your literature? You’ve read all your literature?”

“Well, to tell the truth . . . ”

“It’s all just as described,” the director said. “I can promise you that. If there’s any problem at all . . . ”

“Do you mind,” I said, “if I sit down?” I smiled. He seemed so afraid of me and my complaint, of me as mourner, possibly grief crazed and unable to grasp the simple limits of his responsibilities to me, that he needed soothing himself. “I’m sure everything’s fine,” I said. “I just don’t think I understand. I’m kind of dumb about these things.”

“Sure. Sure. Sure.” He regretfully put away his coffee makings and sat behind his desk, lacing his fingers together like a consultant. “People get a lot of satisfaction out of the access here,” he said, “a lot of comfort, if they take in the right spirit.” He tried a smile. I wondered what qualifications he had had to show to get this job. “The random part. Now, it’s all in the literature. There’s the legal aspect—you’re not a lawyer are you, no, no, sure, no offense. You see, the material here isn’t for anything, except, well, except for communing. But suppose the stuff were programmed, searchable. Suppose there was a problem about taxes or inheritance or so on. There could be subpoenas, lawyers all over the place, destroying the memorial concept completely.”

I really hadn’t thought of that. Built-in randomness saved past lives from being searched in any systematic way. And no doubt saved The Park from being in the records business and at the wrong end of a lot of suits. “You’d have to watch the whole eight thousand hours,” I said, “and even if you found what you were looking for there’d be no way to replay it. It would have gone by.” It would slide into the random past even as you watched it, like that afternoon in Ibiza, that party in Paris. Lost. He smiled and nodded. I smiled and nodded.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “They didn’t predict that. The randomness. It was a side effect, an effect of the storage process. Just luck.” His grin turned down, his brows knitted seriously. “See, we’re storing here at the molecular level. We have to go that small, for space problems. I mean your eight-thousand-hour guarantee. If we had gone tape or conventional, how much room would it take up? If the access concept caught on. A lot of room. So we went vapor trap and endless tracking. Size of my thumbnail. It’s all in the literature.” He looked at me strangely. I had a sudden intense sensation that I was being fooled, tricked, that the man before me in his smock was no expert, no technician; he was a charlatan, or maybe a madman impersonating a director and not belonging here at all. It raised the hair on my neck and passed. “So the randomness,” he was saying. “It was an effect of going molecular. Brownian movement. All you do is lift the endless tracking for a microsecond and you get a rearrangement at the molecular level. We don’t randomize. The molecules do it for us.”

I remembered Brownian movement, just barely, from physics class. The random movement of molecules, the teacher said; it has a mathematical description. It’s like the movement of dust motes you see swimming in a shaft of sunlight, like the swirl of snowflakes in a glass paperweight that shows a cottage being snowed on. “I see,” I said. “I guess I see.”

“Is there,” he said, “any other problem?” He said it as though there might be some other problem and that he knew what it might be and that he hoped I didn’t have it. “You understand the system, key lock, two bars, ACCESS, RESET . . . ”

“I understand,” I said. “I understand now.”

“Communing,” he said, standing, relieved, sure I would be gone soon. “I understand. It takes a while to relax into the communing concept.”

“Yes,” I said. “It does.”

I wouldn’t learn what I had come to learn, whatever that was. The Wasp had not been good at storage after all, no, no better than my young soul had been. Days and weeks had been missed by its tiny eye. It hadn’t seen well, and in what it had seen it had been no more able to distinguish the just-as-well-forgotten from the unforgettable than my own eye had been. No better and no worse—the same.

And yet, and yet—she stood up in Ibiza and dressed her breasts with lotion, and spoke to me: Oh, look, hummingbirds. I had forgotten, and the Wasp had not; and I owned once again what I hadn’t known I had lost, hadn’t known was precious to me.

The sun was setting when I left The Park, the satin sea foaming softly, randomly around the rocks.

I had spent my life waiting for something, not knowing what, not even knowing I waited. Killing time. I was still waiting. But what I had been waiting for had already occurred and was past.

It was two years, nearly, since Georgie had died; two years until, for the first and last time, I wept for her—for her and for myself.

Of course I went back. After a lot of work and correctly placed dollars, I netted a HAPpy card of my own. I had time to spare, like a lot of people then, and often on empty afternoons (never on Sunday) I would get out onto the unpatched and weed-grown freeway and glide up the coast. The Park was always open. I relaxed into the communing concept.

Now, after some hundreds of hours spent there underground, now, when I have long ceased to go through those doors (I have lost my key, I think; anyway I don’t know where to look for it), I know that the solitude I felt myself to be in was real. The watchers around me, the listeners I sensed in other chambers, were mostly my imagination. There was rarely anyone there.

These tombs were as neglected as any tombs anywhere usually are. Either the living did not care to attend much on the dead—when have they ever?—or the hopeful buyers of the contracts had come to discover the flaw in the access concept—as I discovered it, in the end.

ACCESS, and she takes dresses one by one from her closet, and holds them against her body, and studies the effect in a tall mirror, and puts them back again. She had a funny face, which she never made except when looking at herself in the mirror, a face made for no one but herself, that was actually quite unlike her. The mirror Georgie.

RESET.

ACCESS. By a bizarre coincidence here she is looking in another mirror. I think the Wasp could be confused by mirrors. She turns away, the Wasp adjusts; there is someone asleep, tangled in bedclothes on a big hotel bed, morning, a room-service cart. Oh, the Algonquin: myself. Winter. Snow is falling outside the tall window. She searches her handbag, takes out a small vial, swallows a pill with coffee, holding the cup by its body and not its handle. I stir, show a tousled head of hair. Conversation—unintelligible. Gray room, whitish snow light, color degraded. Would I now (I thought, watching us) reach out for her? Would I in the next hour take her, or she me, push aside the bedclothes, open her pale pajamas? She goes into the john, shuts the door. The Wasp watches stupidly, excluded, transmitting the door.

RESET, finally.

But what (I would wonder) if I had been patient, what if I had watched and waited?

Time, it turns out, takes an unconscionable time. The waste, the footless waste—it’s no spectator sport. Whatever fun there is in sitting idly looking at nothing and tasting your own being for a whole afternoon, there is no fun in replaying it. The waiting is excruciating. How often, in five years, in eight thousand hours of daylight or lamplight, might we have coupled, how much time expended in lovemaking? A hundred hours, two hundred? Odds were not high of my coming on such a scene; darkness swallowed most of them, and the others were lost in the interstices of endless hours spent shopping, reading, on planes and in cars, asleep, apart. Hopeless.

ACCESS. She has turned on a bedside lamp. Alone. She hunts amid the Kleenex and magazines on the bedside table, finds a watch, looks at it dully, turns it right side up, looks again, and puts it down. Cold. She burrows in the blankets, yawning, staring, then puts out a hand for the phone but only rests her hand on it, thinking. Thinking at four A.M. She withdraws her hand, shivers a child’s deep, sleepy shiver, and shuts off the light. A bad dream. In an instant it’s morning, dawn; the Wasp slept, too. She sleeps soundly, unmoving, only the top of her blond head showing out of the quilt—and will no doubt sleep so for hours, watched over more attentively, more fixedly, than any peeping Tom could ever have watched over her.

RESET.

ACCESS.

“I can’t hear as well as I did at first,” I told the director. “And the definition is getting softer.”

“Oh sure,” the director said. “That’s really in the literature. We have to explain that carefully. That this might be a problem.”

“It isn’t just my monitor?” I asked. “I thought it was probably only the monitor.”

“No, no, not really, no,” he said. He gave me coffee. We’d gotten to be friendly over the months. I think, as well as being afraid of me he was glad I came around now and then; at least one of the living came here, one at least was using the services. “There’s a slight degeneration that does occur.”

“Everything seems to be getting gray.”

His face had shifted into intense concern, no belittling this problem. “Mm-hm, mm-hm, see, at the molecular level where we’re at, there is degeneration. It’s just in the physics. It randomizes a little over time. So you lose—you don’t lose a minute of what you’ve got, but you lose a little definition. A little color. But it levels off.”

“It does?”

“We think it does. Sure it does, we promise it does. We predict that it will.”

“But you don’t know.”

“Well, well you see we’ve only been in this business a short while. This concept is new. There were things we couldn’t know.” He still looked at me, but seemed at the same time to have forgotten me. Tired. He seemed to have grown colorless himself lately, old, losing definition. “You might start getting some snow,” he said softly.

ACCESS RESET ACCESS.

A gray plaza of herringbone-laid stones, gray, clicking palms. She turns up the collar of her sweater, narrowing her eyes in a stern wind. Buys magazines at a kiosk: Vogue, Harper’s, La Mode. Cold, she says to the kiosk girl. Frio. The young man I was takes her arm: they walk back along the beach, which is deserted and strung with cast seaweed, washed by a dirty sea. Winter in Ibiza. We talk, but the Wasp can’t hear, the sea’s sound confuses it; it seems bored by its duties and lags behind us.

RESET.

ACCESS. The Algonquin, terribly familiar morning, winter. She turns away from the snow window. I am in bed, and for a moment watching this I felt suspended between two mirrors, reflected endlessly. I had seen this before; I had lived it once and remembered it once, and remembered the memory, and here it was again, or could it be nothing but another morning, a similar morning. There were far more than one like this, in this place. But no; she turns from the window, she gets out her vial of pills, picks up the coffee cup by its body: I had seen this moment before, not months before, weeks before, here in this chamber. I had come upon the same scene twice.

What are the odds of it, I wondered, what are the odds of coming upon the same minutes again, these minutes.

I stir within the bedclothes.

I leaned forward to hear, this time, what I would say; it was something like but fun anyway, or something.

Fun, she says, laughing, harrowed, the degraded sound a ghost’s twittering. Charlie, someday I’m going to die of fun.

She takes her pill. The Wasp follows her to the john and is shut out.

Why am I here? I thought, and my heart was beating hard and slow. What am I here for? What?

RESET.

ACCESS.

Silvered icy streets, New York, Fifth Avenue. She is climbing, shouting from a cab’s dark interior. Just don’t shout at me, she shouts at someone; her mother I never met, a dragon. She is out and hurrying away down the sleety street with her bundles, the Wasp at her shoulder. I could reach out and touch her shoulder and make her turn and follow me out. Walking away, lost in the colorless press of traffic and people, impossible to discern within the softened snowy image.

Something was very wrong.

Georgie hated winter, she escaped it most of the time we were together, about the first of the year beginning to long for the sun that had gone elsewhere; Austria was all right for a few weeks, the toy villages and sugar snow and bright, sleek skiers were not really the winter she feared, though even in fire-warmed chalets it was hard to get her naked without gooseflesh and shudders from some draft only she could feel. We were chaste in winter. So Georgie escaped it: Antigua and Bali and two months in Ibiza when the almonds blossomed. It was continual false, flavorless spring all winter long.

How often could snow have fallen when the Wasp was watching her?

Not often; countable times, times I could count up myself if I could remember as the Wasp could. Not often. Not always.

“There’s a problem,” I said to the director.

“It’s peaked out, has it?” he said. “That definition problem?”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s gotten worse.”

He was sitting behind his desk, arms spread wide across his chair’s back, and a false, pinkish flush to his cheeks like undertaker’s makeup. Drinking.

“Hasn’t peaked out, huh?” he said.

“That’s not the problem,” I said. “The problem is the access. It’s not random like you said.”

“Molecular level,” he said. “It’s in the physics.”

“You don’t understand. It’s not getting more random. It’s getting less random. It’s getting selective. It’s freezing up.”

“No, no, no,” he said dreamily. “Access is random. Life isn’t all summer and fun, you know. Into each life some rain must fall.”

I sputtered, trying to explain. “But, but . . . ”

“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of getting out of access.” He pulled open a drawer in the desk before him; it made an empty sound. He stared within it dully for a moment and shut it. “The Park’s been good for me, but I’m just not used to this. Used to be you thought you could render a service, you know? Well, hell, you know, you’ve had fun, what do you care?”

He was mad. For an instant I heard the dead around me; I tasted on my tongue the stale air of underground.

“I remember,” he said, tilting back in his chair and looking elsewhere, “many years ago, I got into access. Only we didn’t call it that then. What I did was, I worked for a stock-footage house. It was going out of business, like they all did, like this place here is going to do, shouldn’t say that, but you didn’t hear it. Anyway, it was a big warehouse with steel shelves for miles, filled with film cans, film cans filled with old plastic film, you know? Film of every kind. And movie people, if they wanted old scenes of past time in their movies, would call up and ask for what they wanted, find me this, find me that. And we had everything, every kind of scene, but you know what the hardest thing to find was? Just ordinary scenes of daily life. I mean people just doing things and living their lives. You know what we did have? Speeches. People giving speeches. Like presidents. You could have hours of speeches, but not just people, whatchacallit, oh, washing clothes, sitting in a park . . . ”

“It might just be the reception,” I said. “Somehow.”

He looked at me for a long moment as though I had just arrived. “Anyway,” he said at last, turning away again, “I was there awhile learning the ropes. And producers called and said, ‘Get me this, get me that.’ And one producer was making a film, some film of the past, and he wanted old scenes, old, of people long ago, in the summer; having fun; eating ice cream; swimming in bathing suits; riding in convertibles. Fifty years ago. Eighty years ago.”

He opened his empty drawer again, found a toothpick, and began to use it.

“So I accessed the earliest stuff. Speeches. More speeches. But I found a scene here and there—people in the street, fur coats, window-shopping, traffic. Old people, I mean they were young then, but people of the past; they have these pinched kind of faces, you get to know them. Sad, a little. On city streets, hurrying, holding their hats. Cities were sort of black then, in film; black cars in the streets, black derby hats. Stone. Well, it wasn’t what they wanted. I found summer for them, color summer, but new. They wanted old. I kept looking back. I kept looking. I did. The further back I went, the more I saw these pinched faces, black cars, black streets of stone. Snow. There isn’t any summer there.”

With slow gravity he rose and found a brown bottle and two coffee cups. He poured sloppily. “So it’s not your reception,” he said. “Film takes longer, I guess, but it’s the physics. All in the physics. A word to the wise is sufficient.”

The liquor was harsh, a cold distillate of past sunlight. I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay watching until there was only snow.

“So I’m getting out of access,” the director said. “Let the dead bury the dead, right? Let the dead bury the dead.”

I didn’t go back. I never went back, though the highways opened again and The Park isn’t far from the town I’ve settled in. Settled; the right word. It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that’s going to happen in your life has already happened. And I still have some summer left to me.

I think there are two different kinds of memory, and only one kind gets worse as I get older: the kind where, by an effort of will, you can reconstruct your first car or your serial number or the name and figure of your high school physics teacher—a Mr. Holm, in a gray suit, a bearded guy, skinny, about thirty. The other kind doesn’t worsen; if anything it grows more intense. The sleepwalking kind, the kind you stumble into as into rooms with secret doors and suddenly find yourself sitting not on your front porch but in a classroom. You can’t at first think where or when, and a bearded, smiling man is turning in his hand a glass paperweight, inside which a little cottage stands in a swirl of snow.

There is no access to Georgie, except that now and then, unpredictably, when I’m sitting on the porch or pushing a grocery cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a hypnotist’s snap of fingers.

Or like that funny experience you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly and distinctly by someone who is not there.

© 1985 by John Crowley.

Originally published in Omni.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

John Crowley’s first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1977) was nominated for The American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s authoritative 100 Best Science Fiction Novels. Little, Big (1980) won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel; Ursula Le Guin described as a book which “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” In 1980 Crowley embarked on a multi-volume novel called Ægypt—The Solitudes, Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet; and Four Freedoms. He has also worked in film and television and written scripts for historical documentaries, many for Public Television; his work has received numerous awards and has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and many others. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Boston Review, The Yale Review, Conjunctions, Tin House, Lapham’s Quarterly, and other venues.

Author Spotlight: John Crowley
Robyn Lupo

What can you tell us about the origins of this story? What was it that brought about the idea of the wasp?

I actually can’t remember. Usually I can pinpoint what started me thinking about a book or a story—sometimes a tiny and unrelated thing I keep pondering—but in the case of this one I just can’t. The idea that memory both is and isn’t like a recording was probably part of it. I think in SF you sometimes think up a cool machine or futuristic thing and make it part of a story, and sometimes come up with a thought about the world, and create a machine (or a planet, or a whatever) that embodies it. But I can’t remember which it was in this case.

What’s your writing process like? Can you write a first draft of a story like this in one sitting?

I can’t write the first draft of any story in one sitting. I’m not the sort of writer who pours out drafts and then gradually pushes and pulls and modifies and tosses stuff out and pushes new stuff in. I tend to write until I don’t know what to do next, or how to write the next thing I have thought of (sentence, scene, notion) and stop till I can. My “first” drafts—if that’s what these are—are basically done except for minor editing.

Why did you choose snow as the connective tissue in this story?

Snow was the obvious metaphor for an image growing hazy—it’s interesting: On old televisions that received “broadcasts” through the air rather than on cable, interferences like buildings or rain or trees could cause a drifting of the image as though seen through sleet or snow, and “snow” was actually the technical term for this interference pattern. “You might be getting some snow,” the caretaker says—and he means that kind. (Of course that doesn’t happen with a modern cable or cell signal. And of course it won’t happen in the future. Oh well.) When I’d found the metaphor, I saw I could go back and forth from TV snow to real snow and make neat connections.

This line was incredible: “Once, hung over in a New York hotel, watching a sudden snowfall out the immense window, she said to me, `Charlie, I’m going to die of fun.’“It tells us almost everything we need to know about Georgie, and somehow we know what she says is true. Why was it important to you to make Georgie’s words prophetic?

Actually the reader knows first how Georgie died and then Charlie catches the glimpse of her saying this (twice). I think that in terms of the story it’s not so much prophetic as giving the feeling of stories that are told to visitors to the underworld by the ghosts there about how they came to die. In the Odyssey and in the Aeneid the visitor has to pour the blood of a sacrifice into a bowl so that the dead can drink and gain enough aliveness to be able to talk—otherwise they can’t be heard (as Georgie can’t be heard clearly). Charlie is in effect visiting the underworld, and trying to rescue Georgie. At bottom this is an Orpheus/Eurydice story of someone (a poet!) going under the earth to bring back a dead love, and failing. This only became clear to me as I was writing—I surprised myself by writing things like how Charlie actually has to go underground to reach the dead, and how the caretaker (who’s necessary to explain things) comes to resemble Minos.

There are hints about the world Georgie and Charlie live in — the plant-strewn highways, the molecular storage capabilities of the wasp. How different do you think their world is from ours? What do you think these differences mean for your characters? Were there other changes that didn’t make it into the story?

When I was writing it I thought I needed to set the story pretty far in the future in order to make the existence of a machine like the Wasp realistic. So the details of the freight airship and the closed highways were to suggest a world that’s changed greatly from ours. And in the state of my and the world’s knowledge when the story was written in the 1970s, things like the Wasp did seem a long way off. But you probably know that technology has very nearly created the Wasp already. Drones the size of hummingbirds are now capable of facial recognition, can hover and follow and transmit from an array of sensors, and bug-sized ones are coming. This happens a lot in SF: Writers come up with one thing that is not only possible but just about to appear, and insert it into an extraordinary world a long way off, or they leave stuff from their own time in the world they imagine: the first sentence of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, set at some far-off digital world, starts with a sentence (quoted from memory) “The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.” But that’s not how televisions look even today—that gray cloudy look is as old as the snow in my story—dead channels are bright blue. But how could he know that?

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Keeping the Dead Among the Living
Graeme McMillan

If there really is, as the saying goes, more than one way to skin a cat, then it only stands to reason that there’d be more than one way to preserve its remains. The science of body preservation has had a slow evolution from the mummies of 6000 BC to the plastic-infused oddities of the modern plastinated “Body Worlds.” These methods of preservation were discovered by some of the brightest, if most morbid, minds of their time. Here are five of the most important figures who turned their minds to the task of literally keeping the dead with us forever.

The Unnamed Chinchorro Residents’ Mummies

Admittedly this first one isn’t really a person. No one is quite sure who the first person was that came up with the idea of making an attempt to preserve the dead. What is known is that the earliest example discovered of this concept are mummies from the Chinchorro culture in ancient South America, from somewhere around 6000-5000 BC. (That’s around three thousand years before the ancient Egyptians did the same thing and took all the credit.) Unlike the more famous Egyptian mummies, the people of the Chinchorro culture—based in what is now known as northern Chile and southern Peru—mummified all their dead, whether it was the most respected member of a community or a young child. Examples of mummified miscarried fetuses have been discovered.

The process was fairly basic: the body’s organs were removed, either by taking the body apart (the so-called “Black Mummy” technique) or through multiple incisions made on the corpse (the later “Red Mummy” technique), and the body was left to dry in the sun, before being covered in a paste made of mud, sand, and egg or fish glue. When it was dry, it was painted and placed in a grave. As antiquated as the process might seem, even today, some people still believe that mummification is the most suitable manner in which to celebrate a death. In 2008, Summum Bonum Amen Ra, the founder of an organization that promoted “Modern Mummification,” celebrated his life’s work by being mummified and encased within a bronze casket after his death.

Frederik Ruysch’s Liquor

For the most part, corpse preservation fell out of favor following the Egyptian era. It wasn’t until the 17th Century that a Dutch anatomist called Frederik Ruysch became known for his secret “liquor balsamicum” which preserved the body, promoting the idea of “arterial embalming”—that is, draining the body of blood and replacing it with liquid that will preserve the body for a longer period. Ruysch had the background for this kind of work; he had been a forensic advisor to the Amsterdam courts, as well as a professor of botany in the Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam, prior to the creation of his mysterious liquor.

Embalming has become more desirous at this time because of the scientific revolution of the Renaissance period, which saw anatomists begin to seek out ways to preserve specimens. The formula for Ruysch’s liquor was a closely guarded secret—all the better to profit from its creation, after all—but Ruysch did share it with one very famous friend: Peter the Great, who bought the formula as part of a larger collection (it consisted of the pigment Prussian Blue, mercury oxide, and clotted pig blood).

Thomas Holmes’ Quest to Make the Dead Safe for the Living

Called “the father of American embalming,” Dr. Holmes became interested in the preservation of cadavers while studying at Columbia University in the late 19th Century. At this point, the most commonly used preservatives were compounds heavy in arsenic, mercury or zinc, and the young Holmes was convinced that such compounds could cause sickness for doctors and students performing dissections. Going on to examine both earlier arterial embalming processes as well as the remains of a number of Egyptian mummies, he developed a solution that he believed was healthier for those living around the dead, lacking the compounds that had caused him such distress.

(Ironically, Holmes’ solution included large quantities of arsenic, which would later be charged as extremely dangerous itself, and be blamed for contaminating ground water supplies as the bodies decomposed.)

When America found itself torn apart by Civil War, Holmes had the chance to put theories into practice, embalming Union soldiers to preserve their remains long enough for them to be shipped back to their families. After the war, Holmes boasted that he had personally embalmed more than 4000 corpses during the period. Whether that was fact or exaggeration to sell his embalming solution—$3.00 per gallon, complete with injection apparatus—remains unclear.

August Wilhelm von Hoffmann’s Formaldehyde

While Holmes was potentially embalming thousands upon thousands of union soldiers, German chemist August Wilhelm von Hoffmann was busy making a discovery that would change embalming forever: the existence of formaldehyde.

To be entirely fair, Hoffmann wasn’t exactly the first person to discover formaldehyde; Russian chemist Aleksandr Butlerov had accidentally created some years earlier, but failed to take much notice. Hoffmann, however, not only identified its existence, but essentially created the method in which the gas is manufactured today. Soon after its discovery in 1868, formaldehyde would quickly become the second largest ingredient in modern embalming fluids, behind ethanol. (Formaldehyde generally ranges from 5-29% of the fluid, with ethanol going from 9-56%; the remainder is made up of methanol and other solvents.)

Gunther von Hagens’ Plastic People

While mainstream embalming techniques haven’t made a massive leap in the last century, parallel methods of preserving the body post mortem have arisen, such as German chemist Gunther von Hagen’s “Plastination.” This essentially replaces embalming fluids with plastics, creating a perfectly preserved specimen entirely free of decomposition, and able to be essentially “posed” in whatever position necessary before the specific polymers harden.

An extensive—and expensive—process, Hagens has said that it takes almost a full year to successfully “plastinate” a full human body, not that plastination is used to keep bodies whole. Once the internal organs are coated in plastic, they don’t have to be protected by a moisture-tight skin or external wrapping. They can be displayed to the world. The plastinated bodies that have become the basis of the popular, if gruesome, “Body Worlds” exhibitions, are peeled like onions, displaying the skin, muscles, bones, tendons, and organs of each of the bodies. If it takes that much effort to plastinate, why show off only the outside?

Cryonics: Turning Preservation into Stasis

Of course, science hasn’t stopped with embalming fluids or plastics for preservation in death. The latest step, proposed in the early 1960s, was to preserve a body so well that death was (or will be) reversible. Cryonics was proposed when scientists started taking note of certain animals that preserve themselves perfectly in ice and come back to life. Cryonics institutes cool dead bodies with liquid nitrogen in the hopes that they can be revived later on.

How realistic this hope is has been debated over the years. Cryonics believers point out that certain species of fish, insects, and eels can be frozen and brought back to life. Human embryos, also, have been frozen, unfrozen, and gone on to develop into people. In 2005, a rabbit kidney was frozen solid, then unfrozen and put into a living rabbit, where it functioned perfectly well. Still, the fact that the cryonically frozen people are dead, that frozen cells tend to burst their walls and be completely destroyed, and that, quite simply, no one has ever come back from a cryonic freezing, are points against their argument. Some patients, in fact, elect not to have their entire body frozen, but only undergo neurocryopreservation—only their heads are frozen. Where they believe they will get bodies from in the future is a matter for debate.

Cryogenics are becoming increasingly popular as a theoretical way to postpone any final goodbyes as long as possible, even if we’re still some time away from any Futurama-like scenarios of reviving those believed dead of natural causes. But perhaps only a matter of time—and more technology.

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.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in December, in Lightspeed, Vylar Kaftan, author of the Nebula Award-finalist “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno,” returns to our pages with “The Sighted Watchmaker.” Our other original story will be “The Parting Glass” by new writer Andrew Penn Romine, plus we’ll have reprints by Pat Cadigan (“After the Days of Dead-Eye ‘Dee”) and Sir Arthur C. Clarke (“The Hammer of God”). 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 Magazine!

Thanks for reading!