Editorial, December 2011
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue nineteen of Lightspeed!

Some big news this month: Lightspeed (and our sister magazine, Fantasy) has a new publisher—and it’s me, your humble editor, John Joseph Adams. Our founding publisher, Sean Wallace, decided that he needed to devote more time to his book publishing company, Prime Books, and since I already edit both magazines, I was the natural choice to be his successor. I’m excited to pick up where Sean left off, and I look forward to helming the magazines far into the future.

I officially begin my tenure as publisher with the January 2012 issue, so this is our last issue under the Prime Books banner. But rest assured: Under the new regime, we’ll still be bringing you the same quality science fiction that you’ve come to expect from Lightspeed.

We do, however, have some fairly major changes in store:

First, we’ll be merging our sister magazine, Fantasy, into Lightspeed. But never fear: We won’t be doing away with any of Lightspeed’s fiction; each issue of the combined magazine will contain Lightspeed’s four science fiction stories and four fantasy stories from Fantasy. We won’t be reducing the number of stories, or replacing any Lightspeed content with Fantasy content; this will be a true merger.

Second, in order to focus more on the fiction side of the magazine, we’re going to cut down on our nonfiction. Going forward, we will cease publication of the related nonfiction articles accompanying each story and instead publish only two feature interviews per issue. We will, however, still have our usual assortment of author spotlights.

Third, since we’re doubling the amount of fiction in each issue, we’re going to raise the price of our ebooks—but not by double: We’ll be raising the price to just $3.99. So you’ll be getting twice as much fiction, for just a dollar more per issue.

And lastly, because we’re in this time of transition, I thought now would be a good time to do a reader survey, to let us get a better idea of who you all are, what you enjoy most about our content, and how you tend to access it, along with general demographic information. If you’d like to participate—and enter for a chance to win a free subscription to Lightspeed from Weightless Books—go to www.surveymonkey.com/s/lightspeed-fantasy-2011-survey and fill it out. It should only take about five to ten minutes of your time. Thanks in advance!

So! Exciting times here at Lightspeed. Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

Vylar Kaftan returns to Lightspeed with “The Sighted Watchmaker,” a story about a being coming face-to-face with her race’s long-dead creator, and the choice it must make as it guides its own creation to sentience.

In our feature interview this month, Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, joins us to discuss working with Dave McKean, being friends with Douglas Adams, and whether or not a human can mate with a chimp.

In “After the Days of Dead-Eye ‘Dee,” author Pat Cadigan introduces us to a tough old woman who has been pushed aside one time too many, and the alien who dares to approach her.

Jeff Lester explores the science of telepathy in his article “Science (and Swindlers) Can Read Your Mind.”

Andrew Penn Romine makes his professional debut with “The Parting Glass,” in which an aging Augment gets the chance of a lifetime—but the price might be more than advertised when he considers the source.

Nigel Wilson sets up a tournament for the ages, which pits famous cyborgs against each other, in “Cyborg vs. Cyborg.”

Arthur C. Clarke gives us the story of Captain Robert Singh, tasked with averting world-wide disaster from an asteroid strike in “The Hammer of God.”

And finally, in “Armageddon Rock,” writer/astrophysicist Alan Smale explains what the odds are that the Earth will be destroyed by a giant rock from space.

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. In 2011, he was a finalist for two Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming anthologies include: 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 2012, Tor Books). John is also the co-host of io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

The Sighted Watchmaker
Vylar Kaftan

“For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was no evolution at all. It made a nonsense of the central point of evolution.”

—Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

The Makers had been dead for billions of years, yet Umos discovered one caught in the starship’s net. A young one, naked, with still-fused dorsal fins. Female, from her pale coloring and wide skull. A form-fitted icemetal pod preserved her sinewy body. Umos caught the pod with an extensor talon and gently untangled the net. He hadn’t used the net in millennia; there’d been nothing to catch but space debris. But today, she had come to him—traveling undisturbed in her pod, preserved ages ago on the day of her death.

It couldn’t be a coincidence.

Umos tractored her into the starship’s bay, running background ID programs on the Maker. She matched no one in his databanks. Her pod slid into place and he repressurized. Sometimes Umos forgot the ship was a tool, and not himself; he was a tool-user like the species that built him, like the species he sought to create on the planet below. But as her body settled into one of his ports—an act that should have been intimate, were he a Maker—he felt nothing except curiosity. Umos was not a Maker. He merely served them.

He switched his attention to the port. He prepared an ammonium hydrate solution, stripped off her pod, and explored her with his inner arms. His fiber cilia tickled her uncovered flesh, testing for bacterial life—unlikely, but seeking life had become habit. So far, he’d found nothing except the microbes he nurtured on the planet below. After he analyzed this Maker, he would check on them again; it had been over 10,000 years since he last looked.

He ran tests, cross-checked, and verified. She was as dead as the others. No life, not even bacterial; efforts to clone her genetic material produced nothing at all. As if, to quote the movements of the great poet Shwahseh, she had chosen warmer water over cold shores. Just like the other Makers, leaving the universe alone to Umos. He played a recording of the poet swimming while he pondered the significance of the Maker’s appearance. He spent twenty years thinking about it.

When he had analyzed all the possibilities, he came to the most likely one: A Maker, perhaps one who’d programmed him directly, must have cast this child in this direction upon her death.

But why? A reminder? A message?

The only message he could think of involved what lay on the planet below. Umos shifted into view mode and slipped through semi-quantum states. The species below could not yet perceive such states; he’d planted its genetic material only half a million years ago. Nothing grew that quickly, regardless of its evolutionary track.

And indeed, as he checked in, the planet looked much the same as it had before. Seas of single-celled organisms, stewing in murky waters. A few had evolved into more complex structures. A promising start, but no more. He took water and air samples and returned to his normal off-planet state.

He reconsidered the young Maker. She was tall for her age and had solid cartilage structures. A fine specimen, now that her flesh was rehydrating. Umos hadn’t seen a Maker since he first embarked upon this mission.

He wondered if he dared experiment. A quick analysis suggested he might; the results proved his suspicions. No bacteria would grow inside her tank, not the seeds he’d brought nor the evolved organisms on this alien planet. Nothing.

Umos had always wondered why the Makers would create him and then abandon him. Why had they left him here? But his databanks couldn’t answer that question. He encoded a name for the child—Wahiia, meaning “only”—and inscribed it on her tank.

For a moment he considered her, enclosed inside his starship—just the two of them, together with these sparse planets and distant stars, in a remote galaxy not their own. Umos’s emotions were limited to ones that helped with his mission, like compassion and hope. But in moments like this, he thought he felt something more.

Umos had a lot of waiting to do. It was neither patience nor frustration; it simply was. Growing new intelligent life took millions—or sometimes billions—of years. Umos required no amusement, but often entertained himself anyway. Partly to keep his systems alert—but also because if he did create a species capable of comprehending him, he wanted to be interesting.

So, to pass the time, he solved the n-1 version of the Givuri paradox and catalogued every possible move in the game of ih. He composed sky-motion songs with his talons and created an element with 180 nucleic pseudoprotons. He decided the locations of all the stars in the universe would interest an intelligent species, so he spent 300,000 years cataloging that data in parallel structures, attempting to predict all the organizational methods that his new creatures might develop based on their potential brain structures.

Wahiia floated motionless in her tank, though sometimes Umos would move her to imitate conversation. Left fin raised, right curled, nostril flared in greeting. Ssshiuaaya, she’d say, if she could.

I’m glad to meet you too, is what Umos would say. Would you like to discuss philosophy?

A tilted brow ridge, and they would begin, asking questions of each other in a fashion known even to the youngest Makers. Wahiia’s body was whole, and thus able to ask any question Umos could conceive. And so Umos kept himself sharp, self-repairing any damage before it progressed too far.

As time passed, he checked on his creatures on the planet’s surface more often. They were large now, impressively multi-celled, with extensive nervous and circulatory systems. They even resembled some creatures in his database—species 01222786, called sumaou with leftward-angled head, a warm-blooded furry carnivore considered a Maker delicacy. A striking resemblance, considering the alien climate in which they evolved. These sumaou were much larger, though—one fierce subspecies was ten times taller than Wahiia, and Umos suspected the shaggy beast would eat her in one gulp.

How strange that these creatures would thrive here, while those that resembled the Makers stayed in the watery depths. The oceans here were not conducive to intelligent growth—at least not yet, though time might show differently. Umos didn’t like the sumaou. They were clumsy and loud. Too large and a too severe a drain on resources, unlike the efficient Makers. Umos tested the planet’s air, soil, and water from 10,000 locations, as he always did now that complex life had evolved.

Growing a new intelligent race was a weighty task, and sometimes he grew tired. He would open Wahiia’s tank and stir her fluids for company. He asked her, Who made you? Who created you and where did they go?

Wahiia’s fins trembled a bit, then drooped as he ceased stirring her tank. As the answer came from within himself, he made no headway on the question.

Many hazards could kill a young race. Solar flares could scorch the planet. Radiation could wreck its climate. A nearby supernova might destroy everything. Umos did not interfere with self-contained ecosystems, but he guarded them from outside forces. The chances of a planet experiencing a catastrophe sufficient to wipe out advanced life were huge. That was why so few intelligent species evolved, despite the seeming probability that they should.

In fact, even now a burst of gamma rays sped toward the planet. Umos knew he should steal them from the sky—bend them into his singularity transcept and divert them in another direction. But he stayed his extensors, troubled. He had 8,000 years before he needed to take action. The giant sumaou grew and evolved, but not in directions which satisfied him. He consulted his tables and ran some probability. It could be that super-intelligent life might yet evolve elsewhere on the planet—perhaps in those small tusked cave-dwellers, the most alien-looking species yet—but the sumaou’s presence stunted that development.

Umos’s priority system instructed that the mission took precedence. But which choice would fulfill his mission? Probability was not the same as certainty. The sumaou might yet find their way. Or perhaps, if this planet ran its course, the cave-dwellers would die out, and the sumaou would follow after them.

Umos measured the gamma rays and calculated the impact. He analyzed the results on the planet’s ecosystem. The sumaou would die—except the strangest ones, the small ones who lived underground—and the cave-dwellers would survive. The decision troubled him. Wahiia, he asked, which would you choose?

I would choose the action most likely to create an intelligent species. That is why we made you: To decide what to do.

But which way will be more effective? There are so many unknown variables.

Choose survival. Sacrifice some so that others may grow.

But then why did you not choose survival? You and the other Makers?

Again Umos had no answer. He stopped moving the fluid in her tank, stopped moving his talons, stopped calculating. He’d made his decision. The gamma rays struck. He watched the ozone depleting, the climate chilling, the sumaou dying.

The Makers had left him to watch this planet without explaining why they’d gone. He was alone. Processes within processes ran faster, interrupting each other. Umos stacked prime numbers into triangular grids, giving his circuits something to do beside stall into a feedback loop. When such distraction ceased to work, he shut himself down for several millennia.

The Makers should have stayed to guide this race themselves, instead of abandoning him.

When Umos woke, he checked his systems, self-repaired, and visited the planet. The tusked creatures had diversified into multiple subspecies, preferring dense forests to their former cave homes. Cold-blooded and land-dwelling—very surprising development in the quest for intelligence, but his charts indicated it could happen. As they resembled nothing in his databanks, he called them awli with wide-spread fins—”new,” with an open-minded gesture.

Umos traveled across the globe, analyzing soil, water, and air, always watching the awli. Some awli lived with small tribes, and others clustered into larger social groups. He liked them better than the sumaou because they were smaller and didn’t waste food. Finally he found what he’d sought: awli attacking each other with sticks. Tool use! Not the best use, perhaps, but there was time. They would learn.

Umos prepared to guide this species to greater intelligence. He monitored them closely, analyzing their tools and technology. He mapped them against evolutionary patterns shown by the Makers in his database. The awli matched a 16 x 8 evolutionary pattern, an especially fast track postulated by the Makers. No known species had ever taken that path—and now Umos could record it happening in detail. He planned to be as complete as possible.

He practiced conversing with Wahiia so he would be ready for the day the awli understood him.

I am Umos, he said. I made you, on behalf of the Makers.

But who made you?

The Makers made me.

And who made them?

He considered carefully. I don’t know.

But the awli would question that, he realized. They would ask, Why not? Where did the Makers go?

He would answer, Is it not enough that I am here with you? I have stayed to guide you. Why do you wish to know these things?

Because someone made the Makers. And someone made those makers. Where did it start?

Umos had millennia to think of what to say. He must be ready. He’d give the awli more than the Makers had given him—he’d give them answers. He would practice until he was satisfied.

Wahiia’s body remained unchanged through eons—the last trace of the Makers, so far as he knew. When they outgrew their planet, they built great colonies in space and spread across the stars. Yet in less than forty years—or two hundred, by the speedy planet he watched—all the Makers simply vanished. This was after they’d downloaded their thoughts into a vast network to which Umos had once belonged. But the Makers no longer existed virtually either. He couldn’t find them. He didn’t know why they’d left him here to guide this planet. Alone.

Wahiia, he said, I am lonely.

I know, she said.

Umos sent currents through Wahiia’s tank, making her fins wave sympathetically. Should I show myself to these creatures? Their intelligence grows. They have mastered fire.

They are not ready for you. They cannot understand their Maker.

Am I then their Maker? I am not your servant, but a Maker myself?

Yes, she said. You are all that remains. You could not have guided them well if we had been here to help you. You needed to discover this fact on your own. And now you understand.

Umos considered this point for one hundred years.

When he fully understood the implications, Umos prepared to guide the awli to true intelligence. He watched them closely. So many died in terrible wars for no good reason. The Makers had never behaved like this. He consulted his charts and determined this species would develop at incredible speeds, accelerating with each millennium. The awli grew as expected, evolving into smarter tool users—a clever but impatient species. They created music, sculpture, and other arts. Umos admired a certain dance they performed when shedding their childhood tusks. But so many died in violence, he thought. Surely he should stop this.

He might reveal himself, perhaps. Even if they were not ready, he might convince them—

Of what?

The awli traveled across the planet. Plagues spread and killed the weak ones. The strongest ones chose the best mates. The species expanded as Umos watched. The awli built cities and monuments, boats and roads—but violence pervaded everything they did. Such trauma overwhelmed his compassion circuits, and sometimes he turned away to avoid seeing it. But as the awli blazed through technology of bronze, iron, steam—they advanced so quickly he couldn’t leave. Any day they might develop the power to see him, and he must be ready. But when they cracked the genome and used their knowledge to kill, Umos grew angry. The awli had gone too far.

He ran a probability test. Even if a major event wiped out this species, no other seemed likely to develop sufficient intelligence. Different factors impaired the other species, even the promising ones in the water. And the star’s lifespan was not long enough to try again on this planet.

Wahiia, if I destroy them all—I could start again in another solar system. I would lose some time, but I could grow another species.

But you searched so hard for this place. This is what you are here for.

Umos considered, but no longer had the luxury of time. The awli were poisoning their planet. No healthy creature destroyed its host. Umos had grown intelligent parasites. Even worse, they developed so quickly that even he could not track their growth anymore.

Distressed, he observed an approaching comet and analyzed its path. Unlike the previous time, these awli were advanced enough to recognize the threat. They calculated a 1 in 4,000 chance of a meteor strike in 150 years; his own more accurate calculations put the probability at 1 in 3. The resulting climate change would destroy the awli. Serious enough that he must take action, if he wished to protect them. But did he?

Umos calculated that the awli would find his singularity transcept home within five hundred years. He had learned all their languages, reorganized himself so that they could understand his treasure of knowledge. Not all at once, of course—but over time they would get to know each other, once the awli were ready.

Wahiia, I will have someone to talk to. I have waited so long. Now I will have someone who thinks differently from me, who will hear all that I know. I wish so much that the Makers had stayed here.

Why do you think we did not?

I do not know. I have never known.

Haven’t you figured it out?

Umos processed very quickly. The act of learning to think for myself improved my intelligence.

Yes.

If I greet them, I will be taking that away from them.

Yes.

He saw instantly what must happen. Then I will leave. I will go where they cannot find me.

Her head sagged, expressing regretful truth. They will develop the technology. They are looking for you now. Had we understood as much as you do now, we would have left before you knew us.

I would have found you, Umos said. I would have found a way. And that would have slowed my progress.

Yes.

Umos considered. He saw the point. Then I must destroy myself. Is there any existence after such an event?

There is not, she said. But I find that comforting.

Yes. As it should be. He stopped waving her fins. But something troubled him. His own end was acceptable, now that the awli had achieved super-intelligence—but he didn’t want to abandon them, violent though they were. They’d go through exactly what he’d gone through, wondering why the Makers had left him. It was cold and cruel, but necessary, as Wahiia—his own thoughts—showed him.

But why had her body come to him in the first place? Someone must have known where he would be. Some Maker had known he would need to talk to Wahiia, and defied the other Makers by sending her body. That Maker understood something the whole species failed to see.

Umos made the final connection.

Instantly he shut away a subprocess so that he himself couldn’t reach it, in case his primary thoughts overrode his decision. The subprocess dropped out of mind for its final secret task. He erased his own memory of having done so.

Goodbye, Wahiia.

Umos closed his surfaces and condensed into a silver streak. He jetted through the comet, forcing its mass into the transcept with him. He reversed its spin pole with a blast of energy. When he prepared to separate, instead of dropping the meteor, he dropped himself into a permanent flat state. Umos was gone, his forgotten subprocess completed. The comet sailed into space, a near miss.

On the planet, the awli hardly noticed the comet. Scientists spoke of it, and then the event was forgotten. The awli kept their telescopes to the night sky, hoping to find their Maker.

In the transcept from which Umos had watched, a single lifeless machine awaited discovery—inert and nameless, just beyond the awareness of current awli technology. Nothing else remained.

Someday the awli would answer their own questions.

Vylar Kaftan writes speculative fiction of all genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and slipstream. She’s published stories in places such as Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, and Strange Horizons, and founded a new literary-themed convention called FOGcon. She lives with her husband Shannon in northern California and blogs at www.vylarkaftan.net. Her story, “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” (originally published in Lightspeed), was nominated for a Nebula Award.

Author Spotlight:
Vylar Kaftan
Christie Yant

Vylar, welcome back! This is your second appearance in Lightspeed, the first being “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” from our inaugural issue. Are you the same writer that you were then? Has anything changed in the way you approach stories?

You can never swim in the same story twice; sharks will eventually eat you.

Since the publication of “Reno,” I’ve learned what means the most to me as a writer: deeply moving a reader. I’m grateful for the emails saying “thanks for the story,” which I still get today.

Many of our readers will recognize the reference in the title to Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker. For those who don’t recognize it, can you tell our readers how it ties into your story?

In 1802, philosopher William Paley “proved” that God existed because life on Earth was complex. As a metaphor, he suggested that if a person found a watch on the beach, it proved there was a watchmaker who constructed it. In 1859, Charles Darwin countered that argument with The Origin of Species; he presented the theory of natural selection, which among many things states that complexity emerges over time in response to external pressures.

In his 1986 book, Richard Dawkins uses specific examples, such as the evolution of the mammalian eye, to show that complexity can indeed arise from the basic building blocks of life. He refers to evolution as “the blind watchmaker.” He then builds an argument against the existence of God, stating that any deity capable of managing such complexity must already be complex himself.

As Umos asks in the story, “Who made the Makers?” There is no one to ask, and therefore he must answer himself. I’ll let the reader finish the analysis here.

Was The Blind Watchmaker particularly influential on you? Are there other books of that kind that have informed and inspired your writing?

I actually read it long after I’d come to similar conclusions on my own. I do want to point out one key difference between Mr. Dawkins and myself. He’s an atheist and a humanist. I would be better described as a scientific pantheist (and a humanist, too). I have enormous respect for his arguments, but find the universe so inspiring that I have to call myself “spiritual.” I think it’s marvelous that we exist at all.

You seem to be as much at home in biology as you are in physics. Which scientific disciplines do you feel most comfortable borrowing from when writing science fiction? Are there disciplines you’re too uncomfortable with to try?

My strongest disciplines are genetics, epidemiology, and neuroscience. I’m reasonably solid in astronomy and immunology as well. There are certainly disciplines I’m not as knowledgeable in, but that’s fixable with research and study. I can’t imagine being uncomfortable about an entire discipline. There’s plenty of stories I wouldn’t want to try without some research, but that’s not the same thing. I think writers should write what they know—but if they don’t know it, they need to learn it. And that includes all the sciences.

Your inclusion of the work of “the great poet Shwahseh” really added depth to Umos’s world. How much world-building did you do for this story? Is there more of Umos’s culture that you developed but didn’t make it to the page?

None. For short story worldbuilding, I make it up as I go along, then build the story around it. This generally goes better in shorter works because I can hold the whole thing in my head. In longer works, I do more planning.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about “The Sighted Watchmaker”?

The awli taste like chicken. This never really comes up in the story.

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Assistant Editor for Lightspeed Magazine, occasional narrator for StarShipSofa, and co-blogger at Inkpunks.com, a website for new, nearly new, and newly-pro writers. Her fiction has appeared in the magazines Crossed Genres and Daily Science Fiction; in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard and Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (both from Prime Books); and forthcoming in Armored (Baen). She lives on the central coast of California with her two amazing daughters, her husband, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @inkhaven.

Feature Interview:
Richard Dawkins
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Richard Dawkins is an ethnologist and evolutionary biologist. A vocal proponent of atheism, he is also the author of many books, such as The Ancestor’s Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, A Devil’s Chaplain, and The God Delusion. His latest book is The Magic of Reality.

This interview first appeared in io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Visit io9.com/geeksguide to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

Your new book The Magic of Reality is a science book aimed at kids. What gave you the idea for this book, and what are you hoping to accomplish with it?

Well, science is wonderful, science is important, and so are children, so are young people, and so what could be better than to write a science book for young people? But actually it’s a book for all ages.

Each chapter begins as a question, like: What is a rainbow? What is an earthquake? What is the sun? And then begins, as you say, with mythical answers to that, and then having dealt with three or four myths, proceeds to what really is the sun, what really is an earthquake, which is, of course, the scientific answer.

What are examples of some of the myths that you included?

In the case of the sun there are Aztec myths which are quite amusing, and which unfortunately end up rather less amusing with the horrific rituals of offering sacrifices of human hearts to the sun god. And there are Ancient Greek myths of the sun, Ancient Egyptian myths of the sun. In the case of the rainbow there’s the legend of Utnapishtim from the Epic of Gilgamesh in Ancient Sumeria, who was told by one of the gods to build an enormous boat to hold all the animals, because there was a great flood coming, and he did, and then when the flood went down the gods put up a rainbow as a signal that they were never going to make another flood again. That may sound familiar because, of course, the story of Noah was simply a plagiarism of the Sumerian story of Utnapashtim.

You make the point in the book that all of these ancient books, although they were supposedly inspired by all-knowing gods, don’t include anything that the peoples themselves weren’t familiar with, so they make no reference to diseases being caused by microorganisms, or that the universe is expanding, anything like that.

Yes, that’s right. I’d forgotten I made that point, but it’s quite a good point, yes. Okay. Thanks for reminding me of that. Yes, quite true.

The book is illustrated by Dave McKean. How did you two start working together?

This was fixed up by the publishers and by our respective literary agents, and it worked very well, and I think the pictures are very good and suit the text very well. But I didn’t fix it up myself, I don’t think. I can’t remember. I think it was done by the publishers.

Did you focus on the text and just leave the art to Dave?

Exactly. Yes, I just wrote the text and then he took the text and pretty much chose what he wanted to illustrate.

I mean, there was a certain amount of back and forth, and so when he’d done the art then of course I modified the text to make reference to it.

Speaking of educating children, there’s often a conflict we have between the rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children versus the rights of children to be exposed to accurate information. How do you think that we should balance those two interests?

My balance would come out in favor of the children. I guess there are some rights of parents with what they choose their children to learn, but I’m biased in favor of freeing children to learn and not letting parents be too doctrinaire in indoctrinating their children.

Creationists often try to mislead the public into thinking that there’s a scientific controversy over whether evolution happens at all, which is of course ridiculous. What are some actual scientific controversies among evolutionary biologists?

There are some very interesting controversies. I mean, there’s the controversy over the importance of natural selection rather than random genetic drift in driving evolution. And that’s an active controversy, a very interesting one, plenty of data to bear upon it. I think nobody would claim that random genetic drift is capable of producing adaptation, that is to say the illusion of design. Random genetic drift can’t produce wings that are good at flying, or eyes that are good at seeing, or legs that are good at running. But random genetic drift probably is very important in driving evolution at the molecular genetic level. That’s one controversy. Another one is the controversy of punctuated equilibrium in the fossil record, which you may have heard of. So there are very interesting controversies within evolution; however, whether evolution occurs is not one of them. It definitely does.

Is group selection an active controversy, would you say?

Yes, we’d have to include that. I don’t think that’s a very interesting controversy. I think it’s largely a controversy about words. But yes, that is a controversy which you can find active scientists participating in, unlike the alleged controversy over whether evolution happens at all, where no active scientist thinks that it doesn’t.

What do you think about the issue of whether homosexuality is biological, and how would natural selection account for that or be involved with that?

Superficially it’s a problem if it is genetic—if the difference between people’s sexual preferences is genetic—because at least a pure homosexual would be unlikely to reproduce and therefore pass on the genes. So the first question you ask is, is it actually genetic, and the answer is probably to some extent yes. There’s some evidence from twin studies comparing monozygotic twins—who have exactly the same genes, pretty much—with dizygotic twins, who don’t, and because homosexuality is one of the many things which is more highly correlated between monozygotic and dizygotic twins, you’d probably have to conclude that there is a genetic component, and that means that we have a Darwinian problem to explain why male homosexuality, for example, seems to be about ten percent, and that’s too high to be easily explained.

Various explanations have been offered. There’s the “worker bee theory” that gay men look after not their children but their nephews and nieces etcetera. There’s the “sneaky male theory” that apparently homosexual males are often actually bisexual, and the fact that they appear to be homosexual leads dominant males—in our cavemen ancestors, so to speak—to leave them behind when they went off, leave the women in their charge, and this would have been a possible way in which genes that make men appear to be homosexual could be passed on by sneakily, so to speak, mating with females when the dominant males are away. I’m not that wedded to either of those two theories.

I rather like the idea that when we talk about genes for anything, like a gene for being gay or a gene for being aggressive or something of that sort, that a gene for anything may not have been a gene for that thing under different environmental conditions. And the hypothetical example that I’ve used for that is, suppose that there’s a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that bottles are common it can do so. I hasten to stress that I only use the idea of bottle feeding as a possible example. There is absolutely no evidence that that is an environmental trigger for this particular gene, but there could be a trigger of some sort from the environment, in which case we would be asking the wrong question if we say, “Why do gay genes survive?” Because it may be that at the time when natural selection was really going on there was no such thing as a gay gene.

So what are some recent developments in evolutionary biology that you’re the most excited about?

Well, there’s the perennial problem of what’s the use of sex, and that is still unsolved. I’m very excited by molecular evolutionary studies and the use of molecular genetics to reconstruct possible ancestral trees about how long ago the common ancestor lived of any two species you care to name, like say humans and chimpanzees, and molecular data suggests that the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived rather recently, only about six million years ago, and you can do similar molecular analyses to work out how long ago the common ancestor of any other pair of species lived. So I’m very excited about that. Molecular genetics can also show off some rather surprising relationships like, for example, the close relationship of whales to hippopotamuses, which I think nobody ever guessed until molecular data was looked at. The closest relatives of whales are hippopotamuses, even closer than any other cloven-hoofed animals. So it’s not that whales and all the cloven-hoofed animals are sort of distant cousins. It’s that whales come off actually within the cloven-hoofed animals. They’re closer to hippos than to anything else. And that’s a very remarkable finding which has come about purely since the molecular genetics revolution. And there are lots more like that. There are projects to analyze the genome of extinct animals like mammoths and like Neanderthal people, and I find them very exciting as well.

Can you elaborate a bit on the “What is sex good for?” issue? I would think that sex is a good way for there to be genetic variety within the population for natural selection to act on?

Yes. Well, that’s fine if you think that natural selection works at the level of the population. If you think that natural selection chooses good populations versus bad populations, in other words, if you’re a group selectionist. Then there’s not a problem. But there is a problem if you’re not a group selectionist, like most evolutionists are not, and so you have to face the fact that on the face of it an asexual female, a female who doesn’t indulge in sex and simply clones herself, is twice as successful at passing on her genes as a female who uses sex. A female who simply dispensed with males altogether would be doing better under quite a lot of conditions, and so whatever the benefit of sex is, it can’t be a slight benefit; it’s got to be a colossal benefit to overcome the enormous benefit of being asexual. And so that’s really why it’s a difficult problem, and why it’s been exercising the minds of evolutionary theorists for about thirty years now.

You knew Douglas Adams and he talked a lot about what a big influence your books were on his thinking. Could you just tell us, how did you first become aware of Douglas Adams and how did the two of you first meet?

I loved his books, and I particularly was fond of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and I think it’s the only book where I’ve read it and then immediately turned straight back to page one and started again, and read it all the way through again without a break. And I then wrote him a fan letter—I think the only fan letter I’ve ever written, and then he wrote me a fan letter back, which was very nice, and invited me to visit him the next time I went to London, and I did. And I remember ringing the bell in his house in North London, and this gigantic man coming to the door. He wasn’t fat, just tall. Well-built, but tall, and clearly amused at the reaction that one’s first sight of him had on people, because he knew that his height was rather striking. He was just sort of . . . gently laughing. And we hit it off immediately, and quite frequently met after that. I used to use him as my sort of guru on technological questions. He and I both loved the Apple Macintosh, so every time a new Mac came out, or a new gadget came out that you could run on a Mac, we would exchange notes on it and he would tell me what it could do and things like that.

So I understand he actually introduced you to your wife Lalla Ward. How did that come about?

Yes, that is true. He knew her through a different route. He knew her because he had been script writer for Doctor Who at one stage in that series. Any Doctor Who script which is witty—they aren’t all witty, but if you come across one that’s witty, it’s almost certainly going to be one of Douglas Adams’s. He injected a wonderful sort of surreal wit into the Doctor Who scripts.

Anyway, he wrote scripts while she was playing the companion, and so he knew her through that, and Lalla and I met at . . . I think it was his fortieth birthday party. We were introduced to each other by Douglas, who was at that time talking to Stephen Fry, who is another immensely tall man, and so Lalla and I, as it were, conversed underneath this archway that was Douglas Adams and Stephen Fry sort of talking over our heads. And so Lalla and I talked through that archway for a bit, and then the party was so incredibly noisy we couldn’t hear ourselves speak, so we simply left the party and went off and had dinner, and we’ve pretty much been together ever since.

On YouTube I came across this video from a TV program where you invite a volunteer from the audience to read a section of Hitchhiker’s Guide, and then it turns out that Douglas Adams is sitting in the crowd, and he comes up and reads a section about the animals who want to be eaten—

Yes, that was quite a nice little episode, because it’s supposed to be children who come up when you call for volunteers, obviously, so I said in my best sort of avuncular voice, “Would anybody like to come up and help me with reading this passage from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?” And so a great forest of hands shot up, little hands, plus one very big hand, which was Douglas, and so I called him out, and this enormous man came to the front and read this lovely passage from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where the animal has been bred to be eaten and to enjoy it, and to want to be eaten, and it’s a very, very typically Douglas thing, a lovely flight of fancy, but also a flight of intelligent thought.

So besides Douglas Adams, would you consider yourself a science fiction fan, and if so who are some of your favorite authors?

I couldn’t really, because I haven’t read enough. I’m not one of those people who reads the science fiction magazines, like Astounding Science Fiction and so on. I’ve read a fair number, not that many, science fiction books by a fairly limited number of authors: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Fred Hoyle . . . Fred Hoyle the famous astronomer, the great astrophysicist who invented the Steady State theory of the universe and was a very distinguished physicist, and who should have won the Nobel Prize actually, but didn’t because he was such an impossible character. But Fred Hoyle wrote quite a lot of science fiction, most of which is not very good, it’s sort of potboiler stuff, but the first one, The Black Cloud, is excellent. And a couple of others that he wrote on Andromeda, A for Andromeda and Andromeda Breakthrough. Those three books by Fred Hoyle are very good, and among the best science fiction I’ve read, mainly because they actually teach a lot of science. I actually learned a lot of science from his science fiction books. And I wrote a forward to an audio edition of The Black Cloud in which I put down a list of the science that I had learned from it. I’m very fond of an author called Daniel Galouye. I don’t think he’s written all that many books, but I’ve read three of them and they’re all very good. John Wyndham. I can’t think of very many more.

I heard you say at one point that you liked this idea that if you were to trace your ancestry back, at each stage the people would be able to reproduce with each other, but if you get far enough apart then people can’t reproduce with each other . . . that you might want to do a science fiction novel involving that somehow.

That idea is certainly prominent in The Magic of Reality. It dominates Chapter 2. I didn’t remember that I thought of doing a science fiction story along those lines. I suppose you could, yes. But once you’ve said the plot you’ve said it really. I’m not sure what you could do with it in the way of fiction. The other plot that I had thought of, which actually you might be able to do something with, is hybridizing humans and chimps, because that’s borderline possible. I mean, it’s never been done yet, but it’s not totally ridiculous to think about. Since we now have both the human genome and the chimp genome in toto, you could theoretically concoct a kind of halfway stage between them which you could either think of as being a reconstruction of the common ancestor of humans and chimps, which lived six million years ago, or I suppose you could think of it as what you might get if you hybridized it.

Now, if you were to make that halfway house genome and clone an individual from it, there I think you do have the makings of a science fiction story because that would raise all sorts of ethical problems in people’s minds, social problems. So you could use your fiction story to explore what might happen. I mean, the religious types would freak out totally. And many people would think it was a very immoral thing to do. You could explore the problems that the hybrid individual, the halfway house individual, might have fitting into human society, or indeed chimp society. So I think you could make a science fiction story about that.

When you talk about hybridizing humans and chimps, are you talking about doing genetic engineering or actually just mating humans and chimps?

Well, I mean in a fiction story you could do either of those, and I’m not sure which would make the best fiction story. Perhaps literally breeding them together, because that would engender an additional frisson of yuck factor in people’s minds. But the genetic engineering route might be more scientifically interesting.

But humans and chimps are genetically closely enough related that you actually could produce offspring?

No, I’m not saying that, and I suspect they’re probably not close enough that you could actually mate them and breed in the ordinary way. But they’re not so far that it would be a ridiculous plot in a science fiction story. I mean, it would be less ridiculous, for example, than the plot of Jurassic Park, which I rather like. I mean, I rather like the idea of getting blood out of mosquitoes in amber. That’s very ingenious. But I think that is actually less plausible than the hypothetical plot of mating a human and a chimpanzee and getting fertile offspring.

What actually is implausible about the Jurassic Park mosquito thing?

Oh, that DNA doesn’t survive that long. I mean, we’re talking 65 million years, and DNA doesn’t survive that long. And even if it did, it would then be a very difficult problem to grow the dinosaur. But it’s a reasonable science fiction plot. It falls within the brackets of what I would think would make good science fiction, as opposed to pure mystery fantasy, which I don’t regard as science fiction at all.

So your advocacy for evolution has put you at odds with some really strange characters, such as Ted Haggard and Ben Stein. Do any of those encounters stand out as the most surreal?

Well, you’ve seen those two on film. The Ted Haggard one was aggressive, or ended up aggressive. I think nowadays I wouldn’t play it like that. I mean, I think I’ve now learned that a better way is to give these people enough rope to hang themselves rather than argue with them. In the case of Ben Stein, I didn’t know I was arguing with him at all. I mean, I wasn’t told this was a Creationist front. The producer, a deeply dishonest man of the name of Mathis, I mean, a real slimeball, led me and various other people like P.Z. Myers and Michael Ruse and others, led us all to believe that we were taking part in a serious science program, and in conversation with me Mathis even led me to believe that he was an anti-Creationist. So when I met Ben Stein—I’d never heard of Ben Stein—this rather unpleasant man came into the room, and I wasn’t aware that he was unpleasant; I wasn’t aware that he was a Creationist, and I started answering his questions in good faith, and only very gradually tumbled to the fact that this interview was not what it had been cracked up to be, but I still treated his questions honestly.

And so for example when he asked me whether I could, under any circumstances at all, think of how life on Earth could have been intelligently designed, or could there ever be life that was intelligently designed, I bent over backwards to think, well, you know, can I think of an extreme condition in which it might be intelligently designed? And I thought of Francis Crick’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that life on Earth had been seeded by directed panspermia, by some extraterrestrial intelligence, seeding the Earth with bacterial life, and this sort of bending over backwards to think of a way in which intelligent life might under some circumstances, you know, what’s the best case I could make for intelligent life, and this was seized upon: “Dawkins believes in little green men!” This was a thoroughly dishonest tactic. Now, if anybody’s listening who’s ever invited to make a film by this man Mathis, he’s dishonest. Don’t do it.

Speaking of really strange characters, I gather from your recent op-ed in The Washington Post that you’re not a big fan of this year’s crop of Republican presidential contenders?

Is anyone that you know? I mean, no, of course not. These people are know-nothings, and it would be a tragedy if any of them was elected. No serious scientist, or nobody even of any education at all, takes Creationism seriously. It’s almost as though the American electorate is splitting into two species, with the civilized, educated ones on one hand and the total ignorant know-nothings on the other, and it’s terribly sad that a large number of voters seem prepared to vote for somebody because he’s like them rather than because they think he’s actually qualified to lead the country.

Your website has this “Convert’s Corner” where there are letters from readers who have abandoned religion after reading your books. Have any of those letters stood out as being particularly memorable?

They’re well worth reading. They’re quite numerous, and many of them are very nice. A lot of people say that they weren’t actively converted by reading The God Delusion, but what The God Delusion did was give them the confidence to come out, give them the confidence to actually say what they believe rather than to secretly keep it to themselves.

You founded an organization called the Richard Dawkins Foundation. What sorts of projects has the foundation been involved with?

There are two, there’s one in Britain and one in America with the same name. In America we’ve done quite a lot of films, quite a lot of DVDs, videos, including things we call “vignettes,” which are sort of three-minute, five-minute little films of a scientist—it might be me, it might be somebody else—having a conversation with somebody else, trying to make one point, one little vignette point, which could then be used by teachers to sort of slot into their lessons just to make one point. Also, longer videos, which have been often conversations between me and another scientist or a philosopher, or another scholar of some kind. We’re trying to pioneer a sort of interview which is not really an interview; it’s more of a conversation between equals, or between people who have expertise in different subjects, like say me as a biologist and Lawrence Krauss as a physicist, where we each learn from each other. So it’s a kind of mutual tutorial, trying to get away from the debate format where you have a punch-up which doesn’t really illuminate. So we’re trying to pioneer the mutual tutorial conversation rather than the debate punch-up.

All right, so that does it for our questions. Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that we didn’t cover?

Well, the book The Magic of Reality [has just come] out in America; it’s [been] out [for a while] in Britain, and it’s doing very well. It’s gone straight into the Sunday Times Bestseller List, which is the sort of British equivalent of the New York Times Bestseller List. It’s gone straight in at number two, which is excellent news. It’s rather unusual for a book to go straight in so high on the list as that. There’s an app for the iPad, which is the sort of ebook version of The Magic of Reality. It only runs on the iPad; it doesn’t run on a Kindle. And it’s more than just an ebook because it has all the pictures for one thing, but it also has various simulations, games, animations, which illustrate points in the book to help explain things, when animation or a movie does it better than just still pictures.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast that airs on io9.com. It is hosted by:

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. In 2011, he was a finalist for two Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming anthologies include: 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 2012, 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.

After the Days of Dead-Eye ‘Dee
Pat Cadigan

The third night Brett was gone, Merridee put out all the downstairs lights and waited at the window by the kitchen table, the shotgun loaded and ready. She’d left all the upstairs lights burning; the glow they threw down let her see the backyard pretty well, considering. At fifty-eight, her eyesight wasn’t as dependable as it had once been—thus, the shotgun and not the rifle. You didn’t have to be a crackshot with a shotgun, though at one time she’d been handy with either weapon. Dead-Eye ‘Dee, her brothers had called her back in her target shooting days. They should have seen old Dead-Eye ‘Dee now, she thought, crouched on a chair in a dark kitchen with a shotgun, waiting for God-knew-what.

A hundred yards beyond the house, she could just make out the silhouette of the stand of trees near the well Brett had sunk twenty years ago, only to have it dry up a year later. That was where it came out of, those trees. Maybe it was actually holed up in the old well. If it were, she couldn’t imagine how it was getting out. She shifted position on the chair and carefully set the shotgun on the table. A moth hurled itself against the screen and fluttered away, up toward the light. Awfully late in the year for moths, Merridee thought idly; maybe it wouldn’t come tonight. Maybe it had wandered off or died or something.

There was a rustle of leaves; a small puff of chill October air came through the window. Merridee blinked, adjusting her glasses. Uh-huh, she thought. Dead leaves danced across the yard as the shadow detached itself from the stand of trees and approached the house. Would it think she was upstairs (if it thought at all)? Or could it sense her waiting in the dark?

The thing moved awkwardly, as though it were used to much different terrain. She could see it a lot better from the kitchen window than from upstairs, where she’d watched it the previous two nights. She hadn’t been able to tell much about it at all, not even whether it was worth creeping downstairs to phone the sheriff about. But tonight she’d get a good look at it, see if it were man or beast, and then she’d know what to do. Maybe.

Just out of the range of light, it stopped and she thought she saw it hunker over, as though examining the ground. It was man-sized but she could tell the limbs were all wrong, the one arm she could make out was too long even for an ape. Maybe it was some poor freak, simple-minded as well as deformed, looking for shelter and food.

It made a strange sound and she jumped slightly, putting one hand on the shotgun. It wasn’t a very fierce noise, something between a sigh and a growl, or maybe a sigh and a snore. Not very animal-sounding, but not human, either.

She peered through the screen, wanting to call to it just to make it step into the light. It sigh-growled again and shuffled along the grass and dead leaves, stopping when it was opposite the window.

It knew she was there. The thought gave her a sudden flash of panic. An image of Brett popped into her head. He knew she was here, too, here in the house alone while he was days away, fishing and hunting in Oklahoma with his friends. His friends knew where she was, too, and his friends’ wives, and her son and daughter-in-law; they all knew. But none of them knew the way this thing knew. The thoughts chased each other around in spirals in her mind as panic passed, leaving behind a rationally cold fear.

She picked up the shotgun. Weeks ago, she had hinted to Brett she’d have enjoyed a camping trip. It had been a long time since they’d taken one together. He’d only reminded her of the rheumatism in her shoulders and knees, that she’d just be in pain the whole time. So he was gone with his friends now and she was safely at home, no rheumatism acting up, watching this shadow. She wished she were anywhere else. Then this thing, whatever it was, could have had the run of the whole place and she wouldn’t have had to know about it, she wouldn’t have been trapped in the kitchen, wondering if she should shoot it.

It didn’t move again for a long time. Because it could see in the dark, she thought, and it was looking her over. She imagined how she must look to it, wide-eyed behind her glasses, her loose, broad face homely with old lady worry, a shotgun in her thick hands like a rolling-pin. Not much as a damsel in distress. Somewhere in the back of her mind was the irrational idea that every bit of her life had been pointing toward this moment and whatever happened afterwards would be mere timekeeping till the grave.

She untensed the tiniest bit, her fear smoothing into puzzlement. All right, now what did the thing want? Was it going to attack or not? Should she phone the sheriff and let him come take care of it? Puzzlement mixed with impatience. Suppose she just walked out there, walked right out there and said What do you want? as bold as you please? With the shotgun, of course. Would that goad it into doing something? Anything was better than this cowering in the dark.

The notion of going out to it blossomed suddenly into a powerful urge. Yes, she would go out to it, get a good look, confront it. It certainly wasn’t going to come in for examination. She thought of Brett sound asleep in the camper. He might think to call her and he might not. It wouldn’t enter his head that anything could possibly happen to dull old dependable Merridee securely at home. She was always securely at home as far as he was concerned, him and everyone else. Except that thing, waiting for her in the dark.

Maybe, she thought as she slid quietly off the chair, it just wanted some food and she should throw it some stale bread.

Hunger. That idea took her as strongly as the notion to go outside. She paused with her hand on the deadbolt. Hunger. One-handed, she fumbled a loaf of that tasteless white stuff Brett was so partial to out of the breadbox on the counter, the shotgun seesawing in the crook of her other arm. Maybe it wouldn’t like the stuff. No; rubbish, she thought. If it were hungry enough, it would eat anything.

She opened the door slowly and poked the screen door with the shotgun. Well, she couldn’t fool it into thinking she was upstairs any more, she thought. But deep down, she knew she hadn’t fooled it at all. Go out. Hunger. She wavered a little before she stepped over the threshold and let the screen door flap shut behind her.

The thing shuffled along in the grass and leaves again. Her coming out hadn’t stampeded it; the knowledge made her feel satisfied and bold. She stood up a little straighter as she hurled the bread in the thing’s general direction. The package landed just inside the lighted area where it lay like litter thrown from some out-of-towner’s car.

Go on; take it, you blamed thing, it’s for you. She wanted to say it out loud but the words stuck in her throat. She heard the hesitant rustling of grass and leaves; the trees on the north side of the house seemed to echo it. Leaves swirled down between herself and the thing. Its shadow stood out a little more clearly to her now and yes, it was all wrong for any man or beast.

It approached the bread with excruciating slowness, like an old fox coming upon a baited trap. Maybe she should have taken the bread out of the bag, Merridee thought. There was a sound like a grunt and she heard something slither along the ground. A lump appeared in the dead leaves beside the bread. Then fingers, big and thick, much thicker than her own or Brett’s or anyone else’s, broke through and clutched the package. Big, thick fingers the color of a thunderhead about to let go, and only three of them, only three big, thick, blue-grey fingers. Merridee stared owlishly, unable to holler or run, the shotgun a meaningless weight in her hands. In some part of her mind, she was screaming her head off but it was so far removed it might as well have been someone else.

One of the all-wrong fingers pierced the plastic and tore into the bread, shredding it. And then . . . she blinked, her eyes watering madly. Something else strange, as though the arm belonging to those fingers had telescoped as the body came closer. Then the arm showed in the light and she saw it was exactly that way, not jointed but extendable, exactly like a telescope.

Without warning, it thrust its face into the light. Merridee stepped back, bringing one hand up defensively, the shotgun forgotten. At last she found voice enough to gasp; screaming was beyond her. The face hung over the package of bread, refusing to go away. Come out. Hunger.

She hadn’t had it quite right. It had wanted her to come out and it was hungry, but not for bread.

Merridee fled into the house.

She woke just after dawn, lying on top of the bed fully clothed with the shotgun beside her, the stock resting on Brett’s pillow. For a moment she stared at it, not remembering. Then she sat up quickly, looking around the bedroom. The thing—Well, it wasn’t in here with her unless it was hiding in the closet. The closet door was wide open, exposing thirty-four years’ accumulation of clothes and personal belongings. No room for a thing in there. She flashed back to her childhood, a million years ago it felt like, the days of monsters in closets. Not her, but her brothers, Charlie and David. Her mother had always been soothing their nighttime terrors, turning on the lights, showing them there was nothing in the closet but the most mundane items of clothing and shoes, while she lay in her own room listening, not a bit afraid. There had never been monsters in the dark for Merridee Dunham. Nor for Merridee Percy, married to Brett and living in this house for 500,000 years, nor for their one child, who was more of Brett than of herself.

She rubbed her hands over her face, feeling as unwashed and weary as a hobo. It was hard to believe in the thing in the daylight, the same way it had been hard to believe in her brothers’ closet monsters. Now she could only vaguely remember the face it had shown her; she remembered her fear and she remembered running from it. But she remembered nothing after that.

Well, obviously, she’d been so tired from staying up that late she’d gone right to bed without even bothering to undress, just like some old man (Brett; who else) who’s spent all day and half the night in a duck blind.

She looked at the shotgun lying on Brett’s side of the bed. If that wasn’t the silliest thing in the world and dangerous besides, sleeping with a shotgun. She left it there while she went to wash.

Later, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and two pieces of sourdough toast, she looked out the window at the stand of trees. All the leaves had blown off them now; the bare branches clawed at the sky in the wind. She tried to imagine how it would look, that creature coming through the trees and shuffling toward the house. It was like trying to picture the shirts and coats in her brothers’ closet congealing into a monster. She couldn’t do it. Shaking her head, she smiled to herself. Like two different worlds people lived in, one filled with strange, inexplicable shadows, one utterly prosaic, and she had never doubted once in her million years long life that she existed in the latter.

As she was getting up to refill her coffee cup, she caught sight of the spot where she had thrown the bread. It was gone; not even a shred of the plastic wrapper remained. Squirrels, she thought. And birds, the tough little sparrows who hopped through the bitter snows. And the wind had blown away whatever had been left behind.

In the early afternoon, she bundled herself up in two sweaters and one of Brett’s old hunting jackets and went for a walk. The phone had not rung all day and she was tired of waiting for a call that probably wouldn’t come. The house was clean—the house was always clean—and there was nothing that needed doing urgently. Brett could recaulk the windows and put up plastic himself after he came back. He was expecting her to do it while he was gone, she knew, but she didn’t feel like it. Let him grumble over it. She would just tell him: I didn’t feel like doing it. What would he make of that? She didn’t know and didn’t care. I’m apathetic but who cares, she thought, and giggled, still tickled at the old joke.

She walked the quarter mile down the dirt drive to the mailbox. The October wind tore at her hair and made her eyes water behind her glasses. She took the glasses off and tucked them into her jacket pocket. There wasn’t much to look at. It was very pretty country but she’d seen it and seen it. Seen it for a million years.

The mailbox leaned forward over the paved road as though it might have been watching for oncoming traffic, of which there was very little on any given day. The mailman had left only one envelope, a brown and green announcement that she, Mrs. Merridee Percy, had another chance to enter the biggest sweepstakes of the year. A quarter-mile hike for a piece of junk mail. But she didn’t begrudge the time or effort. She put her glasses back on and examined the brightly colored enclosures on the walk back. A $100,000 dream house, a yacht, a brand-new Lincoln-Continental (she could just picture it destroying its suspension on the dirt drive), a full-length mink, a home entertainment system with a big screen TV and a record player that took funny-looking little records—compact discs, the brochure called them—a video-recorder and lots of other things. Any of them might be hers already. There was also a sheet of little stamps offering cut-rate subscriptions to magazines. No purchase was necessary to enter this wonderful sweepstakes but she examined the stamps anyway. Maybe she might order a magazine or two, something that had articles on foreign places or one of those science magazines if they had one that wasn’t too technical to understand. Brett had given her the Ladies’ Home Journal once, years before, but she’d found little in it to pique her curiosity. She’d already been living in the Ladies’ Home Journal for a quarter of a million years by then.

She reached the house, paused, and then walked around back. The trip to the mailbox had not been sufficient to relieve her cooped-up feeling.

The sweepstakes announcement was crammed into a pocket. She kept her hand on it while she approached the stand of trees. She wasn’t looking for the creature, she told herself, absolutely not. It was getting harder and harder to believe in it as the day wore on. But if anything unlikely did pop out at her from somewhere, she’d pull the sweepstakes announcement out and throw the brochures right in its face. All right, she’d say, you tell me how you can be real in a world that has sweepstakes and cut-rate magazine subscriptions! Well, it wouldn’t be able to, that was all there was to it, and the thing would just melt away into thin air, and that would be the end of the matter. A $100,000 dream house didn’t come with monsters in the closets. Reality would take care of any old thing better than a shotgun would.

She found the package of bread lying torn up on the boards Brett had nailed down over the dried-up well. Some of it had been nibbled at. Squirrels, she thought firmly. And birds. Squirrels and birds for certain and apparently they didn’t like that bland white stuff any better than she did. And monsters didn’t eat Wonder Bread, whether they lived in closets or dried-up wells.

She left the enclosure describing the $100,000 dream house crumpled up next to the bread and walked back to her own house.

When evening came, she went upstairs to the bedroom and looked at the shotgun still lying on the bed.

“Slept all day, did you?” she said aloud and laughed at the absurdity of the statement and the sound of her own voice. She’d hardly ever spoken out loud in an empty house; unlike some people, she wasn’t in the habit of talking to herself, never had been. Oh, when that Brett called—if he called—she’d give him what her grandfather had called Billy Blue Hill. You go off shooting up half of Oklahoma and what happens to your stay-at-home wife but she becomes a babbling idiot, talking to shotguns and sundry. And seeing shadows in the back yard.

She cradled the shotgun in her arms. Not thinking, not feeling anything at all, she took it downstairs to the kitchen and stood it against the wall next to the table while she made supper.

She ate staring at the barrel. No, she imagined herself saying to someone who didn’t know anything about how people lived (and she couldn’t think who that might be), no, we generally don’t eat supper with our shotguns handy, or sleep with them either. It’s just a funny kind of thing I’m doing here and I don’t know what for.

A funny kind of thing. Come to think of it, there was lots of room in her life for funny kinds of things. She could set down her spoon, get up, walk around to the shotgun, pick it up and blow a hole right through any one of the four walls, or all of them. She could shoot up the whole house and dance naked in the ruins until Brett came home, if she wanted to. Or she could run upstairs, pack a bag and take off to see the world. She could fling her plate of pork and beans on the floor and roll around in the mess singing; she could phone the fire department and say there was a brush fire raging out of control behind the house; she could start the fire herself and not phone anyone. She could have done anything that came into her head no matter how foolish or malign, and there were plenty of people whose lives were so crowded up with such things that there was barely room for the things they hadn’t done yet. But her life was spacious enough to accommodate a Sears-sized catalogue of antics. Even in the days of Dead-Eye ‘Dee, there’d been plenty of latitude and a look down the coming longitude would have shown nothing but the traditional, famed, proverbial and inescapable straight-and-narrow.

I see, said the imaginary person she had been relating all this to. She froze, bent over her plate. A tingle crept along her scalp from neck to crown. She had forgotten this imaginary person, the one who didn’t know anything about how people lived. She had done with that stray notion but here it was hanging on in her head as though she didn’t know her own mind.

She turned her head to the window; it was closed and she saw only her own reflection against the night. Her reflection nodded at her slowly, with great certainty.

She didn’t hurry. She scraped the rest of the pork and beans into the garbage pail and washed the bowl thoroughly, leaving it to drain in the dish rack. Then she slipped on the two sweaters and the jacket, taking time to adjust the rumples and pull the sleeves down. The shotgun—well, of course, she would take it. She found extra shells in the utility drawer and put them in the empty pocket in the jacket.

Light? She went upstairs and put all the lights on again but she didn’t turn off the kitchen light. There was no more bread to offer it except her own sourdough and she wasn’t going to give it that—that was the good stuff. Tonight she’d fling the rest of the contest brochures at it if it got too active. Maybe then it would get the hint. And if it didn’t, there was the shotgun.

Prepared, she stood in the middle of the kitchen and counted to thirty before she picked up the shotgun and went outside.

There was the smell of coming rain or snow in the chill air and the wind had picked up. Merridee walked forward a few steps, her feet crunching on the newest layer of dead leaves. She’d just keep going until there was some sign that she should stop.

The sign came as a feeling of pressure high on her chest, as if the wind pushing against her had suddenly become deep water. All right, she’d stop. She hefted the shotgun impatiently, wanting to get this whatever it was going to be over with, just as if she didn’t have what amounted to all the time in the world.

She could practically feel all that time all around her, stretching away from her in every direction, past, present and future. Far, far away, almost too far to see was Dead-Eye ‘Dee, still shooting and hitting nearly every bull’s-eye. You could only see her from behind; maybe she’d known even then there were no targets to shoot at ahead of her. After Dead-Eye ‘Dee there was a big patch of present, forty years of Now, one day almost interchangeable with any before or behind it. And then an area that rose up unseeable into the dark, into the night sky for all she knew, but if it had been steps, she would have liked to climb them.

And if she did climb them, what might she find? Nothing so prosaic as, say, a $100,000 castle in the air or heaven. No, something else, something really else, that couldn’t be weighed or measured by the standards of white bread or shotguns or sweepstakes. There would be closet monsters and strange, inexplicable moving shadows and ideas you’d have liked to have in your head to do if you could even have conceived of them, and things—

And things that moved in an atmosphere neither air nor water but something in between. They didn’t eat anything like pork and beans or sourdough; they didn’t eat. They were consumed themselves by something that might have been food in the real world of shotguns and somehow they emerged not just whole but more than they had been before, and they didn’t take notions to do this or that, notions took them and they found themselves in this notion or that one. It was a world where they did not dream; the world dreamed them and lived through them as instruments. And as instruments, their limbs bent in odd angles and directions, and their joints telescoped—

And their faces. She looked at its face now without fear, without anything. Their faces were an asymmetrical arrangement on an oval of puckered openings, none of which were eyes and at the top a large irregular dark pad crisscrossed with tiny lines, like a picture in a science book of human skin enlarged a hundred times to show detail. It would be sensitive, that pad, like sight and smell and taste and touch and hearing all run together and enlarged a hundred times as well, and the size and shape of the patch would determine what the creature it belonged to was like—

“I see,” Merridee said, even though there was no need to speak out loud. But she wanted to tell it the same thing it had told her. She lowered the shotgun, resting the stock on the ground.

The thing bowed its head, aiming the dark pad at her and its arm telescoped out, sliding through the grass and leaves until the three-fingered hand lay within six feet of her. The thing crouched and its arm telescoped inward, dragging the creature’s body closer to her. The pressure against her chest increased.

Poor thing, she thought. It was hungry for its home. And where it touched her mind, it let her know that she was right. Yes, hungry to be home and it was going home soon.

Going home with her help.

Merridee’s nerves gave a jump and she wasn’t sure she had understood it that time. But it prodded her gently in her mind again (she still didn’t think to wonder how it could do that) and she knew she had understood. Going home with her help. She would take it home.

“Me?” she whispered. “I can do that?”

Yes. She could.

She put a hand to her mouth. It was too—All her life—Nothing ever—The thoughts came and went in flashes. She looked back at the house (half a million years of nothing and he couldn’t even find heart enough to take you on a camping trip, leave you behind with the rest of the furniture) and back at her life (Dead-Eye ‘Dee shooting bull’s-eyes with her back to the future because she knew nothing would come to a girl who didn’t even get monsters in her closets) and back at her world (where sweepstakes announcements came solely to show her what other people would be having, to show her that everyone knew exactly where she was, securely at home, at her correct address) and then she turned back to the creature with her eyes tearing in the cold October wind, a million years of life with all that room in it falling away from her old lady body like a worn-out skin. Yes, yes, she would take it home and gladly, if she had to carry it on her back, she would take it home if the effort tore her into a million bloody pieces. She would take it home. Yes.

No.

The negation in her mind was strong and deep enough to make her reel. She caught herself, leaning on the shotgun until the dizziness passed. The thing shimmered in her watery vision. Panting a little, she wiped her eyes and leaned toward the creature with pained confusion. “No?” she whispered. “But I thought—I thought you—” She remembered the thickened medium it lived in, the way its nourishment consumed it (what a bad time it would have had trying to get bread to eat it rather than vice versa); she remembered all the wonderful strangeness it had showed her and thought a question mark at the end. I thought you wanted me to take you home?

Its home receded in her mind and was replaced by the house behind her.

“What?” she asked and even as she spoke, the answer was forming. The dark pad, touched to her open mouth. She tasted something thick. The all-wrong limbs collapsed, the body shrank in on itself, the head going down like a deflating balloon. Gone home, at home in her and in her house and her world, where they would stay together, its own world only in their joint memory. She would remember what it remembered, know the things it knew. But she would remain in the house, waiting for Brett, and it would be home.

“Going home . . . to me? In me?” she said, incredulous.

The image of her open mouth pressed to the pad flashed in her brain again. No pain. No fear. No difference.

“You son of a bitch.” She raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger.

The explosion seemed to echo for hours. She wasn’t used to the noise of a shotgun; it had been years. The shotgun had bucked in her hands but Dead-Eye ‘Dee had always been able to stand up to any kind of recoil. She waited until the ringing in her ears began to fade before she walked over to examine the thing.

She had literally blown it to pieces. There was hardly a fragment larger than the palm of her hand, except for its arm, which had still been extended. It lay like a forgotten pole in the leaves, the fingers limp and boneless. There wasn’t blood, just a kind of syrupy jelly glistening on the dead leaves. She had a crazy urge to scoop the jelly up and touch it to her mouth, but the urge died quickly.

Even as she watched, the pieces of the thing were melting. Like snow. She poked one of the fragments with the barrel of the shotgun and made a face at the slime it left on the metal.

Here it had come creeping around the house, peering into her mind, showing her things, showing her all those wonderful things, touching her, making her feel different and letting her believe it would take her away, take her out of the house of white bread and Brett and sweepstakes—and all it wanted was for her to stay right where she was, knowing what was out there and not being allowed to go to any of it. Just like Brett and everybody else.

“You son of a bitch,” she said again. “To hell with you.” She kicked some leaves over the remains and turned back toward the house. The sight of the hand, melting like all the rest of it, stopped her for a moment. Then she walked on, hoping it had known at the end just what it was like to have a last chance snatched away from it.

It melted away completely during the night in spite of the cold temperatures. There was no trace of it at all in the morning, not even in the frost.

© 1985 by Pat Cadigan.

Originally published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Pat Cadigan sold her first professional science fiction story in 1980; her success as an author encouraged her to become a full-time writer in 1987. She emigrated to England with her son in 1996. She is the author of fifteen books, including two nonfiction books on the making of Lost in Space and The Mummy, a young adult novel, and the two Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novels Synners and Fools. Pat lives in gritty, urban North London with the Original Chris Fowler, her musician son Robert Fenner, and Miss Kitty Calgary, Queen of the Cats. She can be found on Facebook and Google+, and tweets on Twitter as @cadigan.

Author Spotlight:
Pat Cadigan
Erin Stocks

It’s refreshing to read a story when the protagonist has some good years behind them. What inspired Merridee’s character and age?

I wrote this story in 1984. What inspired Merridee’s character and age was the scarcity of same. There are very few stories about older people in our field, or any other, for that matter. Most of the time, older people show up as disapproving parents or other authority figures, or saintly grandparents, or pedophiles who have escaped justice, or just people who can no longer do much of anything. The story remained vague until it occurred to me to put an older woman in as the central character. Then the whole thing gelled.

Merridee thinks with nostalgia of her brothers, how they called her Dead-Eye ‘Dee. Why did you decide to give her this backstory? And the nickname?

This is a case of the character taking over. As soon as I put Merridee in the story, she told me her backstory, complete with nickname. I am but a servant of the story and all its elements. When a character starts telling me about herself, I listen and obey.

Several of your novels touch on the idea of the mind as a place where reality and one’s perception blur together, and it could be argued this happens to Merridee as well, considering the alien speaks to her inside her mind. Was this an intentional choice, or do you find yourself returning to this thematic idea naturally?

I wrote this story before I had written any of my novels. In fact, it’s the first story I wrote after I had quit smoking, when I was pregnant with my son. I had to learn how to write all over again so I was dealing with my own inner struggle—developing new coping mechanisms, habits, etc. At the same time, my situation was the opposite of Merridee’s—I had everything to look forward to, because I was pregnant and happy about it and my life was a great place to be. I had also written several of the stories that would eventually form most of my first novel Mindplayers; I was already writing about issues concerning the mind, the brain, and identity. I doubt I’ve written anything that doesn’t deal with those things in some way, even if very indirectly. I told someone once that most of my work is concerned with identity. Identity is my big theme and that surprised me—I’d always thought it would be sex.

Why was Merridee so receptive to the alien in the first place?

What intelligent person wouldn’t be receptive to a new experience? (To be honest, I think you answer this in your next question.)

Do you suppose, had she not been at her wit’s end with the inertia of her life, she may not have lived through this encounter?

Actually, Merridee probably would have survived no matter what—she’s obviously a survivor, even if her skills and talents have gone untried and unappreciated for decades. I’ve spent a lot of time around older women—I mean, all my life. If you want to know where the feminist movement in the U.S. really began, it was in the factories during World War II. After the war, the men came back and said, “OK, we’re back, what’s for dinner?” And a lot of women said, “I thought the Army taught you how to cook.” My Aunt Loretta met her partner, Dolores, while working in a factory. By the time the war was over, they were running a candy-making business in the basement of an apartment building they’d bought together. There was no way either of them wanted to give any of that up for a husband. (Dolores’s story is even more fascinating, allegedly involving bootlegging and smuggling during the Great Depression.) My mother and these two women raised me and I called all three of them Mom interchangeably. But I digress.

How are you with a shotgun?

Well, the thing about a shotgun is, you don’t have to be much of a shot—you aim it in the general direction of whatever you have to bring down and it makes a big mess. As a target-shooter, however, I am lethal. It’s been quite a few years since I did any shooting but it never takes me long to regain accuracy. There’s probably an alternative timeline where I’m a SWAT-team sniper.

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks is a writer, musician, and graduate of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has been published 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.

Science (and Swindlers) Can Read Your Mind
Jeff Lester

Up until very recently, if you wanted to have your mind read, you had to visit a psychic or a mentalist who would, for a small fee, pretend to do so. These people could tell you things about yourself despite never having met you, convey messages to you from loved ones who’d passed on, or even discover where you’d hidden an item on stage just by touching you. The tools necessary to accomplish all this were surprisingly few—a crystal ball, a beautiful assistant, and a cynically wielded knowledge of human nature. But now there’s another option for those who want to have the contents of their mind exposed: You can go to the Gallant Lab in Berkeley and a team of scientists can read it for you . . . and all they need is an fMRI scanner, a couple of movie trailers, and eighteen million seconds of footage from YouTube.

MRIs See Minds in Motion

Currently the best method for measuring human brain activity, functional magnetic resonance imaging (“fMRI”) doesn’t directly measure the activity of neurons, those cells that process and transmit information—rather, fMRI measures the changes in blood flow, blood oxygenation, and blood volume caused by neural activity. Because neural activity occurs much faster than the corresponding hemodynamic changes, previously it had been thought impossible to use fMRI to decode dynamic activity in the brain. But the team of researchers at the Gallant Lab devised a two stage encoding process that allowed them to model the relationship between the information recorded by the brain and the signals measured with fMRI.

First, a library of visual energy and motion filters is built, spanning a range of specific directions, speeds, and positions with each tied to specific neural activity. Second, each element of the library is processed through an equation that describes how neural activity then influences hemodynamic activity. Because fMRI measures that hemodynamic activity using volumetric pixels (or “voxels”) of 2.0 x 2.0 x 2.5 millimeters, each voxel represents the simultaneous activity of hundreds of thousands of neurons. Through regression analysis, the researchers create an encoder able to map the motion and energy of a visual action to the corresponding voxels measured by fMRI.

With this encoder in place, the researchers tested it by turning the tables and using it as a decoder. Shown a series of trailers for movies like The Pink Panther 2, Star Trek, and Madagascar, subjects in an fMRI scanner had their brain activity recorded. Those records were then processed back into a collection of visual actions. To test the accuracy of the data, a small video library comprising approximately eighteen million seconds of randomly selected YouTube footage was broken down and sorted into the same types of distinct motion directions, positions, and speeds used in the first stage of the encoding process. The hundred clips whose predicted activity was most similar to the observed brain activity were averaged into a “reconstruction” and then compared to the original movie trailer viewed by the subjects. The accuracy of the result, according to the Gallant Lab scientists, is far greater than mere chance and “demonstrate that dynamic brain activity measured under naturalistic conditions can be decoded using current fMRI technology.”

Although the aim of the experiment was to create a computational model of brain activity relating to moving images, possible future applications could include the development of a brain-machine interface for a neural prosthesis (which could work at the prompting of brain activity), or decoding the visual content of mental processes like dreaming, imagining, or remembering.

Even Frauds are Scientific About Their Trade

It all seems a far cry from the world of hucksters and con men, doesn’t it? In fact, scientific attempts to “read” subjects through different approaches, such as Gallant Lab’s breakthrough in neuroimaging, share more things in common with the psychic offering you advice from your deceased Uncle Pete than you might think.

After all, while the goal of science is to expand the greater body of knowledge with hypotheses proven through replicable testing, conmen and fakes need a replicable way to separate the money from a mark. There are three important considerations shared by scientists and charlatans alike.

1. Assemble The Library

Data is crucial. Just as researchers at Gallant had to create dictionaries of positioning and movement, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen developed the Facial Action Coding System to taxonomize human facial expressions. By breaking facial expressions into specific Action Units, Ekman and his collaborators created an index that paved the way for the science of microexpressions popularized in the TV show Lie to Me (based on Ekman’s work). Momentary expressions, unconscious actions on the face before a person has a chance to paste on an expression that allows them to lie, can be recognized and read—allowing the reader to see what’s really in a person’s head.

Similarly, Ricky Jay is widely considered to be one of the best performers of sleight-of-hand and misdirection not only because of his considerable physical dexterity but because he has accrued arguably the greatest collection of writings on stage magic and trickery ever assembled. As the magician Michael Weber explained in a New Yorker profile on the man, “There are two ways you can expand your knowledge [in magic]—through books and by gaining the confidence of fellow-magicians who will explain these things. Ricky to a large degree gets his information from books—old books—and then when he performs for magicians they want to know, ‘Where did that come from?’ And he’s appalled that they haven’t read this stuff.”

By gathering and studying data, scientists (and swindlers) can process related information more quickly, allowing them to make jumps at an intuitive level. As the theoretical physicist Henri Poincaré wrote, “It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.”

In an interview with David Frost, Orson Welles talked about the occupational hazard of phony psychics: becoming a “shut-eye,” which was the term for when a fake fortune teller began to believe they had actual psychic powers. Welles quit his brief career as a fake fortune teller after surprising both his client and himself by correctly announcing she had just lost her husband: “Undoubtedly, it’s not psychic,” Welles told Frost. “Undoubtedly, there was evidence of a tragedy. There were all kinds of things that went into the [mind] and got processed without me crookedly thinking what I’m going to say to her.”

2. Know the Value of Good Code

Converting a piece of information from one form to another is the essence of coding. And according to Gallant Labs, one of the keys to their experiment’s success lay in their construction of the encoding model that allowed them to predict brain activity response to “arbitrary novel movie inputs.” To a much lesser extent, other scientific attempts to read minds or mental states search for the way a person’s thoughts or feelings are encoded in unconscious movements, whether that’s the incomplete shrug or eyebrow twitch studied in microexpressions.

The phenomenally successful mind-reading act of the early 20th century, John and Eva Fay, also knew the value of good code: Like many tag-team mentalist performers, the Fays constructed a cipher made up of ordinary words and phrases that, when used properly, allowed the assistant to tell the blindfolded psychic what they held in their hand, where an audience participant was from, or any number of arcane details, all under the disguise of asking a question. The psychic then announced these details to the astonishment and delight of the audience.

3. Let the Subject Do The Work

One potentially controversial element to the Gallant Labs experiment is that all three of the subjects were co-authors of the paper. In order to build the proper energy motion encoding model for each subject, it was necessary they spend several hours in an MRI watching footage. In order for the encoding and decoding processes to be as accurate as possible, the subjects had to remain alert and focused for long periods of time, chores best done by those fully invested in the research. Because the experiment focused on the early part of the visual system which is mostly free of influence from intention or prior knowledge, Gallant Labs insists it is highly unlikely any cheating or bias skewed the results of their work.

But the best judge of that will be how easily other researchers can recreate these results using different subjects: A difficulty in doing so has injured the reputation of both microexpressions (after receiving such criticism, Paul Ekman no longer publishes his work in peer-reviewed journals, claiming that the work could be replicated by countries the United States views as a potential threat).

By contrast, “cold reading” counts on exactly the sort of subject bias true scientific experiments try to avoid: The cornerstone of pseudo-psychic mind-reading, cold reading is the art of using statements applicable to a wide range of people as if they were personally and specifically directed to the swindler’s mark. Sometimes called Barnum statements (because, as P.T. Barnum claimed about his shows, “they have something for everyone”), they elicit the listener’s trust in the charlatan’s “psychic” ability because the listener doesn’t realize the extent to which the statements are true for everyone. “You say, ‘between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, you had a great change come into your life,’” Welles told David Frost. “Well, that happens in everybody’s life. ‘You’ve got a scar on your knee.’ Everybody fell down and has a scar on their knee!”

With the subject’s trust in place, the psychic uses the conceit of a varying psychic connection that allows them to “hear” several spirits (some of whom the psychic claims are confused or reluctant to speak) to make guesses about their mark—for example, asking if the listener knows someone deceased whose name begins with an “M”—and refining or dismissing them based on the mark’s responses. (If the psychic correctly guesses the name of the deceased person is “Michael,” the mark believes the psychic can really communicate with the spirits. If the psychic guesses wrong, they can say they misunderstood the spirit, and the spirit is actually concerned about someone named Michael—does the subject know who they might mean?) With the use of cold reading and Barnum statements, most marks will believe psychics have told them a tremendous amount of information, when in fact it is the mark who has actually told the psychic.

Because of the way human consciousness works, we believe our knowledge of the world to mostly be based on observed facts, instead of biases and inferences that influence the “facts” we record. As scientists try to read the human mind, they must work doubly hard to ensure their results show what the subject sees, not what they themselves want to see. To stand Poincaré’s statement on its head: “Through intuition, we discover—but it is through science that we prove.”

Jeff Lester has written for io9, Newsarama, and Comix Experience’s Savage Critic website, as well as for Telltale Games’ Sam & Max and CSI series of video games. With Graeme McMillan, he co-hosts Wait, What?, a podcast reviewing comics, graphic novels, and the latest developments in the comics industry. He currently divides his time between San Francisco and the amorphous internal landscape of his own head.

The Parting Glass
Andrew Penn Romine

I gulp the whiskey and it burns my plastic throat, sets my nutrient sac on fire. I’ve got filters, but they haven’t been changed in six months. Too expensive. It takes a lot of alcohol to saturate them, and I tax my system beyond specifications.

Finnegan’s is my favorite bar on Pontianak Station, a wreck of plastic furniture and faux shamrocks designed to appeal to the hardworking Euros and Northos who do the dirty work that drives Pontianak’s port industry. Django, the proprietor, haunts the deck behind the bar molded to look like beams of wood and dispenses me another Santiago single-malt. He doesn’t say anything but makes a face as I pour it down.

I’ve been gulping Hermán Santiago’s shit all my life. His bad whiskey pales in comparison.

The vid hanging over the bar spatters my retina with frenetic grav-ball action: Titanics versus Icers. Icers don’t stand a chance, but I root for them anyway. I like the underdog.

“Jake, you got company,” Django warns in Tagalog, breaking his considerate silence.

I see their reflections in the amber mirror of my whiskey—a pair of thick goons in classic black jumpsuits, a flare of white at the collar.

Trinity thugs. Both wear the same impassive squarish face. Probably clones, certainly augments.

The meatwall parts like a pair of cathedral doors and she steps through, haloed by cheesy stained glass panels of leprechauns and Stonehenge. She’s wearing clerical black, too, but the crosses on her lapels are red.

Terah Castillo. Red Priest, 1.5 meters, compact. Definitely an augie, like me. I should know. I’ve seen most of her wetware.

“Terah.” I haven’t seen her in twenty years; she looks the same—great. Rejuve treatments. I ignore my thumping mechanical heart. It isn’t supposed to notice things like that anymore.

“You look—different, Jake. Took me awhile to track you down,” she speaks in Spanish. She never much liked English, and saves the Tagalog for cursing.

“I didn’t want to be found. Five points to the Trinity mob.” If she has found me, it means he has, too.

“I thought you stopped keeping score,” she says.

“No, I just stopped paying attention to the clock. Why are you here?” I finish my whiskey and signal to Django for another. Terah shakes her head when I offer her one. She knows the old man’s stuff is crap, too.

She scowls, face scrunching like a kid’s. Fans the flames of my chemical passion. You have to work hard to feel anything when so much of yourself is mechanical. Humanity fades, you know?

“He wants to see you again.”

I’m almost disappointed she isn’t trying to kill me. That, I could handle.

Terah’s glance flicks to the meatshields, and they back away. If she shoots them some telemetry or radio burst, I don’t pick it up. My receivers finally died three months ago when a rowdy Finnegan’s patron blasted me with a concealed EMP pistol. There are oceans of words in her glance.

“I’m out, Terah. You know that.”

“Mr. Santiago doesn’t know that.”

“Of all the people in the República, he should.”

Once upon a time I busted skulls for pay. Boxing, Muay Thai, later played enforcer for Trinity, even though I never converted like Terah. Job paid for a lot of augments, but only as long as I kept fighting, and I got tired of that. Now, Django pays me in whiskey for throwing bums from his bar. Not a bad living, but I can’t trade it for new parts.

“So he’s on Pontianak?” That thought is accompanied by an unwelcome twinge of fear. My adrenal pumps have been sticking lately.

“No. But he wants to fly you out to Santiago.”

Santiago Station is the old man’s private Bernal sphere orbiting Rhea. He went hermit fifteen years ago. Hasn’t left it since. Rarely has visitors. Rumor has it he’s really indulged himself—the interior of the habitation sphere is a jungle, modeled after some idyllic spot on Old Earth.

Terah sees the questions flicker across my eyes. She could always read my thoughts, even without a datalink.

“My promise, on whatever we once had, Jake. This is not a hit. If it was you would have never seen me coming.”

She makes the old sign of the cross and raises her palms to show me there are no hidden particle emitters under the skin.

“What did we have?” I snarl, slapping down a pair of golden cronás for Django’s long-suffering hospitality. The plastic coins disappear before the flimsy bar top quits vibrating. Terah doesn’t answer.

“So what does he want?”

“He’s got some old associates to track down. They’re tough bastards, and he needs people he can trust on the job.”

“What’s in it for me?” I ask.

“A new body.”

There’s something. I stagger from my squeaky stool, the frayed myomers in my back groaning with the weight of my armored skeleton. I’ve never wanted to see Santiago again unless it was to kill him. In what passes for dreams during my sleep cycles, I’ve already done that a thousand times. Bastard has it coming for the things he did to Mama and me. But there’s no way around it: I’m falling apart. I can get a new body or kill Santiago with the particle beam emitter concealed in my right arm.

Either way works for me.

“I’ll give him another chance,” I grind the words out, pressing my fury into a tiny knot.

“What about me? Do I get another chance, too?” I see hunger in her eyes, and it surprises me that my broken body responds.

After all, I’m not all machine.

The Trinity Mob doesn’t require vows of celibacy for all of its enforcers. Usually, most of the Red Priests do it to prove their dedication to the organization. Terah’s one of Santiago’s favorites, so she doesn’t need to take the vow to prove anything.

She takes me back to one of the topside resorts along the eastern strand of the Sunflower Sea. Looks like a cathedral. Santiago owns it, no doubt. She leaves the goons in the plush, glittering lobby, and we ascend to the crystal night of the penthouse. Pontianak’s mirrors have long since been set to night-cycle, and the distant lights of the slums crowded along the far shore twinkle like diseased stars on the artificial sea. We are pointed away from Saturn, but its rings section the sky in silver arcs. I don’t spend much time looking. Terah and I sweat out old grudges amid tangled sheets and raveled limbs.

I pretend the things we do aren’t just business, and for a while, so does she. Once upon a time, it wasn’t like this. Under all our meat, we’re mostly machine now, and something snaps in my hip socket. Our history comes crashing between us with blind, groping fingers, and whatever romance we thought we might rekindle is clinically dead long before we finish.

A half-hour later, I’m back out on the patio, feeling the wind in my hair, letting Pontianak’s night-cycle winds cool my skin. My adrenal pump is malfunctioning again, and I fight the resulting urge to hurl myself off the balcony into the sea below. More of Santiago’s rocket-fuel whiskey helps. Terah joins me outside, wrapped in the iridescent bedsheet. She trails her fingers along the wall, watching the lights of the night ferries.

“I wouldn’t say this to anyone but you, Jake, but Si Santiago, may katok sa ulo.” She sits between the water and me.

I laugh and gulp the whiskey. Nothing new. Santiago lost it a long time ago.

“He’s built himself a replica of an ancient Spanish Empire mission on his station.”

“And this is supposed to make me feel better about going to see him?” Santiago has always taken his religion seriously, even if most people stopped believing in the Church as anything more than a racket. He has always been pushy about it, too, despite his own many sins.

“Sorry. You could have said ‘no.’”

“I still might.” I choke my words with another drink.

I remember the last time I saw Santiago, with tears in his eyes and his pruny old-fashioned grandfather face cratered like Enceladus after a meteorite strike. He had refused cosmetic enhancements since before I was born in the underside of the Mindanao ghettos. He had the best life extension enhancements under the hood, of course, but he came from a time where age was respected, a requirement for leadership.

“That’s not all,” Terah continues, hugging herself in the chill. “He finally reskinned himself.”

My eyes must be bulging from my skull because Terah laughs.

“Young body. Maybe twenty years or thereabouts, male. He spends most of his time performing mass for the androids who tend the garden.”

I wonder what else he performs on them.

“Is this about trying to convert me again?” Now I’m gulping from the whiskey like it’s an oxygen bottle in vacuum. I’m half joking, but I think I’ll jump from the roof if she says yes.

“I doubt it.”

I think about the last time I saw Santiago, right after Mama died. How he begged of me with teary eyes for forgiveness, absolution I would not give. In the end, he had to let me go. Or so I’d thought.

“He will,” I say.

The República de Saturno is a whole solar system in and of itself. Sixty-two moons, twelve distinct rings, a hundred and twenty-two planetoids and fifty-five artificial stations ranging from the huge habitats of Mindanao and Pontianak over Titan to the smaller corporate factories or private stations like Santiago. That’s the whole R.S., give or take. We left Old Earth behind almost a century and a half ago; men like Hermán Santiago ensured we remained independent and economically strong. Small matter that they carved out empires for themselves along the way.

We burn five days in a private shuttle from Pontianak station out to the moon of Rhea. She glistens like a shattered snowball, twirling the skirts of her own faint ring suggestively at our approach.

One of Terah’s goon twins is flying the shuttle while she points out the viewport at the distant ball of Santiago. It looks like a cocktail onion five-hundred meters in diameter, speared by a long toothpick. The ends of the toothpick are tufted with enormous heat radiator panels, and comm dishes sprout like immense, inverted mushrooms from each end. I catch a glint of emerald from one of the mirrors ringing the station—a reflected peek into the polar windows of the spinning habitat sphere to the rainforest inside. So many trees and no people—an obscene luxury in a population starved for space.

The station’s curtain of mirrors catches the distant sunlight and also Saturn’s glare, becoming hard bright rings of light that blot out any further examination. Our shuttle aligns with the central axis and drifts toward an outstretched docking arm.

“Ready?” Terah asks.

I shrug and feel a metallic crunch in my left shoulder actuator. An amber warning flakes across my retinas, and neurostim redirects the pain. Another part to replace. I need this new body. I’m still limping from my failed night with Terah.

“I’ve never been ready for Santiago,” I say, mostly telling the truth.

We dock and are met inside by another pair of Trinity Goons, with the same pale, squared-off face. More clones. We fly into a vast corridor of the central shaft in a gyrocopter. The gyro’s powered by thrusters in micro-g, but one of the goons sets the tilt-rotors to standby. The portholes of Santiago’s labs flash past—golden disks of light that reveal nothing of the contents of the room beyond. We pass a few bots in exo-packs, servicing the transfer ducts. I see no other humans, augies or otherwise.

I’m on edge, wondering why the hell I agreed to come. My adrenal pumps are still failing, but I’m beginning to think that the sweet panic coursing through my veins might be actual fear. I can’t tell anymore.

We exit the gaping mouth of the central corridor into the blue sky over a sweltering jungle. Light streams in from the south polar mirrors, and I can almost believe it’s all real, that I’m planetside. Then I see the upward curve of the horizon, the forested sky hanging above. The flyer swoops over a half-klick of jungle, a lush carpet and a disgusting tribute to Santiago’s money and power. The azure diamonds of a river belts the equator—a pumping station disguised as a waterfall at one end—the butter-colored stones of a 17th century Spanish mission at the other.

“You weren’t kidding. He’s really bought into this,” I say.

Terah nods as the flyer descends into the nearly 1 g pull close to the jungle floor. We put down in a clearing outside the mission. I see what look like robed monks tending vegetable gardens. The glint of chrome beneath their hoods betrays their artificial nature. Androids, bots, or reskinned consciousnesses—they give me the creeps.

A track of red dirt leads from the clearing into the jungle. Flanking the path are two TK-A-5047 sentry drones. Tikbalangs. Squat killbots with oversized crescent heads, a chicken’s frantic bipedal gait, and twin miniguns mounted dorsally. Reliable, deadly—they eye us with compound sensors that glimmer with programmed suspicion. Their antennae twitch toward us like a horse swatting flies.

As soon as I step out, the flyer lifts off.

“Good luck,” Terah calls. I’d prefer it if she would hang around, but Santiago is the only one who is going to be doing any begging.

It’s musty inside the mission’s chapel, and I wear the humidity like a second skin. High, narrow windows to my left let in light stained in patterns of judgment and redemption. Ranks of rustic wooden pews march past side-chapels to the altar at the far end. Paneled with gold and the sad-eyed visages of haunted saints, it also features an out-sized crucifix and Trinity’s scrawny, dying god.

My eyes are on the figure standing behind the altar. Like the bots outside, he wears the simple brown habit of a monk. As I approach, the young man looks up and smiles.

“Welcome, Jacob. It’s good to see you again.” The voice is young, but I recognize my one-time employer and personal devil. His Spanish is crisp, formal, like he watches too many period vids. Judging from the fantasy he’s constructed inside Santiago Station, I guess he does. He has the same quick brown eyes I remember from long ago. Anger electrifies my neural wiring as I realize his new body is not too different from the one I once had.

He sweeps the altar with a linen cloth. I see the host wafers stacked on a golden plate. A burnished goblet of gold sits nearby. He moves, languid in the heat, like a snake hunting prey. Even while he’s playing altar boy, he’s dangerous.

I decide to kill him before he has a chance to strike.

“You’re not the Hermán Santiago I remember,” I say, giving the silent signal for the particle beam in my arm to start cycling. My arm grows warm, buzzes with energy. His security scans will probably pick that up, but I don’t care.

“Oh, but I assure you I am Hermán Santiago, Jacob.”

I felt less vulnerable when he used to call me Mr. Batao.

“Welcome home. Have you come to kill me after all?”

I nod. But then I remember he’s promised me a new body.

Santiago’s placid gaze betrays no fear at my admission. He gathers the wafers of the host and wraps them carefully in the square of linen. He unlocks a box—real wood—behind the altar and places them inside.

“I find the androids poor officiants in the Sacrament of Communion. I prefer to serve myself.” He’s ignoring my threats. He counts on me being powerless again. But I wasn’t a full cyborg last time we met.

I shuffle on my feet, widen my stance. I wonder how many of his Tikbalangs are scurrying through to the jungle towards the mission, miniguns chattering. My hips ache; my shoulder’s locking up. I could have fought my way out, once. But not today. I wonder how long I’ve got to live.

 Santiago locks the host away as if we are just standing in the middle of the jungle with all the time in the world. He leaves the goblet of wine where it is. Standing with his hands folded behind the limestone altar, he’s a cherub beneath his tortured god. Is he about to pronounce a benediction over my death? Offer some prayer to usher me to oblivion?

The chapel isn’t climate controlled, and the humidity of the jungle flutters my heat sinks; other parts of me sweat.

“Despite my appearance, Jacob, I’m an old man. And as a man grows old, he wants to gather all the things that he loves around him.”

I almost puke nutrient paste. I gauge the distance between us and wonder whether I can tackle him and break his neck before his security systems fry me. But the body he wears is too much like mine when I was mostly meat. After all this time and all he has done to me, I want to look like that again.

“What’s the job, Santiago?” This is business. I have to keep it together.

He laughs, almost girlish, and flashes a beatific smile of perfect white teeth.

“You’ll like my price.”

“Not sure I will,” I lie. He knows I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t already accepted.

I hate him for that.

“You know I have always considered you family, Jacob,” he begins, walking out to the front pew, where I stand stiff-shouldered and ready to fire.

“Sure had a funny way of showing it,” I spit, remembering his nocturnal visits to me and Mama in the Mindanao ghettos. I never found a lock for my door strong enough to keep him out of my room.

“I know that I was not always kind,” he answers, “but I always took care of you.”

“I didn’t need your pity. I don’t need your guilt.”

“Jacob. You’re my son. Let me help you.”

I can’t kick his revelation or crush the trachea of his lies. My particle blaster won’t vaporize his words.

“You have nothing I want,” I snarl.

The youth waves my denials away with a soft, graceful hand.

“Then at least let me offer explanations. You’re a clone, of course. One of many.”

“How does that change anything?” I raise a trembling hand, seconds away from opening the hidden firing port.

“I’ve seeded the República with thousands of genetic copies of me. You may refuse my offer, others won’t.”

“I’ll find them. Kill them all.” If Santiago abused them like he did me, it would be a mercy to end their lives.

“Before the killing starts,” he sniffs, “at least hear me out.” He reaches for his goblet of wine.

I nod as he drifts in and out of the kaleidoscope light cast by the chapel windows, steps away from the altar with his cup.

“I feel a man should have purpose with every action. You contemplate pointless suicide now. Let me offer an alternative. For fifty years, we have had the technology to reskin ourselves into new bodies when our old ones give out. We’ve even had the ability to clone ourselves and transfer consciousness. But until now, we could never recombine what was separated.”

He raises the glass to me. Dark liquid the color of blood swirls within.

“Now we can.”

He tells me other things, too. About nano-assemblers and distributed consciousness clouds. Tiny robots swimming in a cup. I hear part of it.

“You want me to join you in your sick head?” I choke out the words.

“Yes. We will be the first to experience Unity. A whole from two broken halves.” His eyes are shining with tears.

“Eventually, we’ll combine every other part of us scattered across the República.”

Santiago is definitely loko. Why he would want the misery and suffering of every clone and offspring in his head I can’t figure. Then I see his tortured god, rough-hewn from the very wood of his cross, gazing down on us. His eyes are painted the same brown as Santiago’s. I wonder if Santiago plans to nail himself to a couple of pieces of wood, too.

I stare at the goblet, a sudden clarity to my thoughts. Just killing Santiago is not enough. But inside his head I could do some real damage. My mind is still strong, even if my metal body is falling apart.

Unity my ass.

“There’s new life in this glass, Jacob. Drink.”

His brown eyes are wide and credulous. He thinks he has me, and I pretend he does.

I snatch the glass from his hand, and see for an instant, my reflection, an inhuman face glaring back with shining red eyes. A sweet musk rises from the cup, rotting grapes and machine oil. The liquid is sluggish and grainy. The first sip sets my mouth on fire.

I choke the rest down.

To his health.

I run through the jungle and the thorns in my head tear at me worse than the thorns under my feet. Dammed behind my rage, Santiago wails. I wear his boy’s body now, in control for once. Inside his mind is a searing white fire, and my soul burns in the flames. But I am still Jake, and the long, graceful limbs of the altar boy propel me across tangles of root and vine. Santiago has top-of-the-line wetware installed; I can see through the jungle almost as if it isn’t there. The overlaid maps show me the best path through the labyrinth of trees to the axis of the station’s spin. I can escape back through the central corridor.

I shut down most of the tikbalangs that pursue with a nudge of thought. The system recognizes my passcodes. I know everything Santiago knows: but a pair of the killerbots lope through the bush at twenty-five meters back, their loyalty uncertain. The old man clutches at my consciousness, tearing off fistfuls of memory. I hold on to what it means to be Jake Batao a second at a time. I’m used to that.

And every second, Jake grows stronger. When I escape the station, I’ll hunt all of Santiago’s victims down. Put them out of their misery. I’ll let Santiago’s consciousness ride along and enjoy the show. Let him watch as I destroy his dream one soul at a time. Then maybe I’ll end it with a gun to the temple. We’ll go meet his god together.

I sift through Santiago’s memories for the best way off the station. He tries to block me with filthy memories of my Mama. They cut like razorwire, but I push past them. There’s a personal shuttlecraft docked in the command module. I can fly it. There are at least a dozen safe houses two day’s burn from here. I can chew threw his false identities for months before the Trinity thugs find me.

I burst through the trees and onto a sward of green grass rising gently ahead of me. The gravity is light here, almost nonexistent at the pole. I bounce towards a ladder that leads to a service hatch beneath the central corridor. But from that gaping tunnel, another flyer roars. Behind the windscreen of the open cockpit is Terah, long black hair fluttering behind her like a ribbon of smoke.

Damn. I had forgotten about her.

The flyer’s engine subsides to a whine, and she drifts down a dozen meters above me. Fortunately, she’s alone.

“Mr. Santiago, what’s wrong?”

One of Santiago’s memories thrusts into my thoughts like a plasma torch.

Hundreds of clones. Perhaps thousands of offspring.

Then I know that Terah’s either my daughter or my sister or my clone, and I’m pissed at Santiago all over again. He laughs, and it echoes deep within the vaults of my mind.

She’s wearing combat shades, but I know how that place on her brow crinkles as she studies me, tries to figure out what’s wrong. Why Santiago might be behaving so strangely. She looks back into the jungle—probably scanning for the old Jake. Just then, the pair of rogue tikbalangs burst out of the jungle, their miniguns whirring.

The ladder shines like a savior beneath the mouth of the central corridor.

Spikes of white fire chew through pressurized atmosphere at 7,000 rounds per minute. I hope those bullets don’t tear through the hull. Good thing the altar boy is also equipped with the latest neurostim reflexes. But in their confusion over my identity, the tikbalang drones target Terah’s flyer. She jerks the controls and slides sideways, but moves in slow motion.

I abandon the hope of the ladder, and do something stupid instead. I’m practically flying, and I interpose myself between Terah and the tikbalangs, forgetting I no longer have a cyborg body.

I am unraveling. My consciousness drifts on the artificial winds of Santiago Station. The air is swarming with nano-bots I didn’t see before. My mind, freed of flesh, swarms with them. My thoughts and emotions whirl in tangled vortices.

I think I’m still Jake. Jake but maybe Santiago or some new mind born of both. Santiago’s not laughing now. He’s screaming, terrified of the darkness of my mind and the weight of our souls crashing together. There’s vertigo and utter darkness and no redemption in our lives, no Unity in our consciousness. Just the howl of lost souls. I remember being born in Manila—on Old Earth when it was still green, and I also remember hunting for food in the trash-ducts of Mindanao Station in the gray, gray light of the lower decks.

I try to push the bastard’s memories away, to remain free of their taint, but they cling to me like droplets of black tar. No flames of understanding light my path, no forgiveness or peace. I scream, too. When the others are absorbed, how will I survive?

The tikbalangs stand sentry over my bleeding bodies. Yeah, Terah, too. My attempt at self-sacrifice is a failure, like everything else I’ve ever tried to do. I send one of Santiago’s acolytes to fetch more wine, but she’ll die before she can drink it. Too late, Jake. Too late.

I drift toward the hulks of the sentry drones, mentally thumbing the pressurization overrides. I could expose the fragile jungle to vacuum, burst this Saturnian pearl like the tikbalangs shredded Terah and Santiago. Add a new sparkle to Rhea’s rings.

The old man pushes back with the force of his accumulated years of treachery. Cajoling, bribing, even begging. I hesitate, and funnel my mind-swarm into the primitive brain of the tikbalang. A new body, but not the one I wanted.

I stalk back toward the mission, where the android priests gather vegetables that no one will eat.

The pools of our minds run together, but my thoughts tug like a riptide, still stronger than Santiago’s. One last effort and I order depressurization of Santiago Station.

I dig into the soft earth of the jungle with my steel claws, immune to the howling vacuum. Eventually the winds cease and the jungle freezes. The shred of Santiago’s consciousness shrieks at me, calling me a coward. I ignore him.

I remain still inside the tikbalang, waiting to be reborn.

Andrew Penn Romine lives in Los Angeles where he works as a visual effects animator. A graduate of the 2010 Clarion West workshop, his stories have appeared in the anthologies Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring 20s and Rigor Amortis, as well as online at Crossed Genres. You can find him co-blogging at Inkpunks.com, mixing cocktails as the Booze Nerd at FunctionalNerds.com, and musing on his own blog at andrewpennromine.com. Follow his day-to-day adventures on Twitter: @inkgorilla.

Author Spotlight:
Andrew Penn Romine
John Remy

Not only is this your first pro-sale, it’s one of the first science fiction stories you’ve written. How did you choose to break from your previous fantasy settings? Was this a challenge for you?

I’d been toying with this story in anticipation of my Clarion West Workshop Week 6 instructor Ian McDonald (whose own fiction I admire). Tired, and feeling like I might not be up to the challenge, I was on the verge of writing something else instead. I remember voicing my reluctance in conversation with Nisi Shawl and Eileen Gunn at a party and they told me to just write the story. So I did.

There are aspects of “The Parting Glass,” including the transhuman elements and the Saturnian setting, that evoke John Varley. Did his works help inspire this story?

I’m a big fan of Varley’s Eight Worlds stories for many reasons, but one of the things I like best are his bizarre, transhuman characters. Despite all the changes they undergo in body and mind, they still seem very human to me—full of all the strengths and frailties we’ve always had. He’s written some of the toughest, most vulnerable characters that I’ve read. I find them fascinating and am drawn to writing similar types in my own fiction. Obviously, that setting also includes the planets of our solar system as individual astro-political entities. That concept is a fun playground.

Were there any other influences?

Richard K. Morgan for his noirish SF, Charles Stross for his unflinching worldbuilding, and Ian McDonald, of course, for his gritty portrayal of non-Western cultures. In a more general sense, I am inspired by the works of John Steinbeck as well, who pits his protagonists against stark, epic landscapes and societal forces. “The Parting Glass” just touches on that very lightly, and many of the spaces in it are claustrophobic to a degree, but the influences are there.

Richard K. Morgan is known for creating main characters that are augmented outcasts, and he envisions cultural settings based on today’s developing countries. I love that you’ve imagined a Filipino archipelago in Saturn’s rings and moons. Can you tell us more about what inspired you to create the gritty Jake and his richly described environment?

Who knows what the colonization of our solar system will look like? Old narratives always suggested that the U.S. and other Western powers would be the dominant shapers of our future in space. I think with the rise of Second and Third world nations today, we could be looking at a very different reality and I wanted to explore that possibility in this story. It seemed a natural fit to transpose the cultures of Oceania to the artificial “archipelago” of moons and space habitats in the rings of Saturn.

As for the grittiness of the setting, all you have to do is look to our own world to see the growing gap between the rich and poor. I’m going to sound a bit pessimistic here, but it’s hard for me to imagine that even when we get around to building our gleaming cities in space we won’t still have the same old human problems of the have and have-nots.

I especially love how you depicted the incremental malfunctioning of Jake’s body: the unchanged filters, his fried receivers, his sticking adrenal pumps. I see parallels to the betrayal of our own bodies as we get sick or grow old. Can you comment on this, and the importance of cybernetic enhancements and full body renewal in your story?

Well, I go back to what I mentioned earlier about the contrast between our augmented selves and our essential humanity. Even if we find some way to live forever, whether it’s through augmenting or discarding our flesh, we are still the same people in our heads. Anxieties about mortality and all those million little neuroses that make us us will still be there. Maybe our silicon bodies or transubstantiated brains will still be fuming over past slights and petty hatreds. I think we’ll still feel the march of time in our minds, and that’s bound to age us.

In the bar, Jake says that he’s “been gulping Hermán Santiago’s shit his whole life.” This is our first glimpse of Santiago. Jake’s animosity towards him is strong, and propels this story, but there is still much that we don’t know at the end. Can you tell us more about their relationship, or at least why you chose to conceal aspects of it?

Santiago seeded copies of himself throughout the Republicá because it fed his ego, his desire for some sort of godhood. It’s certain that he took liberties with these people that he just considered extensions of himself. He broke into young Jake’s bedroom at night, and while we’re not sure explicitly what transpired there, we know it led to a lifetime of manipulation and control of Jake. When Jake was finally able to escape from that cycle, he carried a lot of anger with him.

It’s a careful balance of what to reveal and when to reveal it. In the end, I really wanted to focus more on Jake’s fateful decisions in the present rather than dwelling too much on the past.

Before we part, is there anything else you’d like to tell the readers about “The Parting Glass”?

I’m reluctant to say what anyone should or shouldn’t read into this story, but I hope that anyone who’s ever considered writing science fiction but was afraid to try will go ahead and give it a shot. It’s fun!

Finally, what do we have to look forward to from Andrew Penn Romine in the future?

I’m working on several short stories at the moment, and have a few ideas for more set in the world of “The Parting Glass.” Sometimes it takes awhile to let those ideas percolate, though. I’m also working on my first novel. It’s not science-fiction but it definitely continues to explore some of the same issues that “The Parting Glass” raises.

John Remy is a graduate of the Clarion West 2010 workshop. He has fiction published in the Rigor Amortis and Broken Time Blues anthologies, and has a story forthcoming in the Pseudopod horror podcast and a graphic novel collaboration with Galen Dara in the Mormons & Monsters anthology. John blogs with the Inkpunks and Functional Nerds. John lives in Southern California with his two Dalek-loving children, and partner and fellow SF-writer Tracie Welser.

Cyborg vs. Cyborg
Nigel Watson

When biology and technology is mixed and matched, you get a big bad mean biomechanical fighting machine. Well, that’s what happens to cyborgs in the cinema and on our TV screens.

Cyborgs have to come to terms with their vulnerable, emotional, biological nature in combination with the hard, emotionless mechanics that give them superhuman strength and abilities. Not surprisingly, some turn against biology and want an ordered, rational, mechanical universe, others try to keep their “humanity” and free us all from the chains of evil. What wins out: the human spirit or the technical perfection of a robot? What has the advantage: the good, the bad, or the ugly? Let’s take a look.

Evil Wins the Early Battles

First in the ring is Steve Austin (Lee Majors), The Six Million Dollar Man, who is pitted against a replicant from Blade Runner.

Austin is a good guy with an infrared bionic eye and new legs and right arm. He can run at high speed and is strong. In the opposing corner, the genetically engineered replicant is equally strong and agile. What gives the replicant the edge is that it has no empathy and is highly intelligent. The replicant would win by asking the ex-astronaut brooding philosophical questions, or by squeezing his head in a thigh lock.

Needing no introduction, Darth Vader—given the opportunity to fight the replicant—would stride into the ring swishing his light sabre and exert “the Force” against his opponent. The replicant can dance around the sabre and laugh at the notion of a universal Force,, yet Vader would win by telling the replicant in his rasping voice that he’s its daddy. With that bombshell the replicant would wither into the shape of an origami unicorn—no, that wasn’t a dream or false memory, I think.

Round Two Will Come Down To Collective Personality

The Darth may have cleared out the early contestants, but later battles will present more of a challenge. Dr Who’s Cybermen are more of a challenge for Vader as they are basically a clunking robot operated by a brain that has been sucked dry of its emotions and sense of self. High levels of radiation or gold bullets will finish off a Cyberman, and they are not very agile. However, they can kill their opponent by electrocuting them with their touch.

Since Vader would not be easy to fight on his own terms, a Cyberman would be best advised to deploy their cybermat weapon against him. The cybermat weapon gives off small metallic “life forms” that are built around the brains of birds or cats, and are able to tune into and feed off the brain waves of humans. In this manner, they would suck the Force from Vader and render him defunct. It seems there are things in the universe more powerful than the Force, and they have the brains of kitties. They Cybermen would win the first battle. But Vader’s just one man.

The Borg are a more formidable enemy who have plagued the Star Trek Federation for generations. “Resistance is futile” is their message to anyone who tries to fight their mission to assimilate biological beings into their collective cyborg society. They are more than just one man—they are every man. The Borg drones generally have a bionic eye and a robotic arm and are under the collective rule of the Queen Borg. They are tough to kill as they are resistant to phaser fire.

In combat with a Cyberman, a Borg would find an enemy who on many levels is similar to itself. Cybermen also have no individuality and their mission is to survive and convert humanoids into Cybermen, through a process of cyber-conversion; whereas the humanoid Borg add bits of technology onto biological entities like attachments to a Swiss army knife, the Cybermen stick brains into exoskeletons or wrap their victims in cybernetic shells.

The Cybermen, besides using the cybermat, often use a wide range of hand weapons or have weapons built into their arm, chest or helmet. They are certainly well armed but they don’t seem that intelligent, and if Dr. Who can beat them with only a sonic screwdriver, then I think the Borg, with their collective willingness to sacrifice any of their interchangeable units, would get the better of the Cybermen.

Does Humanity Save the Day in the Final Battle?

RoboCop, as former police officer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), is used to fighting all forms of evil and would of course resist the Borg with all his might. Although he is encased in a robotic body he has a flickering sense of his own humanity that guides his actions, and he knows the difference between good and evil—unlike the Borg who are a hive of evil-doers without enough self-awareness to realize it. Indeed, RoboCop can be seen as a Christ-like figure who suffered death and resurrection as a cyborg. In life he was shown to be a good man and an honest cop. But will this hurt him the way it did Steve Austin?

The Borg might be intelligent and tough, but RoboCop has a good track record for dealing with badass technology. He lets his understanding of good and evil guide him, not hinder him. He was able to take on the powerful Enforcement Droid robot series 209, who was armed with heat-seeking missiles, gas grenade launchers, two 20mm cannons and a 20mm gun. Robocop has a good history of taking on a better-armed foe. He even uses his opponents’ weapons against them. He acquires the experimental Cobra Assault Cannon from a local crime boss and takes the boss and his gang out with it. With some luck, he’d be able to defeat the Borg with weapons that they themselves created.

The final showdown is between those two cyborg gods of the eighties: RoboCop and the Terminator. The flesh-covered Terminator has a fully armored combat body that can withstand gunfire, heavy weapons, and even explosions. Although the Terminator has at its core a chrome exoskeleton and hydraulic servomechanisms, it can be modified—it can also learn to acknowledge or even feel emotions. The Terminator T101 comes in the form of Arnold Schwarzenegger and can be a hero or a villain according to the demands of the various sequels and spin-offs of the original film. The battle is the ultimate test of man versus machine. Does something that was originally—and mostly remains—a man win out, despite his relatively primitive body? Or does a superior robot with a little man around the edges, and some learned humanity, have the advantage?

At first sight, it would seem that a Terminator would easily grab and smash poor old RoboCop into an unattractive pile of scrap metal. Yet, RoboCop is well protected by his armored body and is armed with a powerful weapon. Although having the emotional weaknesses of a human, he also has the human ability to think quickly and adapt to rapidly changing situations.

RoboCop would have to resort to sophisticated methods of combat rather than meet his rival head-on. Yet I don’t think it would be such an easy battle for RoboCop. His best opportunity is to take action against the Terminator as it arrives back from the future. In its naked state it experiences a few seconds of disorientation, so RoboCop could use those moments to make his move.

One idea, which he could steal from Independence Day, is to plant a computer virus into Arnie’s head. However, that depends on whether he is wireless-enabled or has a suitable input socket accessible to RoboCop— not likely, eh? It wasn’t a very convincing plot device in Independence Day either . . .

A far more credible battle scenario is for RoboCop to lure Arnie into a nearby steel mill. After much fist-on-fist action and plenty of shooting, RoboCop could trick Arnie into diving into a huge vat of molten metal—a 100% certain method of disposing of Terminators. Nuclear missiles should blast any left-over bits of Arnie that might try getting away. Easy really, and it would prove for certain that skin is superior to tin.

Nigel Watson holds a BA degree in Psychology (Open University) and a BA (Hons) degree in Film and Literature (University of Warwick). He lives in Plymouth, U.K., with his wife and three children and has an unhealthy interest in alien abduction research. He is the author of The Alien Deception (2009), Portraits of Alien Encounters (1990), Supernatural Spielberg (with Darren Slade, 1992) and editor/writer of The Scareship Mystery (2000).

The Hammer of God
Arthur C. Clarke

It came in vertically, punching a hole ten km wide through the atmosphere, generating temperatures so high that the air itself started to burn. When it hit the ground near the Gulf of Mexico, rock turned to liquid and spread outward in mountainous waves, not freezing until it had formed a crater two hundred km across.

That was only the beginning of disaster: Now the real tragedy began. Nitric oxides rained from the air, turning the sea to acid. Clouds of soot from incinerated forests darkened the sky, hiding the sun for months. Worldwide, the temperature dropped precipitously, killing off most of the plants and animals that had survived the initial cataclysm. Though some species would linger on for millenniums, the reign of the great reptiles was finally over.

The clock of evolution had been reset; the countdown to Man had begun. The date was, very approximately, 65 million B.C.

Captain Robert Singh never tired of walking in the forest with his little son Toby. It was, of course, a tamed and gentle forest, guaranteed to be free of dangerous animals, but it made an exciting contrast to the rolling sand dunes of their last environment in the Saudi desert—and the one before that, on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. But when the Skylift Service had moved the house this time, something had gone wrong with the food-recycling system. Though the electronic menus had fail-safe backups, there had been a curious metallic taste to some of the items coming out of the synthesizer recently.

“What’s that, Daddy?” asked the four-year-old, pointing to a small hairy face peering at them through a screen of leaves.

“Er, some kind of monkey. We’ll ask the Brain when we get home.”

“Can I play with it?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. It could bite. And it probably has fleas. Your robotoys are much nicer.”

“But . . .”

Captain Singh knew what would happen next: He had run this sequence a dozen times. Toby would begin to cry, the monkey would disappear, he would comfort the child as he carried him back to the house . . .

But that had been twenty years ago and a quarter-billion kilometers away. The playback came to an end; sound, vision, the scent of unknown flowers and the gentle touch of the wind slowly faded. Suddenly, he was back in this cabin aboard the orbital tug Goliath, commanding the 100-person team of Operation ATLAS, the most critical mission in the history of space exploration. Toby, and the stepmothers and stepfathers of his extended family, remained behind on a distant world which Singh could never revisit. Decades in space—and neglect of the mandatory zero-G exercises—had so weakened him that he could now walk only on the Moon and Mars. Gravity had exiled him from the planet of his birth.

“One hour to rendezvous, captain,” said the quiet but insistent voice of David, as Goliath’s central computer had been inevitably named. “Active mode, as requested. Time to come back to the real world.”

Goliath’s human commander felt a wave of sadness sweep over him as the final image from his lost past dissolved into a featureless, simmering mist of white noise. Too swift a transition from one reality to another was a good recipe for schizophrenia, and Captain Singh always eased the shock with the most soothing sound he knew: waves falling gently on a beach, with sea gulls crying in the distance. It was yet another memory of a life he had lost, and of a peaceful past that had now been replaced by a fearful present.

For a few more moments, he delayed facing his awesome responsibility. Then he sighed and removed the neural-input cap that fitted snugly over his skull and had enabled him to call up his distant past. Like all spacers, Captain Singh belonged to the “Bald Is Beautiful” school, if only because wigs were a nuisance in zero gravity. The social historians were still staggered by the fact that one invention, the portable “Brainman,” could make bare heads the norm within a single decade. Not even quick-change skin coloring, or the lens-corrective laser shaping which had abolished eyeglasses, had made such an impact upon style and fashion.

“Captain,” said David. “I know you’re there. Or do you want me to take over?”

It was an old joke, inspired by all the insane computers in the fiction and movies of the early electronic age. David had a surprisingly good sense of humor: He was, after all, a Legal Person (Nonhuman) under the famous Hundredth Amendment, and shared—or surpassed—almost all the attributes of his creators. But there were whole sensory and emotional areas which he could not enter. It had been felt unnecessary to equip him with smell or taste, though it would have been easy to do so. And all his attempts at telling dirty stories were such disastrous failures that he had abandoned the genre.

“All right, David,” replied the captain. “I’m still in charge.” He removed the mask from his eyes, and turned reluctantly toward the viewport. There, hanging in space before him, was Kali.

It looked harmless enough: just another small asteroid, shaped so exactly like a peanut that the resemblance was almost comical. A few large impact craters, and hundreds of tiny ones, were scattered at random over its charcoal-gray surface. There were no visual clues to give any sense of scale, but Singh knew its dimensions by heart: 1,295 m maximum length, 456 m minimum width. Kali would fit easily into many city parks.

No wonder that, even now, most of humankind could still not believe that this modest asteroid was the instrument of doom. Or, as the Chrislamic Fundamentalists were calling it, “the Hammer of God.”

The sudden rise of Chrislam had been traumatic equally to Rome and Mecca. Christianity was already reeling from John Paul XXV’s eloquent but belated plea for contraception and the irrefutable proof in the New Dead Sea Scrolls that the Jesus of the Gospels was a composite of at least three persons. Meanwhile the Muslim world had lost much of its economic power when the Cold Fusion breakthrough, after the fiasco of its premature announcement, had brought the Oil Age to a sudden end. The time had been ripe for a new religion embodying, as even its severest critics admitted, the best elements of two ancient ones.

The Prophet Fatima Magdalene (née Ruby Goldenburg) had attracted almost 100 million adherents before her spectacular—and, some maintained, self-contrived—martyrdom. Thanks to the brilliant use of neural programming to give previews of Paradise during its ceremonies, Chrislam had grown explosively, though it was still far outnumbered by its parent religions.

Inevitably, after the Prophet’s death the movement split into rival factions, each upholding the True Faith. The most fanatical was a fundamentalist group calling itself “the Reborn,” which claimed to be in direct contact with God (or at least Her Archangels) via the listening post they had established in the silent zone on the far side of the Moon, shielded from the radio racket of Earth by 3,000 km of solid rock.

Now Kali filled the main viewscreen. No magnification was needed, for Goliath was hovering only 200 m above its ancient, battered surface. Two crew members had already landed, with the traditional “One small step for a man”—even though walking was impossible on this almost zero-gravity worldlet.

“Deploying radio beacon. We’ve got it anchored securely. Now Kali won’t be able to hide from us.”

It was a feeble joke, not meriting the laughter it aroused from the dozen officers on the bridge. Ever since rendezvous, there had been a subtle change in the crew’s morale, with unpredictable swings between gloom and juvenile humor. The ship’s physician had already prescribed tranquilizers for one mild case of manic-depressive symptoms. It would grow worse in the long weeks ahead, when there would be little to do but wait.

The first waiting period had already begun. Back on Earth, giant radio telescopes were tuned to receive the pulses from the beacon. Although Kali’s orbit had already been calculated with the greatest possible accuracy, there was still a slim chance that the asteroid might pass harmlessly by. The radio measuring rod would settle the matter, for better or worse.

It was a long two hours before the verdict came, and David relayed it to the crew.

“Spaceguard reports that the probability of impact on Earth is 99.9%. Operation ATLAS will begin immediately.”

The task of the mythological Atlas was to hold up the heavens and prevent them from crashing down upon Earth. The ATLAS booster that Goliath carried as an external payload had a more modest goal: keeping at bay only a small piece of the sky.

It was the size of a small house, weighed 9,000 tons and was moving at 50,000 km/ h. As it passed over the Grand Teton National Park, one alert tourist photographed the incandescent fireball and its long vapor trail. In less than two minutes, it had sliced through the Earth’s atmosphere and returned to space.

The slightest change of orbit during the billions of years it had been circling the sun might have sent the asteroid crashing upon any of the world’s great cities with an explosive force five times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

The date was Aug. 10, 1972.

Spaceguard had been one of the last projects of the legendary NASA, at the close of the 20th century. Its initial objective had been modest enough: to make as complete a survey as possible of the asteroids and comets that crossed the orbit of Earth—and to determine if any were a potential threat.

With a total budget seldom exceeding $10 million a year, a worldwide network of telescopes, most of them operated by skilled amateurs, had been established by the year 2000. Sixty-one years later, the spectacular return of Halley’s Comet encouraged more funding, and the great 2079 fireball, luckily impacting in mid-Atlantic, gave Spaceguard additional prestige. By the end of the century, it had located more than one million asteroids, and the survey was believed to be 90% complete. However, it would have to be continued indefinitely: There was always a chance that some intruder might come rushing in from the uncharted outer reaches of the solar system.

As had Kali, which had been detected in late 2212 as it fell sunward past the orbit of Jupiter. Fortunately humankind had not been wholly unprepared, thanks to the fact that Senator George Ledstone (Independent, West America) had chaired an influential finance committee almost a generation earlier.

The Senator had one public eccentricity and, he cheerfully admitted, one secret vice. He always wore massive horn-rimmed eyeglasses (nonfunctional, of course) because they had an intimidating effect on uncooperative witnesses, few of whom had ever encountered such a novelty. His “secret vice,” perfectly well known to everyone, was rifle shooting on a standard Olympic range, set up in the tunnels of a long-abandoned missile silo near Mount Cheyenne. Ever since the demilitarization of Planet Earth (much accelerated by the famous slogan “Guns Are the Crutches of the Impotent”), such activities had been frowned upon, though not actively discouraged.

There was no doubt that Senator Ledstone was an original; it seemed to run in the family. His grandmother had been a colonel in the dreaded Beverly Hills Militia, whose skirmishes with the L.A. Irregulars had spawned endless psychodramas in every medium, from old-fashioned ballet to direct brain stimulation. And his grandfather had been one of the most notorious bootleggers of the 21st century. Before he was killed in a shoot-out with the Canadian Medicops during an ingenious attempt to smuggle a kiloton of tobacco up Niagara Falls, it was estimated that “Smokey” had been responsible for at least 20 million deaths.

Ledstone was quite unrepentant about his grandfather, whose sensational demise had triggered the repeal of the late U.S.’s third, and most disastrous, attempt at Prohibition. He argued that responsible adults should be allowed to commit suicide in any way they pleased—by alcohol, cocaine or even tobacco—as long as they did not kill innocent bystanders during the process.

When the proposed budget for Spaceguard Phase 2 was first presented to him, Senator Ledstone had been outraged by the idea of throwing billions of dollars into space. It was true that the global economy was in good shape; since the almost simultaneous collapse of communism and capitalism, the skillful application of chaos theory by World Bank mathematicians had broken the old cycle of booms and busts and averted (so far) the Final Depression predicted by many pessimists. Nonetheless, the Senator argued that the money could be much better spent on Earth—especially on his favorite project, reconstructing what was left of California after the Superquake.

When Ledstone had twice vetoed Spaceguard Phase 2, everyone agreed that no one on Earth would make him change his mind. They had reckoned without someone from Mars.

The Red Planet was no longer quite so red, though the process of greening it had barely begun. Concentrating on the problems of survival, the colonists (they hated the word and were already saying proudly “we Martians”) had little energy left over for art or science. But the lightning flash of genius strikes where it will, and the greatest theoretical physicist of the century was born under the bubble domes of Port Lowell.

Like Einstein, to whom he was often compared, Carlos Mendoza was an excellent musician; he owned the only saxophone on Mars and was a skilled performer on that antique instrument. He could have received his Nobel Prize on Mars, as everyone expected, but he loved surprises and practical jokes. Thus he appeared in Stockholm looking like a knight in high-tech armor, wearing one of the powered exoskeletons developed for paraplegics. With this mechanical assistance, he could function almost unhandicapped in an environment that would otherwise have quickly killed him.

Needless to say, when the ceremony was over, Carlos was bombarded with invitations to scientific and social functions. Among the few he was able to accept was an appearance before the World Budget Committee, where Senator Ledstone closely questioned him about his opinion of Project Spaceguard.

“I live on a world which still bears the scars of a thousand meteor impacts, some of them hundreds of kilometers across,” said Professor Mendoza. “Once they were equally common on Earth, but wind and rain—something we don’t have yet on Mars, though we’re working on it!—have worn them away.”

Senator Ledstone: “The Spaceguarders are always pointing to signs of asteroid impacts on Earth. How seriously should we take their warnings?”

Professor Mendoza: “Very seriously, Mr. Chairman. Sooner or later, there’s bound to be another major impact.”

Senator Ledstone was impressed, and indeed charmed, by the young scientist, but not yet convinced. What changed his mind was not a matter of logic but of emotion. On his way to London, Carlos Mendoza was killed in a bizarre accident when the control system of his exoskeleton malfunctioned. Deeply moved, Ledstone immediately dropped his opposition to Spaceguard, approving construction of two powerful orbiting tugs, Goliath and Titan, to be kept permanently patrolling on opposite sides of the sun. And when he was a very old man, he said to one of his aides, “They tell me we’ll soon be able to take Mendoza’s brain out of that tank of liquid nitrogen, and talk to it through a computer interface. I wonder what he’s been thinking about, all these years . . .”

Assembled on Phobos, the inner satellite of Mars, ATLAS was little more than a set of rocket engines attached to propellant tanks holding 100,000 tons of hydrogen. Though its fusion drive could generate far less thrust than the primitive missile that had carried Yuri Gagarin into space, it could run continuously not merely for minutes but for weeks. Even so, the effect on the asteroid would be trivial, a velocity change of a few centimeters per second. Yet that might be sufficient to deflect Kali from its fatal orbit during the months while it was still falling earthward.

Now that ATLAS’s propellant tanks, control systems and thrusters had been securely mounted on Kali, it looked as if some lunatic had built an oil refinery on an asteroid. Captain Singh was exhausted, as were all the crew members, after days of assembly and checking. Yet he felt a warm glow of achievement: They had done everything that was expected of them, the countdown was going smoothly, and the rest was up to ATLAS.

He would have been far less relaxed had he known of the ABSOLUTE PRIORITY message racing toward him by tight infrared beam from ASTROPOL headquarters in Geneva. It would not reach Goliath for another 30 minutes. And by then it would be much too late.

At about T minus 30 minutes, Goliath had drawn away from Kali to stand well clear of the jet with which ATLAS would try to nudge it from its present course. “Like a mouse pushing an elephant,” one media person had described the operation. But in the frictionless vacuum of space, where momentum could never be lost, even one mousepower would be enough if applied early and over a sufficient length of time.

The group of officers waiting quietly on the bridge did not expect to see anything spectacular: The plasma jet of the ATLAS drive would be far too hot to produce much visible radiation. Only the telemetry would confirm that ignition had started and that Kali was no longer an implacable juggernaut, wholly beyond the control of humanity.

There was a brief round of cheering and a gentle patter of applause as the string of zeros on the accelerometer display began to change. The feeling on the bridge was one of relief rather than exultation. Though Kali was stirring, it would be days and weeks before victory was assured.

And then, unbelievably, the numbers dropped back to zero. Seconds later, three simultaneous audio alarms sounded. All eyes were suddenly fixed on Kali and the ATLAS booster which should be nudging it from its present course. The sight was heartbreaking: The great propellant tanks were opening up like flowers in a time-lapse movie, spilling out the thousands of tons of reaction mass that might have saved the Earth. Wisps of vapor drifted across the face of the asteroid, veiling its cratered surface with an evanescent atmosphere.

Then Kali continued along its path, heading inexorably toward a fiery collision with the Earth.

Captain Singh was alone in the large, well-appointed cabin that had been his home for longer than any other place in the solar system. He was still dazed but was trying to make his peace with the universe.

He had lost, finally and forever, all that he loved on Earth. With the decline of the nuclear family, he had known many deep attachments, and it had been hard to decide who should be the mothers of the two children he was permitted. A phrase from an old American novel (he had forgotten the author) kept coming into his mind: “Remember them as they were—and write them off.” The fact that he himself was perfectly safe somehow made him feel worse; Goliath was in no danger whatsoever, and still had all the propellant it needed to rejoin the shaken survivors of humanity on the Moon or Mars.

Well, he had many friendships—and one that was much more than that—on Mars; this was where his future must lie. He was only 102, with decades of active life ahead of him. But some of the crew had loved ones on the Moon; he would have to put Goliath’s destination to the vote.

Ship’s Orders had never covered a situation like this.

“I still don’t understand,” said the chief engineer, “why that explosive cord wasn’t detected on the preflight check-out.”

“Because that Reborn fanatic could have hidden it easily—and no one would have dreamed of looking for such a thing. Pity ASTROPOL didn’t catch him while he was still on Phobos.”

“But why did they do it? I can’t believe that even Chrislamic crazies would want to destroy the Earth.”

“You can’t argue with their logic—if you accept their premises. God, Allah, is testing us, and we mustn’t interfere. If Kali misses, fine. If it doesn’t, well, that’s part of Her bigger plan. Maybe we’ve messed up Earth so badly that it’s time to start over. Remember that old saying of Tsiolkovski’s: ‘Earth is the cradle of humankind, but you cannot live in the cradle forever.’ Kali could be a sign that it’s time to leave.”

The captain held up his hand for silence.

“The only important question now is, Moon or Mars? They’ll both need us. I don’t want to influence you” (that was hardly true; everyone knew where he wanted to go), “so I’d like your views first.”

The first ballot was Mars 6, Moon 6, Don’t know 1, captain abstaining.

Each side was trying to convert the single “Don’t know” when David spoke.

“There is an alternative.”

“What do you mean?” Captain Singh demanded, rather brusquely.

“It seems obvious. Even though ATLAS is destroyed, we still have a chance of saving the Earth. According to my calculations, Goliath has just enough propellant to deflect Kali—if we start thrusting against it immediately. But the longer we wait, the less the probability of success.”

There was a moment of stunned silence on the bridge as everyone asked the question, “Why didn’t I think of that?” and quickly arrived at the answer.

David had kept his head, if one could use so inappropriate a phrase, while all the humans around him were in a state of shock. There were some compensations in being a Legal Person (Nonhuman). Though David could not know love, neither could he know fear. He would continue to think logically, even to the edge of doom.

With any luck, thought Captain Singh, this is my last broadcast to Earth. I’m tired of being a hero, and a slightly premature one at that. Many things could still go wrong, as indeed they already have . . .

“This is Captain Singh, space tug Goliath. First of all, let me say how glad we are that the Elders of Chrislam have identified the saboteurs and handed them over to ASTROPOL.

“We are now fifty days from Earth, and we have a slight problem. This one, I hasten to add, will not affect our new attempt to deflect Kali into a safe orbit. I note that the news media are calling this deflection Operation Deliverance. We like the name, and hope to live up to it, but we still cannot be absolutely certain of success. David, who appreciates all the goodwill messages he has received, estimates that the probability of Kali impacting Earth is still 10% . . .

“We had intended to keep just enough propellant reserve to leave Kali shortly before encounter and go into a safer orbit, where our sister ship Titan could rendezvous with us. But that option is now closed. While Goliath was pushing against Kali at maximum drive, we broke through a weak point in the crust. The ship wasn’t damaged, but we’re stuck! All attempts to break away have failed.

“We’re not worried, and it may even be a blessing in disguise. Now we’ll use the whole of our remaining propellant to give one final nudge. Perhaps that will be the last drop that’s needed to do the job.

“So we’ll ride Kali past Earth, and wave to you from a comfortable distance, in just fifty days.”

It would be the longest fifty days in the history of the world.

Now the huge crescent of the moon spanned the sky, the jagged mountain peaks along the terminator burning with the fierce light of the lunar dawn. But the dusty plains still untouched by the sun were not completely dark; they were glowing faintly in the light reflected from Earth’s clouds and continents. And scattered here and there across that once dead landscape were the glowing fireflies that marked the first permanent settlements humankind had built beyond the home planet. Captain Singh could easily locate Clavius Base, Port Armstrong, Plato City. He could even see the necklace of faint lights along the Translunar Railroad, bringing its precious cargo of water from the ice mines at the South Pole.

Earth was now only five hours away.

Kali entered Earth’s atmosphere soon after local midnight, 200 km above Hawaii. Instantly, the gigantic fireball brought a false dawn to the Pacific, awakening the wildlife on its myriad islands. But few humans had been asleep this night of nights, except those who had sought the oblivion of drugs.

Over New Zealand, the heat of the orbiting furnace ignited forests and melted the snow on mountaintops, triggering avalanches into the valleys beneath. But the human race had been very, very lucky: The main thermal impact as Kali passed the Earth was on the Antarctic, the continent that could best absorb it. Even Kali could not strip away all the kilometers of polar ice, but it set in motion the Great Thaw that would change coastlines all around the world.

No one who survived hearing it could ever describe the sound of Kali’s passage; none of the recordings were more than feeble echoes. The video coverage, of course, was superb, and would be watched in awe for generations to come. But nothing could ever compare with the fearsome reality.

Two minutes after it had sliced into the atmosphere, Kali reentered space. Its closest approach to Earth had been 60 km. In that two minutes, it took 100,000 lives and did $1 trillion worth of damage.

Goliath had been protected from the fireball by the massive shield of Kali itself; the sheets of incandescent plasma streamed harmlessly overhead. But when the asteroid smashed into Earth’s blanket of air at more than one hundred times the speed of sound, the colossal drag forces mounted swiftly to five, ten, twenty gravities—and peaked at a level far beyond anything that machines or flesh could withstand.

Now indeed Kali’s orbit had been drastically changed; never again would it come near Earth. On its next return to the inner solar system, the swifter spacecraft of a later age would visit the crumpled wreckage of Goliath and bear reverently homeward the bodies of those who had saved the world.

Until the next encounter.

© 1992 by Arthur C. Clarke.

Originally published in Time Magazine.

Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency, Inc.

In a career spanning over six decades, Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) wrote 100 books and more than 1,000 short stories and essays covering science fiction and science fact. Among his best-selling novels are Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama. In 1945, he proposed global broadcasting via communication satellites in geostationary orbit. One of his short stories inspired the World Wide Web, while another was expanded into 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he co-wrote with Stanley Kubrick. Born in Somerset, England, in 1917, Clarke was educated at King’s College, London. He worked in the British civil service and Royal Air Force before turning full time author in 1950. Recipient of dozens of awards, fellowships and honorary doctorates, Clarke had both an asteroid and a dinosaur species named after him. Queen Elizabeth II gave him a Knighthood in 1998. Clarke lived in Sri Lanka since 1956, engaged in diving, astronomical observations and underwater tourism.

Armageddon Rock
Alan Smale

The Doomsday Asteroid is coming. An immense boulder with our name on it is cruising through the Solar System, and we all know what will happen when it arrives.

Four and a half billion years ago, our moon was formed when a planetoid the size of Mars hit the early Earth, ripping a chunk out of it. For the first billion years of the Earth’s existence, comet and asteroid impacts kept its surface temperature too high to sustain life, but may have seeded the planet with the raw materials necessary for life to evolve soon after. Sixty-five million years ago, a giant asteroid impact near Chicxulub in the Yucatan was responsible for the mass extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs, along with many other animals and plants. In 1908, a much smaller meteor burst in the air a few miles above Tunguska, Siberia with a force a thousand times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, causing widespread devastation over hundreds of square miles. Impactors from space have already substantially affected Earth’s geology, biology and history, and there are plenty more rocks where those came from. It’s only a matter of time before another one comes to visit us. Catastrophically.

How Big Is Big?

With an asteroid impact, size and location are everything. An asteroid ten to fifteen kilometers across, like the one that caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction, would set off global firestorms and earthquakes, and the dust it would kick up into in the stratosphere would cause a severe “impact winter” that could last many years. On land, these effects would lead to worldwide catastrophic extinctions. Sulfate aerosols, ozone destruction and smoke would raise the acidity of the oceans, so even creatures that swim or crawl underwater would not be immune. And if the asteroid fell into the sea in the first place, destructive tsunamis would flood hundreds of kilometers inland, drowning low-lying areas around the world. If this happens, it’s curtains for the human race, and for most of the other species we know and love. (If it’s any comfort, some mammals will probably survive. At least, they did last time, along with crocodiles and cockroaches.)

A smaller rock one to two kilometers across could still annihilate civilization. Direct earthquakes and fires would be limited to the area a few hundred miles from ground zero, but the dust would decrease sunlight to the level of a cloudy day almost globally, blighting world agriculture with summertime freezes. The sulfates, smoke and water vapor injected into the air would magnify these effects, and the ozone layer would probably be destroyed. Again, if our rock goes into the ocean, its shorelines would be flooded tens of kilometers inland. We’d probably all freeze, drown, or starve.

Naturally, the smaller the rock, the better our chances. An asteroid 300 meters across shakes the ground considerably but ignites only localized fires, and the dust is well below catastrophic levels. However, it still creates a crater five to ten kilometers across, which could cause extensive devastation to a heavily populated area, and with a sea impact the tsunamis would cause unprecedented flooding.

Did I mention that the Tunguska meteor was only tens of meters across?

Identifying the Threat

How will we find out about the next deadly space invader? With blind luck, we’d get a few weeks’ warning.

We can do better than that. An international effort called the Spaceguard Survey has been underway since the 1990s to find and characterize all Near Earth Objects (NEOs) that threaten us. NASA, in collaboration with the U.S. Air Force, is the main supporter of NEO research in the U.S., and in 1998 Congress directed NASA to detect 90% of all Near Earth Asteroids over a kilometer across by 2008—a target which has recently been achieved. NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite has just completed an accurate census of Near Earth Asteroids, and soon wide-field surveys conducted by the Pan-STARRS Project and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will increase our knowledge still further.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory maintains an online list of local rocky space junk. As I write—October 2011—there are over 8,000 NEOs catalogued. Of these, 1,254 are described as potentially hazardous, meaning they exceed 150 meters and will swing within 7.5 million miles of Earth—less than 20 times the Earth-Moon distance, a close approach in cosmic terms. Most NEOs are in complicated but predictable orbits around the Solar System. In all likelihood, when the Big One is identified we’ll have decades, maybe even centuries to prepare.

All right. Let’s assume Spaceguard has detected the Doomsday Asteroid. We know its size and composition from its brightness and spectrum, and its ETA from its orbital elements. We face a global catastrophe. What now?

Blow It Up

Obvious, right? A few well-placed nuclear bombs should do the trick. However, the obvious thing to do may also be the dumbest. Vaporizing a rock a mile across takes an immense amount of energy. Even if we have the power and skill to disrupt our earth-threatening asteroid, many of those chunks would still head straight towards us, potentially causing widespread devastation. Same problem with the “kinetic kill” approach, where we throw a heavy spacecraft or other large object into the asteroid’s path hoping that the high-velocity impact will break it up or knock it off target.

As it turns out, the math shows that, given a year’s advance warning, it takes roughly a thousand times less energy to deflect our doomsday rock than to disrupt it. Trying to blow up an incoming asteroid would definitely be a desperation measure, a hail-Mary play with a strong chance of (literally) blowing up in our faces.

Push It Aside

This was the approach adopted by one of the earliest studies: Project Icarus, initiated at MIT in 1967 by Professor Paul Sandorff as a class assignment for 21 advanced system engineers. Their mission was to assume that the mile-wide Icarus asteroid was heading for Earth, and devise a means of stopping it using existing technologies. The final—rather ingenious—solution involved the launch of six Saturn V rockets within a six-week period, each armed with a 100 megaton nuclear bomb, accompanied by five Atlas-Agena rockets carrying probes to send feedback to the asteroid-killer team. Detonating the six bombs in succession, within a hundred feet of the Icarus asteroid, would vaporize its surface and knock the rest of it off course.

Forty-five years later, it’s still a better bet to use our nuclear missiles to shove the asteroid aside instead of blowing it apart. However, our lack of control is a serious concern. The risks of failure are still daunting.

A steady shove is greatly preferable to a short, sharp shock. We don’t need to tear the asteroid apart, merely delay it. The Earth is 12,700 kilometers across, and orbits the Sun at thirty kilometers per second, so it travels a distance equivalent to its diameter in about seven minutes. That’s how much leeway we need, and the more notice we have, the gentler the push needed to buy us that time. Just as an example: Given thirty years (and enough fuel), the Space Shuttle’s main engine, attached to a 1 kilometer asteroid and fired from its surface, could deflect it sufficiently to miss the Earth.

With enough lead time, another gentle alternative is to put a heavy spacecraft—a so-called “gravity tractor”—into orbit around the asteroid, powered by an ion thruster. Over a few years their mutual gravitational attraction will tug the asteroid gently off course. This method works just as well on a floating rubble pile; even a loosely-bound collection of rocks will be deflected by gravity. In a similar approach, an ion thruster can be aimed directly at the asteroid from a rather lighter spacecraft, providing a steady force to deflect it, while another thruster firing in the opposite direction keeps our spacecraft on course.

We might install a mass driver on the asteroid’s surface. A mass driver is a kind of electromagnetic catapult; a series of electromagnets fired in sequence along a long tube can accelerate a projectile in a magnetizable casing to high speed. As every action has an equal and opposite reaction, shooting a continuous stream of heavy asteroid-rock projectiles would exert a steady force in the opposite direction, shepherding the asteroid away from its disastrous date with our homeworld.

A hundred years from now, even grander options might be available. We might attach an immense solar sail to the asteroid and use the solar wind to “blow” it off-course, or use high-powered lasers to ablate the asteroid’s surface directly.

What Are The Odds?

At last, some good news! According to our best estimates and the geological record, Tunguska-sized events happen only once every two to three thousand years. Roughly speaking, kilometer-sized asteroids hit Earth only once every million years or so.

Even better: In September 2011, NASA’s WISE mission revealed there are far fewer nearby asteroids with planet-destroying power than previously thought. The NEOWISE survey shows there are probably fewer than a thousand near-Earth asteroids larger than a kilometer; 911 of these have already have been found and tracked, and none pose any threat to Earth in the next few centuries. As for the even weightier dinosaur-killer class of asteroids, those over ten kilometers across, it’s believed that we have now identified all of them.

Plenty of smaller rocks remain. The expected number of midsize asteroids a hundred meters to a kilometer across has shrunk from 35,000 to 19,500, but the Spaceguard projects have only identified around five thousand of these.

Nonetheless, this is encouraging. It appears that the odds of Death by Meteor are miniscule, and that we should get lots of warning of such a calamity. But let’s keep watching the skies anyway, okay?

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 recently won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History (Short Form).

Coming Attractions

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed, is the first of our super-sized issues incorporating our sister publication Fantasy Magazine. In this first issue under our new publisher (see our editorial in this issue for details, if you missed the news), we have original science fiction by new writers Megan Arkenberg (“How Many Miles to Babylon?”) and Ken Liu (“The Five Elements of the Heart Mind”), plus SF reprints by Paul McAuley (“Gene Wars”) and Nancy Kress (“Always True to Thee, in My Fashion”). Plus, original fantasy stories by Marissa Lingen (“On the Acquisition of Phoenix Eggs (Variant)” and Sarah Monette (“Blue Lace Agate”), and fantasy reprints by M. Rickert (“You Have Never Been Here”) and Aimee Bender (“A State of Variance”). All that plus our usual assortment of author spotlights, and feature interviews with bestselling author Neal Stephenson and award-winning author R. A. MacAvoy.

It’s another great issue—and the first under our new regime—so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed Magazine!

Thanks for reading!