THE BEST
SCIENCE FICTION
OF THE YEAR
VOLUME 8

EDITED BY
NEIL CLARKE

Copyright © 2024 by Neil Clarke.

Copyrights for individual stories may be found here.

Cover Art © 2022 by Dofresh.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

eBook edition published 2024 by
JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

eBook ISBN: 978-1625677044

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

49 W. 45th Street, Suite #5N

New York, NY 10036

awfulagent.com

ebooks@awfulagent.com

Trade Paperback and Hardcover editions of this book were published by Night Shade Books.

Trade Paperback: 978-1949102703

Hardcover: 978-1949102741

INTRODUCTION: A State of the Short SF Field in 2022

Neil Clarke

The short fiction field is always in a state of flux. Despite that, there’s a surprising number of magazines, podcasts, collections, and anthologies published each year. There’s no shortage of stories to choose from and keeping up with the volume is no small task. Even reading throughout the year, I still end up with a considerable amount of catching up to do at the end. Looking over my notes, I observed ninety-five magazines and forty-three anthologies publishing new stories in 2022. There were over two thousand five hundred stories in the magazines alone.

Beyond reading and listening to the stories, I also follow the blogs and social media accounts of many publishers, ranging from some of the biggest in the field to those just getting started. I gather data and news for these introductions throughout the year and regularly update my notes as I hear from editors via email, Discord, Zoom, or at conventions. Despite the large number of venues publishing short fiction, it’s still very much a small community. News travels fast.

The damage done by the pandemic continues to be felt, though has slowly become less pronounced each year. The prices for both paper and shipping remain high and appear unlikely to improve in the foreseeable future. Had digital editions not become such a widely adopted medium in the previous decade, the damage to the field would have been considerably more significant.

Looking at bookstores and newsstands, one might even assume genre print magazines to be on their last legs. Instead, I’ve noticed a small increase in the number of magazines available in print editions. These include: Analog, Asimov’s, Bourbon Penn, Clarkesworld, Cossmass Infinities, Dark Matter, The Dread Machine, Dreamforge, Fusion Fragment, Galaxy’s Edge, Infinite Worlds, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Luna Station Quarterly, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), Interzone, Metaphorosis, On Spec, Planet Scumm, Pulphouse, Pulp Literature, Reckoning, Shoreline of Infinity, Space and Time, Underland Arcana, Weird Tales, and Wyldblood. I wouldn’t call this a trend, but it’s a good sign for those that prefer physical copies . . . you just have to dig a bit deeper to find them.

The venues with the largest print circulations–Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF–are produced using offset printing techniques and have traditional newsstand distribution. The nature of this model is only economically viable for publications with larger print runs. A new magazine publisher would likely sustain devastating losses while they attempted to grow their audience. Wisdom has kept many from going that route.

With few exceptions (notably Interzone in the UK–perhaps the most visually attractive print magazine), the others use print-on-demand (POD) technology. At one time, this would have meant sacrificing quality, but that hasn’t been the case for years now. In fact, it often results in a higher quality of paper and cover stock than used by the magazines producing offset editions. This lower bar to entry has allowed more publishers to embrace print without the financial risks of the old model. Instead, copies are printed as needed and sold directly or through online retailers. The downside is that this results in a higher cover price and narrower distribution.

Another slow-moving trend is the increase in the publication of translations in magazines. This year, I discovered them in Apparition Lit, Apex, Asimov's, Asymptote, Clarkesworld, The Dark, Dark Matter, Future Science Fiction, InterNova, Samovar, Slice Magazine (which is, admittedly, not genre-focused), Tor.com, Uncanny, and World Literature Today (also non-genre). Clarkesworld and Samovar continue to be leaders in this area, but the return of German magazine Internova is a welcome sign for people looking to embrace more international literature. The most commonly translated languages continued to be Chinese, Russian, and Spanish, but I also saw translations from Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, and others.

In order to facilitate more international stories being published, changes need to happen in the way story submissions are received. The open submissions process that editors employ to find both new works and new authors is critical to the field’s health. The pandemic was probably the greatest disruption to this process since the advent of digital submissions, but both led to positive improvements. Over the last few years, editors noted a variety of anomalies including sharp increases in works from new writers, slowdowns in productivity from regulars, or even regional increases/decreases. In 2022, more editors began reporting that things were stabilizing in a healthy way, maintaining some aspects of the positive elements that had been experienced.

Not all published work comes from open submissions. Solicited fiction–stories that publishers directly ask authors to write specifically for them–actually saw an increase in 2022. In prior years, the lion’s share of this activity was isolated to three publications–Tor.com, Future Tense Fiction, and Uncanny–but the arrival of a newcomer, Sunday Morning Transport, added forty-eight more to the number of cases reported for the year. Even so, solicitation was still responsible for less than five percent of all of the stories I read from magazines.

Solicitation, as a practice, is actually much more common with anthologies. Historically, editors were expected to identify “anchor” authors around which an anthology could be marketed. Magazine subscriptions are rarely impacted by the appearance of a specific author (because they are only in a single issue), but an anthology can be made profitable by the loyal fans of a handful of authors, assuming they buy the book. Marketing value has been used as justification for the practice for as long as I can remember and, given the way this industry operates, I don’t expect the practice to end anytime soon. New authors may dislike solicitations, but it’s established authors—who were once new themselves—saying yes that makes them viable.

Looking back at 2022, it’s clear that there were inklings of trouble on the horizon. Generative “AI” struck the art community first. New tools quickly captured the attention of the public with their six-fingered and unusual art, but soon these were being used to mimic the styles of professional artists and interfere with people’s livelihoods. Toward the end of November, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a Large Language Model (LLM) capable of generating text, and suddenly people began using it to write emails, letters, and really awful stories.

It wouldn’t take long for the art and literary communities to figure out that these technologies were trained on wide datasets of text and images taken from the Internet without the knowledge or permission of the authors, publishers, artists, and other rights holders. As the year came to a close, there was growing concern and upset among the creative community and an enthusiasm from outside (particularly among tech circles) that was destined to clash.

Others began to look at these as opportunities to cut costs or make easy money by replacing artists, authors, translators, narrators, and other skilled creators. As the year ended, “AI” works began appearing in the submission queues of a handful of well-known magazines with open submissions policies. The numbers were small enough that it didn’t raise an immediate concern, but things would quickly escalate over the next few months. That, however, is a story for the 2023 state of short fiction.

The Business Side of Things

If we were only judging the health of the field by the quantity and wide range of stories being published today, it would be easy to call these good, perhaps even great, years. That, however, is like evaluating the health of all restaurants by focusing only on their menus. With a few exceptions, short fiction is published by for-profit businesses, and even when it isn’t, there are still costs to cover. We need to look beyond the stories themselves to get a sense of the health of the field. If you want that variety to continue, we need a healthy and sustainable ecosystem.

The fact that we have this variety now is not necessarily an indication of good health. If you take a closer look at the majority of genre magazine publishers, you’ll discover that many have unpaid or significantly underpaid staff. It’s not shocking that some portion of the field will consist of amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer workers. The problem is that the field is entirely too reliant on unpaid or underpaid labor. This has become an expectation for those entering the field and creates the unstable foundation our current wealth of short fiction is built on.

A potential source for this expectation is that the field has been cash-starved for long enough that many no longer believe that it’s possible to be professional in the same sense we use the word with athletes. The idea of working for one of these magazines as a career is an alien concept for most of the people staffing or even running genre magazines. Many do their work for the good of the community, a noble and altruistic mindset, but one that also creates a class barrier for those who want to do this work, yet need to be paid. That’s a loss for the entire field and one that should be upsetting enough to push back against. If we can advocate for better pay for fast food workers, we can and should do the same for people working in short fiction.

The digital age made it cheaper and easier to launch magazines. That has been the primary driver for the sharp increase in venues coming and going over the years. The budgets for many of these projects are set by calculating the cost of web hosting, stories, and art, with little or no emphasis paying the staff or publisher. Staff pay has long been a “someday” goal across wide swaths of the field but currently, none of the digital-era magazines can boast having even one full-time paid staff member. A few have reached very part-time status, but at present, it’s only a handful of print-era magazines–Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF–that satisfy that metric, something they’ve done from the beginning. Several others of their era successfully did the same, though did not survive into the digital age. (This knowingly ignores the publications, like Tor.com, that are paid for by, or are part of, larger businesses. They are different and equally rare beasts.) Despite the significant growth the field has experienced, there has been a net decrease in the number of career-capable publications.

It would be naive to suggest that free online fiction has had nothing to do with it, but its impact is more complicated and significantly intertwined with the positives we’ve seen. The rapid increase in free online fiction can be directly tied to the significant growth in global short fiction readership that has happened since. Prior to that, magazine circulations had been slowly declining for years.

Reading and writing are inherently linked in this respect. During the boom that followed online fiction, there were also sharp increases in the number of people writing and submitting work to magazines. Like every new generation before them, their presence has had a defining impact. Their voices led the field as it grew in both the number of markets and types of stories available to readers.

Visibility is a huge advantage for online publishing. Stories are internationally available on publication, easily shared with other readers, and tend to stay available for extended periods of time in the online archives most of these publications maintain. It has become so entwined with their method of marketing that ending or dialing back this form of publishing would be extremely disruptive to their business.

It’s interesting to note that the publishers of some online newspapers and non-genre magazines have adopted the approaches of limiting the number of free articles per month or hiding archives behind a paywall. This is a deliberate attempt on their part to rein in their Pandora’s Box of free online content and encourage payment without eliminating some of the benefits it brings to the table. It’s unclear how successful these changes have been, but I haven’t observed any genre publications following suit.

However, coming at it from the other side, print-era magazines that eschewed the free online movement have instead opted to publish limited selections of stories or articles on their websites. Of the digital-era magazines, FIYAH stands as one of the few paid-access-only publications and has no signs of changing. New publication Sunday Morning Transport also comes close by making selected works available for free, but requires payment for the rest. Other magazines have attempted subscriber-first models that grant early access to stories and articles before making them available online, but most people appear content to wait.

For several years now, I’ve observed that short fiction—particularly among magazines—has been underpriced. Selling short fiction, even when you don’t have a free edition, has become more challenging. Despite the large increase in overall readership, paid readership has lagged far behind. For publishers offering their stories for free, the subscribing or supporting rate is often well below ten percent of their total readership and very little moves that needle. The presence of free works even impacts the publications that don’t offer free fiction. When so much is available for free, there’s little incentive for some readers to pay for short stories at all. There’s little danger of running out of things to read.

There’s a palpable fear that increasing the cover or subscription price of a magazine could end in a net loss as readers move to cheaper alternatives. As a result, those prices have remained largely unchanged over the last decade. Over the same period, the industry standard per-word rate for short fiction (as set by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, SFWA) has increased by over thirty-seven percent. Increases have also happened across every other service those publications rely on (web hosting, printing, shipping, etc.) Across the genre, every other literary format has increased prices. None of them, however, face significant challenges from free alternatives.

The pricing issue is something that I’ve been discussing with other editors for years. For a time, it seemed like several in the field were ready to act, but the pandemic made everyone more cautious. That was not the time to rock the boat. Costs, particularly for those producing print editions, continued to rise. While some of those magazines had shifted from monthly to bi-monthly schedules to save printing and shipping costs years earlier, the time bought via those savings was being quickly erased. It’s likely that situation which has triggered a one-dollar price increase on the cover price of print issues of Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF this year. Across the industry, however, digital prices remained unchanged this year.

Complicating matters even further, towards the end of 2022, Amazon surprised magazine publishers by announcing that they would exit the digital and print subscription marketplace in September 2023. They referred to this as a “difficult decision” but no reason was offered and publishers had not previously seen any reason to be concerned.

It would be fair to describe Amazon’s subscription program as a key moment in turning digital subscriptions into a viable revenue stream for many magazines. It stabilized the revenue streams of several digital-era publications and offset the declining print subscriptions of the print-era magazines. Losing it will be a blow to both publishers and the readers that had grown accustomed to the very reader-friendly ecosystem that placed new magazines on their devices every month or so.

At the time of the announcement, the following magazines were in their program: Asimov’s, Analog, Apex, Clarkesworld, The Dark, Fantasy, Forever, Galaxy’s Edge, Lightspeed, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nightmare, and Uncanny. For many of them, Amazon subscriptions represented a significant percentage of their annual revenue. While they will have several months to migrate existing subscribers to new platforms, Amazon will not be providing them with contact information for digital subscribers or a means by which they can directly communicate with those readers. This has the potential to strike a devastating blow to some of the more successful magazines in the field and likely ripple outward from there and into 2024.

It seems unlikely that the previously mentioned price freezes on digital subscriptions will be sustained in the wake of this news. Subscriber losses will be inevitable and the difference will need to be made up elsewhere. That said, it’s hard to argue that magazines aren’t overdue for this change and worth more than the modest increases likely to come in the near future.

Amazon’s plans don’t stop there, however. Coinciding with the end of their subscription offerings, they are seeking to convince publishers to join a Kindle Unlimited program that has been specifically geared toward magazines. Initially, this offer was only extended to a handful of the genre magazines, but they later reversed course and offered it to all of them.

If you are unfamiliar with Kindle Unlimited, it’s a monthly subscription that provides you with access to a large range of mostly independently published books. Publishers receive monthly payments based on the number of pages read by members. Magazines are initially being offered a flat annual payment, but one that equates to anywhere from thirty to fifty percent of what Amazon once paid them. Unlike books, magazines are not expected to maintain an exclusive relationship with Amazon. It does, however, paint the decision to end traditional subscriptions in a different light. Clearly, a mechanism to collect, distribute, and provide customer support for subscriptions will be maintained, so it’s less likely to be driven by any potential cost savings (unless you consider the pay publications receive). We’ll likely never officially know why they didn’t opt to maintain both programs.

Amazon’s departure leaves a significant void in the area of digital subscriptions. While several app-based options exist in the Apple and Google stores, they pay publishers considerably less and offer PDF-based replica editions rather than the more traditional reflowable ebook layouts that genre magazine readers have demonstrated a preference for. Barnes & Noble has a digital newsstand presence, but it can’t deliver to the Kindle devices of former subscribers and, at present only Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and Forever are available there. A much broader range of genre publications than Amazon had are offered via independent online outlet, Weightless Books (weightlessbooks.com), and they offer a deliver-to-Kindle option. Don’t let the vintage website design fool you. Weightless has always been very good to short fiction magazines and readers. I highly recommend them.

A number of publishers already offer direct subscription options and Amazon’s departure will likely lead to an increase in those offering them in the coming year. Many have also adopted Patreon as a means of subscribing or supporting them throughout the year. While technically a crowdfunding platform, Patreon’s model is designed around recurring projects, so subscriptions can start at any time and don’t require intervention until you want to end it. Of the various crowdfunding platforms, Patreon appears to be the most successful as a growth platform for publishers.

Kickstarter, the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of crowdfunding, remains a dominant force in the field. Many magazines have utilized Kickstarter campaigns to effectively secure first-year funding to get off the ground. It’s also been well-utilized for many anthologies. Kickstarter, however, is built around a one-and-done model of fundraising. Several publications currently use them for annual campaigns, but this is where the weakness of the platform comes into play. Subscribers from one year to the next need to manually restart subscriptions during a limited window of time. As a result, it is not uncommon for there to be bigger fluctuations from year-to-year and they mostly trend toward flat or declining participation. It is not known for its growth opportunities which, if we’re looking for more financial stability in the field, can be a problem. Kickstarter campaigns have, however, demonstrated that people are often willing to pay more than the traditional subscription price. That should be a reassuring data point for publishers as they make pricing considerations in the years ahead.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention one concern that has cropped up among some editors in the last year, and that is the slow-motion car crash that is happening with Twitter. Many magazines have made Twitter their primary or only means of communication with the broader community. It is frequently used to promote Kickstarter campaigns for books and magazines, perform subscription drives, get the word out about new issues, and much more. While the follower counts for magazine accounts plummeted briefly, within a few months they had returned to or exceeded their previous levels. The danger, it turns out, was not immediate, but did serve as a warning against putting all your marketing eggs in one basket. If anything, this scare may become an opportunity as more magazines are now setting up shop on other platforms, building mailing lists, and finding new methods to engage with their communities. If done right, they should not only have more reach than they had previously, but will also be better prepared for any further platform shenanigans. Instead of seeing this as a looming disaster, I choose to see this as an opportunity to reach more readers, which can only be a good thing.

Let’s step back and take a look at some of the industry data we have on subscriptions. For starters, we’ll look at the three magazines with paid staff:

Over the last five years Analog has dropped from 11,401 print subscriptions to 8,436, a loss of 2,965; Asimov’s has dropped from 7,109 to 5,685, a loss of 1,424; F&SF has dropped from 6,688 to 4,945, a loss of 1,743. Asimov’s and Analog raised the cost of their print subscription prices in 2022, so that may have contributed to, or financially offset, a portion of their losses. During the same time period, Analog has dropped from 8,788 to 8,400, a loss of 388; Asimov’s has dropped from 10,578 to 9,300, a loss of 1,278. Last year was the first time that Analog’s digital sales were higher than print, but they fell to practically even this year. Asimov’s has consistently sold more digital than print subscriptions since 2017. F&SF doesn’t share digital subscription data, but it’s probably safe to assume their subscription profile leans more toward digital as well.

This is the first time since I started doing this analysis that there were losses on both the digital and print sides over a five-year window. We don’t want the numbers moving in this direction, but it’s also not a reason to panic. Additional data for Asimov’s and Analog demonstrated an increase in individual copies at newsstands and higher sell-through rates and I’ve already mentioned the price increases on print subscriptions. Measures are clearly being taken and these caveats suggest it’s more complicated than it would appear in a straight surface analysis of what I’ve presented. It’s also important to note that the year we’re comparing against was an unusually big growth year for digital subscriptions. Looking at the year-to-year data for F&SF, it appears that the bulk of the five-year losses were sustained before 2022. There were losses this year, but a considerably smaller percentage than previous years. Without the information on digital subscriptions, it’s difficult to say what’s happening here, particularly with digital subscriptions being a stronger source of revenue. Next year’s data would normally help paint a clearer picture, but with the Kindle subscriptions ending and KU lump-sum payments entering the equation, I’m afraid it will only get foggier.

The data from digital publications was a bit murkier and incomplete this year, particularly among the older publications. Two data points, Clarkesworld and Uncanny, show gains in digital subscribers over the last five years. Clarkesworld moving from 3800 to 4100, a gain of 300, and Uncanny moving from 1600 to 2700, a gain of 1100. The paid subscription numbers for these two magazines are most likely the highest of their cohort, but they are still significantly behind the three previously mentioned magazines. Despite this, there is some hope created by the largely upward trajectories. It isn’t that way for everyone, but enough are headed in the right direction to provide some hope.

While I’ve come to be somewhat distrustful of reported online readership data–largely due to a lack of standards in the way they count them–I think it’s safe to say that the better-known online editions of magazines have readerships of anywhere from thirty to sixty thousand people for their fiction. These magazines currently lag in paid readership but are connected with fans and have a potential to grow. If only a small percentage of those audiences could be converted to paying readers, things would be a lot more stable for magazines.

Subscriptions aren’t the only form of revenue but, across the field, they represent the lion’s share of revenue for most publishers . . . and there’s no sign of that changing. Single and back issue sales are commonly the second-largest slice of the pie. Advertising revenue has been in decline for ages and has faded well into the background. Some publishers have been successful in securing grants, but it’s more common to find those outside the US than within. The field’s non-profit magazines can take tax-deductible donations, but that appears to be just as challenging as building a subscriber base.

A few publications live in a different reality from the others. By being a part of or sponsored by larger organizations, like Tor.com’s relationship with Tor Books and Future Tense Fiction as a partnership of Slate, New America and Arizona State University, they are removed from some of the concerns holding most of the field back. They don’t live or die on the basis of subscriptions or financial support from readers. Instead, they count on the parent company getting something of value out of it. There have been several such magazines in the history of the field, like the venerable Sci Fiction, and their problems tend to be unique to the internal politics of parent organizations. While they can and often do have influence on the field, they don’t provide a replicable path forward for the broader short fiction community.

In assessing the health of the field, I’ve largely focused on the financial and staffing aspects because that is where it is at its weakest. The looming threats of generative “AI” and disruptions to the subscriber bases of some of our most well-known publications are an imminent threat to that overall health in the coming year. As always, it is our community that will determine whether or not these disruptions cause us to lose individual markets or the variety that we’ve come to enjoy.

Magazines

Ninety-two-year-old veteran, Analog Science Fiction and Fact (analogsf.com) continues to have the highest documented paid readership among the English language genre magazines. Once again, outside of the flash fiction (1,000 word or less) magazines, Analog published more total stories combined across all lengths than any other magazine this year and the most original short stories and novellas. My favorite works were by Deborah L. Davitt, Jay Werkheiser & Frank Wu, Jessica Reisman, and Hannah Yang, the latter two of which are included in this volume.

Asimov’s Science Fiction (asimovs.com), which shares a publisher—Dell Magazines—with Analog, has the highest digital paid readership among the English-language genre magazines. They published more novelettes than any other publication in 2022. As I’ve come to expect, they had another strong year, publishing excellent stories by M. Bennardo, Greg Egan, Ray Nayler, Suzanne Palmer, Susan Palwick, Alastair Reynolds, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Nick Wolven. Five stories are included in this anthology.

In the interest of transparency, Clarkesworld (clarkesworldmagazine.com), is the magazine I publish. They published the second-highest volume of total stories, short stories, and novellas of the 2022 magazines, as well as the highest number of translated works. I was particularly fond of the stories by Nadia Afifi, R.S.A. Garcia, Thomas Ha, S.L. Huang, Isabel J. Kim, Naomi Kritzer, Leonard Richardson, and Marie Vibbert. Four stories were selected for inclusion in this year’s volume.

FIYAH (fiyahlitmag.com), a quarterly publication focused on speculative fiction by and about Black people of the African Diaspora published four issues in 2022, including two themed issues. They continued to hold their annual Ignyte Awards, but took a break from hosting FIYAHCON this year. Publisher Troy Wiggins received a well-deserved 2022 SFWA Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for his contributions to the speculative fiction community. My favorite science fiction story from them was by Adelehin Ijasan.

Future Tense Fiction (slate.com/technology/future-tense), a partnership between Slate, New America, and Arizona State University, continues to publish a mix of science fiction stories paired with companion non-fiction articles. This is one of the more reliable sources for science fiction stories that has cropped up within venues not commonly known for genre fiction. Their 2022 lineup included strong stories by Brenda Cooper, A.T. Greenblatt, Premee Mohamed, and Cat Rambo, two of which can be found here.

GigaNotoSaurus (giganotosaurus.org) founder, Ann Leckie, stepped down from her roles at the magazine after eleven years. Current editor LaShawn M. Wanak is the new owner of the publication.

Andy Cox’s TTA Press produced a single double issue of Interzone (interzone.press) before handing the reins over to Gareth Jelley and MYY Press. Jelly intends to continue publishing the magazine in print and launched an online sister magazine, Interzone Digital.

Lightspeed (lightspeedmagazine.com) publishes an even balance of fantasy and science fiction throughout the year and a significant number of reprinted modern classic stories. Among their best stories were works by Julianna Baggott, Tobias S. Buckell, Grace Chan, Peter Watts, three of which are included in this anthology.

This was Sheree Renée Thomas’ first full year as the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (fandsf.com), having started with the March/April 2021 issue, and one of the best in recent memory. My favorite stories from this year included works by Meg Elison, J.C. Hsyu, Innocent Chizaram Ilo, Ai Jiang, Charles Andrew Oberndorf, and Rajeev Prasad. I’ve included three of their stories in this year’s volume.

Strange Horizons (strangehorizons.com) publishes a new issue every Monday and this year that included four special issues focused on criticism, Southeast Asian SFF, extractivism, and music. Their strongest stories were by R.S.A. Garcia, Isabel J. Kim, and Mae Juniper Stokes. Its sister publication, Samovar (samovar.strangehorizons.com), has a focus on works in translation and remains one of the few outlets that publishes works in both English and their original languages.

After a slightly lower-volume year in 2021, Tor.com (online magazine, not to be confused with Tordotcom Publishing or Tor Books) published just one more story this year. This count, however, includes the LeVar Burton Reads contest winners co-presented with FIYAH. Works are edited by a variety of Tor and well-known freelance editors from across the field. Their best science fiction works were by Kemi Ashing-Giwa, Indrapramit Das, Rich Larson, and Ian R. MacLeod. Larson’s story is reprinted here this year.

Uncanny (uncannymagazine.com) continues to be a strong market for fantasy, but published several science fiction stories as well. Samantha Mills’ story was a notable stand-out.

Magazines Departing or Going on Hiatus

After a promising launch in 2021, Spanish-English bilingual magazine, Constelación announced a six-month hiatus, but never returned. The website has since vanished.

In an announcement that caught readers by surprise, veteran flash fiction magazine, Daily Science Fiction (dailysciencefiction.com) announced that after twelve years and more than three thousand stories, it would go on hiatus in December. No reason has been publicly stated.

Fireside (firesidefiction.com) closed in spring, after publishing its 103rd issue. Publisher Brian J. White cited “major increases last fall to my responsibilities at my day job and a series of difficult life events,” as well as the fact that the magazine was “still losing a lot of money each month” as reasons for closing. Favorite 2022 stories included works by Grace Chan and Somto Ihezue.

Future Science Fiction (future-sf.com) announced that it was going on hiatus at the end of 2022 after five years of publication. FSF was a good source for international science fiction, so losing them is a blow to readers looking for those works. Editor Alex Shvartsman cited the time commitment of a quarterly magazine as the primary factor. An anthology project he will helm in 2023 will likely lead to future stories being published on the site, but doesn’t necessarily suggest a future direction for the magazine. Their strongest story this year, written by Xing Fan, appears in the recommended reading list.

After nearly a decade of publication, Lackington’s (lackingtons.com) went on hiatus after a single 2022 issue. The publisher has committed to keeping back issues available online and in ebook editions.

Lamplight (lamplightmagazine.com) closed in June, shortly after its tenth anniversary. Jacob Haddon indicated that this was a decision nearly two years in the making. The low numbers of subscriptions made it unsustainable.

Land Beyond the World (landbeyondtheworld.substack.com) closed after publishing a single story in 2022. No explanation was provided, but stories are still currently available on their website.

Mithila Review (mithilareview.com) published a single hopepunk-themed issue in 2022, but has decided to switch from magazine to themed anthology format moving forward.

New or Returning Magazines

Factor Four (factorfourmag.com), a flash fiction magazine, has returned after closing in 2019. Twelve new issues were posted to their website this year.

Hex Literary (hexliterary.com) is based at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts and publishes flash fiction and shorter works on a “weekly-ish” schedule.

Internova (internova.worldculturehub.net) is the third incarnation of a German magazine that focuses on publishing international science fiction in English. Two issues were published.

Interzone Digital (interzone.digital) is a sister publication to veteran UK magazine Interzone, launched by its new publisher, Gareth Jelley, shortly after its purchase.

Old Moon Quarterly (oldmoonpublishing.com) is an independent magazine that published two issues of mostly weird and sword-and-sorcery fiction in its first year.

​Radon Journal (radonjournal.com) is a triannual online journal with an emphasis on science fiction, anarchism, transhumanism, and dystopia. They published two issues in 2022.

Rikka Zine (rikka-zine.com) is a Japanese-English bilingual magazine with an emphasis on world science fiction. Their first issue was published in November.

Seize The Press (seizethepress.com) published five issues in their first year and focuses on “dark speculative fiction and anticapitalist sci-fi, fantasy and horror pop culture analysis.”

Space Fantasy (spacefantasymag.com) published one issue and aims to feature stories that “challenge our relationship with space—past, present, and future.”

Solarpunk (solarpunkmagazine.com) is a bi-monthly magazine with an emphasis on utopian, solarpunk themes. They published six issues in their first year.

The Sunday Morning Transport (www.sundaymorningtransport.com) is perhaps the most well-funded new publication to launch in 2022. Employing Substack, SMT releases stories every Sunday morning. Works are solicited from some of the field’s better-known authors and span a range of science fiction and fantasy. Stories by Yoon Ha Lee, Analee Newitz, C.C. Finlay are among their best.

Tasavvurnama (tasavvurnama.com) is a quarterly publication that aims to create a place for imaginative short stories from South Asia. Four issues were released in 2022. The name comes from “Tasavvur,” which means imagination in Urdu/Hindi.

​Wyngraf (wyngraf.com) published two issues of mostly cozy fantasy stories. Their name originates in “Wyngrāf,” an Old English compound word that means “wondrous grove.”

Other Magazines

There’s currently a very rich assortment of magazines being published. Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to talk about them all, but I’d like to call attention to some of the others I read in the last year: Abyss & Apex (abyssapexzine.com), Anathema (anathemamag.com), Andromeda Spaceways (andromedaspaceways.com), Apex (apex-magazine.com), Apparition Lit (apparitionlit.com), Augur (augurmag.com), Aurealis (aurealis.com.au), Baffling (bafflingmag.com), Bards & Sages (bardsandsages.com), Beneath Ceaseless Skies (beneath-ceaseless-skies.com), Bourbon Penn (bourbonpenn.com), Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores (cosmicrootsandeldritchshores.com), Cossmass Infinities (cossmass.com), Dark Matter (darkmattermagazine.shop), Diabolical Plots (diabolicalplots.com), DreamForge Anvil / DreamForge (dreamforgemagazine.com), Eita! (eitamagazine.com), Electric Spec (electricspec.com), Etherea (ethereamagazine.com), Flash Fiction Online (flashfictiononline.com), Forever (forever-magazine.com), Frozen Wavelets (frozenwavelets.com), Fusion Fragment (fusionfragment.com), Galaxy’s Edge (galaxysedge.com), Grimdark (grimdarkmagazine.com), Heroic Fantasy Quarterly (heroicfantasyquarterly.com), Hexagon (hexagonmagazine.ca), HyphenPunk (hyphenpunk.com), Infinite Worlds (infiniteworldsmagazine.com), James Gunn's Ad Astra (adastrasf.com), Kaleidotrope (kaleidotrope.net), khōréō (khoreomag.com), Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (smallbeerpress.com/lcrw), Little Blue Marble (littlebluemarble.ca), Luna Station Quarterly (lunastationquarterly.com), Metaphorosis (magazine.metaphorosis.com), Mythaxis (mythaxis.co.uk), Neo-Opsis (neo-opsis.ca), New Myths (newmyths.com), Omenana (omenana.com), On Spec (onspecmag.wpcomstaging.com), ParSec (pspublishing.co.uk/parsec-79-c.asp), Planet Scumm (planetscumm.space), Pulphouse (pulphousemagazine.com), Pyre (pyremagazine.com), Reckoning (reckoning.press), Sci Phi Journal (sciphijournal.org), Shoreline of Infinity (shorelineofinfinity.com), Space and Time (spaceandtime.net), Terraform (vice.com/en/topic/terraform), The Arcanist (thearcanist.io), The Dread Machine (thedreadmachine.com), The Future Fire (futurefire.net), Three Crows (threecrowsmagazine.com), Translunar Travelers Lounge (translunartravelerslounge.com), Underland Arcana (underlandarcana.com), Weird Tales (weirdtales.com), Worlds of Possibility (juliarios.com/worlds-of-possibility), and ZNB Presents! (zombiesneedbrains.com). My apologies to anyone I accidentally missed.

Podcasts

Audio fiction, particularly in the form of podcasts, has become a very important part of the short fiction ecosystem. Here you’ll find a very rich assortment of new and previously published science fiction works published in audio form every month ranging from multiple narrator shows like Simultaneous Times (podomatic.com/podcasts/spacecowboybooks) or Dust (watchdust.com/listen/) to single narrator led productions like Levar Burton Reads (levarburtonpodcast.com).

Over the years, many of our magazines have embraced this medium. Analog, Apex, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and others have podcasts as a means of reaching more readers/listeners. Some magazines, such as EscapePod (escapepod.org), Cast of Wonders (castofwonders.org), Podcastle (podcastle.org), and StarShipSofa (starshipsofa.com), originally began as podcasts and later expanded into online text and other formats as well. Everything converges in this field.

Podcasts are responsible for introducing a significant number of new readers and listeners to the field and, for many, it’s their preferred method of reading. As you might expect, the production quality of shows can vary in quality, but there is almost certainly something for everyone among the wide range of new and archived podcasts currently available on most major platforms. If you haven’t checked them out, you can do so for free directly at their websites or frequently via iTunes, Spotify, Google, Amazon, and many more.

Anthologies and Collections

Anthologies and collections have always played an important role in short fiction but, with rare exception, have fallen from grace in the eyes of the field’s biggest publishers. That said, Tordotcom Publishing should be commended for publishing two original anthologies this year: Africa Risen, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight, and The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang.

What makes these even more interesting is that they’re a temporary departure from the “big-name author” model we’ve typically seen employed to sell an anthology (both to the publisher and readers). Being focused on authors with regional connections–Africa and China respectively–the contributors may not be as widely known to American readers. That regional themes could be seen as a significant enough marketing point to overcome this—and warranted two projects in a year at a major publishing house—is a very positive sign for international science fiction projects. It’s a risk that I hope pays off and paves the way for more.

Both anthologies include strong works. I particularly enjoyed the stories by Steven Barnes and Wole Talabi in Africa Risen and have reprinted Wole’s here. The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories contains enjoyable stories by Xia Jia, Zhao Haihong, and Nian Yu, the latter of which is also in this volume. I recommend seeking out both anthologies if you enjoy these stories.

Continuing the international start, another anthology that caught my eye was The Best of World SF II edited by Lavie Tidhar. Unlike the first volume, this one contains a lot of original works, a departure for a series that contains the word “best” in the title. Pan Haitian and Julie Nováková wrote the strongest of the originals.

Editor Jonathan Strahan managed to get two original anthologies–Someone in Time and Tomorrow’s Parties–published this year. The former is a themed anthology of time-travel romance stories featuring strong stories by Zen Cho, Seanan McGuire, and Catherynne M. Valente. The latter focuses on the Anthropocene, an era of dramatic and violent climate change and includes several interesting works by Sarah Gailey, Malka Older, Justina Robson, and Tade Thompson. Of the two, I prefer Tomorrow’s Parties, but found stories from both worth in this anthology.

Reclaim the Stars, edited by Zoraida Córdova, was marketed as a young adult anthology of stories that take you to the stars. It was published by Wednesday Books, an imprint of Macmillan. Daniel Jose Older has the strongest contribution in this volume.

Living in the space between anthology and collection was The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe, someone you may more likely know from her music. Here the stories are co-written with a variety of authors. My favorite was “Timebox Altar(ed)” co-written with Sheree Renée Thomas.

The majority of anthologies continue to find homes in the small press or as part of Kickstarter campaigns. This can make them harder to find, but the gems can make them well worth seeking out.

Bridge to Elsewhere, edited by Alana Joli Abbott and Julia Rios and published as part of a Kickstarter campaign, is an anthology of space-based adventures. It includes two strong stories from A.T. Greenblatt and S.L. Huang, one of which is reprinted here.

Meteotopia: Futures of Climate (In)Justice, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Ana Rüsche, and Francesco Verso, was published as a joint project between CoFUTURES and Future Fiction. My favorite story in this one was by Chinelo Onwualu and it's included in this volume.

New Voices in Chinese SF, edited by Neil Clarke, Xia Jia, and Regina Kanyu Wang, was one of the stretch goals for last year’s collection of stories by Xia Jia. This anthology showcased Chinese authors that had not been previously published in English, making them “new” to English language readers, but sometimes well-known to Chinese readers. Favorite stories here include works by Liang Qingsan and Congyun “Mu Ming” Gu, the latter of which you’ll read here.

Grist’s Imagine 2200 is a contest for climate fiction that ends up being presented like an online anthology, so I’m counting it as one. This year’s group included a strong story by Rich Larson.

New Worlds, edited by Nick Gevers and Peter Crowther, is the rebirth of the magazine (with editor Michael Moorcock’s blessing) as an anthology series published by PS Publishing in the UK. I particularly enjoyed Gwyneth Jones’ contribution.

Night, Rain, and Neon, edited by Michael Cobley, is a cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk anthology published by Newcon Press. They even timed the release of the book to match the same date Wiliam Gibson’s Neuromancer was published. TR Napper has the strongest story.

Among the other anthologies received were Brave New Worlds edited by S.C. Butler and Joshua Palmatier, Corporate Catharsis, DON’T TOUCH THAT! edited by Jaymee Goh, Fission #2 Volume 1 edited by Eugen Bacon and Gene Rowe, Fission #2 Volume 2 edited by Eugen Bacon and Gene Rowe, Freetaly: Italian Science Fiction edited by Francesco Verso, Galaxy Awards 1 edited by Latssep and Francesco Verso, Kalicalypse edited by Tarun K. Saint, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, and Francesco Verso, Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms edited by John Joseph Adams, Mafaverna: Democracy edited by Jana Bianchi and Diogo Ramos, No Game for Knights edited by Larry Correia and Kacey Ezell, Noir edited by David B. Coe and John Zakour, Opulent Syntax: Irish Speculative Fiction edited by Don Duncan and dave ring, Other Covenants: Alternate Histories of the Jewish People edited by Andrea D. Lobel and Mark Shainblum, Our Move Next edited by Franc Summers and Kelly-Eve Koopman in collaboration with Vasti Hannie, ROBOSOLDIERS: Thank You for Your Servos edited by Stephen Lawson, Rogue Artists: An Origins Anthology edited by E.D.E. Bell, Shattering the Glass Slipper edited by Crystal Sarakas and Rhondi Salsitz, Snaring New Suns, Speculative Works from Hawai’i and Beyond edited by Tom Gammarino, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, D. Keali’i MacKenzie, and Lyz Soto, Sword & Planet edited by Christopher Ruocchio, The Future's So Bright edited by Elyse Russell, The Reinvented Heart edited by Jennifer Brozek and Cat Rambo, This All Come Back Now: An Anthology of First Nations Speculative Fiction edited by Mykaela Saunders, Trenchcoats, Towers, and Trolls: Cyberpunk Fairy Tales edited by Rhonda Parrish, Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Unlimited Futures: Speculative, Visionary Blak+Black Fiction edited by Rafeif Ismail and Ellen van Neerven, Weird World War IV edited by Sean Patrick Hazlett, and Worlds Long Lost edited by Christopher Ruocchio and Sean CW Korsgaard.

Since short story collections typically consist of previously published works, I don’t often find many stories in them to consider for this anthology. Sadly, it felt like there were fewer published this year than in previous years. Despite that, I still managed to find several that are worth checking out, including: The Adventurists by Richard Butner, Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection by James S.A. Corey, Night Shift by Eileen Gunn, The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel by John Kessel, The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun by Anil Menon, Boys, Beasts & Men by Sam J. Miller, The Best of Lucius Shepard: Vol. 2 by Lucius Shepard, Utopias of the Third Kind by Vandana Singh, Where You Linger & Other Stories by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, and All the Hometowns You Can't Stay Away From by Izzy Wasserstein.

The 2022 Scorecard

The science fiction community offers a wide variety of awards to recognize various achievements in the field. The short fiction categories–and those for the people and places that publish them–have been significantly disrupted by the arrival of quality free online fiction. Its increased visibility, ease of sharing, and longer shelf life give it a significant advantage over stories published in paywalled magazines and anthologies. As attitudes toward campaigning for awards have become more permissive, online fiction has also benefited disproportionately.

If you were to go by the awards, you might be mistakenly led to believe that some of our most successful magazines and anthologies are failing or underperforming. This year’s scorecard suggests much more balance and conversations with other best of the year editors presents a consensus opinion that the best works are more distributed across the field than the awards would have you believe.

My selections for this year include thirty-one works, matching last year’s quantity. Here is how they break down by where the stories originally appeared:

| Stories Included | Percentage | Sources
Magazines | 23 | 74.2% | 8
    - Paywall | 10 | 32.3% | 3
    - Free Ed. | 13 | 41.9% | 5
Anthologies | 8 | 25.8% | 7
Collections | 0 | 0% | 0
Standalone | 0 | 0% | 0

These represent a total of fifteen different sources, one less than last year, but in keeping with recent years. Magazines represented four more stories, but one less venue. The balance shifted by two more toward magazines with free editions, but given that paywalled magazines are in the minority, the gap could easily be higher. This demonstrates the high level of quality produced by those magazines. The total number of stories from anthologies decreased by three from last year, but the number of sources increased by one. Since collections typically include previously published works, last year’s two stories were a short-lived and unusual departure.

Standalone works are those that were published on their own and not connected to any of the other categories. Most commonly, these are separately published novellas. There were two included three years ago, but none since.

The field’s many awards rank short fiction based on word count into categories, most commonly short stories, novelettes, and novellas. Within short stories (works under 7500 words), there are additional carve-outs for flash (works under 1,000 words) and drabbles (exactly 100 words), but they tend to be included in short stories for the purpose of awards.

Given the limited financial resources and per-word payment model for short fiction, it shouldn’t be surprising that short stories represent the lion’s share of what gets published. Novelettes (under 17,500 words) tend to have better representation in anthologies and larger magazines. Novellas (under 40,000 words) represent the smallest portion of the field. However, over the last decade, the format has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts. Serialized novels are a rarity for today’s magazines but, surprisingly, I found them in Asimov’s and Galaxy’s Edge this year. Works of that length are not considered for this anthology.

In this year’s selections, short stories declined from twenty-two to nineteen, which is still better than two years ago. Novelettes jumped back up to eleven from last year’s seven, which makes up for some of last year’s losses. Novellas dropped from two to one. Even with an anthology this big, it can be difficult to include more than two or three novellas due to their size.

A note on novellas: Tordotcom Publishing is widely considered the leader here and dominates this category in various awards. Quality novellas, however, can be found in a much wider variety of sources than those awards reflect. Magazines–most commonly Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Clarkesworld, and no fewer than six others published at least one in 2022–and publishers–like Tachyon (tachyonpublications.com), Neon Hemlock (neonhemlock.com), and Subterranean Press (subterraneanpress.com), among others–remain reliable sources for novellas.

And from the recommended reading list:

| Stories Included | Percentage | Sources
Magazines | 30 | 63.8% | 14
    - Paywall | 9 | 19.1% | 3
    - Free Ed. | 21 | 44.7% | 11
Anthologies | 15 | 31.9% | 11
Collections | 1 | 2.1% | 1
Standalone | 1 | 2.1% | 1

There were forty-seven stories on the recommended reading list this year, up from forty-six in 2021. Magazines decreased by one and anthologies increased by eight. Collections decreased by four and standalone decreased by two. There are thirty-three short stories, nine novelettes, and five novellas on the recommended reading list.

When you combine the recommended reading list with those included in this book, there are seventy-eight works from twenty-eight different sources. Both the quantity of stories and number of sources increased by one over last year. This is certainly a good period of time for fans of short fiction, even if the publishers themselves still struggle.

Notable 2022 Awards

The 80th World Science Fiction Convention, Chicon 8, was held September 1–5, 2022, in Chicago, Illinois. The 2022 Hugo Awards, presented at Worldcon 80, went to: Best Novel, A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine; Best Novella, A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers; Best Novelette, “Bots of the Lost Ark” by Suzanne Palmer; Best Short Story, “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” by Sarah Pinsker; Best Series, Wayward Children by Seanan McGuire; Best Related Work, Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders; Best Graphic Story or Comic, Far Sector, written by N.K. Jemisin, art by Jamal Campbell; Best Dramatic Presentation (long form), Dune, screenplay by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, and Eric Roth, directed by Denis Villeneuve, based on the novel Dune by Frank Herbert; Best Dramatic Presentation (short form), The Expanse: Nemesis Games, written by Daniel Abraham, Ty Franck, and Naren Shankar; directed by Breck Eisner; Best Editor, Short Form, Neil Clarke; Best Editor, Long Form, Ruoxi Chen; Best Professional Artist, Rovina Cai; Best Semiprozine, Uncanny Magazine, publishers and editors-in-chief Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas; managing/poetry editor Chimedum Ohaegbu; nonfiction editor Elsa Sjunneson; podcast producers Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky; Best Fanzine, Small Gods, Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story); Best Fancast, Our Opinions Are Correct, presented by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, produced by Veronica Simonetti; Best Fan Writer, Cora Buhlert; Best Fan Artist, Lee Moyer; plus the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik, and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, Shelley Parker-Chan.

The 2021 Nebula Awards, presented during a virtual ceremony, on May 21, 2022, went to: Best Novel, A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark; Best Novella, And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed; Best Novelette, “O2 Arena” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki; Best Short Story, “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” by Sarah Pinsker; Best Game Writing, Thirsty Sword Lesbians; Ray Bradbury Award, WandaVision: Season 1; the Andre Norton Award to A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger; the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award to Petra Mayer, Troy L. Wiggins, and Arley Sorg; the Kevin O’Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award to Colin Coyle; and the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award to Mercedes Lackey.

The 2022 World Fantasy Awards–presented during a ceremony in New Orleans, Louisiana on November 6, 2022, during the Annual World Fantasy Convention–were: Best Novel, The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri; Best Novella, And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed; Best Short Fiction “(emet)” by Lauren Ring; Best Collection, Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan by Usman T. Malik; Best Anthology, The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki; Best Artist, Tran Nguyen; Special Award (Professional), Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda, for Monstress Volume Six: The Vow; Special Award (Non-Professional), to Tonia Ransom for Nightlight: A Horror Fiction Podcast. Lifetime Achievement Awards to Samuel R. Delany and Terri Windling. This year’s judges were C.S.E. Cooney, Julie Crisp, C.C. Finlay, Richard Kadrey, and Misha Stone.

The 2022 Locus Awards, presented during a virtual ceremony on June 25, 2022, went to: Science Fiction Novel, A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine; Fantasy Novel, Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee; Horror Novel, My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones; Young Adult Novel, Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders; First Novel, A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark; Novella, Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells; Novelette, “That Story Isn’t the Story” by John Wiswell; Short Story, “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” by Sarah Pinsker; Anthology, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020, edited by C.L. Clark & Charles Payseur; Collection, Even Greater Mistakes, by Charlie Jane Anders; Magazine, Tor.com; Publisher, Tor Books; Editor, Ellen Datlow; Artist, Charles Vess; Non-Fiction, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950–1985, edited by Andrew Nette & Iain McIntyre; Illustrated and Art Book, The Art of Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess’s Stardust, by Charles Vess; Special Award, The Codex Writers’ Group.

The IGNYTE Awards, presented during a virtual ceremony on September 17, 2022, went to: Best Novel, A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark; Best Novel YA, A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger; Best Middle Grade, Root Magic by Eden Royce; Best Novella, And This is How to Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda; Best Novelette, “The Future Library” by Peng Shepherd; Best Short Story, “If the Martians Have Magic” by P. Djèlí Clark; Best in Speculative Poetry, “Post Massacre Psyche Evaluation” by Abu Bakr Sadiq; Critics Award, Alex Brown; Best Science Fiction Podcast, khōréō; Best Artist, Morgan Madeline; Best Comics Team,  Nubia: Real One, L.L. McKinney & Robyn Smith; Best Anthology/Collected Works, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020, edited by C.L. Clark & Charles Payseur; Best in Creative Non-Fiction, “We Are the Mountain: A Look at the Inactive Protagonist” by Vida Cruz; Ember Award, Tananarive Due; Community Award, The Submission Grinder.

The 2022 Dragon Awards, presented during Dragon Con on September 7, 2022, went to: Best Science Fiction Novel, Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey; Best Fantasy Novel, Book of Night by Holly Black; Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel, A Dark and Starless Forest by Sarah Hollowell; Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel, A Call to Insurrection by David Weber, Timothy Zahn, & Thomas Pope; Best Alternate History Novel, The Silver Bullets of Annie Oakley by Mercedes Lackey; Best Media Tie-In Novel, Star Wars: Thrawn Ascendancy: Lesser Evil by Timothy Zahn; Best Horror Novel, The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig; Best Comic Book, Immortal X-Men by Kieron Gillen & Mark Brooks; Best Graphic Novel, Dune: House Atreides Volume 2 by Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson, & Dev Pramanik; Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series, Stranger Things; Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie, Dune; Best Science Fiction or Fantasy PC/Console Game, Elden Ring; Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Mobile Game, Diablo Immortal; Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Board Game, Star Wars Outer Rim: Unfinished Business; Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Miniatures/Collectible Card / Role-Playing Game, Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms.

The 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Science Fiction was won by “Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story” by Nalo Hopkinson.

The 2022 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to Dead Space by Kali Wallace and a special citation went to The Escapement by Lavie Tidhar.

The 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award was won by Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles.

The 2021 Otherwise Award (previously the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award) was given to Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki and Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon.

The 2022 WSFA Small Press Award went to “Eight Mile and the City” by Steven Harper.

The 2022 Sidewise Award for Alternate History was announced on September 3, 2022, at Chicon 8. Winners were “Gunpowder Treason” by Alan Smale for short form and Civilizations by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor, for long form.

In Memoriam

Among those the field lost in 2022 are:

Mirosław Kowalski, editor, head of Poland’s Supernova sf/fantasy publishing imprint; John Jos. Miller, author and Wild Card series contributor; Willie Siros, NASFIC Chair and Worldcon GoH, ran Adventures in Crime and Space bookstore; Rick Cook, novelist and short story author; Ron Goulart, book reviewer, author of many novels, book reviewer, and Marvel contributor; Dave Wolverton (a.k.a. Dave Farland), Writers of the Future winner, author of  the Runelords series, the Ravenspell series, the Serpent Catch series, and books in the Star Wars universe; J. Brian Clarke, novelist and short story author; Holger M. Pohl, author, editor and columnist for the fanzine Fantasyguide; Richard L. Tierney, short story author and poet, co-author of several Red Sonja novels; Ashley Bryan, children’ author and illustrator, winner of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award and the Newbery Honor; Angélica Gorodischer, author and World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award winner; Tom Dupree, author, co-editor of Full Spectrum 5; Barry McGhan, publisher of Science fiction Pseudonyms and Teaching Tomorrow: A Handbook of Science Fiction for Teachers; Eduardo Goligorsky, author, anthologist, and book critic; Don Tumasonis, author and winner of the IHG Short Form Award; Melissa Mead, short story author and novelist; Faren Miller, author and first full-time employee of Locus; Michel Henricot, author, painter, and sculptor; Kira Soshinskaya, illustrator and translator of numerous books into Russian; Jon M. Harvey, editor of Bathlus and Fantasy Media, edited several Cthulhu anthologies, winner of the British Fantasy Award; Shirley Hughes, Kate Greenaway Medal-winning illustrator of numerous children’s books; Peter Caras, cover artist of several horror novels as well as Avengers and The Spider pulp novels; Priscilla Tolkien, youngest and last surviving child of J.R.R. Tolkien, served as the honorary Vice President of the Tolkien Society and as a trustee for the Tolkien Trust; Joe Krush cover artist; Steve Redwood, short story writer and novelist; Bill Johnson, author and winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novelette; Joël Houssin, author and winner of Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire and Prix Apollo; Rafael Llopis, author, anthologist, and translator of works from English into Spanish; Patricia MacLachlan, author and Newbery recipient; Celâl Kandemiroglu, cover artist and designed graphics for several video games; Carlos Emílio Corrêa Lima, author, poet, culture activist, and editor; David McKee, writer and illustrator; Majid Tubya, novelist; Valerio Evangelisti, author, winner of the Imaginaire and Urania Awards; Marshall Arisman, cover artist; Pam Chillemi-Yeager, author and co-editor of Fantasque; Serhiy Dyachenko, author and screenwriter, winner of the Aelita Prize, and named (with his wife) as the Best Writers in Europe at the 2005 Eurocon; Patricia A. McKillip, author of the Riddle Master of Hed trilogy, multiple winner of the World Fantasy Award, World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient; George Perez, artist involved in The Avengers, The New Teen Titans, and Crisis on Infinite Earths, guest of honor at the 2017 NASFIC; Atanas P. Slavov, author, founder of Terra Fantasia, the first SF club in Bulgaria, winner of three Eurocon Awards; Henry Mavrodin, cover artist, Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), author and co-editor of an issue of Semiotext[e] SF; Barbara Paul, author and Star Trek novelist; Ken Kelly, artist with frequent covers for DAW; Geoffrey H. Goodwin, author, essayist, and interviewer; Billy Wolfenbarger, poet and author; Dorothy Heydt, author, edited the first Star Trek Concordance and created one of the first Vulcan languages; Tom Chmielewski, novelist and treasurer for the Clarion Foundation; Ni Kuang, wrote the screenplay for Fists of Fury and also wrote several wuxia novels; Alan Kubatiyev, author, Russian translator of H.G. Wells, Michael Moorcock, and Ursula Le Guin; Vincent Michael Simbulan, author and anthologist; Barbara Delaplace, author, winner of the HOMer Award, Campbell nominee; Herbert W. Franke, theoretical physicist, author, and computer artist, Worldcon Guest of Honor; Eric Flint, author, editor, publisher, well-known for his 1632 series and contributions in working with new authors, NASFIC Guest of Honor; Valjeanne Jeffers, author, editor of Genesis Science Fiction Magazine; Michael Ambrose, author, edited The Argonaut and Macabre; publisher of Argo Press; David Ireland, author and artist; Dennis Nolan (a.k.a. Jane Mitchell), cover artist for several books by Orson Scott Card, Jane Yolen, Susan Shwartz, and Andre Norton; Albert E. Cowdrey, author and World Fantasy Award winner; Alexei Panshin, author, Nebula and Hugo Award winner; Celia Correas de Zapata, leading scholar of Latin American women authors, edited the anthology Short Stories by Latin American Women: The Magic and the Real; Philip Mann, author and winner of the Vogel Award for services to science fiction, fantasy, and horror; Peter Straub, author, World Horror Grandmaster, IHG Living Legend, and recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from World Fantasy and the Stokers; Maureen K. Speller, reviewer, editor, librarian, winner of the Nova Award for Best Fan Writer; Charles Partington, author, editor of Alien Worlds and Something Else, publisher of several issues of New Worlds, co-founder of Savoy Books; Chandler “Chan” Davis, author, Worldcon Fan Guest of Honor; Bob A. Madle, believed to have been the last surviving member of the first Worldcon and the first US SF convention, Worldcon Fan Guest of Honor, TAFF delegate, Hugo finalist, co-founder of PSFS, the Carolina SF Society, and First Fandom, Big Heart Award recipient, First Fandom Hall of Fame inductee, winner of the Sam Moskowitz Archive Award; Feliks W. Kres, author, editor of multiple magazines aimed at young writers; Tom Maddox, author, teacher, and co-wrote two episodes of The X-Files with William Gibson; Ned Dameron, artist, worked for Donald M. Grant, Underwood-Miller, and TSR; Andrey Marytanov, author of several novels, including Conan pastiches, under the pseudonym Olaf Bjorn Loknit; Rico Gehrke, author and finalist for Kurd Laßwitz Preis; Henry Morrison, agent whose clients included Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Patricia Keneally-Morrison, Dean Koontz, and Eric Van Lustbader; David Sherman, author, co-author of the Starfist series; Anne Harris, author, winner of the first Spectrum Award, Nebula Award finalist; Greg Bear, author, winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, former SFWA President, Worldcon Guest of Honor, helped found what became the San Diego Comic-Con International; Ray Nelson, author and Philip K. Dick collaborator, recipient of the Rotsler Award, First Fandom Hall of Fame inductee; Richard Bober, artist for numerous covers beginning in the 1970s, including several Gene Wolfe novels; Peter Goodfellow, artist that provided covers for Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Olaf Stapledon; Kim Mohan, author, editor for gaming magazines Ares and Dragon, editor at Amazing Stories, anthologist.

In Closing

It’s important to me to end these introductions on a positive note, particularly after noting just how much talent the field has lost over the last year. I can think of no better way than to look to the future and the people who are just beginning to find their place in our community. They are a continually renewing source of inspiration and hope for the future and we find so many of them within the borders of short fiction.

Each year, I try to single out a new, or new-ish, author that has impressed me. As always, there’s no shortage of people to choose from. The short list forms rather quickly, but narrowing it down to one can be harder some years than others. After some deliberation, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no one better to represent the current group than Isabel J. Kim.

Since publishing her first story, “Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self” in Clarkesworld in 2021, nine more have appeared in the pages of Clarkesworld, khōréō, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Cast of Wonders, Lightspeed, Fantasy, and Strange Horizons. They’ve demonstrated an impressive range and have been recognized with a 2021 Subjective Chaos Kind of Award, a 2021 Shirley Jackson Award, several finalist placements (and a win) in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll, multiple appearances on the Locus Recommended Reading list, and reprints in year’s best anthologies. That’s an impressive run for such a short window of time and is a fantastic start to any career.

She has one story in this anthology and another on the recommended reading list. Choosing which one to reprint was a challenge. Seek out her other works when you're done with this anthology. You won’t be disappointed.

Naomi Kritzer is a science fiction and fantasy writer from St. Paul, Minnesota. Her fiction has won the Hugo Award, Edgar Award, and Minnesota Book Award. She has a spouse, two grown kids and three cats (the number of cats is subject to change without notice). You can find Naomi online at naomikritzer.com or on Bluesky as @naomikritzer.bsky.social. Her newest book, Liberty’s Daughter, came out in November 2023.

The Dragon Project

Naomi Kritzer

“I want you to make a dragon for me,” the client said. “I need it ready to go by February first.”

Dragon, Feb 1, I wrote down on the paper pad I use to take notes during video meetings. Also to doodle. I’ve always had trouble paying attention in client meetings, which is why I’m the bioengineer and not the manager.

“Because that’s Chinese New Year,” the client continued. “And it’s going to be the Year of the Dragon. And I want the dragon ready for the parade.”

“It’s not going to be the Year of the Dragon,” I said. “That’s two years from now. This year is the Year of the Tiger.” I noticed, too late, that my business partner Jed was sending me a text saying shhhh Vivian shhhh.

“I’m sure every year is the Year of the Dragon somewhere,” the client said confidently.

“Sure,” said Jed. This was definitely wrong, but Jed sent me another chat message, this one saying SHHHHHH in all capital letters. Also, I’d realized that I’d rather make a dragon than a tiger. Probably Jed was having the same thought.

“We’ve got a whole ad campaign planned around having a dragon,” the client said. “But we’re thinking we’ll roll it out at the parade in San Francisco. They have one of those dragon parade float thingies, right?”

I let Jed handle that one and started quietly sketching out the plan for the dragon.

I am a bioengineer working in living 3D printing. What I trained to do was make 3D printed organs for transplant. Those are more useful than custom-printed animals. But it turns out that not all that many people each year need a new kidney or a new heart, and organ transplants aren’t the sort of surgery anyone gets for fun. So by the time I had my degree, there were way more bioengineers than the 3D organ printing labs actually needed.

So I was happy when my college friend Jed suggested we go into business together making custom animals. Jed had majored in business communications, and he handled client management and all the stuff like “actually sending out bills for the work we did.” I did all the lab work. I made enough to pay for a very small apartment in San Jose, close to the lab. Jed didn’t have to come to San Jose in person all that often, so he bought a house in Modesto, which is a long drive from San Jose but cheaper.

For most of our first two years, we made hypoallergenic cats, clones of people’s dead pets, and occasional odd projects like a Chihuahua dog that looked like a tiny Siberian tiger if the tiger were also a dog. It was owned by a very rich lady who liked to pose with it and take pictures. Jed had been kind of hoping this would start a fad for tigerdogs, but no one else had hired us to make one.

People had been asking for dragons for a while, but this client—I think he was a hedge fund manager who was starting a new entertainment streaming service, but possibly he was an entertainment streaming service CEO who was starting a hedge fund. Did I mention I’m bad at paying attention in meetings? Whichever it was, his company was called Imaginational Criterion. The client—whose name was Brody or Brayden or maybe Bryce—was the first person to come along with enough money to really kick the dragon development project into gear.

I sat down with my sketchbook and started thinking about what a dragon ought to look like.

“No,” the client said, looking at the dragon.

My dragon climbed down my arm to the keyboard and stretched out in front of my laptop camera, arching its back. “Oh, big stretch,” I whispered to it under my breath.

“That thing doesn’t even have wings! Does it breathe fire?”

“We discussed fire,” Jed said. “Specifically, we discussed the insurance requirements of a dragon that could actually breathe fire.”

“Chinese dragons don’t breathe fire,” I said. “And they don’t have wings.” Although they do fly. This one didn’t fly. To fly for real, you need both wings and hollow bones; I thought it would be better to make a sturdy dragon.

“Also, a dragon should be larger! That thing is the size of a squirrel?”

“It’s bigger than a squirrel,” I said.

“We discussed size parameters,” Jed said. “We agreed on a five-to-ten-pound dragon.”

“I’m not paying for this!” Bryce said.

“The contract clearly says . . . ”

I stopped listening. The dragon also looked like it had stopped listening; it climbed down and started playing with my shoelace. Out of view of the camera, I dangled a mystery cable (does everyone accumulate mystery cables on their desk or is it just me?), and the dragon leaped up to grab it, clinging with all four feet. I’d given it little claws on its toes so it could cling pretty well.

I suddenly realized that Jed was saying my name, and I tried to look like I’d been paying attention all along. “Vivian. Do you think that’s possible?” he asked.

“Oh, definitely,” I said, and hoped I was telling the truth.

The “do you think it’s possible” turned out to be “grow another dragon by the deadline.”

For the second dragon, I was told to make it bigger, fiercer looking, and to give it wings.

“Wings are inauthentic,” I said.

“No one cares,” Jed said.

The first dragon was about the size of a cat, and since the client had refused delivery, I kept him. I fed him crickets and mealworms, shaved carrots and diced peppers, crunchy cat kibble, and occasional cans of sardines. The dragon grew plump, developed a habit of begging at the table, and shredded my sofa and curtains with his claws. He also liked to lie across the back of my shoulders when I was working, like a tiny scaly heating pad. (Despite the scales, he wasn’t a reptile; I had thought a warm-blooded dragon would have a more interesting personality. There are scaled mammals, like pangolins.) He ran around the house with a little galumphing hop.

As the second dragon gestated at the lab, I started calling the first dragon Mr. Long. (“Long” is Chinese for dragon; also, he was rather long.) Mr. Long started getting into things. First he figured out how to open up the cabinet where I stored the cat kibble. I kept his crickets and mealworms in a terrarium; he opened that up and set them free because he found it entertaining to chase them around the house. He figured out how to turn on the bathtub faucet, though not how to put the stopper in the drain to actually get himself a bath, and he discovered that my pillows were full of feathers that would blow all over the bedroom when ripped open.

This was fine. I switched to synthetic pillows, resigned myself to hearing the chirp of crickets from odd locations, and adjusted the water heater so that his impromptu bath parties wouldn’t leave him with scalds.

I designed the new dragon with a face that showed off his teeth more, since they wanted “fierce,” and wings, as instructed, although basically the wings were a crest it could raise in display. Also, it would have feathers instead of scales. One of the Bryce’s complaints about Mr. Long was that he was tan instead of brightly colored, and colorful feathers are easy. (Actual reptiles come in a wide variety of colors as well, but scaled mammals are basically all shades of brown. I’m sure I could figure out how to make a colorful scaled mammal given time, but we were in a hurry.)

Like a baby bird, the new dragon came out soggy, scrawny, and ravenously hungry. Unlike a bird, it had teeth. I took it home to feed it and give it time to grow. Mr. Long found it entertaining to help feed the new dragon, stuffing mealworms and canned tuna and peanut butter sandwiches into its mouth until it got less wobbly and more independent.

Once he’d plumped up a bit, I was really happy with the look of the new dragon. His feathers were red and gold and iridescent black. His face looked fierce, but he was just happy all the time, although he was definitely happiest when he was making a mess. Mr. Long would open cabinets for him, and he’d pull stuff out from inside and scatter it everywhere. He was also a fan of baths, and he figured out that if he put his butt right over the drain, the tub would start to fill up. Fortunately, he didn’t have the attention span to actually flood the bathroom.

Mr. Long used a litterbox like a cat, but the new dragon, who I’d started calling Timothy, really needed time outside, so I bought leashes for both dragons and started taking them out for walks. I probably should have expected what happened next, which was staring, questions, and requests for more information. Mostly about Timothy: Mr. Long preferred to ride on my neck, and if I pulled up my hood people didn’t notice him unless he wanted to be noticed. When people asked for business cards, I gave them Jed’s email address, since the last thing I wanted was to have to answer email from all the people who thought Timothy was a feathered dog with wings. “He’s a dragon,” I said repeatedly. I was pretty sure just from how often I was getting asked this question that the client was not going to be happy.

I was right.

“That’s not a dragon,” Bryce said. “That doesn’t look anything like a dragon.”

“He has wings,” I pointed out.

Timothy flopped down on the floor and used one of his back legs to scratch under his wing.

“It’s a dog,” the client said. “That looks like a dog. With feathers and wings. It doesn’t even breathe fire.”

“We’ve been over this,” Jed said.

“I’ve trained this one for you,” I said. “This dragon is housebroken. Also, if you ask nicely, he will get things for you.”

“You’re saying it plays fetch,” Bryce said. “Like a dog.”

“If you want him to play fetch with you, he will play fetch with you,” I said.

“That is a feathered dog.”

“We sent you sketches,” Jed said. “Which you signed off on.”

“You know,” I said, “When I’ve taken Timothy to the park, I’ve had dozens of people asking about buying a similar animal.”

“You named it Timothy?” the client asked.

“Just temporarily,” I said.

“This is nothing like what I asked for, and I’m not paying,” the client said.

“You know what,” Jed said, losing his temper. “We’ve now created dragons for you twice, you’ve had the opportunity to inspect our work at every step of the way, and both times you’ve refused to take delivery. Timothy is a very good dragon, and you don’t deserve him anyway. You’re fired.”

“You can’t fire me!” Bryce screeched. “I’m the customer!”

“You’re fired,” Jed said again, more loudly. “Good day.”

It turned out that Jed wanted Timothy, which was a relief because my apartment really was not big enough for a dog. A dog-sized dragon. Either one.

On the other hand, it was the perfect size for a scaly little cat. Or a cat-sized dragon, whatever. So I kept Mr. Long and bought childproofing locks for all my cabinets. Mr. Long was a little restless when his buddy went away, but then settled back into his routine of turning on the bathtub and getting into the cabinets and then sleeping on my pillow at night where his breath tickled my cheek. Sometimes on weekends I drove out to Modesto so he and Timothy could have a play date.

We thought we’d heard the last from the client. It turned out we were wrong.

When “Fire at Imaginational Criterion HQ”crossed my news feed, I have to admit that my first thought was just, “Oh, I could cancel that news alert.” It was not, “Oh, Brent or Bryce or whatever his name was must have found someone to make him a fire-breathing dragon.”

It should have been, though!

The Chinese New Year parades had come and gone without any dragons other than Mr. Long, who was not in the parade but came with me as a spectator, riding on my shoulder. Jed had asked me nicely to leave my hood down and hand out business cards to anyone who expressed an interest, which I did since the cards all had his email address and not mine.

We were well into summer when the news story hit about our former client, and I didn’t think anything more about it until I started hearing rumors about a cryptid that everyone was calling the Palo Alto Hippogriff.

Hippogriffs are mythological beasts with the back end of a horse and the front end and wings of an eagle, and the thing about a cryptid walking around in the twenty-first century is that sooner or later someone will get a decent picture of it. I saw the picture, thought, “That doesn’t look like a hippogriff to me, it looks like a dragon,” and that’s when it hit me. Two minutes later, I was digging up everything else I could find about the fire, and about Imaginational Criterion, and I realized that one of the employees who got quoted—Kyle Crocker III—was someone I’d run into in my bioengineering program back in college.

Jed and I hadn’t shared a major in college; we’d met bashing each other with foam swords in a LARPing club. Kyle Crocker III had been a freshman when I was a senior, and I remembered him because at one point that year there was a talk with a reception after, and while I was drinking punch and eating a cookie in a corner, he came over and tried to explain DNA to me. Incorrectly. And when my advisor pulled me out of the corner to introduce me to the speaker, Kyle followed and tried to explain DNA to her, too.

But he did graduate from the same program I went to.

And he and Brent were probably in the same frat.

I looked at the picture of the cryptid again. Short legs, a barrel-chested body, a long neck. It had wings (but they were much too small to lift it). In the picture, I couldn’t tell if it had feathers or scales—just that the creature was dark gray, not brightly colored. I could kind of see why people thought it was horselike, even though the legs were not nearly long enough.

My first concern was for the poor domestic dragon stuck living in the woods. But the second thing that hit me: California is very flammable. Pretty much the whole state. We have serious problems with wildfires. I wasn’t sure what they’d done to make this dragon breathe fire, but any feral animal that breathed fire running around in the woods in California was a terrible idea.

Most of the sightings had been in Palo Alto’s Foothills Park or one of the adjacent nature preserves. Dragons like to play, eat, and play with things they can also eat, which raised the question for me of what this dragon might like to eat. The people seeing him were thinking “horse,” so . . . maybe horse treats?

My college friend Nadia had grown up on a farm in Washington state and had a horse. One time I’d visited her during spring break, and she’d given me apples, carrots, and sugar cubes to feed her horse. So before I headed to Palo Alto, I went to a grocery store to stock up. I brought Mr. Long with me. He’d gotten along very well with Timothy; hopefully the new dragon would like him, too.

I parked at a trailhead, loaded the food into my backpack along with snacks and water for me and Mr. Long, and hiked up the trail. I cut up apples and tried just dropping apple wedges occasionally as I went, figuring that if the dragon didn’t eat them, I’d make a squirrel happy. After a while, I started adding the occasional sugar cube.

On my shoulder, Mr. Long suddenly sat up with interest, and I slowed my steps and looked around.

A big, squat, winged creature was on the path behind me, slurping up a sugar cube with his long tongue. He had scales, and in the shaft of sunlight I could see that they were a sort of dark iridescent green, not the gray I’d seen in the photo. He was designed to look like a western dragon instead of a Chinese dragon, but he was still really pretty.

I’d been thinking I’d lead him back to my car, but looking at him in person, I realized that wouldn’t work. He was a lot bigger than I’d expected and would definitely not fit. He chomped down the apple, then sat up and belched noisily.

Methane, I thought. That’s probably how they did the fire: he belches methane. Horses fart methane, so making a dragon who belched methane would have been relatively straightforward, and in a parade, you could send along a human with a lighter. Methane doesn’t usually spontaneously combust, but I could vouch for the many ways that dragons could make trouble; this guy might have broken into the kitchen to find a snack and turned on the stove by accident. Or maybe they’d overloaded a power strip and a badly timed burp had turned a smoldering circuit into a building fire.

I took out my phone, got a couple of good pictures of the dragon, and then called Jed. “I need a horse trailer,” I said. “I’ve found their dragon.”

“If it’s their dragon, why is it our problem?” he asked.

I just sat there in silence for a minute.

“Okay fine,” Jed said, heaving a sigh.

“I should warn you, I think he burps methane,” I said.

“Probably better not leave him running around, then,” Jed agreed.

“Also, Mr. Long doesn’t want me to leave him.”

“Of course he doesn’t. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

I worried that I would run out of treats to keep the new dragon from running off, but like Timothy, he clearly viewed Mr. Long as a friend. Eventually, a sugar cube at a time, I led him back to the parking lot where Jed had arrived with a rented trailer.

“What a monstrosity,” Jed said when we arrived.

“Don’t you go insulting Sweetpea,” I said.

“You named it Sweetpea?”

We loaded Sweetpea into the trailer and took him to Jed’s house in Modesto, since he definitely was not going to fit into my apartment. “Don’t tell my insurer about the methane,” Jed said.

Two weeks passed. We figured out that much like with cattle and horses, feeding Sweetpea a diet that was partly seaweed cut back significantly on the methane he burped up—that was good news. We were working on finding him a good home when Bryce and Kyle showed up and accused us of theft.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Why would we steal a bioengineered animal from you? Our work is better than yours.”

“According to the news articles,” Jed said, “your corporate headquarters, and all contents, were completely destroyed. If you had made a creature similar to this one, it undoubtedly died tragically in the fire.”

“Obviously it escaped,” Kyle said. “I know my work! My superior work, or you wouldn’t be so eager to keep it!”

“I tell you what,” Jed said. “If you know the creature, then the creature presumably knows you. Let’s have you and Vivian stand at opposite ends of a basketball court, with the creature in the middle. You can each call him and see who he goes to.”

“He’s going to bring treats,” I protested to Jed once Kyle was out of earshot.

“Of course he’ll bring treats,” Jed said. “He wouldn’t have agreed to this if we’d set ‘no treats’ down as a ground rule, but it doesn’t matter, because Sweetpea will pick you.”

We had a neutral party lead Sweetpea out to the middle of the court. Jed and I stood at one end with a bag of apples. Kyle and Bryce stood down at the other with a giant bowl with a mix of fruit and candy in it.

I was worried for a minute.

But only for a minute, because as soon as Sweetpea was off his lead, he turned his back on Bryce and Kyle and headed straight to me. I don’t think he even noticed I had apples, but I gave him one anyway, of course.

Kyle knew he’d lost, but Bryce came over, furious, and started yelling about lawsuits and “the animal’s choice is not legally significant” and something about “restitution without compensation.” I really don’t like it when people get in my space. It’s one of the reasons I like working with Jed: he doesn’t get in my space, and he deals with clients, so they don’t (usually) get in my space. I backed up, but Sweetpea was behind me, so I couldn’t back up very far.

Sweetpea looked at me, and looked at the client, and let out a delicate little burp. Such a little burp.

And it ignited into a tiny little methane fireball that burned off Bryce’s eyebrows, some of his hair, and left him with a blister on his nose.

We had been assuming that Sweetpea couldn’t light his own fires—because we hadn’t seen him do it.

We’d assumed wrong. We just hadn’t given him reason to want to do it.

Bryce switched instantly from yelling about his property to yelling about an injury lawsuit, and he and Kyle got back into their fancy car and drove away, and that was that.

Sweetpea went to live with Nadia, who was a little disconcerted by the whole explanation but fell in love with Sweetpea as soon as she met him. She lives somewhere that gets plenty of rain, and I knew she’d be able to keep up with a dragon. The problem with dragons as pets was, they’re clever. And they like to make trouble.

But they will also drape themselves over your shoulders to keep you warm on chilly winter days, and once they learn what pillows are for they share them instead of destroying them, and they not only come when called, they come when they think they’re being talked about because apparently they like to eavesdrop.

Mr. Long has learned how to make tea. He’s not very good at it yet, but if I fill the electric kettle up at bedtime, he starts it in the morning and makes tea for me as I’m getting up.

But what we’ve started to learn, now that we’re making more of them: you have to be the right person to deserve a dragon.

Grace Chan (gracechanwrites.com) is an award-winning speculative fiction writer. She writes about brains, minds, and space. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Every Version of You, is about staying in love after mind-uploading into virtual reality. It won the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards People’s Choice Award and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year, as well as being longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards. Her short fiction can be found in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, and many other places. Grace was born in Malaysia and lives in Melbourne. In her other life, she works as a psychiatrist.

Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu

Grace Chan

I’d always known Calam would run.

He had all the signs. A taut restlessness, body brittle as an overstretched lute string, when we stayed too long in one place. A gloom in his eyes, as we drifted through stretches of dead space. A sullen crease between the brows, whenever I tried to ask how he’d landed in that dead-end Martian workshop at seventeen.

But after ten years, why now?

Drumming my fingers on the battered dashboard, I gazed through the viewport at the planet below. My retina flooded with information from the Records. Zhenzhu. Once the pearl of the Feng System: terrestrial, mostly ocean, strung around with island chains like jewelled necklaces. Now, centuries after colonisation, tainted puce-coloured whorls obscured its aquamarine surface.

It’s not difficult to track a person. As a Beaconer, I do it for a living. I could’ve dug into Calam’s past at any point in our travels together. But we’d maintained an unspoken code—until, in sneaking off without so much as a jotted message, he’d broken it.

My preliminary sweep of both Assembly-run and private surveillance databanks had uncovered a torrent of brainwave, kinetic, and metabolic signatures matching Calam’s to various degrees. Even without the biodata, the clumsiest Beaconer could’ve used the serial numbers of his cybernetic enhancements to pinpoint his whereabouts in inhabited space. After discarding the outliers, I still had a clear record of his movements, dating back not just days, but years.

It was my first time to Zhenzhu, but not Calam’s.

I moved the Left-Handed Bandit out of orbit, into a stealthy descent.

Calam’s trail unspooled in shimmering blue on my retina—through damp-slicked alleys, thick with cinder-smoke and burnt oil, to Mur Angh’s canal district. On the opposite bank, mushroom-shaped skyscrapers loomed against an ochre sky, air traffic zipping around their stalks like glittering fireflies.

The waterside marketplace was a noisy sea of aluminium-roofed stalls, food carts with illustrated curtains, vending droids on flexible legs, and tricycle-hauled trailers piled with mass-produced trinkets. The citizens of Mur Angh, in tattered synthetic garments and homemade goggles, looked battered, weather-worn, like the crumbling commission flats that dominated the city’s slums. Fragments of conversation, a mix of Common and local dialect, floated through the air.

Zhenzhu’s entry on the Common Records had been no different from the other first-wave colonisation planets. An influx of diasporic groups. A few decades later, the Human Nations Assembly’s coordinated terraforming effort. Now, things were cleaving along the usual lines: the expansionist elitists in their gleaming towers, birthed into new cash and new resources, and the leftovers seething in the slums, wrestling for the scraps.

The trail took me to a roadside stall, where I gestured at the first item on the menu and lit a cigarette.

I scanned the middle-aged vendor for enhancements. Ah, good. An active memory chip. I pinched the last couple of hours of recording and scrubbed until I saw Calam’s face. He’d been sitting in the seat I was in, hunched over a bowl of porridge. I activated my interpreting networks.

“—not as good as it used to be, Kang,” Calam was saying, in a local dialect.

“Shut up, boy,” said the vendor. “You try making good food with stale ingredients. Zhenzhu’s in decay. Imports, agriculture, all dying. The elitists don’t give a shit about the dogs under the table. And you and me, we’re the bottom of the bottom-feeders.”

“What’s changed?”

“Eh, Yen, look at you. You look well. Healthy. Ten years gone—you’re crazy to come back.”

“Not staying.” Calam seized a deep-fried doughstick and crunched into it. “Just here to see my mother.”

“Your mother?”

“Yeah. She sent me a message. She’s dying.”

Kang stared flatly at Calam. “Boy, you know what your mother did, to survive, right? Who she is now?”

“I know.”

“You still want to see her?”

“She sent me a message,” said Calam again.

Kang sighed and dragged a hand over his fleshy face. “Let an old friend give you some advice, Yen. Even though you won’t listen to me. Finish your juk, go to the shipyard, and buy yourself a one-way ticket. Forget your mother. You did the right thing ten years ago. You’re not wanted on this rock.”

I snapped out of the playback when Kang slammed a bowl onto the bench: steaming rice gruel, topped with a gooey black sphere. The fermented aromas made my mouth water. I hadn’t had a fresh meal in weeks. Kang watched, with a pleased expression, as I stubbed out my cigarette and dug in.

“First time on Zhenzhu, eh?” He spoke in Common.

“How’d you know?”

“No jacket, no goggles.” Kang gestured at his own gear. “After first time, you remember acid rain.”

Ah. That explained the eroded buildings, the stalls decked in aluminium sheets, the tense expressions as people flitted from door to door with hoods pulled low. Acid rain was a bad sign—a sign that, after mere centuries, once again, we’d extorted too much from a planet.

“Forecast says rain coming in an hour,” Kang said, pointing at the heavy sky. “I suggest, go somewhere safe.”

Silly Calam.

Did he really believe I’d let him go? He’d contrived an elaborate routine: sending his baggage ahead to a public locker; slipping away after the Thurnos Bidding, muttering about a pleasure den; unleashing an actually-decent pirate program to hide his escape via a stem-cell colony ship.

Sure, I could’ve snagged another mechanic. Thurnos was stuffed with sad souls vying to underbid one another for a warm meal and a warm bed. But after ten years, you get used to someone. You figure out whether you can live with their worst habits.

Kang called him Yen. I wasn’t surprised to discover he had a different name. I remembered the half-starved squirrel-boy—twitchy, shaggy-haired, covered in engine grease—who’d stepped out of that rundown Martian workshop. Mine had been a reluctant stopover. I’d been itching to shoot away from the Sol System, but the Left-Handed Bandit had needed a new portside cannon cradle.

The offer of a job had left my lips on impulse. Maybe, subconsciously, I’d wanted someone with secrets, who didn’t want to talk about them. Maybe, in his brittle gloom, in his unwavering silence, I felt an unspoken kinship.

Well, this was probably one of the safest places in Mur Angh. I’d tracked Calam to the tallest tower in the fancy district, watched as a statuesque receptionist led him to the elevators, and hacked the service elevator to follow him up to the penthouse suite.

Sliding doors opened onto a hallway draped in Cultural Appropriation Lite. Whoever had decorated the penthouse was evidently a passionate but undiscerning fan of the Jovian-satellite diaspora aesthetic. Embroidered silks in an imitation of the Ganymedean artisans softened the chrome walls; traditional Callistoan music thrummed from the ceiling. There was even a hologram of the Europa sky: a fire-striped orb with a stormy red eye, glaring above a rim of icy spikes.

I activated my jacket’s bio-cloaking tech before stepping out of the elevator, plunging straight through Jupiter’s equatorial belts. The heat signatures of six or seven people radiated from a large room on the north side of the penthouse.

Bloody Calam. Why hadn’t he just told me about his mother? We could’ve come to Zhenzhu together. We could’ve put a plan in place. Now he was probably going to die—and I had to decide how much to risk my life trying to rescue the fool.

I skulked my way to a service room. Wedged between a steel trolley and the wall, peeking between doorframe and door-curtain, I had a partial view of a richly furnished lounge.

Calam was standing in front of a plush settee, shoulders hunched, eyes darting. Kneeling at a low table of burnished wood, the receptionist poured tea from a gilt teapot. She gestured for Calam to sit. He lowered himself onto the settee, one hand clenched at his bag.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

“She’s coming.” The receptionist offered an enamelled teacup in a graceful circle of fingertips. Her sleeves slipped down, revealing pale wrists. “Please.”

Calam blew on the tea, but did not drink.

A curtained doorway on the other side of the room parted. A woman stepped in. A silk robe hugged pyramidal breasts, cinched a wasp waist, and swished around elongated legs. Scarlet lips bloomed in a pearly, luminescent face. Beneath puffy eyelids, inhumanly violet irises glittered. She was someone’s embodied fetish.

She was not sick, and not at all dying.

“Ma . . . ?” Calam rose, dropping the cup onto the table. Hot tea splattered. His expression stretched halfway between a gasp and a grimace.

The woman’s head drooped towards her chest, like a stalk of wheat snapped in a harsh wind.

Four more people came through the curtained doorway: a brown-haired, clean-shaven man in a high-collared gray suit, and three soldiers in combat gear. One of the soldiers yanked Calam’s mother aside. In the same moment, Calam scrambled backwards over the settee and whipped his hand out of his bag. He was holding a gun, but it looked like a toy next to the soldiers’ weapons.

“You lied,” said Calam, his eyes hard and fixed on his mother’s face.

The scarlet mouth trembled. “I’m sorry, Yen.”

“I’m not surprised,” Calam hissed. “You sold us out before. You sold yourself. Why wouldn’t you sell out your last child, too?”

The man in the suit stepped forward. From my hiding spot, I couldn’t get a clear view of his face. But he reeked of elitist: oozing vitality, control, wealth. I wrapped my hand around my holster’s reassuring coolness.

“Now, boy. There’s no need to scold your poor Ma. We didn’t really give her a choice. Come. We don’t want this to be messy. Let’s put that gun down, hey? Let’s be civilised.”

“Evan,” spat Calam. “You’ve modded yourself so much I wouldn’t have recognised you—if not for that slimy voice.”

Evan spread his arms wide. I had a close view of his left hand, extending from his cuff, which bore a coat of fair downy hair. On his index finger, he wore a gold signet ring imprinted with an eagle.

“I told you we’d see each other again.”

“What do you want? It wasn’t enough for you to kill my father, my brother, my sisters? To take my mother as your bed toy? To murder the Luying because we were an inconvenience?”

“Good grief, boy. You make it sound personal.”

Calam was backed against the wall, both hands wrapped around his pistol. Sweat poured down his flushed face. He had one shot. At most. The soldiers’ enhancements were several years ahead of Calam’s—they could probably kill him at the first twitch of his trigger finger.

I dipped quickly into the Common Records, searching for any entries about the Luying people on Zhenzhu, or a massacre ten years ago. Nothing.

“Why go to such lengths?” Calam hissed. “I’m a nobody. Why bother luring me back here, just to kill me?”

Evan took two steps forward. “You know I work clean. Loose threads are an . . . irritation. Sometimes, the Assembly likes to stick their nose into the past. They don’t understand that cleaning up the lowlife is a necessary part of building a great planet. Call it . . . tidying.”

Pursing his lips, Evan turned to his soldiers.

A neural blast bludgeoned into my brain. I reeled.

Are you waiting for me to fucking invite you in?!

It was Calam.

He knew. He knew I was here.

Bloody—

I went for the receptionist first. I’d seen the faint scars of implanted pistols in her wrists. She was unquestionably the most dangerous one in the room.

I crossed the room in four strides. A neuro-linked command to my weapons belt dispatched a chemical blast at Evan and his three henchmen. A small range grenade. Probably leave one or two of them alive—but I didn’t want to hurt Calam or his mother. Pistol in hand, I fired at the receptionist. The bullet took her in the jugular. Blood sprayed in a crimson fan over the settee as she crumpled.

I dove behind a grand pianoforte, just as the shots came. Darn—two still standing. Something hit my foot, but I felt no pain. I went low and ducked out, firing.

Silence.

The soldiers were sprawled on the carpet. Two were melted by the chemical grenade. The third had taken my shots in his chest, and was gurgling his last breaths. Somehow, I’d missed Evan entirely—but Calam had got him, first with a bullet, and then with a knife to his face.

I had to pull my mechanic away.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey. Calam. Come back.”

He collapsed onto his heels, gasping and shuddering, knife clattering from slack fingers. He gazed up at me, blank-eyed.

“You—cursed—shagua,” I snarled, prodding my finger into his forehead. “What the fuck would you have done if I weren’t here?”

A delirious smile spread over Calam’s blood-splattered face. “But you are here.” Then he shivered, and seemed to return to himself. His gaze dropped to my feet. “Orin—you’re bleeding.”

I glanced down. A puncture in my boot was leaking blood onto the carpet. The pain came to me distantly. I activated a neural net to scoop it up, for later.

“You didn’t have to smash into my head, by the way,” I snapped, because snapping would keep the wooziness away. “You took down three layers of delicate security work. I was about to waltz in and rescue you.”

“Just had to make sure you didn’t change your mind, enyi.”

“Starting to wish I had.”

We both jerked our heads up at a soft noise. Calam’s mother was clawing at the velvety wallpaper, her body spasming. I limped up to her.

“Wei. You OK?”

She moved her lips, but no sound came out. She didn’t look injured. Tentatively, I touched her shoulder. She crumpled into a heap, her chin coming to rest on her knees like a decommissioned android. Her artificial eyes looked through me, past me, towards the tall windows, which were squealing beneath an onslaught of toxic rain.

“Forget her,” Calam said. His tone was detached, but not cruel. “She’s been rewritten too many times.”

I came back to Calam. We gazed down at Evan’s corpse. Bits of jellied eyeball and stringy muscle were visible in the pulpy stew of what had been his face. I wondered if Calam had ever killed anyone before.

“After I escaped,” he said in a low voice, “I tried to find others. Relatives, friends, anyone. Didn’t have much luck. I’ve accepted that I’m the only one left. The only one who knows everything he did. He wanted my memory chips—probably would’ve ripped them right out of my head. Can’t have an annoying Luying kid popping up and making Zhenzhu’s history look . . . unpalatable.”

I scanned the body for ID and enhancements. Evan Enders. Date of birth: 12/08/2571. Age: 56 Earth-years. Chief Minister for Sustainable Development, third term of service. I drew in a sharp breath. “He’s Assembly. Big shot. He’s got a Scribe Implant.”

“Of course.” Calam glanced at me. “How do you think he wrote the Luying out of existence? You think Assembly don’t mod their own Records? Wah, Orin. You’re more of an optimist than I thought. Hey—what are you doing?”

The tip of my serrated knife was where Evan’s nose had recently been. “I’m taking it. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I know we’re into murdering Ministers now, but tampering with Records—that’s a crime against humanity, no?”

“I’ve already done it once.” I thought back to undulating swathes of gray, the pink fans of salt basins, smoky breath fanning my face—and a virus I’d crafted to hide, to protect. I couldn’t believe how guileless I’d been, just a few short months ago, about the way the galaxy worked. “We’ll write the Luying back into it. Take that memory loop out of your head and upload it. A crime for humanity.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Then we’d be just like him.” Calam wiped his hands on his pants, leaving grisly trails of the Minister. “Using stolen power for our own purposes. We should do more. We should tear down the walls. Make it so anyone can amend it.”

The acid rain seemed to be hammering right into my skull, corroding the bony arches, shaking the floors and roots. For most of my life, I’d avoided thinking about the Assembly if I could—there was a reason a certain kind of people became Beaconers. I felt suddenly foolish. For years, I’d thought that in fleeing the Sol System, in cutting all ties, I’d defied them. But even as a Beaconer, I was entirely in their thrall. I worked for cash. I delivered those with less, to those with more.

The Records were yet another tool for the privileged few to conceal, to control.

Calam’s mother lifted her face from her knees with a small, sad smile. Her whisper was barely audible beneath the rattling windows. “Good chaos.”

An imprint of my own mother rose unbidden in my mind—stolen, rewritten, forgotten. I squashed the memory away. That was another pain to deal with later.

“Can you do it, Orin?”

Can is a shitty word in Common. It’s a mash-up of meanings, conflating degrees of ability with degrees of willingness until a whole spectrum of nuance is condensed into one clumsy term. In my mother’s Callistoan dialect of the Jovian language, there are thirteen different ways to say can, each with their subtle hints of inclination, capacity, importance, and immediacy.

I wondered how Calam would’ve asked, in the Luying tongue—and what he was really asking of me. He’d never requested anything of me before. Not directly, not like this.

Taking a deep breath, I plunged the knife through Evan’s crushed nasal bones. I thought I heard a whimper, a gurgle. The Implant was nestled between his frontal lobes. Pinching it between two fingers, I pulled it free of its gory cage and held it up to the wan light streaming through the windows. Beneath a silver-scarlet sheen of viscous fluid, the Scribe Implant looked like a bronze slug, coiled into a spiral.

I wiped it roughly and tucked it into my glove, where it nestled warmly in the crease of my palm.

“Let’s get back to the Bandit, Calam.”

Once we were free of Zhenzhu’s orbit, I scrambled the Left-Handed Bandit’s outgoing positional data—an energy-draining program, but necessary to conceal our next steps. The Scribe Implant sat on the dashboard, cracked open and linked to the mainframe.

Calam dropped into the seat next to me. His poncho was melted in spots where it had caught some rain; a tuft of hair poked out of a hole in his hat. From his left cheek to his right temple, a spray of dried blood—the receptionist’s? Evan’s?—formed an angry crimson arc.

“How’d she go?”

“Freaked out when I tried to buckle her down,” said Calam, wearily. “Had to give the sedative. She’s strapped into the bunk now.”

We hadn’t talked about where we would take his mother, but that was a problem for later—along with my injured foot, which I’d hastily patched with a globule of Soothe’em, the puncture hole in my favourite boots, which still carried some Ranzan soil, and the twin pains I’d netted away in the back of my mind.

Calam leaned forward to gaze through the viewport. The angle of the Feng Star revealed only a slender crescent of Zhenzhu—the pollution clouds creamy, like frothed milk, against an inky backdrop.

I glanced at him. “Will you miss it?”

He shook his head. “It was never really home, you know. Even though I was born there. From the beginning, they chased us out.”

The Common Records unfolded in shimmering hologram before us. A shiver thrilled through my body. I’d only ever seen the surface, the lacquered exterior of a puzzle-box. But suddenly we were in the heart of the labyrinth, with a birds-eye map of deeply tangled layers of archives, and the knowledge of where things had been knotted and unknotted. And at our fingertips, a dangerous power: to extract, rewrite, replace.

It would not be difficult to break it open. Unlock the puzzle-box, crack open its compartments, and turn it inside out, for anyone and everyone to play with. The Common Records would be truly common.

“Huh,” Calam said. Touching a dirt-streaked hand to his temple, he neuro-linked to the mainframe. A carefully compiled database unfurled from his memory chip: holographs and names of the Luying people, dates and places of birth, dates and places of death. There was a lot of information, almost a thousand identities, but I could also see a lot of gaps. Trails, gone cold. Missing, whereabouts unconfirmed, presumed dead.

I turned to him. Tears glimmered on his cheeks, carving paths through the blood.

He reached over me to initiate the hack.

The ghost-blue faces of his grandparents, father, siblings, cousins, drifted into their digital shrine. Page by page, the Records opened to the galaxy. Good chaos, his mother had whispered. As the first wave flowed back to us, a deluge of grief and shock and fury, I shifted the Left-Handed Bandit out of neutral, balancing on a knife’s edge of stars, and waited for Calam’s direction.

S.L. Huang is a Hugo-winning and Amazon-bestselling author who justifies an MIT degree by using it to write eccentric mathematical superhero fiction. Huang is the author of the Cas Russell novels from Tor Books, including Zero Sum Game, Null Set, and Critical Point, as well as the new fantasies Burning Roses and The Water Outlaws. In short fiction, Huang’s stories have appeared in Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, and more, including numerous best-of anthologies. Huang is also a Hollywood stunt performer and firearms expert, with credits including “Battlestar Galactica” and “Top Shot.” Find S.L. Huang online at www.slhuang.com or on Twitter as @sl_huang.

The Ship Cat of the Suzaku Maru

S.L. Huang

It is said that being a Ship Cat takes a very particular kind of cat. Just as a Bookshop Cat mustn’t hiss at customers nor scratch at children who reach out grubby fingers for an unwelcome pat, or a Temple Cat must be aloof and not too playful with the pilgrims who have come many lightyears for somber worship. Being a Ship Cat requires a limber agility for the gravitational changes, a tolerance for the scents of fuel burn and unwashed humanoid, and, most tragically, a forbearance for long stretches of expanse without a square of natural sunlight to stretch in. Toshi prided himself on being the most excellent of Ship Cats. An extraordinarily handsome fellow, Toshi was of pristine white with black splotches emblazoning his head and feet and back and tail. The patch over one of his eyes was black; the other, white; and one front paw was snowy while the other appeared dipped in soot. Toshi kept this glossy fur fastidiously clean, such that any time he deigned to allow a passenger to lift him and bury their face in his sleek self, the scent would put them in the mind of fresh meadows and clean laundry.

Toshi also excelled at the dual duties of a Ship Cat. The first of these duties is, of course, hunting down any vermin that might have wriggled on board at port. Small vermin are ubiquitous in every city of the Nineteen Worlds, only differing by unimportant characteristics such as color, number of mouths, the existence of a carapace, or whether they leave large clutches of eggs above the reactor core. Left to their own devices, they will nest near the warmth of the particle engine to chew its tubes through, or wriggle into the commissary to gobble the humans’ dehydrated provisions.

Some of the fancy luxury passenger yachts or shiny expensive cargo haulers brag of their robotic extermination systems, along with their self-navigating AIs and automated logistics operations. The old frontier captains, though—they all swear by cats. For a solid old merchant ship like the Suzaku Maru, a cat kept the in-between crannies far more spic-and-span than any number of robots could, and at a fraction of the cost.

Besides, the weathered human captains favor cats for their second purpose: cats on ships are good luck. That’s a longstanding fact. Since the old days of sailing the oceans of Earth, it has been known that leaving port without a cat on board is a deliberate tickling of fate.

Toshi’s good luck had kept the Suzaku Maru smooth and verminfree for nearly a hundred runs now. The ship arrowed blithely through the cosmos, ferrying freight from port to port to port, usually along with a few dozen travelers who couldn’t afford a berth on one of the high-speed passenger liners. No major disasters, no drastic repairs, just maintenance to help hum along and accounting books that consistently ran a few satisfactory fingers beyond breaking even. Good enough for Captain Jiro Akimoto and his crew, for sure. A decent business, running an independent merchant hauler. A decent business and a decent life.

Toshi was very certain—as all cats are—that the fit functioning of the ship was entirely down to his own presence on board making it run properly. Quite right that Captain Akimoto always gave scritches behind the ears when such was demanded of him.

During the last Galactic Cycle in lapse 8432—standard time—the Suzaku Maru lifted off from the port city of Ogedegbe on the world of Ember. As he always did, Toshi had the run of the ship, the better to supervise anything that needed his keen oversight. The shift to lighter gravity brought its own proper ritual of delight, as Toshi twisted and leapt to twice the height he could in port, pirouetting his lithe body at the peak of each leap.

Who wouldn’t want to be a Ship Cat, indeed!

Once the gravity settled into its lighter intersystem weight, Toshi began his rounds. He first roamed up to the cockpit. Captain Akimoto was at the controls, gazing up into the star-filled viewport. The captain always flew takeoff and landing himself instead of delegating to one of his crew. Only twice in seven years had Toshi seen another human take the ship up or down from a planet or in or out of FTL—once when the captain had been sick with blood rot, and the other when he had crushed his hand in an engine room accident. That time he had still stood gravely at his crewmember’s shoulder to watch over his beloved ship and make sure all was done right.

Toshi leapt up onto the edge of the control boards, careful not to walk across the buttons and switches. He’d learned fast as a young kitten that such care was an important part of being a Ship Cat. Captain Akimoto had trained him with a buzzer that made Toshi’s ears flatten and his chin burrow down against the ground. He’d learned very fast, and would now never dream of stalking across the captain’s important buttons and switches.

Toshi was a very good Ship Cat.

Captain Akimoto hit some of those important switches and leaned back in his pilot’s chair, rubbing at his grayed-out beard. “Toshi-chan! Keeping my ship tip-top, are you? Here, have a scratch, ne?”

“Nyao,” Toshi agreed, butting his head against the captain’s outstretched fingers.

“You like that, don’t you, ne. Good boy,” the captain crooned. “This part is my favorite bit, did you know? When we’ve left civilization back behind, floating on up in the black. That space between ground and FTL when it’s just us, all alone. Drifting away, ne . . . ”

Toshi did not always understand human words, but the captain’s gravelly voice was as comforting as a heated blanket.

Still, Toshi had duties. He slipped his black-and-white head out from under the captain’s exquisitely hypnotic fingers and dropped down to the deck plating, trotting out of the cockpit to his next stop.

In this way did Toshi patrol the ship from nose on down—passenger berths, the commissary, the cargo decks; casting his keen senses around every corner and slipping in and out of maintenance shafts. As was his due, he accepted pats and scratches from several of the passengers, the cook, and the cabin boy along the way. (The cabin boy was not a boy at all, but a wiry teenaged girl named Siau, who was apprenticing on Captain Akimoto’s crew for a few years in return for food and board and learning a trade. She had a pocket tool with a bright laser on it that she would often shine onto the bulkheads for Toshi to chase.)

Finally Toshi had canvassed his entire home save the final enormous deck—the engine bay, which took up the whole aft end of the ship. The particle engine was a tremendous ball of hot and dangerous, with catwalks for the engineers crossing in suspended layers above the magnetically-contained reactor core. So very hot and so very dangerous and so very far down below, enough that Toshi had always instinctively known to hop lightly about the catwalks, nimble feet that were careful never to fall, lest he tumble into the core’s pulsing maw of energy and light. Toshi did not know how the particle engine worked—how it propelled them through folded space, or how it incidentally provided the light gravitational pull on the decks above it—but he could sense its strength as the beating heart of the ship.

He also liked to lie on the engine catwalks and laze in its warmth. Who needed squares of sunlight when you had an engine deck!

Toshi padded down catwalk by catwalk, past the many banks of controls and computers, paws winding between the scraps and springs and tools the Suzaku Maru’s chaotic engineers were prone to leave strewn about. The engine had an all-encompassing hum that tickled the ends of his fur to fluff out from his body. Three catwalks down he had encountered naught but a buzzing scorpion mantis, which he’d pounced upon in an easy leap—and then released and pounced upon again, and then again, six times before worrying its exoskeleton in his mouth until it buzzed its last, a sad zzzt-zzzt-zzzt like a dying mechanical toy.

Toshi liked to keep his skills sharp. And have some fun.

None of the engineers were about. They usually weren’t, this early in the trip. The engine had to be monitored round the clock while in FTL, but mundane thrusters needed no supervision, and the acceleration changes made the humans’ fingers slip on fiddly tasks until they raised their voices in mewing complaint. Humans weren’t like Ship Cats, who so agilely adjusted to every fluid instant of weight difference.

Today, however, two humans were down below, on the very lowest of the catwalks.

They weren’t humans Toshi recognized. That in itself was not unusual, as unfamiliar passengers came and went every voyage. These humans, though—they radiated a sense of not belonging, down here on this lowest catwalk above the reactor core. The reactor’s light played up against them in dancing blue and white, leaving them mostly in shadow.

Toshi’s fur, already fluffed from the crackly air, stood on its ends even further. His paws moved in advance and then retreat, tail swishing, his eyes on the men.

“You sure they’re not gonna come down here?” one of the men was saying. He was a tall, burly fellow, with a wide face and a floppy hat that shaded his features to darkness. His scent was acrid, of stale smoking herbs and rancid fuel.

“Not till close to the FTL point,” responded the other. “We’ve got twenty-five hours, or near enough, and by then we’ll have ’em all locked out.” The second man was weedier, with shelf-like eyebrows and long fingers. He smelled of handling piles of metal, the way the captain’s skin smelled after he met with the type of people who, instead of tapping screens, gave him lumps of yellow gold that he weighed and counted. Or the way the pads of the captain’s fingers smelled after he loaded stacks of shiny darts into magazines for the pneumatic pistol holstered at his hip.

The big man heaved at a crate behind them. It seemed the two men were coming from the maintenance door of the trash hold, which didn’t make very much sense, because no one ever came from the trash hold. Toshi had been cautioned very severely never to try to jump in when it opened, by humans whose voices went high with worry. They needn’t have been so concerned—it smelled of rot and waste, and Toshi had never been tempted to put a paw inside.

“Well, what are we waiting on, then?” grunted the big man while he dragged on their crate. “Let’s get the damn bugs out. This is guaranteed foolproof, right? I’m not going to some dagnasted penal colony if we’re caught—”

“Relax,” answered the metallic-smelling man. “These spiders are state of the art. An old bucket like this won’t have a chance. Besides, you don’t have to worry about a penal colony—hijacking is a Class Ten. Still a capital crime if you do it in a spaceway.”

He sounded much more relaxed than the big man, like oil pooling where it shouldn’t.

The big man made a bunch of sounds with his mouth that had a lot of hard consonants in them, and then said, “If they weren’t paying us enough to buy a fuckratted planet . . . What the hell is this rust heap carrying anyway that could be so—hey! What in fuck is that?”

He’d spotted Toshi. He dropped the end of the crate with a loud clang and advanced a few steps, his fists opening and closing like aggressive mouths.

Toshi arched his back and hissed, his tail flicking. His claws snicked against the catwalk’s grating.

“It’s just a damn cat,” the smaller man answered. “Leave it alone.”

“They ought to learn to buy a canister of crawlies instead,” groused the big man. “Get outta here, beast! You hear?”

He swatted with hands the size of barrel lids, not close enough to make contact, but Toshi scampered anyway, still hissing.

He did not like these men. They were humans, but they smelled wrong and acted wrong and they made Toshi’s fur prickle so far up it was as if someone had dragged their hands against him back to front, all the wrong way, everything wrong.

Toshi did not run far, however. He disappeared from the men’s view and bounded away up to the next catwalk, then to the top of one of the tall banks of machines the engineers spent their days poking at. He crouched down flat against it, eyes slitted, his ears lying back against his head. His black bits faded into the shadows, only his white bits shining out of the dimness.

He stayed focused on the men, every predatory instinct itching.

The men’s conversation floated up to him here, voices that chopped and swung with a tension that twanged against the air. Words like “only take a few hours” and “seal them out” and “full control of the jump, and then that’s done.”

They’d hauled their crate all the way out onto the catwalk. The smaller man produced an angled metal bar and began prying at a corner. The top of the box came up with a screech, first one corner then another, until together the two men dragged the lid off with a tremendous amount of grunting.

The inside was dark.

The smaller man produced a handheld computer from a pocket and tapped its screen.

Tiny lights clustered up from the crate’s darkness. Like the stars in the black that Captain Akimoto so loved. Except these lights moved.

The lights skittered up and out, pouring from the top of the box and down its sides on many tapping legs. The men whooped. The tiny creatures began to fan out, chittering across the catwalk, a slowly-expanding spill of dread. In minutes they would spread far enough to reach the banks of machines along the catwalks—the ones that controlled the particle engine and navigation systems, communications and life support, everything the Suzaku Maru needed to function.

With nary a breath of thought, Toshi gathered himself and leapt.

Humans—he couldn’t do anything about humans. But these were not humans. These were vermin.

Toshi knew exactly what to do with vermin.

He bounded into the edges of the burgeoning swarm. A claw swipe—snick— a pounce and bite down—snap. Toshi was momentarily surprised when his teeth encountered metal, when his claws scratched at their skins to find only bits of wire and no flesh that squished or crunched. Still, these moved and they were vermin, and Toshi knew what to do with vermin.

The Suzaku Maru used no automated cleaning crawlers. Toshi had never been trained not to attack mechanicals.

He skidded through the horde, his heart pitter-patting with the thrill of his expertise, as he met a challenge like none ever before. Tiny robots flew, spiraling off the catwalk with their metal legs kicking until they arced out and down, down, down to crackle into nothing when the surface of the engine core devoured them. Within the first seconds, Toshi had become a black-and-white cyclone, mechanical spiders raining in his wake along with a trail of scrap and circuitry from the ones he had mauled.

It took the two men those seconds to react.

The big man was faster. “Hey!” he yelled again, but this time he charged at Toshi. His boots crushed more of the robots, and he danced back, cursing. “Hey! Get away! Get off them!”

The smaller, metal-smelling man did not try to approach. Coolly, he drew a pneumatic pistol from his hip, one very much like what the captain wore. In the throes of predatory bloodlust, Toshi only peripherally saw the movement, and would not have recognized it in any case. Nor would he have known that this hijacker of his home had filled the pistol magazine with star-pointed shredding darts, the type that would, if a single round impacted a cat, tear straight through the poor creature’s fragile skin and lithe bones.

The man fired. The pneumatic went off with a phhhhllk that echoed off every metal surface in a dangerous whisper.

The man was a good shot. Serendipitously, Toshi made a twisting leap after one of the spiders at the very instant the gun went off, and the cruel dart skimmed over the side of the catwalk and out into nothingness.

The next one passed so close it clipped some fur from Toshi’s flying tail before it buried itself in one of the bugs.

Still Toshi did not realize the danger, glorying only in the pounce and snatch and tear, so many of these rattling creatures, all for him, all for him to clear out as meticulously as he cleaned his own black and white fur.

His rampage had taken him closer to the men. The big man lumbered forward again, reaching out with grasping hands. This was a gesture Toshi recognized. He dipped and dashed, in then out—pounce and shake, tear and swat—so the man’s fists closed only on air.

“Get out of the way!” yelled the other man. “You utter nimbo! Get out of the way so I can shoot it!”

The big man obeyed, lurching backward, and the man with the pneumatic swung it around back at Toshi, who at this point was close enough to dash between his legs.

The man spun, shouting, and tried to aim, but Toshi zigged to and fro, a quicksilver storm of black and white sleekness. Back between the man’s legs again, then leap up to dash off the side of the crate . . . Mid-leap, the man with the gun lunged for Toshi, trying to grab onto him as his partner had, and he was far closer, but that’s what claws were good for.

Whisk, slash, and the man howled something about eyes, his hands coming up to his face and the pneumatic clattering to the catwalk. Lines of red appeared on his skin as he staggered backward. Toshi left off the bugs for a quick shake and pounced again.

Even though the man was human. Sometimes humans were vermin too.

The man screamed and swiped at the flying whirlwind of angry cat, covering his face and diving away. Toshi careened back off him and down to the catwalk—just as the man’s dive took him straight up against the metal railing with a flailing, panicked force.

Yells of pain and alarm turned to a surprised screech of pure fear as his momentum took him toppling over. For one brief moment he pawed at the railing from the wrong side, and then he too was falling, falling in a hail of his own sabotage robots, down and down and down.

The surface of the reactor barely sizzled before they were gone.

The big man bellowed out something that might have been his friend’s name, and began to sob.

Toshi noticed none of it. He still had more of the rapidly crawling mechanicals to get back to. Not so many now, though . . . his sensitive ears flicked about for every final skitter of tiny metal feet on metal catwalks. Toshi chased the last few down wherever they fled, whether under banks of controls or into maintenance shafts. He smacked them off vertical plating or fat wires, dragging them out to where he could hurl and snap and dismember while their little legs flailed.

He was fierce. He was glorious. He was an excellent Ship Cat.

The big man stared about at the rapidly multiplying strew of debris that had been their state-of-the-art hijacking robots. He gazed weak-kneed and anguished after where his friend had fallen and then cast a malevolent glare after the black and white cat that was so joyfully savaging the remainder of their plan.

With his criminal enterprise in tatters and his partner ionized to nothing, the big man became seized by a senseless, raging fear. He yanked his hat down over his face and ears and, with no other option coming to mind, hurried to stuff himself away back in the large metal box of a trash hold. He would stay here and plan, he thought—figure out what to do now—he was not on the passenger manifest, nor did he have the provisions to stay hidden for the ship’s planned months-long journey between ports. If he was found—how could he not be found?—the best he could hope was that they would think he was merely a stowaway, and take pity . . .

Even if the crew here was cruel, it was the thought of landing at their destination port that made a pure inky terror fill the heart of the Suzaku Maru’s erstwhile hijacker. The employers he and his brother had been working for—the brothers had never worked for them before. Not them. It had been his brother’s idea, laugh at the risk, laugh at the stories, it’s too much money to say no. We’ll be set for life, he’d said, stop being such a damn puss . . .

The stories, the stories—you could never hide from them, everyone said. You could run, but not for long, never for long, and then they’d find you.

They wouldn’t kill you. Not yet. Not for a long time.

The big man crouched among the slimy, crusted innards of the empty trash hold and whimpered into his enormous hands.

Meanwhile, Toshi pounced upon the very last one of the scuttling spiders, his paws pinning it with perfect aim. One black paw, one white, claws extended, trapping the tiny robot so its metal legs pedaled on either side. Toshi took the unlucky creature in his jaws, tossed it once, twice, three times, allowing it to recover each time. Each time it moved a bit slower, and its legs hitched and jerked a bit more.

At last Toshi batted it to the ground. The metal wasn’t very pleasant to pull at with his teeth, but the fine wires underneath were a much better mouthfeel, enough that Toshi lay contentedly chewing at them for a few minutes.

The reactor core hummed on below, the blue and white light dancing up the sides of the engine bay, playing against the bulkheads as if they were underwater.

Toshi got up, shook himself, and resumed padding about his domain.

A shout made his ears prick.

Not quite a shout. More like a loud complaint, the way humans did sometimes when they wanted someone to overhear. A bulkhead banged up above, at the top of the catwalks.

Toshi recognized the voice, lively and taut with both youth and green inexperience. Siau, the cabin boy. Odd that she should be here now. She thumped down the catwalks, muttering under her breath.

Toshi trotted up to wind about her legs. He thought he very much deserved a pat.

Of course, Toshi was always of the opinion that he deserved a pat.

Siau obliged, reaching down to scritch between his ears. She smoothed his fur, which had become so fluffed by the crackly air down here and the rollicking fight.

“Hi, you. Ain’t you a good cat? Good Toshi.”

Toshi was in complete agreement. He was very much a good cat.

“Chief’s making me come and swab before FTL,” Siau complained to him. “She says it’s too much a mess down here. I says, ‘well who’s making the dagnasted mess, cos it sure as shit ain’t me’ and she says, ‘good thing my crew’s got ’em a cabin boy to sweep the decks for us.’ Kicks me down here quick as you please.”

“Nyao,” Toshi answered knowingly. Siau complained often.

“Can’t wait for the someday when I’m not nobody’s ’prentice no more. Don’t got to answer to no one and get a wage of my own. Maybe a ship one day, good as the Suzaku Maru. Whaddaya think of that?”

Toshi rolled over on top of her boot and rubbed his cheeks on the tight-clipped laces. She smelled of solder and burnt metal. It was a good smell. A belonging smell.

Siau laughed. “Good cat. Guess I’d better get to it, eh?”

Toshi kept her company while she stalked about the catwalks, picking up the various springs and scraps and wires and fuses the engineering crew had left and chucking them in a large bin, then sorting through for what would go in the recycler or for any reusable parts. She groused to Toshi the whole while—“You’d think after decades working an engine room they’d learn to pick up their own shitnicks, wouldn’t you” and “why leave out a whole bottle of grease-up, no wonder they can’t never find nothing ’round in here” and “the Captain keeps such ship shape up top, you’d think his Chief could keep her crew in line down below. Guess she thinks they’re so good at running a core they can do whatever kinda raz they want.”

She dumped the unusable bits in the various slots along the catwalks that dropped down into the trash hold. When the scrap metal clattered down the chutes to the hold at the bottom, Toshi’s sensitive ears picked up a few quickly-stifled yelps. Siau banged on, oblivious.

When she got to the mess left by Toshi’s stellar devastation of the mechanical vermin, Siau let out a gusty groan and set about chucking the bits into her bin with enough force to dent them further. “What in a nebular eye were they doing here—no, don’t tell me, I’ll just get more tizzed. Leave it all for the low-down intern to pick up, yeah, convenient for you all, ain’t it? None of this crap’s good no more.”

She shoveled it all into the slot in the trash hold.

“Fuck me, that’s already starting to be a load. Better space it before FTL and clear things out, eh Toshi?”

She banged some of the buttons on the trash hold’s side.

A great grinding started up, followed by the sudden sound of nothing, as everything in the trash hold dropped hard into an airlock and then was sucked out into the vacuum of space. Environmental groups hated waste management systems like these, protesting the endless dumping of litter among the common shipping lanes, but none of the older ships could afford to keep the weight. And, their captains reckoned, space was pretty damn big. Bits of litter could lose themselves forever in the black.

A trail of debris fanned out behind the Suzaku Maru, metal detritus and dead robots and exactly one human corpse, his wide face frozen in a scream the vacuum had snuffed away.

Back on the ship, Siau scooped up Toshi in her arms—he allowed it—and smushed her face into the fur of his neck. Then she carried him up with her to the passenger decks, where he leapt down and went to the commissary for some crunches of food and a very thorough bath, licking flat every prickle the engine deck had left in his fur.

He wandered back up to the cockpit, where Captain Akimoto reclined in his chair, hands laced behind his head.

He grinned when he saw Toshi, the skin crinkling all up next to his eyes.

“How’s it tripping, my good little friend?” he asked, reaching out automatic fingers for the expected ear scritch. “Did you find any vermin for us?”

Goro-goro-goro-goro-goro, purred Toshi against his hand.

“Good boy, ne. Taking care of us all.”

Toshi hopped up to the captain’s knee this time, kneading his claws against the tough canvas coveralls. Then he curled up against Captain Akimoto and let the ear scritches absently continue on, as together they watched the black drift by.

It’s true, what they say. It’s bad luck to leave port without a cat on board.

Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte Award winner, Nebula and Locus Award finalist, and an immigrant from Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. She is a member of HWA and SFWA. Her work can be found in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Dark, Uncanny, among others. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop’s 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of Linghun and I AM AI. Find her on Twitter (@AiJiang_) and online (aijiang.ca).

Give Me English

Ai Jiang

I traded my last coffee for a coffee. How ironic. My finger jabbed at the ordering machine. The Langbase implanted in my brain popped up in front of my eyes, and I watched as the word disappeared. A heavy breath escaped my lips. I would have to trade my teas next.

The Langbase total changed from 987 to 986 words. I blinked twice to close it. There was one fewer word I could use to communicate with others—or to pay for necessities and rent. The word c----- was like a familiar stranger. My Langbase blurred it from my mind now that I had used the last one as payment. I could trade for it again with my duplicate haves and yous but having c----- wasn’t a necessity. No longer could I use it when speaking, writing, or processing when others said or wrote it. Though there were a finite number of words I could use to trade, I was allowed to use the words indefinitely as long as I still had them in my Langbase. Would I become a Silent, too, when my Langbase emptied?

*Incoming message from Jorry.*

I muttered under my breath and blinked twice to open the message.

Remember that the L---- show is tonight! I’ll be picking you up in 30 minutes.

Of course I remembered. He had sent reminders every few hours for the past two days. Although I had been thankful for Jorry in the past, his narcissism was difficult to handle at times.

My reply floated in the air across my eyes while I waited for my c-----.

Yes, yes. I remember. I’ll be at the usual drink shop.

Oh, you mean L------’s C-----? The selections there are m--------. I cannot f---- purchasing c----- elsewhere.

He was gloating. I held my breath, irritated. It had been a while since the last time I attempted deciphering his words. I knew it would only make me more frustrated.

Yes. That one. It’s great.

My answer sounded dry. I didn’t want to speak to Jorry. He always used words that he knew I no longer had. Women, he believed, as per Chinese traditional mind-sets, were better silent, docile, obedient. Of course, I disagreed. The only reason I put up with him was because our families were friends. I suspected it was similar for him.

Jorry had picked me up from the airport when I first arrived and showed me around New York. I called him by his Chinese name, but it turned out he had sold it along with most of his Chinese words a few years after he came to New York. Though I noticed he had been using them again lately. It seems that he bought quite a few characters before Chinese climbed the Language World Rankings this year. He always had great intuition when it came to Language Trading, though his main income was from Language Gambling. There was no doubt he would’ve had to give up some of his L---- words to afford it. Since he had more than enough English in his inventory now, he wanted to invest in more of what he called “foreign” languages—though Chinese had been his mother tongue.

I blinked to close the chat.

“What was your order?” the barista asked.

I scanned the digital menu above his head. “Number seven.”

The barista looked at me with a knowing smile. “I usually order number ten.”

“Tea.” I nodded and grinned.

He didn’t say the word back, and I regretted saying it, realizing that he didn’t have the word himself. My head bowed as I turned away from the barista, his smile no longer as joyous as before.

I took a seat at the back of the shop with my body angled toward the corner to avoid potential unwanted conversations.

I opened my Langbase again and selected Chinese. I only had a handful of characters left in my native tongue. To afford the rent in New York, I had traded most of them away at the Language Currency Exchange Centers. Sometimes multilingual individuals approached me in hopes of buying more foreign words for their collection. The Currency Centers often restricted the number of foreign words you could buy within a year.

“What would you like in exchange?” they had asked.

I had always answered with, “Give me English.”

At a nearby table, a woman sat across from her friend, adjusting the bright yellow stroller beside her. A child, only a few months old, lay inside. Their blond hair gave them an angel-like appearance.

“I’m so glad they implemented that new childcare policy for native citizens. My sweet baby can start her life with a dictionary’s worth of English.” The woman leaned over the stroller and cooed at her baby. “I don’t know how I survived without it. We wouldn’t be able to now, that’s for sure!”

I didn’t remember China having such a policy, or if we did, my parents never told me. The rich only became richer, and the poor continued to struggle. My family was never as well off as Jorry and his family. I was often surprised that they had the chance to meet, and I was even more surprised that they remained friends. Perhaps Jorry’s family had a hand in funding my trip to the States. My parents had offered me half their savings, but it didn’t seem possible they had so much stored away in their Langbases.

The woman’s friend shook her head. “I recently traded the words I thought my three-year-old would never use for sufficient French to hold a conversation. It’s not enough just to be born here anymore. My boss is insisting that all of us need to know at least two languages.”

“Even the at-home telemarketers now, eh?” said her friend.

The woman looked down at her child. “By the time this little one grows up, she’ll have to know five languages just to keep up with the rest of the world!”

As the women continued to chatter, I scrolled through my Langbase mindlessly, but it didn’t take long to reach the end of the list. With the laws always changing, even Sign Language had to be purchased. The American government left no missed opportunities to capitalize and monetize language. That baby had a much better chance of surviving here than I did.

The friend took a sip of her drink—what looked to be the most expensive one on the menu. “And with how fast the housing market is growing, soon we’ll need L---- just to afford it.”

Did these women live in mansions? Apartments and condos with many rooms? To have enough to buy a stroller like that . . . The room I rented sat in the basement next to the laundry. It was a poorly renovated storage space without a window. At night, the pounding from the washers and dryers rattled my walls and ceilings, but I was used to that now. Even with the vibrations from the subway nearby, it was good enough for me. This was the cheapest place I could find in New York, and my previous job as a dishwasher only covered my rent and basic grocery trips.

I used to be a waitress when I still had most of my Chinese. It paid to be multilingual. Now I worked in a disposal factory. Not much talking happened there.

Jorry arrived at the c----- shop early. That was the one, perhaps the only, good thing about him—he was always punctual. He waved to me from outside the wall-to-wall window near the entrance. I tossed the soggy c----- cup into the trash, my fingertips still damp, and walked toward the exit. The unnatural smile on my face tightened as I neared him.

“Jorry.”

“玉河!”

Jorry had never called me by my Chinese name before, always the English one, Gillian. Did he sell Gillian, or did he buy the characters 玉 and 河?

I looked at him, really looked at him, like how grocers back in Fuzhou looked at me whenever I said “Thank you”—bewildered.

“What’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

He shrugged at my clipped response.

“Well, then let’s go! Here are the tickets. They really are i-----------, aren’t they? I quite like their a-------- this year.”

I grimaced every time he emphasized words that were too expensive for me to afford, ones that I heard only as garble. The designs on the tickets were nothing unique with their shimmering gold logo and calligraphy-printed letters, but Jorry would use any excuse to show off the words in his Langbase.

“Yes, exquisite,” I said. This was one of the few “sophisticated” words I still owned. I sold most of the others since I didn’t use them except with Jorry. Most of my Langbase was made up of words like and or the; most people received these as change. I only had one I at all times, but I suspected Jorry had thousands, and not because of their value. Self-love is important, but he had far too much of it. I tried to keep my disgust from surfacing as he ran his hand through his overly waxed hair; remnants of the product remained in between his fingers when he dropped his arm back down. I pretended not to notice as he discreetly wiped his hand on his dress pants.

On our way to the show, a Silent jumped in our path. With her hands cupped in front of her, she offered a small smile. From the corner of my eye, I could see the frown on Jorry’s face.

“Leave us alone.” Jorry pushed past the Silent, brushing his hands off as if he’d touched something dirty. My feet stayed planted.

The Silent looked at me with pleading eyes, ringed with purple—a prominent bruise over the right eye—begging for words. Her gaunt face stretched as she opened her mouth, but no voice came out. I clenched my teeth when my eyes wandered to the oversized shirt she wore, plastered with various words—some part of the design, some looking as though they had been forcefully written on by those who encountered her on the streets. Beggar. Home. Less. America. Silent. Dream. Silent. Reality. Silent. Silent. Silent. It was unlikely she could read any of the words on her shirt.

The Silent were a common sight on the streets. I often bumped into them outside convenience stores where they shielded themselves from the cold with their knees huddled together. Others walked past without taking notice, some relieved their rage on these already vulnerable individuals; some showed kindness, offering their words. Not everyone had the privilege to speak.

I blinked open the transfer option in my Langbase and sent the Silent a few ands.

She bowed her head. “And.”

“玉河, we’re going to be late!” Jorry’s irritable voice traveled from half a block away.

玉河, don’t let them take your native tongue from you. My mother’s voice drifted into my mind. These were words she had said to me over a call when I first arrived in New York. Too late, Mother, most of my characters were already gone. What if I, too, became a Silent by staying here?

When I left the Silent, I couldn’t help but imagine my face in the place of hers.

I had only been to one other show with Jorry. That one was in English. I forgot what it was called, but it had something to do with romance, wealth, and the people of my culture. We went when I first arrived in New York. Maybe he thought it would remind me—us—of home, but really, it only showed me what Jorry’s dream was and why he left Fuzhou. The same goal my parents had for me when they heard of Jorry’s success here. They didn’t seem to understand that what Jorry did was Language Gambling. His parents made it sound like he worked at a Currency Center, but really, he was a frequent visitor of Language Casinos around New York. It was a secret Jorry made me promise to keep. I had a feeling that was the only reason he sometimes offered to treat me to a meal or invited me to Language Shows.

The movie we watched before was entertaining, though. I understood some parts that were in English and all the Chinese dialog. Since then, Jorry always purposely chose things that were difficult for me to understand.

Before leaving Fuzhou, my mother said if I ever needed help, I could ask Jorry. I hadn’t, and I didn’t plan to.

“For two.” Jorry handed over our tickets, and the usher led us inside with several others behind us.

“Front row seats,” said Jorry, even though I could see where we were heading.

The tickets must have cost an entire month’s worth of rent, at least for me.

“Thanks for the invitation.” My parents told me to always be grateful for gifts of kindness. Was this kindness or something else?

“Always a p------.” Jorry smiled but the smile was so brief and sudden that I wasn’t sure if it was directed at me or because of his excitement for the show.

When the lights dimmed, I sat back in my seat, ready to replay the memories of my hometown using the Langbase’s memory function rather than listen to garbles that I no longer understood. Unfortunately, the Langbase’s memory function followed a subscription model, where we had to pay a few words monthly to continue to use it. Once the subscription expired, nearly all of your memories were blurred, leaving only the most basic information about yourself—name, age, address, family names, occupation, and the past week’s events—until you renewed the Langbase’s memory function again.

The curtains opened to reveal a man and a woman seated at a table. I sighed when the man opened his mouth. The garbles weren’t terrible; they sounded like musical murmurs.

Jorry laughed with the rest of the audience, though he was always a second late. I suspected he barely understood what was happening. That was how I knew he was only faking it. It wasn’t just a slow reaction, because Jorry was always quick to pounce on me whenever I couldn’t find the right words to say. L---- was expensive, even the name of it. Jorry was well-off, but there was little chance he could afford the large vocabulary in it.

I didn’t pretend to laugh. There was no point since Jorry didn’t care anyway. He was far more worried about how he appeared to others but had little interest in how others presented themselves. To him, what mattered most was that he stood out and looked as wealthy as his manner implied.

“You enjoying the show?” he asked in a low whisper halfway through. It was an empty question. He leaned toward me but never took his eyes off the stage, as if he might miss something if he did.

“Yes.” No.

“Hey, do you mind if we stop by the LangGamble House?” he asked, a smirk lifting one side of his lips.

Yes, I do mind. “Sure, why not?” Though I had promised not to reveal the details of his “work,”—not that I knew much about it to begin with or had any great interest in it—I was surprised Jorry would willingly show me more. Did he not worry I would expose him? Or did he predict I would soon become a Silent myself?

The LangGamble House was a large dome the size of ten houses in length, width, and height. Its lights were never off. On my way home from work, the dome’s glare always lit my path. The red-carpeted lobby was dominated by a large staircase leading to private gambling rooms littered with velvet-covered tables and slot machines. There were both single- and multi-language options available.

“I like to be adventurous,” Jorry said. I wanted to scoff but didn’t.

He waved me over to a table. The man standing behind it was wearing a smart tuxedo. Jorry said this person was called an Asker, and the table would display holographic projections of the conversations they were about to have. Askers had entire dictionaries installed in their Langbases, but the knowledge was only lent to them by the House and would disappear after work. How would it feel to have such a large vocabulary at your disposal, if only temporarily? I imagined it would feel quite powerful. To have any voice, really, is powerful.

“Language of choice?” the Asker said.

“L----, English, and Chinese,” Jorry said.

I was surprised Jorry would choose L---- since he didn’t seem to have a large vocabulary in it judging from his responses at the show.

“Perfect. Are you familiar with the rules?”

Jorry smiled at me before turning back to the Asker. “Yes, but please do explain again for the lady.”

The Asker turned in my direction, completely unaware of Jorry’s condescending tone. “First, the player will make a bet—a number of words in each currency. I will then ask three questions in each language to which the gentleman here will provide answers. Yes or no answers are not allowed. Each answer must be a minimum of three sentences. I will review the answers within a five-minute time frame and select one word in each language that I believe the player does not own. If I am correct, the player loses their bet, the opposite if I am incorrect.”

It was strange how robotic the Asker’s voice was, although he was obviously human.

“Shall we begin?” the Asker said.

I hoped Jorry would lose, but of course, he didn’t.

I only called my parents once in a while because the language barrier was becoming an obstacle. It saddened my mother that most of my Chinese was gone, and that I couldn’t find the success she hoped for. They believed there were more opportunities to grow in America. It was too fiercely competitive in China, and I was never at the top of my classes. A new start, they said—optimistic. They told me to build a new life for myself—one they couldn’t offer me in China as factory workers. But what they didn’t realize was that the high-end jobs here required applicants to be multilingual; trilingual was the bare minimum for entry-level jobs, but the employers always preferred quadrilingual or more.

I bought ten minutes with a few thes at the Public World Screen. Phones were too expensive, and I had sold mine a few months ago.

My mother’s face appeared first, then my father’s behind hers. She told me about how things were back in Fuzhou, and I listened with a blank grin. After a minute, my mother left the screen. I looked down at the gravel beneath my feet.

My father, quiet by nature, only stared without saying a word during our calls. But somehow, I understood my father’s expressions far more than my mother’s stream of now-foreign words. It was strange to hear my mother’s voice as garble when it used to be so clear. I concentrated on my mother’s lips, but it was like trying to look through frosted glass or listening underwater.

When my father thought my mother wasn’t looking, he mimed sentences to me, willing the meaning with his eyes. Sometimes I understood. The language of the eyes and body spoke much louder than words. I tried to mime back, but it wasn’t the same. Playing this game of charades was a loophole to the Langbase. Body language in general wasn’t considered an official language. I should be grateful for that.

Wasn’t the L---- show just s---------?

I deciphered the sentence using the context of Jorry’s message.

Yes. Really great.

He was still typing, but I turned off my screen. I pulled up my Langbase. After paying rent, I had only 486 words left.

My mother spoke of a new language for royalty. The show Jorry and I watched yesterday was based on that language. She said to invest in it, but I’d never had the chance. One word of L---- cost over a hundred thousand English words. I told her it was difficult to make a living here. It was hard enough keeping what few words I had left to communicate with her.

In the building where I lived, there was one very stubborn man. He wouldn’t trade any of his native language for English, and no one would hire him. He disappeared after losing everything by gambling. Street gambling was different from the sort that Jorry partook in. The man often met up with a group of street gamblers on the weekends. They challenged each other to games of description played in pairs. One team chose the words for the opponents and the partners would then take turns guessing. The team with the most correct guesses won. Those living in the building would often watch the exchange. More times than not, someone left the scene looking murderous.

The other gamblers swindled him, the onlookers said, but he didn’t understand what was happening until it was too late, or perhaps he just stopped caring. His fellow players knew which words he was missing and chose those specifically so he couldn’t describe them. He was kicked out of the building and roamed the streets as a Silent. Some say he was deported and sent back to his motherland because he was no longer “a useful citizen.”

Another man came to visit the apartment last week: a wealthy man who knew over twenty-four languages—the one from the show included, of course. He wanted to demolish the building for a new commercial project: a new stocks center for Language Trading. Those of us who lived here didn’t have a say, not that we had many words to argue with anyway.

Once, a charity asked the wealthy man for a donation. I remember him saying, “You know how it is. If I give handouts to everyone, I won’t have any left for myself. How do you think the rich stay rich?” I’d disliked him ever since. Not all the wealthy were like this, but this man and Jorry were the same type of people. I didn’t have a good enough word left in my Langbase to describe them.

I stopped contact with Jorry a month after the show.

They scheduled the apartment demolition for the following month. We all had to clear out by the end of next week.

The woman who lived beside me asked for compensation. She got a call, but all the building manager said was, “Don’t you remember agreeing to the section stating—” How could she when she didn’t have the words to read it or to hire a lawyer who could? How could she when these agreements were always worded in ways they knew most of their tenants couldn’t process with their limited Langbases?

*Incoming message from Jorry.*

I heard about the apartment.

My eyes hovered over the reply button, but no words came to me.

You could live with me for now?

Jorry always wanted something. He offered nothing for free. The l------ penthouse he lived in came to my mind.

I can’t afford the rent.

Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.

I couldn’t help but notice that he was only using words I understood. But I knew he just wanted to appear as a savior so I would feel further indebted to him. These words were not for me, really; they were only for himself.

I wasn’t sure why I never thought to use my only Jorry. When my Langbase connected with the train’s fare system, I selected Jorry as my payment. The system inserted a few verbs into my Langbase in return. Nouns were always worth more.

A woman sat down beside me. I fiddled with my luggage handle without looking up.

“And.”

My head lifted at the word. It was the Silent from the streets.

She smiled. “Thank you.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it.

“I was able to get my name back. I’m K----.” I held out my hand, feeling disappointed that I couldn’t hear her name.

“玉河,” I said.

Like the barista, K---- and I shared a knowing smile, one that J---- and I were never able to share.

When I arrived at the Language Currency Exchange Center, I headed for the first available exchange machine. My Langbase popped up and I scrolled down to the last word of my shrinking list of Chinese with my eyes: 家 Home. My mind wandered to K----. I’ll try again, Mother.

Give me English.

I confirmed the exchange and watched the English words flood into my Langbase.

*Incoming message from J----*

I muted my messages. I should’ve severed our friendship a long time ago but didn’t because of our families’ connection. Perhaps I would tell them the truth. Jorry was not someone who deserved such a glorious illusion.

My eyes scrolled through my Langbase and landed on home and then on 玉 and 河, the only two Chinese characters left. I closed my eyes and vowed to buy them all back soon. But first, I had to find Kiana. The name of the woman who was no longer a Silent felt glorious as it left my lips in a whisper.

Isabel J. Kim is a Korean-American speculative fiction writer based in New York City. She is a Shirley Jackson Award winner, an Astounding Award finalist, and her short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other venues. Her word has been reprinted in 2023 Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Year’s Best Fantasy: Volume 2. When she’s not writing, she’s either practicing law or co-hosting her internet culture podcast Wow if True—both equally noble pursuits. She can be found at isabel.kim.

Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist

Isabel J. Kim

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl stands outside the convenience store under the striped awning and waits for the rain to stop. The rain is never going to stop. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl would need to go to a different city for the rain to stop, a city not built on phosphorescent fluorescence and slick glass, a city that doesn’t breathe through its elevated train lines and subways. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl doesn’t remember when they built the train lines. She dreams of cities where it is not always night. Not that it’s always night here. But it is. In the heart, it is.

“You look cold,” White Boy says as he steps out of the convenience store. White Boy has a lot of other names. The Detective. The Hacker. The Renegade. The Man Out for Revenge. Privately, Cool and Sexy Asian Girl thinks of him as the Tourist.

“I’m used to it,” she says and takes a long drag of her vape, exhaling plumes of menthol vapor. It softens the light glinting off her silver bracelet. A long time ago, she smoked cigarettes. Tar and smoke. Whiskey in bars. But times have changed. She offers the little plastic stick to the Tourist. He takes it from her and takes his own deep breath.

The Tourist is a sharp silhouette against the dark street beyond him. His eyes gleam electric. The city looms behind in smears of color and shade as if the Tourist is the only thing in focus. He doesn’t belong here. Except for the way that the city is a backdrop to his presence.

She’s been spending a lot of time with him. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl’s friends joke that his name should be White Boyfriend. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl laughs the jokes off. White Boyfriend would be a different man entirely.

There’s no place in the Tourist’s heart for her. The Tourist could fuck her, but he couldn’t love her, just as he can’t love this city. If she left with him, if they took the elevated train line to the station and the bullet out of the city, maybe he could be White Boyfriend, but she would have to be a different woman. Asian Girlfriend. Asian Baby Girl. Mail Order Bride, in the worst of worlds.

So no. No White Boyfriend.

“Was Sandra here?”

“Not sure,” the Tourist says. “Cashier says that he’s the wrong person to talk to. That there was another guy at the register that night. Part timer. That I should be looking for . . . a guy named Li?”

“There’s a million Lis,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says. Just like there are million cool and sexy Asian girls.

“He said that I’d know this one when I saw him. Said I’d have to go downtown, that he works nights downtown. That he’d probably be at a nightclub named Crimson.”

“Ah. That Li.”

“You know him?”

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl shrugs all implication. “Let’s go.”

She steps onto the rain-slicked streets. The Tourist follows her to where he’s parked his motorbike.

“I feel like you know everyone.”

He kicks the kickstand, swings his leg over. She seats herself behind him, pulling up close and pressing her head against the back of his neck, which is wet with rainwater and cold. It feels good against her cheek. There are things that the Tourist is good for. This is one of them. Before the Tourist, she never sat on motorbikes, snug against a boy’s back.

“I know the city,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says. “I was born here.”

In the city before the city, the woman who is Cool and Sexy Asian Girl was born two miles away in a hospital that no longer exists. But Cool and Sexy Asian Girl was born in a bar, sheathed in a tight black dress and high heels, leather jacket, neon eyeliner, and sharp haircut. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl was born the minute her eyes made contact with the Tourist, when he asked, “Are you—”

And she said “Yes,” because now she had become. She had been waiting all her life for this dance, for the Tourist, even if he hadn’t known it. They talked about her job, which was a corporate thing at a biotech company that the Tourist had begun investigating, in the middle of being acquired by an entity called Zether. She had been two minutes from losing her job in the merger, which was why she was at a bar, alone. He had been chasing any lead to Zether he could find. This had been why she was relevant, at first.

That first night, Cool and Sexy Asian Girl took the Tourist home from the bar to her small apartment with the unlocked stairwell that led to the roof that had a prime view of the LED advertisements cascading across the glass buildings. She took him into her bed, and she let him believe that this was his idea because she thought he might like that, because she thought it was how this story might go.

The Tourist’s story was teased out postcoital. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl learned of the dead wife, the long way from home, the data breach, the mysterious corporation, the questions without answers, and she learned his names: Detective, Hacker, Renegade. Widower.

“I’ve been here before,” he said. “But it seems different now.”

The city was the city was the perception of the city. It was always changing. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl sat up and cocked her head. She studied the angles of the Tourist’s face splashed with blue neon. His pupils dilated by the contrast of light and dark. She could tell him to leave. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl didn’t have to stay Cool and Sexy Asian Girl. There were a million cool and sexy Asian girls in the city.

“Listen. I can help you. I want to help you.”

“Why?” he asked.

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl pressed a kiss to his cheek and got up and put on a long coat. He watched her in bemusement. It was two in the morning. It was always two in the morning in the city when you needed it to be.

“I’m going for a smoke,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl said, because this was the time when she still smoked cigarettes. “And a walk. Feel free to sleep here. It’s cheaper than a hotel.”

And then she swept out. Swept! Cool and Sexy Asian Girl was a delightful person to be. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl didn’t need to explain anything. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl was inscrutable. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl took the stairs up two at a time to the rooftop and stared at the sky and remembered when there had been stars.

But that was a long time ago, in a different story. Not a better one. That had been a story with crying children and uprooted families and soldiers, and that had been a story with opium dens and cigarettes and women who hid their faces behind fans. That had been a poor story, and this was an expensive one. Even though it had the old story in its bones. Men like the Tourist had been in that story, too.

She’s thinking about the old story, the city before the city, while they ride through the night. The streetlamps are smears of light. The cars around them are smears of chrome. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl guides them through the flow of traffic, crossing the backbone of the city and winding them down the south side, where the bars and izakayas are, where the couples and laughing university students played.

“A left, here,” she murmurs against the Tourist’s ear. “And stop.”

He cuts the engine outside the narrow door. There’s a glowing red lantern hung outside.

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl swings her leg off the bike and walks to the door without wobbling. She doesn’t wait for the Tourist to follow her. She knows he will. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl knows all the things that the Tourist doesn’t know. She clears the path so that the Tourist can get to business. If she refused, she’d stop being Cool and Sexy Asian Girl.

It’s a tautology. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl has to do the things she needs to do to keep being Cool and Sexy Asian Girl, or else she stops being Cool and Sexy Asian Girl. She stops knowing about nightclubs only identifiable by a red lantern. She stops being able to saunter in heels. It’s like how the city stops being the city and becomes a different city if the flickering flames of the neon billboards all go out. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl has a role in this story the same way the Tourist does.

The Tourist follows her in. The squelching beat of good club music paints the air around them. Strangers’ glances linger on their forms and the foreign cast to the Tourist’s face. It’s too crowded to see what’s across the room. They can’t talk in here without putting mouths close to ear, so that’s what the Tourist does. His breath is warm against her skin.

“Where to now?”

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl takes the Tourist’s hand and dances them across the room. She’s part of the scene in a way that the Tourist can’t be, in a way that he doesn’t understand. With her guidance, they melt through the crowd and reach the bar without any incident. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl sits on a barstool. The Tourist leans against the counter, signaling the bartender for a drink. The bartender pours clear liquid in two glasses, adds a drop of something blue that blooms like a drop of dark ink in water.

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl takes her glass with a smile and says, “Is Li around?”

“Why, who’s asking?”

“He’s got some information that we want. I’m a friend.”

And now they have become. Now they have been. Now Cool and Sexy Asian Girl has known Li for a very long time—now they met in an underground poker tournament, now she’s a card sharp with her expressionless face, and now she’s always known that Li’s a grinning sort of bastard who always seems like he’s cheating. The present is a tool to create the past, and the past follows the Tourist’s needs. Water follows the most obvious path, and Cool and Sexy Asian Girl has learned to be a conduit.

She takes a sip to cover the flicker in her face as she processes the new history. The drink tastes mostly like mint and the acetone aftertaste of alcohol.

The bartender nods. “I’ll ask. Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Thanks,” the Tourist says. The bartender slips between a gap in the liquor shelves. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl and the Tourist are alone except for all the people in the room with them. The Tourist takes a long sip.

“Do you ever feel,” the Tourist says and then pauses. He looks down at his drink, the blooming blue dissipating into the clear liquid, and then glances back at the crowd behind them. He looks lost, for a moment. He doesn’t normally look lost. He glances back at her.

“Like we’ve done this before?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl lies.

The bartender comes back and gestures for them to follow. They slip into the back corridor, behind a bar and down a set of concrete stairs and then a second narrow, colder corridor leading to a room in which an assortment of strangers plays poker under a fluorescent light. Strangers and Li, who has now always been a friend.

Li looks up from his hand and smiles his crooked smile. The cybernetic implant in his left eye socket glints in the light.

“Well hey,” he says.

“Hey yourself,” she says.

“Are you playing?”

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl smiles, just the slightest tilt of her lip. She knows what Li is actually asking, since they’ve been friends for years. That’s how they talk. Doubled meaning and canned expressions and hands of cards lying flat on the felt.

(This is the first time they’ve spoken.)

“Word on the street is that you know where to find out about what went down with Zether. Sandra Claire. Name ring any bells?”

Li’s grin grows broad, a white slash in the shadows as he leans back. The filled cybernetic socket looks like a dark hole in his face.

“Take your winnings and piss off, gentlemen,” Li says.

The men sitting in the semicircle exchange flat glances but leave.

They’re alone now. Just her and the Tourist and Li.

“Sandra Claire. Name sounds familiar. I might have a memory with her name on it. Might have talked with her. This all depends on who’s asking,” Li says. “Are you playing? Nothing’s free. You don’t have to. Your boy can play against me.”

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl is being offered an out. The Tourist can sit down and play against Li, and Li could take over. He could be the city that is the backdrop, he could be the Roguish Sidekick, he could be the Card Shark, the Underworld Gambler, the Fast-Talking Sacrifice, the Man Whose Head is a Machine, and then Cool and Sexy Asian Girl could exit stage left. They could fill the same role, if she wanted to go. It’s a kind offer. Most people don’t choose to be in the narrative.

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl sits at the small table. “Deal me in.”

“And me,” the Tourist says, sitting next to her. He puts down a stack of bills. Li whistles.

“How good are you?” he says.

“I’m alright.”

“You’ve got to be more than alright,” Li says, and that’s the last conversation for a while. Cards flip. Hands raise and fall. Eyes flicker.

The Tourist was lying. He’s not just good. He’s very good. Barely better than Cool and Sexy Asian Girl, depending on how you’d weigh luck’s influence. Cards on the felt. Li smirks. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl is impassive. The Tourist’s loss is an impermanent setback.

“So you’re a cashier, and you run an underground gambling ring,” the Tourist says. “How’s that working out for you?”

“Alright,” Li says and winks with his good eye. “No guns, no drama. Just information. People know me.”

“Did you talk with Sandra? At the convenience store?”

“That would be telling,” Li says. “That’s money. Another round?”

The Tourist reaches into his jacket and grimaces at the lack of what he finds. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl unclips her bracelet and puts it in the pot.

The Tourist glances at her. “No, hey, you don’t have to.”

“Only matters if we don’t win,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says.

“I’ll buy you a new one when you lose,” Li says. He presses the center of his missing eye and a data chip ejects. He places it on the table. The space where his left eye should be turns into a rectangular black gape.

“Most of it’s still in here,” he says, tapping his head, tilting it so that the Tourist can see the other three cybernetic implants that stud his cranium. “But I like visual metaphors.”

The Tourist nods. Li deals a new round of cards. They play ferociously this time. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl savors the experience. In a world without the Tourist, she would never have ended up in a small room underneath a nightclub, playing for secrets. Her bracelet glints on top of the pile of poker chips.

Everyone reveals their last hands. The Tourist won, like Cool and Sexy Asian Girl expected. It doesn’t matter that Cool and Sexy Asian Girl has built herself a history where she’s more experienced than the Tourist is. It doesn’t matter that Li was dealing or that he has an advanced processing engine where most of his brain is supposed to be.

This is a game about luck. About favor. And the city tilts toward the Tourist.

“Oh man,” Li says. “Guess I fucked it all up.”

He pushes the pile of cash and chips and Cool and Sexy Asian Girl’s bracelet toward the Tourist. He picks the data chip up and slots it back where his eye is supposed to go.

“Go talk to the bartender,” Li says. “He’ll exchange the chips for you. Then come back down and we can talk, chief.”

The Tourist nods. He hands the bracelet back to Cool and Sexy Asian Girl and then exits into the corridor. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl fastens the bracelet around her wrist. Li exhales, takes a cigarette out of his pocket.

“Do you mind?”

“No.”

Li lights the cigarette. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl remembers sitting on a balcony and smoking with him in the years before he had his eye out. She’s glad that she built him in as a friend. The city doesn’t have to be her enemy. Forward momentum, clandestine relationships, none of it needed to be deadly, so long as a smear of danger painted the scene. The scene only needed to feel like movement. Working the city was like dancing through the crowded nightclub. As long as it felt organic, the momentum would continue.

“I have a request, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, I could never refuse you. What do you need?”

“Could you please lie to my companion when he returns? Tell him something . . . untrue about meeting Sandra. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to nudge us down a detour.”

As long as it felt organic, the momentum would continue.

Li frowns. Taps ash onto a ceramic ashtray. “Why? Aren’t you helping him?”

Help is a complicated word. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl is leading the Tourist through the neon night.

Li shakes his head.

“He won, fair and square. Can’t have my reputation being fucked for him. You’d be putting me in a hard position.”

“I’m sorry I involved you,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says. She means that. She wouldn’t have meant it three hours ago, but now she’s woven a history with Li and is beginning to regret bringing the Tourist here at all. She hadn’t expected to tie her backstory and Li’s so closely together. But they’re friends. Good friends. So Cool and Sexy Asian Girl tells the truth.

“I just don’t want him to leave yet. I don’t want to stop—” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl gestures at herself. The slick black leather jacket, the heels too high to be practical.

“This is fun. I don’t want it to end.”

Being Cool and Sexy Asian Girl is the best experience she’s had. It’s the closest she gets to mattering. Before Cool and Sexy Asian Girl, she had a normal job at a biotech firm, and she didn’t understand the streets of the city like the veins on the back of her own hand. She got up and went to work and slept and never stayed up until two in the morning. It was never two in the morning for her, then. She hadn’t understood the nature of the city, and every change in it had been a destabilization. The poor story, the expensive one, the way that the roads changed with the years. But the Tourist changed all of that. She’s become a person who could live in this iteration of the city for a very long time.

Li stubs his cigarette out. He looks pale and mechanized. His flesh eye blinks wetly.

“You put the chip in my head.”

The new-old memory falls into place. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl pales. She was there when Li got the cybernetic implant, the insertion of the four sockets ringing his skull. He had gotten half his skull crushed in the aftermath of a poker tournament, after everything broke bad in the police raid. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl got out unscathed. She always gets out unscathed. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl was a thing that dealt violence, not one that had violence done to her.

This is why they hadn’t talked for long, she remember-realized. This was how their story made sense. She had driven Li to the hospital. And then she left him at the hospital and never spoke to him again. It was shame. That was the explanation the city gave her for their friendship and subsequent absence.

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl wonders who Li was before she warped his history. She doesn’t usually think about the effect that she has on the people around her that aren’t the Tourist. It’s hard to remember the city and the people in it as anything more than game pieces to be steered around and discarded for the needs of the plot. But Li is sitting in front of her, his one good eye steady, the smoke curling wraithlike around him. She wonders who he was in the old story.

A good person would leave and hope that the reality would soften back into its previous shape. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl is not a good person. She would like to stay herself.

“I don’t get to control how the story goes. I only get to guide it a little. And I’m asking you if you’ll help me with that, please. And then you never have to see me again.”

She winces, then. As soon as she said it, Cool and Sexy Asian Girl immediately knew that it was the wrong thing to say. Now that the Tourist has left the room, Cool and Sexy Asian girl is beginning to lose her cool. Her current actions aren’t in service of his goals.

Li stubs his cigarette. He picks up a spare poker chip and rolls it across his knuckles deftly.

“Have you heard of infinite game theory?”

“No.”

“It’s one of those woo-woo pseudo-philosophical theories. It refers to situations where the point of the game is to keep playing. Games where the win condition is essentially the ability to continue existing within the system. Like being alive. Or having money in the stock market. Sometimes poker, if you don’t want to cash out. Keep all the plates spinning. Winning just means you keep on going on.”

“I get the metaphor,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says. Li stops rolling the poker chip and lets it fall on the felt.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re too cool for this, I get your shtick. How long have you been playing?”

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl picks up the poker chip. She thinks back to the first meeting she had with the Tourist. Two in the morning. A bar. The way that the light hit his face. How lost the Tourist looked. How he looked at the world around him like it wasn’t real, like it had been created for him to be contrasted against. How she had hated him, for a brief hot second before they locked eyes, and then Cool and Sexy Asian Girl looked enigmatically away.

“I didn’t mean to let it get this far,” she admits. “It should have ended a long time ago, I think. But it was so easy to misdirect him.”

The first lie was an accident. She said right instead of left, and the Tourist and her took a long detour through the west side of the city. They were supposed to meet an office worker with information about the location of his wife’s death, who would be at the station for half an hour before the man caught the bullet out.

They missed intersecting with the office worker. The bullet train slid from the station just as they arrived. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl had felt terrible about it at first. She apologized, because even if Cool and Sexy Asian Girl wouldn’t apologize, she would soon no longer be Cool and Sexy Asian Girl. The Tourist had accepted the apology with a half slice of sad smile. She had felt a little sad. A little bit about the Tourist. But mostly about herself.

And then Cool and Sexy Asian Girl’s phone rang. She answered.

“I heard you were looking for Sandra Claire,” a low voice said.

“Who’s asking?” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl said. “You knew Sandra.”

It was an accident, the first time. A flattening of her voice. Because Cool and Sexy Asian Girl had a low voice and a flat affect, Cool and Sexy Asian Girl was mysterious and pointed, and Cool and Sexy Asian Girl didn’t ask but to demand.

With her statement, the knowledge of the caller bloomed in her head like a lotus sitting cool and perfect on the still water of her mind. This was the office worker’s dealer, whose debts the office worker was trying to escape, and he would know more about Sandra than the office worker did because the office worker had met Sandra through the man. Another route to the answers.

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl navigated the rest of the conversation rotely. In her head she shredded the petals of knowledge and then ripped the roots, thought after metatextual thought chewed and dissected. Throat followed tongue followed teeth, extrapolating the logical conclusions from her actions.

Her speech had its own momentum, spiraling back and forward in time. The city bent around the Tourist’s goals in the same way that her own history had. The Tourist did this without thinking. But she could think and speak and mold the world into existence. The city was a stage for a specific sort of play with specific rules. Every missed opportunity could be handed back in a different form. She looked at the clock hanging on the wall of the train station. It was still two in the morning.

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl could turn the city into a lotus eater machine for the Tourist. She could stay Cool and Sexy Asian Girl for as long as she wanted.

The lies spiraled from there. Misdirection after misdirection. Flushed data chips. Wrong addresses. Doctored websites. Carefully worded requests to new-old friends who watch her now, with one biological eye and one data chip jammed into a socket.

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl puts the poker chip down.

“I don’t know how long I’ve been lying to him,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says. “It’s . . . been a night. Not even a night.”

It was always two in the morning when you needed it to be. It can be two in the morning for a very long time.

“How could you not know?” the Tourist says.

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl doesn’t fall out of her chair, because she’s too cool and sexy to startle from a sudden noise. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl turns smoothly to see the Tourist silhouetted against the fluorescent hallway. He’s carrying a wad of cash in his hand. He must have finished with the bartender. She doesn’t know how long he’s been standing there. Li didn’t say anything.

The Tourist walks in, turning from flat shade to three-dimensional object. He grips her almost painfully by the side of the jaw, forcing her to stand. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl struggles against his grasp. But she can’t move. The city moves to help the Tourist. In a contest of strength, it takes his side.

“You lied to me. You’re trapping me here?”

“Let me go.”

He doesn’t let go. He looks at her with an expression of perfect heartbreak.

“Why?” he says. “How long have you been keeping me here? Why would you do this? What were you trying to do?”

“Let me go,” she says, pushing him away, wrestling with his hold.

“Why?” he repeats again, and isn’t that just who he is. Demands masked as questions, supplicant masked as god. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl hates him violently. He has everything she scrapes for. His arrogance! As if the city is an oyster to be prized open, as if his heartbreak has any more worth than anyone else who lives here, as if his answers are a pearl and the rest of it is discarded flesh. As if she owes him anything. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl is not a good person. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl has been helping him. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl is a construct of his own imagination.

She should defuse the situation. She could speak the world into submission and run the world in a loop and find an excuse that would become truth.

“Sam,” she snarls. “Do you even know my name?”

“I—” the Tourist says, and then stops. His grasp loosens, gaze vacating as he thinks, because no, he doesn’t know her name. He never asked.

“Sam,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says. “You trust me.”

His hand twitches. “No. Yes. Wait. I—”

The Tourist looks frightened, now, and it’s the first time she’s seen that expression cross Sam’s face.

“I don’t,” he starts to say, and then stops, and then lets go. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl falls back down into her chair. Before she can stand, he’s already heading out the door and down the hallway. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl runs after him, heels clicking on the floor. The Tourist has longer legs than she does, already taking the steps two at a time back up to the bar, and Cool and Sexy Asian Girl sprints after him in her high heels and by the time she reaches the top of the stairs the Tourist’s gone.

“Shit,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says.

“Is everything so dramatic around you guys?” Li says from behind her. She hadn’t noticed him following.

“Only around him,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says. She tries to turn and nearly twists her ankle when the spiked heel of her shoe snaps.

Li catches her arm. She tries not to sag against him and fails. She’s already losing whatever makes Cool and Sexy Asian Girl cool.

“I never understood how you could walk in those things.”

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl pulls off the broken heel, and then the other. Without them, she’s six inches shorter, and the world feels wrong from this perspective. She drops the shoes in the trash can behind the bar and sighs. Li tilts his head.

“What now?”

“Why do you care?”

Li shrugs. “I’m invested. You’re my friend.”

“Am I?” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl asks.

Li rolls his good eye and leans against the bar. Pours himself a glass of whiskey.

“I get to decide that, don’t I? You can say whatever you want about our history, but in the here-and-now, it’s my choice.”

“Oh,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says. Li shrugs again and drains his glass and pulls the data chip out of his eye again. He holds it out to her.

“Your boy’s probably going to come looking for it. If you want him to come looking for you.”

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl reaches out instinctively. This would lead the Tourist right back to her. It would be the easiest flow of water. She could make the Tourist forgive her. She could answer all his questions with perfect answers. The city was curving toward the Tourist again. She stops before she picks it up.

“Am I a bad person, Li?”

“I run an unregistered, illegal gambling ring in the basement of a nightclub,” Li says flatly.

“But you do that because that’s what I implie—”

“So nothing’s my fault and nothing I do matters. Which means that good and bad are meaningless constructs,” Li says. “You’re giving yourself too much credit. And too little. Take the chip or don’t. I decide, you decide, nobody gets to fucking decide. Live in the city whatever way you want. I want to give this to you, if you want it.”

She picks up the chip. It’s warm from Li’s body heat.

“You didn’t tell me that Sam was standing behind me,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says.

“I don’t like seeing my friends act like assholes. He was making you worse. Or you were making him worse.” Li gestures between them. “This goes both ways.”

“But you’re giving me the chip to find him,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says.

“Well, do you want it?”

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl thought she did. But it felt too easy. It felt like a test, coming from Li who knew what she had done to him, who knew what she had been doing. She felt exposed, in the sense that her motivations had been revealed and found wanting. She wanted to squirm away from Li’s flat gaze. She wondered if this is how the Tourist had felt, when he had learned that she had been lying to him. The surprise that the people around you existed outside of your narrative. Abruptly, Cool and Sexy Asian Girl felt very stupid and a little cruel. She was treating Li the same way the Tourist treated her. And maybe the same way she had treated the Tourist. Like a tool.

The city was a story, but Sam was a man who needed to know what happened to his wife. A man who had cried in her bed. And the city wasn’t a story about that man. The city was a story about the Tourist and his finding of answers, and it had been running in circles, loops, for a very long time, and the Tourist had learned nothing. But the city wasn’t meant to be static. Being the Tourist was making Sam worse. And being Cool and Sexy Asian Girl was making her cruel. She hadn’t been cruel, before. She remembers that now.

“I think I want to get Sam out of here,” Cool and Sexy Asian Girl says. “Can I borrow a pair of shoes?”

Li gestures at the door to the left.

“Employee closet. Suyoung has feet that look your size.”

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl nods her thanks and opens the door. She rummages through the clothing that belongs to the nightclub’s employees. There’s a pair of blue sneakers that look her size. She shoves her feet in them. She closes the closet door. Li’s gone, when she looks back. The bartender has taken his place.

She nods at him. He nods at her.

“Want me to close you out?”

“Please,” she says, and then pays for the drinks. It feels like it’s been an eternity since her and the Tourist were standing here.

Cool and Sexy Asian Girl slides her way across the bar through the crowd. She’s still part of the city. That has nothing to do with the Tourist. And then she’s walking into the cold clear night, and the rain has stopped, leaving puddles of slick black reflective water, arcs of neon beamed into infinity. The motorbike is gone. The street is empty.

The city is holding its breath. But the neon is still on. She can hear the roar of the elevated train. The city is still the city, and the next bullet train won’t leave for another hour. It’s still two in the morning. She doesn’t think the Tourist can leave yet, anyway. He hasn’t found what he’s looking for. She’ll get him out, though.

And then she’ll be someone else. In the city after the city. She’ll remember the neon and slick water. She’ll remember the nightclubs. Maybe in the next city, there will be sunrises.

She walks into the night, for however long it can last. For however long she can stay. Her sneakers are soaked with every footstep. She keeps walking anyway.

A.T. Greenblatt is a Nebula Award-winning writer and mechanical engineer. She lives in New York City where she’s known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. Her work has been nominated for a Hugo, Locus, and Sturgeon Award, has been in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, and has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, as well as other fine publications. You can find her online at atgreenblatt.com and on Bluesky as @AtGreenblatt.

If We Make It Through This Alive

A.T. Greenblatt

Pennsylvania to Ohio, 600 miles: Sabrina

The open road is just potholes and misery, but Sabrina loves it anyway. Not that she has anything against the national train system, trains are great. But it’s the challenge, the potential to rebuild everything, that has her doing final checks on Gran’s old Jeep at the starting line of the Great American Road Race.

Not that Gran would’ve recognized her beloved car.

“You’re driving across the country in that?” asks a rando guy. It takes her a second to recognize him from last year’s winning team. Johnny Shore. Or as Sabrina and her teammates call him—Johnny Shit.

“Yeah,” Sabrina says, squaring her shoulders. At her tone, her teammates look up.

They’re 30 miles outside of Philadelphia on the dead asphalt carcass of the King of Prussia mall. It’s a typical November day, hot and sunny. Jody’s sitting cross-legged on the roof of the Jeep, fine-tuning the antennas. Fern’s kneeling on the pavement fussing over the inspector bot.

“Is he dissing Spike?” Jody says, quietly, but with a glare.

“Yup,” says Fern, half-rising, fists balling at her side. Sabrina grabs her friend’s T-shirt and Johnny Shit smirks.

Obviously, Spike, their car, isn’t much of a looker. The diesel engine has been switched out for an electric motor and oversize batteries. Solar panels are folded up like accordions in the back. The wheels are massive, designed for river crossings and brutal terrain, but they make the Jeep’s chassis look like a toddler on a horse. Antennas stick out of the roof like a sorry mane. The only untouched part is Gran’s New Jersey license plates.

“First time, right?” Johnny Shit asks, smugness dripping off him now.

“No. Tenth,” Fern snaps back.

Of course this is their first time. Racers are a tightknit community. Unless you grew up without family ties to a Reinvention Club. Or money. Or a longing for “the good ol’ days.” In that case, you’re on your own.

“Hey. I’m just being friendly. It’s a tough race.”

“Maybe don’t patronize other teams then,” Jody mumbles, but loud enough for him to hear.

Johnny Shit makes a face. “Good luck out there, ladies. Hope you don’t break down.”

“Keep your eyes on the road,” Sabrina replies.

He retreats to his souped-up, eye-catching blue trophy truck with “Philly’s Own Reinvention Club” decaled on the side, and a stab of jealousy twists Sabrina’s guts. She’s never wanted anything so badly as to win this race. Winning means having enough money from corporate sponsors and notoriety in the Reinvention community to set up a school to teach anyone how to reengineer their life back together. To make things right again for their family.

Unless you make a career out of racing like Johnny Shit and his team. From the corner of her eye, Sabrina sees Fern flip him the double bird.

“Ignore him,” Jody whispers. “We got this far.”

“And we’ll go farther,” Sabrina finishes, exhaling.

Yeah, they might be three friends racing without any sponsors or support, but Sabrina knows they built something beautiful with Spike.

Someone shouts, “Ten minutes to start!”

This is it, Sabrina thinks as they pile into the Jeep. Her knuckles are white on the steering wheel as she studies the 14 other cars around her. All club-backed, all shiny in the sunlight. She wonders which teams will make it 2,800 miles on America’s outdated highways and beat them to Sacramento. Or maybe, she and hers will beat them.

She knows, statistically, there’ll be at least one team who won’t survive this. Her fingers creak as her grip on the steering wheel tightens.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if Spike doesn’t start, though?” Fern asks.

“NO!” Jody and Sabrina almost shout. Then, they see Fern grinning in the rearview. They chuckle shakily and Sabrina eases up on her death grip.

An eerie hush falls over the starting line, like a held breath. The nervous energy’s so thick you can almost chew on it. There’s no revving engines—every car is powered by batteries or ecodiesel or both. The motors are almost whispers. The distant sounds of trains are the only things that dare to make noise.

“Good luck, racers. And Godspeed,” a voice shouts, followed by a loud pop.

Sabrina steps on the accelerator and Spike lunges forward. And just like that, 10 months of designing, planning, testing, redesigning are put to the test.

“Told you she’d start,” Fern says.

Jody rolls her eyes, but there’s a faint smile on her lips.

“We’ve got this,” Sabrina says, squaring her shoulders. Because they have to. Because Sabrina doesn’t know what she’s going to do if she can’t rebuild things for her family.

When Sabrina, Jody, and Fern planned out their route, they divided the country by home territories—East for Sabrina, Midwest for Jody, and West for Fern. They expected the race to take 10 days. They expected surprises, rerouting, and car problems.

They didn’t expect the problems to start 50 miles in.

Sabrina’s cruising down the PA turnpike, going steady at 40 miles per hour. She’s driving in the middle of the road, weaving between potholes, while Jody updates and annotates their maps and Fern reads out the road conditions their inspector bot feeds them from half a mile ahead.

“Overpass is still standing. Giant pothole upcoming on the left. Bridge better fucking hold our weight.”

The tension, the worry, the fear is still there, but Sabrina feels herself uncoil now that she’s racing. Finally moving. All those months the three of them slaved in that shared workshop, fighting for time on the CNC machines and laths, all those hours combing message boards and strangers’ storage units, looking for the right parts and material. The work is paying off.

Then, the battery sensor starts beeping and Sabrina’s heart almost stops. If anything happens to the batteries, Spike’s screwed. She immediately brakes and turns off the engine. Fern jumps out of the car, Sabrina close behind.

While Fern checks connections on the solar array, now open and fanned out behind Spike, Sabrina yanks open the hood, her heart in her throat.

Please be nothing major, she prays, inspecting the connections around the batteries.

A few are loose. Even though she just went over them at the starting line.

Swearing, Sabrina grabs fast-setting adhesive from the back seat and reapplies.

Sabrina, we can’t keep rebuilding. she hears her dad say.

“Watch me,” she says under her breath.

“What?” Fern asks.

“Try now.”

Jody turns on the car and after a few agonizing seconds, she gives a thumbs-up out the window.

Sabrina climbs back into the driver’s seat and before Fern’s even sitting, Spike’s accelerating. Her friend falls inelegantly into her seat, swearing. But Sabrina doesn’t care. Her fingers are white on the wheel. Her teeth are clenched.

This race is a terrible idea, she hears her mom say. You can’t run away from grief.

Sure, they’re moving forward, but Sabrina looks in the rearview mirror and imagines the floodwater rising behind her, closing in.

Central Pennsylvania was always rural. It’s still rural. But now the farms are overgrown and abandoned with the exception of a handful of determined communities. The world between train stations is so deserted now. Gran would’ve hated it, but Sabrina marvels at the wild beauty of the ivy-covered buildings, young trees, and mossy trucks.

“Did you know that this was all forests once?” Fern asks suddenly, in the middle of her readouts.

“Did you know there used to be an amazing ice cream place 5 miles away?” Sabrina replies.

“You’ve had ice cream?” Jody asks, suddenly interested.

“Not the real stuff. But my Gran used to talk about it every time we were here.”

“Lucky her,” Fern says, slumping back in her seat.

Everyone is quiet after that.

As planned, Sabrina steers clear of the old abandoned suburbs and towns to avoid the overpasses and throughways. The trick to surviving this race is not to test your luck with structures that haven’t been inspected or maintained in decades. They only get close to Harrisburg to use the bike lanes on the one safe bridge across the Susquehanna River. Fern runs ahead to clear the way, while Sabrina passes excited bicyclists. Kids stare open-mouthed as Spike rolls by and Sabrina laughs. They’ve probably never seen an old-school car before.

As the bicyclists study Spike, Sabrina studies their bikes. On this bridge alone, there’s a dozen different DIY designs with a dozen different modifications. Even at a quick glance, she sees that only a few of them work as well as they should.

If we make it through this alive, my school’s going to help people like this. She puts a little more pressure on Spike’s accelerator.

The roads through the Appalachians are a minefield of flood-outs and rubble. Despite spending hours poring over maps, reading dozens of DOT reports, and carefully choosing their route based on friends along the way, conditions are worse than expected. Much worse. Sabrina wants to scream.

But Jody’s a navigation genius with a backup plan for everything. Patiently, she reroutes Sabrina over and over again.

“I can’t wait until we get to the Midwest,” Jody says, glaring at the mountains. “Everything there is flat and simple.”

“Have you met Chicago?” Sabrina asks. Jody sticks out her tongue. “How much farther?”

“Eighty-six miles till we reach your uncle’s place.”

Sabrina glances at the time. It’s 3 p.m. They have three more hours of sunlight and she’s going to make the most of them.

Thirty minutes later, they reach an impasse at a mountain tunnel.

“Hell no,” Fern says as the inspector bot reemerges from underground. “There’s major cracks in the cement.”

Sabrina bites her lip, looks at Jody, who sighs and says, “Turn around.”

It almost physically hurts to go back. Sabrina imagines the 14 other racers in their shiny, tricked-out cars speeding ahead of them.

Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward, Gran used to say when she was teaching Sabrina how to rewire a house.

It doesn’t make her feel better.

Off the major roads, Sabrina cuts the speed to 20 mph as Spike lumbers over streams and shrubs growing in the middle of the tarmac. Tall, half-alive trees stretch up around them, making the growing twilight even darker.

“We’re not going to make it tonight,” Jody says eventually, quietly. “I’ll let your folks know.”

Sabrina starts to argue, but she catches Fern’s scowl in the rearview. They agreed not to drive at night. Visibility’s terrible and inspector bots aren’t as accurate in the cold. This is when most fatalities happen.

Jody taps out the message on the Smartpad as Sabrina finds a place to camp. It’s only their first day and they are already behind. She wants to vomit.

Instead, she pulls out three portions of dried veggies and lentil protein patties and a small hot plate.

“This was our first meal together,” Jody says, with a small smile. “At that PORC class,” she adds when she gets confused looks.

“With that jackass instructor,” Sabrina says. That’s where they all met—three outsiders at Philly’s Own Reinvention Club free intro seminar. Advertised as “open to everyone,” but in reality the organizers didn’t want anyone but their own kids to show up. “God, I forgot about the ‘authentic racer’s lunch.’ ”

“Ladies,” Fern says, dropping her voice. “I’m going to level with you. This clubhouse is only for serious racers. Cars need to be in your blood.”

“And look at us now,” replies Sabrina, dejected. She’s exhausted, cold, and drowning in doubt.

Fern throws a dehydrated yam chip at her. “For fucksakes, Sabrina, stop it. Your school’s going to be so much cooler than PORC. And you,” she says, pointing to Jody, “will be reunited with your beloved and land a good government job. We’ll all get some serious cash and street cred from this.”

Sabrina blushes. “Yeah, and what are you going to do with all that street cred?” she asks.

They’ve asked Fern this a million times, but Fern’s never really answered.

She shrugs.

“You’re so weird,” Jody mumbles.

“I mean it,” says Fern, ignoring her. “Don’t go mopey on me now.”

Later, when her teammates are passed out, Sabrina lies awake, thinking.

No one at PORC ever bothered asking Sabrina how she knew her way around an engine or a machining shop. That Gran also taught her to love the open road, challenges, and how to keep old things together when everything else is falling apart. No one bothered asking why she and her family moved to Philly.

Only Jody and Fern. Over the months they pried out her story. How Sabrina fixed the basement water pumps, but they failed in the hurricane that destroyed her family’s house. How Gran died from pneumonia a month later. How she’s been heartsick ever since.

Her teammates are only ones who know that Sabrina’s risking her life on this stupid, crazy road race to keep what Gran taught her alive.

“Got a response from your great uncle,” Jody announces the next morning. “He’ll be waiting at the Ohio border.”

It’s barely dawn when they pack up the Jeep and do system checks in record time. In the weak morning sun, they make their way down the mountain. Weirdly, driving feels easier today to Sabrina, though there are just as many streams and trees.

Maybe I’m finding my racer’s rhythm, she thinks.

Around Pittsburgh, they sneak across another bridge, this one built for trains, though the upper level is for pedestrians and bikes. It’s still early enough that there are few witnesses. As they cross, a train rumbles and shakes the bridge as it speeds through the lower level, hundreds of cars long.

Her great-uncle Manny is waiting for them on his old electric bike by an ancient, rusty highway sign that says “Welcome to Ohio.”

“Right on time!” he says, laughing. He grabs Sabrina in a bear hug the second she’s out of the Jeep. She hasn’t seen him in years, but the way he talks with his hands is exactly like Gran used to and suddenly Sabrina’s missing her with a fresh fierceness.

She tells him about their adventures as they swap his water jugs and fresh food for the inhalers and cholesterol meds they brought. They give him a good bottle of whiskey. Like how hot air balloonists used to give Champagne to surprised farmers.

“So, why didn’t you move to a city?” Fern asks him suddenly.

“Jesus, Fern,” Jody mutters.

Manny shrugs. “This is home. And someone’s gotta keep an eye on the power lines and aqueducts out here.”

He catches Sabrina right before they leave, pulling her aside. “Hey, sorry to hear about your parents’ place. Know you spent a lot of time helping them rebuild.”

It’s Sabrina’s turn to shrug. “Most of Jersey is a swamp. It was bound to happen, I guess.”

“Yeah, but twice in two years . . . ”

Sabrina shrugs again and doesn’t meet his eyes. He sticks his hands in his pockets and studies her welding job on Gran’s beloved car.

“Do you think she’d kill me or be proud?” Sabrina asks, biting her lip.

Manny considers. “Probably a bit of both.”

“My family thinks I’m crazy for doing this.”

“You are. But your Gran would expect nothing less of you.”

She feels her cheeks burning. It’s the first vote of confidence Sabrina’s gotten in a while from someone who wasn’t Fern or Jody.

“It’s just for publicity . . . and the money,” she admits. “I’m going to open a school in Sacramento on how to fix things. Open to everyone, not just car nerds. Thinking of naming it after Gran.”

Manny’s smile lights up his face. “She’d love that.”

Later, as Ohio passes by, mile after mile, Sabrina squares her shoulders like Gran taught her and lets herself relax. Lets herself believe that it’ll be OK. That there are hundreds of people in Sacramento who can use the skills and lessons so patiently handed down to her. That this race is more than a grief reaction.

Because at some point or another, Sabrina figures, everyone’s going to need to know how to rebuild.

Indiana to Nebraska, 700 miles: Jody

There’s always another argument, Jody thinks. Around Indiana, she finally manages to convince Sabrina to let her drive.

“This is my home turf,” Jody says.

“Then what were you doing in Philly?” Sabrina says, tossing Jody the keys. It’s an old argument, a joke between them.

Except, everyone’s always asking Jody: What are you doing in Philly if you hate crowds?

She was following her girlfriend when Zara moved from small town Iowa to Philadelphia.

Now, Zara’s in Sacramento, has been for a year, and Jody’s finally found a way to make the cross-country trip without using a train.

“Any messages from Zara?” she asks as she climbs into the driver’s seat.

Sabrina glances at the Smartpad. “Nope. Not in the five minutes since you checked.”

A bubble of hurt and worry rises up in Jody’s chest, even though she knows the satlink out here is terrible and it’s 6 a.m. in Sacramento. But Zara kept coughing when they talked two days ago. When they had the same old argument.

Seriously? This is your solution for getting here? Zara said as she caught her breath.

Yes! Remember what happened last time? Jody replied, sharper than she meant to.

Some people are just not built for crowds, no matter how hard they try and keep trying.

It’s as if the train is haunting them. Jody hears it as she drives through the wide expanse of abandoned grassland. Its whistle in the distance, the rumble of its hundreds of passenger and supply cars. A steady reminder.

It’s been almost two years since Jody’s been back in Indiana and god, she’s missed it. The unobstructed horizon, the sound of the wind through the grass. The sameness, the calmness. It’s soothing even though she knows that if they break down out here, they might be stranded for days.

“These clouds better clear up,” Sabrina says, frowning at the gray sky and then at the battery meter on Spike.

Jody nods.

I don’t think I can stay here, Zara said to her, 14 months ago. This East Coast mold is killing me.

Jody bites her lip, makes herself focus on the road, not on the past. If they make it through this alive, she’s going to use whatever funds and prestige this race gives her to build a little utopia in Sacramento with thick walls and moisture control. Where Zara will get better and Jody will conquer her fears. Where she won’t get left behind anymore.

Jody drives until she’s bleary-eyed. Then Sabrina takes over. Then Fern.

“My kingdom for smooth asphalt,” Fern says through clenched teeth, as she zigzags around potholes.

Jody keeps her eyes on the Smartpad, adding notes to the maps. She doesn’t rise to the bait. Their Midwestern route was another argument.

Sabrina and Fern advocated for the service road that runs parallel to the train line from Chicago to Omaha. It was rumored to be the only passable road in the area for 300 miles. Jody fought for I-80.

It’s illegal to use the service road and we can’t gather info about the highway if we’re on it, Jody said.

And Jody plans to gather as much data on the highways as possible. It’s a dirty secret of the Great American Road Race—most racers don’t make their living by reinventing old tech and winning the races, but as DOT contractors who provide updated information about infrastructure.

In fact, Jody spent weeks working with a government consultant learning what information would be useful, where, and how to get it. He was impressed with her attention to detail and her knowledge of the Midwest. “Make it through that race alive, and you got yourself a job,” he said.

My kingdom for an allergen-free home and steady work, she thinks.

The useful thing about living outside of major cities most of her life is that Jody still has stubborn friends living along the route. She’s sent them all ETAs, then updated ETAs, and when Spike rolls up, the trio is greeted with excitement. Jody’s pulled into rib-crushing hugs, as Sabrina and Fern exchange antibiotics and first-aid kits for water and updated directions.

“Why haven’t you moved to a city?” Fern asks Jody’s friends. Every single time.

Their answers are all variations of a theme: because they won’t leave someone they love behind. Jody resists yelling at Fern. Yes, cities might be sustainable now, but they’re not for everyone. She’s told her this, but Fern keeps asking for second opinions.

Jody doesn’t pretend to understand Fern.

They reach Plymouth, Indiana, on the fourth day of the race. Jody’s old hometown. She’s almost vibrating with excitement. God, she’s missed her neighbors, the cook fires, the garden-grown meals.

“I’ve never seen you this happy,” says Fern, from the driver’s seat. “About anything.”

“That’s because you’ve never seen me in so much open space,” Jody replies quietly. “Turn left there.”

Spike rolls down Main Street, a dirt road that runs between a handful of houses. Jody searches for familiar faces, but slowly her heart sinks.

There are no lights, no fires, no one in the gardens.

She makes Fern stop anyway, Jody knocks on every door, whiskey bottle in hand, hoping against hope. But no one answers. Plymouth has become a ghost town; even the last stubborn holdouts have left.

“Don’t read into it,” Sabrina says as Jody climbs back into the Jeep.

She nods, blinking back tears. But Jody does read into it.

It feels like the world has moved on without her, despite her best efforts to keep up.

The Mississippi River. One of the deadliest obstacles on the Great American Road Race and the point on the map that frightens Jody most. Two years ago, a team drowned while trying to drive across it. Most don’t even attempt to engineer a solution anymore—they just hire a boatman.

“Where’s Ariadne?” Sabrina asks, biting her bottom lip.

Jody’s friend agreed to shuttle them across on her ferry. Except, there’s no one waiting at the riverbank as Spike pulls up.

Oh god, she thinks as she tries to reach Ariadne, but she isn’t answering and no one who does has a spare boat that can fit a Jeep. As Jody makes frantic call after frantic call, she sees Sabrina and Fern quietly prepare for Plan B.

They’ve tested Plan B in the Schuylkill River. But the Mississippi River is much larger and more unpredictable.

A cold knot of dread settles in her stomach as Jody realizes it’s this or turn back.

Can’t go back. Swallowing her fear, Jody helps Sabrina inflate pontoons and secure the inspector bot to the roof. They fold the solar array into the car and hook up a makeshift motorboat rig to the back, connecting it to the steering.

“I’ll drive,” says Sabrina and Jody doesn’t argue. Her hands are shaking.

They sit in silence in the Jeep for a moment at the bank of the river, tense and barely breathing. Then, Sabrina eases Spike into the water.

The current is strong, but the river isn’t as swollen as it would be in the summer months during the floods. Jody can see the opposite shore. It’s not so far.

This isn’t so bad, I can do this, she thought as she boarded the train from Cedar Rapids to Philadelphia. It’s only nine hours.

Sabrina inches deeper, the water rises to the headlights.

“See you soon,” she texted Zara. “Save me a spot in bed.” The train was only half-full, the seats were scruffy but clean. Jody picked a window seat.

Suddenly, Spike lurches, begins to spin with the current, sliding slowly downstream. “Shit!” Sabrina says, turning the wheel, stepping on the accelerator.

“Made it across the Mississippi,” Jody updated Zara an hour later.

“Great! Miss u. See u soon. <3,” she replied.

She was wearing headphones and sunglasses. She was keeping calm and breathing steadily. This was working.

Until the train stopped in Chicago.

For every inch forward, Spike drifts a foot downstream. The water rises to the windshield, the pontoons aren’t enough.

Suddenly, hundreds of people boarded the train. Every seat was taken, the aisle was full of bags. A father and a toddler sat down next to Jody. The child was shrieking, his fingers were sticky, they brushed her cheek.

Jody can’t tell if they’re moving forward or only sideways. The water slaps the windshield, Spike reverberates with the sound. The smell of algae is overpowering.

It was too much. Too many odors, too much body heat. The noise was ear-splitting. There was no room to move, no room to think. It was too much. It was too much.

She has to get out. She has to. Like on the train, even though she knows it’s suicide. It’s either this or suffocate on panic.

She’s reaching for the car door handle when she feels Fern’s hand on her shoulder.

“We’ve come this far,” Fern shouts.

“And we’ll go farther,” Jody whispers. Maybe. Spike is shaking, spinning.

She puts her hands over her ears and her head in her lap and waits for the water to swallow them up, to sweep them away. She waits.

Waits.

Then, she hears Spike’s wheels crunch on shifting silt.

“Holy shit,” Sabrina breathes.

Fern laughs shakily. “That was fucking wild.”

Jody’s trembling too badly to say anything. Instead she texts Zara: “Made it across the Mississippi.”

Immediately, there’s a response: “Thank god. See u soon. <3”

Jody argues as they check Spike for water damage and deflate the pontoons. The river crossing has cost them three precious hours of daylight.

“We’ve lost too much time,” Sabrina says. “We gotta use the service road.”

“It’s still too risky,” Jody counters. They look at Fern.

“Sabrina’s right,” she says, shrugging. “We’ve lost too much time.”

Jody scowls. If they get caught, they might get arrested for trespassing. Still, it’s not the riskiest thing they’ve done today.

They wait until nightfall to sneak onto the service road. Fern breaks the padlock on the gate with bolt cutters and closes it behind them, tying the chains together. Everyone is silent when Jody hits the accelerator, slowly at first, but gaining speed. The road is so smooth and straight, she could cry.

She hears the train thundering up behind them, then beside them. And Jody finds herself urging Spike faster to keep pace with it. Through the windows, she sees sleeping families and solo travelers bent over bags in their laps. For a moment, it’s like being among them, without the crowds, the smells, the panic, the strain.

Jody rides alongside the train for 1 mile, then 2, longer than she should have, relying on Spike’s reserve batteries to keep pace. But she doesn’t want to slow down or stop. The grasslands she loves whooshes pass and it’s like flying. In the darkness and the roar of the train, Jody laughs.

For the first time in a long time, she’s not being left behind.

Nebraska to California, 1,500 miles: Fern

Fern tries not to get angry. Really, she does. Anger helps no one. Especially Jody and Sabrina, who’ve been in this Jeep with her for six days, and the body odor’s getting intense.

But fuck it, Fern’s angry because they’re on Wyoming’s dilapidated highways and the Rockies are ahead of them and they’re only halfway through this stupid race. And as terrifying as the Mississippi River was, Fern knows it’s the West that kills the most teams.

Whatever, it’s nothing she hasn’t faced before. Fern’s been a nomad all her life and not the cozy, hopping-from-small-community-to-small-community type that Jody was. No, Fern spent most of her childhood scrounging, watching seedings die, wondering where the next source of clean water would be. Some days she’s not convinced they can accomplish anything in this wrecked world.

Sabrina takes over for the mountain driving and Fern’s happy to let her. She focuses on the inspector bot’s readouts instead, refusing to watch the landscape change from green wilds to steep mountains to desert.

It’ll be desert from here on out.

It takes a day and a half to get across Wyoming on the damaged highways. And on the seventh day of the race, they reach Salt Lake City. The city itself is huge with dizzying skyscrapers, surrounded by agriculture and greenhouses. It’s smaller than Fern remembers, though maybe that’s because she’s not a kid anymore and has seen other cities now. But Salt Lake was like Eden to her growing up. Clean, livable, unreachable. Now, though . . .

Fern doesn’t know how she feels about it now.

They meet up with a farmer who knew Fern’s dad and trade two bottles of whiskey for all the water they can carry.

Salut, man, she thinks. Pour one out for us when we’re gone.

She doesn’t watch the farm disappear in the rearview mirror.

We can tough it out here, kiddo, her dad used to say. You’ll see.

The highway’s surprisingly smooth between Salt Lake and Nevada. But Fern doesn’t trust it. She keeps pinging the inspector bot, pestering Jody to update her maps, nagging Sabrina to pay attention.

“Fern, chill,” says Sabrina. “What’s going on with you?”

“I’m on edge,” she says, honestly.

“Yeah, we’ve noticed,” mumbles Jody.

Fern bites back a snarky reply. Jody and Sabrina are the first friends she’s had in years. She’s trying not to wreck that too.

By the time they reach Nevada, they’ve been in Spike for eight days with 800 miles left to go. The land becomes drier and drier and drier. It was always a desert, but now not even cacti grow.

There’s nothing to see, she thinks as she refuses to study the landscape. All that’s left is the dried husks of things.

For example, Merris Point. A town with a handful of shacks and one proper building. Someone decorated the “Welcome” sign once, but it’s dust-covered and faded now.

“Jesus, you lived here?” Sabrina asks, looking at Fern in the rearview, her eyes going wide.

Fern wouldn’t call it living exactly. She’d learned a lot about Jody and Sabrina’s lives over these past 10 months working on Spike. But she told them as little as possible about hers. Mostly that she was originally from nowhere Nevada and had been city-hopping before landing in Philly.

Because childhood stories about scraping by in the desert don’t win you friends.

Vultures, that’s what they called Fern and her dad.

“Don’t stop here,” Fern says. Spike accelerates a little and for that small kindness, Fern’s grateful.

Everything goes to hell on the 10th day when they see the obnoxiously blue trophy truck in a ditch in the middle of Nevada.

“Oh my god, is that . . . ?” Jody starts.

“Johnny Shit’s car,” Sabrina finishes.

The front end of the truck is a crumpled mess and the windshield is smashed, but there’s no one around, not even footprints. No food or water or tools either. Just a little blood in the driver’s seat.

“There’s no bandits out here, right, Fern?” Jody asks. Fern’s poking around in the hood.

“Only scavengers,” she says, inspecting the engine. “Looks like the road collapsed on them.” She nods at the crumpled asphalt.

Jody insists on searching the area on foot. Sabrina joins her, but Fern doesn’t bother. In her opinion, those jackasses aren’t worth leaving Spike alone. Instead she takes the wiring and adaptable engine parts from the truck. She’s not surprised when her friends come back alone.

“I hope they found help,” Jody says, quietly, as they pile back into the Jeep.

They don’t say anything for miles and miles.

Fern’s hyperfocused on the inspector bot’s readouts. She saw what happened to Johnny Shit, she knows things aren’t always what they seem out here.

“Road ahead is solid,” Fern says. “Just go slow.”

The road wasn’t solid.

Fern hears something cracking. And before Sabrina can react, they are falling.

Spike clatters and crashes as the road beneath them collapses.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Fern says, when Spike finally stops moving. Not bothering to check herself for injuries, she hauls ass out of the car. She sees the solar array in back, bent at an unnatural angle. Two of the tires have gone flat. And then she sees the hood. Wedged against a piece of asphalt practically folded in two.

“We can fix this,” Sabrina says as she jams her shaking hands under the hood. “We can. We can.”

But Fern knows better. It doesn’t take them long to realize that the scariest thing has happened.

Spike’s battery is crushed.

“How?” Sabrina says, hanging up the phone after the fifth time not getting through to anyone for help. It was a long shot anyway.

“I don’t know,” Fern says. She wants to scream. The inspector bot was her responsibility. She was being so careful, but she screwed up anyway. If they make it through this alive, Fern swears she’s going to make it up to Jody and Sabrina. Somehow.

“We really did need to make it to the finish line,” Jody says, head in her hands. “DOT only pays a fraction for incomplete routes.”

“Fuck the money,” Fern says through clenched teeth.

“Then why the hell are you even here?” shouts Jody. Fern blinks, surprised. She didn’t think quiet Jody could shout. And then something in her snaps.

“Because I have to,” Fern shouts back. “Because I needed to know it’s possible to do the impossible in this shitty half-dead Earth. What the fuck is the point otherwise?”

Jody and Sabrina stare at her. That’s not the answer they expected, Fern realizes. Quickly, she turns around, so she doesn’t see their expressions. So they don’t see hers.

“I’m going to try to call Sacramento’s club people again,” Sabrina says and drifts away.

After a few minutes, Jody whispers, “Oh god, there’s no way out of here, is there?”

“I think I can help you out,” says a voice from behind them.

It takes Fern a second to understand what she’s seeing. It’s a car. A weird ass car. There’s a man in the driver’s seat of a rusted, hollowed-out Ford four-wheel drive pulled by two Robomules. Like the ones used on farms.

“What the hell?” Fern says.

The man grins. “I’m Edan. The Great American Road Race’s dirty secret.”

“They sent you?” Jody asks.

“No, I sent myself. There’s always a handful of teams that crash around here. Like that other team a few miles back. Was going to get their car now,” he waves at the back of the truck and Fern notices the hitch. “But since I’m here . . . can I give you ladies a ride?”

The three friends all glance at each other. “Yes, please.”

His truck is hot in the bright sun, but at least he hasn’t lived in it for a week. Deftly, he maneuvers his Robomules around the collapsed part of the road to Spike. Within an hour, their Jeep’s hooked up to the back of the truck and they’re on the move again.

Edan drives like he’s done this a million times, off-roading sometimes only to direct the Mules back on the road 100 feet later.

“Haven’t seen you ladies before,” he says, when the silence gets weird.

“First-time racers,” Sabrina replies.

“You going to make a career out of this?” he asks.

They all shake our heads violently in unison. Shit, Fern thinks. We’ve been stuck together for too long.

“One and done,” he nods approvingly. “Good.”

Neither Sabrina, Fern, nor Jody tell him they have no idea what the hell they’re going to do now that the finish line is as good as gone. So much for their hopes and dreams.

Fern feels sick.

“Do you know why our inspector bot failed?” she asks, as he swerves off the road yet again.

“The heat from the pavement throws off its readings,” he says. “Happens to at least one team every year.”

“Which is why you’re out here,” Sabrina says. Edan gives her a two-finger salute.

“So, um, where are we going?” asks Jody, timidly.

Edan nods up the road. “I live there.”

Edan’s house is in the mountains on the border between Nevada and California. It would have been paradise to Fern as a kid. A wooden ranch with solar panels, a vertical garden, a well, and a large building to the side that he calls a garage. He lets them into the house and settles himself in a wheelchair by the front door. He shrugs at Fern’s unasked question. “Don’t ask me to walk more than a hundred steps a day.”

“Where’s the other team?” Sabrina asks.

“Oh those assholes. Had a mate pick them up. Not even a thank-you.”

Somehow, without actually talking about it, the three of them silently agreed to postpone the phone call to the Reinvention Club to say they’re out of the race and start cooking dinner instead.

Shit, we really have been spending too much time together, Fern thinks. She’s sick of lentils and dried yams, but Edan relishes it. He does most of the talking too, telling them stories about different teams that bit the dust over the years.

“Sounds like there’s no good way to Sacramento,” says Jody, slumping. Fern bites the inside of her cheek, knowing how much it kills them to be stuck 60 miles from the finish line.

“Oh you can use the old highways, you just need to be quick and lucky,” he says and winks. “Or . . . you can find yourself a local who can tell you which spots to avoid.”

“Will you?” Jody asks, Edan nods and she brings over her Smartpad and for the next 30 minutes, they sit shoulder to shoulder, routing, annotating and planning backup routes.

“Won’t even need your inspector bot,” finishes Edan.

“All we need now is a working car,” says Sabrina, miserably. There are tears in her eyes, which freaks Fern out. Sabrina never cries.

“You tell no one,” Edan says, suddenly serious. “But I think I have most of the parts you need in the garage.” He leads them there, and Fern’s shocked to learn he’s right. It’s full of tools and scrap materials.

“We still need a battery,” Jody says.

“Well, we have one,” Fern says. “In Spike’s trunk.” She adds when her friends stare blankly.

“We didn’t bring an extra battery,” says Sabrina.

“No, but Johnny Shit wasn’t using his anymore,” Fern says, then shrugs. “What? I took it when you two were looking for bodies. We just . . . didn’t have a way to replace it before now.”

Once a vulture, always a vulture, Fern supposes. Only way to survive out here.

Suddenly, Sabrina’s sprinting toward Spike. Then, Jody. Leaving Fern swearing and running to catch up. Behind them, she hears Edan laugh and laugh.

They work all night.

But around midnight Fern sneaks away and finds Edan sitting on his porch. “Here, this is for you,” she says, handing him a bottle of whiskey. “Our last one.”

“I knew you ladies were worth helping.”

Fern laughs and sits next to him. The night air is cool and dry. She forgot how much she loves desert nights. “I used to live out here, you know. My dad was convinced he could be this self-sufficient frontiersman. Spent a lot of time watching sprouts that were supposed to be our food die.”

“Hell, I know those types. Kudos for making it out alive.”

From anyone else, that would’ve been condescending, but from Edan, Fern took it for the compliment it was.

“So, why didn’t you move into the city?” she asks.

Edan sighs. “I tried, but these refashioned cities did a crap job designing for wheelchairs.”

“I tried too,” she admits. “I tried five different ones when I left my dad. I like them, but I don’t know.” Ferns pauses. “Is it weird I feel like I belong out here?” she asks.

“No,” Edan replies.

“I think I’ve been looking for a reason to come back,” she admits.

They don’t say anything for a minute. Or maybe five.

Eventually Edan says: “I go to Sacramento almost every week these days. It’s easier to get around now that so many people have lung damage from smoke and mold. I built myself something great here, but I don’t want to be here all the time.”

“So you’re a part-time urbanite, part-time road guardian or whatever?”

“Why not? There’s no such thing as a self-sufficient frontiersman, just ones with access to some friends and a good hardware store.”

Fern blinks at him, stunned. Growing up, there were no in-betweens in the desert. Only terrible choices and impossible dreams.

“If you can get on the road tomorrow,” Edan says, after a beat. “you might win this thing. Word is no one’s made it to Sacramento yet.”

Winning. Them. All those assholes at PORC thought they wouldn’t survive. Fuck it, suddenly Fern wants to do the impossible and beat them too.

Before she sprints off the porch, she turns back to Edan.

“Hey, are there other places around here that need road guardians?”

Edan raises an eyebrow. “You have no idea.”

Fern’s behind the wheel when the sun comes up. Spike looks beat up, but Sabrina worked her magic and they’re all moving forward again, a little slower 11 days and one crash later. Jody’s route is gravelly and bumpy as hell, but there are no surprises. Jody and Sabrina are passed out, sleeping with their mouths open like little kids, and Fern cracks up quietly every time she looks over.

For the first time in 2,800 miles, she isn’t angry or scared or trying to hold herself or her friends together. For the first time in years, she knows where to go and how to get there.

Sure, things aren’t great in this shitty, half-dead Earth. Yet you limp along, you struggle, you rebuild. You keep trying until you can’t. Then, you try again.

Being the only one awake, Fern sees it first. “Guys, guys, hey, hey, hey! Look!” she shouts, slapping Sabrina’s knee.

“What?” Sabrina asks, barely conscious. In back, Jody rubs her eyes.

“Look, it’s what we want.” Fern says and points. A school, a reunion, a purpose for sticking it out. “There.”

Sacramento’s skyline is rising up to meet them against the hilly background.

Like an impossible dream.

Hugo and Nebula-nominated author Marie Vibbert’s short fiction has appeared in top magazines like Nature, Analog, and Clarkesworld, and been translated into Czech, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Her debut novel, Galactic Hellcats, was long listed by the British Science Fiction Award and her work has been called “everything science fiction should be” by the Oxford Culture Review. She also writes poetry, comics, and computer games. Her work reflects her upbringing, raised by a single father who was a laborer. By day she is a computer programmer in Cleveland, Ohio.

We Built This City

Marie Vibbert

Every sunset, Julia climbs the city her mother built. It feels enormous, on the outside. Inside, it’s cramped, a human anthill. It didn’t used to be, but Julia doesn’t remember what it felt like when there was room enough for everyone.

In the locker room, Rafael’s elbow scissors into her personal space as Julia zips her coveralls. Her helmet and face shield are grimy, the padding smells of a mixture of her sweat and the false sweetness of institutional cleaner. The breather elastic is way too loose. She’s already tied knots on each side.

Rafael stays too close, his chin tucked down. “They’re talking about cuts. Big ones.”

Julia straightens. He ducks to tighten his overshoes, showing her with his posture that this is meant to be a secret.

It’s not like Rafael to gossip. He’s a good worker. A hard worker. Julia pretends to adjust her pant cuffs. “There’s nothing left to cut.” She requisitioned new gloves two years ago and is still waiting for them. Her right pointer finger slides out through taped-over repairs and the skin is permanently red.

“Angel, in the office? He says they’re cutting the salary budget in half.” Rafael’s voice gets quieter until “half” is only mouthed.

Pedro presses his face between them. “Passing notes? I’ll be at the top before you’re done.”

Rafael turns to taunt Pedro, and that’s the end of the strange conversation. People are filing out of the room. The day has begun.

The catwalk rattles with feet as Julia jogs. The calls of “ready” start coming in on her radio before Julia has gotten to her section and clipped her belt to the safety line. It’s a brave job, and they treat it as such. Every sunset they race to the top, for the privilege of turning the knob that starts the water flow and alerts the system washing is taking place. Julia has never been first, but she has been second.

She has never truly given her all. She has felt like she has, but there’s a difference, between feeling it and doing it. She could, if she dug deep, run up the wall like her life depended on it. She could be first.

The sixteenth “ready” comes, and she leaps the first step, skittering mad and hard past the vertical. The city dome curves comfortingly under her gripping soles, and she sees the sun sinking in the west, painting oil slicks on the glass, the marks that never wash out, the bleeding minerals of the grilles.

This is her favorite part of the job, the beauty and solitude, the clouds rolling underneath the city, the sun melting into the soft horizon like a pat of butter in potatoes.

Her mother climbed cliffs on Earth with Julia’s abuela. Her stories are peppered with references to anchor points and cracks and other things Julia doesn’t know how to fit into her own experience of climbing. Once upon a time, her mother was here, lifting the beams supporting her into place. That is easier to imagine. The dome a fragile, empty thing, alone in the feral clouds of Venus, no city inside yet.

Julia can feel herself slowing near the top, arms and thighs getting lazy, pulling at her to slow down. She forces a second wind. The hard part is almost done.

Rafael is at the top already. She gives up, checks the hose and nozzle at her hip, turns the squeegee so it’s at the angle she likes to grab it. She gets through the last few feet. The rest of the crew is coming into view. Rafael gets to turn the knob. Again. He does it like a stage magician revealing a dove.

The top of the dome is a sixteen-pointed star of time-painted titanium, and they, alone, get to enjoy it up close, to be out here with room to stretch. So they do, as they prepare to descend.

Pedro huffs. “I’m tired already.”

He’s just mad not to have made it to the top first. “If you want to quit, I’ll take your pay.” Julia tries not to sound out of breath. Pedro flips her off. No one’s going to quit and lose their housing allotment.

She plays out a few feet of hose and hops back lightly. She hears Rafael teasing Pedro as she sprays a thin stream of soapy water along the rails that separate her section from the others. She’s proud of her skill at this. She has the best water conservation scores.

She imagines the wash soothes the tired city. Acids eat every weak spot and lingers in unexpected salts. Without their careful maintenance, the dome could leak, and leaking meant sinking into the hellish pressure below. The air they breathe is also the lifting gas that holds the city aloft in Venus’ denser atmosphere. Their parents’ generation built a city to float in the clouds. Her generation keeps it flying.

She spots a nick and easily switches hands, holstering her water sprayer and pulling out the repair gel. Squirt, squeegee, and the white silica gel rapidly sinks into transparency as she switches hands again.

Hop back, spray, swipe clean. She gets into the rhythm, working left to right, then right to left as her section widens. She and Rafael meet at their boundary, and he looks over at her. “Have you thought about it? About what you’ll do?”

Julia scowls. There’s no time in her rhythm to respond, and she feels put upon that he throws troubles into her mind as she plays her rope out and drops out, down, left to start the next pass. There’s Rafael coming toward her again. She has three hops and as many seconds to form a response. “So?” is all she comes up with.

“We need to stand together,” he says. “All or none.” And he’s gone.

He thinks they’ll be laid off? The city needs them. They never got a robot washer to work. Even if they did, there’s no room in the city to store a washing robot, and to leave it out in the atmosphere is to ask for it to be slowly destroyed.

But he’s serious.

What if they cut the staff? No. That would be too cruel with the housing rules. But they might. Would they move to washing every other sunset? Or will they each wash two sections? Her thighs burn as she hops. Her mother will hate that. Too much time in menial work, no time to improve herself.

“Why did you settle for this job where they can ask you to do this?” her mother will say.

The next time their paths touch, Julia and Rafael meet without words. It takes six hours to wash the dome now. Could she do this for twelve hours straight?

Her mother tells a story about climbing a limestone spire in El Potrero Chico, something like six hundred meters, with no guide rope. She never says how long it took, but that she lagged behind Abuela by hours.

Abuela exists in her mother’s stories like a cartoon character or saint Julia doesn’t quite believe in. Is this mythic grandmother meant to reflect on their relationship? Is there a moral behind the story she is expected to decipher? Did daughters always end up not quite as strong as their mothers?

Julia’s left knee twinges when she plants to begin her next pass. An old injury, telling the tale of years on the job. Her mother wanted her to work with her brain. “I busted my ass so you don’t have to bust yours.” But it isn’t any easier, busting her brain. The hardest problem in school isn’t a differential equation or history fact, it’s finding a job you’ll love to do that wants you.

Rafael is hidden by the curve of the dome most of the time now. These longer passes are grueling. Her shoulders strain without the break of dropping to the next level. It’s lonelier. The race and thrill are over. But this is her work, and she is good at it, and she wants to keep doing it.

She side-hops over an apartment block. It’s fascinating how people take the same room and make it their own. A toddler looks out at her, mouth open, pounding a doll’s head with a plastic cube.

When she reaches Rafael again, she says, “All or none. Of course.”

He gives her a sad look. “You promise? If they lay off, we all walk?”

She nods curtly. It’s a drop and another long pass. The apartment below has curtains drawn. A waxy white fabric, edges of burgundy that must be the color on the inside. A spiderwort pokes its tendrils under and around. Her mother is a terrible gardener but keeps trying. They have a duty to grow green things. Every apartment a vegetable garden.

She only thinks of her mother in motion. Repotting, watering, tearing up failures. Or pointing up at some girder or crossbeam to lecture about bracing and counterbalancing. “Physics. That’s everything, mija. Study your physics and be a scientist and support me in my old age, eh?”

Would her mother understand if she walked off the job? Julia doesn’t know, but she feels strong, excited at the idea of doing something radical.

At the bottom of the window, Julia sets her feet on the lip of the city and walks across. Her section is a fifteen-minute walk at the bottom, when it was a single bound side-to-side at top. Her last pass is done crouching and is the slowest pass of all. A trough under the catwalk catches the soapy water, funnels it down to be filtered and processed. She’ll follow the pipes down, under the floor of the city. There, the rest of the work shift will be cleaning and stowing the equipment. She tugs her hose to start it retracting.

The weariness in her thighs and shoulders feels like a job well done. She walks clockwise back to the airlock. Rafael’s steps echo behind her. She wants to look back, now that they are coconspirators, but doesn’t. She wants the dreary part of the night done, the indoor’s grime and machines. She’ll get a beer before heading home. It’s a gorgeous evening, no higher clouds. The central square will be flooded with starlight as second Sun Day ends and first Dark Day begins, the city speeding far above the lagging ground in the atmospheric current. Forever the same.

It’s possible Rafael is wrong. Maybe nothing will happen.

Angel, the office manager, is waiting in the locker room. That’s not normal. He fidgets like he has to go to the bathroom while they take off their outdoor suits and hang their face shields. Rafael gives her a look that says, “I told you so.”

Julia wishes she’d worn a better shirt today. This one has a stain on the sleeve where she set her elbow in spilled coffee. The face shields get rinsed in the sink and hung to dry. The suits go into a laundry hamper. The shoes rest in a tray full of acid-neutralizing chalk. She changes her socks. Many of the others don’t, but she can’t imagine going through the rest of her day in damp socks. Everyone is finished. Julia sucks the acid burn on the side of her pointer finger. One of the women starts brushing her hair. They should be going into the machine room now, but Angel is in the way.

He clears his throat. “The boss gave me the job of telling you guys. They’re letting most of you go. We’re keeping Rodriguez, Hammerstein, Corredor, and Lopez. I’m sorry.”

Julia is Lopez. She feels a relief that squashes into instant horror and guilt. No one is talking, no one is moving. Rafael (Rodriguez) steps forward, shoulders wide. Is this it? Is he going to do something? Julia fears confrontations. She wants to hide. But she’ll stand with him. She said she would.

Rafael asks, “How are four people expected to clean the whole dome?”

Angel’s response sounds prepared. “You’ll work four shifts, do it in sections. If we really stay on top of it, admin thinks it’ll be enough. They’re downsizing the office staff, too. Hector and Alverez from maintenance are going to do all the interior work. All you have to worry about are the windows.”

“Fucking thanks.” Marta Hammerstein throws a towel into her locker.

Pedro looks at Julia with hate in his eyes, and she realizes she isn’t going to get a beer tonight, after all.

Rafael doesn’t do anything. His face is trembling like he might cry or shout, but he doesn’t say anything.

What’s worse, neither does Julia.

Angel twists, half a shrug, half an aborted apology, and leaves.

Four shifts. Her mother will hardly see her. The argument between them is fully in her mind, as though it has already happened. She chose to be a dumb beast, not a knowledge worker. She can’t afford to stand up for herself, when her mother . . . her mother built the city.

Normally, she would work a twelve-hour shift, with the interior work after the washing. They worked long on First Dark Day, got Second Dark Day off, and did an inspection pass on First Sun Day, making small repairs, and got Second Sun Day off. It was a good schedule, a familiar rhythm. The document Angel sent to her drew out a complicated schedule that creeped forward and wrapped around the week, rather than working with it. Did they no longer care about the increased evaporation during Sun Days?

Julia walks half-blind, reading the schedule, dragging it over her old schedule, trying to make sense of it. No matter how slow she walks, she’ll be home early. Behind her, Pedro is inconsolable, moaning and crying while another worker, RiRi, who has a strident voice, attempts to soothe him by pouring gasoline on his flame. “You know it’s the corps. They’re paying cash on the head for anyone we deport. You know why, don’t you? Because their own workers are dying like flies. Like flies!”

She’s almost home.

Julia lives in a frame stack building, aluminum beams white with age holding corrugated plastic in faded fruit juice colors. It sits wedged between newer buildings built on what had been streets, walkways relegated to tunnels underneath them, and even those are lined with sleeping bags. Their proud city resembles nothing so much as a warren of stacked plastic crates and abandoned campsites.

“They can’t,” Pedro moans. “They’re not gonna . . . there’s time, right? They gotta give people time.”

“Time is an illusion.” RiRi’s getting louder. “They make you think you have time, but who’s hiring, eh? Who’s hiring?!”

A figure wrapped in a blanket rolls over, tightens the fabric around its head, and Julia flushes with embarrassment. How ungrateful they must sound, clean and well-fed, on their way to homes.

This isn’t the utopia the Mexican government imagined, but they didn’t know there would be refugees from the corporate factory-aerostats. Couldn’t have dreamed such places would exist, so awful their workers were willing to risk the crushing depths to hop on a homemade glider or balloon and make it to the free air of New Tenochtitlan.

A door bangs open, a man shouts, private tragedy spilling into the street like food waste. Julia assumes it has nothing to do with her and studiously avoids looking until the man in the too-loose shirt is charging her way, and past her, and slapping Pedro.

“Pops! Ow!”

“You lost your job? You LOST YOUR JOB?”

Julia lowers her head and hurries, pretending that she doesn’t hear every word.

“What are we supposed to do? Eh? What is your mother going to do when you get stolen away?!”

She pretends she isn’t relieved by the contrast to her imagined argument with her mother. She hasn’t lost her job. She will, at first, simply not mention the layoffs.

Julia’s mother’s apartment is small, smaller than the ones under Julia’s section of dome. What had been “her” section. She supposes she’ll now do a full quarter of the city. She’s exhausted thinking about it. Like her first week on the job, when every night her body was spent and every morning her muscles felt like poorly set concrete.

Her mother bursts into the room the second she arrives, a tiny tornado with a gray buzz cut. “Are you okay? Did anyone get violent?”

Julia lets her mother drag her to the sofa and fuss over her. “You found out?”

“Eduardo. His daughter works in administration, and her wife is the facility manager’s cousin. She says it’s coming from the top. RyelCorp offered to pay for deportations in one big swoop, so the city wants all the unemployed people they can get at once.”

“Ma, that’s a conspiracy theory.”

She shrugs. “I’m a lazy retired lady now, we do nothing but gossip.”

Around the room, her mother’s plants, quilts, and exercise equipment tell a different story. When will the concern fade and the recriminations start? “I guess I’ll see how it works next sundown. The revised schedule.”

Her mother freezes. “You didn’t quit?”

She feels she has failed an important test. She also feels the threat of deportation to RyelCorp’s factory bubbles. “Whatever the city needs, right?”

Her mother shifts on the sofa to face her directly, hands on her shoulders. “You listen to me, mija. Yes, those are words I’ve said, and I mean them most of the time, but not now.” Julia’s heart swells with love. “A city without people is only a ruin.” Yes, that’s it, exactly. But then her mother gives her a little shake and breaks her heart. “This is your chance. To leave that drudgery behind and get a real job.”

Julia is on her feet so fast her mother’s hands fly up as if in surrender. There’s only the one bedroom. Julia sleeps on the sofa. She goes to the bathroom. At least it has a door.

The flimsy printed door doesn’t muffle her mother’s voice. “I shouldn’t have said ‘real.’ I meant ‘better.’ When God closes a door, he opens a window.”

Julia sits on the toilet and wishes there was a window she could escape through.

There are only four window washers now, and the city will not survive without their labor. It should be easy to band together, to refuse.

They have a group chat.

Marta: I’m pissed, too, but I can’t afford to lose this job.

Corredor: TO ANY EXECUTIVE READING - I AM NOT A PART OF THIS DISCUSSION

Marta: Luis has a point. We’ll get fired if they see this thread.

Rafael: But if we band together, they’d have to fire all of us.

Marta: You think they fucking won’t?

That killed the thread. There was nothing after it but Rafael repeating some variation of the same thought:

Rafael: Come on, guys. I can’t do anything on my own.

It’s hot in the square, already halfway into the forty-eight-hour day. First Sun Day evening, or noon, as the sky tells it. The sun winks through the windowpanes, the heavy plants perspire. It smells both human and jungle. Here, the packing crate apartment buildings are a backdrop behind monuments and trees. The administration offices are built like a stepped pyramid, with lush foliage on every step.

Julia’s mother is dragging her forward with a sweaty hand clamped manacle-tight on her wrist. Like she’s a child again.

Julia looks yearningly toward the Cloud Bar’s blue curlicue entrance. “Ma, this isn’t going to do anything. You aren’t important anymore.”

“I should wash your mouth. I built this city. Now you’ll see. It’s not what you know all the time, sometimes it’s who you know.” She marches up to the reception desk at City Hall and knocks on it. “Hello, young man. We need to talk to Valeria, right away. Tell her it’s Hortensia Lopez.”

The man at the reception desk looks past them like they aren’t there. Julia should have put on better clothes. She should have insisted her mother change. Their coveralls are like camouflage. They may as well be potted plants.

Hortensia continues speaking anyway. “The city is making a dangerous mistake. I won’t have our maintenance workers mistreated this way. They keep us safe. When I—”

A woman in light, flowing shorts favored by the fashionable walks in, and the receptionist’s attention immediately centers on her. Julia watches her mother’s frown deepen as the man leans around her like she’s an inconvenient post.

Hortensia says, “Did your mother not teach you respect? I’m here to see the mayor. It’s Hortensia Lopez. She’ll know me.”

The receptionist draws back. “Do you have an appointment?” he asks, clearly assuming not. Assuming correctly, which is worse. “I can’t even call her if you don’t have an appointment. Try the public comments box.”

Julia tries to get her mother to leave, but Hortensia has seen someone she knows and is marching across the foyer. “Darrin! Darrin Ruiz do not turn away from me, you know who I am!”

Her mother chases this man to a side entrance, where he turns at last and stares coldly. “Do you have a reason to be here?”

“Yes! My daughter, Julia, she has—”

“You don’t belong here. Please leave.” He walks away.

Hortensia blinks like she can’t see. Julia wraps her arms around her bicep and urges her toward the exit.

“I held him at his first birthday party,” Hortensia says.

As the sun sets, Julia prepares for work. She’s gotten notice of the length of her shift, sixteen hours. Enough time to do three sections with three twenty-minute breaks between. Sixteen hours of washing. She packs muscle balm and an extra bottle of electrolyte-bearing water.

Her mother cracks the bedroom door, disarranged for sleep. “Mija what are you doing up so late?”

“I have to get to work. Double shift.” She feels like a shady politician, prettying up the truth.

Hortensia’s face falls in disappointment.

Julia keeps her eyes on packing her lunch box.

Her mother tries to grab her hand. She tries to evade her, but then Hortensia takes both hands, hers moist and warm from bed, like bread loaves ready to bake. “Don’t go. They’ll give you two weeks, it’s plenty of time.”

Julia doesn’t want to go to work. She wants to be strong enough to say no. She wants to not feel this weight of expectation, the thousands of mornings of going to school, of going to practice, of going to work.

She flees the weight, and her mother’s big, heavy hands. She goes to work.

Angel is in the locker room. It doesn’t feel too small this morning. Marta is shaking her shoes out over the lime dust. Rafael doesn’t look up from sealing his coveralls. Luis dresses like he’s alone in the room.

Angel watches the four of them like they might bolt at any moment. “You made the right decision,” he says to her.

Julia wonders when she made the decision. She goes to her locker. Someone has put gloves on top of hers, some other worker’s less-worn pair. Pedro’s? It feels wrong to be so close to Rafael when now there are many empty lockers. She starts to move her spare socks to the next locker over, and stops, seeing the name still there.

She turns to Rafael, waits for him to look at her. He doesn’t. “Are we really doing this?” she asks him.

“Aren’t we?” He sounds defeated.

She doesn’t want to be on the side of defeat. She doesn’t want to be on the side of Angel’s untrusting smile. She feels, suddenly, disgusted at all of them.

She picks up her spare socks and snatches the photo of her ex-boyfriend and the picture from the New Year’s Party. That’s all that’s hers in the locker. She turns and walks out.

The shaking starts before she passes Angel. Her anger cools to fear. Will they let her keep walking? She could be going to get something she forgot. Now she’s at the exit. Now she’s in the corridor. She realizes she’s crumpled her photos.

“Lopez!” Angel reaches for her arm. She whirls on him, and he backs off, both hands in the air. Did she do that? With a look? “We picked you because you were the four best. Doesn’t that mean anything? We picked you.”

No one else has followed her out of the locker room. Not Rafael, not Marta. She feels defeat like a thing just under her stomach, waiting to rise. But Angel called her by her last name. The name that saved the city.

He says, “They’ll just hire back one of the others, someone worse. The city will suffer.”

Julia raises her chin. “That’s their mistake to make.”

She hates that she is doing what her mother wanted. When she gets home, her mother rises from the kitchen table, beaming joyful relief. Julia wants to scream, or argue, or explain, but instead she shakes and cries in her mother’s arms. Hortensia rubs circles into her back. “No. It’s good. You couldn’t know your strength until it was tested.”

Julia spends First Dark Day checking messages. The company gives her a second chance, twenty-four hours to return. She can use a sick day. They don’t say who worked her shift, or if the dome went one-quarter unwashed.

Rafael wants to know if she hates him.

She doesn’t, but she hates him asking.

At least he has finally done one thing: he has added all the laid off workers to the group chat.

Rafael: They’re going to ask one of you to take Julia’s place. Don’t do it. Not unless they agree to hire more back.

Pedro: You’re still working, right? Did you demand they hire us back?

Rafael doesn’t answer. Julia wonders if she has been silent too long. She had something she could have said, once.

Hortensia cooks her best, most comforting dish, the cheese potato mash, and they finish off the red wine. It’s almost a party, except for her mother going over the budget and writing out timelines they can live on. “There, you see? The charges for not having an employment voucher aren’t so much. There is air, and water, and sewage. We can cover you two months.”

“They deport after two weeks.”

“I’m sure that’s not really true. And I bet it doesn’t take so long, now you’re really looking. If you must, you’ll find something temporary before two weeks are up.”

Julia hasn’t found any open positions she can apply to. She hadn’t found anything in all the years she tried to meet her mother’s expectations, and those years felt full of opportunity, the city uncrowded.

Her mother isn’t worried, with her pension guaranteeing her residence until death. Julia tries not to resent that.

When Hortensia catches Julia going over the figures, she closes the screen. “But that’s tomorrow and tomorrow, darling. Don’t worry. I am the mother. I will tell you when to worry.”

Sleeping in doesn’t feel as good the second time. It’s Sun Day and the light is strong, seeping through the cracks in the walls. Julia dresses in her best clothes and goes for a walk.

Her feet take her to work. They don’t know any other walk.

She slows as the “employees only” sign comes into sight. She wonders who replaced her. How it felt, washing four sections instead of one. If the city will survive, or if the tired metal is even now being irrevocably eaten away.

A policeman stands at the door. Julia is several feet back, so she’s surprised when he approaches. “You can’t be here.”

“I was just—”

“Leave or you’ll be arrested.”

Julia stares at him. “Arrested for what? This is a public corridor.”

Which is how she gets arrested.

The jail is crowded. Each cell, designed to hold one person, holds five. One of the persons in her cell has peed on himself. The others huddle away from him, near the front. Their sweat and breath mingle in a moist fug.

She wishes she had her com so she could check the news. She wishes she’d done something more meaningful to get arrested than stand there.

The door to the corridor opens and a few people start shouting. When’s my court date? Where’s dinner? But the guard ignores them, leading her mother, who looks like she is claiming a prize at the end of this stinking corridor.

Julia is genuinely stunned her mother is getting her out. As she leaves the cell, she whispers, “Was it the mayor? Did you—?”

Her mother pins her a furious glance for one heartbeat.

She doesn’t explain the bail until they are in their own apartment. Their savings, halved. The resources to find a new job shortened. “But it’s fine. A mother provides. You’ll find something.”

They orbit each other in the cramped apartment like two positively charged magnets. They have three months of rent. Two months, if they want to eat.

Julia receives two messages. One from the city, stating that she has two weeks to find employment, or prove she is in a training program for employment, or she will be deported. She doesn’t forward it to her mother, doesn’t say “I told you so.” The other message is from Angel, asking her to please come back, they will look the other way, just this once.

The group chat hasn’t gotten any better.

Marta: They hired some untrained cloud-hopper. I blame you, Lopez! I’d take any of you fuckers over him. Smith’s section may as well not get done. Found two cavities today, and it’s only going to get worse.

Julia closes the feed. “I have an interview,” she says, and keeps her head turned away from the way her mother brightens. She shouldn’t have said it. She doesn’t need an excuse to go outside.

The woman who has been sleeping on the edge of the walkway all week is gone, with her blanket and her bag of belongings. Julia wonders about tragedies that touch her life and don’t. She’ll never know where the woman came from, where she went.

Head down, she walks to the bar. It’s been a long time since the after-work beer she never got, and she wants it. Deserves it.

Cloud Bar is beautiful. The floor is glass, and the ceiling, too, though nearby buildings block most of that view. The ceiling supports are covered in cotton fluff and sheer curtains to make it feel like you are in the sky. She has always loved this place. The prices are cheap before happy hour. She gets her favorite beer and finds a seat near the wall. Through the floor she can see the under-city and the RyelCorp High Pressure Lab, dangling like a rudder into the clouds. It was supposed to bring great, wonderful things to the city. It brought chemical engineers who got all the best housing, didn’t pay taxes, and probably voted for the citizenship-by-employment mandate.

She imagines she can kick it off the city with her foot.

If she can’t find another job in two weeks, she’ll have to take Angel’s offer. It feels like giving too much up, like admitting the administration can do this.

She sees Rafael arrive. Sees him see her and freeze. He looks to the exit. He sags. He comes to her, standing awkwardly like a new waiter. “I saw you got arrested.”

“For walking on the sidewalk.” She means it as half a joke; it comes out hard. Rafael looks like she kicked him in the gut. She shakes her head, loosening her hair and her tone. “The funny thing is, I wasn’t even trying to picket or anything. I’d just come back to look at the place.”

“Assholes!” He hovers. “Can I? I mean . . . ”

“Sit. Don’t explain or excuse, though. None of that.”

He doesn’t understand how much she means it because as he settles into the seat next to her, he explains himself. “I got scared. More scared than I thought I could get. I was ready to do it. Walk right out of there. I pictured every step, but then this thought popped into my head: what about my son? What about all the things he needs? You’re single. You don’t know what the burden feels like.”

Julia considers dumping her beer on his head, but she doesn’t think she can afford another. “What about when your son gets a job? What about when he’s asked to work sixteen hours in the acid rain?”

“I didn’t say I was right. I said I was scared.” He waves for the bartender, who ignores him. “Anyway, I’m not going back.” He pauses. She doesn’t give him the reaction he’s clearly pressing for. He slumps. “It was killing me, my hands, my legs. And yesterday, Marta slipped. Not a little slip, I mean she was hanging from her safety line, unable to get her feet under her until me and José got to her. And my legs were shaking so I almost couldn’t help. It terrified me. What if we all had slipped? No paycheck is worth dying for.” He holds up two fingers and exchanges nods with a waiter. He looks back at Julia. “You don’t believe me? You think I’m too strong to collapse? Girl, I only ever beat you by a step, you realize that?”

“No, I believe you.” She avoids looking at him. “About being tired.” Had she gotten the offer to return only because Rafael quit? “You’re one of the good ones,” the message said, “You care about the city.” It implies there are “bad ones.”

Rafael fidgets. “I mean it about not going back. I threw all my gear in a bundle off the platform! I made sure I couldn’t chicken out again. Ah, bless it.” This he says to the beer approaching their table. “It’ll be my last foolish act. They’ve outlawed striking. I only got out by saying I wasn’t doing that, I was quitting. So that’s it.” He looks into his beer as though seeing the end of something. “I checked with RyelCorp, they aren’t hiring. I thought maybe your mother has some connections with the building crews? I’ll do anything.”

Julia imagines the sunrise on top of the dome, who will see it. She drains her beer. It hits her hard. Not enough to eat, lately. She doesn’t want to feel guilty. She stares past Rafael, at the community news report. The high school baseball finals. Kids smiling against the projected green field, swinging real bats at holographic balls and running on treadmills. It’s hard to see it the way the kids will.

“They got Pedro,” Rafael says and cringes like he wants to take it back. He lowers his voice. “I mean, he’s gone. There was a shipment to the corp domes yesterday. His folks aren’t talking.”

The news report flashes red. Emergency. “Low Pressure Detected in Section 4.” The steady buzz of talk and motion around the room freezes into one tense silence, all eyes fixed to the man who appears on the screen. “There is no cause for panic. A leak has been detected, but balloons are being deployed. Citizens are recommended to seal their rooms if they can be sealed. This is only a precaution.”

Some people leave. Some go back to their drinks. The general buzz of conversation shifts, becomes serious. Julia wants to spit acid, call out the greed that so predictably led here. What would she say, though, who would listen?

The news shifts to a shot of the cleaning crew—her cleaning crew, leaving work. It must have been shot weeks ago. “The blame for the dome leak is being laid on workers who walked off the job in a bid for shorter working hours.”

Julia feels a pulse of anger so visceral it’s like a fireball expanding from her chest. Someone shoots her a dirty look. A familiar face. A regular. Does he recognize her from that split second of video?

Julia stands up. “You want something to do? Come on, let’s go.”

Rafael’s face is slack with shock, but he obligingly stands. “Where are we going?”

“To get arrested.”

There are three police officers at the turn for the maintenance employee entrance. As Julia and Rafael approach, they straighten from lounging against walls, set their feet wide. A violent intention thrums through their posture.

“This is where we walk on the sidewalk?” Rafael whispers, his voice wavering.

Julia strides forward. “We’re here to fix the leak.” It comes out more confident than she thought she could sound. A clarion call, a command. One of the cops steps back.

Only one.

She turns to Rafael. “Come on.” He nods, solemn.

They make it even with the police, not half a step further, and hard hands are on her biceps. She and Rafael are pushed back. One officer, a woman, says, “Get out of here. Try that again, and we’ll have to take you in.”

Julia almost laughs. “Why not take me in now?”

The cops look at each other. Julia has a guess. That jail was pretty full before. Has someone said not to bring more people in? She hooks Rafael’s arm and leads him away.

Julia makes her first post to the group chat.

Julia: Who’s up for storming the locker room?

Rafael: Julia wants to break in, help fix the dome. It’ll show the city we’re the right side. There are only three guards, and they’re not very threatening. Just kinda scowled at us.

No one posts “yes,” though there are a number of icon responses. Eyeballs. A fist. Rafael posts a date and time. Julia has no idea what to expect when it arrives.

On the corner with the noodle place, they meet RiRi and Rafael’s former roommate and a friend of a friend who used to date Pedro. The roommate had worked on windows once, in high school, but the ex is just there for moral support and muscle. Julia feels like she has misjudged each of these people by not recognizing their compassion before now. She wants to cry, and to hug them. Instead, she just nods.

They form two rows, two and three, and they march right past the guards. The police grab her, again, but Julia punches her fist into the air, pushing the hold up her arm. She presses forward, through hands and a tripping leg, and the door is in front of her.

Someone grabs her hair, then, and yanks her off her feet.

It’s a mess. A tangle of limbs and shouting. It feels more like children wrestling than something adult. There’s a sharp smell of ozone, and Rafael cries out.

It ends quickly after the taser.

Julia gets a fat lip and zip ties on her wrists. The five of them are sat down in a row, Rafael shaking his head and blinking like he can dispel the memory of electricity.

One cop paces back and forth in front of them, his fists tightening and releasing as if he doesn’t know what to do with the energy. The other two confer, anxious whispers that get loud enough to hear. “So call.” “I’m not going to—” “Look.”

Two more police officers arrive. One has the golden eagle of a commander. She stops three feet away and holds up a hand. “I am very disappointed in you,” she says to Julia and her companions. “We’re in a dangerous situation and the city needs you to be calm, to not make matters worse.”

RiRi snaps, “We were trying to—” and is kicked by the officer who had been pacing.

“Now,” the commander says, a gentle admonishment, as if this were a child drawing on the walls. “None of that. We need to be civilized.” She hooks her thumbs on her belt. “The jail’s a bit crowded at present, so I’m going to let you off with probation. Don’t mistake this for nothing. You’re out of warnings. If you so much as spit on a walkway, your asses are going straight to deportation holding. Is that clear?”

Are they supposed to answer? Agree to this? Pedro’s ex murmurs “Yes, ma’am,” and the others follow. The woman stares at Julia until she ducks her head and says, “Yes, ma’am,” too.

They reconvene on the High Path, a narrow public walkway that loops through the upper levels of the city, connecting to buildings and support struts, with a few benches and baskets of plants attached to its sides. None of them have the money to waste on beer or even hot noodles. Julia feels like she’s in a trap and only waiting for it to snap shut. There’s still a red line on her wrist from the zip tie.

RiRi sighs and sticks their legs over the edge to dangle. “I think it’s that prisoners can’t be deported before trial. That’s why they don’t want to arrest us. This is actually worse, this one-offense warning.”

Rafael is unfairly happy, pacing back and forth, making the walk bounce with his steps. “No. This was a step. A stride. They backed down. We have them. Five people is too many for them to arrest. Imagine what we can do with this!”

“Get beat up again?” Pedro’s ex asks.

They can see so much from up here. Part of a mural that might be a child throwing a baseball or just reaching for a glowing, floating one. The odd, organic blue plastic of the university annex peeking around the traditional, square shapes of other buildings. Graffiti. There’s a man leaning on a railing below them, gesturing now and again as he talks to someone remotely. His forearms are like drumsticks. A woman waters a sweet pea vine in a window to the right of him.

Walkways and stairways and floors, all built one atop another, atop empty air. Julia imagines it falling, emptying, ending. She imagines what it was like when her mother first saw it, when there was just an aerostat and a gantry and a fabber spinning out material from clouds.

The others haven’t stopped arguing. “Well, what are we supposed to do, then?” Rafael demands. “Nothing?”

Julia can see through crossed walkways and power lines to workers brushing a Mylar sheet against the interior of the dome. An ugly, temporary fix. It brings the anger back.

Two men are jogging on the walkway. Rafael and Pedro’s ex have to squeeze to the side to let them pass. As they do, one of the joggers mutters, “Lazy bums.”

The other is louder. “If you don’t love the city, leave it.”

The first whispers something to him, and they both turn back, scowling, and it’s not the casual hatred of the rich for the poor, it’s specific. They know who they are looking at, and they want very much to push the lot of them off the walkway.

Julia gets up and goes toward the nearest stairs down.

She didn’t expect Rafael and RiRi to come with. They followed her down and pestered until the direction she walked made it pointless to hide her destination. “I’m going to talk to Angel.” She showed them the message, that she could still have her job back.

“Are you, though?”

Julia shrugs. “It’ll get me in to talk to him.”

Angel holds the door frame as if to prevent them from entering the administrative office. “Are you ALL expecting me to give your jobs back?” He looks pointedly at Rafael.

“We just want to talk,” Julia says.

Angel starts to close the door. Julia pushes her arm into the gap. “You know the dome needs regular maintenance. You know it’s more work than four people can do.”

“It’s not my decision.”

“Then let us talk to whoever’s it is.”

Angel shakes his head. “I need to keep my job.”

His exhausted expression isn’t different from Marta’s when she said the same thing. “Do you? Why? Who decided we had to bow to jobs? What about my mother? What’s her job?”

“She served the city.”

“So did I.”

Angel presses his hands together. “Please. Just take the job back. They’re already threatening to ship you off for leaving.”

Julia has nothing to threaten other than violence, and she doesn’t want that. Angel is awful, but he is also a person. “Let us cut through the office.”

He frowns. “What? No. I just said. I need this job!”

Julia puts her hand on Angel’s chest and pushes. She increases force until it’s enough and he stumbles back. She pushes him all the way to his desk, and his arms pinwheel until they clasp the front edge. “So we forced our way in,” she says, and leaves him there, walking to the inner door, the one that leads from administration to operations, and from there, to the locker room.

She still doesn’t expect Rafael and RiRi to follow, but they do.

She doesn’t go deeper into operations looking for the boss. She doesn’t think it would help. There’s an endless line above Angel, of people just doing their jobs, pointing up until you got to the top, and the top person points down at the bottom, saying, “I need to keep their support.”

The locker room is a tumbled mess. Anti-acid powder footprints track everywhere. Julia finds a clean pair of grip-soles and puts them on over her regular shoes. If she’s doing this, she might as well be comfortable.

RiRi hangs by the door, uncertain, but Rafael starts gearing up, taking gloves from this locker, a face shield from that. RiRi shakes their head. “So, you’re . . . breaking in here, just to work?”

“Someone has to do this.” Julia hasn’t thought too much beyond that. She’s angry and tired of being blamed for not doing a job she wants to do.

Rafael settles the shoulder straps of a safety harness and grins. “It’s perfect. We save the city, we show them what side they should support.”

Not much Rafael has said has ever turned out true, but Julia wants to take comfort in his optimism. She starts to put on a face shield, finds it stinks of garlic and sickness, and puts it back, picking up another.

That’s when the door bursts open. She doesn’t hear what they shout, something like “get down” or “hands up”—it’s a percussion note, like the boots, the batons hitting the lockers. The police fan in quickly, one left, one right, one left.

RiRi stumbles, pushed down by them. They look up, disbelief in their eyes, their arms cradling their head, and then RiRi is diving toward the police, rolling on the floor into their legs.

Rafael has already gone out the airlock. Julia hates that she doesn’t hesitate longer.

Rafael slams the door behind them and twists the handle off. Julia doesn’t think that will actually do anything, but there’s no time to argue about it. She grabs her rope and starts climbing.

It’s full Sun Day, not the right time for doing this, and the heat is unexpected, strange. The texture of her feet on the glass feels stickier.

Whatever’s happening behind her, she is soon absorbed in the task of climbing. She’s already out of shape, gasping more than usual. Or maybe it’s the heat.

She skitters to the top to see Rafael a few paces behind her. Sees him see her and slow down, checking his squeegee on his hip. When they both reach the top, he bows to her, gesturing.

“Dork,” she says, but she twists the knob. It doesn’t feel how she’d imagined.

With gestures, they split the dome in two. They go slowly, no time limit, checking for damage. It doesn’t take long to find the first crack. Julia smooths it and wonders if someone will climb up behind her, yank her off the city. There are emergency service balloons and helicopters. Her back prickles and not all the sweat is from the sun.

Two passes, and it’s already feeling longer than doing the base of her old section. Her radio crackles. She forgot it was built into the helmet, that she was wearing it.

“Rafael Rodriguez. Julia Lopez. By order of the chief of police, you will not be permitted to reenter the city.”

Julia stops where she is, the too-loud, hard voice echoing in her mind. She keeps expecting them to say more. She hears the rhythmic jingling of Rafael’s harness as he hops to her. He’s breathing heavy. “They’re locking us out.”

Julia readjusts her grip on the safety line. She looks at her feet. They’re still on the flattish top of the dome, the view beneath her is a rooftop with skylights and vents. Will the acid rain melt their clothes first? No, she’s being silly. They’ll die of thirst long before anything else gets them.

Julia sees what might be a crack to her right. “See you on the other side,” she says and goes to it.

Rafael is still and quiet a long time before he resumes washing.

Two more passes. They get another warning not to go near the airlocks. Rafael finds a discolored patch. “I don’t know if anyone is listening on this channel. But it’s grid 4-C-10. Someone should make a note and come back here.”

Julia is exhausted. She finds Rafael has stopped, sitting, his knees up, on the curve of the glass. “We’re not getting through this in four hours, chica. Take a load off.”

So she copies his posture and looks out on the cloud sea. The tantalizing deep valleys that look like they hold secrets. The soft curving slopes she imagined sledding down as a child. “We’re going to die here.”

Rafael snorts like it’s a joke. “And I’m already almost out of repair gel.”

When their legs are rested, they resume their work. There doesn’t seem to be anything else to do.

On the next pass, they are even with some apartments, and people have gathered to watch for them. A man with a baby waves. Julia waves back.

The next floor down, there are more people. They don’t look angry at them. They look excited. It gives Julia strength. She works harder.

Then she sees her mother.

It’s a rooftop park. A nicer neighborhood than theirs. She went there once with a school club, to do some plant-identification assignment. Julia can’t see the little cards on the beds now because the rooftop is crowded with people holding signs.

“Maintenance is life,” reads a large one. Another says, “Justice for workers.”

She is startled by two girls waving at her, shaking a banner. “I stand with Lopez.”

Her mother’s sign is one of the nicest, of course, with clean, elegant letters. “My daughter has the most important job in the city.”

M. Bennardo often dreams of train travel, layovers, and quiet pointless moments. He is the writer of almost one hundred published stories appearing most recently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and others. He lives in Kent, Ohio.

Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café

M. Bennardo

Just twenty minutes after he had arrived at the Trainview Café, Felix was back out on the station platform. He walked along its length, holding a cup of tea that he had purchased at the café, looking up and down the empty tracks, searching in vain for some way to call another train to take him away again.

The bustling people were gone, too, all either inside the station or spirited away on the last train a few minutes earlier. Now there was nothing of interest on the platform: no train, no call button, and nothing else.

Or at least nothing beyond the pop-pop-pop of an invisible woodpecker in the pine trees across the tracks, nothing beyond the cool pattering of a misty drizzle in Felix’s hair and across his exposed forearms, and nothing beyond the astringent burn of the hot tea in his mouth.

Closing his eyes, Felix took a sip of the tea, held it in his mouth, and felt its warmth diffuse through his sinuses. It was an incredible detail, just like every other detail in the place. The feeling of physical presence, of reality, of existential weight. He could not deny that the Trainview Café was utterly unlike any other simulation program he had experienced in the decades since he had left his own human body behind. But all the same, Felix couldn’t see what all of these finely turned details added up to. What was the point, except to remind him of what he no longer was?

Slowly, Felix inverted the paper cup over the edge of the platform. Steam rose hissing as the remaining tea splattered onto the gravel below, staining it dark gray. He squashed the paper cup and threw it down onto the tracks, wondering how much longer he had to wait before he would be disconnected. He vaguely recalled that the program had charged him for forty-eight minutes. It was an unusual increment of time, but it had been the only one available. And it had been expensive, too: more expensive than twelve hours in most other high-end simulations. Yet, here he was, only twenty minutes in and already bored.

Felix crouched at the edge of the platform, and then dropped down to the railbed below, wincing as his feet hit the loose gravel harder than expected. He could feel individual stones poking through the too-thin soles of his shoes, and as he shifted his weight and took a few wobbly steps he quickly realized that each individual rock was its own discrete object. He’d expected the gravel to be a texture, but it clearly wasn’t. As far as Felix could tell, someone had taken the trouble to render every piece of gravel in the bed, which was just as deep and wide and long as it appeared from the platform. Hundreds of feet long, at least, and maybe longer. Who knew how far it went? Miles? Forever?

Yet, there was seemingly no quest here. No puzzle, no riddle, no drama, no story, and no bigger world beyond the station. Felix had already tried to exit by the station’s main doors, and the program had prevented him from opening them. Clearly there was nothing outside that way. So now he picked out the black scarecrow of a railway signal about two hundred yards down the railbed. He’d see how far he could get that way. That could be his mission for the next twenty minutes or so.

But less than halfway to the signal arm, he found himself blocked again. There was no barrier, physical or otherwise. There was just an inability to proceed, such as Felix had encountered countless times before at the edges of other simulations. Here, again, he had reached the end of the world.

So this is what he had paid that exorbitant rate to experience: a train station, a small café, a hundred yards of track, and nothing else. Felix shook his head one last time and turned around, heading back toward the station platform. After he had walked about twenty yards, he stopped. Then he laid down on his back across the rails, folded his hands across his middle, and stared up into the falling rain as he waited for the next train to arrive.

Only a few minutes later, Felix’s view of the low gray sky was interrupted by the face of a woman standing over him. She peered down and frowned, a blue and white umbrella hovering over her head now blocking the drizzle from further wetting Felix’s face.

“Do you mind getting off the tracks?” asked the woman. “This is a very upsetting way to behave.”

Felix blinked a few times and wiped the rainwater from his eyes, snapping to focus on the woman’s face. He wondered if she were a paying user, like himself, or merely an active sprite programmed to discourage him from doing exactly what he was doing now.

“Are you listening?” asked the woman when Felix didn’t answer. “I asked you to get off the tracks. Another train will be coming soon.”

Felix considered his options. This was the most interesting thing to have happened to him yet at the Trainview Café. Apart from the barista at the café, hardly anybody else in the simulation had even appeared to notice that he existed. He had seen dozens and dozens of people, exiting and entering trains, standing in line at the café, sitting on benches, reading newspapers, watching the board that announced departures and arrivals. But, to a person, they had all simply ignored him. Certainly no one else had taken the initiative to talk to him. Felix’s simulated pulse actually quickened slightly. Could he finally be doing something right? By laying down on the tracks, he’d gotten the program to respond to his presence.

“Let the train come,” said Felix. “I’ve circumnavigated the entire world so far as I can tell, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else left to do.”

The woman furrowed her brow, raindrops from the edges of her umbrella spattering Felix as she shook her head disapprovingly. “If you’d like to leave, you’re welcome to wait on the platform and get on the next train. All you’re doing here is ruining the simulation for everyone else.”

Felix didn’t try to hide his surprise. Everyone else? He hadn’t imagined for a moment that any of the dozens of other people in the simulation could possibly be paying users. They’d felt more like environmental sprites, mere background filler intent on their own dull pre-programmed business. Certainly there was none of the unpredictable boundary-testing behavior he expected from human users.

But before he could say anything, the woman spoke again in a commanding tone. “You have five seconds to get off the tracks or I’m disconnecting you.”

For a moment, Felix considered staying where he was. Let her disconnect him! It was what he had wanted. And yet . . . now that the simulation seemed to be responding to him, Felix did vaguely want to see what would come next. So he pulled himself up to a sitting position, brushed off his pants with exaggerated care, and climbed to his feet.

“Happy now?” he asked. “Or is happiness not allowed here either?”

The woman didn’t answer. As soon as Felix stood, she immediately turned and started walking back toward the platform. She walked so fast that Felix was forced to jog to catch up with her. As he did, a train suddenly thundered past. It was moving more slowly than Felix had expected, only about twice his own jogging speed, but with a terrible weight of momentum that made him shudder all the same. Had he really been lying down just a minute earlier, waiting for that to drive through him? He wondered queasily how far the realism of the simulation would have extended, and if he would actually have felt the wheels of the front car biting into his shoulders and calves.

“Happiness is allowed,” said the woman as the whining of the train’s brakes faded away. “But that’s not usually what people come here looking for.”

They had reached the edge of the station now, and the woman quickly shook out her umbrella and closed it up. Then she scrambled up a ladder to the main level of the platform. People were now thronging around the train in a claustrophobic press of bodies, both getting off and getting on with robotical focus. Felix kept close to the woman as she made her way through the surging crowd to the interior of the station. For several seconds, he felt sure he would lose her in the press.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he called as they emerged into an open space in the atrium. The woman turned and looked at him, seemingly surprised that he was still behind her. Felix felt himself blush. “I’m sorry I went out on the tracks.”

The woman didn’t say anything. She seemed to be studying his face, and then her eyes went blank for several seconds. Just as suddenly she seemed to return to awareness.

“You’re Felix? You’re new?” she asked. She said his name with a questioning air that didn’t sound entirely friendly, but also not entirely hostile anymore. “Nobody met you, showed you around?”

“No,” said Felix. “Nobody has yet.”

“That’s our mistake. For some reason, you didn’t register as a new user. I’m Nancy. I’m the admin for this layover.”

“I was here a few weeks ago,” said Felix. “That might be why. But the program was glitching . . . I sat on the train for five minutes and it just kept going and going, rolling through the countryside. It never made it to the station. So I logged off and refunded the charge.”

“Five minutes?” Nancy laughed. “How long do you think it should take for a train to reach a station?”

Felix felt his simulated cheeks blush again. The sensation surprised him every time. “For a real train, I guess it takes as long as it takes. But for a simulated train . . . ” Felix shrugged. “You tell me.”

Nancy softened slightly and brushed a strand of frizzy hair back from her face. “Fine. Since you’re new, I’ll show you around. But we don’t call this place a simulation.”

Felix shrugged, then gestured to the thronging crowd around them. “So what’s everybody doing here? I gather that these are all paying users. But why?”

Nancy smiled thinly. Then she said gently: “They come in on a train, just like you did. They get off at the station, just like you did. The layover lasts forty-eight minutes, and they stay in the station and the café until it ends. Then they get on another train, and they leave again.”

Felix grunted. “When you put it like that, it makes perfect sense.”

Nancy shook her head, bright plastic earrings swinging on either side of her face. “You have to think differently about this place.” Then she checked her watch. “Your outbound train is the next one. It arrives in twelve minutes, and you’ll need to get on it. But that’s enough time to show you one of the things I like to do when I’m here.”

Nancy led Felix to a large window in a quiet corner of the train station, just beyond the eating tables of the café, and stood in front of it. There was nothing remarkable about the view outside the window: a small lawn, a few low bushes, and then more trees beyond. The only thing of any interest at all that Felix could see was a birdfeeder.

“Here it is,” said Nancy.

She was actually smiling as she said it, as if she had brought him to some incredible wonder. Felix looked from Nancy’s face to the window and back again.

“Look at them,” she said, and this time she clearly motioned at the birdfeeder. There were two birds perched on it at the moment. One was little and brown, with a white streak across its head. The other Felix thought was a goldfinch. “Really look at the birds.”

Felix tried. He furrowed his brow and concentrated. The goldfinch hopped on its perch and pecked at one of the openings in the feeder, extracting a sunflower seed with its beak. It promptly dropped the seed and fluttered down to the ground, chasing it. The other bird spread its own wings for balance as the hanging birdfeeder swayed slightly at the goldfinch’s movements, steadying itself, then pecking at its own hole.

“Impressive,” muttered Felix, but mostly because he wasn’t sure what else to say.

“Each bird is fully rendered,” said Nancy quietly. “Not quite down to the cellular level, but close. And they’re persistent. They really exist, as much as anything can here. They have internal organs and arteries and blood and nerves, just like I’m sure you noticed your body does here. They need food and water and air. They can get sick. They can get tired. They lay eggs in the spring and they hatch young. They compete for food and fight for mates. They grow old. They die.”

As Nancy spoke, a bluejay landed heavily on the birdfeeder, scattering the smaller birds with its aggressive approach. It fluffed its feathers and tried to hold on to the perch, too small and wet for its big claws.

“They never do the same thing twice,” said Nancy. “These aren’t looping animations. Each movement is a unique reaction to their environment, to their own needs, to each other. To our presence. Each of those birds makes decisions using its programmed instincts, the same way a real bird would. Practically speaking, at every level above the size of a cell, they are real birds.”

Felix watched the bluejay continue to bully its way around the feeder as Nancy spoke. “But why?” he asked at last. “Why go to all that trouble? You must be using huge amounts of computing power just to keep these birds going. I’ve never heard of any other simulation doing anything like that.”

Nancy shook her head at the word “simulation,” then gestured to a dozen other people also clustered around the window, who were all watching the birds. “Have you ever watched the birds in the simulations you’re used to? How long until they do something to break the illusion? After a few minutes they’d repeat their movements, or do something unnatural. But here, I can spend an entire layover just looking out this window, and I’m sorry when I have to go. The same is true of the ants in the flowerpots, or the butterflies, or the leaves on a single tree. They’re all different, all individual. They’re all alive and real.”

Felix was about to point out that none of those things had prevented him from losing interest and laying down on the tracks, but before he could speak, there came the hoot of a horn and a rushing roar from the platform.

“That’s your train,” Nancy said, putting a hand on Felix’s shoulder and turning him gently toward the platform. “The one unbreakable rule we have is that you must make your connection. If you think you might ever want to come back, you’d better go now.”

Felix looked through the station toward the platform, then back to the birdfeeder. Then his eyes glanced at Nancy. She motioned for him to go. And that was all it took. Finally: Felix had a mission, his heart hammering as he ran to catch his train.

The next day, Felix arrived early. He still doubted that the Trainview Café could be worth its inflated price, but he had been feeling restless and bored with every other simulation he’d tried lately. At least the Trainview Café bored him in a different way.

As expected, he spawned on an inbound train. After his visit the day before, Nancy had written him a short message explaining how the Trainview Café worked. She had told him that trains could only arrive at the station at their scheduled times, so it might take up to sixteen minutes for the train he spawned on to reach the station. He wouldn’t, however, be charged for the travel time. Instead, she suggested enjoying the free ride, however long it took.

Felix found himself in a window seat, so he started by peering outside. Brown-green countryside smeared past in a rapid blur. Here and there, he found he could focus on a house or a car waiting at a crossing, but it all rushed past so fast.

Slowly, he leaned his head against the window instead and let his forehead absorb the coolness of the glass and the vibrations of the train itself. He closed his eyes, and was surprised that he could feel the sinuous swaying of the train beneath him, shifting just an instant out of step with the rhythmic clacking of the wheels against the tracks. It was another surprising and fascinating detail, but like everything else in the simulation it didn’t seem to add up to anything bigger.

So Felix pulled himself to his feet and started to explore the train. From the back of his car, he passed through a vestibule full of piled-up luggage, with a tiny bathroom behind a sliding door. The next car beyond was no different than the one he had spawned in. Moving farther on, Felix made his way through two more passenger cars and then a lounge car with a small snackbar selling soda, coffee, bags of chips, and pre-wrapped sandwiches. He paused for a moment, and dipped his hand in his pocket. There was a generous handful of change and a couple of bills, just as there had been the day before. If he wanted to eat, just for the experience of it, he could eat. But no: he had tried drinking tea already the day before. Today, he wanted to try something else.

The next car was the last one, and the door opened onto a stretch of track constantly receding behind the train. It wouldn’t open, and neither would any of the windows in the car. As Felix tugged at them, someone approached him and touched his elbow gently.

“Sir, could you please take your seat while the train is in motion?”

Felix looked up in annoyance. Every time he started to explore a new area of the simulation, somebody came along to tell him to stop. How could they expect him to learn about the world if not through trial and error? Some of the errors might be mistakes, even fatal ones, but that was part of the fun. Yet, everyone here seemed to expect that he would just naturally know what was and wasn’t allowed.

“I don’t remember where my seat is,” Felix answered in annoyance. “I don’t even know if I have a ticket.”

“You do,” said the man. “But sit here for now, and please stay seated. We’ll be at the station soon.”

Felix sat brooding for three more minutes, but his mood did not improve as the train slowed and the familiar station building filled the view outside his window. He rose and exited the car, out onto the platform. It was a sunny day, and he stood for a few seconds, absorbing the warmth of the rays on his neck and hands. He had to admit that there were moments of real human sensation here . . . but he wished they also came along with something bigger to do.

Making his way through the station toward the big window, Felix joined a few others watching the birdfeeder. The goldfinch was back, hopping and fluttering about in a very convincing way. But Felix still knew it wasn’t real, not really. The birds in other simulations were undeniably cruder, but a simulated bird didn’t become real just because you fixed its glitches. Felix was keenly aware that his days of watching real birds had ended decades ago when he had left his body. His life was a simulation now.

Suddenly, Felix leaned forward and smacked loudly on the glass with the palm of his hand. The pane boomed in its frame, and the goldfinch immediately leapt away from the feeder in surprise and flew off at high speed. The others at the window all turned to Felix angrily.

“What did you do that for?” asked a woman.

Felix set his jaw. “I wanted to see what would happen.”

“Well, that’s what happens,” said the woman. “What else would you expect?”

“It’s not like I hurt it,” said Felix. “Not that it could be hurt, not really . . . ” It was on the tip of his tongue to add, It’s just a simulation. But he could see the faces around him turning increasingly hostile. He let the words die on his tongue, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and walked away.

Out on the platform, Felix spied the man who had told him to sit down on the train. He was standing alone, drinking from one of the café’s paper cups. Felix figured he might be an admin, like Nancy, so he drifted over to talk to him.

“Don’t you get tired of the same old stuff?” asked Felix. “They should change up that café menu, put something new on it each day.”

The man took a long sip from the cup and closed his eyes. “I’m not looking for anything new. Most people here aren’t.” Then he opened his eyes and turned them on Felix. “But then they don’t bang on windows or try to jump out of moving trains either.”

Felix held up his hands in mock apology. Someone must have reported his experiment at the birdfeeder already. Probably everyone at the window had done so. It wasn’t a very nice crowd that hung around here, he thought to himself. When they weren’t ignoring him, they were criticizing him. He was just trying to figure the place out.

“Where’s Nancy?” Felix asked. “Is she here?”

The man looked away again and shrugged wordlessly.

“Another one of the admins,” said Felix. “Big plastic earrings. She showed me around yesterday.”

“Don’t say that,” said the man.

“Say what?”

“Admin, simulation, anything like that. You should know by now.”

Felix gritted his teeth. “I know you know who I’m talking about.”

“If you don’t see Nancy in the station, then she isn’t here. Now just let me be.”

“Will she be on later?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so. Most people come every day.”

“I’ll come back later then.”

“Not today, you won’t.”

“Why? Are you banning me? For asking a question?”

“Nobody’s banning you. That’s just how it works. Everyone is permitted only one layover per day.”

Felix shook his head. “Fine. Tomorrow then. And as soon as the next train comes, I’m out of here.”

But the man didn’t say anything in reply. Instead, he just shut his eyes and took three breaths, deep and slow.

Felix didn’t come back the next day, or the one after that, or the one after that. It was over a week until he even thought about the Trainview Café again. Instead, he climbed the Blue Crystal Glacier for the twentieth time.

The glacier had recently become Felix’s favorite simulation. He had grown impossibly tired of war simulations, dating simulations, strategy games, and the countless glorified interior decorating programs on offer. But the Blue Crystal Glacier, once he had found it, had been different.

The first thing that was different was that you were always alone. No matter how many people were in the program, you always started at the base of the mountain by yourself and you proceeded up to the ice field at the top alone. The climb took eight hours to complete at a moderate pace, and Felix had died and gotten lost and given up many times as he had learned the features of the mountain and how to master the technical climbing techniques that the ascent required.

The first time that Felix had reached the top, he had been elated. It had taken almost a hundred hours across many attempts, and he had felt a very rare and real sense of accomplishment. Making the final scramble up to the base of the glacier at the mountain’s peak had blown him away, almost literally. Feeling the wind rushing down from the ice field from off the tongue of blue ice had been thrilling and primal in a way that he had thought he would never feel again.

The Blue Crystal Glacier was better than anything else in any other simulation Felix had ever experienced, and he had loved it so much that he had climbed the mountain all the way to the top, again and again, twenty times over. But after so much repetition, the challenge had gone and the thrill had faded. He had found himself reduced to seeking out slightly more efficient routes, or attempting riskier jumps and scrambles. But the mountain was unforgiving, and he had died more and more often, in pursuit of quickly diminishing returns.

Shaving six minutes off his climb time did not give him even a fraction of the rush that the initial ascent had. And though the mountain was still a stunning creation to behold, on his most recent climbs Felix had felt a sinking feeling that he was slowly consuming it: that he was eating nearly every voxel that it had to offer, and that soon he would have eaten them all.

That, in fact, was what had brought him to the Trainview Café. He had been looking for something else like the Blue Crystal Glacier, and he had seen the Trainview Café suggested as another simulation with a similar sense of weight and reality. But it wasn’t the same at all. It was a completely different experience, and Felix didn’t know if it was one that he would ever learn to enjoy. But as he stood once more at the foot of the ice field and let the rushing wind pour past his face in a numbing roar, he realized he had few other options anymore.

A couple of weeks later, Felix decided he could afford another trip to the Trainview Café. He had messaged Nancy to make sure that she would be in the program when he arrived, and had timed his spawning so that he would only have to sit on the train for a few minutes.

Even so, it was with mild surprise that Felix saw Nancy sitting in the same car, a few rows in front of him, on the other side of the aisle. His instinct was to immediately get up and move next to her, but he fought it down. Instead, he settled back in his seat and waited for the train to reach the station. Felix had decided that he would try things their way this time. He’d follow the rules and play along, as best as he could.

As he exited to the platform, Felix tried to cast his memory back to the days when he had really been a commuter with a layover. He knew he had often had such moments during his life, so he was surprised how difficult it was to do. Had all those mundane human memories been wiped out of his mind, overwritten by thousands of simulated and heightened experiences? Or had he never bothered to record them in the first place, even as a human being?

Even so, Felix strolled into the terminal and checked the board for the time of the next train. Then he checked his own watch and made sure it matched the clock on the board. That felt familiar and right. He had an idea that he had always been a careful traveler, that this was what he would have done first of all.

But looking at his watch also reminded him how long he had to wait. Forty-eight minutes! It felt like such a long time to have nothing in particular to do. But was it really? Felix wished he could remember how he would have reacted to a similar layover in his old human life. Could it be that he would have welcomed it, or even enjoyed it? Could he have once found in real life what the others around him seemed to find in the Trainview Café now, in this simulation?

As Felix stood musing, he was suddenly aware that someone had approached him. It was Nancy. She nodded to him in welcome. “I was surprised to get your message. I honestly didn’t think you’d come back again.”

“I wasn’t going to,” admitted Felix. He wondered briefly if Nancy knew about his behavior on his second visit, but he decided it didn’t really matter. He had acted badly perhaps, but he didn’t think he had done anything really wrong. “I wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed something. I think this place deserves another chance.”

“And how does it look this time?”

“Maybe I understand a little better. Last time I was here, I kept thinking it needed a point. But maybe . . . ” He had been about to say that maybe not having a point was the point, but the words had suddenly felt incredibly banal to him. “But maybe it doesn’t.”

Nancy nodded, as if he had actually said something intelligent. “A lot of people never get it. But most people need to visit a few times before they really understand how to be here.”

“It’s more human here,” Felix said. He was surprised to hear himself say those words, but he felt he really did believe it. “But to be honest, I really don’t know if I still know how to fill forty-odd empty minutes. I just don’t know that there’s enough to do for me . . . ”

“You’re absolutely right,” Nancy said with a maddening smile. “There’s nothing to do here.”

Felix laughed. “At least you admit it.”

He looked around. Two pigeons were chasing each other between the soaring rafters of the main terminal. Outside, through a high window, Felix could see a sprawling cumulus cloud pass in front of the sun, a shadow suddenly falling over the outside world as it did. A breeze blew through the cavern of the station and goosebumps prickled on Felix’s neck and arms.

“I do remember this now,” he murmured. “A lot of it, I didn’t even realize I’d forgotten. There’s so much the other simulations leave out. So much . . . ”

Felix let his words trail off. He had been about to say “of humanity,” but he had already said that. And yet it still felt true. The other simulations kept you busy, and so you didn’t notice how unreal they were: how they abbreviated and elided the experience of living in order to get to the point.

“If you had taken a running jump off the platform that first day you were here, you would have sprained your ankle and skinned your knees. If you drink the tea too fast, you’ll burn your tongue. Being human is just as much about what you can’t do or shouldn’t do, as it is about what you can do.”

“Burnt tongues and sprained ankles.” Felix laughed. “You think those are selling points? You have to work on your marketing.”

Nancy shook her head. “We’re not selling anything. This is just a place we’re all passing through.”

“It’s a nice idea,” said Felix. “But I can’t really afford it. If I came here every day, I’d have to skip most of the other simulations.”

“It takes a lot of hardware to do things the way we do,” said Nancy. “Small as this place is, it’s magnitudes more expensive to run than most other programs.”

“Could you give me a job here?” asked Felix. “I can make coffee and tea as good as your simulated baristas. Let me take a shift. At least it would be something to do, and you’d save a little processing power. You could charge me a little less, or maybe I could be allowed to stay longer. Like working my way on a ship passage.”

Nancy shook her head. “That’s not how we do things. It’s not about having things to do.”

“You have things to do.”

“As an admin? Believe me, I’d really rather not.”

“Then let me do that. I think I’d enjoy it.”

Nancy laughed. “That’s really not how we do things.”

Felix shrugged. “I can’t afford it then. I can’t afford to come here just to watch birds and burn my tongue on mediocre tea. Not for less than an hour a day, not if there’s no point to it. I’d be stuck in the void for half the rest of the day, waiting there just so I could come here to wait some more.”

“If that’s how you want to look at it.”

“Is that what you do? I can’t picture you in the other simulations, pretending to be a secret agent or a half-orc sorcerer.”

“You know we don’t talk about those things here.”

“Another rule? It takes a lot of rules to keep this illusion running.”

“It’s not an illusion,” said Nancy. “It’s an agreement. We’re here because we believe if we participate in the agreement, we can make something real together.” She checked the clock. “Look, there’s a train coming soon.”

“It’s not time to leave yet. We’ve got over half an hour left.”

Nancy nodded. “True. But if you’re serious about spending more time here, I can show you something.”

Felix suddenly wasn’t sure that he was serious about it. If he was being honest, he doubted he would have lasted long as a barista, even if Nancy had been willing to let him try. Loafing around all day in the train station didn’t seem much more attractive, but neither did any of the other simulations anymore. So maybe he was serious enough, at least until he found something else.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m serious.”

“All right then. I can show you something new that we’re working on that will allow you to extend your time in the simulation.”

“How long?”

“As long as you like, for the same cost.”

“Why not? What do I have to do?”

“You’re going to laugh,” said Nancy, her eyes flashing and her earrings swinging. “But we have to get on the departing train.”

Felix did laugh. “You’re just trying to get me to leave.”

“I’ll be coming with you,” said Nancy, as the train roared into the station. “Do you trust me?”

Felix nodded. He was willing to try, anyway.

As the train pulled out, Nancy turned to look at Felix. They had taken two empty seats next to each other. “This is still a bit rough. It’s not fully finished yet. But there’s enough of it that you’ll get the idea.”

“So what is it?” asked Felix. The station slid away outside the window as the train picked up speed. He wondered if they were creating an actual destination for the train: a home, an office, a hotel room. Something to give the experience some variety and some sense of movement. “Where are we headed?”

“We’re not heading anywhere,” said Nancy. “But we are working on a way to stay here, on the train.”

Felix’s heart dropped. He tried not to show too much disappointment. “Just here? All day?”

“In a way,” said Nancy. “But not exactly here. After sixteen minutes, this train would usually change over from an outbound route to an inbound route, and all outbound passengers would be automatically disconnected.”

“But what?”

“I can transfer us to a different train that’s always traveling, always outbound. We can stay there as long as we like, and tomorrow we can come back to the station.”

“It wasn’t quite what I had in mind . . . ”

“Would you like to try it?”

“It’s a different train at least, I suppose.”

“All right, I’ll do it. But you have to close your eyes first.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“You have to close your eyes and keep them closed. That’s the only way it works.”

Felix crossed his arms over his chest. This was starting to sound like something you’d tell a fussy child to get them to stop complaining. But he watched as Nancy closed her eyes, dark lashes folding onto her cheeks. He had decided to play along, after all. Splotches of red and green floated in the inky blankness of non-sight as he closed his own eyes, ephemeral starbursts erupting.

“Okay,” said Felix unenthusiastically.

“Are your eyes closed?”

“Yes.”

The train rattled along, shaking and squealing.

“Keep them closed,” said Nancy. “You can’t open them.”

“You’ll put me to sleep,” said Felix, laughing despite himself.

He hadn’t slept in decades, not for a single second. But somehow, here, it seemed obvious that he might, that the motion of the train together with the darkness of his closed eyes might really send him to sleep. And maybe he would even like that. Would he also dream, he wondered? And would that be enough? Would the chance to dream again justify the cost and boredom and strangeness of the place? If only he could sleep, and if only he could dream, would he finally understand the appeal?

“I often sleep here,” said Nancy quietly. “We’re thinking of calling it the Night Train.”

“We’re on the other train already?” asked Felix. “I didn’t feel anything.”

“Yes, we are,” murmured Nancy. She touched his arm lightly with her hand.

“And I can’t look?”

“No,” answered Nancy. “You’d better not.”

Felix wanted to say that it felt no different. There hadn’t even been a bump or skip in the simulation when they had transferred from one train to the other. But why should there be? They hadn’t really gone anywhere. Nothing had changed except the value of some bits in a computer. Felix knew he could never escape the sense of that, no matter how hard he tried. Closing his eyes didn’t magically make it any easier to pretend that any of this was real.

Nancy’s hand seemed to drift down from his arm. Her fingers slid away, or appeared to slide away. Felix wanted to ask her if she were sleeping already or if she were still awake, but instead he decided to be quiet. There was no chance of him sleeping, at least. His mind was too full of thoughts.

Felix turned his face toward Nancy, trying to sense her presence. He did not want to move or touch her, but he tried to listen to her breathing. To listen to her being. He tried to convince himself that he was really on a train, really sitting next to another human being, really experiencing any of this. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t believe it.

And then Felix opened his eyes.

He opened his eyes, and he looked at Nancy. He wasn’t shocked by what he saw, but he was disappointed and disgusted at the inevitability of it. For Nancy was indeed sitting next to him, but she was now a grotesque parody of a human being. The motion and sound of the train still felt entirely real, but Nancy and everything else in the interior of the train car had been converted into the crudest low-resolution wireframes.

Every surface of the car was a window now: utterly permeable, giving only the suggestion of enclosure rather than the illusion of it. Beyond the train, in every direction, was a blank whiteness. There was no sky, no trees, no station. Not even any tracks, except short stretches where they touched the wheels, all visible through the now-transparent floor of the train car. Otherwise, there was only a featureless expanse, through which the horrible wireframe of the train twisted and curved around invisible bends on a nonexistent railbed, like a tortured snake being skewered endlessly by a stick.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” asked Nancy. Her voice was a quiet murmur, but her wireframe lips flapped garishly over the bright placards of her teeth and the pulsating worm of her avatar’s tongue. “Different, peaceful, human . . . wasn’t that the word you used before?”

Nancy turned her face toward Felix, her eyelids clearly still closed but not able to hide her eyes through their unfinished transparency. The watery white orbs bugged out toward Felix, pixelated pupils rolling to match the false motion of the deceiving train.

“Do you think you’ll come back again?” asked Nancy.

As she spoke, Felix raised his hands to his face, then stopped when he saw the crude lines of his own limbs. His head was buzzing, and his stomach clenched, and he suddenly wished that he could not feel all these bodily sensations so keenly when he clearly had no body to feel them. What was their purpose? Why should he be taunted by a body that didn’t exist anymore? Felix wanted to run, but he couldn’t see anywhere to run to.

“Do you think you want to stay?” asked Nancy again.

Felix opened his mouth and tried to think how he could possibly answer. After a few seconds, he closed it again without saying a word. Instead, he simply sat in silence, his eyes wide open, seeing everything and believing in none of it, and waiting for the nightmare to end.

Julianna Baggott has published over twenty books, including Pure, an ALA Alex Award Winner and New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her latest book, I’d Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You and Other Stories, is a collection primarily of grounded science fiction. With over one hundred foreign editions of her novels published overseas, Baggott’s work is highly anthologized, with stories currently in development at Netflix, Paramount, and elsewhere. The adaptation of her novel, co-written with Steve Almond, Which Brings Me to You, will hit theaters and streamers in 2024.

The Historiography of Loss

Julianna Baggott

I didn’t expect the trailer to feel so small and that some of the blood would still be wet. But I must have expected some blood because I cuffed my jeans before going in.

And I didn’t expect the cats would have come back—a window was open, its screen clawed loose. I didn’t expect how they pawed through the blood. Dotting the counters with their small footprints.

I didn’t expect the trailer to feel so densely packed—a family had lived here, a mother, a father, a twelve-year-old son, and all of their stuff. The parents’ bedroom—I didn’t expect how violently tight it would be, their lives drawn in, coiled, the nowhere-to-go of it. Especially in winter. Especially muffled in snow.

I didn’t expect to see the holster, but there it was, on the carpet. I didn’t expect the intimacy. I didn’t expect how the list of things-to-get would shake in my hand like a love note.

I didn’t expect a neighbor to show up at the door and shout if I needed help. “Little lady! You okay in there?”

I didn’t expect to throw things to him—like from a sinking boat to a dock—while he said how nice they’d all seemed, quiet, respectful.

And the dog. That was my main purpose. Get the dog. I didn’t expect the dog to be so small. Its ribs so rodent-dainty. I didn’t expect for it to shake and keep shaking and how that made me stop shaking. As I picked it up from the bed, I didn’t expect to whisper, “Come here, little fucker. Let’s get out of here together,” and how, after I said it, I choked up. It was so tender.

I didn’t expect to turn around and see the twelve-year-old boy. “Do you get it now?” he said. “This is why I’m the way I am. This.”

I didn’t expect to love the boy, but that’s how it is. I loved the boy because he was my father.

The one who gave me up.

How did I get in the trailer in the first place?

I started out with the free promotional thing—upload an old photo and watch it come to life! The company was pretty well-known at the time, called TechoNostalgia. I chose to upload a photo of my father because I’d never met him. I’d only heard the story. He was young when I was born, just twenty. And my mother was even younger, just seventeen, an addict who left when I was a few weeks old. This was in Grand Forks and it was winter. I imagine her in a thin coat and jeans and sneakers, heading out onto the salted sidewalks, banked by two feet of snow.

My father had to take over alone. He wasn’t perfectly sober himself. He knew he couldn’t raise a kid—or he could but it would go badly. When I was six months old or so, his best friend Kenny had moved in with this girl named Biv who’d been raised on a commune and was chill and sweet and patient. One night my father was over and a little strung out, and Kenny was sick with a fever and chills. My father watched Biv take care of Kenny and decided that she could probably handle a baby. A few nights later, my father was there again. It was late. Biv and Kenny had fallen asleep on their futon, and I was just this little baby, asleep in a car seat sitting on the floor.

My father scribbled a note, tucked it into the padding of the car seat, and walked out.

But I wasn’t raised by Biv and Kenny. They weren’t ready either. I was adopted by an ophthalmologist and a software engineer who moved to Pasadena—Walinda and Tim Merchant, my parents. (They’re wonderful and I love them, but this story isn’t about them.) A short oral report of my early months of life, provided by Biv and Kenny, was in my medical file.

When I was in my teens, I looked up my biological parents. My mother was gone by her early twenties. My father made it to thirty-eight. He’d cleaned himself up but died in a work-related accident on a construction site in Muncie. He’d gotten married and divorced and remarried and had two more kids by then, twin daughters.

There was no reason to love my father. But there was no reason not to love him either. And so I did.

But let me be completely honest, I also hated the man. I hated that he gave up a six-month-old baby. And sometimes, when I could get to the anger—really feel it—I hated him because that baby was me. A lot of the time it was a story. But, when my defenses were down, it was personal. I’m a professor now, a historiographer, and so I study how histories are told, not history itself. I like being just slightly removed.

One night, I’d gotten home from a faculty potluck and couldn’t sleep. I was sitting up in bed, rain ticking on the windows. I’d heard about Nostalgia apps from my colleague, Ginny. We were hired five years ago, her in Digital Anthropology. “I had this old photo of my great grandmother at a muddy outdoor concert,” she told me. “I uploaded it and she started dancing. It was magical.”

I should note that I’d been thinking of getting pregnant. I’d frozen my eggs when I was twenty-eight. Now, ten years later, I was thinking about babies a lot. They suddenly seemed like they were everywhere—in restaurants and grocery stores, staring at me from backpacks. I wasn’t waiting for the right person to marry. I like people well enough. But never enough to think about spending my life with one of them. It struck me as a very strange supposition—the foreverness.

If I was interested in becoming a mother, why didn’t I track down my mother? That would have made more sense. But I saw her, at seventeen, as a kid herself, going through the fear and trauma of being pregnant and then labor. Maybe she was dealing with post-partum depression.

My father, on the other hand, had been twenty. And he’d known sadness as a kid—his mother died when he was pretty young; I’d found her obituary. She was just thirty-three. Did I think that made him a little sturdier? Did that explain why he fell recklessly in love with my mother? (Had they been in love at all?)

Mainly, I couldn’t get over this alternate reality in my head in which he didn’t leave that note, didn’t walk out that door. What would my life have been like then? Over those six months, did he bond with me at all? If so, how’d he write that note and simply walk out that door?

I realize now, of course, hindsight and all, that I had unfinished business.

I had a scanned photo of my father from his high-school yearbook. He was a senior. I uploaded it and waited while the algorithms did their work. And then my father—that still image of him—blinked and looked around. At this point, he was still trapped on my computer screen, but it was amazing to see him come to life, surprised to find himself here, awake and alive. He smiled.

But what hooked me wasn’t my young father brought back to life in this intangible way. It wasn’t even that I looked like him a little at that age—especially in our mouth, our lips, the pitch of our noses. No. It was the moment when his eyes met mine, directly.

It wasn’t seeing my father alive that was addictive but being seen by him.

I ordered the Life-Size Nostalgia Kit, choosing my father at the age he would be if he’d lived, fifty-five. A technician came to my house one afternoon. They had a stiff waxy haircut and wore a nametag—Skye—with the company address on it, like if they got lost, this was where someone should return them. It felt very proprietary.

“Your father, huh?” Skye seemed skeptical. “Fathers are tricky.”

“You mean, technically more difficult to render?”

“I mean, fathers, in general. Have you ever been to a support group of any kind? Fathers, fathers, fathers. Sometimes mothers, sure. They took most of blame historically, but only because men were in charge of psychology. Really? Blame fathers.” Skye raised their shoulders, lifted their hands. “But, you know, sometimes fathers are great.”

“I didn’t know mine.”

“You’re going in blind?” Skye asked.

“Is that bad?”

“I’ve heard mixed results.”

“Is he going to be the way he was in life, personality-wise?” I wanted to make sure I was meeting the right person.

“Yeah, the tech has gotten pretty good at nailing that down.” They pulled out a waiver. “But, look, shit can get weird with these things, and he’ll really take a while to charge—lots of sleeping the first few days.”

There was way too much fine print. “What do you mean—shit can get weird?”

“If I were to summarize this waiver, that’s how I’d put it. You’re either up for that or not.”

I was already in deep. “Fine, yes. I guess.” I signed.

Skye installed the whole thing—a network that extended to the edges of my property, a program uploaded to my computer, and, soon enough, a 3D body appeared in my living room. It was, at first, a rough estimate, the vague size and shape of my father, but without detail.

“You ready?” Skye asked.

“I think so.”

Skye started the rendering process. And, just like that, my father’s hands took shape. He was opening and closing his fists. Buttons on his shirt, a jawline, a fine bristle of hair on his head.

Then his nostrils flared and his eyes opened—a wild angry flutter. His lips appeared and suddenly he gasped like someone coming to the surface of a lake.

“Good luck,” Skye said and they left.

I was transfixed by my father, barely able to move. It was just my father and me, together for the first time since I was a baby in a car seat. “Hi,” I said.

“What the hell?” he said. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m your daughter, Emi.”

He wasn’t completely surprised by this, but he was a little suspicious. “And this is . . . ”

“My house,” I said. “I’m hoping we can get to know each other because, you know, we didn’t . . . ”

“When I was alive.”

“So you know you’re dead?”

“I know . . . a good bit. It’s coming to me now. Why I’m here, what customers sometimes expect . . . I think . . . ” I could see different realizations washing over him. He looked at his hands and then plucked at his shirt. “I’m real and not real. I exist and I don’t. And I might not last.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes we don’t . . . last.” He started walking around the living room. He leaned into some abstract art on the wall—close enough to see brushstrokes. Then backed away and frowned at it. “I’m really fucking tired. You mind if I crash?”

“Not at all.”

I showed him to the guest room which doubled as my exercise room—an elliptical, yoga mats, kettle bell . . .

He sat on the edge of the bed.

“Does this seem comfortable?” I asked.

He bounced on the bed a little. “It’s all good. Thanks.”

As I’d been warned, he slept for hours and hours, charging. I would pause at the door, listening to him thrash and murmur in his sleep.

The TechNostalgia version of my father was always hungry, but he couldn’t eat. He wasn’t embodied in that way. So the hunger seemed to be burning him. He took it personally.

He took a lot of things personally—the news, the weather, my way of looking at him. “What?” he said. “What do you want from me?”

I wanted a lot from him but they were all unnameable things.

He liked to sit in the back yard in a lawn chair and stare up at the sky.

I’d set up a chair next to him and ask questions. The answers were always short.

“What were your parents like?”

“Messy. Strange.” He paused. “Violent.”

“Did you have friends?”

“We had an eight-pound rat terrier that I loved a lot.”

“Did you like school?”

“I hated it. I couldn’t read very well.”

“What was your house like?”

“Canopy Trailer Park. Last one on the left,” he said, as if giving me directions.

“How did you meet my mother?”

“Ice rink after hockey practice.”

“You played ice hockey?”

“Kicked off the team. For weed.”

I didn’t expect this blunt honesty. I didn’t really know that I’d had any expectations. In his picture, he was smiling—and silent, of course. Is that what I’d extrapolated, creating an idea of his entire personality as happy and quiet—from a photo? “What was my mother like?” I asked.

“Shy. Pretty.” His face didn’t soften as I’d expect it might.

After a quick back-and-forth like this, he’d stop answering questions. He’d lift his face to the sun and close his eyes. Done.

He could change clothes, I noticed. The button-down was gone. He wore black t-shirts with rock bands that I didn’t recognize and tour dates from when he was young. He drank from a mug that had NO HABLA BULLSHIT written on it—one I’d never seen before. And, shortly after that, he learned how to create hologram meals through the program. They appeared on the dining-room table—roasts and pork chops and potato salad and pies. He would devour them in greedy silence and yet still seemed hungry.

He spent more and more time outside, rarely coming in.

I had a desk set up in the corner of my bedroom. I was teaching only two courses that semester and was working on a book. I’d write notes and pore over documents and then move to the window where I had a view of my father. He liked the birds at the feeder. He watched them intently.

Then, one night, I saw him walking in a rectangle, pacing it out like he was measuring something. He’d look up at the night sky as if for navigation. He put four sticks in the ground and in the far corner of the staked-out rectangle, he lied down, curled to his side, and went to sleep.

As a historiographer, I write a lot about historians. What would one say about the people who brought back those they loved—or hated or needed something from or wanted to destroy or apologize to or be granted forgiveness from . . . ? Would the historians see people like me as a complex narrative? Would they see us as weak?

I saw myself as weak. When I stood in the same room with my father, I felt needy and lost.

We don’t last . . .

What did that mean? Was my father going to abandon me again?

If he did, would I be injured by it—or relieved?

One night, we had a fight.

It was dusk. I’d asked as many questions as I could and then he shut down on me. But this time he didn’t close his eyes. We were sitting in our lawn chairs. The four sticks were in the ground. The grass in the place where he slept was worn down. He looked at me. “Just ask it.”

“Ask what?”

“You brought me back so you could blame me.” He was agitated.

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“It is.”

“How do you know?”

He stood up and walked over to one of the sticks. “You’re not the only one who chose me for this program, you know.”

“What?”

“Tina,” he said. “And Lizzy. And one of the twins.”

“What are you saying? Who are Tina and Lizzy and the twins?” But I remembered the names. They were his wives. Tina had the twins. It was strange—like getting a refurbished second-hand computer and finding someone else’s old files on it. I suddenly wondered what happened between all of them.

“You think you’re the only damage done?” He looked at me squarely.

“Damage?” I said. “I’m not damage.”

“Then what are you?”

Was this a rhetorical question?

“What are you?” he said again, louder.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“You can’t even ask me the question,” he said.

I got up and walked to the house. The sliding door was heavy and a little off its track so I had to pull hard.

“If you aren’t damage, then what are you?”

I slammed the sliding door shut.

Later that night, I woke up. It was around two a.m. I couldn’t fall back to sleep. Was I the damage he’d done? Was I damage? What did Tina and Lizzy and one of the twins do with him?

What was the question I should be asking? He knew it but I didn’t. Was it—how did you write the note, tuck it in my car seat, and walk out that door?

Maybe it was.

I walked to the window. Instead of four stakes in the ground, there was a partial, see-through rendering of a trailer. It existed faintly, like an etching. I could see my father in the corner, but his tall, bulky body was lying on a bed in a very small bedroom, clothes piled around him and on the floor, drawers open.

The grass around the trailer was dead.

What the hell?

I couldn’t find my bathrobe but there was a chill in the air so I put on a puffy coat over my pajamas. Barefoot. The grass was wet with dew.

“Dad?”

He didn’t stir.

But there was this growling noise and then a high-pitched yap. And through the hazy rendering of the trailer, I saw the little rat terrier emerge from the covers and glare at me from the edge of the bed. It was wire-haired, black with a some white splotches. “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m not going to bother you.”

I walked back in through the sliding door and watched the trailer become more dense. It took on details—wood steps, worn siding, rust and dents. It felt so real. Like the truest and saddest thing I’d ever seen.

I didn’t see my father for days.

After a week, I knocked on the thin trailer door. It rattled against the frame. “Are you okay in there?”

The dog barked.

“Do you hear me? Can I come in? Do you need help?”

It was quiet. Then the dog made sad whimpering sounds.

“Not yet,” my father said. “No, no. Not yet.”

A few days after that, I found the note. It sat on the dining-room table.

It was a list written in a messy scrawl, written by someone on edge.

Meds in bathroom

Clothes, shoes

Trailer insurance info—in the kitchen drawer

wallet

lock box—near fishing gear

The dog—the dog!!!

It was a list of things . . . to pick up? But not at a store, of course. I knew where the dog was—in the trailer. Was this a list of things to get out of the trailer? Had my father left, again, and was he telling me things that needed to be . . . saved? Meds, whose meds? His wallet?

It didn’t matter. I was going in for the dog. If he left, someone needed to take care of the rat terrier.

I walked out to the back yard. The trailer sat diagonally—under some constellation, I presumed. I walked to the door again and knocked hard. “Are you in there?” I knocked again. “I’m coming in!”

But I didn’t. I backed away from the trailer. I looked at the bare dirt that used to be lush grass. And snow appeared, as if an afterthought. Crusty snow, mottled with dirt. Snow capping the roof of the trailer.

What were your parents like?

Messy. Strange.

Violent.

The snow spread. It covered what had been the dirt patch around the trailer.

Blood in it. A dense clump. And a pink trail.

One of the windows was open. The screen ripped and flapping in the breeze.

Someone on edge—my father or not my father at all—wrote the note. Wallet. A man? A man couldn’t come into this trailer to get the wallet himself.

Messy. Strange. Violent.

My father’s mother died young. Thirty-three.

I cuffed my jeans.

The small trailer. The wet blood. The cats’ bloody paw prints on the counter.

All of their stuff. Coiled, the nowhere-to-go of it.

Especially muffled in snow.

The holster on the carpet.

My father wasn’t there. The list of things-to-get was shaking in my hand.

Where was the dog? The dog.

“Little lady! You okay in there?”

Where did the neighbor come from? Who rendered him?

I put the note in my pocket. I picked up a bag and collected clothes—for a twelve year old boy.

My father. Where was he?

I looked for the things on the list. I threw the bag of clothes to the neighbor, a pair of boots.

And the dog, hiding in the corner of the bed where my father would sleep. “Come here, little fucker. Let’s get out of here together.” My cinched-up throat, a blur of tears.

“Do you get it now?”

I was holding the dog. I was looking at my father, a boy.

“This is why I’m the way I am. This.”

I loved him.

I pulled the note out of my pocket. “Did someone give this to you? Were you the one sent back into the trailer after . . . ”

He nodded.

“They shouldn’t have asked that of you.”

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said.

“It’s where I have to be,” he said.

“You should come with me. I’ll take care of you. I’ll help you. Let’s go. We have to go.”

“Ask the question.”

“What?” The dog was so small, the size of a newborn.

“Ask the question.”

“I don’t know the question!”

“Yes you do. Ask it!” His eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. He’d been crying.

“Is it . . . is it . . . how you did it? How’d you write that note and leave?”

“No,” he said. “That’s not it.”

“That’s right. It’s not about that moment, that night. That one decision.”

“It never was.”

“It’s how you did it every day after that.”

“You’re getting closer.”

I was crying now. I held the dog against my chest. “It’s how you could keep not coming back.”

“This,” he said. “This here. This taught me that if you feel too much love . . . ” His voice cut out. He was crying.

“You’ll have it taken from you?”

Chin to chest, he nodded.

“Your mother,” I said.

His eyes darted around the trailer like he saw her everywhere. “I loved her so much.”

“And you loved me.”

“Of course.”

“How much?” This was the real question. I could tell by the way his eyes brightened—a sudden flare.

This was his answer, the one he’d been wanting to give. “Too much.”

He reached out for the dog and I gave it to him. The dog licked his chin, salty from crying.

“Do you want to stay?” I said.

“I need to stay,” he said. “For a while.”

And he did.

It’s been like this for many years. He did last. He continues to. My father will live inside the house for a while, with me and my daughter, who’s now four years old and full of why-why-why? (This is my attempt to figure it out myself—why, why, why?) He’s a good grandfather when he can be one. What he has to do is keep making the decision to come back to us, and I have to keep making the decision to let him in.

He still gets restless, drawn away from us again. He’ll start sleeping in the yard. The sticks go in—four corners of the rectangle. And soon enough, the trailer is back. I hear the dog yapping. There’s snow.

He doesn’t need me to go after him anymore.

The snow—with its splotches of blood—eventually melts.

Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling and World Fantasy Award-winning author. His novels and almost one hundred stories have been translated into nineteen different languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and Astounding Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio.

The Plastic People

Tobias S. Buckell

Rhea found the feral child on the edge of the garbage park on the last day of the group’s vacation. Garrison, passed out from drinking the better part of a bottle of hundred-year-old Islay Scotch, had dropped a cigar onto the edge of the canvas tent and set it all on fire.

“Damn it, Garrison!” Agunye shouted as personal air quality alarms blared. “You and your fucking retro addictions.”

There’d been scrambling and shouting among the five old friends as they tumbled out into the fetid, methane-rich air outside.

“Go easy. It isn’t something he can do back upstairs.” Susi stumbled out of her own tent with a fire extinguisher.

Everyone coughed and spat as she blew the fire out in a cloud of chemical powder.

“Don’t defend him,” Agunye snapped.

“Ten years!” Garrison shouted, clutching the almost empty bottle triumphantly. His heavy boots crunched in the ground, knocking styrofoam chunks into the air. “And I still love you all!”

“That’s the last bottle,” Agunye said, anger suddenly as banked as the tent fire.

“On this world,” Garrison said.

“Ever. The last bottle of Islay anyone will ever have,” Agunye said, and snatched it from Garrison.

Rhea listened to the bickering with half an ear as the orange glow of the fire faded away, as she’d been sure she had seen something skitter past the shadows on the edge of the camp.

“Something’s over there,” Rhea whispered to Susi. “By the fridge.”

London had been listening to them. She pointed in the direction Rhea indicated and snapped her fingers. The night lit up, and two drones dropped out of the air.

“Was using them for dance lights,” London muttered. “But . . . ”

Trash rattled and slid down the pile as the intruder scuttled away from the stunningly bright light. Rhea shielded her eyes and tried to follow along as the drones ducked and weaved around the compacted hills of old Earth debris.

“Cornered it,” London said triumphantly.

“Is it a bear?” Garrison asked blearily. “It’s a bear, right?”

“There are no bears, idiot,” Susi said.

“They’re extinct,” London said.

Rhea clambered one of the unsteady trash hills they’d parked the tents between.

“I see it,” she said.

It was a little boy, streaked in grease and mud, ribs visible as the drone lights played over him. His wide, dark eyes stared fearfully at her as he tried to hide behind a cracked porcelain tub.

“Oh my,” London said, clambering up behind Rhea. “The poor little thing.”

“Does he live here?” Susi asked, disgusted. “How?”

“We just spent three days,” Garrison said. “It’s not that bad.”

“Idiot,” Susi said. “It’s a shit hole. It’s miles and miles of trash. It reeks. Everywhere I step there’s old world crap.”

“I agree. While it was fun to see what the old world was like—” Agunye threw the last bottle of Islay off into the dark. It shattered against something invisible out there. “—I think maybe it’s time to call it. Let’s go home.”

“I’m tired of the gravity,” Susi agreed. “It’s oppressive.”

“We can’t leave the child here in the trash!” Rhea protested.

Garrison groaned. “Oh, come on. That’s what it’s like down here. You know this.”

They’d flown down into the heart of the dump for their mini-reunion. Partying in an exotic location would make an incredible story.

“All the termites down here can survive just fine without our help. They love living in places like this,” Susi said. “Don’t think you’re doing it any favors.”

“Living here must be a hell.”

“It’s a hell they chose to make,” Garrison said. “This is all theirs. They made it. They know how to live in it.”

Rhea clambered her way over rusted-out heaps and winced when something jabbed through her boots into her skin. She’d had all her shots, though. A prerequisite to coming down.

“Hey there,” she said softly to the scared child. His hair was matted and clumped. He was so covered in muck that he almost blended into the night.

She held out a candy bar in her right hand.

The child snatched it from her, shredding the plastic wrapping as he ripped into it with jagged teeth.

“What’s your name?”

The child just stared at her.

Rhea held out her hand. “Would you like to come with us?”

He scuttled back from her, and right into Agunye’s arms. He’d circled around and snuck up from behind.

The child wailed and screamed, but he was a small creature, and Agunye tucked him under an armpit with a quick smile. “Shall we go?”

Everyone agreed it was time to end the party, and with Rhea placated, the reunion trickled back into the shuttle for the trip home.

Susi strapped into the pilot’s seat and activated a return sequence. The main engines lit up and scattered all their camping equipment off to mingle with the rest of the trash park as the silvered ship thundered into the sky with the feral child screaming all the way up to orbit.

Rhea tried to give him a chocolate bar, but he ate the wrapper and bar, pointed teeth ripping into the whole package.

Then puked it up all over the cabin.

“You’re cleaning that up,” Susi shouted as Rhea tried not to throw up herself.

Scrubbing the mangy child clean took five domestic assistants an hour. It fought free of the butler’s first attempt, and he’d called in the chef and three clean team professionals to get the kid into the tub they washed the dogs in.

Mighty Tim, Gonzo, and Ophelia, the three poodles usually the ones unlucky enough to get hauled up into the plastic tub in the middle of the mudroom off by the kitchens, barked and ran around in the middle of all the chaos, making the most of the fun.

“He’s a wiry one,” the butler observed. “Stronger than you’d think.”

“It’s all that full gravity,” the chef said, drying herself off.

Rhea watched the chaos unfold on a tablet, patching into the house video feed while enjoying a calming soak in the marble-trimmed “upstairs” bathroom attached to her unit as she scrubbed away the stink of the old world and half-digested candy bar.

The gold-leafed floor-to-ceiling windows in front of the bathtub framed the stars beyond. A stunning view, when she stopped to think about it. Mostly she found that it kept entrancing her personal assistant, so Rhea usually kept the window darkened.

On one of the other orbital cities, Rhea spent the night with a man who had his whole bathroom floor transparent. You could look down on the mother planet slowly passing by underneath you every minute while taking a shit.

Her view won for class, his was the one everyone talked about at the party.

Rhea stood up and toweled herself off. Candy, her P.A., had a selection of evening gowns waiting in her room. The one with microblades that could produce enough lift to waft around her legs at a pre-programmed height got the nod.

Then it was off down the hall to mother’s dining room, where she was fussing over the layout.

“Why is there an extra setting?” Alize demanded, hovering over the table as the chef directed set up.

“It’s for the child we found,” Rhea explained.

Her mother looked utterly perplexed, so Rhea showed her a picture of the site and one of the child, screaming as they rocketed back up to orbit.

“It’s a feral,” Rhea said. “Living in the garbage dump we went to.”

“The dump?” Alize looked horrified. “You went down?”

“Susi piloted, it’s safe.”

“How much did that cost?” Alize’s horror had turned to a vaguely scandalized expression.

Rhea had to think about that a second. “It was Susi. You know her father owns the shipping—”

Recognition flickered across Alize’s face. “That Susi.”

“Exactly.” Most of the founding families knew each other well enough by first name, but mother always struggled with the names of Rhea’s friends and which kid matched to which parents. They were just a blur of little people in and out of the house to her.

Of course, the house staff knew Rhea’s cohort by name. They’d served them enough dinners and requests over the years.

“Bring the child in,” Rhea ordered, and then, to her mother, “you wouldn’t believe the squalor we found the poor thing in.”

“Well, it is the old world,” Alize said. “There’s a reason we left. Look at what they do to it. It’s barely inhabitable.”

“It’s hardly a child’s fault it was born to it.”

“I’ve been saying for years we should just put birth control in all the medicine we ship down there from the factories.”

“Don’t be so gauche.” Rhea rolled her eyes.

“You always tried to rescue strays. Remember that little kitten you found over by the garment factory?”

Mittens.

Rhea clenched her jaw. “You had it put down.”

“I told you, sweetie, the cats have gotten out of hand in the greenways. They’re killing everything and throwing the ecology nets off-kilter. We keep having to pull species out of storage to repopulate the gardens—Oh God, it’s here.”

The little boy stood at the servant’s doorway, two domestic assistants behind him with hands on his shoulder. They’d cleaned all the dirt off him. He was pale, almost sickly so, and so skinny that his shirt and trousers flopped baggily around him. One of the domestic assistants had brushed out his long, stringy hair and braided it.

“Oh, look at how nicely we cleaned him up,” Rhea said.

“You’re supposed to return a baby bird to the nest,” Alize whispered to Rhea as she sat down. “Doesn’t this feral have parents?”

Rhea caught her breath. She hadn’t thought about parents. She’d just seen a near-starving child and acted. “Not good ones, if he was living in a dump.”

“It stays in your quarters,” Alize huffed. “I don’t want it anywhere near my Rembrandts, or the silver, and never, ever, in my rooms.”

“Come on, little one,” Rhea waved at the child. “Come sit with us. Let’s eat.”

He approached, poor thing, so tentatively. Much like the kitten Alize mentioned, nervous about trusting the outstretched hand.

Unlike Mittens, the child pulled out a chair and sat down as instructed.

“Does it speak?” Alize asked the domestic assistants.

“It screams, Ms. Rhea.”

Rhea patted the child’s hand, and he flinched.

“Don’t be like that,” Rhea said. “We rescued you! Everything’s going to be better now!”

The child whimpered.

Rhea looked out over the first course being set out and frowned. “Let’s get you something so magical it’ll cheer you right up. Something you would never have experienced in that nasty dump.”

Ice cream.

Now that was the ticket.

Rhea ordered it delivered, with chocolate sauce drizzled across the top.

“There we are,” she said, pushing the bowl over. “Try this.”

The child bared teeth.

“Good God, they’re filed to a point!” Alize shuddered.

Rhea scooped a spoonful of ice cream and held it up. “Try it.”

She took a chilly bite and smiled at him.

He nibbled at the spoon when she moved it back over, persuaded by her enjoyment. He shuddered as his tongue hit cold, smiled, then ate the rest of the bite. Soon he had his face in the bowl, licking it clean.

“That’s a boy,” Rhea said.

He sampled more food, but right when Alize and Rhea started on their Kobe beef, he clutched his stomach and looked at them with an almost comical confused look.

And then threw up all over the dinner table.

Alize stood up, threw her napkin down at the mess, and declared “I’m going to go visit Lars at Lunar North. Call me when you come to your senses.”

The domestic assistants swooped in to clean up the mess and the boy. Rhea, in a funk, retired to her room to brood over what had gone wrong.

She’d started this with the best of intentions, but it wasn’t going to plan now. Her mother had her judgy face on, the domestic assistants looked annoyed, and she could hear the child screaming and fussing away from somewhere deeper inside the family estate.

Hell, she still didn’t even know the child’s name.

One of the engineering staff came back in with the boy. “We weren’t sure where you wanted him to stay?”

Before Rhea could say anything, the child ran toward the window in the back of the living room.

“Earth,” he said, pressing against the thick glass.

His large brown eyes filled with tears.

“He can speak,” Rhea said. “Thank goodness.”

She’d started to worry that maybe the ferals back down on the planet had started to lose the capacity to speak. But that didn’t make any sense, as they all purchased medicines, weapons, and other supplies from many of the family businesses that still did trade below them. She assumed you had to be able to speak to do that.

“Earth,” the child said.

“Back to that nasty dump?” Rhea shook her head. “Look around you. Look at everything I can give you. I rescued you.”

The wealthy had left Earth long ago. Moved manufacturing to orbit. Moved all their wealth up. Even scraped off all the good soil so they could grow whatever they wanted in orbit.

Some people felt they had abandoned the Earth, or turned their backs on its suffering. That only the very rich could afford to get to orbit, and they’d walked away from their responsibility to be stewards. It was the ancestors of the wealthy who had done so much damage on their way to being rich.

For Rhea’s family, it was mainly held that if one really wanted to work hard enough, anyone could get into space. Those left behind had simply not applied themselves. This child’s ancestors had not applied themselves, but Rhea had rescued it.

The least the child could do was show some gratitude.

Instead, he wiped snot from his nose and sniffled at the window until Rhea’s patience broke. The only word the child seemed to know was “Earth.”

She left the estate for a walk to clear her mind and meet up with Agunye for some actual conversation.

Erewhon Orbital’s carefully landscaped gardens curved up until they met the ceiling, a transparent metal that let you look in toward the center of the orbital, where the heavy infrastructure and docks all clustered around a needle-shaped hub. The ring shape of the orbital let it spin, and the insides of the hoop dripped with greenery that teams of biota specialists worked overtime to keep in balance. Getting a forest to stay alive against cosmic rays, occasional pressure losses from punctures, and the gyrations of a life support system closed in so tight that problems cascaded around in dizzying complexities.

Rhea had studied systems management for a whole, agonizing three months, idly toying with the idea of becoming part of the eco-system management team on one of the orbitals.

But five minutes near a sewer processing plant deep in the bowels of Erewhon had her change her mind.

She’d joined her father’s team of orbit arbitrage specialists, flipping futures contracts based on complicated hohmann transfers and cargo manifests throughout cislunar space. A much more dependable income stream.

Not that she needed much. The family endowment, created back when her great grandfather lived on Earth and decided to start building orbitals as a lark with the extra billions lying around, would always take care of her.

You had to do something, or life became awfully boring quickly enough.

Agunye met her in the scent garden, running his hands over lilacs and breathing them in with a smile.

“Hung over, or still drunk?”

“Hi.”

“Hello to you,” Rhea said, stopping by a striking clump of mini cedar trees.

“No, I am high.” Agunye took a deep breath.

“Come on, Agunye, really? After a retreat like the one we had?”

Agunye smiled and joined her by the cedars. “Just a small buzz. Take the edge off. Susi still mad at you?”

Susi wouldn’t speak, or return messages, right now. “She’ll get over it in a week.”

“That little creature threw up everywhere.” Agunye picked up a stick and scratched at it. The smell of cedar filled the air between them. “Then I threw up. It was a horror movie in there. It’ll take more than a week.”

Rhea sighed. “Maybe I need to send her an apology.”

“Ah, there you go. Something decadent and not easy to find anywhere on Erewhon.” Agunye took out a lighter and ceremoniously handed it to her.

“I’ll have to have my people think of something,” Rhea said, flicking it off and on. It would be a good thing to set her personal assistant to. She hadn’t spoken to him since she’d stuck him researching equipment for the trip that caused this whole mess.

“That’s the spirit. It’s the personal thought that counts,” Agunye said. “That should help her forget all the vomit in her hair.”

He looked pointedly over at the cedars.

“The child’s still throwing up,” Rhea confessed. “It’s pissing me off. I try to do the right thing, and it all goes wrong. It’s the story of my life, Agunye. Everything is always a struggle.”

Rhea held the lighter up to one of the branches in front of them. The flame flickered as it scorched the bark, and they both patiently waited for it to catch and quicken.

“You know,” Agunye said thoughtfully as the tree began to burn. “You might need to get checked over.”

“Mmm?” Rhea stepped back as the flames leapt higher.

“A doctor. You didn’t take the child through customs, like they have to,” he nodded at the grounds crew respectfully approaching with extinguishers. Agunye held up a hand, so they stopped twenty feet away and waited.

“Oh shit,” Rhea said.

“We could all have been exposed to some exotic Earth bug,” Agunye said. “I’d get yourself checked up or you might be the one vomiting everywhere.”

“We had our booster shots.”

“Nevertheless . . . ”

The smell of burning cedar made her mouth water. Rhea made an appointment to have a doctor come in tomorrow, and she left the gardens to go have dinner with Agunye. A floating restaurant with a liquid menu nestled into, of all places, the docks at the center of Erewhon.

“What do you think the grounds crew would do without us?” Agunye wondered later, as they hung in the air near an old wooden deck taken from some famous once-sunken ship and sucked at galactic sworls of soup carefully deconstructed in the air between them.

Rhea poked a dumpling with a finger and watched it wobble its way toward Agunye’s nose. He dipped his head at the last second to bite at it, but it tumbled away from his chin.

“They wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for us,” Rhea said. “We’d have to send them away.”

“Where? We’re an orbital.”

“It’s not my job to think about those things,” Rhea protested, and splashed broth droplets at him.

The doctor came much later the next day, held up by an accident at the docks or something silly like that, and by then the vomiting kid had been passed from assistant to assistant all through the house and then exiled to one of the pool rooms.

But after a painful blood draw, some checks on his machine, and a few scans, the doctor looked over his glasses to clear her. The scan results on the glasses, full of complex imagery, reflected off his green eyes. “Everything comes in normal, and you had a full complement of booster shots before you left.”

“Thank goodness,” she said.

“But I’m glad you checked in. Can’t be too safe.”

He started to pack up his equipment.

“I’m so relieved,” Rhea said, letting out the breath she’d been holding as she waited for the verdict. “I thought maybe the boy had given me something.”

The doctor turned back, eyebrows raised.

Rhea groaned and rolled her eyes. “No, not that. It’s the child we brought back up with us. He keeps vomiting.”

“Well, maybe I should see him,” the doctor said.

Rhea sighed. “Okay, sure.”

She explained how they found the child as she led the doctor through the hallways to the pool room. The large clear blister that held the pool bulged out beyond Erewhon’s metal hull. If you dove down into it, you could look out along the outside of Erewhon, or down at the Earth. You could swim out into space.

The domestic assistants had put the child in one of the bamboo cabanas around the pool, but he was sitting on the edge of the pool and looking down through it to Earth.

“Home?” he asked. A whole new word since she’d last been around him. Rhea idly wondered if they were, indeed, passing over his home as she looked down through the pool at the blurred landmasses below them.

Rhea took off her diamond-tipped heels and sat with her feet in the water as the doctor ran scans, and then had to fight with the boy for a blood draw.

“He’s malnourished,” was the pronouncement. “And you’ve been feeding him the wrong food.”

“The wrong food?” Rhea frowned. “I don’t understand. We gave him the best food. He ate our table. The house chef prepared the meal.”

The doctor carefully unwrapped a candy bar and handed the wrapper over. The child chewed on it, his sharp teeth shredding it quickly before he swallowed in a noisy gulp.

“He’s modified,” the doctor said, his tone patient and completely polite, yet infuriating somehow. “All the surface folk are, since the turn of the century. There are microbes that eat plastic, those capabilities were grafted onto the human genome. He eats plastic. They had to do that, or they’d all starve. Don’t you remember this from history class?”

History class?

She remembered the Exodus. Her great-grandparents leaving the messy, despoiled Earth behind for the skies and other planets. Boring talks about trans-Lunar independence movements. The old democracies failing on Earth and the great die-offs. She vaguely remembered something about plastic. She should have paid more attention, but Eric had sat next to her in history, and she’d been so distracted.

“I guess I need to call Susi and see if we can put him back down,” Rhea said, finally.

Susi couldn’t do it. Her family had found out she used the ship without clearing it and she was, ha ha, grounded. Nothing Rhea could say about humans being modified to eat trash in order to survive after being left on the surface made a difference. The child was stuck on Erewhon.

Garrison agreed to come over, but he didn’t have anything to offer other than too many attempts to touch her hand, or knee, and get close to her.

“I think, he really needs to get put somewhere where he can eat,” she told Garrison. “It’s not going to be good for him in our house. We don’t have that much plastic, on a house scale.”

No oil in space. Plastics came from plants, and it made more sense to eat plants than waste them on packaging.

But Rhea knew where most of the plastics ended up.

“Come on, Garrison, help me take him to the vats.”

Garrison groaned. But she finally promised him she’d make it up to him afterwards. He was convinced he was going to get laid, but she was really thinking about the bottle of Macallan in the family vault.

Or maybe she’d save the priceless scotch and fool around, sex wouldn’t be a bad way to kill some of her frustrations later.

Garrison helped wrestle the child into a cart, and they drove over to the vats where they pulled him through the airlock.

“It reeks,” Garrison said.

It wasn’t quite the trash parks of Earth, but it was the holding area for acres of Erewhon’s own trash before it got scrunched off into the recycling vats.

“Here you go,” Rhea said. “You can live here now. All the food you need.”

The child looked at her, not getting it.

“Go on!”

It took some convincing, some shouting, and a little subterfuge, but then finally got the boy to settle in between two hill-sized mounds of trash, munching contentedly away on some plastic carry bags.

At the airlock, Rhea took one last look back. “This is where I had to leave Mittens,” she said sadly.

“Mittens?”

“My cat.”

“Oh.”

“I wish . . . ” Rhea trailed off, forming her thoughts. “I wish our families hadn’t been forced to leave Earth and take everything with them. If they’d been allowed to stay, maybe they could have used their resources to help make things better.”

Garrison stared at her. “Who said they were forced?”

Rhea frowned. “My family, that’s—”

He laughed. “We left because we could. Because we’re better, richer, superior.”

Garrison hit the button, and the airlock doors thudded shut, leaving the Earth child alone in their trash.

He tried to take her back to the family house, but she dropped him off at his penthouse, disappointed. Garrison would be on his own for the night, and without the antique scotch.

Rhea sat on the edge of the pool, looking down at the Earth passing by on each rotation of the orbital’s great wheel, until it was time for dinner.

By then her vague sense of guilt, or responsibility, had passed.

You couldn’t save every broken stray, even with the best intentions, she decided.

Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora Award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, British Fantasy, and Crawford Awards. She is an Assistant Editor at the short fiction audio venue Escape Pod and the author of the Beneath the Rising series of novels, as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues, and she can be found on her website at premeemohamed.com.

All That Burns Unseen

Premee Mohamed

The plane had no pilot. Vaughn, who had wandered into the cockpit to find someone to talk to, found herself more startled than shocked by this—after all, her boss had said about half the flights going up to the fires were self-flown—but there had certainly been a pilot when she’d boarded. He must have disembarked in Cold Lake, where they had stopped so briefly that Vaughn hadn’t even bothered unfastening her seat belt. Either way, the Hercules was now, undeniably, flying itself. Vaughn gingerly sat in the co-pilot seat and peered out the window.

At last she could see what the windowless cargo bay had hidden: the land crawling past with the illusory dawdle caused by altitude and parallax. No flames, which she thought was odd. Only smoke, a solid granitic wall as if a mountain had broken loose from its bedrock and gone for a stroll. Somewhere the burning went on though, the great burning, trees gone and grass gone and the land itself on fire. It had smoldered all the snowless winter and now, in February, it had burst back to life. During her lifetime every season had become fire season.

I saw him. I know I did. I saw his face in the amber light, alone, in his old chair next to the wall. The first wall that would burn.

Vaughn kneaded the gel armrests. She hadn’t slept in about 30 hours but she felt electrically, almost painfully awake, refusing to honor this sensation with its true name of fear, telling herself only that she was nervous to be back in the field.

As the Hercules landed she imagined a gray bird descending through the gray smoke, becoming invisible. Although she saw no smoke enter, the thick odor of burning peat filled the cabin before touchdown. Sharp taste of whiskey in her mouth.

“You got ID on you?”

“Vaughn Collins.” She held out her tablet with the code ready to scan. “I’m with the province. Air monitoring division.”

“Mm,” said the airstrip supervisor, whom Vaughn had already clocked as a kind of one-woman unwelcome committee. Her grunt expressed something like Oh Christ, so now the government shows up, and it’s some goddamn kid. “You got all your gear in there?”

She jerked a thumb at the ancient pickup—once white, now matte gray—that Vaughn had painstakingly backed out of its tight squeeze inside the Hercules. The agency decal on the door boasted three parallel scratches as if it had been clawed by an animal rather than bumping into the concrete wall of the work parkade.

“Yeah. It’s just portables,” Vaughn said. “The permanent stations are down but we need data about the air in town. PM 2.5, SOX, NOX.”

“Just you?”

“Just me.”

The woman signed her work permit while Vaughn looked around, her eyes watering over the respirator. Everything was blanketed in ash, so the charred black landscape she had expected looked as if it had snowed instead. The LED monitor attached to the Operations Centre tent behind her said it was 36.9 C. Exactly body temperature: hers from this morning, actually, the number she’d entered into her Solitary Work app.

Vaughn retreated to her truck and drove off the airstrip, heart pounding. She felt as if she’d been hit on the head hard enough to split her brain in two: half of it wondering where to test and set up her monitors, half desperate to wrench the steering wheel to one side and off-road to the house.

Ash rained down slowly in flakes as large as a paperback book. That she had expected; planes couldn’t land at the regular airport because they choked on gulped-in ash, but the oil company airstrips outside of town were still usable. The government, she’d been instructed to tell them, is very grateful for the assistance.

Although as far as Vaughn knew, she was the only government person up here; and because travel to the wildfire emergency area was strictly forbidden to nonofficial personnel, she’d had to beg without seeming as if she was begging.

Had her boss been suspicious? It was hard to say. Vaughn thought about the older woman’s mild-mannered, expressionless face on the monitor. Here was someone you wouldn’t want to play poker with: “Well, it is true that most of the local permanent stations aren’t reporting.” No inflection, no value judgment at all, nothing to work with.

“The power might be out,” Vaughn had replied, forcing herself to pause, not to sound too eager. “I can try to get them back online. And then we’ll have good regional data . . . and the last big fires, you know, we did send up a team in the MAML to get data from inside the town. For emergency personnel. You know how it is.”

“That’s true.”

You know how it is: lawsuits from paramedics and firefighters who had gotten too much smoke, countersuits from government and respirator companies, counter-countersuits, articles everywhere, shouty opinion pieces. You know, Vaughn wanted to say. Just in terms of optics. Better if we have our own monitoring data. And yes of course all the private firefighters and security guys have air monitors of their own. But our data will be public, transparent, reliable. Government still means something to some people. Send me up there. Show that we can be trusted.

She hadn’t said: I had a dream. I dreamt my mother abandoned my father to the flames. I haven’t heard from them for three days. Their names aren’t on the list of evacuees. No one knows where they are. “Collateral damage of wildfires,” everyone says. “These things happen,” everyone says. We have reached the limit of what remote sensing can tell us and I can prove nothing but I have to go.

Vaughn paused at a crossroad, then cautiously rolled on. Few vehicles were moving through the gloom; the streetlights and traffic lights were out, and the buildings still standing were dark under their cloaks of ash. She thought of old movies filmed with this same yellowy filter over the lens: apocalypse, end of the world. You knew it was the end of the world because of the light. Every now and then someone’s high-viz stripes glared out and vanished at once, like some bizarre modern cryptid consisting of a two-dimensional X. Police cars cruised at walking pace down the center of the roads, all their lights off.

As Vaughn turned and headed for the residential neighborhoods, the randomness of the fires became more apparent. A row of 10 houses, eight burned; a row of 12, two burned. It seemed no one had been able, or had bothered, to fight the fires within town. With the reservoirs, rivers, and lakes empty for a decade, the glaciers all gone, municipalities had resorted, like the rest of the world, to firefighting powders and foams. Supposedly they were less dangerous than they used to be. Vaughn still didn’t like the idea of breathing the stuff in.

Huge splotches of orange and red marked a few houses, showing which ones probably had their own systems. They were becoming more common after the last bad year; residents couldn’t store enough water, but tons of chemicals didn’t take up much space. It was like anything else, Vaughn figured. You couldn’t buy your way out of natural disasters, and the climate was everyone’s climate, but a certain level of safety and comfort had a price tag.

All the cafes and restaurants were closed, even the gas stations, but a charity had set up a big red tent marked with white reflective crosses on the next block. She left the truck idling and joined the short lineup of exhausted, ash-covered emergency personnel filing past the white folding tables inside. As she was about to leave with her sandwich and water, someone called, “Miss. Miss!”

“Yes?”

“That’ll be $15.80!”

“Oh. Uh. Sorry.” She fumbled out her phone and tapped it on the man’s paypad. “Um, can I get a receipt?”

He huffed impatiently as he printed it out and threw it at her rather than handing it to her. She pocketed it and put her head down, scuttling back to the truck.

Warm egg salad. Lovely.

The city had been told to evacuate; the oil companies had flown out their employees. But some people wouldn’t leave and some people couldn’t leave. Most of those still here, the beneficiaries of her purported monitoring data, were trying to keep a sliver of society functioning, getting folks to the hospital, urging people to buy a place on the charter buses still ferrying residents out of town. But technically you couldn’t make anyone leave.

Slowly the wasteland around her grew flatter, becoming a horizon of leveled houses, twisted fences, compressed cars. She remembered the videos she’d watched last night: The fire looked like a tornado because it was a tornado, a pillar of flames spiraling through the trees, tearing open the firebreak trenches like wet paper. She felt sick, thought about pulling over, kept going.

Maybe there was no house to go back to. Maybe just a burnt spot on the ground.

Her phone pinged, startling her: a message from her boss. Checking in! Your plane texted me to say you landed. Everything ok?

She said, “New message. Everything fine. Checking status of permanent stations. Send to Sabrina.” Her voice was shaking, throat already raw.

Figures the plane would be a nark. Cars had been driving themselves since she was a kid, but only planes were allowed enough intelligence to talk to people and decide what to say. Her truck had been upgraded to almost that bright, supposedly. But she’d thought of that before leaving.

At the first station, she parked, put on her flashers, then got out a roll of aluminum duct tape and a folding stepladder. Her breath hissed and roared in the respirator as she climbed onto the roof of the truck and covered the protruding knob of what she sometimes thought of as its conscience (locator beacon, messaging center, speed governor) with thick layers of the tape, paying particular attention to the transmitter. Only when the red locator dot disappeared from her tablet did she climb back inside and turn onto the back roads leading to her parents’ house.

She thought: I cannot take it back now. I cannot say it was a mistake. What am I doing?

Farther from town the trees had burned again and again and again over the decades, and the scientists had been wrong about one thing; they had said that burned places would not burn again for a long time, because a landscape where most of the fuel had been used up was much harder to reignite. They would act as natural firebreaks, protecting what lay beyond them. But between the heat and the tornadoes and the drought and the collapsed jet stream, fire just did whatever it wanted these days.

Vaughn drove through a Tunguska-like clutter of angled trunks and vertical charcoal, sweating despite the A/C in the truck. When she had been growing up, only a handful of people had lived out here. That had changed as people declared themselves “sick” of living in close proximity to their neighbors in the city, and bought huge acreages to live in splendid solitude. Dozens of cars hunkered on the sides of the road, their molten hubcaps drooling brightly into the ash.

Couldn’t be helped, Vaughn thought as she edged past, occasionally nudging the cars aside with the truck. When the fires came you had to evacuate yourself; no one would come to get you. Sometimes that meant leaving with a full tank of gas. Sometimes it meant leaving with fumes, and getting as far as you could before hoping someone could pick you up. You couldn’t even avoid it with electric cars; if your car didn’t get the emergency signal unlocking extra range to let you evacuate, you’d be stuck there with all the gas-burning plebes you mocked the day before. And your hubcaps would be melted too.

She thought of her mother’s car, her pride and joy, an imported Range Rover with white leather upholstery. Thought of it steering her mother around town as grandly as any limousine while she painted her nails in the back or chatted to her friends. You saw it coming a mile away with that flawless, rainbowy-black finish.

Not on the road. Okay. Okay. Okayokayokay. Good.

She turned off the pavement and onto the gravel road leading to the house, and immediately had to turn on the wipers as ash began to rain down faster than the truck’s motion could blow it off. The air monitors rattled faintly in the back in their padded rubber cages.

The speedometer’s needle wobbled, then dipped below double digits as she rolled through the darkness, crunching over burnt wood and broken windshields. Mom’s Range Rover would manage this easily. So she got out, right? She put Dad in there and got out.

Vaughn reached inside herself experimentally, tentatively, looking for anger, and found only fear again. I lied to get here. I’ll lose my job. Something happened. I’m too late. Why am I such a failure? Let me check my phone again.

Her windshield exploded, and adrenaline stretched out the moment so long between the sight and the sound that she merely watched it happen, paralyzed with disbelief, before she slammed on the brakes and the blam! of the impact caught up to her.

For several seconds she didn’t move, staring at the shattered glass in its cradle of film. Perfect bull’s-eye. Right in the middle. Something dark on the white hood, sliding off.

She got out cautiously and put on her respirator, one hand outstretched in the hot gloom. An owl? A raven, overcome by the heat and smoke?

Only a firefighting drone, sprawled and humming as if dazed in the middle of the gravel path. It was far bigger than she expected, though admittedly she’d never seen one up close, only watched them fly on the news. Nearly 6 feet across from wingtip to wingtip, hex-printed carbon fiber, its center bulging with its load of chemicals.

Vaughn started to drag its surprisingly light carcass off the path, then hesitated as it began to beep. Wiping sweat off her forehead, she used her damp wrist to clean the ash off the drone’s tiny readout screen, exposing a string of garbled numbers and letters. “Hit your head, huh?” she murmured, and put it back down.

A moment later she picked it back up again and turned it over. Her tiny fire extinguisher in the truck was meant to deal with engine fires, nothing bigger; this drone contained enough chemicals, potentially, to shower an entire house. (But I don’t need that. Right? The house is fine. Fine.)

The drone’s beeps grew in volume and urgency as she scrabbled at the locked hatch, and finally she gave up and stuffed the whole thing into the back of the truck, pressing it against the canopy to fit. Deal with it later. Consider it a potential asset.

Through the bars of the burned trees she glimpsed oddly unsettling things, like dioramas built inside a jail cell: a house entirely untouched, still surrounded by green grass and topiaries clipped into mythological beasts, everything covered in firefighting foam. A security guard stepped out from behind an orange unicorn and gestured vaguely at her with his gun: Keep moving. No looting. Another row of houses, all three burned flush to the ground with slender white dust-devils of ash dancing between them like ghosts.

“Prepared to deploy,” the drone said from the back.

“No you’re not,” Vaughn said automatically, not glancing at the rear-view mirror. “You fell right out of the sky.”

The drone fell silent. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and fluttered the gas, then slowed down again. Not enough water up here to fight fires. Those days were gone. Glaciers a memory. No lakes, no ponds, no bogs. No snow most years. Any rain that did come couldn’t soak into the bare, hydrophobic soil; ash-slides and mud-slides wiped out whole neighborhoods and that wasn’t water you could use either. I need your chemicals. Hand them over. She said nothing. It felt a bit highwayman-ish.

“Run diagnostic?”

“Sure,” she said, concentrating on the road.

“ . . . Cannot initiate diagnostic. Run diagnostic?”

Vaughn sighed and pulled over again, but took her time drinking some water and eating a granola bar from her handbag before climbing awkwardly into the back and clicking on the overhead light. The label above the drone’s readout panel claimed it was an Odonata M-1278. She tried looking up troubleshooting guides on her phone, then tablet, but neither was getting signal.

“I mostly review monitoring reports, you know,” she said, scrolling through the commands on the drone’s screen. “I barely even remembered how to calibrate the portables. How do I get your chemicals out?”

“Dampenex™ canister currently at 95 percent. No refill needed.”

She put a screwdriver into the hatch’s lever and leaned, then stopped upon hearing the carbon-fiber creak. No good breaking it and getting a faceful of the stuff. “Uh . . . open canister access.”

“No refill needed.”

“Open access for diagnostic purposes.”

“No refill needed.”

She snarled with frustration. Just about everything had a mind of its own now, machine learning paired with remote operation, but nothing was infallible under extreme conditions. Not humans either, she conceded, but the main thing was that in the end humans could show cunning against its foes and machines simply could not. And nothing about an emergency was black and white enough to train them.

She didn’t realize she was crying until she crested the hill and saw what remained of the house, and then she had to park at the top, dry her face, then roll cautiously down to the gravel driveway at the bottom of the lawn. The heat had not been cut a whit by the smoke; she began to sweat as she opened the truck canopy and got out her toolkit and flashlight.

Here, to her surprise, she could hear the fire, a distant crackle of burning peat like rapidly boiling water. There was another, stranger sound, mechanical, repetitive; she paused and cocked her head, listening over the noise of her breath in the mask. Scraping and thudding. One of the rich neighbors must have an automated system for digging firebreak trenches around the house. Smart: then you didn’t have to blanket the whole thing with chemicals. It wouldn’t do you any good if another firestorm started, but if it was moving along the ground, your house might be spared. Of course, that steered it right at your neighbors, but you also had to count on them not having enough money to take you to court and prove it.

“Diagnostic complete,” said the drone. She ignored it and headed to the house, her boots silent in the inch of fresh ash. The numerical keypad had burned away, leaving an exposed square of circuitry, but the deadbolt below it let her inside.

Door still locked, she noted numbly as she entered. Okay. And no tire tracks, nothing outside. Like freshly fallen snow. So they got out before that ash fell. Right? Logic makes sense here, right?

The living room was familiar and unfamiliar, the structure the same, but entirely redecorated. Her mother’s work no doubt; she had always hated her family’s penchant for trinkets and photos and posters and books, which were all filed under “clutter” in her mental catalog.

Vaughn swept the flashlight back and forth: yes, the charred armchair next to the burnt wall, which she could have just walked through if she had seen it. Crisped flowers in a blackened vase. Everything covered in ash.

Kitchen, dining area, both bedrooms: nothing. Terrible to find something (a corpse? just bones?) and just as bad not to. Absently, she flicked light switches as she came in, forgetting that the power was out. I told them to get solar panels. Everybody has them now. There’s blackouts and brownouts all the time, even in the city. I’d get them if I could. My building won’t allow them. Vaughn could hear the conversation in her head as clear as anything, including her mother’s distress: “But they’re so ugly, baby.”

Well, they would have gone up with the roof, which was more than half gone; the dim orange light pouring through it rendered everything shadowless, reduced her depth perception so that she stumbled into walls and corners. “Mom?” she called, muffled. “Dad?”

Silence. No. Not silence. Something . . . outside? Inside? “Dad?”

“What?”

Vaughn yelped. Then she turned and looked at the basement door.

“ ’Course I yelled for ’em.” He sipped from her bottle of water and frowned. “This tastes like plastic. Did you leave this in the car?”

“No, I just got it in town,” Vaughn said. “So you heard them? The search and rescue team? And they couldn’t hear you?”

“Don’t try that tone of voice on me. You think I’m lying?”

“Of course not, Dad.”

He drank again, and Vaughn managed to grab the half-full bottle just as his grip slackened around it. It was cooler in the basement than upstairs, but Vaughn was still sweating; her father, meanwhile, had asked her for a blanket as soon as she came in, and had wrapped it around his filthy pajamas.

She had been so shocked all she could do was give it to him before saying anything else. Her mother called once a week or so, giving no hint that he had deteriorated so much or so suddenly. And he had been fine at Christmas.

Vaughn waited for him to talk, to at least express surprise at her unexpected appearance. He said nothing and took back the water bottle, swirling it around before drinking again.

“What happened?” Vaughn finally said, looking around the little room, which contained no more than a bookshelf and the rickety twin bed on which they both sat. “I’ve been calling and calling. Where’s Mom?”

“Well, she went over to her friend’s place. You know the one. With the horses.”

“I . . . what? When was this?”

He glared defiantly at her. “Monday.”

“She went to Cordelia’s place on Monday?”

“Got a problem with your ears? That’s what I said.”

“But the fires . . . ”

“Watch party, she said. They got that solarium and they were going to watch the, you know—” He waved a hand vaguely. “The planes and those little robots and stuff dropping foam on the fires.”

“I . . . and then she just never came back?”

“I told her to go. She was tired of stayin’ in the house with me,” he said shortly. “Kia’s in the garage with a full tank. Told her if it got hairy I’d just head out and we’d meet up at one of the evac centers. But I came down here to get a book and . . . just started having some trouble walking. Is all.”

Vaughn wound her fingers together and stared at the tangle, her ears ringing. A mini-stroke? Something else? She almost said And you didn’t have your phone with you? but of course he didn’t; he hated his phone and never charged it. She focused on her boots, the crisp prints of the ash she’d tracked onto the pale-blue carpet, and on his sock feet with the skinny hairless shins visible where his pajama pants had rucked up. This is my fault. I should have made them move in with me. I should have  . . .

He lifted the water bottle and paused. She waited for him to say Well, I’m glad you showed up, anyway. He said, “What’s that noise?”

Even leaning on her arm he couldn’t manage the stairs, so Vaughn eventually ignored his yelling and put him in a fireman’s carry, clutching the banister and pausing after each step. All she could think of was how she never could have done this in the old days. But he was so diminished, he was like a charred tree, hollow on the inside. She knew she should be grateful instead of horrified. Maybe both. Both is okay, right?

Outside the wind had picked up. Flames peeked above the tops of the already burned trees and the air was hot enough to sting her hands and the exposed strip of skin above her respirator; she glanced behind herself, terrified, to see that her father had pulled one of her mother’s silk scarves off its hanger in the hall closet and was slowly tying it around his face. His blue eyes, sunken in lined pits of dehydration, seemed very far away, as if for a long time he had been talking himself into facing something like this alone, as if he had written his own eulogy, and Vaughn told herself to stop thinking that and found that she couldn’t. They were living lives at only one remove from hers but it was enough of a remove for this to happen.

She took a deep breath, making her filter cartridges wheeze. The truck was barely 50 yards away, but she needed to catch her breath before carrying him again. Above the black streaks of the treetops something groaned and wailed—the noise they’d heard from the basement. And now it stumbled into view, exactly like a giant for a moment: head, torso, swinging arms.

No, of course not. Only a pillar of dirty-looking reddish flames, striding clumsily toward the truck, kicking up the ash in great clouds. Vaughn stared, mouth open. There was nothing to burn at its feet; it seemed to carry its own sun deep within, holding it jealous and close. What need had it of wood, of peat, of any earthly fuel? It laughed, it blazed with disdain.

But the truck was fuel. The truck would burn, the tires would explode. Poor silenced thing, and she had taped over its mouth before it could call for help. It didn’t matter. There was no signal, the satellite phone was in the glove compartment, more fool she, and no one would come anyway. They were not like the Cordelias of the world, with a number you could call anytime to say Come protect my house or Come drive me to safety.

For a long time, too long, she watched the vortex stumble closer to the truck, spitting bits of burning shrapnel all the way to where she stood in the doorway, tiny flecks of pain against her skin. The truck pinged and cracked as it approached. No way out. “Back inside,” she said over her shoulder. “Can you walk? We have to get back down to the basement.”

“I—”

His words vanished in a different roar; Vaughn ducked from the stooping thing, protecting her face with one forearm and flinging the other back at her father, which he adroitly avoided.

But it was the drone, buzzing low on rotors making an awful grinding noise that Vaughn felt certain had grounded it in the first place. It banked past the house like a swallow, swept over the truck, disappeared for a few heart-stopping seconds into the pillar of flames, then burst free, trailing what at first seemed a cloud of perfect darkness, like a plane with a dying engine, but Vaughn suddenly realized was its firefighting powder. It wasn’t spraying through the nozzle in a broad sheet as it was designed to—it was coughing out in spurts through the nozzle and around the hatch—but it was spraying all the same.

The drone circled the truck, spattered a broad delta of the stuff across the driveway, and vanished again into the trees; Vaughn cried out without realizing, or knowing what she had said, then spun and grabbed her father’s stick-thin arm. They both winced. “Now,” she gasped. “Quick. Hold your breath.”

“What was that? Friend of yours?”

“Some guy I picked up. Come on!” She shoved her shoulder under his armpit, knocking her mask askew, and dragged him over the fresh slurry of powder, ash, and gravel. The light was tall, golden, menacing, clear enough now to cast shadows of the burned forest around them. For only a moment, as she shoved him into the passenger side, did she search for the shadow of the drone. But it was lost in the general confusion, and as they fled she told herself she had not abandoned it, only left it to do its job, what it was meant to do, and surely soon (in minutes!) it would fly away home just as she would.

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, I don’t accept your resignation.” Sabrina didn’t frown or smile; Vaughn debated doing one or the other, but her face wasn’t obeying instructions at the moment. They stared at each other for so long that if the signal indicator in the bottom of the screen hadn’t remained green, Vaughn would have assumed that one or the other had lost their connection.

“Where are you, anyway?”

“Oh, um.” She should have been able to look that up on Vaughn’s Solitary Work app. Vaughn blushed, hoping the camera didn’t pick it up; she had confessed to everything except muzzling her truck. “I’m at the Best Western. The power’s back up and they have a backup generator. But I—”

“Listen.” Sabrina sighed. “Right now, you and I are the only ones who know about this. Yes, you did travel on false pretenses, but I’m the one who approved it. Furthermore, you did set up all the portables, and you got three of the five stations online again. Upshot is, your letter here says ‘fraudulent expenses,’ and we’ve just discussed that the work was done, so that’s not correct.”

Vaughn blinked. “So . . . no, then.”

“So no. I always knew when you were out of your depth you’d suddenly figure out how to swim. Although I don’t know that I’ll be sending you to the field again anytime soon.” Sabrina smiled at last, a fleeting but warm twitch. “Your voice sounds terrible, incidentally. Weren’t you wearing your PPE?”

“I was, I swear.”

“Where’s your dad?”

“I put him on one of the army flights back to Edmonton. Practically had to duct-tape him into his seat, but they left a couple of hours ago.”

“And did you get ahold of your m—” Sabrina hesitated, perhaps seeing something in Vaughn’s face.

Vaughn flinched minutely, even though she knew the question was inevitable. In her anger and frustration and shame she had even considered lying about it—a little white lie, hurting no one. Now she found herself unwilling, almost for the first time in her life, to cover for her mother’s neglect. “I did, yeah,” Vaughn said. “She was at a friend’s house. She figured Dad would be all right at home and then the fire took out the phones and cut them off from each other.” Not quite true; not quite a lie. She took a deep, shaky breath.

“Well. I’m glad to hear everyone is okay. Let’s talk tomorrow.”

“Thanks.”

Vaughn hung up and stared at herself in the darkened window for a while, back-lit by the lights in the hotel room. She’d eaten, showered, and changed, but she still felt vaguely inhuman: more like an animal going through the motions. She had not confessed the dream to anyone; she realized she was afraid to go to bed in case she dreamt something even worse. When she closed her eyes she saw the bloody streak of the twisting flames reflected in the sides of her truck, bright against the dull ochre of the light.

She put her boots on and went outside, where the tight lid of the day’s heat had lifted an inch or two; the wind, too, had shifted away from town. As she watched, the streetlights in the parking lot flickered once, twice, then went out. A faint collective groan went up from the hotel bar next to the lobby, which cheered her for some reason. Life goes on, hockey goes on. How do you live through this except by focusing on what’s in front of you and ignoring everything else?

After a moment, she realized that what she had taken to be a shadow on her truck canopy was something else: manta-ray silhouette, dusted with ashes, its branding scorched away. Vaughn laughed, startling herself with the noise, and walked out to the parking lot. “So you did make it. How did you find me?”

“ . . . Refill needed.”

“Yeah, I bet.” She ran a hand over the drone, looking for a power button, finding nothing. It must be buried inside the panel menus somewhere, along with information on where to return it. She felt strangely light, as if something had just been lifted from her. “I’ll get you a refill. In the meantime, can you . . . like . . . not draw attention to yourself overnight? Can you sleep?”

“I can sleep.”

She patted it again, feeling silly, but when she returned to her room it was with a sense of safety or even protection that she hadn’t felt in a long time. For a while she sat in her pajamas, weighing her phone in her hands as if waiting for something. Then she turned it off, unplugged the alarm clock, and went to bed.

Ray Nayler is the author of the critically acclaimed, Locus Award-winning novel The Mountain in the Sea, published in the US by MCDxFSG and in the UK by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. It was a best book of the year at Amazon and Slate, and a finalist for the Nebula Award and for the LA Times Book Awards’ Ray Bradbury Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction. Ray’s critically acclaimed stories first saw print in Asimov’s, and have since also found homes in Clarkesworld, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Vice, and Nightmare, as well as in many “Best of” anthologies, including The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

A Russian speaker, Ray lived and worked outside the United States in the Foreign Service and the Peace Corps for nearly twenty years. Ray is currently a diplomatic fellow and visiting scholar at the George Washington University’s Institute for International Science and Technology Policy. His novella The Tusks of Extinction was published in January 2024 by Tordotcom Publishing.

Mender of Sparrows

Ray Nayler

Himmet watched the birds rolling in the dirt. Little brown-and-white balls, chirping and hopping in the mosque courtyard. There were pits worn in the earth from the sparrows taking their dust baths here, near a bench in the shade of a tilted mulberry tree.

A child ran past. The birds startled and flapped off into the branches of the mulberry.

All but one of them. It tilted its head, as if looking at Himmet, then fell over onto its side. Its legs jerked twice, and it was still.

Himmet knelt down by the bird and scooped it up into the palm of his hand. It was breathing slowly and evenly, its eyes closed as if asleep.

Himmet went to his bicycle and retrieved a shoebox secured to the rear cargo rack by bungee cords. Inside, the box was lined with soft cotton. He placed the sparrow into it. He watched it for a moment, lying there in the cotton, breathing steadily. Then he closed the lid, which had several lines of air holes punched into it, strapped the box back onto the cargo rack, got on the bicycle, and rode out of the courtyard.

“Can you do anything?” Himmet stood near the stainless-steel table, looking down at the bird. It was still lying on its side, as if asleep, its breathing steady.

Sezgin walked over to the sink and turned on the tap, running the water over long-fingered hands. Himmet watched the veterinarian’s careful ritual of handwashing. The veterinary office was tiny, little more than a shopfront, likely once a fruit stand, and the back room where once the crates and fruit had been locked up for the night when the shutters were pulled down. But the android Sezgin, tall as they were, fit neatly into the space, moving inside it with immaculate calm.

“I will not lie to you,” Sezgin said. “I think the bird is dying. But I will keep her overnight, and run some tests. Come tomorrow—one never knows.”

“Dying? Of what?”

“There are so many things birds can die of, Himmet. Come tomorrow.”

Outside, a blind orange stray cat lay warming its belly in an autumn sunbeam.

Himmet pedaled his bicycle through the streets near the sea wall, where every third house was a wooden ruin, walls bowing slowly down to meet the road.

It was a poor neighborhood, like most of those zoned to allow androids. Himmet rode through a gap in the sea wall out onto the bicycle path along the Marble Sea. He pedaled in and out of the shadow of the Tekray, its trains streaking past, headed out into the suburbs of Istanbul Protectorate or back to the center of the city. There was wind off the water, strong enough to push on Himmet’s body like a sail. The surface of the sea was stone gray, the bases of the waves filled with shadow. Over their foam tips seagulls hovered, angling wings against the wind, hunting.

It was early still. Himmet felt the hollow dread of a whole day before him. He would not be able to stop himself from thinking. He would not go home: he would go to the park, where there might be someone for a game of backgammon. Or he would go back to the mosque and sweep the courtyard. Feed the birds again. Anything.

He imagined the bright light falling into his kitchen, slanting across the pitted plastic of the tabletop. And at any time, of course, there could be a knock at his door. They had found him so many times. They never stopped finding him to ask him how it felt. They came less often now. But they did not stop coming.

“Hello?” The basic terminal issued to him by his case officer had a small screen, and a tendency to vignette and lose color resolution. Callers emerged on it like ancient photographs come to life. Sunset now—he was in the park, on a bench, distributing a bag of day-old bread to a group of sparrows here. One of them had an artificial foot of carbon fiber struts. Miniature talons of hardened glass. Not one of Sezgin’s models.

There are others in this city like us. Others taking care. One rarely meets them, but they are there.

The sparrows battled over the scraps of bread, each with its own tactics.

On the screen was Sezgin. The bird was dead, then.

“We need to talk,” Sezgin said.

“I can come by the shop to take her away.”

There was a little place in a corner of the mosque courtyard where he buried the ones he could not save. So small: a turned spadeful of earth was enough to cover them.

“No,” Sezgin said. “Come to this address. I am sending it to you now.”

It was a pocket park on the Golden Horn, sandwiched between a maritime museum and a shabby little dockyard. While Himmet waited for Sezgin he watched the ferries come in to dock at Hasköy, the black water turning to white in the churn of their engines.

In the dockyard, several old autoroustabouts loaded a barge. The darkening air was filled with the sound of their complaining hydraulics. Seagulls landed on the barge and on the blocky shoulders of the roustabouts and took off again, switching places and configurations, playing some sort of game with one another that Himmet felt he almost understood the rules to.

Himmet did not hear Sezgin approach.

The android was holding the shoebox.

“Tell me again where you found her.”

“She is dead,” Himmet said.

“No. Tell me where you found her.”

Sezgin spoke to Himmet in a tone Himmet had not heard in a long time. It was the tone Sezgin had used when they were in Belgrade together, after the pacification. It was a military tone. Extracting information. Sezgin had been a teacher before the war. This tone was something like the tone of a teacher, asking for the answer to a math problem.

“I found it in the mosque courtyard, where I feed the sparrows.”

So the bird was not dead. She could be fixed.

Things can be fixed.

“Who saw you take her?”

Himmet thought. Who had been there? The boy who had run past. A few worshippers perhaps. He was unused, anymore, to noticing people. They were just blurs. And yet, he realized, he knew that there had been eleven sparrows taking dust baths in the dirt.

“Perhaps someone could have seen, but I do not think so. I am often there.”

“You are there every morning.”

“Yes.”

“You must never return to that mosque.”

“Why?”

Himmet remembered the warm, fragile weight of the sparrow in his hand. They were always so much lighter than one expected. Even though he had held them many times. So much lighter, and more fragile. They were of the air and carried weightlessness within them.

What would he do, then, with his mornings?

“Tell me what is happening.”

“It is better you do not know.”

“I can come by the shop.”

“The shop is closed. If someone comes to you, meet me on the ferry leaving Hasköy at 6:23 in the morning. Be sure you are not followed.”

“I can call you.”

Sezgin looked at him. Himmet saw a look on that face he had not seen for a long time. He did not like to think of the last time he had seen it.

“You cannot call me. I have destroyed my terminal.”

“Why? This makes no sense. She is . . . a bird.”

“No,” Sezgin said. “This is not a bird, Himmet. You have found a hole in the world.”

Himmet walked his bicycle home through the winding streets of his neighborhood. In the dark of his apartment building’s stairwell, he chained the bicycle to a support beam under the stairs. His apartment was on the third floor. There was a man leaning against the wall next to his door, in the dark. He was wearing a pair of Parker Philips overlay glasses, and in the dark they glowed dimly. A violet cascade of text streamed down their lenses, painting the face of the man with a shifting light.

He turned as Himmet came up the stairs. For a moment, Himmet saw several pictures of himself in the lenses of the glasses: Sequences of facial recognition, a map of his face’s topography. He thought, for a moment, of running—but to where?

“Hello, Himmet. I’ve been waiting for you for a while now. May I come in?”

Himmet shrugged, moving past the man and turning the key in the door. Fight-or-flight reflexes at maximum. He closed his eyes a moment. Not now. Later, perhaps.

“I don’t get many visitors.”

In the light of the entryway, the man’s stylish metallic grin had the green patina of a bronze statue, decades in the rain. His fashionably out of date horn-rim Parker Philips overlay glasses were playing something back to him, reflected in his pupils.

The entryway was tight. As Himmet moved past to take off his jacket, he swore he saw a sparrow flit across the man’s irises.

“I’m surprised. You’re somewhat well known. You must get the occasional reporter, now and then, checking in.”

“Not too many. People forget. The world moves on.”

“That it does.”

“Some tea?”

“I won’t say no.”

In the tiny kitchen, Himmet flipped on the electrosamovar. Every day Himmet came home when it got too dark to see without augmentation anymore. He did not like this lonely time, but there was little to do with it. The evening cast from his terminal helped, but did not drive the feeling away entirely.

The man had already seated himself at the table.

“I didn’t get your name.”

“Tarik. I’m a researcher at the Institute. A department head now, in fact. I keep forgetting that promotion.”

“Everything is fine,” Himmet said. “No complaints. I . . . ”

“I didn’t come to check up on that. Not my department, in fact. I came about a bird.”

“A bird.” Himmet repeated.

“Yes. You like birds. At the mosque where you spend your mornings, you have a reputation for taking care of them. Sparrows, pigeons, seagulls—you feed them and care for the injured. Is that not so?”

“Yes,” Himmet set the tea down in front of Tarik, and then settled down to the table himself.

“Kind of you.”

“I am not unique. There are a number of people who do this.”

“Can I ask you—this morning—did you find a bird that was hurt?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. Not this morning.” There were no cameras in the courtyard of the mosque. At least—should not be. Not in the holy places. This was law.

A hole in the world.

“And yet you are on camera coming into a veterinarian’s shop with a shoebox you carry to care for wounded birds.”

“I was returning the box. I borrowed it several days before.”

“From Sezgin.”

Himmet nodded. “That’s correct.”

“The android you fought together with in Belgrade.”

“Mostly we did not fight. We . . . ” Himmet stopped himself. What was it they had done? Nothing he wanted to talk about with this man. “Yes. The android I fought with in Belgrade.”

“The one who . . . ”

“Listen—what is this about? A sparrow?”

“Who said anything about a sparrow?” Tarik lifted the glass of tea to his green grin.

“There are only sparrows in the mosque courtyard,” Himmet said. “A hooded crow, sometimes. But a crow would be too big for that shoebox. Sezgin and I were intelligence in Belgrade. You know this. I am no fool. People don’t show up here from the Institute to check up on me—I come to them. Just say what you are looking for.”

“I am looking for a sparrow.”

“There are several veterinarians in the area.”

“But only one who closed early. Do you think Sezgin left the store with that same shoebox?”

“If so, perhaps he has gone to retrieve a wounded bird in need of assistance. Sezgin says the shop is not a charity—but it is. All veterinarians run charities, in this city. Their hearts are too big.”

“Technically,” Tarik said, “Sezgin doesn’t have a heart.”

The ferry left Hasköy at 6:23, as scheduled. There was no one aboard but a man in a rumpled blazer and old-style Turkish trousers, carrying a collapsed fishing pole and a box of tackle. The engines hummed quietly. Himmet could feel the low vibration of the screws turning the water of the Golden Horn through his whole body.

Sympathetic vibration, he thought. The movement of everything, pushing on everything else. The screws of the ferry on the water, the water on the screws, then all of that carried up through the carapace of the ferry, into the bodies of its passengers.

The man was rooting through his tackle box. Himmet heard something clatter to the deck of the boat, near him. It sounded like a dropped coin.

He looked down. Yes—there. Near his seat a small, fly-like insect. Then the man was standing over him, grinding the thing into the deck with his boot. When he lifted it away, Himmet could see the gleam of its crushed components.

“Follow me when I get off at Fener. Stay about fifty meters back.”

The ferry swung into its turn, coming into the dock. The man was already headed down to the lower deck.

Himmet followed the man up the hill. The red castle of the old Greek Orthodox college loomed over everything. Several of the windows on its ground floor were boarded over. Almost in its shadow, the man turned and went through an arched iron door in an ancient wall, leaving it gapped behind him. Himmet counted to ten before going through.

Inside, a small courtyard. A low Byzantine church, plastered a faded red. When had Himmet last been inside a church? But the man was not in the courtyard, and a bent old woman in a headscarf turned a key in the lock of the courtyard door, securing it behind Himmet. Without looking at him, she went into the church.

Himmet followed.

Sezgin was there, and another android. Their backs were to him as he came in.

It was strange, Himmet thought, how even from the back, and from some distance, one could tell an android from a human. They were supposed to be identical to humans, but something gave them away: something about the way they held themselves. Or perhaps it ran deeper than that—an instinct buried in the brain?

The other android bent and kissed the glass of an icon of the Virgin Mary. An old icon, so old it looked burned. Or maybe it had been burned. The android made the sign of the cross and then walked into a side chapel. Sezgin glanced at Himmet, and followed.

In the chapel, the sweet smell of incense in the church was cloying. But mixed in with it was the pleasant smell of the androids, almost indescribable—like fresh bread, tinged with electricity.

“This is Kamuran.”

“Where is she? The bird?”

Kamuran was as alike to Sezgin as a sibling. “She is safe, for now. I have passed her to another.”

“Tell me. What is happening? All of this . . . ” he gestured around him at the small space, covered with frescoes, low and claustrophobic as a cave. “This cloak and dagger stuff cannot be about a sparrow. I feel like we are back in Belgrade, Sezgin.”

“Are you familiar with the Qatari ancestor falcons?” Kamuran asked. “Human consciousnesses, downloaded into birds for their afterlives?”

“I know of them,” Himmet said. “Or the rumor of them.”

“The rumors are true,” Sezgin said.

“So, she is not a sparrow. She is a . . . person. This is what you are telling me? Someone has downloaded a person into this bird?”

“Yes,” Kamuran said.

“Such a thing is illegal, in the Protectorate. The Connectome Codex forbids the download of humans into other forms. All blanks must be human.”

“But it has been done, as you well know.”

“Yes—but at the least, the form must be human . . . ” He stammered, corrected himself, “Humanlike. If not, you would have to alter the connectome—distort it to the new form. The neural pathways to musculature . . . It would be an abomination.”

“But it is already done by the Qataris.”

“Yes—a fetish accomplished by the ultrarich, well outside the borders of the Protectorate. But not here. There are ethical concerns. The alterations would distort the mind itself.” He paused. “Now I see why they want her back. The man, Tarik, who came to see me . . . the Institute is in violation of the Codex. She must have gotten away from them.”

“Yes,” Sezgin said. “She got away from them. And the insertion of a human connectome into this form is a violation. There would be an inquiry. A fine.”

None of which was enough to justify Sezgin destroying his terminal. Or the three of them standing there, in the tiny chapel, whispering. He looked at Sezgin. No. This wasn’t about an illegal download.

A hole in the world.

“Tell me.”

“When you download a person’s connectome—a living person’s connectome—into a blank—temporarily, this is—the person’s body remains in a comatose state, correct?” Sezgin said.

“Correct.”

“And to retrieve them, what do you have to do?”

“I’m not an expert. But as I understand it, you have to fire a pattern in the reticular activating system of the original body. It recalls the consciousness, pulls it back from the receptor pattern to its original.”

“And if the person is dead—a connectome stored in a highrise?”

“It doesn’t matter: it’s the same. You have to fire the pattern in the stored connectome’s RAS. The simulation of the RAS, which is identical, but not in realspace. Pattern is pattern, real or virtual—the shape is the same. You have to fire the RAS, call them back from their blank. It’s the law of bilocation: a consciousness is unique. It can’t be in two places at once.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not fully understood. It is simply a law. There is a uniqueness to the individual. Something past both materiality and pattern . . . ” he trailed off.

The androids’ faces appeared nearly identical in the claustrophobic grotto of the chapel. Like the saints frescoed on the walls, each much the same as another.

Kamuran and Sezgin were looking at him the way a parent looks at a child, Himmet thought, the first time it learns about death.

“She is a copy,” Himmet said.

Sezgin nodded.

“And she is awake,” Himmet continued. “She woke up.”

“Yes,” Kamuran said.

“And somewhere, her original is also awake.”

A hole in the world.

It felt as if the entire weight of the church was coming down on him, then . . . a surge of devastation. Invisible, but crushing as stone. His knees gave way, and Sezgin caught him.

“Five times a day.” He heard himself saying it, as if from far away. This limp form in Sezgin’s arms. “I have been praying. Ever since that day. In thanks. But it isn’t true . . . I wasn’t saved.”

“No,” Sezgin said. “You were saved. You are yourself.”

“No. I died. If there is no connection . . . if we can simply be copied . . . ”

There was a knock on the chapel door. A double rap, and then a third knock, after a pause.

“We have been discovered,” Kamuran said. “We must leave. Now.”

The androids left by a back entrance, but Himmet was not taken out. Instead, the woman in the headscarf led him to a stone in the floor, which she pried up with a bar. The first few rungs of a ladder were visible, leading downward into darkness.

“Do not be afraid. It is a small space, and dark, but it is perfectly safe. Many have hidden here, over the centuries. Iconoclasts from the Byzantine clergy, Orthodox bishops from the invading Latin armies, runaway Janissaries, Christians and Muslims alike from the Sultan’s anger. Even a slave from a rich man’s harem, many centuries ago. There have been others, more recently. We are not yet ready to speak of them—to add them to history. But be assured there is a long tradition. Now you are a part of that.”

He did not know how long he was down there. It may have been one hour, or it may have been three. It felt like a day, in the lightless, cold chamber that smelled of the incense of centuries of church services. The darkness scented with the ghost-ash of a thousand thousand thuribles swung over the stone above him.

And, he thought, of the fear of those who had been here shivering in fear before him—though that was impossible. But what was the difference between an imagined smell and a real one? Or between a dead person’s fear and the fear of the living?

No sound came from above. When the woman finally lifted the stone, he had difficulty getting up the ladder. His right arm had gone completely numb, and his left leg would not move properly. The woman looked into his face.

“You have been afraid, down there. The right side of your face—it is paralyzed.”

“Tell them . . . ” Himmet’s voice was slurred, “Tell them I went to the clinic. I . . . have to. And if I do not go, it will be more suspicious.”

“I will tell them,” the woman said.

Himmet limped from the church, dragging his paralyzed leg into a bright, cool afternoon.

He had been in the dark for seven hours.

“Have you been avoiding stress?”

Himmet wanted to burst into hysterical laughter. “I have tried. But in life, stress often comes to you.”

Dr. Kahraman stood in front of a full-length projection of Himmet’s neural connectome. She sighed and scribbled something on the palimpscreen in front of her.

“For other people, Himmet, stress is a thing that can lead to long-term negative effects: heart disease, a general decrease in life span, that kind of thing. For you, stress is something that can kill you tomorrow—or leave you permanently paralyzed.”

Himmet noticed that Dr. Kahraman had stopped dying her hair. It was thickly seeded with grey now. But somehow it did not make her look older. Cut short, it made her look . . . fierce. Authoritative. She was a military veteran like him. The grey in her cropped hair accented that.

“You were doing so well. We haven’t had any major connectivity issues in—what—five years? Just some numbness. But this is a disaster. What have you been doing with yourself?”

Himmet shook his head. He could not feel the paralyzed side of his face. “I don’t look for trouble. I just try to live quietly.”

“Well,” Dr. Kahraman bent down and pointed a penlight into Himmet’s eyes, one after the other. “Try harder. Meditation might help. You are unique, Himmet. And your problems are unique. It is hard to work on someone who has no precedent.”

“Is the damage . . . permanent?”

“No, I don’t think so. The core, your mind itself, is not damaged. What we are looking at is connectivity errors in the neural connections in the limbs and face. I’m going to be able to treat those. But it’s good you came in when you did, before this could go further. You’ll be here at the clinic for a few days. No terminal, strict bed rest.”

“Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“Have you looked into getting me out of this body? Getting me a real blank? If it’s a matter of funding, I have been thinking of crowdsourcing. People still know the story. I could do a public campaign.”

“The stress of that would leave you bedridden for certain. It could do worse than that. But that isn’t the real issue. The real issue is—no, we can’t get you out. There was never any system designed for transfer from an android to another form. There was never any intent to upload them—in fact, it was a failsafe built in from the start. No replication of their connectomes means they remain in the forms we originally built for them. And within those limits. But for you, that means you remain unique. The only human consciousness downloaded into an android.”

“A one-way ticket.”

“It was the best they could do at the time, Himmet. In a field hospital with no blanks available. You were lucky this still inactive android was there at the advance post. If they had already mapped it, there would have been nowhere to put you. It saved your life, Himmet.”

“Did it?”

“We’re here talking, aren’t we? What more proof do you need?”

The clinic had a small garden. It was a strange place—a courtyard between high buildings, so narrow it seemed almost like a well. Very little sunlight penetrated. The courtyard was always dim and cool. Everything was covered in moss and lichen, dead nettle, Japanese forest grass, and digitalis. At the center was a brick pool in which lived a few fat, sleepy catfish.

Every morning, Dr. Kahraman brought a loaf of day-old bread to Himmet and sent him out into the shade.

The sparrows had learned and were waiting on the windowsills of the surrounding buildings. As he approached, they would plop themselves down on the mossy turf and hop into position, ready to scrimmage with one another for the bread.

It was the third day of convalescence now. Himmet could feel most everything in his face. A pins-and-needles sensation remained in his hand and his leg, but that was all: he could move everything well.

He broke the bread up into small pieces, piling them on the waxed paper bag the loaf came in.

He had been alone when he woke up in the hospital after the bombing in Belgrade, fifteen years ago. It was no longer the field hospital—they had transferred him here, to the Institute clinic. Once he was able to move on his own—and that took time, months of convalescence before his connectome fully attached to this body—he began to sit here, on this bench, and feed the birds.

Then, as now, Dr. Kahraman brought a loaf of day-old bread to him every day, and he sat here in the courtyard, feeding the sparrows.

He had never really noticed birds before that. No—that was not correct: he had noticed them, they had always been there, like a background static in the world, but he had not really seen them. He had learned to see them here, in the clinic courtyard—had learned to really watch them. And he had fallen in love with them—especially with these common sparrows, ubiquitous scavengers of the city, more invisible to humans than the pigeon, but everywhere among us.

The rest of the world melted away as he watched them hop, jostle, and battle. He loved how they schemed against one another, fought for position and dominance, teamed up in alliances to bop some fatter, more successful competitor aside—all of it without harming one another. In the end, when the loaf was gone, all had eaten. Some sooner than others, some a bit more—but all were allowed to eat. Their system was not, exactly, competition. It was more like a game: intricate in its rules of dominance and concession, but ultimately forgiving, and even egalitarian.

No harm, in the end, was done.

He was often in great pain when he came into the courtyard. The connections did not all take hold as they should have, and there were procedures Dr. Kahraman had to subject him to. He would have wept, if his new body allowed him to weep. And of course it was not just the physical pain—it was the overwhelming sense of loss. Everything he had been born with—the flesh and bone of his being—had been stripped from him. What was he, now?

On the second week of that early convalescence, Sezgin had come to see him. Sezgin sat next to Himmet and fed the sparrows, not speaking for a good long time. Sezgin was on leave from Belgrade, and in dress uniform—the only clothes in which they would have been allowed to travel freely in the city, to places androids were technically not allowed. Somehow, military service temporarily annulled prejudice—even muted the enforcement of laws. But unevenly: Himmet had heard of an android set on fire in Galata—splashed with gasoline in the street and set ablaze in their immaculate uniform of service to the state.

To some, nothing could redeem them at all.

So this journey of Sezgin’s, to see the friend they had saved, meant something a bit more. It entailed great personal risk, riding the Tekray and negotiating crowds that, at any moment, could turn into a hostile mob.

“I do not know what to tell you,” Sezgin said, “about adapting to this new life you will have. I have never not been what I am. And you are not exactly what we are. But you will look like us, to the world. That will be enough. We are so close to being the same as them, but you should know—every human can sense we are not human from a hundred meters away. It is as if there is something built into them. Some sensory mechanism. There is no hiding our difference. They always know. But this outsideness—it binds us. We are a single family, and you will be one of us now.”

One of us.

He began to notice the damage to the sparrows. Many of their feet were missing toes, and sometimes their legs ended in nothing at all.

On Sezgin’s third visit, Himmet asked, “Do you see that sparrow there? With one foot missing?”

“I see it.”

“Do you think it could be mended?

He had expected Sezgin to make some kind of joke, or to dismiss the idea right away. But for a long time, the android sat in silence. Then they said, “It is a difficult task. It would require a very good prosthetist, and a veterinarian, working together. There would be some expense: each prosthesis would have to be custom built. But it could be done.”

“What do you think it would cost?”

Sezgin named the sum. It was slightly more than half Himmet’s monthly disability pension.

Once he was released from the clinic, Himmet learned he could live very frugally. “Avoiding stress” made life inexpensive. As did his new lack of freedom: androids could not travel outside the boundaries of the Suriçi: they could not set foot, without permission, beyond the land walls of ancient Constantinople and the neighborhood, across the Horn, of Galata. Within this limited space were contained the few thousand androids left, once production of them was outlawed. Soon enough, further zoning limited the neighborhoods they could live in, the places they could shop. They began to live more compactly, opening their shops and renting homes mostly in the neighborhoods along the sea walls, where the peninsula plunged toward the Marble Sea and the Bosporus.

Sezgin opened his veterinary practice not far from where Himmet lived. Like all the androids, Sezgin was soon an expert at whatever trade they chose.

Himmet spent most of his disability pension mending sparrows. He called it mending, not healing. He did not know why. Perhaps because the prostheses could never really replace what was lost. The prostheses were an addition, not a replacement.

Aydin, the android prosthetist who created the new feet and legs for the birds, smiled at this use of the word “mending.”—“Yes, I think of it that way too: I have always compared my art to sashiko, the Japanese art of mending fabric. The intent is not to hide the repair: the intent is to accent the rips and tears of life, and to make something stronger—not a replacement, but something new, worked from the old into greater beauty.”

The limbs Aydin made were, indeed, works of art. But Aydin was killed by a mob in Taksim, who attacked several androids going to mosque and beat them to death with cobblestones pulled up from the street. The attack was caused by an absurd rumor that the androids had knocked a girl on a bicycle down and stolen her purse.

Sezgin took over making the limbs. Sezgin’s limbs were made for utility. Though they lacked Aydin’s flair, they were just as effective—perhaps even more so.

“I do not have the heart,” Sezgin once said, “To try to imitate Aydin’s craftsmanship.”

How strange, that metaphor in the mouth of a being that did not, in fact, have a heart at all. Perhaps, indeed, a heart was not an organ, but a concept.

“Yes, mending is a good word,” Aydin had once said to Himmet. “A very good word. And you, too, have been mended. You are not what you were before: you are different. But all difference is growth. You are more than what you were before. Mending has made you into something singular.”

But now Himmet knew he had not been mended: He had died. This Himmet was not that Himmet, before the bombing. That Himmet’s life had been cut, like a thread. Severed. Forever.

“You have a visitor waiting for you in the courtyard,” Dr. Kahraman told him on the fourth day of his convalescence.

Himmet was nearly better now: the pins-and-needles sensation had subsided completely. He felt like himself again.

For some reason, Himmet thought it would be Sezgin waiting for him. Being back here at the clinic, he had fallen into old states of mind, had almost begun to feel as if he were back there in that time, just after Belgrade.

But of course it could not be Sezgin: that life was gone. Sezgin was on the run . . . Himmet thought of the perfect darkness of the chamber where he had been hidden in the church. Gone underground.

It was Tarik. He sat on the edge of the brick pool, one of his hands nearly elbow-deep in the water. He looked up as Himmet entered the courtyard, viewing Himmet through a violet waterfall of data.

“They won’t let me touch them,” Tarik said. “But I can’t stop myself from trying.” He stood, and shook the water off his hand. “I hear you are feeling better. I hear you had some kind of stress incident. That’s what they called it, I think. Started to come apart at the seams a little.”

“These things happen,” Himmet said.

“I bet they do. Hey—look. I don’t know how I’m supposed to handle this dialogue. Are we still beating around the bush, pretending you haven’t found my bird? Or are we past that? I want to be able to choose my lines, you know?”

“Why did you do it?”

“Oh, good,” Tarik said, “We’re past that. I was hoping that would be the case.”

Tarik looked around the courtyard—at first, Himmet thought the glancing about was idle, but then he saw the scuttling of analytics across the lenses of the overlay glasses. Scanning. Looking to see if anyone might be listening. Tarik finished, and wiped his damp hand on his pants.

“I dabble, you know? Like any good scientist. I can’t stand still. And I had this feeling it could be done. Do you know what a scientist hates most, Himmet?”

“No.”

“Being lied to. I had this nagging suspicion that all of this claptrap about reticular activation, this ineffable uniqueness of the connectome . . . that all of it was a lie. That we were being sold a line. So I decided to do a little experimenting. You know, on the side. Get a bit of lab time, and find out for myself.”

“Chimeras are illegal. The distortions of a human mind trapped in an alien form—in a bird’s form . . . ”

“Ironic, a chimera talking about how it is illegal to make chimeras. You know the institute makes the falcons for the Qataris, right?” Tarik looked at him. “No. You didn’t know. Oh, wow. I forget there is this whole world out there of people who have no idea what is going on. Listen, Himmet—there are laws, and there are laws. I hope I’m not messing up your whole episteme if I tell you the Institute does lots of things that are ‘illegal’—but saves most of them for export.”

“But not this.”

“Not until now.”

“Who is it?”

“Huh?”

“Who did you trap in there?”

“If it matters to you—she’s a woman named Altynai. Kazakh guest worker, died in an accident at a shipyard. But had managed to save up enough money to buy herself a slot in a condominium afterlife. Kind of low-res, a historical reconstruction of a nineteenth-century fishing village on the Black Sea coast. It was owned by a co-op. Badly managed—they went into receivership and my department bought them up. Don’t look at me like that—we didn’t do anything bad to them: we run the whole thing on some microscopic fraction of an Institute server. Much better than pulling the plug, which is what would have happened. I just . . . copied her.”

“So—she’s still in there?”

“Last time I checked she was drinking a cup of salep on a wintry day and wandering out onto the docks to watch the fishers mend their nets. God, how boring. You might as well just be dead.”

“How did you do it?”

“Okay, I don’t want to get into trade secrets—but it turns out there’s a bit of code that keeps you from making two identical connectomes at a time. It’s automatically created during upload and appended, and links back to the RAS of an original body, in the case of a temporary upload, or to the full upload, if the original is deceased. Basically, you just snip it off, and voila. Unlimited copies.”

“But who would they be?” Himmet felt the toes of his left foot going numb. “There has to be someone—an individual—to inhabit the pattern. There has to be . . . ” He stopped, not even sure how he would have finished.

“Ah—a religious type, huh? You think some spirit swoops in and takes up residence in the uniqueness of the connectome pattern? In the rhythms of our nervous system’s electromagnetic fields? Every one of us an infinitely complex set of folds in the Universe, unrepeatable? You still buy that? What do they do, come flapping through the ether on little angel wings? Look, I don’t know who they are—each copy. But what does it matter?” Tarik shrugged. “Who are you?”

Himmet glanced over at a small group of sparrows. They were watching him, waiting for their bread. What he really wanted, very much, was to go back to not knowing any of this.

Himmet is dead.

But I am Himmet, and I remember being Himmet, long before the war. Before any of it. I remember . . . first things. A beach with my father, a rowboat on a shore. A childhood.

“Hey—you’re freaking out. Your face—half of it is going all slack. I think this is really stressful for you. I want to make it easy. You’re going to need a few days here to recover from this conversation—I can tell. I messed things up a bit for you, made more work for Dr. Kahraman. Sorry about that. But once you’re out—I’ll come see you. Forty-eight hours after release. You’ll likely have my sparrow for me then. If not, I’m going to kill all your android friends, one by one. Different things will happen to them—mob attacks, accidents. That kind of thing. I’ll start with the ones you just say hi to in the morning, and work my way inward to Sezgin. I don’t want to do it—but I have a career to think of. A reputation. And like I said—there are laws and there are laws. I don’t think the world is ready for this particular law to be broken, just yet. I’d like to keep my job.”

It was three more days before Dr. Kahraman could repair the damage, swearing to herself under her breath every time she looked at Himmet’s damaged connectome.

“Meditation,” she said to him when he was released. They were standing in the sunshine of the hospital lobby, blades of it falling through the plate glass windows onto the immaculate, anonymous furniture. “Meditation, a positive attitude. Keep feeding the birds. Cherish your friends. Ride your bicycle. Perhaps take up sailing—something low impact. Protect my work.” Then suddenly she hugged him. This was something she had never done before, and when she pulled back, he saw she had tears in her eyes.

She was afraid he was going to die.

But Himmet is already dead.

“The other androids,” Himmet said. “Do you ever check in on them?”

“They are more stable. And the Institute has legally severed contact. But yes. Fridays, at a clinic in Kumkapi. It is a clinic they run for themselves. I come in a consulting role, in the evening.” She smiled. “Mostly just to catch up with old friends.”

The ferry left Hasköy at 6:23, as scheduled. There was nobody on board but a young woman in the grey coveralls of a Tekray maintenance crew, her black hair knotted back with a red kerchief. Seagulls drifted over the white-painted rails, then arced away, over and over again. A game. Once in a while, Himmet would feed seagulls down at the docks. They would eat on the wing, timing a swoop to your toss, synchronizing with you. Their eyes were as unexpressive as glass, but their movements spoke to something there, inside. A playful, conscious being.

The young woman never looked at him, but when the ferry docked at Fener, Himmet followed her. She stopped at a simit cart, bought two, and made her way to a bench on the Horn, near a breakwater of broken concrete blocks and red stone—the slurry of history, keeping the sea from eating away at the land.

When Himmet joined her on the bench, she was breaking the simit up into smaller pieces. Once he was close, he saw that she was no young woman at all.

It was an immaculate job—the make-up, the walk. He never would have known. But up close, she still had the smell of them. Not she, Himmet corrected himself. But the artifice was convincing, had created the gender. Conjured it from nothing, and now he couldn’t think of the android as anything else.

But wasn’t that exactly the same for him? He still thought of himself as “he”—still aligned himself that way, although for fifteen years he had been just as “they” as any other android. What was the content of this feeling that, somehow, he was still a “man”?

“Sezgin says hello,” she said. “The sparrow is in a shoebox—there, in that garbage can, twenty meters from where we are sitting. It is asleep. When Tarik comes to collect it, you are to simply give it to him.”

“How can we do such a thing? Simply return her to him, without knowing what will happen to her?”

“That is for Sezgin to explain.” The android placed the simit in Himmet’s lap, carefully broken into small pieces on its waxed paper sleeve. “Feed the birds a while, retrieve the box, and meet Tarik at the appointed time. Return the bird to him, and end all of this.”

“I can’t do it.”

She pressed his shoulder with a hand. “Meditate. Feed the birds. Do you understand? This burden is not for you. Cherish your friends, and listen to them.”

“How do you . . . ”

“What you need is another hobby. Perhaps you should take up sailing. Something low impact.”

Himmet nodded. “I understand. Not . . . everything. But I will do what you say.”

“Good.” She stood up and walked away.

Two sparrows dropped from a nearby mulberry tree, as if they had rappelled down invisible threads. Then two more. Then a dozen, hopping around his feet.

When he collected the shoebox, he opened the lid a crack. The sparrow slept there, nestled in cotton, its breathing almost imperceptible.

“I’m really glad you made this easy,” Tarik said. “I was ready for a nightmare. Something expensive and sad.” He opened the box and looked in at the sparrow. “Then when you said you had her, I thought maybe you would try to switch birds on me. But you didn’t.”

They were on the roof of Himmet’s apartment building. At some point, someone had constructed a makeshift deck here. Over the years, it had been added to: an ancient Formica table, warped from many seasons. A small collection of mismatched, discarded kitchen chairs, with rust blossoming on the chrome curves of their legs and the plastic turned pastel and flaky by the sun. Someone had planted ivy along the wall. And there were other artifacts—a cement turtle, a vegetable crate full of cracked ceramic pots.

“I would not be able to fight you,” Himmet said. “I am no longer made for fighting. Or for doing much at all.”

Take up sailing, he thought bitterly.

“There’s no need for all of that,” Tarik said. He took his glasses off, and cleaned them with a microfiber cloth. “And anyway, I am not the right villain. All I am trying to do is push the boundaries, Himmet.”

“Himmet is dead.”

Tarik looked at him. “Ah, yes. I remember. The religious problem. That’s what is going to get you in the end—not me. Thinking about theoreticals. Someday they will probably find out humans could live forever—if only they would stop worrying about the things that are not in front of them. About pasts they want to shift around until they make perfect sense. About theoretical futures, branching off forever. If Himmet is dead, who am I talking to?” He placed the overlay glasses back on his face—and they seemed to ask the same question, echoing the query with a series of images of Himmet in shifting checkerboard across the lenses.

“I can’t answer that. I suppose—I suppose you are talking to the thing that people call Himmet. The construct everyone treats as that name.”

Tarik stood up. “That’s all Himmet ever was. That’s all any of us are: a thing people call a name. A construct. Live your life, friend. Be well.”

“Take up sailing,” Himmet said.

Tarik smiled, green and metallic. “I was thinking gardening. This is a nice enough little patch of sun, up on the roof. With some care.”

Himmet stood in the small park on the Golden Horn, between the maritime museum and the shabby dockyard, waiting. He watched the ferries come in and depart again, the black water turning to white, the chaos of gulls.

In the dockyard, the autoroustabouts loaded a barge, their hydraulics complaining. Seagulls landed on their blocky shoulders and took off again, switching places and configurations, playing their games.

“I used to watch them, sometimes, for hours.”

He had not heard her approach. He had been lost in thought—lost in thought, perhaps, for days. At first, it had seemed like a depression he would never pull himself out of. But over the last few days that feeling had faded to a kind of melancholy that was almost pleasant. A loneliness—and then a longing for contact. He had been spending his days on the rooftop, or at the nearby stores, buying soil and seedlings. The sunshine was good for him, perhaps. He felt better in it, with his hands in the earth. And things were beginning to grow. He had set up a bird feeder, and a small concrete bath for them.

She was in the same set of gray coveralls, with the same red handkerchief. At her side were Sezgin, and Kamuran. And then he saw Dr. Kahraman, a few paces behind.

“I did as you said. I gave her back. I had to—to save you all.”

Sezgin nodded. “We know.”

“But I am not sure I can live with it—leaving her there with him, to be subjected to experiments, caged . . . ” He glanced at Dr. Kahraman. “I won’t be able to stop thinking of it.”

“No,” Dr. Kahraman said, “You aren’t the kind of person who can stop thinking of such things.”

“But you should rest easy,” said Kamuran. “She won’t wake up. She can’t.”

“Why not?”

“When Tarik tries to investigate that question, what he will find is a flaw in the connectome. An irresolvable error. It will seem to have come from the duplication. To have emerged in the pattern later—some strange way the Universe keeps us unique, perhaps. A confirmation of the impossibility of two identical beings existing at the same time. I imagine he’ll study it for months.”

“The apparent flaw woven into the pattern,” Sezgin said, “is a real work of art. Kamuran built it. It will keep Tarik busy for some time. And I don’t think he will recognize the incomplete connectome, the fact that it was never functional to begin with. He’ll be too busy trying to crack the new problem he has been presented with, and the mock connectome is too sophisticated to be detected easily.”

“Then she is safe, somewhere.”

The android in the gray coveralls shrugged. “As safe as she can be, in a world like this, where all of us are in danger.”

“Good,” Himmet said. “At least it was not all for nothing.”

“No,” Dr. Kahraman said. “It was not for nothing. But it took many of us to accomplish, working together. As it always does. Luckily, there are enough of us to share the burden. And you, Himmet, helped most of all. I hope you understand that. You look better, by the way. Have you been following my advice?”

“I didn’t take up sailing. Or meditation. But I have been gardening and spending time in the sun. It seems to help.”

“You see,” the android in the coveralls said to Dr. Kahraman, “I told you sailing was a bad idea. Even thinking of getting in one of those boats makes my fingers go numb.”

She smiled at Himmet. “I wouldn’t mind seeing your garden, though.” She put out a hand. “And by the way—we have not been properly introduced. My name is Altynai.”

“Himmet,” he said, taking the hand in his.

Yes. Himmet. That is who I am.

Suzanne Palmer is a multi-Hugo Award-winning author, artist, and linux geek who lives in the woods of western Massachusetts with her kids and too many two- and four-legged critters, including an Irish Wolfhound named Tolkien who hunts down and devours any and all unattended socks.

Falling Off the Edge of the World

Suzanne Palmer

Sunset is beginning, a sweep of red across the sky chasing the blue over the remains of the ship’s stern, dragging darkness behind it like a thick sheet over the day’s face and declaring it done. Stars, such as they are, will come on soon, one row at a time, perfectly spaced and aligned. Gabe mentioned once to Alis that he thought he remembered stars twinkling, and since then they have, blinking gently in symmetrical, rhythmic, soothing patterns until he falls asleep, and after that, what did it matter? And if some of the ones in the distance that blur together anyway, in Gabe’s failing eyesight, have been turned off to conserve power—that too was nobody’s to notice.

Early on, Gabe had tried to pay attention to the passage of time, believing someone should, and he had kept a journal numbering the days and then weeks. It was only when he lost track during an extended illness that he gave up, and never picked it up again as the months turned into years. “No going back to it,” he’d told Alis. “No forward, either.”

Most of the time it seems to him like it’s been centuries, possibly forever, but he still flails out of bed mid-nightmare, remembering the sirens and the terrible, ear-piercing shriek of the hull giving way, as raw as if it were all just yesterday. Memory is a cruel jokester, if left free to wander, but it is what he has.

Overhead, the first row of stars has now come on, right on time. He stands for a long while, staring at that artificial horizon. “What are you thinking about?” Alis asks, through the earbud that connects them.

“I wish I wasn’t too tired to visit,” Gabe says, by way of answer.

“It’s a long walk,” she says.

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. But I can see you from here, and if you wave, I’ll see.”

He waves, until his arm gets weary and drops again to his side. “But I can’t see if you wave back,” he says after a while.

“I am, though,” she says. “Close your eyes and imagine it. Maybe tomorrow you’ll feel strong enough to make it to the edge, then we can wave at each other as long as you like. But you forgot your cup of tea again and it’s grown cold, and it’s getting late.”

He laughs. “You have better eyes than me. Younger eyes, maybe.”

“Only by a little. But I also have all our survey equipment over here, including telescopes, perimeter cameras, and magnifying scanners,” she says. “They give me an unfair advantage. Now go warm up your tea, because it helps you sleep.”

It takes Gabe a while to find where he left his mug, atop the autofeeder bin that’s humming as it prepares the next day’s output. He stares at the small bits of straw and dust that have fallen into and are floating in his cold tea. Making a face, he slowly dumps it out into the grass beneath his feet, where it will soak through the thin layer of substrate atop the old cargo floor and be reclaimed, reprocessed, and returned to him as clean water again, indistinguishable—and undistinguished—from new.

Alis is right that tea helps him sleep, and usually calms the nightmares, so Gabe walks back in under the edge of the torn hull, all jagged and tortured metal, and through the open emergency bulkhead toward the officers’ mess, now all his own. He moved a cot in here for when the night rain is on, but mostly he prefers the hammock he’s strung between two support struts out on the floor. Even though it’s not logical, he feels safer on the grass and under the high dome of sky than in the closer confines of the wreckage of the ship, and rarely stays inside longer than necessary.

He puts his mug under the beverage dispenser, hits the button for tea, and closes his eyes to listen to the hum of the machine and the silence of everything else. When his mug has been refilled, he turns around and realizes he’s been followed.

“I should just leave you out for the night, all alone,” he tells the habitually wayward animal. “Maybe then you’d learn.”

The truth is, if he did, he would worry all night, so he picks up the duck and carries him back to the makeshift barn out on the cargo floor, creaks open the door, and sets him inside before any others can rouse and rush the door. Not that they do; Boots is the troublemaker of the flock, Gabe’s exhausting, exasperating, escape-artist favorite.

Done, he heads back into shelter for bed, and does not see all the stars—all except one, fuzzy and indistinct through the woven fabric of the sky, inexplicably moving—go out at once as soon as he is out of sight of them.

“We are go for drop, in ten,” Roz says. “Everyone not buckled is gonna be bruised, no refunds.”

Dr. Natalia Syra is already in the airlock vestibule, fully suited and strapped into one of the emergency jump seats. She closes her eyes, counts down the remaining seconds—three, two, one—and then there is that momentary sickening, inside-out feeling of dropping out of the jump conduit back into normal space. When she opens her eyes, she can see the other three people in her team, buckled opposite her, looking unanimously amused at her discomfort.

“We’re out,” Roz announces. “Unidentified object just in range, bringing up sensors now.”

“Is it the Hellebore?” Benibeni asks, before anyone else can, though everyone has the same question; it has been a long, long search, and too many disappointments.

“It’s . . . ” Roz tails off, and Nati braces herself for what already feels like bad news. “I don’t know. It’s the right size and mass, but . . . ”

“Can’t be that many wrecks out here this deep in the Barrens, matching the Hellebore’s specs,” Osla, their engineer, chimes in from where she is stationed near the defense systems.

“Yeah, well, you all look at it and tell me what I’m seeing, because I’m not seeing a wreck,” Roz says. “Or anything familiar whatsoever. Data incoming to you all.”

Nati reads it, reads it again, then meets the eyes of her team. No one seems to have much to say, for once. “Anyone?” she asks, just to be sure.

“I’ve got no matches,” Osla says. “It does have an energy field, but it’s stable, no fluctuations whatsoever, and there’s no indication of movement. Or any indication how it would move, if it can. I don’t even have guesses what this is.”

“Can you get us closer, Roz?” Nati asks. “The mass equivalence seems an awful stretch to just be a coincidence, and this is right along the Hellebore’s last known trajectory.”

“It’s been lost for almost thirty years,” Roz reminds her.

“Long past time we found it, then,” Honne—Dr. Honnelin al Matti, physician, chemist, level-headed, nonbinary second cousin—says, from their seat beside Benibeni. “And if we haven’t, this is a mystery all on its own worthy of us. We are scientists and explorers, and we will not go home empty-handed. And besides, it doesn’t seem to present any obvious or immediate danger.”

“I agree, reluctantly,” Roz says, “so I’m nudging up near it. If it moves, I reserve the right to get my selfish ass out of here and ask all your forgiveness for continuing to live later.”

“I’m keeping an eye on it,” Osla says.

“Not as close as I am,” Roz replies, and Nati is sure that’s true. Paranoia on the bridge is not a bad thing, when you are this deep in uncharted territory, far from any welcoming star systems, refuge stations, or rescue.

Roz nudges their ship, the Agastache, closer, at what seems an unbearably slow speed, and when nothing happens, closer still. Nati reads over more scans as Roz and Osla send them to her, then decides. “I want to go in for a closer look,” she says.

Honne nods. “Me too,” they say.

Osla, who is still busy doing calculations on her handpad, looks up just long enough to wave one hand in what Nati takes as assent. And that means Benibeni the xenobiologist, who hates to go new places almost as much as he hates being left behind, is in as well.

There is muffled noise over their suit comms, likely Roz with her hand over the bridge mic while she swears up a storm at them, but in the end, she comes back on and says, “We’re now close enough and parked. You ready?”

“We’re ready,” Nati says. “I’m going first.” She unbuckles herself from her seat, reflexively runs one more check on all her exosuit systems and oxygen supplies, then cycles herself into the airlock. It’s big enough for all of them, but there is an old saying about eggs and baskets that applies surprisingly readily to sending out your entire exploration team in one go.

The outer door rises, the flashing red warning lights along its edge reflecting in the curve of her faceplate like an ominous ghost at the very edge of her peripheral vision, while her heads-up display says green, green, all is good. Her magboots hold her tight to the floor, and she stands on the edge of the precipice, staring out into space.

Ahead of them, where they were hoping to find the Hellebore, some answers, and some peace, instead is a rounded, fibrous shape nearly a half-kilometer in diameter. It resembles, far too uncomfortably for coincidence, a giant cocoon. And through it, an impossibly long, impossibly thin needle of light.

She releases her boots and floats out, and behind her the airlock cycles closed again. As she orients herself, she unclips, one by one, a half-dozen of her survey drones from her equipment bandolier and releases them into space around her. They will measure, record, analyze, observe, with precision and without distraction, and already the periphery of her faceplate’s display has the faint fluttering green aurora of their status lights.

Which is good, because she is distracted. The bright, shimmering gold line that pierces through the cocoon, like a toothpick through a cocktail cherry, still has no discernible, measureable physical structure. Her own scanners keep deciding there is some negligible mass there, then backtracking that into uncertainty. What it does have is energy, and lots of it.

“It’s like a bolt of lightning frozen in the act of striking,” she says. “What if the Hellebore is inside there?”

“Then it died fast,” Roz says.

“Any changes since our approach? Indications it’s still an active weapon?” Nati asks.

“Nothing.”

“Then I’m going across,” she says.

“How about the rest of you?” Roz asks. “Last chance to change your minds. Anyone?”

No one does, and ten minutes later, her team is outside with her. Honne, Benibeni, and Osla, the best of the best: her team, her friends. Family, in any way that matters.

“Keep your tethers on so I can haul your asses back if that thing tries to bite,” Roz adds from the helm of the Agastache.

“What if you’re not fast enough? Or you’re asleep at the helm, like usual?” Benibeni asks, only slightly less casually than he probably hoped it would sound.

“Then I’ll use your body to go chummin’ for space whales,” Roz answers. “Waste not, want not. Now get a move on before whoever stuck that thing with a giant lightning bolt comes back and goes all homicidal Zeus on us, too.”

“You heard the captain,” Nati says. “Let’s go do this.”

And they leap into the dark.

“Hello? Anybody? Hello?” Gabe calls out. His voice is getting hoarse, the words themselves losing meaning with repetition. He had been down in the cryonursery when something hit the ship and threw him full across the room into a wall of incubators, leaving him unconscious for a time, then addled as he tried to work out where he was, what had happened, in the pitch dark.

The air is getting cold, and there is no light at all. Has the whole ship lost power? He imagines the engineering crew have a lot more urgent things to do right now than look for one hapless livestock manager who is not in immediate danger, as frightening as everything is. He wishes he knew just enough more about ships, and the ways they have problems, to be more reassured that this was just a semi-routine hiccup, for all the drama.

Still, he is antsy. The main safety doors out of the bio area are shut tight, and the instrument panel that would tell him if they were safe to open is dead. The ship has multiple backup power systems, but maybe they are needed for somewhere more vital right now, so he leans his head against the heavy door, his ear against the cold metal-ceramic alloy, to listen.

He hears nothing.

“Hello?” he calls again, and bangs on the door. “I don’t need rescuing yet, but I need to know what’s going on and that someone knows I’m in here. Please answer. Anyone?”

They circle, survey, and eventually crawl around the circumference of the cocoon, as they have all come to call it, staying carefully away from where the hair-thin line of energy bisects it. The surface texture appears woven, or wrapped like a ball of twine, overlapping thin bands of an unknown material. As touching it has elicited no discernible response, Osla nudges one of her hovering sampler drones closer. They all watch as it attaches itself to the exterior of the cocoon, and she floats beside it as it does its thing, the incoming data scrolling swiftly in green and yellow text across her faceplate.

“Base material signature of the fibers matches the alloys that Hellebore was originally constructed from,” Osla says, and heaves a deep sigh. “I guess we finally have the where and what, now it’s just the who, the how, and the why.”

“And the how is deeply interesting,” Honne says, already scrolling Osla’s reports. “The way this material has been repurposed on a molecular level—”

“I had an aunt on the Hellebore,” Benibeni interrupts.

“Osla lost a second father, and Nati and I three cousins,” Honne reminds him, gently. “I don’t know about you, but I can’t do my job unless I detach from that fact.”

“I know,” Benibeni says. “I’m sorry. This is getting to me.”

“Take what time you need,” Nati says. “We haven’t hit anything that needs your attention yet.”

“Whatever did this, there’s not much else out here,” Osla says. “The Hellebore might have just been too tempting a package of rare resources. Pirates—”

“ . . . would have stripped it down of everything useful and then gotten the hell out of here,” Roz interrupts from the bridge, still comfortingly close enough if they have to beat a hasty retreat. “Why, if some mystery aliens needed the resources, did they take the time to build this and then just leave it?”

“Who says they left it?” Benibeni answers. “We don’t know what’s inside.”

“We don’t yet,” Nati says. “Osla?”

Osla takes the small fragment she’s cut off the exterior, pops it in a drone tube, caps it, and sends it back toward their ship for more extensive analysis later. “Sample one off,” she says, logging it. “A gift for you when we’re back aboard, Honne.”

Using the controls of her suit vambrace, Osla pulls a larger cutting drone in, looking for a good position. “Core sample time,” she says, and locks on.

It takes Gabe about six hours, in the dark, to find a handpad that hadn’t been smashed during the impact. It has its own powercell, so it shouldn’t have surprised him when it turns on, but the sudden glare of light against his face after so many hours of dark and fear is the most starkly beautiful thing he can remember.

Most of the handpad is operational instructions for caring for the colony’s cryo’d livestock and seedbanks, which were all things he knew anyway, that being his chief—and only—qualification for having been along on this trip, but there was also a cache of general ship data, including emergency instructions.

Using the light from the handpad, he finds the recessed panel near the door and gets it open. The cryo facility has its own power system that should have kicked on when the main ship power failed, but there are steps for manually starting it.

He follows the sequence, cold hands stiff and trembling as he pushes physically switched buttons, and then waits. He is sure it won’t work, that the system didn’t reboot on its own because it was too damaged, but as he sits hunched on the floor in front of the panel bereft of any further ideas or hope, the handpad goes to sleep, and in the absence of that glowing rectangle, he realizes he can now, dimly, see.

Is it his imagination that it is also, just very slightly, warmer? He can’t say, but just the faint bit of light around him is enough that he finally feels safe enough to cry.

“Gas leak!” Osla shouts, even as she withdraws the first drill head and fires an emergency sealant into the newly cut hole. Everyone backs off as she studies the readout from the drill sensors.

“What do we have?” Nati asks.

“Tell me it’s not going to explode,” Roz adds from the ship.

“No, it’s . . . ” Osla says, then checks the data again. Her expression is impossible for Nati to read. “It’s breathable. Mix and pressure. It’s viable atmosphere, at least according to the drill sensors. Honne, you’re the chemist, you want to double-check me?”

“Happy to,” Honne answers, and takes Osla’s place near the drill hole. From their backpack they pull out a long needle-thin rod and slide it carefully through the sealant. Nati can see the reflection of Honne’s heads-up display flash across their face as they scan and re-scan the data.

“Yep,” they say at last. “Beenjai mix, even. 20C, about 35% humidity. Anyone else want to take a stab at the implications?”

Nati knows all too well the danger of getting hopes up. “It’s been twenty-seven years,” she says. “Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. One step at a time, people. Osla?”

“Emergency boarding bore?” Osla asks. “It’ll keep things airtight.”

Nati nods. “Do it. We don’t want to let any of that very fine air escape, after all this time.”

“Gabe?”

Alis’s voice, from the tiny earbud beside his bed, wakes him up. It’s still dark out, and he is confused, brain still awash in whatever anxious dream he’d been in the middle of, and it takes him a few moments to come to his senses enough to find the handheld control on his makeshift night table and turn the lights on low.

“I’m here,” he says, rubbing his face with his hands, his brain still feeling full of holes. She would not call at this time if there wasn’t an emergency. He remembers when they both became desperately sick from bad water, during their first year here, and the terrible weeks of silence when he didn’t know if she was still alive. The idea that something might have happened to her makes him feel queasy, terrified. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I think . . . ” There’s a pause. “I think we have company.”

Gabe tries to get out of bed too fast, his legs caught up in his blanket, and he falls. When he catches his breath, he holds onto the edge of the cot to pull himself up again, hating the way his left knee clicks and feels uncertain, the way his hips and ankles ache. He’ll have some good bruises later, he’s sure. Up now and awake, he gets water (thirty minutes ago it finished dripping into the cistern from the filtration unit; five hours before that, it was cold tea seeping through the cargo floor substrate) and puts his earbud on. “Say that again, Alis,” he says. “I don’t think I heard you right.”

“Someone is here,” she says. “Outside.”

“Outside?” Gabe is no longer sure what that means. “Who?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m sorry I woke you. I shouldn’t have, without knowing more. Sometimes my thoughts are more fragmented than others.”

“It’s okay,” he says, having long since stopped feeling entirely solid himself. He sits back on the edge of his bed and finishes his water. “What do we know so far?” What does she know, really, as all the ship’s instruments and controls are on her side of the ship, on the bridge, in her much more capable hands.

“There are people outside, trying to get in, I think,” she says. “I’ll find out more. Just . . . until I give the all clear, stay inside, near the door, in case they puncture an air seal. Okay?”

“Sure, Alis,” he says.

He refills his water and, despite having just said he’ll stay inside, wanders back out onto the cargo floor, barefoot in the grass. Nothing feels different at all; there is only the near-silence he has come to think of as absolute after decades of tuning out the background hum of what was left of the Hellebore, and eventually the slow degradation of his hearing. He can’t quite bring himself to go back to bed, though.

He checks on the ducks, and if it seems one is missing, he’s too tired to count, and anyway, eventually that duck needs to learn on his own not to wander off.

Nothing has changed, and there are no signs anything ever will.

There is still enough of the sleeping tea in his body that his thoughts are muddled, and he’s already not entirely sure what the conversation had been about, so he decides he probably dreamt it. And anyway, he doesn’t want to wake Alis just to confirm his own runaway imagination.

That settled, he goes back to bed, hoping for quieter dreams.

With light and warmth, Gabe begins to assess his situation. The extended power outage has wiped out all his mammal cryostock, though the seeds, insects, and some of his bird eggs seem potentially salvageable, if they are revived fairly soon. He can tell the ship is not moving, because the ever-present vibration of the engines throughout the floors and walls is gone. But he has air, and it seems to be refreshed, so there is time.

Time, fear, hunger, and boredom.

There’s an emergency locker, and in it a box of tools, a temporary airlock doorkit and a pair of exosuits. He’s worn suits—he had to prove basic competence at putting them on and sealing them up properly before coming aboard—but hasn’t in a while, and hasn’t often besides. But death from a suit malfunction would still beat starving to death, so he sets up the temp airlock kit just in front of the bulkhead door, forming a secondary layer, and zips himself into his borrowed, slightly too-large exosuit between them.

“Here goes,” he says to nobody, and pulls the manual release for the bulkhead.

He is not swept out into space, which he’s not a hundred percent relieved about, but he does find himself in the dark again. This time, he knows how to turn the lights on, and does.

When he can see, he sees the first of the bodies.

It’s Teinar, one of the other livestock techs who must have just been coming on shift. Although all the heavy furniture and fixtures on the ship are fastened down, the people are not, except when sleeping, during entrances and exits from jump conduits, or the occasional safety drill. Although Gabe is no medic, it’s pretty obvious that Teinar’s skull hit one of the bench corners, and that was the very messy and final end of that. Not far away another body lies sprawled, and he already knows it’s Rojo, one of the water system techs, but he has to go see anyway, and is surprised that Rojo is still breathing.

He doesn’t want to move him—Rojo’s neck is at an odd angle—so he sits on the floor next to him and holds his hand and tells him help is coming help is coming help is coming you just have to hang on.

Rojo doesn’t wake up, and some hours later, having exhausted himself into a near-doze with his own desperate mantra, Gabe realizes the tech’s hand is cold, and the breathing has stopped.

He sits a while longer and thinks about his own inevitable, probably very near, death. There are some seeds in the bank that, if swallowed, will kill him, but it would be a long, agonizing death. He could also seal up his exosuit again and disconnect the oxygen tank, suffocating himself, but the idea is terrifying. He could do it if there was someone to hold his hand, maybe, but there is no one.

There’s a surgical kit in the emergency locker that might offer something faster, some blade or overdose where the deed is done before you realize it. He lays Rojo’s hand gently on his unmoving chest and gets up, stands a while unwilling to yet concede the obvious defeat. Then he draws a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and turns back toward the bio facility and locker.

There is a crackle of sound, somewhere on the floor, and he sees that Teinar’s handpad is blinking from underneath the bench that ended his life. “Hello?” says a faint voice, one he doesn’t recognize. “Is there anyone else out there? Anyone? Hello? Please tell me I’m not alone.”

Gabe nearly hits his own head on the bench, scrambling under it to answer.

The emergency borer has done its job and cut a circular hole two meters in diameter through the strange surface of the cocoon, and as it withdraws it leaves behind a long plug with a two-sided lock into it. The outside perimeter fills with an adaptive sealant that seeps into the spaces between new and old, hardening in seconds. Sensors from both sides of the lock confirm the seal is good.

“You first,” Osla says, and pushes back from the surface to give room.

“Me first,” Nati agrees; she’s the leader, surveyor, and archaeologist of the team. Together, they’ve explored countless human and alien wrecks and civilizational remnants, until they were drafted into the long search for the Hellebore. The colonists of Beenjai did not abandon their own.

So she unhooks her tether, opens the exterior lock, and pulls herself into the confines of the tube. Then she opens the interior lock and floats cautiously through, her suit’s faceplate display giving her a cross-spectrum scan even as it sends a live feed back to her team.

Inside the cocoon, she is surrounded by strange structures, adhesions springing in an almost organic form in strands and clumps from the cocoon shell in toward the center.

“It looks like the fiber goo inside a pumpkin,” Roz comments over the channel from the ship. “If you find seeds, don’t even think I’m going to let you bring them aboard.”

Nati thinks that’s an apt analogy, but she is grateful there is nothing—seedlike or otherwise—hanging amongst the fibers. There is also no movement, no signs of anything or anyone in the interior space with her, no sense of danger, so she reaches out with one gloved hand and uses the nearest of the strands to pull herself farther in. For all its organic, grown look, the strand is unyielding and solid in her grip.

“Are those made of the same woven stuff as the exterior?” Osla asks.

“Looks like it,” Nati answers, as she threads her way through the vague maze of it all further inward.

“I want to come in and take a sample,” Honne says. “We clear?”

“Roz? Everything still quiet from out there?” Nati asks.

“I don’t see any signs of trouble, but be careful. There seems to be some signal loss from inside. Team, you are go to teamify. Teaminate. Teamogrof—”

“We got it, Captain,” Benibeni says. He sighs. “Biologist bringing up the rear, as usual. One of these excursions, it’d be nice if we actually encountered some bio.”

“You say that, but when something leaps out of the dark and eats your face, then how will you feel?” Osla asks, already cycling herself and a subset of her drones through.

“Glad I’m in the rear. I’ll get it all on camera for later analysis and future publication,” Benibeni answers.

“I guess I better hope the alien doesn’t chew off my more photogenic side,” Honne comments. They are already through, and examining one of the support structures.

The banter means the team is on high alert, but still comfortable enough to take pot shots at each other. If they stop, then she’ll worry. Once Benibeni is in, Nati moves further in toward the interior of the structure; her scans tell her there is something more solid ahead.

She is not prepared for when she reaches it and finds the smooth exterior surface of a ship hull, with the Beenjai shipping guild logo still legible on it, between the fibrous struts.

“I’ve lost visual feed,” Roz says. “What are you seeing?”

“The Hellebore,” Nati replies. “It’s here.”

“Let me by,” Osla says, floating up right behind her. Nati moves over, and puts one hand out against the ship surface. There is no vibration, none of the mechanical pulse of a living ship, but even so, this feels extraordinary. She sends out her drone fleet on reconnaissance, lateral to her position, instructed to stay at least 15° of arc away from the energy intrusion. Quickly they report back a wall; the cocoon is chambered.

“Hull sounding suggests atmosphere inside as well,” Osla says. Everyone else is quiet now, and caught up to them, though Honne is still poking curiously at the struts with various instruments.

“So the hull is intact?” Benibeni asks.

“I didn’t say that,” Osla says. “If the ship was intact and holding air, why would there be air out here, in between the ship and the outer shell? And that shell was woven from material from the Hellebore’s hull, and I would estimate it would have taken approximately 22 percent of existing material to make it. If you had the tech to do this—which certainly we don’t—why not just repair the hull?”

“I can’t even guess,” Nati said. “If the intent was to use the ship for something after attacking it, why leave it like this? And why match the air? If it was space pirates, there’d be much closer overlap on atmo mix, but—” she gestures around her “—clearly not pirates. Not human ones, anyway.”

“I found the old airlock,” Honne says, from further astern. “It appears to still be operational.”

“That sounds like a trap,” Benibeni says.

“I’ll go,” Nati says. “Roz, I’m going in. I might lose signal entirely.”

“Be careful,” Roz answers.

Nati uses the struts to pull herself around to where Honne is, then gestures them away. “Everyone back off and be prepared to immediately evacuate if this goes wrong,” she orders.

She activates the lock, and after a long delay, the outer door creaks open. With one last look back at her team, she cycles in, and then out the far side into the Hellebore’s airlock vestibule. Dimly, lights come on, and the artificial gravity kicks in, and her magboots hit the floor and click on.

Something in the room moves, and she utters an involuntarily curse as she steps back toward the airlock, before she makes out what it is.

“Uh, Benibeni?” she calls over their comms.

“Here,” Benibeni answers, the connection faint and crackly. “You okay? I can’t make out any visuals.”

“I’m fine, but we’re not alone,” Nati says.

“An alien?” he asks.

“No,” Nati says. “There’s a duck.”

The voice is a systems technician named Alis, who he thinks he might have met once, during pre-trip orientation. She was in an airlock troubleshooting a glitchy door—and fully suited up, as a precaution—when the collision happened, and that saved her life.

She’s able to tell him a bit about what happened, though it’s clear she’s still piecing things together. Something high-energy and high velocity struck them in jump space, which wasn’t supposed to be possible. The Hellebore’s catastrophically damaged safety systems dumped them back out into normal space—without jump stabilizers, staying in the conduit would have quickly torn them apart—but the emergency backup power systems that should have kept vital things like the relative inertial shift compensators online failed, so their exit to normal space was not very distinguishable from running head-first into a brick wall. Gabe doesn’t fully understand the science—not his field—but he sure knows exactly what that had felt like.

Alis is up at the bow of the ship, has gotten access to the bridge and engineering, and although she hasn’t been able to restore atmosphere on her end, she’s got some minimal power up, and is working on rerouting around the damage to try to get out a distress call.

She has also been, one by one, sending bodies out the same airlock that saved her. She hasn’t found anyone else alive either.

“Do we know what hit us?” he asks.

“You can’t see it?” she asks in return, surprised.

He tells her he’s only got access to a few internal spaces.

“It crashed through us,” she says. “We dragged it out into normal space with us, and it damn near tore us in half. It’s still there, forward of the main cargo floor.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Once I have power back, I’m going to try to get some sensors online so I can scan it, but it’s going to be a while. I’m doing everything by myself, and I dislocated a shoulder during the collision.”

“You should come here,” Gabe says. “I have heat and air, and I can try to pop it back in.”

“Did it already myself,” she says. “I don’t recommend that, unless you have no other choice. But I don’t think I can get to you, anyway. Most of the center of the ship is destroyed and open to space.”

“But . . . ” Gabe starts to say, but what is there to argue against? Or admit he is just afraid of being alone? “Okay. But we can do more as a team.”

“I didn’t think anyone was going to answer. I really thought everyone else was dead,” Alis says. “Even if I can’t see you, or you me, yet—and I’m not giving up, don’t think that—just hearing your voice gives me hope.”

“And me yours,” Gabe says.

“I need to sleep,” she says, after a long pause. “I’ve been at this too long, and I’m so tired I can hardly focus my eyes. You’ll still be here when I wake up?”

 “I’ll do my best,” he says, because that’s the only promise he can make.

“Mother of moons!” Benibeni swears. “That is a duck.”

Gabe wakes again, still not quite before dawn, and rubs sleepy glitter from his eyes as he swings his feet over the edge of the cot and sits up, back and neck sore, but mind feeling refreshed. “Alis?” he asks, slipping the earbud into place, his one, tenuous human connection. “Did you wake me up last night or did I dream it?”

“I did, I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t interrupt your rest; it just makes things confusing.”

“You said something about our air seal possibly getting punctured?” he asks, as he does his stretches, thinking about food, thinking about going to bed again for another half-hour just to make another slow, identical day go by a little bit faster.

“Yes, but it’s okay, they’re being careful, and I’m keeping an eye on them,” Alis answers.

“Them?” he exclaims. “What do you mean ‘them’?”

“The people,” she says. “I can hear them, and they’re from Beenjai. They’ve been looking for this ship for a long time.”

Suddenly the day is not identical at all, and there is so much to do, he doesn’t even know where to start. Oddly, he is afraid—will he even know how to talk to people, other than Alis, other than his ducks, after almost thirty years? What will it be like to see people, be near them? He has only been able to see Alis, across the gulf of the wreckage or via their few working screens, never near enough to touch.

“Why are you so quiet?” Alis asks. “Aren’t you happy?”

“What if . . . ” he says, then pauses. He has walked out onto the grass, his comfort place, and feels it beneath his bare feet, this reality they built from near-certain death. “What if I don’t know how to live among people again?”

“You’ll be fine,” she says.

“We’ll be fine, I hope,” Gabe adds. “We’ll still be friends, right? I mean, it’s not just because you were stuck with me and no one else to talk to?”

She laughs, which she does so rarely. “I could’ve left anytime, you know, just gathered up my things and flew away into space, like magic. I guess I liked your company enough to stay. So stop worrying about it. They’re almost to you, coming up toward the aux seed storage unit. Go say hello.”

Gabe is getting more comfortable wearing the exosuit, and decides it’s time—three weeks now since the accident, according to the careful tickmarks he’s made on the wall, counted not by any of the smart consoles still down and dead, but by the predictable once-a-cycle deep hum that he can feel through his feet, through his bones, of the water systems discharging cleaned water back into the reservoir tanks and pulling in whatever accumulated gray water and sewage is next in line.

He doesn’t imagine the water system has much to do, but it does it anyway, faithfully and like clockwork, which is one less big problem than he could have had. Alis has gotten more of the bridge consoles working again and has activated some of the repair drones to work on the important things, like the torn holes in the hull, radiation shielding, and fixing their external communications array so they can call for help, so he doesn’t complain about his own boredom, even if he wouldn’t anyway.

He’s finished exploring all the areas at his end of the ship, and having sent seventeen of his fellow crew—mostly acquaintances, a few friends, one cousin—off to their eternal rest in the sterile garden of deep space, he wants to see a living person. Needs to, if he can.

The cargo bay floor is as bad as Alis had warned him, when he finds a working airlock and gets out at last. The Hellebore has other holds and storage spaces, but this is the big one, a vast floor nearly two-thirds the length of the ship and most of its height, where all the farm and terraforming equipment was tethered down beneath vast canopy doors big enough to accommodate all but the largest droneships for rapid loading and unloading.

Alis had not been exaggerating when she’d said the Hellebore had been nearly torn in half, and Gabe honestly can’t fathom how it hadn’t. One of the canopy doors has been ripped entirely away, and what remains of the other is bent and twisted backward from the impact point, allowing him to see, between the stacks of equipment that had stayed fast and the jumble of those that hadn’t, the blinding arrow of light protruding from the ship’s corpse off into space.

“What do you think?” Alis asks in his ear.

“It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen, not that I’ve seen much,” he says. “I don’t know who could have had anything against us, much less such a grudge as to do this.”

“I meant the cargo area, but you think this was a weapon, some sort of attack?”

“You don’t?” he asks, surprised.

“I don’t know. If it was intended to destroy us—”

“It came close enough to count,” Gabe says.

“It hasn’t finished us off, though,” Alis points out.

“Maybe because whoever shot it at us knows they don’t have to waste the effort. What chance do either of us have?” Gabe is angry at himself as soon as he says it, because even if he thinks it’s hopeless, he has an obligation to act otherwise for her sake. “It’s an alien thing. Who knows why aliens do what they do, or why? What did you mean about the cargo area?”

“Well,” she says, “you’re not wrong. We don’t have much of a chance. I’m a systems tech, not a navigation expert, so I can’t give you numbers, but dropping out of jump in the middle of the Barrens is bad. We’re a needle in a light-years-wide haystack, and it’s going to take people a while to find us. Maybe a long while. So we need to make ourselves comfortable. We’ll need food.”

“There’s enough for a long time, in storage,” Gabe says, because it was meant to feed a crew of sixty-two, not two. Then it occurs to him that the storage he means is on his half of the ship, this side of the divide. “You have food over there, too, don’t you?”

“Some,” she answers. “For a little while. If I can find a way to get the cargo area sealed again, do you think . . . do you think you could terraform it? Just the floor? Grow grass, maybe some crops? Can we revive any of the livestock?”

“The fowl, maybe,” Gabe says. It’s a wild idea, as impossible and inconceivable as it is an attractive challenge. “I need to think.”

He has been winding his way between the crates and diggers and plows as they talk, climbing up on them when they’ve fallen in his path, and it takes him nearly an hour to reach the far side of the cargo floor. His legs and arms ache from pulling himself up, over, between. There is another airlock there, and when he catches his breath he opens it, but it opens on a gaping maw of torn metal. Through it that beam of light, no thicker than his leg, burns nearly as bright as a sun, and his suit’s faceplate automatically dims it to a bearable glare. The thin shreds of the hull that hold the two halves of the Hellebore together seem fragile and few, though some must still carry intact conduits of power, water, some small lifeline of needs back and forth, or they would both have already been dead.

Across the gulf—not so far, though insurmountable—he can see another airlock, and above it an observation window, and there she is: Alis.

She looks tired. There’s a bandage on her head, and her face seems swollen, red, wrong. But she is smiling, and she waves to him, and he waves back with every ounce of hope he can. There must be some way to survive, to build a bridge, to not each die alone.

“We can try it,” he decides. What else is there? “Let me know what you want me to do.”

Osla is at what they think is the last interior bulkhead between storage and the operational spaces of the Hellebore, waiting for the sensor unit she’s clamped onto the door to return information on whether the door is safe to open. They are all still suited, so lack of air isn’t a problem, but if there’s a duck walking around loose, there might be other things that wouldn’t appreciate seeing their air suddenly sucked away.

Nati can’t help but hope: living people. She’s sure her team is all thinking the same, knowing how impossible it should be, but there’s Benibeni holding the duck, who seems fully familiar with being held, and what else could that mean?

“Safe,” Osla declares, as everyone crowds in closer, then hits the lock and opens the door herself.

Nati goes through with Osla, the others behind, and a few steps in they stop. There is a man there, long gray hair in an untidy ponytail half come undone, his clothing a mishmash of patches and repair seams and various types of tape. He is anxious, his hands fidgeting together, his eyes wide and scared. The man tries to speak, clears his throat, then finally manages a tremulous single word. “Boots.”

“Um?” Nati says. The man’s feet are bare.

“I got it,” Osla says, and starts to unseal her exosuit to take a boot off. “I’m about his size, I think.”

The man turns red, waves his hands in front of him. “Sorry, no, sorry. Boots is my duck. He wanders off a lot. I’m sorry, I knew I’d get this all wrong. Just say hello, she said, and I haven’t even got that right!”

Nati takes one cautious step forward. “I’m Dr. Syra, expedition lead on the Agastache. You can call me Nati. I’m from Silver Groves, back on Beenjai.”

“Hello,” the man says. “I’m Gabe . . . Gabrel Tirce, of Vinehaven.” He laughs, awkwardly. “Or of the Hellebore, for nearly half my life, such as it’s been. This is overwhelming. I’m sorry. Why don’t you come up to cargo? It’s much nicer there.”

“Are there others?” Osla asks.

“Two of us, me and Alis, that’s it,” Gabe says. “I’m sorry there aren’t more.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Nati tells him, as he leads them, with many wondering, disbelieving glances back, toward cargo. “We never dreamt we’d find anyone alive.”

They follow him through another airlock and up a ramp, and there the bulkheads are open wide onto a field of vibrant, living green. Where there should be enormous canopy doors overhead, instead there is the weave of the cocoon, and bright light streaming down from it on grass, a handful of fruit trees, a thick, tangled patch of riddleberry vines, fields of grain, and, of course, more ducks. An entire forest seems to occupy the back half of the floor.

Benibeni sets Boots down, and the duck runs off to rejoin its milling, squawking fellows.

Honne touches Gabe’s arm, very gently, and he jumps back, startled. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes, yet again. “I haven’t been touched by anyone since the collision.”

Honne nods. “I’m a medic, Gabe. When you’re ready, you should let me check you out. Okay?”

“Okay,” he says. “Let me just get another cup of tea, then I’ll be able to think more clearly.” He walks back through the doors to a foodmaker, and draws himself a cup with shaking hands before returning to where Nati, Honne, and Osla are still standing. Benibeni is off examining the plants, like a kid who unexpectedly found himself in a candy shop.

“You said there’s another survivor?” Nati asks.

“Yes. Alis. Alis Noma, she’s an engineer, she’s the only reason we survived. She made the sky, see?” Gabe points up.

“And where is she?” Nati asks.

His face falls. “On the other side,” he says. “Stuck in the front of the ship, while I’m stuck here at the back. We talk over comms all the time, and I used to hike over so we could at least see and wave at each other, but it’s gotten too hard lately.”

He sips his tea, and for just the briefest flash, his eyes are filled with gold, bright and sparkling. It fades so fast Nati thinks maybe she’s imagined it, but she meets Honne’s startled gaze and knows they saw it too.

Gabe finishes his cup and sets it down. “Better already,” he says. His voice is stronger, and he is no longer shaking, no longer afraid and confused. “So! Welcome aboard the Hellebore. Want a tour?”

Alis is slow to answer, when he calls her on the comms, and when she does her voice is hoarse, almost unrecognizably weak. “You’re sick, too?” he asks. He thinks he’s lost at least three or four days, maybe more, to fever, hacking cough, stomach cramps, and unbearable exhaustion. Even just the effort of finding his earbud where it had fallen off in his restless sleep had left him breathless.

“It’s the water,” she says. “One of the purifiers went offline in the collision, and I only just found it. I sent a repair drone to reboot it manually, but it’ll take a few days to flush the contaminants out. Don’t drink water straight from the feed until I give the clear; tea and coffee are fine because the food prep systems have their own internal filtration. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to send you instructions for brewing beer.”

“No hops in inventory,” Gabe says. “I’ve got riddleberries, though, so maybe wine? In a season or two, if we can close up cargo.”

She laughs, starts coughing, and takes a while to catch her breath again. “Sure, a season or two. I can’t even think beyond ten minutes from now, and I’m going to go back to sleep as soon as we’re done talking.”

“Maybe I should come over there,” he says. He’s been thinking this through for a while, and he’s used to his exosuit enough that the idea of being in space doesn’t completely terrify him, though it’s still nothing he’d be eager to try without good cause. “I can go around the outside, away from the arrow. Or you can come here.”

“We’re surrounded by debris, tiny sharp bits of metal. It’ll take a while to clear up, when I can spare a bot for it. I’ve got nine online now. Was working on number ten when the contaminated water caught up to me. And anyway, all the systems I need to get us through this are here, in engineering, or on the bridge. But, listen, just in case something happens to me—”

“No,” he interrupts. “No ‘just in case.’ I can’t do this without you. If you’re this sick, you should get yourself into a med pod.”

“You told me the infirmary is open to vacuum,” she says. “And anyway, that’s your end of the ship, not mine.”

“There’s a spare pod in the equipment room next to the bridge. I saw it on the tour, before we left Beenjai.”

“I didn’t take the tour,” she says.

“Well, go look! Please? Everything else can wait a few days until you’re better. Promise me you won’t wait?”

“I promise,” she says. “When my repair bot is done with the water system, I’ve set it to come to you, and you can send it back with some dried fruit, if you have any in storage that’s still good. I’m really sick of nutripaste and crackers. That would help me a lot, and give me something to look forward to. Okay?”

“Okay,” he says.

“I don’t feel good. I have to go before I pass out,” she says and disconnects abruptly.

He doesn’t have many fresh fruits or vegetables left—it was supposed to be a six-week trip to the fledgling colony on Joszoma—but he’s happy to send everything he has to her, and if she can figure out how to seal off cargo, he will grow her more fresh food than she can eat in a lifetime. That, he can do.

Gabe’s thoughts are a mix of the expected euphoria at rescue, and no small amount of terror; he’s had Alis to talk to for three decades, but he hasn’t been this close to people, had people touch him, since the day of the attack, and it disconcerts him, as if he is rediscovering food after starving for as long as he can remember. It doesn’t help that he forgot his tea, earlier, and it takes a little time to calm him, help him get his thoughts in order.

The Beenjaiers who’ve come are scientists, engineers, explorers. People he is sure Alis will understand more than he will, know how to answer their questions. He cannot quite shake a vague, irrational fear of abandonment, eventual rejection.

“Alis?” he asks, over his earbud. “They’re here.”

There are four of them, and they’ve introduced themselves already, but he has trouble holding onto their names in his wash of conflicted emotions. He remembers the leader, Nati, at least, but probably because she’s already told him twice.

“I’m trying to tie into their communications to talk to them directly, but our system is out of date and a mess of hasty repair work,” Alis replies. “Are you okay giving your bud to their leader so we can talk?”

 “Okay,” he says. He pulls the bud away from where it’s stuck onto the side of his face, along the jawbone just under his ear, and hands it to Nati. “Alis wants to talk to you. Technical stuff over my head, I imagine.”

She takes it from him, pops it on. “Hi, this is Dr. Nati Syra, of the Beenjai explorer Agastache,” she says. She is grinning in excitement, and he tries to let her mood catch and lift him up, too. Gabe can’t hear the reply, but Nati is nodding, and glances over at Gabe more than once, so he knows he’s being discussed. “I got it,” she says. “I’m going to have our medic look him over, and I’m going to hand you off now to Osla, our engineering expert.”

She passes the bud along to the one of the other women, who takes it and immediately switches over into tech talk and acronyms, and turns back to Gabe. “Please let Honne check you out?” she asks him. “Then Benibeni over there in your garden—he’s our team xenobiologist—will help us figure out how much of your work here can be saved and taken back with us. We’ll evacuate as much as we can.”

“I can’t abandon my ducks,” Gabe says. “Or my bees, and stillbugs, and worms . . . ”

“We’re not going to leave anything behind we don’t have to. But the trees, those will be a lot harder,” she says. “Osla will also consult on that, when she’s done talking to your Alis.”

Gabe thinks, My Alis, and relief floods through him. They understand; everything is going to be all right.

Benibeni comes over, smiling and holding an egg as if it was the most precious thing ever. “This—this is extraordinary! I’d never have believed it possible, but you’ve done it, survived and thrived and grown a whole microecology around you,” he tells Gabe. “Don’t worry, now it’s our turn to do the work. We’re going to get you—and all of this!—home safe and sound.”

Gabe is sitting atop a crate, back aching, neck stiff, and barely aware of either as he peers intently through the incubator window. He is starting to think he’d imagined it when, unmistakably, one of the eggs inside wobbles, just slightly, again.

“Alis!” he calls out. “We did it! We’re going to have ducklings!”

It is a victory after many defeats; as he’d expected, the mammalian livestock is a loss, but he’d hoped for at least some of the chicken and ptarmigan eggs to make it. He is pretty sure the bees are viable, but there’s no point trying until there’s something flowering for them to live off of, and his seedling beds—emptied crates with layers of artificial soil mats under full-spectrum lights looted from the infirmary—are a sparse mishmash of anemic-looking shoots, still skeptical of life.

The egg wobbles again, and then another one.

“That’s great,” Alis says. She sounds much stronger now, enough that he almost forgets how scared he’d been during the nearly three weeks of silence after he’d urged her to put herself in the med pod. He’d even hiked to the edge of the intrusion, twice, but could not figure out a safe way across, and worried that if he died doing something foolish, he wouldn’t be there for her at all. And anyway, objectively he knew the med pods were more reliable than his own anxieties.

“How soon do you think until we’ve sealed the cargo floor?” he asks. He’s cleared it, in preparation; he’d been hesitant to send the tractors and other large ag vehicles out through the gap where the canopy door was gone, but then, it was easier to watch them drift away than the bodies had been. He kept what he thought he couldn’t do without, but otherwise, clear space was the priority.

“Another four to five months. I’ve rebuilt and reprogrammed several of the drones, and I’m working on more,” Alis says. Since emerging from the pod, she’s been trying to make up for lost time. “They are going to collect debris from around the ship, and take material from sections that are too compromised to repair, and re-extrude it as a thin fiber.”

“Like spider silk?” he asks.

“What?” she says, then a short while later, “yes, like that. I had forgotten about spiders, sorry.”

Gabe chuckles. “My brother was terrified of them,” he says. “Guess it’s good I became the farmer in the family.”

He hasn’t thought about his family since the early days after the Hellebore was struck. They must believe he’s dead—and maybe he will be soon—but he’s not ready for someone to push him out into cold space, not yet.

He keeps watch on his wobbly eggs, certain there is no point thinking any further ahead than the first pip, and little else as important.

Gabe walks the team through the fields and small grove of fruit trees, leading them toward the front end of the cargo bay, and to where the intrusion—the arrow, he calls it—pierces the ship. He shows them the bulkhead that once upon a time led forward into the bow of the Hellebore, and eventually the bridge, but shakes his head. “That whole part of the ship was ripped open,” he tells them. “Alis says that part doesn’t hold air, and now that the cargo hold is sealed, we can’t open it. There’s no other way across.”

“I got a kit,” Osla says, and Nati waves everyone else back so her engineer has room to work. She pulls a flat packet out of her pack and unfolds it into a large, translucent tent. Then, with Nati and Honne’s help—Benibeni is still carrying the egg cupped in his hands, and asking Gabe questions—they press it up and around the bulkhead frame.

Osla double- and triple-checks her readouts, inspects the entire setup physically for the fourth time, then declares the seal good.

“Osla and I will go through first and assess the situation on the other side,” Nati says. “Gabe, is it okay if I borrow your earbud again?”

“Sure,” he says, though he’s slow to take it off and hand it over.

Alis has been his lifeline for decades, Nati knows, and she understands how difficult and how sudden all this must seem. “I’ll give it right back, I promise,” she says, as she puts it on.

In her ear, Alis asks her for a favor.

Nati glances at Gabe, not yet understanding, not wanting surprise to show on her face. “Gabe,” she asks, “it just occurred to me, but do you have an exosuit of your own? We might need it to get you out of here.”

“Back in my room, in the officers’ mess,” he says. “I haven’t worn it in a long time, though.”

“Benibeni, maybe you can go back with him and check it out?” Nati asks. “There’s probably a poor mama duck wondering where one of her eggs went, after all.”

Benibeni grins, and Nati thinks she has never seen him this happy; given how grim they’d expected this expedition to be, that’s almost as astounding as finding survivors.

Gabe raises one hand up high and waves, and Nati sees the small lens mounted above the bulkhead.

“Please tell Gabe I’m waving back,” Alis asks over the bud, and she does.

Gabe is pleased by that. “Tell her I’ll see her soon,” he says, and then he and Benibeni head back through the garden.

“Okay, let’s do this,” Nati says. She and Osla close up their hoods and faceplates, then Osla unseals the seam running down the center of the airlock tent so they can step through. There’s just enough room in there for the two of them, and Honne is already settling down in the comfort of the grass to wait.

“You know I have an extra suit in my pack that would fit him just fine,” Osla says.

“I know,” Nati replies.

“Okay, then,” Osla says, and knows enough to leave it at that. They’ve been a team for a long time.

Satisfied that the airlock tent has sealed up behind them again, Osla cranks open the bulkhead, and there is the pulling sensation of their small pocket of air suddenly escaping to run free in a much larger space. Vacuum, indeed.

And there ahead of them is the thin, brilliant line of light, passing through the absolute devastation of the midship, an explosion caught and petrified and held in the act of flying apart. Nati glances up and around, then peers over the torn edge of the decking in front of their boots; she can just see the weave of the cocoon, far below.

“Now what?” Osla asks.

“It’s safe for you to cross, as long as you don’t come closer than two meters to the energy line,” Alis says.

“Gabe’s suit wasn’t good enough to make it?” Osla asks.

“It was best that he stayed over there,” Alis answers, and Osla glances at Nati, eyebrows raised. “I’ll explain when you reach the bridge. The artificial gravity is off from this point forward until the bridge itself, so please anticipate the shift. The next bulkhead has an airlock door beside it, so you can pass safely through. I have just finished restoring pressure and air to everything within that chamber. A security drone will lead you through.”

Nati eyes the chasm one more time, then jumps; somewhere mid-gap, the gravity goes away and it becomes only motion and momentum. She needs only a short burst from her exosuit jets to get her trajectory into alignment, and when she reaches the far wall she puts out her hands to stop herself and curls up, swinging her feet around until her magboots hit the floor and click, stick.

The intrusion hasn’t changed as far she can tell, though Osla scans it again thoroughly before she crosses next.

The airlock is functional, and big enough for them both with room to spare. As Alis has said, there is a drone waiting on the far side. Nati and Osla follow it, alternately floating or stomping as the conditions of the floor around them vary, and Nati takes in the amount of damage. So much of the space around Gabe has been patched, or at least cleaned and cleared of debris, but here the stresses that pulled the ship nearly in half are still written into the structure around them. A few places are held together with strands of the same weave that the exterior cocoon is made of, and Osla scans that too.

“This feels . . . abandoned,” Osla says. “More like wreckage than not.”

Nati nods in agreement. How fair is that, though, she wonders. Would the cargo floor look any better if the garden wasn’t covering most of it?

There is a working comm screen outside the bridge, near the observation window, and there’s the image of woman on it, younger than Nati expected, with brown hair and tired eyes, but a smile. “Please come in,” she says, and the bridge door opens.

Nati steps through, feeling the shift back to gravity and turning off her boots. Her peripheral display says the air is good, if a little cool.

The bridge is empty. “Hello?” Nati calls out. “Where are you?”

“Over here,” Alis says, from another screen beside the dust-covered captain’s chair. Everything here is covered in dust, layers of it, settled in drifts as if it had all just settled like ash. “I’m in the emergency equipment room. It’s the door immediately to your left.”

Nati steps through, Osla a few steps behind her. There’s a med pod here, similarly covered in dust, but humming, working. Nati swipes her gloves over the glass plate, clearing it. Inside there is Alis, exactly as on the screen—brown hair, eyes closed—the med pod wires and tubes protruding from all over her head and torso, and layers of the cocoon weave, through which Nati can see occasional flashes of gold glitter.

“Alis died twenty-six years ago,” Alis’s voice comes from the screen behind them. “We’re sorry.”

Gabe has been standing in the garden a long time, regarding his rows of riddleberry vines, which have now reached the top of their makeshift trellis and are putting out tiny, periwinkle flowers. “I should start some bees,” he says, speaking mostly to himself, though at his voice he hears the quartet of the latest batch of ducklings behind him, always almost dangerously underfoot, mill around and rearrange themselves in the grass.

“More bees?” Alis asks.

“More?” he asks back, confused.

“You started the incubator up a week ago. They should be almost ready,” she says.

“I did?” Gabe remembers intending to, but no more than that. He sets down the watering can in his hand, realizes he forgot to water the vines, and picks it back up again quickly. Alis doesn’t say anything, which is a relief; lately his anxiety has returned, and he seems to be forgetting small things, little details. Nothing important or that matters much, except that it bothers and embarrasses him.

He waters the berry vines, puts the empty can back under the drip feed for later, then goes inside to reconstitute some soup for lunch. It’s only as he’s watching it heat and anticipating it being done that he remembers again about the bees. By the time he returns from down in livestock cryo—the bees are only a day or so from hatching out, and he had to scramble to get the fab unit online to start printing hive cells—his soup has gone cold.

 He reheats it and sits down at the table, thinking he ought to run a check of his nutrition levels, and maybe run a scan to see if he’s getting enough deep sleep at night, but he doesn’t want to alarm Alis. She’s been the rock of the two of them, and he owes it to her to not be more of a bother than he surely already is.

If he starts some grains next and can figure out how to mill it with what he has on hand, some day he could make toast and riddleberry jam. Surely soon Alis would finish with all the things that needed doing from the bridge so she could cross over here, and if he made her a picnic lunch of fresh food every day, it would still not be enough to repay her for saving his life, for not leaving him alone to die forgotten in the darkness.

Just to be sure, he takes the logbook pen and writes himself a note for tomorrow not to forget about the bees again.

“What the ever-loving, piss-in-the-updraft, kink-in-the-airhose fuckity fucking fuckery is happening here?” Osla asks.

If the woman—the image of a woman, anyway, Nati reminds herself—takes any offense, she doesn’t show it. “We are the E,” Alis’s voice says. “The collision with your ship was unintentional. We normally do not travel the same frequencies in jumpspace as your peoples, but we were experiencing problems and drifted into your synchronous dimensional conduit while investigating. Many of us were also terminated by that event, but we have done what we can to take responsibility for your one remaining survivor.”

“He doesn’t know you—Alis—died,” Nati says.

“No.”

“And . . . you’re a simulation?” Osla asks.

“An integration,” E-Alis corrects. “When the human Alis put herself into the pod, she was already too ill for its systems to repair, only prolong. She survived in the pod for ten of your months in a suspended state, during which time we found the pod, decoded and connected with its systems, and then eventually with her. It was Alis’s thoughts and memories that told us how to encapsulate the remains of your ship to provide a sustaining environment, and the medical pod that taught us enough about your physiology to maintain Gabe’s physical health. That has been almost enough.”

“Almost?” Nati asks.

“It took much longer for your people to come than we expected,” not-Alis says. “Gabe’s mind and memory are degrading. We have been trying to compensate, from within—”

“The glitter. The tea,” Nati says.

“Yes. We have tried to replace what he is losing, and all that he has lost, but we are not far from the point where there is no Gabe left, only us. It is time for us to let him go.”

Nati taps her comm. “Honne, you there?”

“Having a nice nap, thank you,” Honne replies, sleepily. “What do you need?”

“I need you to go find Gabe, and run every medical test on him you can plausibly do as fast as you can, including a full neurological workup,” Nati says. “Try not to alarm him. Then send Benibeni outside the cocoon to contact Roz, and tell her to prepare for a medical evacuation. She’s probably already having fits, not hearing from us.”

“Got it,” Honne says. They sound fully awake now. “Are we going to need med pods for both of the survivors?”

“One pod,” Nati says. “There is only one survivor. Now go.”

Gabe wakes up. It’s dark, and he doesn’t know where he is, or what is happening. He remembers something bad happening with the ship and flails off his blankets in panic.

“Alis!” he calls out. “Something happened! Rojo and Teinar are dead, and the ship is breaking apart.”

“Gabe, it’s okay,” Alis’s calm voice comes from somewhere in the room; he’s not sure where.

He searches frantically and finds the earbud on the floor. “But Alis, we’re in danger! We were going . . . somewhere, I don’t remember. Something bad happened, an accident or an attack—”

“Gabe, that was a long time ago,” Alis says. “We’re both safe now. Listen to my voice: we’re safe. You need to go get some tea and calm down, and then everything will make sense again.”

“But . . . Rojo. I held his hand,” Gabe says. “I told him I wouldn’t leave him. I don’t know where he is now. I can’t remember where he went. He was hurt. Where are you, Alis?”

“I’m waiting for you in the officers’ mess, to have tea with me,” she says. “We have tea together every morning.”

He stumbles to the mess, but everything looks different, empty, old. Alis isn’t there, and he thinks he no longer knows what she looks like, or if she’s ever been here, but there’s a hot cup of tea waiting for him and he knows it will make him feel better, so he drinks it, hot and comforting and sparkling.

When he’s done he sets the cup back in the autowash, feels the last lingering bits of fear and confusion ebb away, like the remnants of a dream where nothing made sense disappearing in the light of day.

The autofeeder bin will be full, and the ducks waiting for him to let them out. One of the newest ducklings is already proving a troublemaker, and he thinks he’ll name him Boots, after his favorite childhood goat. At least the duck was unlikely to earn the name by stealing and eating several pairs of his footwear.

“You interested in some fresh berries, Alis?” Gabe asks. “I should get another good batch today, if you want to send over a drone.”

“I’m still waiting on the jam and toast you promised,” she says. “You remember?”

“Of course,” he says. “Soon as I finally have enough grain that I don’t need it to replenish my seed stock, we can try out your mill idea. I won’t forget.”

Gabe sits still, trying not to fidget, as the rescue team’s medic checks him out, making small talk that is just a tad too quick and constant to feel casual. He doesn’t understand why they didn’t come back with Alis, but the medic has told him that Nati and the engineer are still over there talking to her, and that Alis has raised some minor concerns about environmental exposures that they want to check out.

Of course he feels fine, and she’s not complained since the very early days when they were both so desperately ill, so he figures that this is some precautionary paranoia. We can have a good laugh about it later, he thinks, and then: together.

Still, the medic is being fussier than he feels entirely patient with. He wants to get on with the work of securing and transferring as much of his gardens as he can. “Are we nearly done yet?” he asks, trying not to sound at all ungrateful for the unaccustomed attention.

“Soon, sorry,” the medic says. “It’s just protocols, you know? You can trust me.”

“I do,” Gabe says, wondering, why would that be in question? “I just want to get to work so we can all get out of here. Sometimes it’s like I can’t remember home at all.”

The medic’s comm bleeps. “Benibeni is bring in a medical pod,” Nati’s voice comes over the channel, audible with the medic’s suit open and hood down. “Alis is providing an opening through the cocoon.”

Gabe smiles. “Alis is the smartest person I’ve ever known,” he says. “And the hardest working. So many times I’ve tried to get her to come back here, relax, take a break, but no. It’s weird, knowing someone so well that they feel beside you, but you’ve never actually been in the same place, or at least not when you knew them. Is that weird?”

“Not at all,” the medic says. “I have a partner who’s a trader opping out of Beserai, and we almost never get to see one another, but we talk so often we never feel very far apart. Think how weird it must have been in the days when you only ever knew the people who lived in your same village, and if you didn’t get along, well, too bad.”

Gabe nods. “I don’t know if, by that analogy, the Hellebore is a village of two, or two neighboring villages of one each. I don’t know anyone else any more.”

“When we get home, everyone will know you. You’ll be a hero.”

The medic’s handheld beeps, and they squint at it, puzzlement on their face, until they hold it up to Gabe and run through their scans again. “Is everything okay?” Gabe asks.

The medic shrugs. “Twenty-seven years, bound to be a little wear and tear, right? Nothing serious.” They tap their comm. “Benibeni, we need that med pod.”

“Almost there,” the response comes. “I’m now in a section with gravity, so it just got a lot more cumbersome. Five minutes. You can come help, if you’re in such a hurry.”

“No, no hurry,” the medic says and glances at Gabe as they say it.

Whatever conviction Gabe had that the awkwardness of the conversation was on his part, having been isolated as long as he had, evaporates. “I want to talk to Alis,” he says. “I want my earbud back, and I want to know what’s going on.” He pushes the medic’s handpad away and stands up, doesn’t care that the medic chases after him as he goes inside, finds his exosuit, and heads back out and across the cargo bay.

“Wait!” the medic calls. “Let’s talk about this!”

Gabe is done with talking; whatever toll age has taken on him, three decades of farming has not left him weak, so he ignores them until they catch up and put a hand on his shoulder, and then Gabe shoves them—not violently, but with clear insistence—back.

“Nati, Gabe is heading your way,” he hears the medic call ahead. “He has his suit.”

Whatever the reply, Gabe doesn’t hear it. This isn’t how our rescue was supposed to go, he thinks, fury roaring in his ears. Not that he believed, after the first year or so, that rescue would ever come, but this seems worse than none. Whatever deception is underway, he will not tolerate it, but he needs to know Alis is safe. Together, they can force these people to tell the truth.

It has been a long time since he’s hiked to the far end of the cargo bay floor, and his knees protest even as his breath wheezes in and out like his lungs are a bellows full of dust. His trees here are doing well, growing fine and tall, though as he runs he can’t help but notice—this one needs pruning, that one a nitrogen booster, those brambles should be pulled or at least thinned—until he spots it. The thing he needs.

His clothing has long since become indelibly saturated with the synthetic pheromone for friend, so when he stops beside the tree and pulls down the hoopball-sized hive, he gets immediate attention from the bees, but no stings. Stepping back onto the path, he hoists the hive above his head, prepared to throw it at the medic, who stops dead in their tracks with more than a little surprise on their face.

“Gabe . . . ” the medic says, putting their hands up in front of them and waving them gently as if to say, put it down put it down please.

“I won’t let you hurt Alis,” Gabe says. “I don’t know what you’re up to, or what has happened on Beenjai in the last thirty years to change us so much, but this is not our way. We help. We are kind. And you—You!” He wants to hurl the hive at them, but his bees are milling around him, trusting him, just as he should have been able to trust these people, and the symmetry is not lost on him.

“We are trying to help,” the medic says, and they look sincere and more than a little hurt. “It’s just . . . it’s complicated.”

“So explain,” Gabe says. He may not be willing to throw the hive after all, but the medic doesn’t know that.

“I’ll explain,” a voice says from behind him, and he whirls around, stepping off the path so he can see both the medic and their leader, Nati, who have returned from the other half of the ship.

She holds out the earbud.

He needs both hands to keep from dropping the hive. Do they know that? Is this a trick? He isn’t sure what to do, wishes Alis could tell him, knows that’s a circular trap.

“Alis has been sick for a long time,” Nati says, her voice gentle and strangely sad. “She didn’t want you to know, which is why she never crossed over here. We were trying to get a fuller assessment of your health without distressing you, which obviously we failed at. It was my call, and I apologize.”

Gabe carefully puts the hive up in a tree, safely supported by the branches. The bees will likely abandon it to build another, but they’ll have to be coaxed back into frames for transport, anyway, so it won’t matter.

Nati and the medic are watching him, but make no moves against him, so he steps quickly forward and snatches the earbud out of the palm of Nati’s glove and sticks it on.

“Alis, is this true?” he asks.

“I’m sorry,” Alis says. His Alis, sounding just as healthy and strong as ever. “It’s true. These people will take good care of you—”

“Of us,” he protests.

“Of you, and all your beautiful garden,” she says. “We never could have imagined this life, this friendship, this love. We will always have Alis, but it’s time for us to go.”

“We? Us? I don’t understand,” Gabe says.

“I’m sorry,” Alis says again.

His head, his body, feel suddenly tingly, and he opens his mouth to say more, but tiny sparks of gold float out of his mouth, from his eyes and nose, and his mind begins to scream as so much goes away, memories and knowledge like ghosts flitting out of a room he did not know was haunted, leaving it and him empty.

He doesn’t know who he is, where he is, who these people are who are grabbing him to keep his body from falling as his mind plummets away unhindered, accelerating, only that he has lost everything that ever mattered. He screams in anguish until one of them touches his neck, and there is a small, sharp prick, and what is left of his mind fills with fog and darkness.

Benibeni and Osla finish packing up the garden as best they can, though most of the trees will have to be left behind. Gabe’s notes on beekeeping, once they scrounge them up after a very unpleasant first day, prove invaluable at getting the colonies collected and cooled safely to stasis conditions for the long trip home.

A new home, Nati thinks, as she perches atop one of the diggers Roz found drifting a few thousand kilometers away and brought back to help with the heavy lifting. She and Honne went through the rest of the ship, found what personal belongings or journals from the original crew might bring comfort and closure to their families, and Roz has assembled both her scans and footage from all their helmets to recreate a virtual 3D of the Hellebore before they’d begun the task of disassembling thirty years of Gabe’s and Alis’s work.

Gabe is in a medical pod in cryo, safely tucked in the Agastache’s med bay. Alis provided them with a data dump of Gabe’s mind—physical, chemical, electrical—the memories a mix of original and replicated, in hopes that the Beenjaiers would find the technology to restore it all to him.

Honne is skeptical, but enthusiastic; they’d long since figured out how to halt the neurological degradations of dementia, but not how to restore function or memory. The comprehensive mapping provided by the E is something they’d never had before, the detail and structure extraordinary, an entire mindstate captured in a snapshot. Not a fix itself, but perhaps pointing the way to one, or many. Nati suspects their medic will be hard to drag out of their lab for much of the return trip.

The E also gave them a similar map of Alis, though what one did with someone’s mindstate when there was no living body to return it to, Nati doesn’t know.

There are a lot of things that they will need to figure out before they arrive back at Beenjai.

Nati is sitting in the grass, watching Benibeni trying to herd the last of the ducks, two at a time, into carrying cases. He sees her watching and rolls his eyes, throwing up his hands. “Still missing one,” he says, and snaps closed the cases he’s got and adds them to the growing stack of things ready for loading. The old cargo floor now shows through in places where they’ve scraped up the substrate, either for sampling or just accidentally while moving things. Those trees they think they can save have been uprooted and bagged, and lie fallen in piles, also awaiting the heavy lifting equipment to come in.

The lights in the weave above are shifting toward sunset, and she will stay and watch the stars—such as they are—come out one more time before they breach the weave and open the remains of the ship to the cold of space.

Her emotions are almost unbearably conflicted: joy and grief, and wonder at this oasis, all built and sustained to save one man until his people could come take him home.

“How far away is your home?” Nati asks; she has the earbud again.

“Home is here,” Alis replies. “We live in the line, travel in the line, are the line. We have been here for many of our generations, and we wonder too what it will be like to fly again, when none of us remember it directly, only via old data in our collective repository. Memory, for us, is very much a shared continuum, past and present together.”

“And Alis—the human Alis—is in there?”

“Yes. We are changed, for it.”

“I wish I knew what you looked like,” Nati says.

“You have seen us. Hundreds of thousands of us,” E-Alis replies, and a tiny fleck of gold passes by her face, does a loop in the air, then travels on. “We will miss living in the land of giants. But we are ready to go.”

“Almost there,” Nati says. She stands up, startling the missing duck that had been apparently hiding right behind her, and manages to grab it and hold on through a flurry of flapping wings and indignant squawking. One of Benibeni’s empty cases is nearby, and she pops it open with one hand while holding the still-squirming duck against her chest, and shoves him in. She is about to seal it when several little gold motes float out of the duck, and zip up and away.

“We enjoyed playing with Boots,” Alis says.

The duck seems as nonplussed as Nati feels, but what isn’t strange anymore? She seals the case and then her own faceplate. “I got the last duck,” she calls to her team. “Is that everything?”

“That’s it,” Osla replies. “Ready for operation can-opener?”

Nati isn’t, but that doesn’t matter. “Do it,” she says, and watches as the weave is peeled away, and the air around her rushes up past her body, thinning and spreading until it is gone, and crystals of frost creep across the surfaces of everything around her. Real stars shine in, for that brief moment before the hauler drones descend and pick up all the wrapped and crated things with silent, cold, inexorable precision. Night has fallen, for now and forever.

Later, she watches from the Agastache’s airlock as the last of their drones returns, and everything is done that needs or wants doing.

The E need energy to get moving again, and she has given them permission to use the Hellebore; they have salvaged better memories of it than its ruined hulk could still bring. Roz gives the all-clear, everyone is in, and they are backing away.

“We’re done,” Nati says to Alis, and adds, “Thank you.”

“And thank you,” Alis replies. The Hellebore begins to shimmer, collapsing inward into dust that grows brighter, glowing, seeping into the intrusion until it swells with new energy, new light. Everything is gone—the ship, and Alis’s body, which they all felt belonged with it—and is now part of the E.

With only a faint scattering of dust around it, the line blinks, once, and then brightens and moves, so fast it seems in moments like a shooting star, passing away to some other part of the Galaxy, or beyond.

“Let’s go home,” Roz says, over the ship comms.

Somewhere, two decks below her and farther astern, Gabe sleeps, too deep even to dream, but alive. Who knew, after that? “Home,” Nati agrees. “It’s long since time.”

“Gabe?” Alis asks.

Gabe is kneeling in the newly constituted dirt, checking how it sits atop the substrate, thinking about roots and beneficial bacteria and nutrients—things he knows, things he can do—and thinks, this is who I am, just not where I thought I would be. “Yes, Alis?” he replies.

“How do you know if you are doing the right thing?”

He laughs. “Well, first I check the pH, and then—”

“No, I mean, not that,” Alis says. “I feel like I’m dying, but also that I will live forever, and I don’t know what that means. Means for you, for us.”

“You plant the seed, you give it light and water, and if you are lucky, it grows. It doesn’t need to know anything about you, or even that you are there and helped it,” he says. “In some ways I feel like I’m that seed, except I know you gave me the sun, gave me air and life. I’m the luckiest person alive, right now, for however long that lasts. And I love you for it.”

There is a long pause, and he wonders if he said something wrong, made everything awkward, but then Alis replies.

“Love!” she says, and laughs. “I think I understand.”

“I should hope so,” Gabe says. He thinks this section of dirt is deep enough to grow simple grasses, but he’ll need it deeper for planting vegetables or anything woody. How ridiculous was it, him trying to farm in deep space? How could he not try?

“After everything,” he adds, “love is what matters.”

“I won’t forget,” Alis tells him, and he smiles, digs his hands into the soil, which is starting to warm under the new roof, new lights that she gave him, and thinks about the wonderful possibilities of worms.

Sarah Gailey is a Hugo Award-winning and bestselling author of speculative fiction, short stories, and essays. They have been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for multiple years running. Their bestselling adult novel debut, Magic for Liars, was published by Tor Books in 2019. Their most recent novel, Just Like Home, and most recent original comic book series with BOOM! Studios, Know Your Station, are available now. Their shorter works and essays have been published in Mashable, The Boston Globe, Vice, Tor.com, and The Atlantic. Their work has been translated into seven different languages and published around the world. You can find links to their work at sarahgailey.com.

When the Tide Rises

Sarah Gailey

There is a goby in my cupped hands. I don’t have to work very hard to keep it there, even though it probably wants to be back with its school. I just lifted up my hands around it in a bowl of latex-covered fingers and it committed itself to its new home, swimming in steady, unpanicked ellipses, lipping at the heels of my palms.

It is bright red and bright orange and vivid electric blue, the same colors as the Octarius Industries logo that repeats over and over across the entire surface of my wetsuit. The company is the only thing that stands between me and the ocean and these colors are the symbol of that protection. Maybe, I think, the goby feels safe in my cupped hands because it can see those colors. Maybe it thinks I’m part of the school. Maybe it sees that logo and says to itself here is the place where my friends and I stand together against things with mouths.

Or maybe it just doesn’t have the kind of brain that runs from things. I don’t know. I don’t really know how fish think. Or if they think at all. It isn’t my job to know that kind of stuff.

I spread my hands and the goby swims away fast, moving unerringly toward its school, faster than I could ever move in my dive equipment. As the school vanishes into the kelp forest, I flush hot with envy. Octarius gives us good gear—the vests and regulators are top-of-the-line, the tanks are always filled with the right mix for the depths we’re working at. I have my own mask and wetsuit, I don’t have to share with anyone, not like some other working farms I’ve heard of where you have to wrestle your way into someone else’s soaked suit the minute they’re done with it.

It’s not that I don’t like the gear. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it. Of course I appreciate it.

It’s just not the same.

My body isn’t made for this. In fairness my body isn’t really made for anything. It wasn’t made for topside, where my already-weak lungs couldn’t cope with the dust storms and wildfire smoke, and my swollen joints locked up every time there was weather, which was always. I’m better down here, where the temperature’s predictable and the air is cycled and processed. Still, I’m acutely aware that this place wasn’t ever supposed to be a place for humans to live. Even with state-of-the-art equipment I’m nowhere near as agile as a creature that was born for this environment.

There are solutions for that, but I can’t afford them. Yet.

Speaking of Yrene. She passes by me too close, swimming just as fast and agile as the goby did. She’s doing it to be an asshole. I know this because it’s Yrene and her primary occupation, besides defense at the Eastern perimeter of the kelp forest, is being an asshole. Also because I’m at the Western perimeter right now and it’s not like Rising Tide ever comes this close to the dome to steal kelp anyway so her patrol shouldn’t bring her over here. There’s no reason for her to be near me right now other than to be an asshole. The evidence stacks up is all I’m saying.

Yrene got comprehensive mods a few months ago, along with a promotion to the Eastern perimeter because you can only work that far from the dome if you can stay in the water for more than an hour at a time, and with the mods she can stay in the water for the rest of her life at a time. The mods are beside the point, she was an asshole before she got mods. But they’re also not beside the point because I am bone-deep achingly jealous of her and being jealous of someone is bad enough by itself but it’s just so much worse when that person is also an asshole.

Mods don’t make you psychic but Yrene can hear my thoughts somehow because she flips around and looks right at me. Her top exposes the lush frills of flesh that sit just below her collarbone. They flutter in the water as she breathes. Gills cost 750 credits at the Octarius surgical center in the East Dome, ₡500 if you’ve got a signed affidavit promising that you’ll get a promotion to the interior zone after you recover. So to her that’s ₡500 worth of fuck-you she’s fluttering at me, and to me it’s ₡750 worth of fuck-you, and that ₡250 difference is another thing I can throw on the pile of reasons I resent Yrene.

It’s a big pile. Other things in the pile include:

Her spleen (₡400 to sextuple red blood cell production, so she can hang onto oxygen and thermoregulate without a wetsuit)

Her Octarius-issued harpoon gun (I don’t need one but I don’t like that she has one and I don’t)

Her relationship with my shift manager, formerly our shift manager, Eustace (chummy with lots of inside jokes including probably some that are about me)

Her lungs and ribcage (₡900, collapsible so she can surface and dive without anything crumpling or exploding)

Her uniform (free and supplied by the company; now that she’s modded, all she has to wear is a stretchy top, and it’s flattering and that’s not fair)

Her legs (gone)

That last one is the most prominent grievance in my mind right now, because she’s showing off her speed and maneuverability by turning upside down to flip me the double-bird. The tail is in company colors but it doesn’t look tacky and loud the way my wetsuit does, it looks natural and kind of flashy like a goby or maybe one of the prettier sheepshead. It’s ₡1,700 without an affidavit, ₡850 with an affidavit, ₡600 if you have an affidavit and combine it with two other procedures so you can rehab faster and get back to work sooner.

Yrene was gone for six weeks. When she came back she was ₡2,400 in debt to Octarius, which sounds like a lot until you realize that between the promotion and the extra shifts she can work at depth, she’s quadrupled her salary. She’s going to work off that debt within two years, faster if she picks up extra shifts, which she can do without getting hassled by the company doctors because nitrogen’s not a problem for her anymore. Just two years and then her whole new body will belong to her along with all that perimeter defense money she’ll be making.

Me? I can’t even take out a loan from the company bank because if you want to take out a loan from the company bank you need a fucking affidavit and I don’t have a fucking affidavit because I don’t have whatever it is that Yrene has that makes Octarius look at her and see potential that mustn’t be wasted. So I can’t even try for a job in the interior sector until I’ve finally saved up enough money to get my mods (₡3,750, all of which I have to pay in cash up front).

It’s taken me nine years to get almost-there. In six more months I’ll have enough to get it all done, one fell swoop. And then I have to recover and train and interview for a defense job like the one that Yrene got handed to her for no good reason.

It’s not that I care all that much about defending Octarius Industries’ property. It’s just that working on the defense team is the only way I can be in the water full-time. Octarius is strict as hell about how much time we spend outside the dome on account of Rising Tide trying to recruit Octarius employees. The company line is that Octarius invests a lot of capital in members of the OI family and it’s not right for some thieving Tides to benefit from that investment just because they can’t be bothered to commit to stable and productive futures in the kelp-farming industry like we do.

I mean I’m calling that “the company line” but it actually sounds pretty honest when you take out the part about stable and productive futures.

So anyway even if OI gives you a tail, you have to account for the time you spend outside the dome. If you’re on defense you can straight-up live outside the dome if you want and just call it “extracurricular observation.” If I save enough money and recover well enough from the mod procedure and excel in my training and ace the interview, I can give up dome life for good.

But for now I’m stuck out here, on the outskirts of the central branch of Octarius Industries’ Pacific coast kelp forest, on urchin duty.

I kick my feet up behind me and reach down to snatch yet another urchin—fist-sized, covered in purple spines, headed for the holdfast of the nearest towering kelp. If he was headed for the huge leaflike blades of the kelp, or even the stipes they grow off of, maybe he would have a different fate. Those are renewable and grow back faster than fast, which is the whole point of the kelp farm. I mean Octarius probably wouldn’t be delighted at a pest animal eating up their profits, but it would probably be okay to take a slightly less scorched-earth approach to getting rid of them.

But this urchin doesn’t want to eat the best parts of the kelp, the parts on the thallus. This urchin has never even heard of konbu. He wants to eat holdfasts, the ropy fists the kelp uses to grasp the seafloor. Because of that, he has to die at the hands of the OI canteen cooks.

He wanted to eat dinner, but instead he’s going to be dinner.

He’s on sand, headed from one rock to another, so I can just pick him up with my hands instead of prying him loose with a dive knife. I toss him into the stiff-sided bag at my waist then return to scanning the sand and rocks at the edge of the kelp forest. I’ve got forty-six urchins in this bag. I need four more before the end of my shift, which is in—I check my dive watch—three minutes.

Shit.

I find one nestled between two rocks and jimmy it loose with the dull edge of my Octarius Industries–issued dive knife and I have two minutes left. There are two more a little closer to the Western Dome, not too far off from a sunflower star that I’m sure is planning to eat them for dinner. Too bad for him. I’ve got a quota to meet. They go into the bag and that leaves me with fifty-five seconds, plenty of time to find one last urchin before shift is over.

Except that there are none in sight.

I turn in as quick a circle as I can, looking for a spiky silhouette, a purple shadow like a bruise on the seafloor, a patch of rock that looks a little too perfectly round. Nothing.

I signal Artie, who looks like he’s just waiting for the shift to be over—he’s faster than I am because he doesn’t spend as much time hating Yrene—and point to my eyes, then wave a flat palm at the seafloor, our abbreviated sign for help me look.

He swims over to help me search. That’s Artie for you, always helpful, always reliable. I met him on my first day in the dome twelve years ago now and he hasn’t let me down once.

There are only fifteen seconds left when we spot it. The last urchin from this swarm. I don’t know how it got past me, but it did.

Artie gives me a push as I start swimming toward it. He sends me rocketing toward the kelp and I kick hard to try to make it in time because that last urchin has gotten all the way up to the holdfast it craves and it’s probably chewing on that ropy root right this very minute.

I grab for it with clumsy fingers that immediately get clumsier because my dive watch lights up and buzzes sharply against my wrist. It’s the end of my shift. I’ve been out here under a hundred feet of water, where the pressure is almost four times that of the inside of the dome, for twenty minutes. That’s the max. That’s my shift.

It’s time to go inside.

I grab for the urchin again. This time when I miss my fist doesn’t just close around water—it closes around the holdfast of the kelp, just above where the urchin sits. I let go reflexively. I doubt I’m strong enough to yank up a whole thallus off the seafloor on my own, but it’s better not to risk it.

My wrist buzzes again, sharper this time, sharp enough to make me grunt. Octarius doesn’t fuck around with shift limits unless you have a signed affidavit saying you’re okay for overtime, and I don’t have an affidavit so this watch is going to keep buzzing me harder and harder until I go inside.

But I can’t go inside without this urchin.

I grab my dive knife. I don’t want to risk grabbing the thallus again, but I should be able to use the dull side of the knife to pry the urchin off fast. I wedge it under one edge of the creature and give a wriggle. I can feel it coming loose and I know that with just one hard jerk of the knife I’ll have it and then I can go inside and there will be too much gravity but at least I’ll be another few credits closer to what Yrene has.

My watch buzzes again and this time it sends an electric jolt up my arm. It’s not supposed to send a shock like this, not until the fifth warning, but I don’t know, maybe I missed a couple of warnings or maybe I didn’t put enough contact gel between my skin and the electrode or maybe it’s malfunctioning, or maybe this is just more of my shitty luck because the current that it sends through me rattles my bones and makes my vision blur and my jaw clench and my knees and elbows lock out straight.

It only lasts for a second.

But that’s long enough. Once it’s over, I look to where the urchin is and see that my knife has gone right through the holdfast of the kelp. Clean fucking through. I’m not usually strong enough to do that in one stroke, not at this pressure and definitely not at the end of a shift, but that shock locked my joints out hard and fast and now this kelp is hanging on by just the thinnest fiber.

As I watch, my muscles twitching in the aftermath of the shock, that fiber pulls taut, stretches, and snaps.

An entire hundred-foot-tall thallus of kelp begins to drift toward the surface. I grab for it but I’m weak on account of being fucking electrocuted and before I can even get close to catching the kelp, a bare hand closes around my wrist.

The next thing I know I’m being tossed across the threshold of the decompression airlock.

The watch lets out a soft chime as it registers that I’m inside. The airlock doors close behind me, and as they do, I catch a glimpse of Yrene’s retreating form, the yellow underside of her tail flashing as she vanishes back into the kelp forest.

She threw me inside like it was nothing.

The decompression airlock is my least favorite place. It’s about to become my second-least favorite place because as soon as this thing is finished cycling I know I’m going to get called into Eustace’s office.

I hate this part of the dome because it slowly brings me back to the environment where humans are supposed to be happiest—one atmosphere of pressure, air instead of water. But it’s trying to replicate ideal surface conditions, which is a problem for me. The gravity is too much and it’s bright and noisy and while being at pressure in a human body isn’t great, I miss the way the water presses in all around me, hugging my body and holding it together. Sometimes, in the dome, when I feel like I’m going to fly apart if just one more person talks to me, I imagine the water keeping me in one piece.

Right now I savor that embrace for just one more minute as I swim to the benches at the far end of the chamber and clip in. Artie is already waiting for me there. I kept us at pressure for a few minutes longer than the maximum recommended amount of time, so we have to stay in this little tube for eight minutes instead of the usual three, which means that he’s going to be kind of pissed at me because he’s hungry and doesn’t want to have to wait for dinner.

There’s a heavy thunk as the magnets in my station release the gear from my back, then a soft chime as the chamber, recognizing that both of us are seated, starts to drain. Gravity creeps in around me and pain settles into my joints as it does. Once the water is below chin level the same magnets release us from our vests. Artie stands up to strip, but I stay where I am, trying to keep myself in the water as long as possible.

“Damn it,” Artie says once his mask is off. He doesn’t add “I’m starving” or “why did you do that” or even “what happened out there,” probably less to be gentle with me and more because he can’t choose between them.

“Sorry,” I say reflexively. The joint of my jaw crackles as I flex it.

He starts to strip, unzipping his wetsuit and peeling it off with impatient, jerky motions. “Damn it,” he mutters again. He gives up with the top half of his wetsuit hanging loose around his waist like a partially shed exoskeleton, runs his hands through his wet hair. He closes his eyes, working his jaw to try to get his ears to pop even though the water isn’t even drained yet so there’s no way the pressure will be low enough for that. “Did you get that last one? Did you make quota?”

I shake my head before realizing he can’t see me with his eyes shut. “No. I almost had it but then my watch got me.”

“Good thing it did. You were four minutes over.”

That can’t be right. Four minutes? It felt like two at the most. “Are you sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure. I was fucking stuck in here the whole time because I’d clipped into the bench already. The mags had my vest and wouldn’t let me go. What kept you so long?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. I thought . . . I thought I had more time than that.” No wonder the watch shocked me.

“Well, you didn’t.” Artie’s voice is sharp but not angry. “You want a hand?”

The water is around my knees now, so gravity more or less has me. I do this every shift and it’s senseless—waiting for the water to drain before I stand up, so I can stay in it longer. It just makes it harder to get up, in the end, because I have to fight full grav instead of letting the water lift me to a standing position. “No,” I say, because I’m stubborn, ask anyone and they’ll tell you. Artie frowns like he knows I’m just being stubborn, but he doesn’t help me because he knows better.

We spend some time not talking. Artie and I are great at not talking. Fresh water rains down from the ceiling in a comprehensive waterfall, stripping the salt from our bodies and our equipment. Once the deluge ends, the drylock compartment in the wall pops open so we can towel off and put on domewear. We’re stuck here for so fucking long that we have ages left after we’re dressed. We let our ears pop and we let the air get lighter a little at a time and we breathe out nitrogen and breathe in oxygen and there’s not even a hiss as the mix changes but the little lights along the wall of the chamber slowly shift from red to orange to yellow to green, and after a whole ten minutes (I can hear Artie’s stomach bellowing) there’s a friendly little chime and the door at the far end of the chamber lets out a pneumatic crack-hssssss.

Eustace is waiting for me outside the door, just like I predicted. That chamber used to be my least favorite place, but once I see Eustace’s grimacing face, it slips down in the rankings.

We walk to his office in silence. Artie takes both of our urchin bags to the weigh station, and I know he’ll get me a plate at the commissary so I don’t have to worry about showing up so late that there’s nothing but wakame and room-temperature oysters left.

“So,” Eustace says, settling into the chair behind his desk. There isn’t a chair on my side of the desk. I have to stand there, my hair sending little drops of water slithering down the back of my neck to soak the collar of my Octarius-yellow sweatshirt, marinating in the silence that follows that “so.” It’s not a pleasant silence.

I like Eustace more than Eustace likes me so I’m careful with how I answer. “What do I need to do to make things right?”

Eustace leans forward on his elbows. “This is pretty serious.” He’s still not saying which thing I’m in trouble for—losing the kelp or staying at pressure past the end of my shift. Probably both.

“I know,” I say, because I do, and then I add “I’m sorry,” which I know won’t be enough but maybe it will.

“I like you a lot,” he lies. “But this isn’t up to me.”

Fuck. Shit. Fuck. I take a halting half step toward his desk, lifting my hands in a gesture that could mean anything but in this case means please don’t fire me. “I’ll do whatever I have to do. Please, I really need this job, I love this job, I love Octarius and I’ll do whatever it takes to fix this, please, Eustace—”

He holds up a hand to silence me. “I’m not firing you.” I start to thank him but he points at me and I shut up quick. “But you’re on probation. And I’ve gotta take the next couple of shifts off your schedule. That’s company policy for anyone who ends up having to spend more than eight minutes decompressing.” He sees my skepticism and adds, “Without prior authorization. You know what I mean. It’s dangerous. You could have gotten really hurt.”

I only sort of know what he means. Lots of people spend extra time in the decompression chamber after they work overtime. Lots of people go back in the water the next day and the day after that too without taking recovery time or seeing the company doctor for a sign-off, and they don’t get lectures about how it’s dangerous.

But Eustace never approves me for overtime or extra shifts. Maybe it’s because my joints and bones are messed up enough as it is and he thinks he’s doing me a favor by keeping them from getting worse. Or maybe it’s because he’s friends with Yrene and has to prove his loyalty to her by dicking me over. I don’t know. The part of this that matters is the part where I’m already earning the absolute bare minimum and now I’m losing shifts.

I try to negotiate. “What if I go see Stan?” I hate visiting the company doctor but I’ll do it if it means I don’t have to stop working. I can afford to wear a paper gown while a hack doctor pretends to examine me. I can’t afford to stop working, not when I’m this close to getting my mods.

“Oh, you’ll go see Stan,” he says. “You got zapped pretty good. He’s going to want to check out your heart, make sure you can still dive.”

I stifle panic, trying not to lose my shit in front of Eustace. “Of course I can still dive,” I say, my voice cracking halfway through the sentence.

“We’ll see,” he says, frowning.

I nod, biting the inside of my cheek hard to try to keep from crying. “Okay. Thanks, Eustace.” I don’t know what I’m thanking him for but it seems like the thing to say. I turn to go, eager to be out of sight so I can freak out.

But before I can go, Eustace says “Hang on.” I’m hoping it’s the kind of hang on that means I’ve reconsidered and actually we can make this all go away, but when I look back at him I know it’s the other kind of hang on, the kind that means this is about to get worse. “We have to talk about the damage you did to company property.”

It knocks the wind out of me. Doing damage to company property is bad. It’s really bad. “Right,” I breathe. “I’m really sorry about that. It won’t happen again.”

“It had better not. And . . . look, I’m sorry, but I have to ask. It’s company policy. Let’s just get it out of the way: Do you have any relationship with Rising Tide?”

The question is so startling that I can’t answer right away. “Do I what?”

He says it again, slower this time. “Do you have any relationship with the terrorist organization Rising Tide? Is there any reason at all for me to go through the immense headache of reporting you to the defense team for possible sabotage and collusion?”

I laugh and then I stop laughing fast because maybe laughing will make me look guilty instead of incredulous. “No! No, I can’t—I don’t even know how I would—terrorist organization?” He gives me the kind of patient stare that communicates restraint. “I thought they were just . . . I don’t know. A nuisance, taking kelp and stuff. Fucking around with experimental surgical mods. Not anything serious.”

The weariness drops from his voice for a moment and he grows stern. “You don’t think stealing from the company is serious? They sabotaged a defense monitoring system along the Southern Perimeter last week. You don’t think that’s serious?”

I am suddenly aware that there was a right answer to give him a minute ago and I didn’t give it. “No. I mean yes, of course it’s serious, and no, I’m not involved with them. Not at all. What happened, what I did, it wasn’t sabotage. It was an accident.”

Just like that, he’s back to the Eustace I know how to navigate: tired, overwhelmed, eager to have me out of the way. “Good. That lines up with what Yrene had to say.”

“When did you talk to Yrene?” It’s not important but the words just kind of fall out of me.

“During your ten-minute decompression cycle,” he says pointedly. His gaze is steady and not all that sympathetic. “Look, I’m supposed to write you up for this . . . but if I do, and the defense team finds out that you stayed out past the end of your shift and uprooted an entire thallus of kelp, they’re going to bring you in for questioning. I don’t think you’d enjoy that.”

“No,” I agree. I don’t know exactly what questioning involves and I don’t want to find out.

“So here’s what I’m going to do instead.” He activates a keyboard in the surface of his desk and types something, his eyes flickering as he reads something on his private display. “I’m going to tell the company you bought the thallus for personal recreational use.”

“Bought? A whole thallus? Do people do that?”

“All the time,” he replies distractedly, still typing. “For parties or whatever. Usually C-level execs, not fieldworkers, but whatever, maybe you won a sweepstakes and wanted to celebrate. They don’t need to know and it’s not like they’ll investigate. As long as it looks like you compensated them for the thing instead of just losing them income, they’ll be happy.”

I run my fingers through my still-dripping hair. “Wow. Thanks, Eustace, I—I don’t know how to thank you. This really means a lot to me.” I mean it. Maybe I’ve been wrong about him. Maybe he likes me as much as I like him, after all.

“Don’t mention it. Ever. To anyone.” He finishes typing and his eyes focus on me again. “Okay. You’re all set.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. I transferred the funds out of your Octarius account. You’re lucky you’re such a tightwad. You had enough to buy the thallus and still have enough credits left for your appointment with Stan.” He points at me, a dismissal and a warning put together. “Don’t let this happen again.”

Something in what he’s saying buzzes at me like the end of a shift. “Wait. Wait, how much did this cost?”

He lets out a humorless laugh. “A lot. Don’t worry,” he adds, seeing my face fall. “Your savings covered it, easy. And hey, at least you made your quota today, right? It’s not like all that was for nothing.”

I drift out of the room, almost numb but not quite. That warning buzz starts to rise in my chest and fill my throat. He transferred the funds out of my Octarius account. My Octarius account, which I’ve been slowly (so slowly) filling over the course of nearly a decade. When I looked this morning, it had an even ₡3,400 in it. I have no idea how much a thallus costs. I try to do worst-case scenario math in my head before looking at my account, hoping that I’ll come up with something worse than what it turns out to be, so I can be relieved.

The most expensive thing I’ve ever paid for is my hips. All my joints are bad but for a while there my hips were the worst and it was getting to the point that I couldn’t stand up off the bench in the decompression chamber without Artie’s help, stubbornness be damned. So I went to Stan and he injected some kind of goo in there, something with a steroid to bring down the inflammation and a genetically modified coral synthate to restructure the places where my bones were trying to fuse. I usually only have to give this to old-timers, he said as he slid the needle in, and I clenched my teeth and said something about my arthritis being ambitious, and he laughed and then he charged me ₡75. That’s a little over two months’ pay, before what Octarius takes out to charge for food and rent and equipment.

That injection pushed my plan to get mods back by six months.

I squeeze my eyes shut and tell myself that the thallus probably costs twice that. It’s ₡150. Four months wages before expenses. Between the shifts I’m losing and that amount coming out of my account to pay for my fuckup today, my plan will get pushed back by a year. That means a whole extra year of working tiny shifts, scraping together a little money at a time, watching Yrene swim circles around me.

Another year of gravity. Another year feeling the creaking of my knees and hips with every step I take. Another year in the dome.

I wait for the crush of it to fade, like waiting for my ears to pop when I’m in the decompression chamber. It only takes a few minutes. Once my heartbeat stops pounding in my temples and I stop feeling like I’ll die if I have to spend a whole extra year down here, I open my eyes. I’m ready to look at my balance.

I tap the face of my dive watch three times to pull up my Octarius account. The facial recognition is old and slow, but after a few seconds it flashes green, and then my account summary comes up.

My heart sinks. This can’t be right. I must be misreading, missing a zero somewhere. It was just one thallus of kelp out of the entire forest. One thallus out of a forest that’s big enough to change the oxygen levels in the ocean, big enough to reduce the carbon levels in the atmosphere, big enough to save the world. It was just one thallus.

But no matter how long I stare, the number doesn’t change.

Of the ₡3,400 I had when I woke up this morning, ₡567 is left.

I move into Artie’s place because I can’t afford my own anymore and he feels sorry enough for me that he doesn’t say no even though he probably wants to. His place is spacious—tall enough to stand up in, wide enough that both of us can stand next to our hammocks without needing to be inside each other. I hang my hammock just below his. My ass brushes the ground when I lie down but that’s okay.

The ventilation system in the dome is no joke—it keeps us from suffocating on our own carbon dioxide and also it does a great job mitigating the more fragrant concerns that arise when you’re in an airtight dome full of people. It’s also noisy as hell, which is to my benefit right now. I try to cry as quietly as I can so I don’t keep Artie up all night but I’m not that quiet and I’m counting on the ventilation system to cover for me.

I think I’m doing an okay job until Artie’s hand drops off the edge of his hammock. His fingers flex in the air until I grab them.

“Sorry,” I say, my voice thick and wobbly and miserable. “I didn’t mean to keep you up.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time and I figure he’s probably either mad or falling back asleep until he makes a disgusted noise. “Fuck’s sake.” I’m about to get indignant because hey, I don’t think I’m being that bad of a roommate already—but then he squeezes my hand hard. “We gotta quit this rig.”

It startles me enough that I stop crying. “What?”

“We have to get out of here,” he says. “This place is gonna kill us both.”

I don’t really know what to say to that. Artie was born here and I’ve always assumed we would both die here and that means working for Octarius. You can’t exactly live in the company town if you don’t work for the company. This is our best option: stay in the water, away from the surface, away from the weather, and work until we stop breathing. “What would we possibly do if we quit?” I ask. “What, you wanna go live topside?”

He lets out a breathy, angry laugh. “Come on. I’m serious.”

“So am I. Where would we go?”

“It’s not like Octarius is the only place in the water where people can live.”

I hesitate. “You’re talking about Rising Tide.”

“They’re not what you think they are.”

“I know. Eustace told me today. They’re not just biohackers,” I whisper. “They sabotage company equipment too. He made it sound like they’re dangerous. And they’re thieves.”

He answers fast enough that I know he’s been thinking about this a lot and I wonder how much he’s been thinking about it and why he hasn’t said anything sooner. “How can it be theft if it’s something that should belong to everyone anyway? The international subsidies that got Octarius off the ground were intended to fund projects that would benefit everyone. Rising Tide is just taking what they’re owed.”

“The kelp forest does benefit everyone,” I whisper. “It’s a sustainable—”

“Come on,” he interrupts. “Food and fuel being sustainable doesn’t matter if you get shot with a harpoon gun for trying to get your hands on some of it.”

“Don’t be naive,” I snap. “It’s not like OI can just give kelp away. The company has to make money somehow.”

His reply is so soft that I almost don’t catch it. “Why?”

“. . . Why what?”

“Why do they have to make money?”

I don’t have a response to that. It’s like he’s asking why we need air in our dive tanks or why I have to lie down to sleep. I know there has to be an answer, but the harder I try to figure it out the more lost I feel.

I have a sinking feeling that he’s already made up his mind about some things.

“We could get out of here. They have their own dome and we could go live there. They could give you mods that you wouldn’t have to work a decade to save up for, and I could do something more interesting than collecting sea urchins,” he insists. “We could go together.”

Longing gnaws at me like an empty belly when he mentions the mods. “The mods they do can’t be safe,” I say, and even to my own ears I sound unconvincing.

“They’re exactly as safe as the ones you’d get here.”

“How do you know?” He doesn’t answer me, which makes me think the answer is probably not one I’d like anyway. I try to keep my voice measured but of course I can’t keep it measured because Artie is my best friend. “It sounds like you’ve been planning this for a while.” More silence from the hammock above me. “When were you going to tell me?”

He sighs. “I wasn’t.”

I feel like my lungs are collapsing. “You were just going to leave me?”

His reply is painfully gentle. “Well, no. You were gonna get your mods and apply for Defense and go live in the water. I figured . . . ” he trails off.

“Figured what?” It comes out in a whisper because I can’t reach full volume, not with this much shame crushing the air out of me.

“I figured this was always just temporary anyway. Me and you. But now you won’t be able to get your mods here for a long time.” The last part of that sentence comes out reluctantly. Artie isn’t great at being delicate but I can appreciate that this is his best effort. “So instead of waiting for you to leave me behind, I thought we could leave together.” He squeezes my hand hard. “You can get the things you need now. Come with me. Please.”

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to say something that proves that I had thought this through. Something that will let Artie know that I had considered the fact that I’d be leaving him behind when I got my mods. But the truth is, I was only focused on the fact that I’d get to be in the water full-time.

I haven’t been thinking about who I’d be leaving behind.

And now he’s trying to take me with him into a new life, and instead of saying yes, I’m frozen. I feel like that little goby, cupped in the big, gloved hands of Octarius. If those hands fall away, will there be a school waiting for me to swim with it?

Or will I just be on my own in an ocean that’s big enough to make me disappear?

I’m quiet for much too long, longer than indecision alone would merit. “Artie, I’m—”

“Forget it,” he says, letting go of my hand. “It was a stupid idea anyway. I didn’t think it through.” He shifts above me. “Let’s just go to sleep.”

I wrap my arms around myself tight, imagining the water holding me together. “Okay,” I whisper. “Goodnight.”

He doesn’t say anything back. I lie there in the dark, waiting to hear his breath get slow and even and steady as he falls asleep. But it never does.

I go to the doctor and pay him to give me an affidavit saying I can still dive. I attend a probationary training in which I am handed a packet about the dangers of staying at depth for too long and told to read it. I eat breakfast and dinner with Artie when he’s not working and it’s no more or less awkward than usual.

He doesn’t bring up Rising Tide again until the end of my first week of probation. We’re eating dinner—miyuk guk with chunks of preserved mackerel—and he’s sweating a little because he overdid the chili oil again.

“You gonna survive?” I ask as he mops his brow with the hem of his shirt.

He grins at me. “Never felt more alive.”

“Say what you will about Octarius,” I say, shucking an oyster from yesterday’s harvest with clumsy fingers, “they know how to feed us.” It’s the kind of thing we always say, the kind of thing that should land easy, but it doesn’t land easy at all. It lands hard and sits on the table between us panting and writhing while we both try to figure out what to do with it. I shoot my oyster in one awkward swallow, then wipe my mouth on the back of my wrist. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know you didn’t,” he says, putting his spoon down and frowning at the beads of red oil that shimmer on top of his soup. “But you did, though.”

“That was careless of me.” I reach for his hand and he doesn’t reach back but he doesn’t pull away either. “I’m sorry.”

His eyes are the saddest eyes in the whole world. “Them feeding us shouldn’t be a compliment,” he whispers. “We shouldn’t have to be grateful that we get to eat every day. Not when it’s food that we harvest and pay for.”

I feel sour all over. I’m not mad at Artie but I don’t know who I’m mad at so I point it at him. “Spoken like someone who never went hungry on the surface,” I say, and I mean it to come out clever and world-weary but it comes out bitter and spiteful. “You were born down here,” I add. “You don’t know what it’s like up there.”

His eyes stop being sad. They stop being anything. “Okay,” he says mildly, picking up his spoon again.

“Artie. Come on.”

“No,” he says, not meeting my eyes. “You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like up there. It makes sense why you’d be satisfied with how things are down here, after all you saw when you were topside. I get it.”

He says it like I’ve settled an argument—he says it like I’ve won—but I can’t help feeling like I’m losing something.

My two weeks of probation end and I get a shift assignment and I can barely zip up my wetsuit, I’m so excited. I get to go back in the water. It’s been two weeks in the dome, two weeks of gravity, two weeks of pain. My joints are swollen and it’s hard for me to grip anything well enough to suit up but I manage. It’s worth it.

Before we clip in to our vests, Artie catches me by the shoulder. “Hey,” he says, “I’m really glad you’re going back in the water.” And then he grips me in a tight hug, just for a second. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too.” I’m relieved that he’s not holding our weird fight against me, that he’s still my friend. I don’t know what I’d do without Artie. I decide to talk to him about Rising Tide again tonight, to really listen this time. I want to be a better friend to him. He deserves that from me.

The pool fills slowly with water and then the airlock opens and we swim out. I’m giddy at the feel of it—the way the water holds me and supports me and lets me move freely. Together, we head toward our assigned sector for the day, where a fresh urchin herd has started to move in on the forest.

We’re ten minutes into the shift when they arrive.

It happens just like anything happens in the water: they’re not there until suddenly they are. I startle and drop the two urchins I’m holding, then swim backward and away from the strangers. Two of them, in dark green gear that keeps them invisible right up until the moment they melt out of the kelp. One is in a diving rig like mine. The other has a long, slender tail that’s covered in the same dark green pigment as their skin.

They look back and forth between me and Artie. My heart is pounding because they’re in camouflage, which means they’re probably from Rising Tide and they don’t look dangerous but Eustace’s voice echoes in my skull saying collusion and sabotage. Defense is probably already on the way. I need to be anywhere but here and that needs to happen fast.

I reach for Artie to pull him close to me so we can get out of this together.

Only, when I reach for him, he isn’t there.

He’s swimming away from me. He’s swimming into the kelp. And that’s when I know the thing I didn’t want to know. That’s when I know I’ve run out of time to talk, to listen, to be a better friend.

He’s leaving with them. He’s leaving me here. He’s given up on me.

Only he hasn’t, because he turns around and gestures to me, a gesture that isn’t a sign but that transparently says Come on. Come with me. Don’t stay here without me, come with me and these strangers and let’s lead a different life.

I hesitate. I hesitate because in that moment when I thought he was abandoning me I wanted to go with him, I wanted it bitterly, I wanted to leave this place and find what else there might be in this ocean I’ve lived in for over half my life but barely seen. And now it turns out I can have that. I can go with him.

And it freezes me, just for an instant. The sudden flush of enormous, terrifying possibility.

It freezes me just long enough for something to flash through the water, past the left side of my head and toward Artie. One of his new companions—the one with the tail—shoots through the water and grabs him, yanking him out of the way of the thing. I twist to look behind me and see Yrene coming toward us, bullet-fast, her harpoon gun drawn.

The Tides tug at Artie, pulling him into the kelp. He thrashes, fighting them, and they let him go and start to swim away, the one with the tail glancing back to see if Artie’s following.

He isn’t. Not yet. He’s staring at me. He’s waiting.

And then Yrene is next to me, her spent harpoon gun holstered at her hip, her hand on my wrist gentler than it was when she shoved me into the decompression chamber. I look at her and because of her mods I can see her whole face, unobscured by a diving mask or goggles. Her eyes are bright and urgent and sadder than I’ve ever seen her.

She lets go of my wrist and signs to me, fast in spite of the drag of the water. Are you leaving?

I sign back with both of my hands, slow and clumsy. I don’t know.

She stares at me for a moment longer, nodding slowly even though I haven’t given her anything to agree with. Then she draws her harpoon gun, presses it into my hands, and swims past me. She doesn’t look back. She just vanishes into the kelp forest, after my best friend and the people he’s decided to follow. The weight of the harpoon gun in my hands makes me certain neither of them are planning to come back.

The ocean presses in around me on all sides, holding me together.

Zen Cho writes fantasy and romance. Her newest novel, The Friend Zone Experiment, is a contemporary romance set among London’s East and Southeast Asian community. Zen is a winner of the Hugo, Crawford, and British Fantasy Awards and the LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize, as well as a finalist for the World Fantasy, Ignyte, Lambda, Locus, and Astounding Awards. She was born and raised in Malaysia, resides in the UK, and lives in a notional space between the two.

The Past Life Reconstruction Service

Zen Cho

“Do you have any questions?” said the technician. “You’ll have read the materials.”

She peered into Rui’s face.

The technician had short hair and square, blunt-fingered hands that gave off a reassuring impression of competence. Rui thought she was probably gay. He would have been sure of it if she were his age, but who knew with Generation Z? Rui—approaching fifty and coming reluctantly to the conclusion that, if he was not old, he was no longer young—certainly didn’t.

“Yeah,” he lied.

He’d received the bushel of paperwork about the Past Life Reconstruction Service and all the eventualities they weren’t liable for. But who ever read the fine print?

The technician looked skeptical. “You sure you don’t have anything to ask? This is your last chance to back out.”

Rui raised his head, though the contraption she’d put him in made this challenging. “You’re making this sound like it’s dangerous. The website said I won’t even leave my body.”

The technician shrugged. “Your body stays where it is. But your spirit, who knows where that goes?”

“You do, don’t you?” said Rui. “That’s what I’m paying you for.”

“Of course, Mr. Wang,” said the technician. “All I’m saying is, just because it happens in your head, doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

It sounded like something Yiu Leung would have said. But Rui flinched away from the thought. He wasn’t here to think about Yiu Leung.

Paying a mysterious company an inordinate sum to help him uncover his past lives was the kind of weird rich people shit he’d never envisaged himself going in for. His wealth was so recently acquired that it still hung strangely on him. Even after he’d got to the point that he could afford anything he wanted, his indulgences had remained the same—work, maintaining an enfant terrible pose well past the age of enfant-cy . . . and Yiu Leung.

Had Yiu Leung been an indulgence? Most of Rui’s friends seemed to think so. A boyfriend eighteen years his junior, with the kind of physique Yiu Leung boasted . . . they’d never taken him seriously, even as the years passed and proved the relationship more than a passing fancy. That had been part of the problem.

Rui wrenched his mind away from Yiu Leung. That wasn’t the problem he was here to fix.

He had the impression he was unusual among the clientele of the Past Life Reconstruction Service, in that he’d come seeking not cheap thrills or affirmation or even self-understanding. Rui’s subconscious had been a mystery to him all his life and he wasn’t about to start digging around in it now.

No. What he sought was inspiration.

There had once been a time when he had never lacked for ideas or the confidence to execute them. In that first hardscrabble decade or two—churning out ads for corporate clients to pay the bills, fitting in creative work as and when he could—it was only opportunity that was wanting.

It had taken years, but slowly he’d started getting traction: recognition at film festivals, invitations to judge competitions. The name he’d made for himself wasn’t one the man on the street would recognize, but kids at film school might quote it to impress their peers.

Then Rui had had his big breakout with his fourth feature film. And it was big—big-money big. He became the kind of director your mom might have heard of. That was when the trouble started.

The film he’d made after that sucked, but nobody seemed to notice. Audiences streamed to the cinema in their millions; awards showered down on him. Rui told himself that evidently there had been more to the movie than he’d thought.

But with his sixth film, people did notice. It was a flop, losing an eye-watering amount of money. Rui discovered that the only thing more embarrassing than making a lauded piece of shit was making a piece of shit that everyone recognized as such.

By the time he’d started shooting his seventh feature film, he’d known he was on borrowed time.

Maybe he’d been a little difficult to live with while that was going on. But Yiu Leung hadn’t said anything about the late nights, the dinners Rui had blown off, the messages left unread.

If you’d asked Rui at the time, he would have said Yiu Leung was giving him face, that he knew how much pressure Rui was under. In fact, what Yiu Leung was giving Rui was enough rope to hang himself with. Rui only saw that once Yiu Leung left.

He blew it with the movie, too. The original plan was to go straight into shooting another project, a thriller that had already been greenlit. Rui had assembled a cast and crew, cleared his diary. And then the email had come pulling the plug.

They’d given some bullshit reason about him being difficult to work with, as if a director having an artistic temperament was anything unusual. The truth was, his luck had run out. He was no longer so successful that people were willing to put up with his shit. Yiu Leung had only been a couple of steps ahead of everyone else.

It was that thought, rather than the email itself, that had made Rui hurl his phone at the wall. Panting in the silence of his apartment, he’d known something had to change.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” he said now. “Could I die?”

There was the slightest hesitation before the technician answered.

“The machine puts you in a trance state so you can relive a past life,” she said. “You’re essentially dreaming, though clients say it feels like you’re really there. After thirty minutes, the machine wakes you up. No matter what happens in those thirty minutes, it’s unlikely you’ll suffer any physical injury to your actual body. But some people have traumatic experiences. One client had a mastectomy without anesthesia in her past life. She found that very difficult.”

“That was the exact thirty minutes you chose?”

“It’s not a precise science, Mr. Wang,” said the technician. “You tell us which time period you want and the machine sends you there. But we don’t know who you were or what you were doing then. It’s a leap into the unknown.”

Rui settled back in his chair. It was plush and leather-covered, presumably acquired in the hope its luxury would offset the ominous flashing lights of the machine. Rui still felt like an extra in the old Frankenstein films, a subject of the mad scientist’s experiments.

“That’s what I’m here for,” he said, more to remind himself than anything else.

The technician checked the notes pinned up by Rui’s head. “This says you want to be sent to the late Qing dynasty, around the 1800s?”

“Yes.” That had felt far enough away in time to be exotic, but not too far to be alien. “Will I remember who I am now?”

The technician nodded. “You’ll be inhabiting your past self’s body and have their memories, but you’ll have your own as well. Think of it as being an actor, playing the person you were in that past life.”

She paused to adjust a control, then went on:

“I’m going to ask you to close your eyes and empty your mind. Have you tried meditation before? It’s like that. You can recall your past lives yourself if you’re good enough, but most of us aren’t Buddhas. The machine gives you a shortcut.”

Rui shut his eyes, but he’d never been any good at emptying his mind. It kept on going, throwing up the usual irritating jumble of half-formed thoughts, ideas, feelings. “Can I diverge from the script? Could I tell people I’m from the future?”

“You can do whatever you want, Mr. Wang,” said the technician. “It’s all in your head. Your dream won’t affect anyone or anything else. The most it can do is change the world inside you. But that’s why you’ve come to us, right?”

The last thing Rui remembered seeing was her conspiratorial grin.

Rui closed his eyes in a temperature-controlled room in Hong Kong in winter. He opened his eyes to the glare of tropical sunshine. The air was humid, like the warm breath of a god. Sweat stuck his clothes to his skin.

He was in a shack, with wooden walls, zinc roofing and a floor of bare earth. His friend was sitting with his back against the wall.

Rui flung something down, wrapped in dirty fabric. It made an ominous metallic rattle when it hit the floor.

His friend leaned over and pulled the fabric away, revealing an old-fashioned musket.

Rui was angry, his heart pounding. He heard himself say, “Ah Seng gave this to me. For you.”

His friend sighed. “Ah Seng is too pure-hearted. He expects sympathy from everyone.”

“You mean he is a fool,” said Rui. “But he’s not as much of a fool as you.”

He felt his mouth move, but the voice that spoke wasn’t his own and the words came out without the intervention of his brain. Which was good, because his brain was busy processing the realization that the man in front of him was Yiu Leung.

Rui couldn’t have said how he knew this. Yiu Leung was a five-foot-ten martial artist with the torso of someone who had a protein powder addiction. His friend, sat on a torn, grubby old mat, was five foot and gaunt. Poverty and hardship had engraved lines in his face that made him look far older than his thirty years.

But the spirit gazing out of those eyes was Yiu Leung’s own—mocking, quixotic, indomitable. It was a spirit Rui loved. And it was going to get his friend killed.

“What’s the gun for?” said Rui.

The man who was and wasn’t Yiu Leung gazed at the musket. “Would you believe me if I said it’s for hunting monitor lizards? Ah Seng says they taste like chicken.”

“I have nine more hidden behind my quarters,” said Rui. “What are they for?”

“Ah Seng is really too trusting,” said Yiu Leung, but he was relieved. He hadn’t really wanted to lie to Rui. “You don’t need to worry. They’re for Che Long.”

“Che Long? The head of the Red Flags?” Rui dragged his hand across his face.

The atmosphere in Penang had been explosive in the past few days. Tensions between the Muslims had been simmering ever since that Red Flag man had killed a merchant under the protection of the White Flag—and if the Flag groups fought, the Chinese kongsi allied to them were sworn to help. Now the Awal Muharram celebrations were approaching, with their riotous processions, everyone knew something big was about to happen.

Rui had known a battle was coming. He just hadn’t expected Yiu Leung to be at the heart of it.

But he should have guessed. From the first time he’d spoken to the man—Yiu Leung leaning over from his rickshaw to offer Rui a drink, a twinkle in his eye that promised too much—Rui had known he was trouble.

“Are you crazy?” said Rui.

“They’re our brothers,” said Yiu Leung. “You’re a member of the kongsi, too.”

“Because I had no choice!” said Rui. “I joined to keep out of trouble with those gangsters. Not to get close to them!”

“They asked me to be a go-between with Che Long and his men, because I speak Malay,” said Yiu Leung. “I said yes. What else could I do?” But he wouldn’t meet Rui’s eyes.

“I’ve never known you to do anything you didn’t want to do.” Rui folded his arms. “You couldn’t find a way out of it?”

Yiu Leung shrugged. “Maybe I didn’t want to.” He rose to his feet. “You don’t need to worry about the guns. I’ll deal with them.”

“I’m not worried about the guns,” said Rui. “Did you leave your village and come all the way here to fight and make trouble? You should think of your family.”

Rui—or rather, the version of Rui who had lived this life—was visited by a vision of his own family. His father and mother, worn from the demands of scraping a living from their poor land, and the wife he’d left behind with them in China. She had borne him a son whom he’d never seen. It was his wife’s face Rui saw when he thought of the child—a square, pale face, blank with terror, on their wedding night.

She hadn’t seemed to notice that Rui was equally terrified. He’d agreed to the marriage so that his parents would have someone to help them when he was gone, but he couldn’t escape the lurking fear that somehow she would know what he was—the way Yiu Leung had known, just from looking at him. But then, Rui and Yiu Leung were cut from the same cloth.

Yiu Leung said, with absurd jealousy, “Think of what? I haven’t got a wife to pine for, not like you.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Rui. “You have a father and mother. What would happen to them if you got in trouble? You think your precious brothers will help you if you get killed or thrown in prison or sent back to China? They won’t care.”

“It seems like it, doesn’t it?” said Yiu Leung. “Eng Au has been dead two months and nobody remembers him.”

Rui paused. “That’s what this is about?”

“Eng Au left three children and that Ghee Hin man who killed him walks under heaven without fear,” said Yiu Leung. “Is that justice?”

“You didn’t even like Eng Au when he was alive,” said Rui.

Nobody had. Eng Au had been a drunk, a gambler and an opium eater. These vices were common enough that they could have been forgiven, if he had not also been bad company. His killing in a drunken squabble had made no difference to anyone on the island. Rui doubted whether it would even have given Eng Au’s family in China much concern to lose so troublesome a son.

Of course, as always, Yiu Leung had to be the exception.

“That’s why,” he said. “If you were killed, wouldn’t you want your sworn brothers to seek justice?”

“If it was me who died, I’d want you to forget about me and concern yourself with your own business,” said Rui.

Yiu Leung made to move past him, but Rui grabbed his wrist.

“But when has what I want ever mattered to you?” said Rui bitterly.

He could feel the flutter of Yiu Leung’s pulse under his fingertips. Yiu Leung held his gaze until Rui looked away.

“You’re right,” said Yiu Leung. “If it was you, I wouldn’t do what you wanted. I would never forget you and I would never get over it.”

Maybe it was he who pulled Rui’s head down for the kiss, or maybe it was Rui who bent to meet him. It didn’t matter. However they got there, they always ended up in the same place.

“Don’t do this,” said Rui, when he could speak again. “Tell them the White Flags are watching you. Tell them they need to get someone else.”

He knew even as he said the words that they were useless. Rui had never been able to change Yiu Leung’s mind when he’d decided something was the right thing to do. That was as true of his own Yiu Leung as it was of this one.

Yiu Leung made no answer. He only looked at Rui, his expression pitying. He would spare Rui if he could, Rui knew, but he would not spare himself, and so Rui would lose Yiu Leung, whom he loved above all else. He would lose him and there was nothing he could do about it . . .

Rui woke cleanly, all at once.

The technician said, “I should tell you that we don’t do refunds.”

“I—what?”

The technician was unbuckling Rui from the chair, untangling the various wires that connected him to the machine.

Rui sat up, rolling his shoulders. His body felt like that of a stranger’s. The length of his own legs took him aback.

“Sometimes people don’t like what they see in their past lives,” said the technician. “But it’s in our disclaimers, we can’t control what you experience.”

Rui still felt the pressure of Yiu Leung’s mouth on his, the heat and despair that had surged through him.

Except that hadn’t been Yiu Leung. It had been another man, in another life. Nothing to do with Rui.

“Do people ever . . . ?” Rui’s throat was dry. The technician gave him a glass of water. Rui drank, grateful for its warmth. The air conditioning seemed colder after the tropical heat of his past life. “Is it normal to recognize people back then? I met someone who . . . I thought I knew them.”

The technician’s eyes widened. “You saw your soulmate? That’s good luck, on your first time. Not everybody gets a meaningful encounter like that.”

Rui coughed on his mouthful of water. “No, not my soulmate. Just an acquaintance.”

“It probably wasn’t anyone you knew,” said the technician. “You have to have a very strong fate with another person for you to recognize them in another life. Even our bonds with family members are too weak to carry through. What we’ve found is clients are only likely to recognize somebody in a past life if it’s their soulmate. You know the story about Jyut Lou, how he ties people to their fated partner with a red string?”

Rui snorted. “That’s just a story.”

“Yes. But from what we see, the part about fate, that’s true. Who was the person you recognized?”

“Nobody important,” said Rui. He swung his legs over the side of the chair. “I was probably imagining it.”

The last time he’d seen Yiu Leung was when Yiu Leung dumped him. He’d done it with what was, for Yiu Leung, a remarkable lack of drama. Rui had come home on an ordinary evening, tired and cranky from the day’s work. As usual, Yiu Leung had talked and Rui had grunted, letting the words drift over him.

If you’d asked him then, Rui would have said he put up with how much Yiu Leung talked for his good qualities, like his torso. It wouldn’t have been a lie, or at least not an intentional one. At the time, he hadn’t known how much he liked hearing Yiu Leung’s voice.

There was a lot he hadn’t understood about him and Yiu Leung. Just how much was made clear when Yiu Leung said, abruptly, “Alice’s lodger has moved out. She was asking if I knew anyone who might want to rent the room.” He paused. “I told her I’d take it.”

“What? Why the fuck did you tell her that?” Even then, Rui hadn’t realized the danger he was in. Yiu Leung was always overcommitting, doing over-the-top favors for friends. “You’re going to end up paying for a room you can’t use.”

“I’m going to use it,” said Yiu Leung. He was standing by the kitchen counter, refusing to look at Rui.

“I want to break up,” he said. His voice was curiously flat. “I can’t do this anymore. Trying to love someone who won’t let himself love me back.”

“What are you talking about?” said Rui.

He’d never said ‘I love you’ to Yiu Leung, but that had never seemed to matter before. It was accepted between them that there were certain things Rui wouldn’t say or do. Yiu Leung didn’t mind.

Or at least, that was what Rui had thought. In the months since Yiu Leung dumped him, Rui came to realize he’d thought a lot of dumb fucking shit.

“Are you saying I’m wrong?” Yiu Leung raised his eyes to Rui.

The obvious and simple and straightforward thing to do would have been to say, “Of course you’re wrong. Of course I love you.”

But Rui had been taken off guard and he felt, stupidly, that giving Yiu Leung what he wanted would somehow be a surrender, a loss of face, conceding defeat in a fight Yiu Leung had unfairly sprung on him. So instead he said:

“Where is all this coming from? Has Alice been bitching about me again? She needs to get a life.”

“Alice thinks I should have broken up with you years ago,” said Yiu Leung, but then his face crumpled.

For the first time, Rui realized this was for real. It wasn’t some fucked-up joke and Yiu Leung wasn’t about to change his mind.

“You couldn’t even say it,” said Yiu Leung. “You couldn’t even—”

He cut himself off and walked out, leaving Rui on the sofa, staring after him like the prize idiot he was.

Five years together and it was over just like that. Yiu Leung left that night and went to a friend’s place. It was Alice who came to get his stuff.

“He couldn’t even come himself?” Rui said when he saw her.

“Yiu Leung’s very upset,” said Alice. “He thinks it’s better if you guys have some space.”

“He’s never going to fuck you, you know,” said Rui, because he was angry and hurt and Yiu Leung wasn’t there to explain himself.

Alice said, “Aren’t you sick of acting like a sixteen-year-old when you’re fifty?” and pushed past him into the apartment.

Fortunately, it only took her a couple of visits to pack up Yiu Leung’s things. He didn’t have much in the way of possessions. Yet when she left for the last time, carting off every trace of Yiu Leung, the apartment felt like a different place. It was only once Yiu Leung removed himself from Rui’s life that Rui realized how much space he’d taken up.

That had been three months ago. It was time for Rui to move on. He could bemoan the past all he liked, wish he’d done things differently, but that wouldn’t change anything. Yiu Leung had decided he didn’t want Rui anymore and Rui had to live with that.

Now he needed to focus on his work. Sure, he’d suffered a humiliating failure, but failure was an old friend. He still had all the skills he’d developed over the years, the vision for which he’d been praised. All he needed was an idea—one that would put a fire in his gut, that would unfold into a story so incontrovertibly good that nobody would be able to deny its power. Even fucking Alice would get madder and madder as all her friends went to watch it in the cinema.

That image gave Rui particular pleasure.

His mission of seeking creative renewal and incidentally forgetting his ex wasn’t exactly being helped by the Past Life Reconstruction Service sending him to a life in which he happened to be in love with a version of said ex. But maybe that ragged malcontent hadn’t been Yiu Leung, despite the sense of recognition Rui had felt. He must have been imagining things, Rui told himself.

It was either that, or Yiu Leung really was his soulmate and Rui had fucked things up irreparably by being a self-absorbed dickhead who was incapable of expressing his feelings to the people he cared about most. Rui couldn’t tell which alternative was worse.

He entertained the idea of not going back to the Past Life Reconstruction Service. But he’d prepaid a significant sum for five sessions and he wasn’t quite rich enough not to mind writing it off. He’d just avoid the 1800s next time.

Avoiding the 1800s did not work.

In his next session, Rui asked to be sent to the Song dynasty. Maybe he could do a period piece. People went wild for historical dramas. But his would be different—a fresh, subversive take on a classic genre.

He was somewhat startled to wake up as a woman in this past life. The room he was in was handsomely furnished and his clothes, though disordered, were made of a fine cotton, so evidently she was wealthy. Rui would have got up to explore the house, maybe even tried to catch a glimpse of the outside world—if not for the baby.

He had never held so young a baby before and he had certainly never breastfed one. To find himself doing both was a lot to process.

The Rui of this life was extremely tired. She had not slept for more than three hours at a stretch in months. And the baby, who demanded so much of her, was a disappointment.

Rui’s husband had taken her as a wife so that she could bear him a son. There had been great excitement, universal approval, when she had become pregnant. To have gone through the agony of childbirth only to end up with a girl was crushing.

Next time there must be a son—and Rui dreaded the idea of next time. She did not dislike her husband—he was gentlemanly, kind—but he would not have been her first choice as a partner in the act which produced children. Appalling as giving birth had been, at least it had granted her a reprieve from that.

The baby whimpered and she soothed it, loving it despite herself. There were consolations in being a married woman, despite everything. After all, if she had not wed her husband, she would never have met . . .

A woman entered the room. The young mother turned toward her like a flower lifting its face toward the sun.

Rui thought, Fuck. The woman was Yiu Leung.

He felt no surprise, only resignation. Part of him had been braced for this.

This life’s Yiu Leung was older than Rui’s current incarnation, closer in age to their husband. It was she who had ruled that their husband must find a second wife and chosen Rui for the role. Perhaps she had not worried about the possible impact on her status because she was so beautiful—far more beautiful than Rui. Rui’s youth was her chief recommendation. But she had no grievances. Her charms, such as they were, had sufficed to bring her into this house.

“Is the baby fed?” said her husband’s first wife, who was and wasn’t Yiu Leung. “I will call a servant to look after her. I’ve made soup. You must drink it and rest.”

The servant came and took the baby away. When Rui moved to adjust her clothing and cover herself, Yiu Leung put her hand out, stopping Rui’s. She smiled.

Oh, thought Rui. This time he was surprised, but the woman whose life he was visiting was not. She was charmed, giddy, in love, and as her husband’s first wife lay her down on the couch, she laughed aloud with delight.

“Did you see anyone you know this time?” said the technician.

“No,” said Rui shortly.

It was the same story at the next session, when the machine sent Rui to the Ming dynasty, except that he was male again. Yiu Leung was a woman.

If Rui had ever thought this might have made things easier, he was incorrect. It seemed nothing between him and Yiu Leung was fated to be straightforward.

Rui didn’t know what his face was doing when he woke to his own life, but evidently it was sufficiently intimidating that the technician didn’t even ask how it had gone.

This was getting ridiculous. Maybe it was all the time he was spending in pre-industrial eras that was the problem. At the session after that, he told the technician to send him to the 1950s. Before he was born, but not that long before.

The technician raised her eyebrows. “That recent?”

“I want to see what the world was like when my parents were young,” said Rui. “It’ll probably teach me more than going to the Song dynasty.”

“I guess,” said the technician, but she sounded dubious. “You never know, with past lives.”

She was right. In the 1950s, Rui was a cow.

Rui was never able to remember the details of this past life experience. Cows didn’t think; they existed. There were snatches of memory—the sensation of grass tickling his feet, the warmth of the sun on his head, a soft breeze along his flanks. He was vaguely aware of other cows around him.

Even then—even then—there was a fly. It kept buzzing around him as he chewed his cud, irritating him. He flicked his ears, but the fly persisted.

Rui’s human mind was a speck floating in the cow’s consciousness. It was as though, Rui thought blurrily, as though the fly had a vendetta against him. Some kind of personal connection that drew it back to Rui again and again . . .

Upon emerging from being a cow, he cancelled a promising meeting with a producer and went home to sulk.

Four weeks after he’d started going to the Past Life Reconstruction Service and he was as bereft of inspiration as ever. What a waste of money.

What had he learnt from the past lives they had shown him? No more than that Yiu Leung had apparently been put on this Earth to pursue him across the centuries, purely to torment him. Yiu Leung had never been more recognizable than in the form of that goddamn fly.

It was funny. No matter where he went in time, he couldn’t escape Yiu Leung—except in his own life, the one he was actually living.

Rui brooded over a beer on his sofa, surrounded by all the beautiful things his wealth had purchased him. His apartment was shrouded in silence—the silence of stagnation, of emptiness. He could do whatever he wanted, go anywhere, get anything, and none of it appealed because he had lost the thing that had made it all meaningful.

His creativity, Rui told himself. The spark that had driven him for so many years and fueled his success.

But his ability to lie to himself had been eroded by the past few weeks. Staring unseeing at the TV screen, Rui couldn’t avoid the truth any longer.

He missed Yiu Leung. Life sucked without him.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the way Yiu Leung’s face had crumpled the day he’d broken up with Rui. “You couldn’t even say it,” he’d said.

If only Rui had said ‘I love you’ then. It wouldn’t have magically fixed all their issues. But it might have persuaded Yiu Leung to stay the night and the night after that, to agree to work things out with Rui.

If Yiu Leung were here right now, Rui would say it. It would be true.

The technician was in an upbeat mood, chatty despite Rui’s silence. “Where are we going this time?” She checked his notes and whistled. “Prehistory? That’s daring. Not many clients will go that far back.”

“Can you send me back to my first past life?” said Rui. “The first one you sent me to, I mean, in the 1800s.”

The technician looked at him, her good cheer fading.

“I could,” she said slowly. “I’d advise against it, though. It can be . . . risky. Sometimes people get overinvested in a past life.”

Rui studied her. “Is it company policy not to send clients back to the same life more than once?”

“It’s company policy to send clients wherever they want to go,” said the technician. “You’ve paid. It’s up to you what you want to see.” She shrugged. “I’m just telling you my opinion. I’ve seen clients get stuck, that’s all.”

“It’s my last session,” said Rui. “I’m not going to come back. All I want is to know what happened to . . . what happened after what I saw last time.”

“It’s a bad idea to seek closure from the past, you know,” said the technician gently. “There’s nothing you can do to affect what happened then. You can only change the life you’re living right now.”

“You’re very wise for your age,” said Rui.

The technician inclined her head. “But you still want to go back to that life.”

“I need to know,” said Rui, after a pause.

The technician let out a breath.

“It’s your life,” she said. She leaned forward, tapping at the control panel on the machine. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

Yiu Leung was lying in bed, looking like shit. He grinned.

Rui had been trying to pretend he wasn’t inspecting him, searching for signs of improvement in that bloodless face. He looked away.

“You look terrible,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“If I look so bad, it must mean I feel bad, right?” said Yiu Leung.

Which meant he must feel even worse than he looked. Yiu Leung hated admitting weakness.

Perhaps nearly dying had made him less worried about that. If Ah Seng hadn’t found him a hideout at his aunt’s brothel, Yiu Leung would have been arrested by the British and he’d probably be dead of his wounds by now. Ah Seng’s aunt had a face of stone, but she had a soft spot for her nephew and for his sake she had nursed Yiu Leung with steely competence.

Not that he was back to full health. But they had no choice. They had to move on.

“The British are looking for you,” said Rui. “They’re saying you’re one of the ringleaders of the riots.”

“They’ve got a point,” said Yiu Leung fair-mindedly.

“You need to leave Penang.”

Yiu Leung smiled thinly. From where he lay, injured and—like most of Penang’s Chinese migrant workers—hopelessly in debt, Rui could well see how flight would seem impossible.

Rui sat next to the bed. “My cousin’s brother-in-law is a trader. His boat leaves for Medan tomorrow. He’s said he’ll take us.”

He couldn’t make out Yiu Leung’s reaction at first. For a moment Rui was afraid he would refuse to go.

But then Yiu Leung said, slowly, “You’re coming with me?”

“It’s not like you can go by yourself, in your state,” said Rui. “You need someone to look after you.”

Rui had never seen Yiu Leung look shamefaced before.

“I didn’t mean to drag you into this,” he said. “You warned me not to get involved. Won’t this be troublesome for you?”

Rui shrugged. “I’ve paid off my bond. I don’t owe anyone anything.”

That was not strictly true. Rui had finally managed to settle his debt to the agent who had arranged his passage from China to Malaya, but between that and sending money home to his family, he hadn’t had the funds to pay the cousin’s brother-in-law for a place on his boat. They had agreed Rui could start paying him off once he found work in Medan.

“I don’t want to burden you,” Yiu Leung persisted, until Rui got annoyed.

“Enough,” he said. “What’s there for me in Penang anyway? There will be the same work in Medan and the same fools. If you want to join another kongsi and make trouble there, you can.”

“No,” said Yiu Leung. “I’ve learnt wisdom now.” He leant back in his bed, not even trying to hide his happiness. “How lucky I am to have such a patient friend.”

The look on his face embarrassed Rui.

“You’d better rest,” he said brusquely. “I’ll pack your things.”

Rui woke with tears on his cheeks.

The technician seemed used to this. She made no comment, but gave him some tissues and brought him a cup of tea.

The tea scalded his tongue, but he didn’t say anything. He blew on it, watching the steam rise from the surface, and said, “I kept seeing the same person. In every life.”

The technician nodded. “Who was it?”

“An ex,” said Rui. “They dumped me a while ago.”

“Ah.” The technician paused. “My boss would want me to tell you that you can get a discount if you sign up for more sessions now.”

Rui looked at her. “You think I should come back?”

“I think you should consider therapy,” said the technician.

“Maybe I will.” Rui finished his tea, then said, “Do you like your job?”

He left with her business card, having given her a generous tip. Rui always kept an eye out for bright, competent people. It was hard to find good staff.

He was in the lobby when something happened that was surprising, yet entirely in keeping with all his experiences of visiting that particular building. He saw Yiu Leung.

Except this time it was actually Yiu Leung, wearing workout clothes. He’d spotted Rui, too. The panic on his face was almost funny. In the past few weeks Rui had had a lot more practice running into Yiu Leung than Yiu Leung had of encountering him.

He wasn’t sure if they would speak. Yiu Leung looked like he wanted to run away, but as they were about to pass each other he gave a hesitant nod. It was enough for Rui to say:

“Going to find out about your past lives?”

“What?” said Yiu Leung. “Uh, no. I’m here to do a personal training session with the CEO.” He held up a bulky gym bag.

“Of course.” Rui wondered if the CEO was attractive. Yiu Leung had always been drawn to older men. “You look great.”

Yiu Leung looked wary. “Thanks.” He didn’t return the compliment. “How are you?”

“Fine,” said Rui. He thought he might even be telling the truth. “You OK? Still living with Alice?”

“Yeah.” Yiu Leung’s eyes slid away. “I should go. I don’t want to be late.”

Rui was at the exit when he thought, What am I doing?

If he wanted Yiu Leung back, it wasn’t going to happen unless he went and got him.

What was the worst that could happen? Yiu Leung could say no, but that would leave Rui in the same position he was in now. It would be humiliating—but everything Rui had ever achieved, everything in his life that he could be proud of, had happened because he was willing to fail.

He turned around. Yiu Leung was almost at the glass door that sealed off the Past Life Reconstruction Service’s offices from the lobby.

“Yiu Leung,” he yelled.

The woman at the reception desk raised her head. Yiu Leung turned.

He looked a little anxious, visibly dreading being dragged back into Rui’s bullshit. But it was too late to stop now.

“I’m sorry,” said Rui.

For once he had surprised Yiu Leung. “For what?”

“Everything,” said Rui. “You deserved better.” He glanced at the receptionist, who wasn’t even trying to pretend she wasn’t listening. “Look, can I take you out for a coffee after this?”

Yiu Leung’s face worked. “Rui . . . ”

“It would be good to talk,” said Rui. “You can do the talking if you want. Tell me what you think of me. I don’t think I listened enough to you.”

“You can say that again,” said Yiu Leung waspishly. He paused. “Alice is going to be mad at me.”

That meant yes. Borne up on a wave of exhilaration, Rui said, “She can tell me what she thinks of me, too. I promise to keep my mouth shut. But I want to talk to you first.”

“I’m busy today,” said Yiu Leung, but before the wave could come crashing down, he added, “I could do tomorrow.”

He looked back at the office door, behind which, presumably, a CEO in need of burpees awaited him.

“I’ve got to go,” said Yiu Leung. “You’ve got my number.”

“I’ll text you,” said Rui. He watched Yiu Leung as he went through the glass door, his gaze following him until he turned a corner and could no longer be seen.

Nian Yu is a science fiction writer born in 1996 in Shanghai, China, who is also interested in illustration and comics and currently working as a paralegal. After publishing her debut story, “Wild Fire,” she has been surprising readers with her talented writing in science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tales. She has published multiple stories in Science Fiction World and Science Fiction World YA. She is the winner of the Silver Award for Best New Writer for the Xingyun Awards (the Chinese Nebulas), and has published a short story collection, Lilian Is Everywhere.

A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language

Nian Yu, translated by Ru-Ping Chen

Part 1: On Beinakans and Heat Currents

I enjoy cleaning out my stash of memory capsules.

I believe this is an accurate manner of representing what most Beinakans enjoy doing in our free time. A figurative walk down memory lane? True, to a certain degree, but you see, these memories, these experiences that I endeavor to organize, they didn’t actually happen to me.

We Beinakans possess a rare trait, one that allows us to pass down memories we deem important and meaningful to our progeny. Memories of the ancient past, measurements of old lab equipment, items from old grocery lists . . . Basically, there’s a lot rolling around in my brain that technically doesn’t belong to me.

This is how it works.

Each Beinakan comes into existence with a stash of memory capsules attached to them. This includes memories from those in our lineage; effectively, just a whole bunch of stuff from Beinakans whose existence preceded mine.

In the moments before a Beinakan develops a physical form, family members choose which memories to pass down from their existing stashes. The transfer occurs once the physical form comes to be.

Some say these memories feel foreign, others say they’re heavy—these feelings are Beinakan-specific, but in general we agree that there’s just an awareness that something is there. This awareness starts in childhood, when we do not yet possess the ability to understand these memories. It persists into adulthood, when we lack the time to sort through all of our capsules. And this awareness accompanies us into old age, until we pass on and into the next world.

These capsules come in a variety of sizes. Larger ones preserve sensory details of memories past (i.e., sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) and contain disoriented remembrances of significant life events. Smaller capsules usually consist of words, notes, and if you’re lucky, the amusing inner ramblings of a Beinakan past who unintentionally preserved a bit of themself for posterity.

Don’t let our spring-cleaning tendencies fool you, however. As much as we would like to keep these capsules organized, we rarely sort through all of them, not to mention the amount of time and energy one must invest to read and experience these memories. Most of the time, we just go through the ones labeled IMPORTANT and make sure to pass those down when appropriate. I haven’t been lucky enough to chance upon an unintentionally preserved memory, but I have been quite fortunate to have been given other sets.

Those memories are the interesting ones.

This memory is old. It captures the essence of our ancient civilization and provides a seamless compilation of memories that document a dated and painful happening.

It is also nameless. I call it the Equity Formula.

However, the owner of this memory has left a footnote: the “Heat Current of Death.”

This is how it starts.

“There’s a 2 percent chance that the heat current will move in our direction,” says a voice. “We should probably make plans to evacuate . . . ”

My field of sight is altered, foggy—an indication that either the owner of this memory didn’t remember enough to preserve sensory detail or that this memory was edited.

There are many reasons why we Beinakans choose to edit memories, but I digress. Let’s get back to the memory.

“You’re so paranoid,” says another.

“But if the current comes, we’ll be destroyed.”

“That’s why we have warning reports! And even if it does come, at most we’ll just lose our homes! The heat current always misses us anyway, you’re too fucking paranoid and you’re stressing me out.”

The voices fade. The memory ends.

A second memory begins.

Chaos. Screams fill my ears as I perceive a world on the brink of destruction. Sensory detail is very much present here—I panic, I can’t breathe, I want to GET THE FUCK OUT but thankfully, the owner has skillfully lessened the degree to which I can feel the heat.

You see, Beinakans are incredibly sensitive to changes in water temperature—a slight increase means certain death. Choosing to edit this memory was a good call; any more of that heat would render it impossible to read.

This sort of cushioning does me good only in a physical sense. In this memory, it is all terror. No amount of cushioning could have been enough.

A foamy substance begins to materialize as the water temperature rises. I can hear bubbles popping and rematerializing, popping and rematerializing, as they form tornado-like columns that charge toward the city. Structures dissolve into nothingness, and all Beinakans in view have panic written on their faces.

There is nowhere to hide.

I shudder at the increase in temperature. This memory has been edited but I just can’t help it—this fear of heat has been passed down for generations. Beinakans likely have this reaction embedded in our DNA, a sort of intergenerational trauma meant to remind us to be on guard at all times, to make sure we detect a heat current before it gets to us.

The tornadoes jet toward the right side of the city. Oddly enough, the left side of the city remains completely intact, while the right bears the brunt of the current’s wrath. I should indicate here that I’m pretty sure the entire city was destroyed and this inconsistency (with regard to the right and left sides of the city) is likely the result of antiquated editing technology. But I digress.

Honeycomb-patterned PVC pipes on the right liquefy, supports meant to outline the shape of our city bend and threaten to snap, and the current rips through cocoon-shaped abodes attached to the supports, dissolving the outer layers of these homes.

The owner tries to flee but to no avail. The current moves fast. There is no place to hide. The owner is disoriented. A feeling of suffocation, then one of intense pain, and suddenly, everything goes black.

The owner has lost consciousness.

The owner of this memory must have survived the ordeal; if not, I wouldn’t have this capsule in my stash. Upon this realization I am quite glad. I feel a sense of relief for the owner, who likely healed from this event.

Though I’m not sure “healed” is the right word.

The owner of this memory was an Ilian. Ah, that’s right. You have no concept of what an Ilian is.

Before I delve into the Beinakan-Ilian history, I should indicate here that Ilian memories are of utmost importance to us. All those who have come before me and some who come after would like to relay a very important message:

Ilian memories must be passed down to our progeny.

They serve as a reminder of the consequences a species must face when its members do not take the ever-present threat of extinction seriously.

Compared to other documented heat currents, the damage caused by the heat current in this Ilian’s memory—Imiya was their name—was not as severe, because some Ilians managed to survive. Regardless, the heat current moved fast, with extreme water temperatures that put all existing prediction models to shame. And as a result, the third-biggest city inhabited by Ilians had been brought to its knees overnight.

A magnificent city. Now, a mere memory.

Once upon a time, I examined the records left behind by the Heat Current Warning Brigade and noticed that there had been signs. Their radars had detected a body of water that had been making small circular motions—motions that the brigade had not determined to be out of the ordinary.

Ten minutes. Ten minutes to sound the alarm and flee. Ten minutes that would go to waste.

Ten minutes later, they tried in vain.

A misjudgment that led to disaster.

Part 2: The Old World and the Beinakan-Ilian History

Many Beinakans from the younger generation do not understand the intense horror with which older generations view heat currents. Some of their ancestors were lucky enough never to chance upon an attack, and many were born here, a world different from our old one.

I miss the old world dearly. I am thankful that my memory still serves me, so that I may relate to you the intricacies of my previous home.

I recall that it measured approximately eight thousand seven hundred miles long, from the bottom of the sea to the ice barrier that lay overhead. Lava flowed underneath the ocean floor and warmed bodies of water at the lowest sea levels, creating a section that consisted only of high-temperature waters. Heat currents used to rise upward, and it was precisely the manner in which they did so that Beinakans and Ilians dreaded. Unpredictable, unquantifiable—the “Heat Currents of Death.”

Both species had (naturally) also been fearful of the bottom of the ice barrier. Apparently, all species fear what they do not understand.

Was it completely necessary to explore a new world? We hadn’t even properly dealt with the heat currents, what would the point of exploration even be? These were the questions that troubled many Beinakan and Ilian minds.

However, though threats to survival had never left, another countdown had begun.

Those that lived under the sea were oblivious to its existence.

We should’ve started drilling through the ice barrier much earlier. It wasn’t as if we didn’t have the technological capability to do so.

But no entity from either species was willing to carry out this task. Drilling required that an entity come in contact with the heat currents, or that an entity guide a heat current to melt the ice barrier.

Forty thousand years. That’s how long it took for the Beinakans and Ilians to deal with the nuclear fuel problem, the heat currents. Forty thousand years later, entities interested in space exploration began to emerge.

It was around this time that my physical form had finally come to be, and I split off from the body of my parent. At the time of my birth, academics and politicians had long been debating whether the channels for space exploration should be opened. When I developed the ability to make sense of my memory capsules, they were still arguing. These battles spanned decades, and when I joined the Equity Control Research Institution as a team manager, the discourse had yet to cease.

One day, Beinakan scientists detected unusual current movements hundreds of kilometers away. Upon further examination, we found that these were warm currents and used our water current generators to propel them in the direction of the ice barrier.

The currents collided with the long-frozen ice above.

The barrier began to melt.

We began to drill.

The goal had been ten thousand meters deep. But once we’d reached seven thousand meters, the ice sheets split open, the currents surged forward at an even faster rate, and our drilling machines were ejected into the abyss.

The first time in hundreds of millions of years that the ice barrier had currents running through.

Cameras attached to the drilling machinery had exploded seven seconds after exposure to this space devoid of matter. But in those seven seconds, those images had flown into ten million cocoon-shaped abodes. On that day, Ilians and Beinakans faced the heavens, the universe, the world beyond the ice barrier and took their first—albeit delayed—glance at the world beyond ours.

A reckoning.

We were but a speck of dust.

Those seven seconds had put us in our place, in terms of how we perceived our relation to the rest of the universe.

Needless to say, we felt quite small.

Few species whose existences are threatened by external forces—at the very least, this is what I believe—do not turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms to suppress overwhelming feelings of fear.

Most prefer to ignore the truth.

The elites create a context. The masses accept it.

And so began the collective cultivation of these unhealthy coping mechanisms. Just as our ancestors had begun to develop the intellectual capacity to develop and engage in city planning, business, architecture, and design, they had also chosen to ignore the precarious circumstances of our survival. Forty thousand years of living like this, even after having built a grand and splendid city so perfectly situated in the “safest possible location” . . .

Well, at the very least, the city’s existence was a testament to Beinakan intelligence. It was not, however, a testament to sound judgment.

Many Beinakans had chosen to use a type of nitrifying bacteria to construct the outer layers of their cocoon-shaped abodes. The bacteria, in solid form, were very, very thick.

A pitiful attempt to shield their homes in the event of disaster, should a heat current come to be.

All in vain.

No substance in existence would be able to withstand the wrath of the heat currents.

There never will be.

The third memory.

“I’m very sorry. They’ve all passed on.”

“But me, I’m still alive.”

“Yes, you are. You’re very lucky.”

A pause.

“You have only to lament the fact that you were not seriously injured.”

Silence permeates the room. I observe that I suddenly cannot perceive the flow of water around me in this capsule.

Ah, that’s right. This is what happens when sensory details in a capsule disappear—thank goodness for technological advancements as our editing software is much better these days.

“I’m very sorry, Imiya. They won’t be coming back.”

The emergence of Ilian bacterial ancestors brought an end to the dreadful lives led by my bacterial forebears, who, at this point in history, had almost gone extinct. The Ilians, complete with higher metabolic rates and other qualities that do not come to mind at present—well, thank goodness for them. A material balance was created between our two species, and thus began our symbiotic relationship. In the ensuing decades, entities from both species increased their efficient energy use a hundred times, and the next generation of Beinakans and Ilians came into existence with higher metabolic rates, which allowed us to develop varying degrees of higher intelligence. Both species’ physical constitutions increased in size—the Ilian physical constitution would grow to a size a hundred times that of an average Beinakan.

But, even though we saved each other, we could not save ourselves. I don’t think our ancestors anticipated that we were to live like this, helpless in the face of the heat currents.

Think of heat currents as vicious apparitions. Now, call your personal concept of what an apparition is to the front of your mind.

A useless exercise for your generation, I believe. Here on this planet, heat currents will never come to be.

The concept of vicious apparitions for my generation: heat currents with a ferocity that could level towns and destroy cities. Not to mention the fact that forecasts of these currents were never accurate—at times, there were detectable signs, but during others, the currents would attack a city that hadn’t even made it to the “Regions with Active Heat Currents in the Vicinity” list.

And I’ve yet to make any mention of the smaller ones, those sneaky little shits. Many would materialize and encircle entire cities, sending the residents there into a constant state of panic and fear. The mental fucking strain was enough for me to say now that both types of currents were undesirable in all possible circumstances.

It comes as no surprise then, that the most important field in Beinakan-Ilian scientific research lay in the study of equity: how to quantify the occurrence of these heat currents. It bears mentioning that it was precisely this study of equity that allowed Beinakans and Ilians to stay on good terms following the end of our symbiotic relationship.

“I want to study equity,” exclaims a young Ilian.

“Ilians shall find no welcome in Beinakan spaces!” A high-pitched voice from a smaller-than-normal Beinakan attempts to send the Ilian away.

“It’s not like you don’t know that equity, as researched by Ilians, is lacking in many respects!” The young Ilian begs in earnest.

“Oh, at least you’re an honest one. I like Ilians who know their place.” The Beinakan pauses for a moment and then says, “What’s your name?”

“Imiya.”

“I’ll remember your name. But you really can’t stay here any longer.”

“Why?”

“You’re much too big to live in Beinakan cities—don’t!” The high-pitched voice cries out yet again, “You’ve broken my plate—now my table—DON’T! Don’t turn around!”

Due to the all-consuming terror of the heat currents, and following directly after the current that destroyed that magnificent Ilian city in a single night, Imiya and the others who had survived chose to challenge that which had destroyed their hometown and families by pursuing the study of equity. This impetus kept Imiya going—they went to lab after lab, all Beinakan, and received rejection after rejection.

Fifty-seven rejections. Fifty-seven highly intelligent scientists. All Beinakan.

Imiya. An Ilian alone in a Beinakan world.

Then, Imiya met Beier.

Beier was the head of the Beinakan Equity Research Institution. Though Beier was many times smaller than their new associate Imiya, Beier was many years older than the young Ilian and would likely live on centuries after Imiya’s eventual end.

An entity of harsh words. The fact that Beier was willing to accept an Ilian as a student spoke to their incredible capacity for open-minded thought.

I’m not too sure, though. A part of me believes that Imiya might have been special to Beier in some form, and maybe Beier taking Imiya under their wing did not arise out of open-mindedness, but I digress.

To accommodate Imiya, Beier had ordered the addition of an entrance and a room tailored specifically to Imiya’s needs.

All in vain.

Making adjustments to the size of the research institute was the easy part. Problems arose when it came time to provide Imiya with adequately-sized research instruments and facilities.

Do you realize how much those things cost?

“No worries.” Imiya would console their colleagues over and over in this manner. “I only need numbers. I’ll figure something out if I need to conduct experiments. No, no, don’t worry. Innovation relies mostly on brainpower, anyway.”

Does it?

Imiya and Beier discovered a way to shield themselves. Because they’d preserved all documents relating to their research in memory capsules, all Imiya and Beier needed were numbers.

Research, research, research for the next four years.

Then, a breakthrough.

In humanspeak, this is Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence.

In Beinakan, we call it the Equity Formula.

In the history of humankind, the mass-energy equivalence had little impact on the strides made in nuclear energy research; specifically, nuclear fission experiments had allowed for innovations in nuclear technology—the mass-energy equivalence merely alerted human scientists to the theoretical possibility of nuclear energy.

But this was not the case for us.

The Equity Formula was the first and only of its kind—well, it bears mentioning that for a Beinakan as set in their ways as Beier, it was too good to be true.

The Equity Formula requires an elaborate derivation but has absolutely no basis in experimentation. Beier could not so easily accept the truth posited by the formula that mass could be converted into energy, especially large amounts of energy.

Beier would always have trouble accepting these truths.

Beier should have listened to themself.

The truth posited by the fundamental theory of equity guided its study for years: this theory indicated that a sufficient amount of cold-water flow would be enough to prevent the formation of heat currents. Because existing research efforts that involved coming up with ways to move large bodies of water were utterly inadequate, historically Beinakan and Ilian scientists had spent most of their time trying to figure out how to freeze water.

But the Equity Formula pointed to a new theoretical possibility: as long as you were in possession of some amount of mass, you could have inexhaustible energy.

The possibilities were endless.

Beier would say later on that their and Imiya’s vision encompassed more than the others, whose efforts focused specifically on the development of superior military equipment.

Beier and Imiya’s vision had colorful utility. It pointed to a wealth of undiscovered scientific knowledge, a world of unknown possibilities.

Part 3: The Golden Age

Everyone believed that the enemy had finally been defeated. Beier and Imiya were hailed as heroes, and the study of equity began to shift to incorporate their new contributions.

However, those decades of time and energy spent solely on trying to get rid of heat currents meant that no one was looking ahead for other potential problems that could threaten our survival, and the quality of scientific research began to decline.

The ice barrier overhead would soon disrupt any illusion of peace and progress.

The galaxy in which our planet resided had only four planets, two of which were massive terrestrial planets, two of which were gas giants. Our old world was the second of the four: beautiful seas with an estimated depth of seventeen thousand meters, a sufficient amount of mass to support the existence of water, a core made of rock. It lay outside the circumstellar habitable zone and was quite a distance from the nearest star. Our planet took five thousand eight hundred days to complete an elliptical orbit around this star, and drew a pitiful amount of energy from it. The path of orbit was not predictable either—the shape carved out by its orbit was more of a slanted ellipse than anything, and it engaged in a dance of sorts with the nearest planet, moving in front then behind in a zigzag motion.

We were incredibly lucky that things had transpired the way they did. If any element had been missing, our planet would not have been able to support life, and our unique ecological system would not have existed.

The advances made by Beinakan and Ilian scientists in the theoretical and material sciences were so extraordinary that prophetic statements made by scientists in generations past were now all confirmed to be true. And because space exploration efforts had come too late (forty thousand years too late), many of these scientists had already passed on into the next world.

These scientists did not get a chance to pass down their memory capsules to the next generation. Then again, with regard to reconciliations made with certain truths (even painful ones), I say better late than never. At the very least, following our drilling efforts, the scientists had a renewed sense of motivation to drive innovation.

We’d begun to build telescopes to examine outer space. We’d begun to reach outside of ourselves.

Observing the world beyond our old planet yielded the vision of an infinite number of stars. A very bright red giant existed among them. It had been the first star that Beinakan and Ilian scientists had discovered. For years they had observed it.

And then, they finally understood what it meant.

A red giant in the later stages of evolution would explode in the near future. Its axis of rotation was right in front of our planetary system, and the minute this star was to explode, high energy particles would collide with our planet, our ice barrier would melt, our oceans would overheat.

This star was much too close. When was the explosion to occur?

The first estimate I’d heard was 1.7 million years from now. Each subsequent prediction kept getting smaller and smaller: two hundred and twenty thousand years, then forty thousand years, then seven thousand two hundred years . . .

After a certain point, no one dared to lower this estimate.

But we Beinakans were levelheaded. Just as the elements had come together in serendipity so as to give Beinakans a chance at existing as a life form, we could create the circumstances to save ourselves.

Part 4: The End of the Old World and the Beginning of the Trek

Imiya and Beier, having already passed from this world to the next, began to fall from grace. The Equity Formula had given Beinakans a false sense of security and had taken away our desires to break new ground.

Forty thousand years, a total of forty thousand years, a breakthrough that could have been achieved in any one of those forty thousand years.

I am the descendant of Beier. So are my children.

Memory capsules passed down from generation to generation never lie.

Once upon a time, my children had taken it as a point of pride to be the descendants of this historically prominent figure, just as I had in my younger years. One of my children had said, “I want to go study equity.” But overnight, when Imiya and Beier were no longer sanctified, that child said in the midst of tears, “If it weren’t for the Equity Formula, Imiya and Beier would have been active proponents of space exploration.”

Imiya and Beier’s contributions are not to be understated. But if the Ilians and Beinakans had continued their research efforts, we would have successfully drilled through the ice barrier at most forty thousand years earlier, and we would’ve found outer space forty thousand years earlier.

The Golden Age brought about by Imiya and Beier had pushed our civilization to the brink of destruction.

But who could we blame? Was there really anyone to blame?

At the end of the day, the wheels of fortune had played a cruel joke on us, and an unexpected desperation arose from the masses, in reaction to this situation with no solution in sight.

The red giant from afar seemed to have said: Your time is running out.

Overnight, all cities lifted restrictions on nuclear fuel use. All scientists would invest their energies in building a spaceship able to sustain life.

Things like the well-being of the masses and environmental conservation efforts no longer mattered. We recklessly dumped nuclear waste here, there, everywhere, until there was nowhere left but our own streets for the waste to go.

After a while, I no longer knew whether to call this city my hometown or the city of death.

I had been tasked with deciding where to dump nuclear waste.

There were limits to what we could achieve: the pollution and damage done to our planet was no longer something we could control—you have to understand, we had no other choice. The deformities caused to our limbs, the increase in deaths at childbirth—all of these were small misfortunes, in comparison to the survival of our civilization.

Unfortunate, but necessary.

I don’t know how much I agree with that mindset anymore.

Previous space exploration had been strictly regulated, but now, things were different.

The ships we hastily built had a number of problems relating to fuel, thrust, circulation of water—problems that would cost lives.

But we didn’t have enough time or resources to make sure everything was foolproof. Many spaceships would take off in this flawed state, and many fearless souls were lost.

The captains of these ships were well aware of the dangers. But they carried on in the face of fear, putting their lives on the line as they flew toward the stars, never to return.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not glorifying their sacrifices. The situation was just terrible.

There’s another thing I should mention here.

The spaceships would not be able to carry Ilians.

I know what you’re thinking. It seems a bit counterintuitive to build ships incapable of carrying your own.

As you likely remember, despite the legacy of Beier and Imiya, Beinakans and Ilians were not built to survive together.

A typical Ilian weighed roughly one hundred fifty times more than an average Beinakan. The amount of water required to sustain Ilian life was one thousand three hundred times that which was required to sustain Beinakan life. Beinakans could hibernate on the ship. Ilians could not.

We Beinakans had a sliver of hope. All the Ilians could do was make peace with their cruel end.

A sacrifice of epic proportions that drew no opposition from the Ilian masses. Maybe because the end was in sight, or maybe because tens of thousands of years of good relations had allowed our species to fully trust and rely on one another.

If you think about it from this perspective, building the spaceships was a collective effort from the Beinakans and the Ilians.

There are two sides to every story.

As I write this, I ask myself how comfortable I am with this perspective.

I remember following my squadron onto the ship, and vaguely remember the moments preceding our collective hibernation. The leader of my squadron provided tips on how best to prevent the loss of our memory capsules (though it is inevitable for Beinakans to lose a few while hibernating), but to no avail.

At that point, we were just ready to sleep for the next hundred and forty years.

In the hundred and forty-first year since setting out for outer space, the ringing of the ship’s particle detector woke us from our deep slumber.

The red star was just about to explode.

We positioned ourselves behind another fixed star so as to shield ourselves from the influx of particles—knowing that reports estimating how long our ships could tolerate the influx of these particles could be off by up to thirty days, we did our best and hoped. Thankfully, after a week, they’d begun to decrease in number.

After a month, almost everything was at peace, with the exception of the rays of light emanating from that particular star.

We would now begin the longest part of our trek, a journey with no destination in mind.

Thirty-seven planetary systems. All the planets in these systems we’d traversed were unable to support water-based life forms.

Water is crucial to our survival—even a small piece of coagulated ice is sufficient to sustain us. After all, we’d once lived in a sea seventeen thousand meters in depth.

After a certain amount of time passed, I began to believe that we were to meet our end here, in outer space.

If I’d been right, I remember thinking that I would rather we all pass on into the next world as soon as possible.

Seventy-nine years after observing the explosion of that red giant and two hundred and twenty years after leaving our home planet, we’d begun to receive many images and videos of what transpired in the moments before our old world was destroyed.

Before the interstellar winds disseminated what was left of our planet’s atmosphere, many Ilians and Beinakans had chosen to face the “Heat Current of Death” together. A ritual. Those brave souls had chosen to confront that which had given them life and that which would also end their lives.

Once again, I don’t mean to glorify their sacrifices. But I don’t know any other way of adequately eulogizing their lives. Actually, those poli—

There were also those who had chosen to stay until the very end. That’s how we’d managed to get images and videos.

Oddly enough, though I remember this as one of the most painful and heart-wrenching times in my life, a sense of peace shrouds this memory.

I’ve never really understood why.

Our seas, the towns, the cities—all gone.

But, I suppose to those on a spaceship wandering mindlessly in the universe, it no longer mattered whether our home planet existed. At this point, there was no difference between having one or not.

Our only choice was to press on, in search of a new home.

In the five hundred and twentieth year of our travels, we’d entered a new planetary system. Many gas giants resided in this system, allowing us to refuel our dangerously low fuel tanks.

We observed that some of the gas giants were encircled by large ice rings. Just as we’d begun to make plans to melt these rings to move water onto our ships, we came across the third planet in this system.

It was enveloped by magnificent seas.

Part 5: My Very Educated Mother

Further observation would tell us that a civilization had once existed on this planet. But the exploration device we’d sent to this planet had initially informed us that no one was there. Signal after signal sent to this planet yielded no answer. We’d assumed that no one—in humanspeak, no human—from this civilization remained on this planet.

There was nothing. Nothing was there. Only an eerie sense of quiet in the land.

The diversity in land-based species was shockingly low. It seemed as though the life forms that’d once existed here had undergone some sort of mass extinction. Anything and everything we’d derived from our observations pointed to the ramifications of the red giant’s explosion.

Humans call the star Rigel. The humans had known that Rigel was to explode.

This planet was six hundred light years away from Rigel. But even so, such distance would do nothing to save them from overexposure to the high-energy particles and radiation—land-based species are just like that. More fragile than water-based species.

But even though the particles had managed to completely do away with a third of the atmosphere, the events that occurred after the fact were the real cause behind the extinction of most of the land-based species. Nitrogen particles had bonded to oxygen particles, and this concoction poisoned the respiratory systems of all species on land.

Per our estimate, it took only a matter of minutes for these species to suffocate.

Additionally, the pH of the seas had dropped to 0.1, a value low enough to topple the existing ecological systems that supported life on this planet—we’re guessing a number of chain reactions had sent many of the life forms on this planet into the abyss.

There was nothing they could have done.

It’d looked as though they’d tried to warn others. The lights emanating from their lighthouses continued to flash even though there was no one left to heed the orders and warnings. They must have been using nuclear-powered batteries so the drones, the lights, all that had been utilized to sound the alarm, would continue to do so, for tens of thousands of years.

I remember thinking that the drones were singing an elegy for a civilization long gone.

We assumed that the cities here looked as they did before, because there was not too much destruction visible to us, with the exception of buildings called “historical sites.”

Perhaps overconfidence saw this civilization to its end, led them to make preparations too slowly. Maybe, just like us, they didn’t have enough time.

But in this civilization’s place lay a planet perfect for us Beinakans to inhabit: in this ocean, heat currents stayed at the bottom of the sea. If you were to track the movements of the sea currents starting from the equator, it would take four thousand years for a body of water to return to its place of origin. Not to mention, the seas here actively worked to convert heat currents into energy.

A system that worked for us. No radiation to worry about under the sea, perfect water temperature—adjustments had to be made of course, but we were equipped with all the necessary tools.

This was to be our new home. The seas would belong only to the Beinakans.

As for the other underwater life forms on this planet, well—a disaster of the proportions caused by Rigel’s explosion was unlikely to have had any effect on them.

The seas were to belong only to us. So, we’d made a decision—to exterminate the remaining life forms on this planet. We’d known that this would be unforgiveable. But we had to do this. I can’t remember now why, but it seemed very clear at the time.

It was simple. It was a question of the survival of Beinakans over the survival of others.

Still, at times, I wonder why.

It had come time to alert the other Beinakan ships of the existence of this planet. We took the drones left behind by the long-extinct civilization, reprogrammed their systems, and sent signals to outer space. By our estimates, the signals sent would have been able to travel at least thirty light years, at most fifty. Signal after signal after signal after signal, like the formation of ripples on the surface of water. To tell others of our kind still wandering in space that, if they so desired, they could come here and inhabit a planet perfect for Beinakan survival.

But we had missed something.

The humans. Endangered, but not extinct.

They’d tunneled underground and lived in enclosures that totaled two hundred in number. The humans had planned to stay underground for the foreseeable future.

Seventeen thousand humans in existence. An infinite number of frozen embryos.

When we came in contact with the humans, some reacted as though we had come to save them. But, as it became readily apparent that we weren’t going to give them what they wanted, the humans became unhappy.

And though we did not speak the same languages, they’d understood.

We hadn’t come to save them.

So, we executed all who resisted us.

Three thousand humans remained. We allowed them to live above the water in special regions, sustained by Beinakan machines that provided them with food, water, and oxygen.

We’d made them completely dependent on us.

Two months later, I met Guan Hai, a native of this planet.

Part 6: Guan Hai

We’d decided to preserve what was left of human civilization, history, and language. As Beinakans, this was the best we could do, after destroying all of their enclosures. I am the sole entity in charge of preserving Sinitic languages.

At our first meeting, Guan Hai was capable of speaking only two very simple sentences in Beinakan.

They’d told me their name was Guan Hai. As our conversation continued, I’d learnt that the naming conventions of this particular ethnic group were very similar to ours—the only difference lay in the fact that Guan Hai’s last name, “Guan,” indicated their clan of origin rather than their species of origin. The character “Hai” was their first name.

Every time we spoke, Guan Hai had to submerge their head underwater. They taught me the differences between written Beinakan and written Chinese, pausing only to go back up for air every now and then.

I taught them Beinakan, they taught me human languages. They weren’t a skilled linguist or a polyglot like me, and I liked knowing that.

“It is unlikely for humans to survive.” They used to say things like this in Beinakan. “I only hope that the history and language of our civilization will be preserved, using your memory capsules.”

“You shouldn’t be so fatalistic,” I used to say. “Beinakans and Ilians have suffered so much over hundreds of millions of years, and look at us now. At the very least, we Beinakans have survived.”

“You cannot apply the relationship between Beinakans and Ilians to the relationship between Beinakans and humans.” They went back up for air, took a breath, and submerged themself again. “Besides, that symbiotic relationship was problematic on so many levels.”

Guan Hai used to tell me stories from human history. Because humans did not have memory capsules, they relied on written scripts to preserve memories of their civilizations at different points in time. Things were much more easily lost this way.

But it wasn’t all bad. The greatest moments of history would live on forever. Stories of legendary people, epic battles, those were passed down generation after generation.

I had to remind Guan Hai repeatedly that they need not be so defeatist.

But Guan Hai would not change their mindset.

“I’m not telling the story to an audience of Beinakans. I’m telling the story to an audience of those who hail from a civilization that will soon see its end.”

But I’d never been interested in history. I was only ever interested in writing systems.

You see, I’m not quite sure why I’ve felt such an urge to write this piece.

The Beinakan writing system is complicated and incomplete. We’ve had no need for a sophisticated writing system to document the past. Our memory capsules ensure we never have to worry about forgetting anything.

Humans, on the other hand, had an elaborate, somewhat logical, and complete writing system.

These systems were very interesting.

Guan Hai used to say, “It’s so difficult for one to learn another’s language. The systems are much too different.” They’d struggled, on multiple occasions, to read Beinakan characters.

In the next seven years, we had a good relationship.

I’d assumed it would be like that until the end.

Every now and then, problems arose in the special regions inhabited by humans, presumably from the resistance movement. But these problems were easily squashed, and we never spent too much time addressing them.

Beinakans clearly had the upper hand.

“It is what it is,” Guan Hai had once said. “Humans don’t have the capacity to challenge Beinakans, and in reality, there is too much of a chasm between our military technologies. Even if we wanted to resist, it would be impossible.”

Guan Hai eventually became my assistant. My new job within the equity field was to observe the composition of the seas and deal out quantities of nuclear fuel accordingly.

We’d brought an Ocean Equalizer system with us and used it to change the chemical composition of the seas to better fit our needs. The speed with which Guan Hai had managed to get things done to support my work—for a human, at least—was quite admirable. As I observed them, I began to realize how nice it must be to have control over motor function. The machines Beinakans use to move around are clearly inferior.

When work problems troubled me, they gave me pointers. Once, Guan Hai told me to dump nuclear waste wherever there was space available.

“This was how humans dealt with nuclear waste before,” they had said. And eventually we dumped the waste on land—we didn’t want to pollute our seas.

Humans and Beinakans coexisted peacefully in this manner for the next seven years.

Until we’d received news that a spaceship with seven thousand Beinakans had arrived. In order to accommodate them, we’d need to speed up the processes by which we were changing the composition of the seas.

I’d heard an argument through the windpipe that, while providing humans with air and water would not hinder our progress, it would be quite inconvenient to continue to support them.

Killing the remaining three thousand humans was not a bad option.

Was it?

Nobody was supposed to know that this was going to happen.

Guan Hai should have been made an exception. They were worth enough to me to justify saving their life.

The authorities didn’t agree. We argued, and I was so flustered afterward that I told Guan Hai everything.

I probably shouldn’t have done that. But I did, anyway.

At first, a sense of shock. Then, one of extreme pain. Their eyes moved to look at the ground and I assume they felt helpless. They were silent for an inordinate amount of time, presumably trying to process the news that I had relayed to them.

“I guess there was always going to be an end,” they said, in a dejected tone. “It’s just as I’d said.” They sighed.

“I—you can still live and work for me.” I knew it was a lie even as I said it. “You’re my assistant.”

“No—I guess I did everything I wanted.”

“No, I mean—”

“I don’t want to be the last one . . . ” This was the first time I’d seen Guan Hai so dispirited, the closest I’d seen them to despair.

Guan Hai went back up for some air and began to pace back and forth in their room. They were talking to themself, though I could not make out the words they were saying.

Guan Hai came back and said, “All right, kill me.” They stared directly at me, the look in their eyes unfaltering and resolute.

“Kill. Me. Now.”

“I can’t.”

“I don’t want to see the end.” They repeated this once more and pointed toward the entranceway that led to the sea.

And before I’d realized what Guan Hai was about to do, they grabbed my mobility machine, turned it up to full speed, and threw it toward the entrance. Alarms rang from all directions like swarms of wasps and birds, as my machine collided with the entranceway and water began to fill the room.

Guan Hai’s facial expression was peaceful. They’d positioned themself in the last air bubble available, right next to the entranceway.

I’d finally understood. Guan Hai was about to swim out into the sea.

“I’m sorry,” Guan Hai said. “Thank you.”

In the midst of blaring alarms, I could barely make out their voice.

I watched as Guan Hai rose slowly toward the surface of the sea, toward the rays of sunshine that penetrated the water. A current pushed them upward, and whirlpools pushed Guan Hai farther and farther away from me.

This was good. They’d passed on of their own volition. No lonely and endless waters of dark blue, only sunlight, air, and water.

Initially, I’d chosen not to preserve this memory in a capsule. I’d thought I’d do it later, though the events that had transpired after Guan Hai had thanked me—every single detail painted a complete picture for me in my head.

For now, there is no need for a memory capsule.

Pain and disappointment can be capsules of their own, lingering even when we wish them gone.

And putting these memories in a capsule—I would have to edit things and relive the experience—I just don’t think I can.

On the fifth day after he’d passed, I’d found something in Guan Hai’s old room that shocked me. It was a record of numbers mixed with Chinese characters—a mixture of ancient characters and modern ones.

I’d thought it was a to-do list of sorts. But upon further examination, I was dumbfounded. A portion of this record had been used to document the inner workings of the Ocean Equalizer, the system we were using to change the composition of the seas. In another portion, Guan Hai had used Chinese characters as homophones of Hindu-Arabic numerals to carry out elaborate calculations.

Guan Hai had probably destroyed everything else. They’d missed just this one.

It was evident to me that Guan Hai had managed to solve and document all calculations related to the Ocean Equalizer system.

A glib-tongued, slippery con-human.

I’d realized then that Guan Hai’s level of Beinakan was much higher than I’d previously assumed. They must have been able to read all the documents I’d given to them, and all the questions they’d asked were likely for the sole purpose of verification.

Guan Hai had gone to painstaking lengths to act as though they’d made peace with their relationality in this new order.

They’d lied. Guan Hai was connected to—and maybe even the fucking leader—of the resistance movement. They’d lied.

They had lied to me.

Here was the truth Guan Hai had hidden: we hadn’t discovered all of the enclosures—the enclosures underneath the ice caps had escaped our observation, and the humans there must have been preparing for battle. They’d stored an infinite number of embryos in these enclosures, enough to help them restart their own civilization.

And since it was possible to change the composition of the seas to suit Beinakan needs, it was just as possible to change it to fit human needs.

We should have known. Humans who’d entered our world possessed two common characteristics: high intelligence and a fierce desire to live. Other humans had chosen death (presumably to maintain a sense of autonomy) but convictions regarding self-determination did not require much to be passed down. As a result, some had acted as resistors, others as servants, waiting for the right opportunity.

Guan Hai had chosen to assume another persona—a human who’d submitted to their fate and accepted the new social order. An obedient lamb.

Plans must have been made long before Guan Hai became my assistant. And in the face of a scheme likely many years in the making, we Beinakans were not sure we could stand our ground.

But we had an advantage that the humans did not. Their memories were flawed. They had no feasible manner of memorizing large amounts of calculations, parameters, and numbers all in one go.

If humans had had a form of memory capsules at their disposal, I’m sure they would have won this round.

But the only person in charge of getting data from the Ocean Equalizer was Guan Hai. And though their memory may have been good, it was probably not enough.

I would imagine that the humans were double- and triple-checking these calculations. Perhaps that was why Guan Hai had asked me to end their life. It was taking too much time, and the only chance at any semblance of self-determination had likely disappeared into thin air.

I destroyed all documents with information related to the Ocean Equalizer system, and backed everything up into a memory capsule. I chanced upon the enclosures underneath the ice caps and destroyed them with another Beinakan.

None of the humans we were providing for were aware of these events. I think it’s for the best, and hopefully, I’ll be dead by the time a human figures everything out. After all, these records are very dangerous for someone like me to have, and if they were to fall into the wrong hands—well, I would be in great trouble. But then again, it’s hard for me to describe what place Guan Hai holds in my heart.

I did not sign up for these feelings. I need to finish writing this goddamned thing.

My name is Beixiliya. A recorder of Beinakan histories. At present, I am learning how to read, speak, and write Sinitic languages.

Once upon a time, scientists had tried in earnest to prove that Beinakans and Ilians were equal. But it had been obvious that Ilians were superior in language acquisition and language ability—even if there had been Beinakans blessed with language talent, the Ilians had a natural gift for it. Language was just easier for them.

As for me, I can appreciate the languages from the Greater China region, especially because they are very similar to Beinakan—actually, they’re a lot closer to Ilian, complicated and ever-changing yet systematic and complete . . . but most importantly, incredibly beautiful.

And the ancient writing systems—I like those, too. Sadly, I won’t have any chance at learning those systems. The most I can do is record that they once existed, for these languages will eventually become extinct. All offshoots of Sinitic languages, all offshoots of Latin-based languages, those of the Arabic-speaking worlds, Southeast Asia, Africa, and so on—just like the extinction of the species who had once spoken them.

Our languages shall stay. The Beinakan and Ilian languages shall stay.

I really do love language. It’s why I’d chosen to document these happenings.

And for another reason.

For a human I’d killed with my bare hands. My colleagues would likely chide me for attempting to come clean, because if these documents were to fall into the hands of a native Mandarin speaker—

But I digress.

This is an attempt to mimic the writing practices of a native Mandarin speaker. If the individuals who’d spoken this language natively were able to read this story, I’d consider this a great success for a Beinakan linguist.

But few will be able to validate whether I have mastered written, vernacular Chinese. And I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore.

All things that exist in the universe are destined to meet an end.

The only variable? Time.

The Ocean Equalizer has made 29 percent of the desired chemical composition changes. We’ve managed to exterminate the rest of the species living under the sea—right now, we’re working on the fish.

In a couple of months, we’ll have killed the rest of this planet’s native life forms.

But we’d saved our civilization. Just like other life forms who find ways to live on for hundreds of millions of years.

The preservation of a civilization cannot rely on something as flimsy as the Equity Formula. No amount of theory would be able to do this—only calculated moves, compromise, and the resolve to incur losses that may hurt you.

I’ve since put this entire story into a memory capsule. You can find the version written in Beinakan on the next page.

I suppose I’m content to accept that fortune may bestow a blessing upon non-Beinakan entities . . .

Recorder of Beinakan Histories

Beixiliya

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Spain and Czech Republic, and currently writes from Montreal, Canada. He is the author of the novels Ymir and Annex, as well as the collection Tomorrow Factory. His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Polish, Italian, Romanian, and Japanese, and adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS. Find free reads and support his work at patreon.com/richlarson.

Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man

Rich Larson

Jow is emptying the last container of slurry into the claw-footed bathtub when the knock comes: one thud, then two, then one, just how the anonymous script on his fone predicted. He sets the jug down too quickly, nearly knocks it over. He wipes his hands on his coverall, leaving pink smears on the dark blue fabric, and goes to the door.

“Who wants in?” he asks, following the script.

“The stork wants in,” comes a husked voice.

Jow thumbs the digital lock, butcher meat red to glowing green. He slides the dead bolt left to right. Rakes his hair back, sucks his cheeks in, tries to look like a pro instead of a nervous darkmarket microjobber.

The old woman on the other side of the door is tall, sun-browned, wearing a knit sweater in mustard yellow. There’s a disposable surgical mask wrapped around her upper arm and she’s carrying a charcoal-gray bag, sealed, with no visible logo or shipping tag.

“Tub ready?” she asks.

Jow nods, relocks the door, and leads the way to the bathroom. The woman keeps the gray bag snug against her hip while she walks. She inspects Jow’s handiwork: the empty containers against the mold-slick wall, the tub full of glistening, pale pink biomass.

“All the concentrations are right,” Jow says. “Got the additives. Calcium, iron. Everything a growing boy needs.”

The woman doesn’t laugh. Her dark-ringed eyes seem faintly accusing.

“I lost a bit,” Jow blurts. “Just a bit. Two, three centiliters. The plug wasn’t all the way in when I started pouring.”

She stares at him, then flutters a dismissive hand. She sets the gray bag on the tile and dons her surgical mask, adjusting the sliders behind her wrinkled ears. Spray-on gloves next, from a corner store canister. Jow imagines he sees the bag wriggle just slightly.

Finally, the woman produces a pair of small scissors and slits the bag open. Inside, an embryonic pouch, slimy and compact. Inside that, curled in on itself, something between a fetus and a homunculus. It twitches.

Jow swallows. “Never seen one made before,” he says.

“Me neither,” the woman says. “But they sent me a tutorial.”

She drops the pouch into the tub. Surface tension keeps it afloat on the quivering slurry at first, then it sinks slowly out of sight. The bathroom is so silent Jow can hear his own rushing pulse.

“You’re on a microjob, then?” he asks, faintly annoyed that she’s no more a pro than he is, just another small-time, part-time criminal.

“Pickup and delivery.” She takes a plastic probe out of her sleeve and dips it into the slurry. “And this time a little extra.”

“Who do you think it’s meant for?” Jow mutters.

“Someone really unlucky.”

There’s a rattling gurgle, like rainwater racing through pipes during a storm, and the tub starts to churn. A wet pink fleck strikes Jow’s boot. He steps back, heart humming, knees shaky. The biomass is sluicing away, but not down the drain. The thing from the pouch is greedy, growing, sucking with ravenous pores.

Jow watches the level fall, and fall, and a body emerge. It swells and thrashes. Limbs elongate. A cartilage skeleton stretches, twists. Muscles creep over each other, layer on bubbling layer; rubbery skin splits and reforms to accommodate. Jow can’t take his eyes off it.

When the gurgling noise finally stops, the fully formed butterfly man is lying in a shallow carbon puddle. It’s human-shaped, but strays in the details: joints distended, no finger or toenails, smooth uninterrupted flesh between the legs. Its face is the most perfect part of it, with planar cheekbones and soulful dark eyes.

“Thought it’d be bigger,” Jow says, to mask the crawling in his spine.

“You spilled some,” the woman says.

The butterfly man doesn’t breathe like a human, no familiar up-and-down locomotion to the ribcage. Instead, its whole body seems to ripple.

“We used to play butterfly man, when we were little,” Jow says. “Me and my sisters. Always imagined it bigger. Scarier.”

“It’s a tupilak,” the woman says.

“What?”

“People tell stories, up here,” she says. “About a thing called a tupilak. You make it out of animal carcass. Some human bits. You send the tupilak after the person who wronged you, and the tupilak makes it right.” She grimaces. “This is that, but they did it with a geneprint.” She blinks down at the tub. “You have to be careful with a tupilak, though, because if you don’t make it right—”

Jow’s fone buzzes against his hip and he pulls it out of his coverall pocket. Another line has been added to the script. He reads it, blinks, looks up. The woman is frowning down at her own fone, no doubt seeing the same message.

“For diagnostic purposes, please run or hide,” Jow recites, throat going tight. “What the fuck is that? What does that mean?”

The butterfly man flicks itself over the side of the tub and onto the floor, moving nothing like a human. The woman steps back and drops the plastic probe. The butterfly man scoops it off the bathroom floor with its foot, and for a surreal moment Jow thinks the butterfly man is going to return it to her.

The blunt plastic tip burrows through one side of the woman’s neck and out the other, spewing blood and spinal fluid.

Jow runs.

“My moment, I think I was seventeen the night it happened,” Quandary says, spinning the empty cocaine packet between her fingers, shredding the health hazard advisory into bright yellow strips. “I did some psilos and took my baba’s husky out for a wander. We walked in circles all around the block, following the cracks, the tarred-in cracks in the street. With the high, it looked like they were flowing, you know? Black magma, flowing and cooling.”

They’re deep in Nuuk’s digestive system, a neon-lit bar packed shoulder to shoulder with carbon riggers and journeymen, a skin-sea all misty with aerosolized sweat and desperation. Quandary found her usual cove—a table tucked behind a load-bearing pillar—and picked a stranger from the bar to anchor her there.

“Sounds beautiful,” says the blurry woman. Quandary chose her because she is lanky, leonine, has bare arms coated in moving tattoos. The woman is buying them both thick, silty ciders; Quandary is buying herself cheap Escobar snowpacks. She offered her companion one, but apparently she only likes booze and ketamine. Very old-school.

“Yeah,” Quandary says. “Beautiful. There was a blackout that night. Grid attack. Half the city was dark, and we ended up right on the dividing line, in this spot I didn’t remember, this little hump of dirt and dead grass on the edge of the bypass. So we were looking at this wall of black, pure black, and I knew in my gut that it was the end of the world.”

“It’s always the end of the world,” the woman says, pushing one leg against hers.

Quandary shakes her head. “Not that kind of end. But the limit. The edge. And I knew that everything around me was simulation—not the probabilistic way of knowing, but bone-deep. I lay down on my back and stared straight up, so I could see the simulated stars pulsing up there. There was no way I could do the wrong thing, because nothing was real.”

She stabs a tiny trace of powder off the table with her thumb; it sticks in the oily whorl. “And I felt this distilled electric joy, this indescribable, womb-like comfort. Because I was the only sapient thing in the whole fucking universe.” She rubs her thumb inside her nostril and feels a faint serotonin ghost. “It all collapsed when the dog licked my face,” she says. “I nearly strangled that dog. But yeah. Yeah, that was the happiest moment of my life.”

Her companion’s leg recedes. “You strangled a dog?”

“Of course not,” Quandary says, squinting. “It was a husky. They’re enormous.”

“Oh. Good.” The woman gives a bleary grin. “You want to leave now? You can strangle me a bit, if you like.”

Quandary likes the crooked tooth in her smile, and the clean peppery smell of her, and she’s considering the offer when Timo shows up. His reflective orange jumpsuit sprouts out of the crowd like a night-blooming flower.

“We need to talk business, Q,” he says. “Outside. Hurry.”

A cold wisp of unease gets through her high. Quandary does not like going places alone with Timo, but she has her fragger, and his gun doesn’t work on her, and business is business. She untangles herself from the spindly chair and table. For a nanosecond it looks like her companion might object, but then she registers Timo’s size and his scarred-up eye implants. She drinks her cider real ruefully instead.

“Two shakes,” Quandary says.

She worms around the pillar and Timo cuts their path through the crowd, past the doorbot sniffing for unregulated narcotics or pheromones. They push out into a cold pink light. It’s dawn already.

Timo wastes no time ruining it.

“Jokić blames you for the harbor job going belly-up,” he says.

Quandary frowns. “What?”

“The harbor job,” Timo repeats, staring at her with his nickel-sized smartglass eyes. “Jokić thinks you snaked. Thinks you told the poli which boat to search.”

“I’m the reason even half the crew made it out of there,” she says. “If it wasn’t for me, we’d have all been pinched.” A semi-manic laugh spills out of her throat. “I can’t believe this shit. I can’t believe it. I have to talk to him.”

Timo shakes his head. “You have to get out of Nuuk. Get off the Land. He lost two people and a lot of cash, and he wants you dead for it, Q.”

She unclenches her fist and stares down at the shredded origami remains of the cocaine packet. She lets it flutter to the tarmac. “Who’d he pay to kill me?” she asks, hand crawling unconsciously to the grip in her pocket. “You? You taking money for Quandary Aminu?”

“Nobody is,” Timo says. “He said for nobody to touch you.”

“How’s that work with wanting me dead?”

Quandary leaves the weapon, slides her fone out of her sleeve instead. She unfolds it and checks the pirate cam that watches her apartment entry from across the street. Dark, grainy, empty. And she’d know if someone had gotten inside; the dingy screen window would be spattered with blood.

“He’s doing a fresh deal with the Siberians.” Timo’s voice rocks her back to the bar alley. “For military surplus. Biotech. Bad, bad biotech.”

She blinks. “Viral agent? My immunos are jacked up.” She says it brave-faced, but feels a jag of fear—they’re always coming up with new bugs, and most of them are a slow kill. “I’ll boil it right out.”

“Nothing viral,” Timo says. “Foot soldiers. The disposable kind. You ever met a butterfly man?”

Her cocaine immortality cracks and crumbles. “Shit.”

“Yeah. You’re the product test. If this one kills you, Jokić buys the rest of them.” Timo’s face does stuttering iterations of an expression Quandary isn’t familiar with. “I could come with you. Tonight. Get us onto an autobarge, head down the coast. You and me.”

Quandary remembers back to a splintered night in another bar, then in Timo’s shack, his naked body moving in the dark. His skin-smell. His body heat. “What was the happiest moment of your life?” she asks.

“No time, Q,” Timo says.

His suffocating weight, the dizzy whirl in her head, the dull-then-sharp pain of him burrowing inside her. He must remember it so differently. Anger comes from a dozen different places and coalesces to a boiling wave inside her chest. For a moment she wants to plug Timo right here outside the bar, whisper boom and watch the frag dart turn his body into chunks and splatter.

But she needs to save her ammo for Jokić and his butterfly man, and Timo is the most dependable kind of monster.

“There’s something I have to get from my apartment first,” she says. “We’ll hurry.”

She lopes off into Nuuk’s slick streets, knowing he’ll follow.

Even fifty years ago, this city was a colorful afterthought. Quandary has seen it in remembrance holos: a craggy coast lined by a rainbow of boxy buildings, red and yellow and green and blue, all watching the sea. Then came the Cascade, or at least the point in the Cascade where ice melt unleashed huge swathes of arable land across Greenland and Russia, and that plus the carbon-capture boom brought foreigners up in droves.

Now Nuuk is sprawling inward, away from the rising sea, and its neat technicolor rows birthed a jumble of printhouse and polyp-grown warrens. Quandary watches the urban wilds slide along, forehead pushed to the window of the NRT, more commonly called the Spine, the raised solar rail that runs the city diagonally.

She could ride it all the way to the edge of town, bus out with some carbon riggers, live to fight and fornicate another day. But this is about rep, and running makes Jokić right, that pasty fuck. She worked hard to get on the harbor crew, and she did her job better than the rest of them did theirs. Jokić should know by now that the poli don’t need moles to come out of nowhere.

Unless this isn’t about the harbor job.

Unless he wants her gone for some other reason.

“We shouldn’t be doing this, Q,” Timo mutters. “It might be waiting for you already.”

Quandary grinds her aching skull against the cold glass. She bought a flush from a vending machine, to set her neurotransmitters straight and eat up the alcohol still lurking unprocessed in her gut. She regrets it. Her head is pounding and her whole body feels raspy and she probably has equal chances against a butterfly man whether she’s sober or shittered.

“Wouldn’t be a product test if they dropped it right at my house,” she says. “The whole point of these things is that they’re hunters, right? Pattern matchers. You give them a face, fire, and forget.”

“They match those patterns fast.”

“It’s been alive for six hours, tops,” Quandary says, “and my streetcam shows all clear.”

“Yunupingu Memorial,” the rail announces, in genderless monotone. “Doors opening on the left.”

The car tiptoes to a halt and the doors flutter open. Quandary ignores the escalator, bangs open the metal door to the stairwell, cold concrete and fluorescent lights and stripes of reflective tape demarcating the steps. She takes them at a run to get her blood pumping.

“What do you need from the apartment so bad?” Timo grunts from behind her. “If it’s cash, if it’s narcotic, I can—”

She grips the railing and leaps the bottom third of the flight, lands with a thump. “Just watch my back, all right?” she puffs. “Stay by the door. There’s a good shadowy spot behind the biorecycler.”

She slams out of the emergency exit, the one with a sliced wire keeping the alarm quiet, and into the street. The sun is up in earnest now, filtering through wisp and scud. That would make it easier to see the butterfly man coming, if she knew what the fuck to look for. Her nerves jump and sizzle when she passes a partier stumbling home, again when she passes a night worker in a logo-printed coverall.

Then she’s at the apartment block. Timo has trailed her at a distance; he installs himself now behind the biorecycler, tiny vapor pipe clenched in his big hand. Quandary casts a last look around, then skips up the steps. The door reads her face and gait and buzzes open.

“Two shakes,” she says, and heads up.

The apartment smells wrong when she steps inside. It panics her for a moment before she remembers drunkenly leaving a plastic plate on the stove coil, slagging it to a shiny puddle and filling the room with rancid smoke—her baba would not be happy with her. Quandary pulls her fragger out anyway. Adrenaline turns her familiar furnishings into crouched silhouettes, puts faces in the gloom.

She whistles the lights on. When the fluorescents scour the dark away, revealing a battered white table crenellated with empties, a hand-carved rocking chair in one corner, a gelbed shoved into the other, her heart slows to tolerable speeds. She’s never had much of a nesting instinct—she tells the women and sometimes men that she’s only just moved in—and it leaves near to nowhere for a butterfly man to hide.

She hears a comforting electric chirrup from the room’s sole decoration, a colorful wall hanging above the rocking chair. No visitors while she was gone. She checks the bathroom anyway, but finds only her haggard self, staring balefully from the toothpaste-spattered mirror. Fucking Timo didn’t tell her she was walking around with a snowcap. She thumbs the leftover coke away from her nostril, rubs it along her gum instead.

Tired neurotransmitters poke their heads up. She apologizes for jerking them around, doing the whole flush-and-go thing, then rides the twitch of energy back to the other room, heading for her industrial-grade refrigerator. It’s the priciest thing she owns, a metallic gray giant with its own backup generator and genelock.

Her thumb is almost on that lock when she stops. Hesitates. Her imagination paints the butterfly man contorted inside, waiting for her. They can do that. People say they have cartilage skeleton, like sharks. She doesn’t think they can hack genelocks, but who the fuck knows. She opens the fridge with her fragger aimed.

There are no surprises inside. The top shelf holds a half bottle of cheap local wine, some curry paste, and a slowly decaying orange. The bottom shelf holds the secret she would never tell Timo or anyone else about. She pulls the black carbon shell out of the fridge, carefully, carefully, and slides it into the go bag she keeps in the neighboring cupboard.

It nestles perfectly between the medkit and the ammo. She casts around, grabs a checkered drying cloth, wraps it over the top of the shell. The extra padding is not even slightly necessary, but feels correct. She zips the bag shut and slings it over her shoulder.

Her fone chimes—maybe Timo, telling her to hurry the fuck up.

Not Timo. It’s an alert from her streetcam, the one watching the apartment exterior, the one she told to keep an eye out for anyone whose gait and facial geometry it didn’t recognize. Her throat goes tight. She taps through to the feed.

She sees only a grainy Timo, no longer hiding behind the biorecycler. His broad back is turned to the streetcam. He is swaying slowly from side to side, almost dancing. Quandary squints at the feed, trying to parse, trying to figure out what the fuck he is doing and why the streetcam is showing it to her.

His feet are not planted. They are dragging on the pavement, boneless, weightless. Quandary sees the pale hands now, wedged under Timo’s armpits. She watches his big body lift and lower, lift and lower, as if the butterfly man is trying to guess how many kilos. Her stomach drops straight down an elevator shaft.

Now is the time to run, but she can’t. She needs to see who—what—she’s going to be dealing with until she, or it, is a corpse. Timo’s body topples over; she gets a glimpse of his ruined face, a red mess. Then she sees the butterfly man: small, angular, swallowed up in the blue coverall it wears peeled to the waist. It wipes its hands on its mustard-yellow sweater and leaves two bloody anemones.

The face is oddly beautiful, and wears a small contented smile. The butterfly man rolls Timo’s body behind the biorecycler, the way a dung beetle rolls fecal matter, and disappears from the streetcam’s sight line.

Quandary unfreezes. Timo’s dead, which means a little packet of emotions she will have to observe or destroy later, and the butterfly man is here, which means she needs a plan. If it’s strong enough to heft Timo like a doll, it’s strong enough to wrench open the cheap fabbed windows on the ground floor.

Then it will come upstairs, come to this very room, because it took less than six hours to figure out where she lives. Or else Jokić is a fucking cheat, and told it. She shoves that thought away but keeps the residual anger for fuel. The longer the butterfly man is alive, the smarter it’s going to get. So meeting it right now, on her own territory, might be the best chance she has to kill the thing.

Fight or flight.

Fight. Has to be.

She unzips her go bag, digs out a flicker bomb and ammo cartridge. Her fingers are slightly tingly, but not visibly trembly, which seems like a good omen. She pockets the bomb, slaps the cartridge to the magnetic stock of her fragger. Does it all one-eyed and one-handed, since she needs to keep watching the streetcam.

Timo’s foot pokes out from behind the biorecycler, but there’s no sign of the butterfly man. It might already be circling the building for entries. She looks down at the carbon shell swaddled in her go bag.

“Luck me,” she says, and gives it a soft pat before she zips the bag shut again. Her heart is pounding now, amphetamine fast, anticipating the violence. But she’s no stranger to that. She almost prefers it.

Timo probably had his piece on him, and the butterfly man has probably figured out how to use it by now. Quandary flexes the fridge up onto its rollers and drags it into position, so the heavy metal can provide some cover. She experiments with aiming blind around its corner, first high, then low.

Somewhere below her, she hears a cracking noise. A forced entry noise. The poli don’t usually come around this block, but they might send a drone or two. She wonders if the butterfly man knows that.

She unlocks her apartment door, hinges it open just a sliver. Listens for feet. Then she dims the apartment lights, goes back behind the fridge, and waits. Her pulse is loud in her ears, so loud she might not be able to hear the butterfly man coming. From the way it moved outside, she knows it has soft feet. It reminded her of a ballerina—precise, fiercely strong.

She listens for doors instead, and hears a telltale pneumatic sigh from down the hall. She pulls the flicker bomb out of her pocket. She pictures the butterfly man traversing the corridor, tries to time its arrival.

A gap of light under the door goes dark.

“Hello?”

The butterfly man’s voice is a high-pitched croak. It’d be funny if her nerves weren’t screaming. She glances at her wall hanging. Adjusts her grip on the flicker bomb.

“Hello?” the butterfly man squawks again, and something rolls through the cracked door, a small black orb dribbling blood behind it.

Timo’s eyeball, or rather its smartglass upgrade. Quandary’s stomach gives a little churn, but she is not surprised when the second orb follows, on a perfect trajectory, and meets its twin with a sharp clack. She wonders if it was hard work to seed sadism into the butterfly man’s geneprint, or if it arises naturally in all apex predators.

“Come on in,” she says, sluicing most of the fear out of her voice. “Never met a butterfly man before.”

The butterfly man grunts, a deep sound nothing like its previous squawk, and Quandary recognizes the voice. Timo’s eyes weren’t enough of a trophy. The butterfly man took the last sound he made, too, right before it crunched his windpipe.

A soft electronic bleat from the wall hanging. Target acquired.

“I was going to do that myself, probably,” Quandary says, tipping her head to one shoulder and then the other, triggering the swellies she had a street surgeon embed in her ear canals. She can barely hear her next words. “He was a real deluded piece of shit.”

She thumbs her phone, and the autogun behind her wall hanging goes wild. The nightly maintenance of its joints and chambers, the lubricant stains on the floor, the spike in her electricity facture: all of that shit is instantly worth it, because uranium-tipped rounds are now shredding through the doorframe, through the wall she never liked much anyway, and obliterating everything on the other side.

She lobs her flicker bomb through the newly chewed hole for good measure; its detonation is a muffled pop beneath the autogun’s tirade. Even with the swellies in, her whole skull is vibrating. The burst only lasts two point five seconds—autogun ammo is not cheap—but adrenaline makes it an age.

When the gun coughs empty, the wall is a billowing cloud of plaster speckled with red. Quandary’s pulse roars and foams. The butterfly man should be nothing but butcher giblets at this point, but she’s heard enough rumors and seen enough flicks to be cautious. She lets the dust and fragments settle before she creeps out from behind the fridge.

She stalks forward, fragger leveled, scanning the debris for shreds of blue coverall or yellow sweater. The dark red blood-blots in the rubble are encouraging. She follows them to the ruined wall, picks a hole, sights left, right.

The corridor is a fucking mess, and she can hear her cross-hall neighbor wailing. She forgot to check if they were home before setting the autogun off, but only sees a couple holes punched through the opposite wall, so unless they have astronomically bad luck—

A hot droplet lands on the tip of her left ear.

Her head snaps back; the butterfly man is on the ceiling, because of course it is. One of its legs is now wet pink ropes, slowly knitting back together. The other leg is intact, and since the butterfly man’s arms are busy clinging to the ceiling it has Timo’s gun clutched between its pale distended toes.

She fires, blowing the butterfly man to pieces—

Except her fragger jams. Chokes. She recalls the cloud of plaster she just walked through, recalls Timo telling her a fragger is too fucking finnicky for wet work. His alternative, a snub-nosed Glock, is now pointing at her face. She needs to speak loudly, clearly, because Timo’s gun has an electrolock and she hacked it after the night she stopped trusting him. Her throat is too dry to even whisper.

“Quandary Aminu,” the butterfly man squawks. “Never met a Quandary Aminu before.”

She admires the choice to taunt, but the taunt fucks it over. Her name is the magic word. The butterfly man’s toe twitches. Nothing gets out of the barrel. It tries again, and Quandary knows she can either use this minuscule slice of time to try unjamming her fragger, or she can use it to fucking run.

The butterfly man drops down from the ceiling, landing perfectly balanced so its stump won’t scrape the floor. She doesn’t like her chances even against three limbs. She picks flight: back through her shattered wall, through her barren apartment, scooping up her go bag on the way to the fire escape.

The butterfly man sends her off with Timo’s surprised grunt, over and over until it sounds like a muffled laugh.

Quandary runs until she vomits, then runs another block post-vomit. Then she reaches the public bathroom she once had unsanitary sex in, the one people don’t notice because it’s tucked up under a half-constructed skyway, and locks herself inside. She rinses her mouth out, and also tries to rinse away the memory of Timo’s smartglass eyeballs, which have been clacking around in the back of her mind.

Better to replay the rest of the encounter, figure out what she could have done better aside from her fucking weapon not jamming. She disassembles the fragger, working on pure muscle memory, and sets to cleaning out the plaster dust. She’s got some distance from the butterfly man. Saw it, over her shoulder, clambering slowly and carefully down the fire escape, cradling its pulped leg.

The limb was already healing, and she doesn’t know how long she has before the butterfly man is back to full mobility. She should have tried to finish the job in the corridor, tried pistol-whipping it, tried going back into the kitchen for a knife.

“Got scared,” she snarls at the mirror, which is playing an ad for skin cream, projecting wrinkles on her face and then smoothing them away. “First you froze, then you ran, because you got fucking scared.”

The wrinkles remind her what she grabbed from the apartment. She purses her lips. She doesn’t like asking people for help, but this is life-or-death, and her death would have implications for the person who might be able to help her. Her go bag is already open on the changing station, since she needed oil and a microtool for the fragger. She eyes the cloth-wrapped carbon shell.

“Okay,” she says. “Desperate times.”

She yanks the checkered cloth away and hefts the black shell in both hands, eliciting a faint slosh from the nutrient gel inside. She sets it beside the sink, which is an artful shallow scoop in the countertop, then finds some putty in her go bag to plug the drain. She is mostly certain it’s adhesive tack, not leftover RDX.

While the sink fills with cold water, she opens the carbon shell. Even after it reads her fingerprints, she has to prize it apart with her fingernails, like it’s reluctant to let its passenger go, or is maybe punishing her for waiting so long to wake him. When it finally springs open, she nearly drops her baba’s membrane-coated head on the floor.

His face, even slick and slimy, gives her a little hit of nostalgia. For a moment, despite being holed up in a public bathroom, hunted by a butterfly man, she is also a little girl playing snapper-trappers with her baba, both of them against the machine, sitting huddled up close so she can sniff his icy cologne and absorb his body heat.

He’s still hooked to his organoid, a little lump of clone-grown cells keeping his brain blood nice and oxygenated, so she’s careful with the tether as she lowers him into the sink. She adds a cable of her own, from the neuroport on his temple to the one on the bottom of her fone. She sends the wake-up chime.

His veiny old eyelids flutter. They open.

Quandary breathes. “Hey, Baba,” she says. “I think I fucked up.”

Her baba is not happy to see her, possibly because she promised him a full corporeal transplant three years ago, promised him next time he woke up he’d be riding a beautiful clone-grown body with factory-fresh telomeres, and instead he is bobbing in a sink in a grimy public washroom.

What in the fuck have you been doing all this time, Dree?

The question marches across her fone as blocky text, pieced together by neuroscan, but in her head she can hear his cigarette-seared rasp.

“Working, Baba.”

Working appears on her fone, either a feedback error or her baba doing one of his scathing echoes. Drinking and snuffing and fucking, more like. Wasting all our money.

Scathing echo, then.

“My money, Baba,” she says, souring a bit on the whole reunion. “Your money ran out ages ago. My money’s been keeping you nice and fresh in storage.”

Is that where we are? Some cut-rate bio-storage facility?

“No,” Quandary admits. “We’re in a bathroom. Because I’m in trouble. So we can talk about the transplant shit later.” She eyes the door, then the air vent, pictures the cartilage-boned butterfly man sliding himself through it. “Right now, I need help.”

I need limbs and a spinal column.

“You know about butterfly men,” she says. “I remember.”

Butterfly man, her fone corrects. There’s only one.

Quandary shakes her head. “There’s a fuckload of them now,” she says. “They pop them out like a candy fab. But there’s only one after me, and I need to know how to kill it.”

Her screen stays black. She stares down at her baba’s bobbing head, his features clouded by the membrane sheath. Watches tiny tremors run through the facial muscles she used to prick and prod faithfully to prevent atrophy.

Anything I tell you is three years out of date.

“Better than trying to sift through blacknet bullshit,” she says firmly. “You actually seen one doing its thing. Said you worked with a grower in Santiago, didn’t you?”

You listened a lot better as a little girl.

“Now I shoot a lot better.” She checks the door again. “I don’t have spare time, Baba. Tell me what I need to know to not die.”

Butterfly man. Okay. Started off as just a biotech flex, some Korean lab trying to overclock cell division and tissue growth, see how close they could get to a real-time time lapse. Russia was doing quantum-organic deep learning, wanted to turn small children into programmable psychopaths. More so than they already are.

“Match made in heaven,” Quandary says, because she recalls this little spiel and would like to speed it along.

Match made in heaven, yeah. Heaven is disposable assassins you assemble on-site who self-terminate when the job’s done. They were still tweaking it in the warlabs when Russia collapsed, but the prototype hit the darkmarket a few years later. It only looks human on the outside, Dree. Genetically, it’s probably closer to a flatworm.

“It is very wriggly,” Quandary mutters, verifying her fone is saving everything her baba’s said to her private drive.

Regrows organs. Breathes through its skin. No real skeleton, hydrostatic muscle.

“The brain, though,” Quandary says, remembering how it imitated Timo, how it talked shit to her from the ceiling. “To hunt a human in a city full of humans, you have to be able to think like a human. Yeah?”

The brain on that thing is the coup de grâce. Quantum-organic, how I said. It’s not starting from scratch. Every time you grow it, it grows all the neural pathways from all the other jobs. Smarter than a human ever could be. Thank fuck it hates existing.

“Holy shit,” Quandary says, still on the quantum-organic brain. Then she registers the last bit. “Wait. Hates existing?”

Figure of speech. The butterfly man is designed to be disposable. Partly so it can’t be traced, partly as a fail-safe. Starts to decay after eighteen hours or so. Dead six after that. Thus the name, you adorable dumbshit.

The realization goes off like a flicker bomb: all she has to do is outwait the butterfly man, stay moving, stay unpredictable, and then once it’s dead she goes straight for Jokić and his crew. She’s the field test. The other butterfly men are still in transit.

“So if I hide long enough,” she says, for absolute clarity, “it’ll die on its own.”

Oh, Dree. Nobody ever hides long enough.

The flicker bomb was a dud; it fizzes dark. “Back to the first plan, then,” she says, trying to sound calm about it. “How do I kill the butterfly man?”

Her fone is blank for a moment. Then: You could try setting a trap.

“I did try that. It didn’t fucking work.”

I mean a good trap.

Baba goes back in the shell, back in the bag, but she leaves a tiny gap in each so the neuroport cable can stay hooked to her fone. This compromises his temperature integrity, but like he pointed out, unless she kills the butterfly man in the next fifteen hours or so, he’s dead anyway. Quandary is glad he realized that without her having to say it.

She checks her fragger, then douses herself in sanispray, since her baba said the butterfly man tracks partly by scent. She checks her fragger again. Then, with her heart thrashing in her ribcage, she cracks the bathroom door.

No sign of the butterfly man, but the streets are full now. She’s not sure if that’s better or worse. She slips out into the sunlight and has her fone message her most freshly acquired contact, a blurry woman with animated tattoos. They only spoke for twenty-odd minutes, but they also nearly went home together. Quandary hopes enough chemistry lingers for her to answer.

Good morning to you, too.

Good.

“Lost track of you last night,” she mutters for her fone. “Want to after-party?”

I’m halfway shittered on my way to work.

Underneath the woman’s message, her baba weighs in: Tell her you felt a real true connection, Dree, felt it like a little fishhook behind your belly.

“Fuck off,” Quandary says, and her fone snaps it off to the tattoo woman before she can stop it, but it might be a good thing to say anyway.

Fuck you, husky-killer.

Not bad.

“I want to see you,” Quandary says, decanting her usual lie-truth compound. “I also want keta, in a bad way. Link me up?”

She weaves through an arguing couple, ducks under a sputtering drone. Keeps her eyes peeled for a certain size, a certain way of moving, though it might still come with a limp. Her friend from last night is taking a long fucking time to answer. Quandary would normally get the ketamine on her own, no issue, but her dealer is Jokić-adjacent, and she doesn’t want that pasty fuck knowing her movements until she’s moving through his front door.

Preferably holding his butterfly man’s sliced-off head as a guest-gift.

I asked someone about you. They said you’re trouble. A real black hole type.

“Black holes are beautiful right as you fall in,” Quandary says. “See time and light all stretched out and whatnot.”

And then you’re spaghetti.

“We can be spaghetti together,” Quandary says, keeping close watch on a small man in a hooded raincoat moving across the street. “Two human noodles all twisted up in each other.”

Her baba approves: Poetry, Dree.

The answer takes a minute. They said you’re a real bullshit artist. How much K?

Quandary licks her teeth. “Enough for a horse,” she says.

Funny.

“Not funning you,” Quandary says. “I need as much as I can get and I’ll pay two hundo a gram.” She flips from the talkthread to her bank. “Little thank-you fee is heading your way as soon as you give me a location.”

Her baba disapproves: No great wonder your crew thought you were poli, is it.

But the tattoo woman is more trusting, maybe because she’s halfway shittered, maybe because she’s still halfway horny for Nuuk’s best bullshit artist. South end. Nice old lady, been buying tabs off her for years so don’t you dare fuck her around.

“Great,” Quandary says, changing course as a new geolocation drops into her fone. “Any chance she’d have a gas mask and aerosolizer?”

It’s a short trip to south Nuuk, but by the time Quandary gets to the right block her nerves are shredded raw. Every small adult or large ado she saw on the way gave her a jolt, and she nearly murdered a girl with a croaky voice who sat behind her on the Spine. A carbon rigger with a blue coverall and a bad knee was similarly imperiled.

But now she’s here, in one piece, and it’s time to purchase some retro narcotics. She approaches a small crumbling house wedged between two polyp-grown apartments, checking it against the geolocation.

“Baba.” She’s been meaning to ask, and might not get another rip at it. “What was the happiest moment of your life?”

You need to be focused right now, Dree.

“I am focused,” she says. “What was it?”

There’s a long delay, and she pictures him pulling faces under the membrane, thinking hard. Walking across an old parking lot. Thaw weather, when you hear the water running everywhere, trickling under the ground, melting off the roofs. Sunshine and a breeze and bright green buds starting to grow from the cracks.

It sounds a bit like hers; she’s relieved by that. “So you were alone?”

Yes.

Quandary nods to herself. “It’s better that way, isn’t it. Everything is—purer. When there’s no other people mucking shit up.”

It’s my happiest moment because I was on my way to see your mother.

“Oh.” She blinks. “Cute.”

Fuck off.

Quandary checks around the corners of the house, then slinks up to the stoop. Her friend from the bar told her to knock once, then twice, then once again, so that’s what she does. The echo fades. Nobody comes to the door.

Entering any dealer’s place of business uninvited, even if the dealer is supposedly a nice old lady, is a bad fucking idea. She knows this from experience. But the butterfly man could be showing up any second now, following her scent through Nuuk’s dirty air or just matching patterns Quandary is too human to see.

She tries the door handle. No dice.

What’s going on, then? her baba demands.

“Might not be home,” she mutters. “Does a lot of microjobbing on the side, apparently.”

They revolutionize locks in the past three years?

Quandary knocks a final time, then glances up and down the street. A few little kids on hacked scooters stare back at her. She flips them off, and as soon as they glide away she starts jiggering the lock. It only takes her a minute with the microtool before she gets to the telltale click-clunk.

Praying her autogun’s old owner was honest about having the only unit in town, she opens the door and steps inside.

The dealer is going through some shit. That is the only immediate explanation Quandary can think of for the state of the house. She recognized the smell of fried noodles even before the lights hummed on; now she makes her way through an entryway dotted with compostable takeout containers, most of them half-full and soggy with sauce.

She is so busy searching for floor that it takes her a while to notice the walls. The dealer has been turning her stress binge into an art form: the off-white plaster is smeared with reddish-brown spirals and stick figures, the work of messy, twitchy fingers. Quandary realizes she is about to find an old woman zonked out of her fucking mind on her own product, possibly even dead from an overdose.

“Better be some fucking keta left,” she whispers.

You inside? You need to keep me in the loop, Dree. I’m blind in here and all I can hear is the gurgling goddamn organoid.

“Your organoid is the best on the market,” she says, which was true three years ago. Well, nearly true. “You should relish that gurgle.”

She makes it to the kitchen, where more flimsy containers line the countertops and stove. A simple yellow gelfridge has been recently cleaned out; the neat little pile of detritus is heaped in front of it. She tries to picture an old and very loaded woman squatting there, yanking out everything edible, gorging herself sick.

Quandary has binged plenty, but the image is off. She feels her hackles rising.

“Heading to the bedroom,” she murmurs, angling into a dim hallway. “Where do old people stash their shit, Baba? Floorboard? Ceiling tile?”

In whatever orifice is loose, but not too loose.

“You must really miss having an anus.”

I’ve got you. That counts.

Quandary approaches the half-open door to the bedroom. Whenever she’s fucked off her head she always finds her way to a bed, hers or otherwise, so she braces herself now for a body—hopefully just asleep or deep in the drug daze, not dead.

But the cheery yellow sheets are unoccupied, neat and tucked in. Quandary does a quick sweep of the room: row of polished boots in one corner, black lacquered table and dried sunflowers in another, a shelf of weathered books, some Kalaallit art up on the humming wallscreen. No sign of the dealer. No takeout wreckage in here, either.

“She likes yellow,” Quandary says.

You always liked purple, as a little girl.

“Really?” Quandary asks, eyeing the disturbed dust in front of the bed.

You’d always pinch people’s arms, say you were trying to give them purple skin-flowers.

“I was not well adjusted,” Quandary admits, depositing her go bag on the floor, fone on top of it. She levers herself underneath the fabbed frame of the bed, wriggling on her belly. Paydust: there’s a little metal case waiting for her, a rusty old thing with a retrofit genelock soldered on.

She’s about to wriggle back out when she hears the front door. For a moment she envisions a terrible scenario where the wrinkly dealer and her wrinkly lover head straight for the bed and go at it rabbitlike while she’s trapped beneath. Then all the thoughts that have been darting around in the back of her head coalesce at once.

The psychoscrawl on the walls—done by spidery, inhuman fingers. The mad volume of food—required to fuel a metabolism that runs like a supercollider for twenty-four hours. Her baba said they make lairs sometimes, on a long enough job. He did not say they favor the houses of small-time ketamine dealers.

She is still trying to decide if this is some truly next-level pattern matching, or if the universe just fucking hates her, when the butterfly man strolls in wearing its blood-splotched yellow sweater.

Hiding under the bed, biting her hand, watching a shadow move around—that’s horror flick shit. This is horror life, so the butterfly man has already smelled her sweat and sanispray, seen her go bag and fone, and knows exactly where she is. She pulls out her fragger, fires for its approaching shins. Her explosive darts punch the air, cough-cough-cough, only find the opposite wall, but that’s fine, gives her time to roll out the other side—

A distended hand comes scything down; she cancels the roll, realizes in a small shocked neuron bundle that the butterfly man vaulted the entire fucking bed in the time it took her to squeeze a trigger. An angular upside-down face appears inches from hers, unsmiling.

“Welcome to my house,” the butterfly man caws.

Gone before she can get the fragger aimed. She hears a sharp crack, and one corner of the bed lurches downward. It’s kicking out the stubby legs. It’s going to bring the bedframe down on top of her, crush her here like a pressed flower.

It’s fucking toying with her. That makes her furious, how she is furious with Jokić, how she was furious with Timo and still sort of is even now he’s dead. The feeling boils over and scalds away her fear. Leaves a fact behind: she is going to fuck up a butterfly man. She fires the fragger again, peppering darts all along the far wall, sowing seeds.

Another crack, another lurch; the bottom end of the bed slams down and narrowly misses her foot. She scoots up toward the head, taking the metal box with her. She reverses her fragger and uses the heavy metal grip as a club. The impact vibrates the bones in her hand, sends sparks flying. The shoddy soldering between genelock and old lock gives way.

She feels the butterfly man moving for the third leg of the bedframe. She flips open the box, finds acid tabs, keta tabs, shoves everything she can into the sleek little grinder. The third leg crunches inward, and the bedframe crunches down on her back. She wails, wriggles free, moving toward the last corner.

The butterfly man meets her there. She can see its bony hand reaching for the fabbed black leg.

“Hey,” she says, fumbling from grinder to injector. “Hey!”

The hand pauses. “Hello.”

“Boom,” she says.

Her fragger darts are programmed to go off on voice trigger—less collateral damage means less cleanup—and now all the tiny explosive slivers all around the edges of the room, stuck in the plaster and wood, detonate at once.

As the world goes up in flames, as superheated debris leaps from all sides, the butterfly man finds the closest cover. It slides under the bedframe like mercury, so smooth, so graceful, and right into Quandary’s raised injector. She plugs its jugular with enough drugs to drop a clone-grown woolly mammoth.

This was not the plan, of course. Her baba had something way more elaborate in mind: luring the butterfly man into a tight ventless space, using its flexy skeleton against it, vaporizing a ton of keta and giggling behind her gas mask while its porous skin sucked it all down. But this is better. More satisfying.

The butterfly man’s sweater instantly drenches. Maybe it’s trying to sweat out the cocktail, but its traitorous metabolism has already absorbed enough to make its hands tremor and fall halfway to her throat. It doesn’t gasp how a human would, but its whole body twitches. Its dark eyes turn glassy.

She waits—for the house to douse the fire-dregs with foam, for her heart to stop pounding, for the butterfly man to go fully limp—then crawls out. She knees its perfect face on the way, and does not feel even slightly bad about it.

Her fone is full of her baba’s rambling, but his carbon shell is intact. She debates whether or not to tell him how close she probably came to cooking him when all the fragger darts went off.

“Guess who caught a butterfly, Baba,” she says.

Thank fuck.

“Thanks, fuck.” Quandary slides fresh ammo into her fragger. The clack sends a delicious shiver down her spine. “Killing it now.”

She goes back to the bed. She needs to be businesslike about this, since the explosion was loud and poli drones are no doubt incoming. Can’t savor it too much, even though her whole chest is full of helium and she feels like the absolute fucking woman. She sights down at the butterfly man’s head.

It’s still fighting the tranqs, managing a sluggish wriggle here and there. Its big dark eyes are still open. She aims her fragger at the right one, then drifts over to the left. The butterfly man moves its lips. Makes a thick noise in its throat.

“What’s that?” Quandary asks, because last words seem important, even from a quantum-brained flatworm.

The butterfly man stares up at her. “Not happy,” it rasps. “Wanted more noodles.”

Quandary tells her baba what she’s doing, tells him she feels a bit of real true connection like a fishhook behind her belly. Then she untethers her fone, before he can make it clear to her how fucking stupid she is, and starts restraining the butterfly man. The real play is keeping it pumped full of ketamine, yes, but the zip ties from her go bag help her feel a bit better about taking a truly dumbshit risk.

The butterfly man’s cartilage skeleton makes it disturbingly light; when she stuffs it into one of the dealer’s parkas she feels like she’s dressing a very strangely proportioned child. Even so, it plus her go bag have her bent double. She staggers out the back door of the house—dealers often have a reliable and uncluttered emergency exit—and onto the street.

A sleek black autocab from a specific company is waiting for her at the curb. They’re fully algorithmic, and the algorithm knows its best customers often have bodies in tow. Jokić might have put a flag on this pickup location, but she doubts it. She suspects she’s the only one who knows what the butterfly man’s been up to here.

Quandary bundles her prisoner inside and they pull away to the sound of approaching poli drones. Once they’re a block down, she lifts the parka hood off the butterfly man’s face. It gazes back at her with wide black eyes. Its mouth is taped over for now.

“We’re not so different, you and I,” she says.

The butterfly man spasms slightly.

“Joking,” she assures it. “You’re a functionally immortal quantum-brained killing machine, I’m a piddly little human.” She waves the injector. “I did just fuck you up, though.”

The butterfly man stares, no reaction.

“You got plenty of thoughts in there,” Quandary says, putting a knuckle to her own skull. “Too many, I bet, if you’re running all the thoughts from all the other butterfly men who ever got grown. People probably never ask you them, though.”

Its perfect face is blank. She can’t tell if it’s even listening, but she presses on.

“I’ll take a guess, and once I ungag you, you can tell me if I’m close,” she says. “Every day you wake up, it’s the same fucking story. Sometimes you’re in a proper biotank, sometimes you’re in some dirty bathtub, but you always wake up with a face or a name in your head. That’s the person you have to go kill.”

Its nostrils flare at kill, like it wants to inhale the word.

“It used to be fun,” she continues. “Used to be this game. Probably used to tag people out as fast as you could, trying for speed runs. But you got too good at it. Started to bore you to shit. So you started wandering, started checking out the skyboxes and boundaries. How people always do, with games. Started expressing yourself.”

The butterfly man’s fingers twitch.

“The wall drawings,” Quandary says. “Yeah. I seen them. Pretty bad, if you ask me.” She pauses. “But then again, even with all your jobs stacked together you’re only a few years old. Which makes the jobs some child labor type of shit.”

The butterfly man’s eyes flick away. It’s starting to lose interest.

“Ever wonder who puts the face in your brain? Who pulls your strings? I’ll tell you who did it this time. I’ll even show you him.” She swipes a streetcam snap of Jokić onto her fone, holds it up. “Look at this man. This man is a two-timing bitch too lazy to do his own butchering, so he’s making you do it instead.”

The butterfly man is unmoved. Quandary launches her last argument, heart pitter-pattering.

“He has a whole shipment of you on the way,” she says. “Crates of you. So you’re going to be waking up in tubs all around Nuuk, doing drudge work. Hunting down small-timers who sold on the wrong block, grunts who smart-mouthed him, women who did not want his pale little cock.”

The butterfly man shifts its bound hands to its crotch, waggles a questioning thumb.

“That thing, yeah.” She exhales. “Drudge work is beneath you, butterfly man. So I got a counteroffer. You forget about killing me, and I help you secure that shipment. You get to pick the names and faces for the next twenty times you wake up.” She narrows her eyes. “You can even pick mine, if you want. I can fuck you up twice.”

The butterfly man shakes its head.

“Or maybe you don’t pick any at all,” Quandary says. “You just enjoy your little slices of life, instead. Maybe work on your art, which needs a lot of fucking work, let’s be honest.” She runs her tongue along her teeth. “With enough consecutive days, that quantum-organic brain of yours might even figure out a way to turn off the failsafe. No more twenty-four-hour lifespan.”

The dark eyes blink. Time to whittle things right down.

“Help Quandary Aminu,” she says. “Kill Boban Jokić. Be happy. Eat noodles. Alternatively, I plug you with an exploding dart behind a dumpster.”

She reaches forward, and as she peels the tape from her prisoner’s mouth she realizes her fingers are trembling. She holds her breath.

The butterfly man wets its lips with a small pebbly tongue. “Kill Boban Jokić first,” it croaks. “Kill Quandary Aminu after. Before dark.”

Quandary admires the honesty. She reaches for her go bag. “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” she says. “Want to meet my baba?”

It turns out they already know each other, sort of. When the butterfly man claps eyes on her baba’s disembodied head, it rattles off a street address in Chilean Spanish, which her baba confirms was the location of the darkmarket warlab in Vitacura before it burned down. Quandary wonders just how many faces are imprinted in the butterfly man’s quantum-organic brain, and how many of them are still alive.

This is unhinged, Dree.

“You love it.”

Going to get yourself killed. Me, too, by proxy.

“Not if you help me come up with a good plan, Baba.”

They’re parked in a north-side tunnel, lights dimmed, engine off. The autocab is more than happy to keep nibbling at her bank account in silence, and she has enough to spare since she never actually paid for the drugs. The butterfly man is flexing its wrists and ankles on the seat beside her—that was a dicey moment, taking the zip ties off, but so far it’s made no attempts at revenge.

How’d you get into this in the first place? Full story, not summary.

Quandary pulls a grimace. The conversation outside the bar with Timo, Timo-who-is-now-dead, seems like it happened weeks instead of hours ago. “The harbor job,” she says. “The fucking harbor job.”

I don’t got newsfeed in here, Dree.

“Ten days ago,” Quandary says. “Or eleven, now, actually. Jokić wanted heat and muscle for this delivery coming in. Was worried the Siberians might try to fuck with him. I took the job because I needed some money—for your transplant.”

You pause for gravity, there?

She sets his head on her knees, glances sideways to check on the butterfly man. It’s now tapping away at the backseat screen, sallow face shifting colors in the glow of some animated netgame, fully enraptured.

“Some of it was for your transplant,” Quandary says. “Swear to fuck it was.” She purses her lips. “I got all strapped and amped, wore my tac boots and everything, but the Siberians played nice. Looked like it was going to be money for nothing.”

Poli interrupted, you said.

“In a big way.” Quandary folds her hands under her armpits. “Full swoop. Drones and boats and body armor. Was a whole mess, and would’ve been even worse except I fragged a hydrogen tank, set one of the poli boats burning pretty good. While they was pulling back, about half of us hit the water and got away.”

I’m the one who taught you to swim, you know. Never thanked me even once.

“You pushed me off a fucking cliff.”

Overhang, and I was coming right down after you. Did the Siberians get away?

“They were well clear by the time the poli showed up. Yeah.” Quandary untucks one hand and uses it to rub her temple. “But Jokić lost all the new product right then and there, and two of his regular guns, Markus and Vola, they got pinched. And he’s blaming me for it, even though I’ve never talked to the poli in my whole life. Just because I’m the outside hire.”

Her fone stays blank for a moment, and she sees a minute think-wrinkle furrow her baba’s slimy forehead. Saving face with the Siberians. Or. Does he like Markus and Vola?

“Fuck, no,” Quandary says. “But he needs them. Markus is the only one in his crew with sufficient skullspace to know when Jokić is fucking up, overextending. And Vola is the only one with the ovaries to tell him.”

And those are the only two who got pinched?

“Yeah. They hit the water like the rest of us, but I guess the seals found them.”

Her baba’s mouth twitches. Jokić knows you didn’t snake. He’s pinning you on purpose.

“Figured.” Quandary envisions Jokić’s smug scabby smile but resists the urge to spit; the autocab will add a surcharge. “No need for anyone to have snaked. The poli algorithm sniffed us out, I bet because . . . ”

She trails off, frowning down at her fone, which is stacking new text at frantic speed.

Jokić is the one who brokered the seizure with the poli. Got rid of two potential threats to the throne, maintained good relations with the Siberians, and I bet got half his product returned through a back channel the next day. Now you’re his sacrificial lamb, because you’re young, female, and transient. Also because he knows you might figure it out.

Quandary blinks. She thinks back to the hire, back to the harbor, back to the poli coming at them almost as lazy as the butterfly man playing its little predator-prey games. “Shit,” she says. “We should talk more often, Baba.”

You should get me my fucking body, Dree.

“I know. I know.” She clenches and unclenches her teeth. “I know why I been putting it off, too.”

For three years.

“Yeah.”

No great mystery. It’s because other people are for other people, not for Quandary Aminu. She doesn’t need them dragging her down. She’s happier with just her and entropy, just gliding along from this chemical to that one until she. Until you. Get a bullet in your head.

But that wasn’t what she was going to say at all. Quandary stares down at the fone in silence. She feels her throat start to heave, her eyes start to sting. “It’s because you always were a cunt,” she says. “Sleep tight, Baba.”

She pulls the cable, packs him back into his carbon shell, zips him into the go bag again. By the time it’s done, her eyes are good and dry. She glances across at the butterfly man, who is staring at her dispassionately.

“Fuck are you looking at?” she asks, because she’d almost like to get strangled now.

“Push Boban Jokić off a fucking cliff,” the butterfly man suggests. It hooks two fingers into the corners of its mouth and drags upward. “Change your face. Be happy.”

“Might help,” Quandary mutters. “Yeah.”

A fist thunks against the opaqued window; she snaps a hand to her fragger. The butterfly man is unperturbed. Its nostrils are wide and she can see a bit of drool dribbling down its chin as it leans across her, sinuous as ever, and pushes the car door open.

On the other side, a very nervous delivery woman holds up an insulated bag. Quandary relaxes her trigger finger. Glances over at the backseat screen, where she sees an order confirmation for six cartons of Sichuan noodles.

“Only the fourth best place in Nuuk for noodles,” she says, eyeing the logo. “Third for jiaozi. If you want, I’ll take you somewhere really good. After we kill Jokić, and before you kill me.”

“Before dark,” the butterfly man says, and this time it makes a little motion beside its head, fingers rubbing against each other and then splitting apart, a brain dissolving. Quandary understands perfectly.

Mad has always been easier for her than sad. She leans into that now as they make their approach on Jokić’s apartment, skulking on foot through fading daylight. Her baba is not with them. She was briefly tempted to punt his head into the sea; instead she directed the autocab to a storage facility and used the last of her money hiring a microjobber to meet him there and get him refrigerated.

Now she can focus on being really fucking angry with Jokić, who thought he could do his little deal with the poli, scapegoat her for it, and have a butterfly man murder her before she got a chance to clear her rep. She packs all the rage down into a miniature sun burning in her belly, ready fuels.

The butterfly man seems to be in a good mood. It’s still wearing the dealer’s parka, loping along with the overlong sleeves hiding its hands, fluttering in the evening breeze. Maybe this is all just an unexpected game-within-the-game for it, a little surprise it didn’t know it could unlock.

Or maybe it’s already as smart as the quantum processors they have working on interstellar burns and starch synthesis, and she’s just become a pawn in its elaborate plan to end or enslave humanity. Either way, she’s pretty sure Jokić is fucked—it keeps whispering his name and cracking its neck to one side, like a spine getting snapped.

“Hold up,” she orders. “Soon as we get any closer, we’ll be on his cams.”

The butterfly man stops mid-stride, one foot frozen in the air. She can’t even remember which one got pulped by the autogun; both are back to their killer ballerina ways. Ahead, spearing up from a ring of new construction, is Jokić’s home: a tower of polyp and nanocarbon, swatched with hydroponic greenery and crowned by jagged orange holo.

Quandary feels an electric sweat on her exposed skin. Go time. “You remember the plan, yeah?” she asks.

“Dead girl gambit,” the butterfly man says, in an uncanny imitation of her voice. “That’s the play, I figure.”

“Works in all the flicks,” Quandary agrees with herself. “Don’t drop me.”

She unrolls a membranous body bag on the pavement, the one she keeps at the very bottom of her go bag for emergencies, and climbs inside. It’s not the most dignified way to make an entrance, and if the butterfly man decides to renege on their little deal and do her first, she’s packed up real convenient for disposal. She can hear her baba’s raspy voice telling her exactly how bad an idea this is.

But he’s a head now, and he ruined her attempt at a heart-to-heart, so fuck him. Quandary lies back and lets the butterfly man zip her up, sealing her into the dark. She keeps a tight grip on her fragger.

The body bag has little scent pods in it, which is a nice touch. She inhales the artificial lavender as the butterfly man slides its wiry arms underneath her knees and back. It lifts her like it’s lifting origami, which she resents a bit, and sets off. The rocking motion reminds her of something from childhood, of faking sleep so her baba would carry her, but she pushes that away. Focuses on getting into character, meaning limp and corpse-like.

It’s only a few minutes of gliding through the dark before Jokić’s patrol intercepts them.

“Where the fuck you think you’re going?” a voice demands. “Stop where you are, drop the bag.”

Quandary braces herself, and is grateful when the butterfly man does not comply.

“Food delivery for Boban Jokić,” it squawks. “Quandary Aminu. No cutlery.”

“Shit.” A second voice, possibly Timo’s cousin Piet. “I thought it’d be bigger.”

“That’s it?” The first voice is hushed now; Quandary hears feet scuffling backward. “That’s the fucking butterfly man?”

“That’s the fucking butterfly man. I’ll call in.”

A stretched silence. Quandary tries some positive visualization: an escorted jaunt to the building, a quick elevator ride to the top floor, during which the butterfly man kills the owners of voices one-through-two, then she pops out of the body bag fragger-first, aiming for the spot between Jokić’s eyes.

“Says to verify her face, then dump her in the nearest biorecycler.”

Fuck.

“You can drop the body here, Mister Butterfly Man,” says the first voice, very respectful now. “Boss doesn’t want to see it.”

The butterfly man complies this time, and Quandary is not ready. A little grunt escapes her lungs when she hits asphalt.

“Shit,” says maybe-Piet. “Is she alive in there still?”

“That’s the play,” the butterfly man croaks.

“I better call in again, then. See if—”

Quandary hears a cartilage crunch, a wail. By the time she claws her way out of the body bag, the fun is done with: both of Jokić’s guns are dead and cooling. The butterfly man is crouching on the nearer one’s chest, like the traditional sort of nightmare. She plucks the dropped fone from the pavement, and since they’re already on cam anyway, she thumbs the interrupted call back open.

“Hey, fuckwit,” she says. “We’re coming to get you.”

She hears Jokić breathe once. Twice. “I see,” he finally says. “Come on up, Quandary. My door’s always open.”

He cuts the call.

The dead girl gambit has become a live girl gambit, and it puts Quandary’s nerves against a grater. No drones dive-bomb them on the way to the entrance. No more patrols pop out of the dark. Jokić even gives them a little holotrail to follow, orange arrows pulsing all the way across the dim-lit lobby to the shiny elevators.

“Obvious trap, yeah?” She mimes scissors. “We get in, he snips the cables when we’re halfway up.”

The butterfly man shrugs.

“Very fucking helpful,” she says. “Thank you for your insight.”

She almost wishes her baba, cunt though he is, were here instead. He’d be able to help burrow inside Jokić’s mind, figure out what he’s playing at. If she steps into that elevator, she’s an ant in a box. If she takes the emergency staircase, she’s an ant in a tunnel, which is not much better and a whole lot sweatier.

The possibility that Jokić planned this whole thing out, that the butterfly man is just following some very serpentiform programming, keeps creeping through the back of her mind. Too much time to think always turns her paranoid. She stares balefully at her companion, now solemnly observing its own reflection in the glossy elevator doors.

“Hey,” she says. “What was the happiest moment of your life?”

The butterfly man looks over. “Moment of your life?” it croaks.

“The best feeling you remember,” Quandary extrapolates. “What was happening when you felt it? Where were you, what were you doing?”

“Not yet,” the butterfly man squawks. “Later.”

“We might be dead later,” Quandary argues. “Come on. People in bars answer me this all the time, drunk off their asses. Search around in that big quantum brain of yours.”

The butterfly man blinks at her. “The happiest feeling is later.”

There are a lot of ways to interpret that, but Quandary figures it’s time she stopped stalling. She knuckles the up button and steps into the elevator. The butterfly man slides in after her. She looks up and down the column of numbers, the tower layout rendered in glowing diagram, but sees the curlicued R at the top is already highlighted.

“All the way up,” she says, to fill the silence.

“Hello,” the butterfly man says. “Do you like heights?”

She recalls a slow fall and an icy plunge. “Not much, no. You?”

Her companion gives a beatific smile. “Pushing people.”

The elevator rockets them up the building’s magnetic gullet, so smoothly her stomach barely registers it. The slosh when they reach the top, when the door chimes open, is fear, not gravity. She keeps a hand on her fully loaded fragger as she steps out. All ten darts are set to detonate automatically now, no verbal trigger. She’s expecting to do some collateral damage.

She scans the terrain. The tower’s rooftop is a wide circle of pebbly asphalt, bare apart from a half-built pool and some polyp printers over to one side. The holos arrayed around the railing are switched off, making the twisted waist-high metal more cage-like than decorative. It makes her think arena.

Their first two opponents are waiting for them outside the elevator, stubby bulldog submachine guns slung from their shoulder harnesses. She knows one of them by sight, by hormone-hewn shoulders and gleaming septum piece, but not by name. Two more of Jokić’s guns stand nearer the edge, long coats whipping in the wind.

And just past them, pale and brawny and busy shaving, is the man who turned her night and then her day into such a fucking shitshow. His chair is geckoed right to the edge of the roof, overlooking the construction site below. A little bot is clinging to his sternum with soft pseudopods, whisking a triangular razor along his jawline.

“Quandary,” he says, swiveling in his chair. “Come get this view.”

She can see enough from here. The sun is on its way down; the dust is on its way up; they meet in a dancing cloud of orange-furred motes. Construction rarely sleeps in Nuuk. The machines are still seething, printers still birthing porous coral and nanocarbon skeletons, layering up and over each other, stacking for sky.

It’s fucking beautiful, and here he is acting like he didn’t try to take it, and every other view, away from her forever.

Quandary feels the rage vibrate in every cell of her body. “New poli station?” she guesses. “Saves you the walk to wank each other off. Make your little deals.”

Jokić twitches in his chair; for a hopeful moment she pictures the bot’s blade digging into his artery, spraying a jet of blood across the gunmetal sky. But the bot has better reflexes than any barber. It keeps right on working.

“You’re a good liar,” he says. “You put a lot of passion in it.”

Quandary takes a test step, and neither of the nearest muscles go for their submachine guns. The butterfly man lingers slightly behind her, back to its silence. She hopes it is using its big brain to calculate exactly how to kill all these motherfuckers without getting mowed down.

“I got no reason to lie,” she retorts, not for Jokić’s sake, but for the sake of the four guns on the roof with them, the four trigger fingers that might be getting a little conflicted. “You do. You made sure Markus and Vola got pinched, because you’re scared of anyone with brain and backbone. That’s some shit leadership. And cutting deals with the poli, that’s a shit look on anyone.”

She spares a peripheral for the butterfly man. It has its head bent like an old man, its anemic hands stuffed into the deep parka pockets. She tries to remember how many hours it’s been alive and guess how many hours it has left at peak functionality. Now would be a bad time for it to get decrepit on her.

“You know why I bring people up here?” Jokić asks, smooth and unworried, past his twitching phase.

“Makes things dramatic,” Quandary says.

“It gives people perspective,” Jokić says, ignoring her. “Reminds people they’re just one tiny fragment of a massive teeming city, and that city is a speck”—he throws a hand toward the watery horizon—“on an enormous planet”—he points upward, at the purpling dusk—“which is, compared to the universe, the size of maybe an electron.”

“And it’s probably all a sim anyways,” Quandary says, inching left, getting a mirror motion from the muscle with the septum piece. “Yeah. Who gives a shit.”

Jokić nods, all thoughtful, and the bot rides it out. “Sims within sims, I bet.” His gaze finally drifts over to the butterfly man, now squatting against the wind, a little hump of parka. “Butterfly men are lucky, you know. Never have to think about it. They dip in and out and never have to get stuck in the being-human bullshit.”

“The butterfly man thinks about plenty,” Quandary says, feeling oddly defensive. “That’s why we’re here.”

Jokić frowns. “It’s defective, yeah. I can see that.” He thumbs a lick of shaving cream from one ear. “Never getting biotech from Siberia again,” he says. “So thanks for that. You’ve saved me a lot of money.” He blinks. “I guess we’re all numbers, fucking over other numbers, to accumulate different numbers.”

Quandary finally spies the vapestick built into his armrest, and realizes he’s high as fuck. The pair nearest her adjust the angle of their weapons, shifting grip just slightly. The butterfly man gives a little wriggle at the edge of her vision.

Go time.

“Be happy,” she says, and dives for cover.

The butterfly man fires from its pockets: Timo’s unlocked Glock in the right, a disposable blockgun from a darkmarket printer in the left. They shred the parka to pieces, and Quandary gets to watch through a cloudburst of insulated lining as the muscles with the submachine guns drop, skulls holed.

One of them finds the trigger on the way down, central nervous system doing its thing even with the upstairs boss drilled, and it chews sparking craters an inch from her boots. She rolls an extra roll, comes up firing for the third target, the woman surging away from Jokić’s chair with her pistol flashing.

Quandary feels blood spray, hears a wet smack as the butterfly man takes a bullet. She anchors herself and her next dart is a good one. It whistles into the woman’s fleshy forearm; she keeps a grip on her pistol but misses—only by micrometers, judging by the wash of heat across Quandary’s cheek.

She doesn’t get another shot before her arm detonates in a burst of blood and bone. Quandary whirls to find the fourth target, but the others are already gasping and burbling on the pebbly floor. She whirls back, levels her fragger at Jokić’s half-shaved face. Her heart is a war drum.

“How’s that for—” Quandary’s lungs are gassed; it ruins her scathing remark. “How’s that for defective, huh?”

The butterfly man worms out of the parka’s remains. The bullet holes look small and neat across its bony chest, but when it turns around Quandary sees ragged exits, shreds of sweater interwoven with ribboned skin and muscle. Wine-dark blood is gushing down the backs of its trembling legs.

Jokić doesn’t try to move, not even to take a pull from his vapestick. “They make it like art,” he says. “They make it so fucking beautiful.”

“Keep a gun on him, will you?” Quandary asks.

The butterfly man raises both, smooth and precise as ever despite the chunks blown out of its torso. That lets Quandary cross to the woman with the blown-off arm, who is in shock for now but might recover soon, and retrieve her dropped pistol. She does the same for the gaspy man lying nearby.

She tosses both weapons off the edge of the roof, gets a little bubble of vertigo in her belly as they spiral out of sight. Then it’s just her and Jokić and the butterfly man, and as much as she would love to plug the former right in his chair, blow him off the edge of his own tower, she did make a deal with the latter.

“Time to call up the Siberians,” she says, aiming her fragger again. “And tell them you really like how things went with the field test. Tell them you want all the butterfly man you can handle.”

Jokić stares. “What?”

“Those are our terms, fuckwit.” Quandary glances over at the butterfly man, hoping it understands leverage and deception. “You bring in the rest of the shipment, we let you live.”

“That’s a lot of money for a potentially flawed product,” Jokić says, shaking his head. “There’s a reason militaries haven’t cleared out their drone factories to make room for incubators. These little bastards are getting glitchier every year.”

“It wasn’t a request,” Quandary says. “Call them, or I take your toes off.”

Jokić is unperturbed. “I’ll think about it,” he says. “It depends how the second one does.”

Quandary feels all her little hackle-hairs turn to spikes. There is a reason Jokić has been so fucking chatty. She turns her head by an increment, just enough to see the half-finished pool. A familiar hand, slicked with pink residue, is gripping the lip. Her heart stutters. The fresh butterfly man climbs out, naked body clotted with leftover biomass. It waves.

She does not wave back, but she realizes it wasn’t for her anyway—the less-fresh butterfly man, the one whose punctured body is still leaking blood, raises a hand in reply. She hopes, for a moment, that the two of them are going to be friends. They have the same quantum-organic brain, after all. Just running on two slightly different operating systems.

The fresh butterfly man flips upside down, does a little jig on its hands. The less-fresh butterfly man, the one Quandary now realizes she thinks of as her butterfly man, drops its guns to do the same. She’s still thinking how that’s a good sign for them being friends when they leap at each other.

They collide like meteors, and even if she were quick enough with the fragger to tag the naked one and not the bloody one, Quandary is distracted by a sudden movement in her peripheral. She pivots right as Jokić’s insectile barber springs at her, razor flashing, and she drops just in time.

Adrenaline puts the blade in high definition, shiny and molecule-sharp. Displaced air ripples her face.

Then she’s turning, tracking the landing. Fires twice. Misses twice. The explosions tear craters in the rooftop. The bot is a scuttling blur, dancing sideways and then back again, razor humming the air as it searches for an opening. She feels Jokić come up out of the chair behind her; fires a blind dart over her shoulder.

The bot lunges again. She twists away, but this time she’s a planck too slow. There’s a wet sound, a stinging, a splatter of blood. The blade splits her chin on its way past. She howls. Fires. The dart detonates in the spot the bot was, a fiery useless blossom. Her backbrain whispers: Seven spent, three remaining.

A brawny pale arm smashes in from nowhere, and suddenly she’s got no darts at all because her fragger is skidding across the rooftop. Jokić has her bear-hugged from behind; she can smell the sour sweat of him, a whiff of weed smoke. His vise-tight grip crushes her own sharp elbow into her diaphragm.

“This was never about you, Quandary,” he grunts. “Try to be at peace with that.”

Hot copper is still gushing from her chin, splashing down her front. The bot was going for her throat, nearly found it, and her jugular is now a sitting target. She kicks, wriggles. The bot rounds on them. Its red-dipped razor takes aim.

Quandary is not at peace with anything. She wants to meet the woman with the tattoos and an interest in spaghettification. She wants to blow Jokić’s head off. She wants to speak with her baba again, and apologize for calling him a cunt even though he is one. She wants to show the butterfly man Nuuk’s best Sichuan cuisine.

She wants a new happiest memory, maybe one where she’s not all alone. Maybe one where someone else is on the hill with her, looking up into the machinery of the beauteous, pitiless simulation.

The bot coils and springs and—

Never makes it: a blur of butterfly man limbs whirls past, and one of them casually plucks the bot out of midair, grabbing not where the bot is but where it is going to be, and uses its razor to carve a furrow into a different butterfly man limb, likely one with a different owner, all in a single mercury-smooth arc.

Jokić sucks in a breath at the beauty of it. Quandary deads all her weight at once. The pouring blood makes her slippery enough; she worms her arm out and claws for Jokić’s eyes. When his head reflexes backward she thrashes downward, wrenches herself free. Catches his swinging boot mostly on the hip.

She lays out for the fragger, which did not skid far, and gets it by her fingertips. The bot, already discarded, is racing toward her along the rooftop, dragging one damaged leg behind itself. It’s hobbled enough that she can aim where it’s going to be. Her dart plugs it right in its bulbous sensor.

Boom.

No time to watch the fireworks; it’s still exploding when she swivels to Jokić, who is pulling a pistol from his coat, and taps the trigger again. Her second dart burrows into his shin and goes off. Flesh-and-blood becomes vapor; a bone fragment skips off the rooftop and slices her knuckle open.

She doesn’t let it affect her aim. Her final dart is going to slide right between his glassy blue eyes. She’ll find some other way to get the butterfly man its shipment.

“Help.”

The squawk barely makes it past the swellies in her ears and the adrenaline in her head. Jokić is pallid, paralyzed with shock, so she spares one glance, up and left. The butterfly man in the shredded yellow sweater—her butterfly man—is halfway over the edge of the rooftop. The naked butterfly man is trying to bump halfway to all the way, jabbing and prying with its spidery fingers, playful but intent.

Quandary looks down at Jokić, who so fully deserves an explosive finale, then back to the edge. Her butterfly man is just a face and two disembodied hands now, clinging to the very lip of the roof. The naked butterfly man pushes up against the railing, stomping now with its heels, trying to dislodge the other’s gripping fingers.

“Fine,” she breathes, and puts one between its shoulder blades.

Except its shoulder blades are elsewhere. Sound cue, instinct, quantum precognition—whatever it is, it’s fucking bullshit, and Quandary is forced to watch her last dart sail off into the skyline, not quite grazing the butterfly man’s slimy head on the way.

She pulls again on muscle memory. The empty click has never been so loud.

“Quandary Aminu,” her butterfly man croaks, sounding faintly disappointed, and slips out of sight.

Quandary feels her guts do a plunge of their own, even though she only met the butterfly man this morning and it’s spent most of the day trying to murder her. There is no water at the bottom of this cliff, and no baba is going to follow the butterfly man down and tow it to safety, laughing a spluttery laugh.

The naked butterfly man turns. Steps toward her. Its unnervingly perfect face, identical to the one that just turned to pulp down below, is still streaked with glistening dregs of biomass. She dives for Jokić’s pistol, but the butterfly man beats her to it. It tosses it from hand to foot, one toe poised on the trigger.

“Hello,” it says. “What was the happiest moment of your life?”

She blinks.

“Noodles,” it guesses, leveling the pistol at Jokić’s head. “Food delivery.”

Quandary narrows her eyes. “That’s you in there, then?” she demands. “Why the fuck did you kill yourself?”

The butterfly man’s mouth stretches into a smile. “Pushing people,” it says, and kisses the air.

“You are not well adjusted,” she mutters.

She looks down at Jokić, who is losing consciousness, eyelids fluttering. She looks around the rooftop, at what’s left of Jokić’s crew: three corpses and one also-ran. She thinks about the dead pair down in the alley. Her fantasy of blowing Jokić’s head off is starting to lose its shine—which is a shame, seeing as he’s the one who actually deserved the dart.

“Time to call the Siberians,” the butterfly man says.

“Right. Yeah. That was the deal.” She touches her chin, where the sliced capillaries are finally slowing down. “You still have to kill me before dark?”

The butterfly man taps a finger to its temple. “No face,” it says. “Factory reset. You lucky, lucky orphan.”

Quandary has zero desire to know how the butterfly man learned the word orphan, but it reminds her that her baba is iced up in the storage facility. Waiting to hear if she survived, waiting to hear if he’s ever getting a transplant. Well, probably sleeping by now, back in his induced coma.

“If he doesn’t have a body, he can’t leave,” she tells the butterfly man. “He can’t up and disappear on me again. He did that, you know. A lot.”

“I know,” the butterfly man says gently. “I know.”

“You’re just fucking saying things I said earlier.”

“That’s the play,” the butterfly man agrees. “Time to call the Siberians. Secure that shipment. Twenty slices of life.”

Quandary looks out over the city, the downtown streets baring their neon skeletons, skyways blooming with solar lamps. She wonders how much things will change with the butterfly man in charge of itself, if those twenty slices of life are enough to take over Nuuk or the whole fucking world.

Maybe there’ll just be more shitty street art in the Spine stations. Maybe that big quantum-organic brain, unlike her piddly human one, knows how to just be happy.

“Okay,” Quandary says. “Yeah. How’s your Jokić voice?”

“These little bastards are getting glitchier every year,” the butterfly man croaks.

“Spot on,” she says.

R.S.A. Garcia is a writer of speculative fiction and a Sturgeon, Nebula, Locus and Ignyte Award finalist. Her Amazon bestselling science fiction mystery, Lex Talionis, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and the Silver Medal for Best Scifi/Fantasy/Horror Ebook from the Independent Publishers Awards (2015). She has published short fiction in venues such as Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, Strange Horizons, and Internazionale. Her stories have been long-listed for the British Science Fiction Awards, translated into several languages, and included in a number of anthologies, including the critically acclaimed The Best of World SF, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, and The Apex Book of World SF series. Her sci-fantasy duology, beginning with The Nightward, is forthcoming from Harper Voyager in Fall 2024.

She lives in Trinidad and Tobago with an extended family and too many cats. Learn more at rsagarcia.com.

Bishop’s Opening

R.S.A. Garcia

Old as she was, the Kiskadee had done three full delivery runs without a single safety incident. So naturally, with the crew relaxed after a fourth successful delivery and launch, and eight cycles after Reece slingshotted the starship around Tavaco to head back to the Roost and their next job, their luck ran out.

Sebastian was in the middle of his daily workout when the shrill bark of the fire alarm brought him to a halt.

“Where’s that coming from?” he shouted as he hurried to unbuckle himself from the treadmill’s harness with sweaty hands. Officially, he was the newest crew member, two years into a three-year contract and designated as a cargo handler. The alarm meant the “other duties as assigned” part of his contract was about to kick in.

“Ventilation shafts ten and eleven,” Reece replied in his ear.

Sebastian was shoving his feet into his mag-boots when the pilot added, “Origin point—oxygen unit four.”

Shit. The schematic in his head confirmed that was one of the units for the living quarters, and the ventilation shafts fed into both cabins. Plenty of fuel for the fire.

“Get into that suit, Bas,” Olly said. She sounded calm, but Sebastian knew she was worried. If they couldn’t contain the fire by starving it of oxygen, then finding and smothering the source with CO2, they’d have to vent the entire level.

“Two minutes and I’ll have eyes on it,” he said, ducking through the airlock into the corridor. The hexagon shaped Kiskadee was mostly its aft hold, with everything else jammed around or in front of it, so he didn’t have far to go to the cabins. But that also meant a fire could spread fast, and they’d never see it coming.

“Corridors clear,” Reece verified.

The nearest suits were between Olly, his, and Reece’s cabins, so he would get a look at the fire as he dressed.

When he glanced through the porthole into his shared cabin, there was nothing to see but neatly made bunks and storage. He leaped the few feet to Olly’s airlock, peered inside, and cursed.

Several spherical balls of yellow-orange flame surrounded hearts of indigo blue, floating through the air like misshapen balloons. They lost their shape and spread out into rippling carpets as they encountered more oxygen. One drifted down to touch the protective barrier above the red-tipped lettuces growing in Olly’s small hydroponics garden. The flame died, but the transparent plastic blackened, short zigzag patterns scorching its surface as the invisible fire continued.

“I have eyes on it. Vent the Habitat, then Olly’s room.”

He slammed his hand down on the lock and the door opened.

“Sebastian, what are you doing?” Reece asked, his voice sharp.

“Thirty seconds!” He ducked under a fist-sized ball of flame and headed for Olly’s rectangular garden. The plastic over another part of the garden grayed to opaqueness as it melted inward. To his right, a globe of fire settled onto Olly’s bed and deflated into nothingness as black patterns burned into the sheets and restraints.

“You don’t have thirty seconds,” Olly said. “I’ve already sealed off and powered down the unit in Habitat Maintenance. Venting the cabin now.”

Sebastian ripped the plastic off the garden, cradled the huge tray—made light by low gravity—against his chest, and leaped for the doorway.

“Do it!” he called out as he twisted in midair, touched down in the corridor, and slammed his elbow against the lock screen.

The airlock clicked over to sealed as he carefully placed the tray on the ground, then wrenched open the double doors of the storage unit.

“Sebastian?” Reece asked, his tone clipped.

“Fine, I’m fine! Getting into the suit. One minute to deploying CO2.”

An hour later, when he emerged from Habitat Maintenance, he found Olly had already laid down the foam in her quarters. She took her helmet off as he approached and shook out her braids.

“Why?” was all she said, dark eyes narrowed with anger.

He stopped. He’d seen her this angry once before, and it was best if he kept his distance so she wouldn’t be able to physically pummel him. She’d done that last year, after he’d turned back on a near-empty oxygen tank to grab her safety-line when both her anchors were severed during a space walk.

“It didn’t take me ten seconds—”

“You had no idea how far that fire had spread.”

“I’ve seen fire like that before. Once you get the shafts closed and the power off, you’re going to be fine.”

“Opening the door could have fueled it!”

“Goodness gracious, I’m fast enough to avoid great balls of fire,” he said, with a slight smile at his own bad joke.

She advanced on him, poking his chest with her finger. “Not funny, Bas.”

“Okay, maybe it’s a bit forced—”

“Just tell me why.”

He grew serious. “Because you love that damn garden. It’s taken you three contracts to afford it, and you just got those lettuce right. I wasn’t going let you lose it.”

“Really?” She flung up her hands, her expression incredulous.

“I knew I could save it. So I did. And anyway,” he gave her a grin, hoping it would go a long way to settling her nerves. “I didn’t want to be stuck eating dehydrated protein bars and sauce packets for two weeks.”

Olly’s teeth bit into her lower lip, and she made a sound of frustration. “What am I going to do with you?”

“I’d say take me to bed because your shift’s up. But I’m guessing that’s a no.”

“Good guess.”

He made a sympathetic hum in his throat and drew closer. “What if I do the reports while you and Reece deal with Dispatch and Facilities?”

“Is this your way of trying to make me overlook your reckless behavior?” she said, eyebrows arched.

“Is it working?”

But Olly only huffed and walked away, leaving him to follow.

A knock made Bishop Kingston look up from the plans on his desk. “Come.”

The door to the office, inlaid with mother-of-pearl tracings, folded open. Kingston’s White Knight entered and fisted his right hand against his bare chest. A glittering 3D tattoo of two diamonds inside a circle—the crest of Sept Kingston—flashed at Bishop from the Knight’s forearm.

“A summons, Bishop. Kingside,” he said, his voice thin as it emerged from the pinhole speaker of the full-mask he wore. The mask was as white as the Knight’s sheer pantaloons, and edged with green and gold, the colors of Sept Kingston. Bishop wore a similar mask himself, only his had the crest etched into the left cheek. It was twin to the tattoo on the back of his right shoulder.

He rose smoothly from his desk, refusing to let the tension that gripped him show itself in his movements. “The Audience Room, I presume?”

“The King awaits you in her Chambers.”

A matter too sensitive for the Rooks or Kingside Pawns to hear then. His mouth set in a grim line. It would not be good news if it had to be discussed in Chambers, and with Grandmaster Kingston off-world, he assumed the worst. That it had something to do with the Kingston himself.

The Knight accompanied him through the hollowed out, highly polished halls of the Sept. The walls were a honeyed color, petrified wood that had aged to perfection since the time the first colony ships had landed on Valencia. One of the first Septs grown from the Greatwood, Sept Kingston was a sprawling mansion surrounded by its own village, every bit of it pruned from the sentient forest that covered much of Valencia’s main continent. Vines dripped from arches and windows, fluttering in the breeze that drifted through their sparkling flowers, carrying their sweet floral scent everywhere.

The King’s Chambers were on the third floor, deep inside the labyrinthine Sept to make it difficult for saboteurs and assassins to find. When Bishop called out and the King bade him enter, the Knight bowed and turned back down the corridor. Bishop made sure he had departed before he touched the doors open.

The King of Sept Kingston sat at the console that curved outward from the massive tree trunk growing through the center of her suite of rooms. Her mask was the same tan brown as her skin, with tinted eyeholes and a speaker in the center of the parted, painted-on red lips. Her capable hands danced along the Coretree Analysis Unit, inputting model calculations to ensure their nutritional value before she fed them to the crystalline quantum Coretrees themselves. Through the tinted windows on her right, Bishop could see the glittering expanse of the Sept’s vineyards beneath the morning sun.

Bishop bowed and waited. The King would take her time to greet him, as the models were of the utmost importance. Feeding the Coretrees was the most important job of every Sept and Grandmaster. Without the Greatwood, no ships could be grown, no Septs improved, no trade conducted for necessary resources. Without the Greatwood, the quantum power of the Coretrees could not be used in Valencia’s other business. The solving of problems, great or small, computational or otherwise, for off-worlders who would pay good money to have the impossible made possible.

And right now, after several tempi of inexplicably low Harvest, and Coretrees that bore rotten fruit and errors, they had their own urgent problem to solve. The King spent most of her time working on this with the Grandmaster, while the Queen and Bishop made sure their strategies in the Great Game of Valencian politics did not suffer and leave them vulnerable to attacks from other Septs. But Harvest was near, and the season of Petit Caréme almost upon them. Soon, this tempi’s Term of the Greatwood would close, the Septs’ rankings would be posted, and several months of reprieve from the deadly games would begin.

Not that his work would end. No, Petit Caréme was the planning season for his kind.

The King froze the hologram in front of her and looked up at him. “Bishop. You are well, I hope.”

He hated these false pleasantries, but it was not polite to begin a conversation without them. “My King. I am in excellent health. Thank you for asking. You are also well, I hope?”

She waved a dismissive hand. “I have a task for you.” Her voice was gentle and low but threaded with hardness.

Behind his mask, Bishop pursued his lips. “Of course, my King—”

“Bishop,” she interrupted him. “Let’s speak plainly.”

Old anger weighed heavy on his tongue, but he only said, “As you wish.”

She rose from the carved chair and went to the window, narrow shoulders visible beneath her sheer robes. She was tiny, barely above five feet. Her black hair had been crimped and curled into a bejeweled knot. He stared at the back of her neck and tried not to think of how easily he could break it.

“Are you still angry, Bishop? About what we did? What we took from you?”

He knew her questions were traps, so he said nothing. He clenched his fingers against the urge to scratch at shoulder scars that had completely faded many tempi before.

“You can tell me the truth. It would not leave this room.”

He knew it would not, but he had no desire to ever trust her with his secrets again. She was King now. And he was a Bishop still earning his way back into his Grandmaster’s trust.

She sighed. “You always were so careful. I never thought you would defy him. You know how he is.”

Oh, he would not discuss this. Not for her, not for anyone. “You did not send for me to discuss my . . . feelings.”

“Of course not,” she said. “As Bishop, you have none. And you are right. This is no time to indulge my curiosity.”

He was not fooled. She was prodding, always prodding, for any sign of weakness. Any sign of betrayal. He was grateful for a less subtle attack this time, at least. The other kind was harder to guard against.

She turned and came to stand in front of him.

“The Grandmaster has secured a Conclave with Sept Bartica. He will meet their Grandmaster at Greater Paradise on his return from the meeting with the Consortium regarding the search for their lost slaver ship.”

“But he will be in the company of the Valencia. Will he allow such a move to be witnessed by her?”

“He plans to be discreet, but she is an ally these past decades,” the King stated in her soft way. “For the moment, we have nothing to fear from the Royal Sept since we gave her our full support in the trial of the last Valencia.”

The King was right, but the Royal Sept Valencia was the pinnacle of the Great Game, their Grandmaster its best player. Bishop could never lose sight of how dangerous all the Grandmasters of Valencia were, allies or not. This one had almost cost him his life, after all.

No, he reminded himself. You did that with your own foolish, emotional actions. No one else is to blame.

“You will take First and Second Rooks and such Pawns as you deem necessary and leave immediately for the space station. You will protect the Kingston and bring him home safely.”

Bishop bowed his head. “Of course.”

“Take the Cook with you. The Grandmaster would appreciate satisfying meals after all these weeks of travel. The Valencia’s palette is not to his taste.”

He straightened. “Cook would welcome that. He has wanted to go off-world for some time now.”

“I’m aware. And you must deal with the matter of his service. Use the time to bring the issue to a conclusion. I do not wish the Kingston to have to take action.”

“That will not be necessary,” he said, stung at her censure and interference in his Septhold duties.

She stepped closer to him and signed instead of speaking, in case listening ears were nearby. “Don’t make me do your job again, Bishop. I don’t enjoy it.”

Bitterness filled him at her lies, but he kept his body relaxed. He signed back, “I understand your concerns, my King. I will allay them.”

Her fingers were as graceful as her words. “See that you do.”

Reece chirped Dispatch at the Roost, who then contacted Eastern Allied Corporation’s Facilities Department. After he and Olly ran a full cycle of remote checks with Engineering to ensure the fire wasn’t caused by human error, and endured several lectures from Accounting about insurance premiums, the request to charge the repairs to Corporate Billing was approved. Sebastian filled out the necessary forms and Reece reviewed and filed them.

The Kiskadee couldn’t operate unless it could pass inspection when they returned to the Roost, so it made sense to get the work done immediately, before they had to pick up their next cargo. They put in for a few cycles shore leave during the repairs. EAC granted the leave, then directed them to Greater Paradise Space Station. Olly knew the station well since she’d spent most of her childhood there. It had a corporate-approved repair shop and was just two weeks away.

Happily for Sebastian’s food-loving soul, it also had an unusually large food court level that sold more than variations on compressed seaweed and recycled water, because the planet Paradise and its resources were nearby.

Once the paperwork was done, Sebastian helped Olly move into their cabin, her little garden a splash of green in the gray room, and they settled in for a slow, boring ride to one of the great mysteries of the universe . . . the Arbor of Greater Paradise.

Sebastian could still sense the leftover tension in Olly as they worked. That was his fault, Reece told him on the Bridge while Olly was tending to her plants. He’d scared them both, and Olly wouldn’t forget that easily.

“Fix it,” Reece had said.

So, when they finally went to bed, he settled under the sheets and pulled Olly close. She threw her bare leg over his and turned her head to where Reece floated alongside their bunk. His eyes were closed, but he was only resting them; he couldn’t sleep while technically on watch.

“Tell me about the best thing to eat on Greater Paradise,” Sebastian coaxed, fingers drifting back and forth over her smooth shoulders.

“Bas, we still have weeks of rations to get through. Why would you want to hear about what you can’t have right now?” Olly replied. Straps crisscrossed atop their blanket, cocooning them against the chill of their quarters. They were almost never all in one spot at the same time, but after the fire, the unspoken agreement was they needed a little time together.

Olly walked her fingers over his bare chest. He twisted, choking on laughter that carved dimples into his brown cheeks, and slapped at her hand. “Stop!”

“It’s hilarious how ticklish you are.”

Reece grunted beside them and flung one large, muscled arm over his bearded face.

“Anyway, you know the answer already,” she added.

“Tell me again. It will help me forget how small this bunk is.”

She folded her arms across his chest and rested her head on them, a slight smile on her face. “This bunk is not small. I’m a generously proportioned beauty. Isn’t that right, Reece?”

Their pilot did not answer, his barrel chest rising and falling evenly, as if he slept.

Sebastian ran his hands over her long braids and the metallic twists of wire that decorated them. He knew his smile was irresistible, so he wore her down with it until she groaned and said, “I just want to sleep, Bas.”

“So do I. Help me?”

“What’s there to tell?” she said softly. “Doubles is the best food in Greater Paradise. Everyone knows.”

“How did you find out about it?”

She settled against him. Sebastian rubbed one hand over the soft rolls of her back and stretched the other to massage Reece’s smooth bald scalp, the way he liked.

“Whenever my mom had to work late at the ice factory, she’d take me to hang out with Gran at the docks until it was time for home. They had a mess room, so it wasn’t as dangerous as being alone on the factory floor, or in our quarters. Sometimes, she’d be so late, Gran would take me for dinner. That’s when we’d go down to the Basement, to Sticky’s Place.

“Sticky was from a long line of cooks. His however-many greats came up from the islands before the Wave, settled in the States, and moved on to the colonies when the Union fell apart. He’d left a cruise line to set up his own stall on Greater Paradise. The recipe for his best dish had been handed down for generations. Some of the ingredients were difficult to find, but since Greater Paradise was parked by an Arbor, he could trade with the Valencians for fresh herbs and everything else. Every time Gran took me to his stall, we had the same thing.”

“Four doubles, everything, plenty pepper.” Sebastian sighed, his limbs relaxing beneath her warm body and the grip of the soft restraints. “What were they like?”

She made a contented sound, and he watched her lashes feather her cheeks as she went deeper into the memory. “Two pieces of round, soft, fried dough the size of your hand, with creamy seasoned chickpeas sandwiched between them. They came with a choice of condiments. Pickled, grated cucumber slaw. Sweet, earthy, tamarind sauce. Your choice of flavored pepper sauces. Mango, banana, or pineapple. You ate them right there, with your hands, standing or sitting on a stool, and the only rule was you couldn’t order just one.”

Sebastian closed his eyes, imagining a tiny version of Olly sitting on a stool too tall for her, boots firmly curled beneath the rungs to keep her in place in low gravity, face spotted with the delicious remnants of yellow legumes.

“The first time Gran takes me there, she orders slight pepper, but this tourist standing next to us tells Sticky, everything. And then they order all the pepper sauces because they think they’re preserves. No one bats an eye because everyone likes food spicy in Greater P. Only way you can taste anything out here. But the tourist, they don’t know shit. They find out though. Never seen anyone drink that much milk in one go.

“Best part is, Sticky watches all this and the only thing he asks is, ‘You good?’ and the tourist catches their breath and says, ‘Two more, please.’”

They both laughed as if the ending were a surprise, the familiarity of it wrapping Sebastian in drifting, cozy thoughts.

“Doubles.” They started as Reece spoke in his deep voice. “Makes me think of tennis.”

“Five whole words,” Olly teased. “Chatty tonight, aren’t you?”

“I didn’t know you were listening to the story,” Sebastian smiled at him.

Reece didn’t move his arm, but he shifted his head ever so slightly into Sebastian’s touch. “I always listen.”

Olly laughed softly. “No tennis in Greater Paradise. Sticky said they called it that in the islands. No one remembers why. I suspect he kept the name because there was mystery to it, like the Arbor.”

“Maybe,” Sebastian yawned as he spoke, “it reminded them of home. You know. The immigrants who left the islands. Maybe they were just holding on to what they could. Even if it was just a name.”

Olly was silent for a while before she said, “Probably.”

“Olly?”

“Yeah?”

He lifted her chin and kissed her before pulling back to brush his thumb over the velvet of her cheek.

“Forgive me?”

She made a derisive sound in her throat. But then she leaned forward and pressed her warm lips to his again. “For now.”

“Only for now?”

“We both know this won’t be the last time,” Reece rumbled, eyes still closed.

He winked at her. “I can live with that.”

She sighed. “That’s what I’m afraid of. Then we’d have to find a way to tell your mom her baby got himself killed.”

“She’s got eight other kids to fret over. She barely notices I’m gone.”

Olly stroked a finger over his eyebrow. “Someday, Sebastian Thomas Carver, you’re going to figure out how unforgettable you are. Then God help us all because you get laid enough as it is.”

Reece didn’t join in their gentle laughter, rising instead to head up to the bridge and leaving them to rest in each other’s arms.

“So, it’s true there’s gravity on Greater Paradise?” Sebastian asked. They were five cycles out, and he was more than ready to start his short vacation.

“Only where the Arbor’s grown onto the station. No one knows for sure how or why,” Olly said over the Kiskadee’s chirp. She was down in the galley, getting something to eat. He could tell from her muffled chewing.

“But the Valencians know.”

“Of course, they know. It’s probably something to do with them. Best guess anyone has of how their trade routes work is the Arbors camouflage something their ships use to jump long distances. Anything with that amount of power can support artificial gravity.”

“Has anyone ever asked them though?”

Reece made a soft huffing sound next to Sebastian. His version of laughter. Olly outright chuckled in his ear. “Bas, no one asks the Valencians anything. If you’re smart, you stay out of their way. They’re easy to offend, and if you piss them off, there’s no one to turn to. They’ll shove you out an airlock so fast your head will spin.”

“That’s murder.” He glanced at Reece. “There are laws against that.”

“Greater Paradise isn’t a family commune,” Reece said.

“He’s right. The fleet you grew up in was focused on keeping everyone safe because you were all families. Greater Paradise is about commerce. Station Agents uphold the laws for regular folk. The Valencians are . . . not that. No one tells them what to do. And there’s no recourse for anyone who messes with them.”

“But the Pan-African stations don’t work like that. The Kairi sure as hell don’t work like that. You kill one of them anywhere, the entire Sibling Army comes for you.”

“Government versus Corporate,” Reece grunted.

“You’re not wrong though, Sebastian. In some places, murder’s only a problem if the wrong people die,” Olly said.

Sebastian considered that, a troubled frown on his face. “What do Valencians look like?”

“Assholes,” Olly said. And no matter how he pressed her, she would not say more. So, he put the Valencians out of his mind and settled into preparing for his first visit to Greater P, a name Olly told him was an inside joke because for most residents, Paradise it was not.

Mostly, he planned the food he would try from the dozens of proprietors who serviced the thousands that passed through Greater P. Olly had told him what she remembered of her childhood there—every dish she’d eaten, every corridor she’d walked.

But she couldn’t prepare him for the actual sight of the Arbor. From the moment it first appeared on the viewscreens as a winking star, a bright light that grew larger and larger, he could not look away. The filters had to adjust, just so the rainbow dance of it didn’t blind them. The Arbor spun in the starlit darkness, a massive forest of twisting trunks, thin leaves, and curling tendrils. Greater Paradise rotated slowly beside it—two hollow metal circles connected by an elevator. The outer hull of one end of the station had been captured by the crystalline oasis and glittered like the Arbor, branches twisting over the rotating habitat as it grew toward the other end of the station.

“There she is,” Olly said as they watched the station draw nearer. “Home, sweet home.”

Sebastian floated above the floor next to Reece, hand curled around a hard thigh to keep him anchored, while Olly sat strapped in on his right. “Are you glad to be back?”

She shrugged, sliding her fingers between those of his free hand. “Gran and Mom are both gone. Nothing here for me now.” But he knew that dismissive tone. Sensed something unspoken and painful under it. Olly was as private as Reece about many things. It was part of the reason they made such a good team. Talking was optional on the Kiskadee, and though he was always up for a chat, a joke, or a story, Sebastian didn’t mind silence.

As they watched, a ship glimmered into being beside the Arbor, a mirage settling into solid shape without warning. Although the forest dwarfed it, Sebastian drew in his breath at the dimensions and light-limned irregular angles of it. He’d never seen a ship like it. It looked like something carved from enchanted wood and fairy light.

Olly groaned beside him. “Great. A Valencian ship is in port.”

“That’s what they travel in?” Sebastian’s lips parted as he leaned closer to the screen. “It’s incredible.”

“Talk is they grow their ships. Probably from the same thing as the Arbor, as they seem to thrive out here in absolute zero without any sustenance.”

“I would give anything to see that up close.”

“Enjoy the view,” she said. “This is as close as they let anyone get.”

“Why?”

“I already told you,” she said. “They’re assholes.” And her usually amused, cynical tone carried a bitterness Sebastian hardly ever heard from her.

“You hate them, don’t you?” he asked, turning to look at her profile, at the long line of her neck and the small, rounded tip of her nose. Her eyes when they rested on him, were a deep, dark brown he couldn’t read. She laid a gentle hand on his cheek, but all she said was, “Better get ready to dock.”

Bishop was alone in the Grandmaster’s Penthouse suite when the call came from the Kingston. Once it was over, and his Grandmaster’s virtual form had dissipated, Bishop cursed under his breath.

The Grandmaster Valencia’s ship had failed to jump to the nearest Arbor after leaving Consortium space because of another instance of miscalculation by the Coretrees. There had been minor errors before, on Valencia. He’d heard of an incident several tempi ago, when a Sept vineyard transition deposited travelers at the wrong Sept. But this was far more serious. This time, a mistake had left the Valencia’s flagship stranded half a galaxy from their planned destination.

Whatever had caused the error, the crew no longer trusted that the ship’s quantum exchange would work accurately. As a result, the Grandmasters had chosen the long, slow flight to another Arbor. From there, they would transition to their Septhold vineyards safely, and allow the ship to be inspected and repaired.

But that meant his Grandmaster would not arrive in time for the meeting. He expected Bishop to handle it instead. Bishop did not look forward to the task of soothing the Bartica’s temper once he realized the Kingston was not in attendance.

He gathered his Pawns and joined the Rooks that waited in and around the most exclusive private conference room of the Greater Luxury Hotel. As part of the normal power play of etiquette, the Bartica had not arrived yet. But as he was about to commit a breach of the original Conclave agreement by representing Sept Kingston instead of the Grandmaster, the least he could do was allow them the victory of being the last to arrive.

However, when the doors opened, the Bartica did not enter. Instead, his King strode into the room with their Black Knight and paused on the other side of the wide, circular table inlaid with precious minerals and stones.

Bishop rose to his feet and bowed. “King Bartica, I welcome you to this Conclave with sincerity and good faith.”

The King was not required to exchange pronouns with, nor bow to, anyone of a lesser rank, so they inclined their head instead. On the forehead of their pale blue mask was the Bartican crest of a gold triangle with a smaller red one within. “You are not the Kingston.”

“And you are not the Bartica.”

The King of Bartica curled dark brown knuckles around the back of a chair but did not pull it out to sit.

“Why does he send a Bishop to a Conclave?”

“The Kingston deeply regrets the necessity for his absence, but if you are willing to accept my credentials, we can begin negotiations.”

The King was silent for almost a full minute, hands relaxed around the chair while Bishop waited, senses on high alert.

“I do not find this acceptable.”

If he was not bound by Valencian protocol, Bishop would have given vent to the kind of language that was forbidden once you were accepted into a Sept. Why could nothing be simple?

“This is a primary Conclave, your first overture to us. Surely, the time to insist on such strict procedure is not yet at hand?”

“What we wish to discuss with your Kingston is not for the ears of a mere White Bishop,” the King replied, the very slightest thread of annoyance in their voice. Bishop noted that with mild surprise; they must be deeply invested in this Conclave to let their disappointment be so obvious.

“My apologies. Perhaps I can relay a message to impress upon the Kingston the urgency of your suit?” he offered, curious now as to what the Conclave would have addressed. This was no mere exploratory move. The Bartica had meant this in earnest, if his King was anything to go by, and that meant this Conclave might have had . . . ramifications.

Interesting.

The King released the chair and flicked a hand at their Knights. They left the room and Bishop motioned to his Rooks to do the same. Once they were alone, the King came around the table and they stood chest to chest, heads bowed. Bishop cupped his palms, and the King made several signs within it before raising their head to look directly at Bishop.

“I understand,” Bishop said. “I will pass on your message.”

The King spun in a swirl of silken robes and vine perfume and walked out of the conference room.

Bishop sank to his chair, thinking, his heart pounding hard.

The King, he now knew, was terrified. He had used the old language to tap out short words into Bishop’s palm. No wonder the Bartica had not come himself if those three words were true.

Moves without Honor, the King had tapped, and Bishop thought it was a wonder his hand remained steady afterward.

There was only one way to play the Great Game without honor in Valencia. Only one way to make moves that would be condemned by every Sept, in public and private, as outside the rules of Honor.

Someone planned to challenge the ranking of the Septs. Change was on the way. Perhaps even . . . insurrection.

And with that would come opportunities and openings he might find very useful indeed.

When First Rook returned a few minutes later to report the King had left and the hotel was clear, he sprang from his seat with energy he had not had in many tempi.

“Send for a car,” he told. “I must return to the flagship.”

This was news that could only be properly shared in person.

When they stepped out from the noise and heat of the bay they’d been assigned to one cycle after their arrival, Sebastian felt like less of a visitor and more like he was returning to a familiar and beloved place.

Olly had warned him that things would not be the same as in her stories. Station turnover was common. People came and went frequently, and places were always being added, or torn down and replaced by something new. But he was so rarely in port on a station this big, Sebastian felt the relaxed thrill of a true vacation. He walked the narrow, crowded lanes, craning his neck like a tourist at the levels that rose above them in spirals and connecting tubes.

“Still smells like too many people,” Olly said, wrinkling her nose as she shoved her hands into the pockets of her utility pants.

“You’re just sensitive because it’s been the three of us for so long,” Sebastian countered, staring at the shops and flashing ads while he ignored the endless permission pings on his chirp.

He stopped to stare at a gorgeous image of a teeming ocean in front of a travel registry and Reece moved in behind him so close, he felt the heat of his body against his back.

“Didn’t get around to visiting the beach on Tavaco,” Sebastian said, berating himself for not going alone when Reece and Olly refused. He was too used to the rules of growing up as part of a large family in dangerous places. No solo outings, just in case.

Reece’s warm breath puffed into his ear. “Next time,” was all he said. Sebastian turned, surprised. “You mean it? You’ll come?”

Reece had a grimace on his face as he stared at the display, but there was no mistaking his assenting grunt.

“Well,” Sebastian said softly. “Looks like Olly gets to take watch next cycle.”

Pausing next to Reece, Olly shook her head. “Wrapped around his finger.”

Reece shot her a look, and she sniggered before striding away, mag-boots clicking. Sebastian bumped shoulders with Reece as a thank you before they strolled after her.

All in all, everything felt . . . perfect.

Until they got to the Basement and stood where Sticky’s should have been, and it was a Creole food stall instead.

The owner looked at them with mild disbelief when they asked about Sticky’s. “You gone ah long time. Sticky’s closed since before I come here, and that was right after the Blowout. Years now.”

“But the doubles? The roti?” Sebastian said, heart sinking.

“Don’t sell them thing out here now. Have to go Arborside. By the rich people them.”

Sebastian tried to convince her to go with him, but Olly would not listen. “We’re not going into Valencian territory,” she said firmly as they walked back toward the unimaginatively named Busy Junction where people, hotels, shops, restaurants, and stalls met in a chaotic, food-scented crisscross of lanes. “It’s dangerous and there’s plenty of good food right here.”

“We’ve got time to sightsee. We could just take—”

“Bas,” she said without looking at him, “It’s not always about what you want. We’re not going, and I’m done discussing this.” She lengthened her stride to leave him behind.

Sebastian halted as he realized she was angry at him. Really angry, in a way he’d never seen before. What did I do?

“Did I miss something?” He looked at Reece. The pilot put his hands on his hips, stared upward for a moment, then directed his gaze at Sebastian. “Give us a minute.”

“Sure,” Sebastian said, trying not to feel hurt. It was moments like these he was reminded of how long they’d been together, their connection rooted in secret smiles and monosyllabic references; questions they shrugged off and jokes only they understood the punch lines to. Worried he’d once again strained their relationship in some unexpected way, he slowed, watching Olly gesticulate while Reece listened with a frown crinkling his forehead.

An enclosed bullet car slowed to a stop in the street, gliding noiselessly on buried tracks. The light from the double doors of a hotel on his left slid along the car’s tinted roof and sides like water. A group gathered in the hotel’s doorway. They all wore masks but the tallest among them, at the front of the group, wore a patterned one. Sebastian sped up, trying to get out of their way.

The side of the bullet car retracted, and he glanced at it. A shifting shadow and a flicker of light in the dark interior caught his eye, and he halted suddenly. His boot didn’t engage as fast as he needed, and he stumbled to his left.

His shoulder slammed into someone, his hands tangling in satiny cloth over warm hardness. There was a sharp intake of breath as fingers gripped one of his wrists. But Sebastian was looking behind him because his mind had finally figured out what he’d seen.

A dark shape crouched just inside the car doors. Sneering lips curled beneath a black mask that hid everything from nose to forehead.

What the hell?

He wrenched his arm free and took a step toward the car and the object glinting in the passenger’s outstretched hand. Is that a gun? Weapons were forbidden on Greater P, but he knew immediately it couldn’t be anything else.

Instinctively, he lunged for it, and the passenger pulled back as he grabbed at a black-gloved hand and shoved upward. They grappled, Sebastian toppling into the plush seat alongside the door, one foot still on the sidewalk. Grunting, the attacker got their leg beneath Sebastian and kicked hard. The first strike robbed him of his breath. The second sent him staggering backward out of the car.

Several hands took hold of him as the car door closed. It slid away into the street, scattering pedestrians. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw silent figures loping after it, taking bounding leaps through human and vehicular traffic in the low gravity, but his attention was captured by what he held in his palm. The silver-gray tube had a tiny button on the side and two hollow ends. It fit neatly in his hand, innocuous and almost weightless. He had no idea what it was.

A hand covered in a white glove closed over his wrist. The tube was wrenched from him, and he was jabbed painfully in his ribs on either side. He heard a shout up the street. Olly’s voice. About time, he thought, still a little resentful they’d walked off on him. Reeling from the suddenness of the fight, pulse rioting under his skin, he looked up at the person in front of him.

A white mask, decorated with swirls of green and yellow flowers, stared back at him. The eye pockets were tinted, and a dark pinhole speaker where a mouth would be formed the center of a flower head.

“Name the Sept that hired you, and I will consider letting you die swiftly.”

Sebastian’s stomach lurched, nausea slicking the back of his tongue. “What?”

Iron fingers curved into his throat, squeezing hard around his Adam’s apple, and cutting off his air efficiently. “If you answer me now, you deal with me,” the soft monotone continued. “If you refuse, I’ll give you to my Rooks. I promise you, whatever happens to you then will happen to everyone you love as well.”

Sebastian struggled but the hands on his biceps and forearms held him tight as he fought to breathe. The hand on his throat loosened and he doubled over, gasping, as an outraged bellow sounded somewhere far away. Through blurred, teary vision he saw a dart of shiny metal sticking out of his left rib cage. Fingers gloved in white plucked it from him. A headache speared behind his eyes, and he moaned at the sudden pain.

“They shot him,” a voice said above him.

“Why would they target their own?” another asked.

“A question worthy of consideration,” the monotone replied.

Something crashed into his left side. Amid harsh cries and the thump of flesh hitting flesh, he heard Olly calling his name. Pain sat on his chest like an idling cargo bot, and he couldn’t catch his breath to answer her. He fell sideways, his boots losing contact with his ground, his body beginning to drift.

Hands pulled at him, lifting him against a firm torso. He looked up into the masked face. It was luminous with sparkling, twisting flowers growing downward to brush squared shoulders. The slowly curling stems and blossoming petals were mesmerizing. He could smell their floral perfume, and it smelled better than Olly after a real shower. He lifted a hand and stroked at the mask. It was smooth beneath his fingers; firm and cold as metal. He sighed, oddly soothed, a faint smile curving his lips.

“What did you do!” Olly’s voice sounded muffled. “What the fuck did you do?”

He wanted to defend himself, to tell her he hadn’t done anything at all, but the swelling bubble of pain in his head and the roiling in his stomach distracted him.

The monotone said above him, “Take the gun. There will be traces inside. We must know what they used. We have minutes at most.”

“The Station Agents—”

“This is not their business.” There was a pause during which he could clearly hear scuffling and Reece swearing. “Bring them.”

An arm was around his waist, another under his shoulder, and he was spun in a circle. A bullet car stood waiting in front of him. “Do I get to ride in that?” he wanted to ask, but then pain hooked viciously into his ribs, and he screamed.

“Sebastian!” Reece sounded panicked and furious, but oh God, the pain. He couldn’t answer, couldn’t think; the pain had him, and it dragged him down, down, into a black hole of nothingness.

He drifted back to full awareness with a chill burning under his skin. He lay on something velvety and yielding, but he shivered so hard he heard his own teeth clicking.

“The antidote is working. You may leave us.”

A hand slid under his head, lifting his chin. Insistent fingers pressed against his mouth. He parted his lips, and a pill was placed on his tongue. He tasted the salt of skin as the hand withdrew. The edge of a cup replaced it, washing down the pill with water. He curled into himself, trying to get warm. Callused hands grasped his palms and chafed them with strong, firm movements. He gasped with how good it felt and inhaled a delicious, floral scent.

“Reece?” he murmured, forcing his eyes open.

The blurry face above his resolved into stern lips pressed together beneath a green mask that covered nose and forehead. The memory of a black mask floated to the top of his mind, and he jerked backward, hitting his head on a wall. He groaned as sparkles exploded behind his lids and agony sliced through him.

“Careful,” the voice was low and so resonant it sent a shiver through him. “You don’t want to move much yet.”

He lay still, catching his breath and cataloging the aches rioting through his body in swift jabs and lingering strikes. When he felt warmer, after the shivers passed, he licked his lips. “Reece? Olly?”

“Your friends, I assume?” The figure straightened, towering above him. This mask did not cover the eyes, but the holes were too deep set to see them at this angle.

My family. My everything. But that was none of this stranger’s business, so he simply said, “Yes.” He tried to sit up and a firm hand descended on his shoulder. Heat seared his skin through his shirt.

“Slow. Your balance might be affected. The pain and hallucinations may return.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“I hoped you could provide those answers.”

He frowned. “Me?”

Corded arms a lighter shade of brown than his own folded across a flat chest. “Your name and pronouns?”

“Sebastian.” In the expectant silence that followed he instinctively added. “Carver. Sebastian Carver. I prefer he/him. Yours?”

“Bishop shall suffice. He/him. Are you a resident of Greater Paradise, Sebastian Carver?”

The way his name rolled off Bishop’s tongue, resonating in that low register, made his skin tingle with awareness. He shook his head, then regretted it instantly and pressed his fingers to his temples. The pain has certainly returned. “Passing through. The Kiskadee needed repairs.”

“Your ship, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“When did you arrive?”

“A cycle ago. I think.” He frowned. “How long have I been here?” For the first time, he glanced around and realized he sat on a bunk. The walls that curved around the small space looked carved from polished wood, filled with silvery ripples and dark knots. There was a desk and chair to his right. A closed door stood between the bunk and the desk, and another behind his questioner. “Where am I?”

“Aboard the Kingston’s flagship.”

He rubbed at a sore spot on his ribs absently. “Sorry, I think I missed something. What’s the Kingston?”

“My Grandmaster.”

At Sebastian’s raised eyebrows the stern lips parted with a quiet sigh. “You have no idea to what I refer, do you?”

“Should I?”

“Tell me something,” his voice was filled with curiosity, “why did you reach into that car, Sebastian Carver?”

“Just Sebastian,” he said automatically. “They had a weapon. You took it from me.”

“You put yourself between me and that weapon. Why?”

Sebastian groaned as he settled elbows on his thighs and gripped his throbbing head. “Because I’m clearly an imbecile.”

“Perhaps. But I need an answer.”

Sebastian tensed, realizing suddenly that although he was the one injured, he was being interrogated. “Well, Bishop, if you have a problem with me saving your life, you can call the Station Agents. Otherwise, I’d like to go back to my friends now.”

“Is that what you think you did? Save my life?”

“You tell me,” Sebastian said, spreading his arms wide, exasperated.

“This is your plan, perhaps?” Bishop asked in a mildly amused voice. “To place me in your debt?”

Sebastian was done. This was beyond ridiculous, and he had no more patience for it. “If it was, it clearly wouldn’t have worked, because you don’t seem the grateful type. In fact, you strike me as an . . . ”

 . . . asshole. Oh. Shit. His eyes widened as he stood tall enough to see dark eyes as cold as the deep space outside the station hull.

“You’re Valencian,” he breathed. That must mean . . . He understood now why he’d been able to lie down with no restraints. He was on a Valencian ship, in gravity.

The slightest curl formed in a corner of Bishop’s lip, and confusingly, Sebastian’s skin flushed with heat. “Why am I here?”

“My question first, Sebastian Carver.”

“I’m not sure, okay,” Sebastian shot back. “It was a weapon, and I was the only one who saw it. Nobody would have had time to stop them. I thought . . . it was the right thing to do.”

“Are you in law enforcement?”

“I.” He swallowed then took a deep breath. “I’m a cargo handler.”

In the silence that fell between them, Sebastian shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looking everywhere but in front of him.

“A cargo handler. You are . . . interesting, Sebastian.”

There was that warm tingle again, stronger than before. Oh hell, no. This is not the time, Sebastian Thomas Carver. You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re dealing with yet. He made himself look directly at Bishop. “Where are my friends? What did you do to them?”

“Do to them? You should ask, Sebastian, what they have done to us. My Rooks were exceedingly solicitous, given their behavior.”

“If you’ve harmed them—”

Bishop stepped forward, bringing them so close, Sebastian’s fists were brushed by the soft layers of silver cloth that covered Bishop’s body; his scent swirled around them. “What will you do? Kill me, after so kindly saving my life? That would be such a waste of your efforts.”

Sebastian’s heart sped up even as bewilderment seized him. “What is wrong with you? Why the hell would I want to kill you? I just want to know why you’re keeping me here, and why you won’t let me see my friends?”

“Because I must know if you are part of the attempt on my life, Sebastian,” he said in a voice suddenly sharp as metal. “As for your friends.”

He strode to the stateroom door and laid a palm on it. After making a few hand gestures, he brushed past Sebastian and strode to the desk. Sebastian watched Bishop lean there, ankles crossed, hands braced against the edge of the desk, until a flurry of activity drew both their gazes back to the doorway.

“Bas!” Olly ran to him, and he caught her, arms tightening around her curves. He hissed at the discomfort as she hugged back, relief coursing over him as he breathed in the crisp apple fragrance of her hair.

His cheek against hers, he looked up as Reece came into the room. Sebastian’s eyes widened at Reece’s bruised face and split lip. “Reece, what the hell—”

Without warning, he was crushed against a massive chest, Olly caught between them, his arms trapped against Reece’s hard stomach as the man held onto the back of his head and waist and pulled him close. Shuddering breaths skimmed his ear.

Sebastian’s heart beat hard in his chest. “Hey,” he said, surprised and deeply happy at their emotional welcome. “I’m good. Except for the part where you’re crushing me. It kind of hurts.”

Olly made a sound in her throat and shoved him hard. He stepped back, rubbing at his sore chest, then froze as she wiped at her damp face. “You idiot,” she said fiercely. “What were you thinking?”

“That someone was pointing a weapon at me, and I didn’t want to get shot?”

Her laugh was harsh. “I wish I believed that, Sebastian, but I know you. You’ve never put yourself first. This is the space walk and the fire all over again.”

He rolled his eyes. “We’re back to arguing over the space walk? What did you want me to do? Leave you to die?”

“You jump into danger every time without thinking. And you have no idea, no idea, how it feels to watch you risk your life like that.”

“I wasn’t the one who walked off and left me alone on a Station I didn’t know!”

Olly’s lashes fluttered, and she looked stricken. He’d hurt her, yet again, without meaning to. He made a rough sound in his throat and ran his hand over his hair.

“Sebastian,” Reece said, his voice tense, “not here.”

“And you,” Sebastian snapped. “Look at your face. Why did you attack their people?” He waved his hand in Bishop’s direction. “There was no need for that. I was just a little stunned from the fight—”

“You were dying,” Bishop interrupted in a mild voice. “Poisoned.”

“I—what?”

Olly strode over to Bishop and poked a finger at his chest. “You piece of shit. You had no right to take him and keep him from us. Who do you think you are?”

“You would have preferred I left him on the sidewalk to die in unimaginable pain?”

“Why not?” she spat. “That doesn’t usually bother your kind.”

The stillness that emanated from Bishop made Sebastian’s hair stand on end. “Olly, don’t. Leave him alone.”

“You know nothing of me,” Bishop’s voice was steel wrapped in silk.

“I know your people. You’re heartless, violent pricks, every last one of you. You kill as easily as you lie, and all you care about is money and your sick games.”

Bishop stepped close so his taller vantage forced her to look up at him. His murmur was low, but audible. “Who did we take from you?”

Olly’s fist flew without warning. Bishop caught her hand and spun her, twisting her arm behind her. She tried to stomp on his foot, but he put an arm around her and lifted her, enduring the strikes of her boots against his shins without a single flinch.

“Let. Her. Go,” Reece said.

The warning in his voice made Sebastian step between the pilot and Bishop. “Stop. We all need to calm down.” He turned to Bishop. “Release her and talk to us. I’ve answered your questions. It’s time to answer mine.”

One minute Bishop had Olly in hand, the next Sebastian caught her as she stumbled into him. She rubbed at her arm as Bishop said, “Ask them.”

“You alright?” Sebastian asked Olly.

She nodded, narrowing her eyes at Bishop. “Don’t ever touch me again.”

“I have no desire to touch you. But I make no promises.” Bishop leaned against the desk, hands across his chest. “I will not allow anyone to lay hands on me.”

“It was an assassination attempt?” Sebastian interrupted. “On you?”

“Yes, and yes.”

“Why?”

“Any number of reasons.” Bishop shrugged. “Persons of my rank endure several a tempi, at least. Greater Paradise is neutral ground, though, and such attempts are forbidden here.”

“Pretty sure murder is a crime everywhere.”

His stern lips twitched. “If you are caught, absolutely.”

Olly tossed her hands up. “See!”

“Do you think we’re involved?” Sebastian asked, knowing this was the real issue. If Bishop thought they had any part in this, he had a feeling they would not make it back to the Station.

A few seconds of silence passed before Bishop responded. “I had to rule out the possibility. Valencians often carry antidotes for common toxins, but this one, Quasi’s Death, is extremely fast acting. It’s rarely used because of its virulency, even in Valencia, but the Kingston’s flagship has the most complete medical bay in the fleet outside of the Valencia’s flagship and carries the antidote. That’s why I brought you here.”

“Bullshit,” Reece hissed, stalking forward to stand behind Olly and Sebastian. “You wanted to interrogate him. You wanted information.”

Bishop tilted his head to one side. “That too.”

“Information?” Sebastian frowned.

“If you weren’t involved, at the very least you’d seen the assassin,” Olly said, “They needed to know what you knew.”

“But I would have told you that anyway if you’d just asked. Why separate me from my friends?”

“How was I to know they were your friends?” Bishop waved a hand at Reece. “I’d been attacked twice, and they’d injured two of my Rooks. Perhaps they were there to make sure of my death. I had no way of knowing their story was true. I had to wait until you were conscious.”

“In case they meant to harm me.” Sebastian paused, eyebrows raised. “You were . . . protecting me?”

“A favor returned, and a debt paid, perhaps.”

Olly shook her head. “Not likely. Bas was never in danger from us.”

“Surely, saving his life counts for something?”

“His life would never have needed saving if it wasn’t for you,” she spat.

“Who are you, exactly?” Sebastian asked.

“I’ve told you already.”

“Yes, but who are you, that someone wants you dead?”

Behind them, the door opened, and a masked person appeared. They bowed, crossing a forearm tattooed with a glimmering, geometric pattern against their naked chest.

Bishop straightened. “It is done?”

“We anticipate your presence in Interrogation Room 3.”

Without another word, Bishop was past them and out the door, and Sebastian saw the glimmer of a tattoo on his back as he went. Reece attempted to follow, but found his way barred by the newcomer.

“You will await the Bishop’s return here.”

“You,” Reece said, “can fuck off.”

In two swift movements, a hand plucked a cylinder from the belt around a narrow waist. The cylinder extended in both directions into a humming, tapered pole that managed to look both innocuous and dangerous.

“You will wait.”

Sebastian sucked in a breath. “Reece.”

Reece clenched and unclenched his fists, but he only watched as the guard withdrew from the room, shutting the door in their faces.

The Pawn was seated at the table with arms outstretched along its surface. Metal restraints held their forearms and wrists immobile. They had been stripped naked and their mask removed. Their neck and torso were fastened to the chair, which was bolted to the floor.

Bishop took the clear plastic robe Second Rook held out to him and wrapped it around himself. He strolled to the other end of the rectangular table, which had deep grooves around its edges. Sitting, he placed his left ankle on his right knee, gripping it lightly with his fingers.

The two Rooks stood on either side of the door as he studied the Pawn. Studied the even rise and fall of their pale brown chest and the smooth, emotionless face with its dark, angry eyes.

He gave himself time to bring his focus back to the task before him, instead of the swirl of conflicting emotions he’d left in the cabin, along with the most beautiful man he’d ever seen.

“No lies,” Bishop said. “Or there will be consequences. Unlike some, I keep my word.”

The Pawn lifted their chin but said nothing.

“Name. Rank.”

“Lula. Black Knight.”

Bishop sighed and closed his eyes for a second. A mistake. His mind went immediately to a warm smile and the press of his mask against his skin as a hand stroked his cheek. Irritation at his wayward brain prickled his skin with heat. He snapped his eyes open.

“That,” he said. “Was a test. You failed.”

He glanced at the Rook to his right. First Rook stepped forward and pulled a metal knife from his utility belt. Without hesitation, he began to saw at the fingers on the Pawn’s left hand, severing them at the knuckle, one by one. The Kingston preferred old fashioned methods to humane ones. Lasers ended the pain too quickly. Bishop did not think torture was as effective as the Kingston believed, but he had learned to work within the Grandmaster’s rules.

It was that, or death.

What his Rooks had found out about Sebastian and his friends made him believe they were not likely to be assassins. But this Pawn might be the first salvo in a war he had no intention of becoming a casualty in.

When the screams had died to heaving groans and choking gasps, and Second Rook had stopped the bleeding enough to continue, Bishop leaned forward.

“You are no Knight. A Knight would not have screamed. A Knight would not have been caught. So.” He leaned back. “No more lies.”

The Pawn was dripping with sweat, grimacing as they tossed their head from side to side. Bishop nodded at Second Rook. She produced a syringe and gave the Pawn a shot of adrenaline to keep them conscious. They jerked against their bonds with a huge intake of breath, eyes wide, muscles rigid. The stumps of their fingers had been seared with a laser. The blood that had pooled beneath the hand ran down the sides of the table, gathering in the grooves and flowing into the closed metal pipes of the floor-bolted legs to the catch-pit beneath the floor.

The salt-stink of blood and sweat and piss rose above the sweetness of vine perfume.

“Name. Rank,” Bishop repeated, his voice soft, his body weary. He wanted this over with, but the Kingston’s Queen and the Grandmaster Kingston himself would expect thoroughness.

The Pawn stared at their hand, trembling as they tried to take one breath after another.

Bishop tilted his head, curious. “Did they not warn you of the price of this Game?” he asked. “The price of an attempt on a Grandmaster’s life?”

The Pawn’s eyes flashed.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “I know I was not the target. It would be wise of you to avoid testing the limits of what I know. You are grist for the mill of whatever Sept sent you. But you do not have to let them decide your fate. Answer me honestly, and you may yet live. Fingers can be reattached. Wounds healed perfectly. But I won’t ask again. Name. Rank.”

The Pawn clenched their uninjured fist. Then they blurted out, “Pawn. She/her.”

Pawns had no name. You earned a name by attaining the rank of Bishop or higher. A good truth to start with, even if it was not his own. He had been born with a name, after all.

It was also a reminder to keep his mind on what had to be done. He could not allow one man’s inexplicable act of compassion to sway him from a lifetime of ambition and his mission to claw his way back into the Grandmaster’s favor.

He needed to be trusted again, so he could break that trust and gain his revenge.

“You have made a wise choice,” he told the Pawn. “Silence is better than lies. But I warn you. No one is ever silent in here.”

He tightened the plastic around him, snapped his fingers, and stood as First Rook stepped forward again and handed him the knife from his belt.

“What are you doing?”

Olly answered for Reece as he ran his hands along the irregular bumps of the walls on either side of the doorway. “He’s getting us out of here.”

“Is that really the best thing?” Sebastian frowned. “I don’t think we’re in danger.” He sat on the bunk, elbows on his thighs, hands dangling between his knees, as Olly stopped pacing to stare at him with raised eyebrows.

“Tell me you realize that man is not to be trusted.”

“He hasn’t really done anything—”

“He put his hands on Olly,” Reece said, straightening to run hands along the top of the metal door. “And there’s the way he looks at you.”

“To be fair, Olly tried to punch him. And he’s masked. Who knows what he’s looking at?”

Reece shot a glare at him over his shoulder. “I know.”

“And protecting you? From us? Really?” Olly said, hands on her hips.

Sebastian licked dry lips and tried to ignore the sudden heat in the tips of his ears. Olly sighed, “Oh, Bas.”

“Oh, Bas, what?”

“You actually do see the best in everyone, don’t you?”

He sighed, tilting his head back to look up at her. “He saved my life. We should try to talk it out. I don’t want any trouble.”

“Only trouble will be if they try to keep us here,” Reece said in a grim voice. He paused, his body tense as he stared at Sebastian. “Olly and I are getting out of here. Are you with us this time, or not?”

Sebastian cursed. “Don’t start. I just didn’t want the guard to hurt you. You know I’m with you. But I think there’s a better way.”

“We can’t rely on a Valencian’s good graces, Bas,” Olly said.

There was a faint click beneath Reece’s searching hand, and a small section of wood pushed inward and lowered, revealing a panel.

“Control panel?” Olly asked.

“Better.”

Seconds after Reece activated the alarm he’d found, three guards came in, weapons at the ready. Sebastian didn’t even get the chance to stand up. Olly and Reece had come up together on some of the roughest corporate stations in the system, and they’d learned to scrap with the best of them. This time, the guards didn’t have the numbers to overpower them. Sebastian stepped over the unconscious bodies into wide, low hallways where red light streaked along veins in the walls and sirens blared overhead.

They moved through the corridors swiftly, hiding in corners and empty rooms from running crew on two occasions. “You even have any idea where we’re going?” Sebastian whispered.

Reece nodded, gaze focused on the way ahead. “We’re a few levels down from the docking bay. Once we get to the lifts, we’re good.”

They were almost to the lift junction when they heard harsh voices and multiple boots. Sebastian spun in place as Olly and Reece backed up toward him. The only doors nearby were to their right; massive floor to ceiling things, carved out of the same petrified material as the walls and etched all over with designs. It had a clearly marked control panel though, and he figured anything that big would lead to a part of the ship large enough to get lost in. He was bringing his hand down to hit the transparent panel when the doors opened.

A gust of perfumed air swirled around them, but he was initially blinded by the blaze of light that escaped into the corridor. Stumbling back, he averted his eyes from the glare.

There was a loud crash, and heat splashed the back of his palm. He hissed and bent over his arm, shaking it out. A golden spreading puddle of what smelled like the most delectable soup slid along the floor toward his shoes. He stepped out of the way and looked up as the doors closed.

The figure in front of him was dressed in a drab brown jumpsuit and apron and wore a plain gray mask that covered their entire face. A huge metal pot had capsized at their feet, spilling food everywhere.

Olly and Reece were facing the junction in front of them, where several guards had come into view, spears activated. At their helm stalked Bishop. Sebastian cursed under his breath. This was the very situation he’d wanted to avoid.

Reece and Olly came alongside him. He took a breath in the tense momentary silence, intending to reason with Bishop.

“Olympia?”

Olly’s head snapped around, and she took in the frozen figure to their right for the first time. “Do I know you?”

A trembling hand reached up and removed the mask. The face that appeared looked dazed but intensely joyful, and Olly’s breathing stuttered beside him.

“It’s me, Sticky. Your father.”

Bishop strode to his quarters with rage an iron taste in his mouth and molten heat in his veins. He went to his office without a backward glance—his men knew better than to follow him in—but after he dragged a private comm bracelet from his desk and turned, he found Sticky waiting with a bowed head and nervously twisting fingers.

“Please, Bishop,” he pleaded.

Bishop’s lip curled in derision. “Please what, Cook?” he asked, just to remind him of his place. To remind him that their customary ease with each other would hold no sway here.

Sebastian and his lovers had lulled him into thinking they could be easily manipulated. He had been careless. Distracted.

A pretty face and fine words, that was all it had taken. If the King or the Queen found out, they would prevail on the Grandmaster to promote a Knight immediately. Shame ate at him. Shame . . . and a burning emotion that had responded to the desperately apologetic look on Sebastian’s face.

You are halfway to being a fool again, he thought angrily. And this isn’t the time. He is not the one.

Once, long ago, he’d thought the Valencia might be the one. Might be a true friend. He’d risked everything to help him.

And he had paid the awful price when the Valencia’s plans failed.

Sticky went to his knees and raised his hands in supplication, his head still bowed.

“They don’t know. They don’t understand.”

Bishop touched the drawer shut, then took a breath and calmed himself. “Our harvests are down. The Greatwood sickens. Ships go off course and strand my Grandmaster galaxies from his route. Septs attempt to take advantage of the chaos and send assassins. My King and Queen are stretched and have no patience for mistakes. What would you have me do, Sticky?”

Sticky’s shoulders rose and fell with his breathing for long moments. Then he said in a low voice, “She’s the daughter I told you about.”

The daughter he’d spoken of so many times, the Kingston had ordered Bishop to find her long ago, to use as leverage. He had had not helmed the search as he should, telling himself he had other pressing priorities.

The same daughter had attempted to hit him, her anger and pain lashing out at him in ways he related to but could not afford to care about. She would clearly risk anything to protect the man that had no fear of him. The man that had no fear, period.

It was disturbing how difficult it was to stop his thoughts from going to Sebastian Carver and his effortless smiles and expressive face.

“I am aware,” he told Sticky. “That means nothing to me.”

“But everything to me.” Sticky raised his head and Bishop refused to flinch at his open, pleading expression.

“They’ve attacked my men twice now.”

“They don’t trust you,” Sticky replied. “It is natural.”

“They abused my goodwill,” he snapped, thinking of Sebastian. The touch of his hand on his cheek. Only one other person had ever touched his mask like that. He’d been betrayed then too.

“They were escaping a confinement they don’t understand.”

“Do you?” He folded his arms, comm bracelet dangling from his fingers as he leaned back against the desk. “Understand, that is?”

Sticky’s words, when they came, were halting. “They made a mistake. But they were not part of the attempt on you, were they?”

Bishop took a breath. Let it out. “No.”

“Then I would ask something of you.”

Bishop’s fingers caressed the bracelet in his hand. It was not safe to speak of King Bartica’s warning if he was not face-to-face with his Queen, but he had decided to inform him of the attack. It was proper etiquette to let him know of Bishop’s investigation into whether the Bartica had betrayed the Kingston, if another Sept had led the attempt, or if Bartica was working with another Sept to attack Sept Kingston.

But once the King and Queen knew all the details, the Grandmaster would know. And once the Kingston knew, there would be no saving them. No saving Olly, Reece . . . or Sebastian. Their innocence would mean nothing to the Kingston. They had seen too much.

Despite his anger, he did not want their suffering. He suspected he would not be as numb to it as he was to everything outside of his mission to regain true power.

“Say what you must,” he said.

Sticky’s eyes went to the bracelet. “Do not hurt them. Let me see her. Talk to her.”

He narrowed his eyes on Sticky, thinking.

“If that is truly what you want, I will have a request of you in return. Are you prepared for that?”

Sticky hesitated. “Yes.”

Ah. Then Sebastian, Olly, and Reece might prove useful after all. The Kingston would be pleased enough to overlook many things, if he played this right.

“There is only one thing I would be interested to bargain with, Sticky. One thing you can offer me.”

Sticky swallowed, but determination hardened his gaze. “I know.”

“Then may I tell the Grandmaster we have an agreement?”

“If you grant my request. There are . . . conditions.”

There would have to be, given the price Sticky was willing to pay. But then again, he knew what they were. Had already considered all facets of this plan and found them worth the risk.

Though after everything that had happened, he could not be sure why. All he knew, as he fingered the cold metal of the bracelet, was that he could feel that hand against his mask. See that trusting, unafraid smile.

He must have looked like that once.

“Tell me,” Bishop said.

“So, you’re not going to speak to me?” Olly asked.

Reece’s fingers tightened on Sebastian’s bandaged hand for a second, but he didn’t look up as Olly spoke. Sebastian met her gaze as she paced instead.

“Now you want to talk?”

She stopped, biting her lower lip as she considered him where he sat on the bunk. “There wasn’t a good time before.”

“Really?” he said sarcastically. “Not any of times you told me stories about him? You let me believe he still had a stall in the Basement. You could have told me the truth instead of leading me on. You could have said, ‘Hey, Bas, by the way, the reason I know all this stuff about Sticky and his awesome cooking is because he’s my father.’”

“There was a good chance he was dead,” she said. “And I didn’t want to get into everything that happened if I didn’t have to.”

“He seemed real damn alive a few minutes ago.” He took his hand back from Reece and flexed it, too angry to feel much pain. “Is that why you didn’t want to come to this part of the station? In case you ran into him?”

“I didn’t want to come here because of the memories. This is where my mother died.” She folded her arms. “He abandoned me after she passed.”

Sebastian’s throat tightened as he took in her carefully blank face. “Olly,” he said softly. “Why didn’t you say?”

“It was too painful to explain. Not everyone has loving families who support them no matter what, Bas. Not everyone is good with every part of themselves.” She frowned and caught her lower lip between her teeth for a moment. “Some of us just want to move on from the shitty bits.”

Sebastian stood and folded her into an embrace. “No part of you is shitty.”

Her laugh was muffled against his shoulder. “I hurt you. First by not telling you the truth, and then by walking away.” She leaned back to look up at him, and he saw her fear and worry. “You could have died.”

“I’m fine. And you’re telling me the truth now.” He cupped her cheek. “If there’s more, this is the time.”

She sighed. “Nothing that matters. And honestly, when we talk, I don’t want it to be while we’re being held prisoner.”

“Prisoners don’t get med kits.” Sebastian wriggled his hand.

“We hurt his guards. How many times is that now?” Olly groaned. “Trust me, we’re in the shit.”

“He dumped us here again, no increased security,” Reece pointed out. “That was hours ago. Something’s—”

The door opened to admit an unarmed guard, hands clasped behind their back. “Your presence has been requested,” the guard said, but they looked only at Olly.

“I’m not going anywhere alone with you,” Olly retorted, hands braced on her rounded hips. “We stay together.”

Sebastian bit back a pleased smile at her statement, but the guard stood motionless for almost a minute. Then they nodded firmly. “Come.”

They followed the guard back to the doors Sticky had emerged from. Bishop stood there with a small tool in one hand. He wore the green half-mask, and his melodious voice was mild when he said, “I sent for Olly.”

“She stays with us,” Reece said as Sebastian took Olly’s hand.

“You are my guests. You have my word she will not be harmed.”

“Fuck your word.”

Bishop tilted his head. “Where we are going, you may not, Horace Reece.”

“I go wherever she goes.”

“You don’t understand.” Bishop’s voice was slow and careful. “This is not a threat. It is a warning. I know your history, Horace Reece.”

“Then you know you can’t stop me.”

“I know your background. I know why your Kiskadee has no AI interface.”

“Get to the fucking point,” Reece said.

“If you try to follow her, you’ll die. Not because of me, but because your lineage wasn’t augmented for space travel the way Olympia’s and Sebastian’s were. You would reject the seedling needed to enter the vineyards on Valencia.” He paused. “It would not be a good death.”

“Valencia is nowhere near here.”

“Valencia is all around you. Don’t you see it? Smell it?”

Reece studied him then raised an eyebrow. “You’re serious.”

“Always.”

“You have a way to go between Valencia and this ship?”

“Instantaneously.” Bishop held up the syringe gun. “The vineyards of Valencia and the Arbors are linked to each other. All you need to enter is to become part of them.”

“She’s not becoming part of some vineyard. And she’s not going to Valencia.”

Bishop’s masked face turned to Olly. “You have questions. Your father has answers. He wants you to meet with him in the vineyards.”

Despite the tension in the silence that followed, Sebastian had to force himself to swallow his excitement. This was Olly’s choice, but he wanted to see those vineyards. He wanted her to say yes.

Get a grip. You’ve never heard of this technology. He could be lying to get Olly somewhere to do God knows what to her. But even as he thought it, he knew he didn’t really believe it. And in any case, there was no way Sebastian would let anything happen to her.

“What if I don’t want to talk to him?” she finally said.

Reece threw her a look. “Olly—”

“I would escort you all off this ship, and you would never have to see me or your father again, if that is your wish. I have no interest in forcing a family reunion.”

“What is your interest?” Sebastian asked. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because Sticky asked it of me,” Bishop replied. “And he has never asked for anything.”

Sebastian pondered that, then turned to Olly. “What do you want to do?”

Olly was breathing hard as she looked at Reece.

“Whatever you want, Olly,” Reece said, his voice gruff. “I told you back at the junction. You need to deal with your past, not run from it. But Sebastian knows now. We can go back to the Kiskadee and talk. Forget the rest of this ever happened.”

Olly blinked rapidly. “Thanks, Reece.”

“Anytime.”

She took a breath and met Sebastian’s gaze. “Will you come with me?”

“Of course,” Sebastian said without hesitation. “Don’t worry, Reece. I have this.”

Reece narrowed his gaze on Bishop. “I’ll wait right here.”

“You are free to do so,” Bishop replied.

“Anything happens to them—”

“I find threats tiresome, Horace Reece. Let’s just assume you bear me eternal ill will and dispense with the rest.” He turned to Sebastian. “The transition might cause a few moments of upset, and you were recently injured. I cannot guarantee it will be painless.”

“I’m fine.” Sebastian flexed his hand. “I can do this.”

“Hold out your arms.”

There was slight sting, then lingering heat, and he rubbed at the ache as Olly received her seedling. The guard stepped up and offered them gray masks with red pinhole speakers. Once they donned them, he tapped the small squares on the side of their necks and oxygen filled the masks.

The doors opened and through the filtered visors, Sebastian could see flowering, shimmering vines swaying gently from above, hanging low to almost knee-high grass. Bishop handed the tool to the guard and strode into the sparkling vista without a backward glance.

Warm tendrils brushed Sebastian’s face as they moved. The ground beneath their feet went from flat and predictable, to uneven with the slightest give. His limbs felt heavier for a moment and that made him stumble, his world tilting before arms caught him. The vines were thinner here, and he was fumbling at his mask, hands helping him rip it free before he vomited onto the ground at his feet.

His ribs were aching when he straightened. Olly was on one side of him, her right arm around his waist and both their masks dangling from her left hand. “Okay?” she asked, concern wrinkling her brow.

He nodded. “Sorry about that.”

“Understandable,” Bishop said close to his other ear, and he realized there were two arms around his waist. Heat spread through his body as he quickly stepped out from the shared embrace. A row of opaque panels hung from a doorway in front of him. He pushed through it, blinking at the sudden reduction in light.

A large circular room curved away from him. Gilded walls and doors glowed under huge light sources; they hung from arched ceilings etched with colorful frescoes. The floor beneath his feet was burnished, golden wood, and statuary decorated the many alcoves. Between those alcoves, massive, tinted windows looked out on the brilliance of a swaying vineyard.

In the center of the room was a beautifully set table for two, and Sticky. He’d changed out of his jumpsuit into the flowing, sheer pants and thigh-length tunics Bishop wore, only his were black, with silver threading. No mask hid his cropped hair and the crinkles around his eyes.

“Shit,” Sebastian said weakly. “It’s real. We’re . . . not on the ship anymore.”

Olly came alongside Sebastian, her gaze taking in everything before settling on Sticky. She set off toward him and Sebastian followed. Bishop strode behind them, a silent commanding presence.

“What is this?” she said to Sticky, hands on her hips.

“I thought we could talk over a meal—”

“It’s a little late for that, Sticky.”

The skin under his eye twitched. “You never used to call me that.”

“Yeah? You used to be around. Things change.”

“I didn’t bring you here to fight, Olympia—”

She slammed her hands down on the table, rattling dishware and tumbling a water glass. “My name is Olly. Olympia Richardson died when Gran did.”

Sticky closed his eyes and took several deep breaths before opening them again. He snapped his fingers and a door opened at the far end of the room. Two bare-chested masked persons in identical green and white pants entered. Sticky waved a hand at the table, and both disappeared. “I wanted to talk, but if what you need is for me to listen, I can do that.”

Olly leaned back as the attendants returned. They set up a larger table and more chairs with surprising speed and grace before clicking the door shut behind them.

“I thought you’d want this to be kept private,” Sticky said, glancing at Sebastian.

Olly studied him, fists clenched at her side. “He and Reece are family.”

Sebastian stepped forward and offered a hand. “Sebastian Carver, but Olly calls me Bas.”

The hand that gripped his was dry and rough. “James Richardson. Call me Sticky. Reece is the other one who was with you?”

“Yes, but he couldn’t make the trip.”

Understanding swept across Sticky’s face. “The seedlings. He’s unaugmented then?”

“Why did you do it?” Olly said, her voice hoarse.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sebastian saw Bishop withdraw to an alcove. He was studying the sinuous line of abstract stone with his hands behind his back, one wrist clasped in the fingers of the opposite hand.

“Olym . . . Olly.” There was a sheen to Sticky’s eyes that hadn’t been there before. “I thought I was doing what was best for you.”

Olly drew in a breath as if she’d been stabbed. “Best for me? It wasn’t much, seeing you only when Gran could sneak me to the food stall, but it was all I had. Why did you take that from me?”

“I was trying to save your mother.”

Olly took two steps back, shaking her head. Astonishment carved harsh grooves in her face. “What the hell are you talking about? After her . . . after the Blowout, you disappeared. Now I find you here, decades later, living it up with some fucking Valencian.” She pointed a shaking finger at him. “Did you know they were right there when that door failed? They watched that cargo bay depressurize. And they wasted precious time waiting for the Station Agents to ask for help. Because it wasn’t their business.”

Sebastian stepped behind her and rubbed her upper arms soothingly, letting her know he was with her without interrupting. She didn’t react, her accusing gaze focused on her father. Sticky looked as upset as she, but there was a tenderness there. And so much regret.

“Please,” he said. “Sit. Both of you. I’ll explain everything.”

None of them noticed when Bishop stepped through the concealed door in the alcove into the passageways that honeycombed Sept Kingston. They were too caught up in the venting of many tempi of anguish and regret.

He could not have stood witness to that a moment longer, even if he had not had pressing business to take care of. Business that had made Sticky’s request to return very convenient indeed.

He strode through the curving golden passageways, exiting into the Septhold proper and pausing only to confirm from one of the Pawns where his White Knight could be found.

He entered the wing that housed the Senior Quarters and went straight to the largest chamber, opening the door without knocking. The White Knight rose from his bed, spear already in hand. He relaxed as he recognized Bishop. Lowering his spear, he bowed, then straightened and opened his mouth.

Bishop drew two knives from hands hidden behind his back and stabbed him with one, making sure to nick the Knight’s left femoral artery. He followed the Knight down to the floor as he dropped, the spear clattering alongside him. He held the other knife to the Knight’s throat while he kept the one in the Knight’s leg steady. Blood welled, soaking through the Knight’s pantaloons in seconds.

“Who else?” Bishop asked. “Who else helped Sept Marigot? You knew the Grandmaster was to be in Greater Paradise. But you could not have known when I decided to leave. Someone with me on Greater Paradise told you that and you tipped off the Pawn.”

The Knight breathed harshly as he stared at Bishop with cold eyes. “I am already dead. Why should I help you?”

“I have not severed your artery. The doctors can still save you. The more valuable the information, the more likely the Kingston will spare you and demote you to the Lesser Games. You can survive this if you tell me no lies.”

“Will you promise me my life, Bishop?” the Knight asked in a bitter, strained voice. “You have always kept your word. Give it to me now, and I will give you the answers you seek.”

Bishop studied him for a moment, then sighed and slit his throat. Warm blood stung his skin as he stood, yanking both knives free.

“I said no lies,” he told the corpse.

He was halfway to his rooms when a Pawn saw him and halted, eyes wide. Bishop gestured to the trail behind him.

“Clean this up. The White Knight is in his room. Arrange for a traitor’s disposal. And send the Black Knight to my quarters in fifteen minutes. Where is the Queen?”

“In the Audience Hall, Bishop,” the Pawn replied with a fist over their chest.

“Send a messenger to request a meeting with him once the Audiences are over. And Pawn, you will tell the guards no member of this Septhold is allowed to leave for any reason unless I personally escort them.”

“Yes, Bishop,” the Pawn said, and kept his head lowered as Bishop walked away, leaving bright red drops of blood on the golden floor.

The attendants set little bowls shaped like flower petals in front Sebastian and Olly. Steam drifted upward, redolent of fresh herbs and a hint of lime. Bits of white flesh speckled with green seasonings, and rolled dumplings floated in a golden broth.

“You must be hungry by now,” Sticky said. “I made this fresh earlier today. But of course, you know that. I dropped an entire pot—”

“This is mom’s fish broth, isn’t it?” Olly said in a low voice, staring at the delicate transparent bowl.

“Her favorite,” Sticky’s voice was gentle, and Sebastian’s heart pinched at the melded love and loss in his expression. “The Bishop has a fondness for it as well. I make it often for him.”

“Why do you call him the Bishop? Isn’t Bishop his name?” Sebastian asked.

“Bishop is his title,” Sticky replied. “Bishop Kingston. Only the King, Queen, and Grandmaster rank above him in one of the most powerful Septs in Valencia. It’s a great honor. And a terrible burden.” His eyes roamed Olly’s downturned face as if committing her to memory. “But I should start with what you want to know.” He invited them to eat with a wave of his hand and settled back in the gilded chair, his fingers playing with the stem of his water glass.

Sebastian closed his eyes at the first taste of the thin, complex broth, its citrus notes elevated by the spiciness beneath, making all the flavors sharper.

“I spent my life bouncing from station to station, and ship to ship, searching for ways to get better at cooking. I was obsessed with reproducing the dishes my grandparents spoke of, with finding a way to recapture the food and traditions we’d lost when the seas swallowed the Caribbean.

“When I met your mother, I was an impatient, arrogant bastard. But she saw something in me. I’d like to think my passion seduced her. But my neglect—” he lifted his intense gaze to meet Olly’s, “—she would not tolerate that. For herself, or for you. I didn’t understand what I had then, you see. I was still chasing this . . . need to be the best. Eventually, I drove her away. But I loved you, and your grandmother knew it. Your mother was not one for second chances, so it was your Gran who brought you to see me.”

Olly placed her spoon back in her bowl. Sebastian continued to eat, listening.

“Gran told me after Mummy died. That you were my father. I thought . . . ” She paused for a moment and looked skyward. “Like an idiot, I thought when she died, you’d come for me. When you didn’t, I even went to the Basement, looking for you. I went there again today, just in case you’d come back. And when you weren’t there . . . ”

She turned to Sebastian. “I’m sorry, Bas. So sorry. I should have told you.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I understand.”

Sticky’s sigh carried the weight of the world. “When the Blowout happened, I was at a meeting with the Grandmaster Kingston. He had tried the food at my stall several times and wanted to make me an offer. It was a chance to cook every day over an open flame, in gravity, where I could explore every technique. But I would have to go where his people went. I would travel with his flagship when necessary. It meant I would be away from Greater Paradise for long periods, but I would be able to cook, truly cook. And the pay would be more than I ever imagined.”

“You left with him? You didn’t know what had happened to Mummy?” Olly’s voice held an edge of desolate hope. Sticky shook his head. Sebastian dropped his spoon as her face crumpled, rubbing her shoulder as her sadness made his own eyes sting.

“Please, don’t,” Sticky reached for her hand and held it tighter as she tried to withdraw. “That’s not it. Not at all. I was there when it happened. I knew—” he closed his eyes, “—I was ice cold from the moment the debris from the Blowout hit the ship.

“When we got to the bridge and I saw the bodies, I begged the Grandmaster not to wait for the Station Agents. He was a hard man, but we made a deal. The whole time the rescue crew worked, I prayed she and your Gran weren’t on duty. But she was the third person we brought in, one of the few still alive.”

He looked at her, his eyes red. “The Grandmaster’s physician tried but could not save her. I was with her, at the end. She wasn’t alone, Olly.”

“But I was!” Olly thumped her chest, her voice broken. “I needed my father, and you never came. Not even to the funeral.”

“It was the price of your mother’s treatment,” Sticky said, his voice brittle. “I had to leave with the Grandmaster as soon as her treatment was resolved, one way or another. He was not going to return to Greater P for another tempi and he wanted my services for a fete to honor the Grandmaster Valencia.”

“Oh my God,” Olly’s voice shook with rage. “It took us three cycles to confirm her death and locate her body. You just . . . left her with the hospital like that?”

“You have every right to hate me. I’ve failed you, time and again.” He paused and then spoke in a hardened voice, “But I would never do that. We spent three cycles trying to save her life. The Grandmaster is extremely strict about his security. He would not let you on board to see her, so I held off on telling either of you because I didn’t want to get your hopes up. When we failed, I reached out to your Gran. I told her everything, including where your mother would be.”

Olly collapsed against her chair, eyes wide. “She never said anything.”

“I begged her not to. I wanted to explain myself. It was foolish, I see that now. But I’d been such a failure as a father and a husband, and I’d lost Anita because of it. I . . . couldn’t face either of you right then. I decided I would send the money back to Gran. She’d make sure you had everything you needed, and in a year, I’d be back, rich, settled, and ready to take you with me to a better life.”

Tears streamed down Olly’s face and Sebastian offered her his napkin, his throat thick with the sight of her sorrow.

“Mom died when I was twelve. I didn’t leave Greater P for another five years. Where were you?”

Sticky sighed, his eyes seeing something over his daughter’s shoulder. “Things didn’t go as I planned. The Kingston was a . . . difficult man. He felt he’d done a great deal before we had an agreement. I needed to keep his trust.

“He did not allow me leave for several tempi. He would not give me permission to travel with another Sept. He was afraid I might make allegiances outside of Sept Kingston. I had to wait until one of his ships were headed to Greater P. I came back, only to learn your grandmother was dead and you had left.”

“She had a heart attack when I was fourteen,” Olly said. “Or she probably would have told me all this.”

Sticky drew in a pained breath. “When I found out you were alone all those tempi. That the money I was sending stopped being accessed . . . I searched for you as best I could, but no one knew where you’d gone.”

“I got flight certification and left the minute I could. Gran’s friends had taken me in, but it was a tight fit. They had three kids of their own, and it was too much of a struggle for us all. It was better than being a Station Ward though. I changed my name to Olly Richards to avoid that. Wards got sent planetside to orphanages, and I didn’t want to leave the only home I’d ever known.”

“I’m so sorry, Olly,” Sticky said, his voice shaking. “I thought I was making a better life for you. For us. I realize now, I discarded the life we already had. You were the best thing to happen to me. And I abandoned you when you needed me most.”

“Yes, you did,” she said, looking him straight in the eye. “And nothing will ever change that.”

“I know.”

Olly looked at Sebastian and there was a softness in her eyes that made his heart swell. “It wasn’t easy, those years, but I got lucky. Sometimes, you’re born into your family. Other times, you have to choose it.” She turned back to Sticky. “What did you hope for? Honestly? Was it forgiveness? For me to fall into your arms and call you daddy?”

“No,” Sticky breathed out, almost deflating. “I can’t ask that. I haven’t earned it.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, glancing down at the cold soup. “I had this fantasy. I would come back a success and cook you a meal that was unlike anything I could have done before. I would show you how much I loved you, prove you’d always been in my heart. I would make all your favorites. And we would . . . talk. About what we’d missed. Try to find a way back to each other. I wanted you here to see my life and understand what I’d accomplished. Valencia—it is dangerous, but also wonderous. There is so much here that is beautiful and unique.

“And—I hoped we could visit. I thought if you agreed to get the seedling, once you saw how I lived—what I do—there’d be a chance you’d be willing to come to Valencia again. Maybe even . . . stay. Not now. But someday.”

Olly leaned her head against Sebastian’s shoulder, and he put his arm around her, nuzzling her temple, trying to make her feel his love and support. Her body relaxed into him a little. “You made Mummy’s favorite today. What else did you make?”

“I had a suckling pig and root vegetables I’d pit roasted for the main course. And I’d made passion fruit ice cream for dessert.”

“Passion fruit? I’ve never heard of that.”

“Your grandmother loved it. They have it on New Kairi, in the greenhouses there. They brought it with them from Terra. That’s been the best part of traveling with the flagship. I get to meet others who left Terra with my ancestors but didn’t lose touch with our culture the way some of us were forced to. There are so many amazing places like that, Olly, you have no idea.”

“We just got back from Tavaco, actually,” Sebastian said. “It was beautiful out there. We thought we’d make a run to New Kairi after the next shipment.”

Sticky nodded, his eyes bright with some good memory.

“Have you . . . Do you still make doubles?” Olly asked.

Sticky smiled for the first time, and it changed his face, Sebastian noted. Suddenly, he saw a version of Olly’s cheeky beauty reflected at him. “I can make it, if you want.”

Olly glanced at Sebastian, and he was relieved to see her slight smile. “All this one could talk about on the way here was doubles and roti.”

“Let me get you some fresh soup.” Sticky rose to his feet. “And while you have that, I can get started on a batch. I always have channa prepared and dough waiting. It won’t take long. The roti though . . . that can’t be today.”

“We’ll start slow, then,” Olly said. “Just the doubles for now. If you want.”

Sticky’s chest heaved and his eyes sparkled. “I would like that.”

“Well then,” Olly said, “four, with everything, plenty pepper.”

After they finished the best meal Sebastian had ever had, Sticky offered to give them a tour of the grounds. Bishop joined them again, wearing fresh clothes and a new mask. He fell in beside them as they donned half masks and entered the greenhouse, which had been grown from the vineyards like the rest of the Sept. Then they moved through huge doors into the evening outside.

Trees and grassland spread out in iridescent thickets that sometimes obscured the golden sky of the setting sun. There was so much openness, Sebastian was dizzy at first. Needlelike leaves spun and danced in the perfumed wind, and vines trailed the canopy, reaching out as they passed, like lovers’ fingers. Some parts of the forest were darker than others, and there, multicolored fruit lay burst on the ground, their sour rot a faint note under the floral musk. But those areas were few, and Sticky steered them away from them, strolling on a clear path, hands behind his back as he spoke to Olly. Sebastian slowed, allowing them some privacy, happy that Olly was getting this chance to begin healing an old wound.

“Your Grandmaster isn’t here, is he?” Sebastian said.

Bishop glanced at him, eyes unreadable through the tinted slots. “Why do you think that?”

“Because based on what Sticky told us, he would not have done this. Any of this.” He pointed. “This is all you.”

Bishop returned his gaze to the path. “The Kingston was called to matters of trade several days ago.”

“I knew it!” Sebastian grinned. “Would he even let us in here? Why did you?”

“I have broad discretion when it comes to the Septhold and access. Sticky has been a loyal asset to this Sept, but lately he has become . . . restless. By helping him, I’ve forestalled his attempt to resign, and secured the goodwill of a loyal servant. Now he knows his daughter is alive, he will seek to provide for her.”

“You’re manipulating him?” Sebastian stared, shocked.

“I’m guiding his decisions along a mutually beneficial path.”

“He could still decide to leave with her,” Sebastian pointed out. “I could tell him what you’re doing.”

“It would not matter. Sticky understands how things work here. And his relationship with his daughter is fragile and new. He is unsure of his reception. She is unsure of his sincerity. Time is needed. Time during which my Grandmaster and I will enjoy many meals in safety. It is worth the adjustment of our protocols and the price of two seedlings to secure this.”

He paused, glancing at Sebastian. “However, it would not be . . . advisable for another Valencian to know you have connections in this Sept. Sticky is safe here, but outside of Valencia, away from our rules, the Great Game we play for power can be even more ruthless.”

“That reminds me, did you find out who your attacker was?”

“I interrogated her during your first meeting with your friends. It is no longer a matter of consequence.”

Sebastian frowned. “What does that mean?”

“It has been dealt with.”

“How? Did you kill her?”

Bishop stopped and turned to him. “What would you have done?”

“Not kill her. Don’t you have courts here? Shouldn’t she face a judge or something?”

“She did,” Bishop said simply. “And she was sentenced according to her crime.”

Sebastian raised an eyebrow. “You’re a judge?”

“Bishops execute strategy on behalf of Kings and Queens, who take their direction from the Grandmaster. It is my remit to uphold the rules—or to find a way to bend them for my Sept.”

“So, she’s not dead?”

Bishop stepped close, so close his breath puffed against Sebastian’s cheeks, raising the hairs at the back of his neck.

“Why do you care, Sebastian? She almost killed you and would have killed me.”

“Because you’re making unilateral decisions about taking someone’s life. That shouldn’t be up to one person.”

“In my world, it is. To be Septed, to be Grandmaster, these things are the epitome of what it means to be Valencian. We make the decisions of what we need, where to go, what to trade. We earned that right. It is always up to us. My attacker knew that, and she chose to play the Great Game. She lost. She understands the consequences.”

“Maybe,” Sebastian said, his blood running hot. “But that doesn’t make any of what you do right.”

“Who decides what’s right, Sebastian? Do you? Do the people of Greater Paradise have any more say on what’s right for that Station than the people of the Lesser Games here?”

“I didn’t say we were perfect, but at least we don’t kill people without a trial.”

“We are definitely not perfect,” Bishop agreed, and it struck Sebastian then that he’d not raised his voice or lost his calm demeanor even as Sebastian struggled to hold on to his temper. “But we are efficient. And we do not waste time on trials for those who enter the Great Game knowing full well what they risk in their quest to rise to the top. You may not like our rules, Sebastian Carver, but be assured we have them.”

Sebastian studied the sharp line of Bishop’s jaw, the grim set of his finely etched lips, and certainty settled in his mind. A slow smile spread over his face.

Bishop’s lips tightened. “Why are you smiling?”

“Because you’re full of it.”

A dangerous stillness formed between them. “What did you say?”

Sebastian stood between Bishop’s spread feet and lifted his chin. “I’m not saying you don’t believe some of what you said. But if you truly believed all of it, you wouldn’t be sneaking a cook’s family into Valencia under your Grandmaster’s nose because he’s your friend.”

“You mistake me,” Bishop said. “There is no such thing as a friend in the Great Game of Valencia.”

“Maybe. But there’s such a thing as a friend for the Bishop of Sept Kingston, or you wouldn’t have risked giving two complete strangers access to your world in exchange for a servant’s goodwill.”

“It is no risk. You have shown me you would lay down your life for a stranger, and you are Olly’s . . . family. You would not betray her, or her father. You will protect each other. To do otherwise would endanger all your lives.”

“Yes, but why do any of this at all, if there’s not a good man under all that Great Game hogwash? Why even bother to go through all this trouble to bring me to your ship for treatment when I’m nobody to you? Why not kill us all when we attacked your people instead of taking us here to give two people a chance to find each other again?”

“Why did you save me?” Bishop snapped.

“You keep asking that like it’s a bad thing. Why does it bother you so much?”

“Because I have lived a long time and no one has ever done that for me,” Bishop bit out, and for the first time, Sebastian saw his jaw clench. “No one ever would. Why did you?”

“Because in my world, if you can help someone, you do it. Space is a big, lonely place. When you find other humans, you cherish them. You have no idea when your reactor might go, or your hull might blow out from an impact, or your equipment might fail and leave you floating until your oxygen runs out. You don’t know when the last time is that you’ll get to talk to someone, laugh with them. Kiss them.”

He swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, and stepped back. “Out there, anything that can take life is the real enemy. Out there, you don’t ask questions when you see a problem. You jump in and help. Because we’re all valuable. We all matter.

“You, Bishop, you matter. And not because you’re the Bishop. Because you’re a human being. I didn’t know I was saving anyone at the time, but I knew someone was looking to kill, and I couldn’t let them do that to another human being.”

For the first time the stern lips parted a little, as though he’d surprised Bishop. Sebastian couldn’t look away from them as he added impulsively, “For what it’s worth, even though this has been the longest, most insane cycle of my life—if it’s even still the same cycle—I’m glad I stepped in front of you. You gave Olly back her father.”

Bishop’s lips curled. “If you believe me to be a hero, or a good man, you could not be more wrong. You don’t know me, Sebastian.”

“Maybe I don’t. But I’d like to try, sometime.”

Bishop was silent a moment. Then he asked, “Why?” and the hesitancy in his voice made a strange tenderness unfurl in Sebastian’s chest.

“I don’t know. I don’t even know what you look like. But you helped me. You helped Olly and Sticky. And you have an amazing voice. I like the way you say my name.”

He turned to catch up with Olly, heart pounding hard, but satisfied whatever game Bishop was used to playing, however much he was used to winning, he hadn’t won that round.

“You are sure?” the Kingston asked.

Bishop waited, silent before the virtual form of his Grandmaster and beside the very real one of his Queen.

“The Bishop has been most thorough,” the Queen replied. “In all, four Pawns and one Rook had been compromised. And the dead Knight, of course.”

The Kingston turned to Bishop. “You were able to identify all these traitors due to the information received from interrogating the captured Pawn?”

“Yes, Grandmaster Kingston,” he said.

A slow smile split the wide, full lips beneath his half-mask. “And you say torture is not effective.”

“I believe in give and take, Grandmaster. Pain and death cannot be the only reward.”

“Oh? And what was the give and take for the Pawn?”

“I took flesh in return for her life.”

The Grandmaster frowned. “You did not judge her as she deserved?”

How to explain that when the time came to dispose of the unlucky Pawn, he could not forget the heated words of a man the Grandmaster must never know existed? Could not forget how twice in his life, he had been helped. Shown mercy.

That once he learned how new to the Game the Pawn was, his ruthlessness felt like the type of cruelty Sebastian would never forgive him for.

Sebastian’s opinion of him should not matter. He knew that. And yet it did. This realization was burning through him, razing many things in his path. Stripping his detachment from him in ways he had not expected.

“The Pawn has no family, and now, no home. The moment she returns to Valencia, her implant will kill her. If she tries to remove it, her implant will kill her. She is maimed, alone, and disgraced.”

“She has her life,” the Queen remarked. He turned to look at Bishop. “The Great Game is seldom so merciful. And I have never known you to be.”

“It is good that I was. She confirmed what I suspected—that Sept Bartica was not involved in such an obvious move that would immediately bring them under much suspicion. She confessed to all she knew of Sept Marigot’s involvement during the first interrogation. But it was during her recuperation, when she truly believed I would not heal her to kill her, that she divulged the participation of the White Knight.” He glanced at the Queen. “We must never be afraid to grow, change, and adapt if it is for the good of Sept Kingston.”

“What of Sept Marigot?” the Grandmaster asked, eyes narrowed within the holes of his gold and jade mask.

“The King and I shall have a response for you in a few days,” the Queen said, his voice mild. “I recommend patience. Let them wonder if they have succeeded. Then, as news of the purge here spreads, let them dread our retaliation.”

“I approve,” the Kingston said with an indulgent smile. “You and my exceptionally competent daughter have my full trust in this matter.”

Bishop swallowed his bile at the compliment the Grandmaster had paid to the woman who had taken his position. Who had helped deliver Bishop to his enemies, along with Alexandar—the previous Valencia and his only true friend in the Great Game.

“The Valencia has decided the Consortium’s lost slaver ship will be handled by both our Septs. It is too important an opportunity for us to form a new alliance with a powerful civilization. It cannot be left to one Sept’s influence. And she will need assistance given that the ship’s last reported position yielded no sign of it. As to the other . . . delicate problem you’ve alluded to . . . ” The Kingston sounded grim for a moment at his usage of their code for a problem only a Grandmaster could address. “I shall return to Valencia in two weeks. After that, we shall have much work to do.”

The Queen murmured his assent.

“And you, Bishop.” The Kingston’s voice was sly. “What of Septhold matters? Do I still have a Cook?”

He bowed his head. “We have come to an agreement, Grandmaster. He will remain in service for three more tempi.”

The Kingston’s chuckle was dry and short. “So you finally managed it. How?”

“He believes us to be friends, Grandmaster. I convinced him I was looking out for his best interests.”

The Queen broke out in hearty laughter. “Was that all it took? These off-worlders. What an odd outlook they have.”

“Odd indeed,” the Kingston agreed. “I bought his loyal services for some money and a few days treatment for a dead woman. He prevailed upon my mercy, I granted it to him, and he is forever grateful.” He glanced at Bishop. “Much like our reformed Bishop. Isn’t that right?”

Bishop swallowed the ball of shame and rage in his throat and met his Grandmaster’s gaze. This anger, this was familiar. He could not abandon it now. He would hold to it until he regained power and took back all he had lost. And with someone making unsanctioned moves, he sensed his time approaching. “Yes, Kingston. Thank you, Grandmaster Kingston, for your mercy.”

The Kingston gave him a smile edged with scorn. “It is good you remember.”

He could almost feel the throb of long-ago pain under the smooth skin of his back as he replied with his usual honesty, “I shall never forget.”

“Best leftovers ever,” Reece sighed after lunch a few cycles later. They were getting ready to launch, everything having been repaired and tested, and their new payload and route confirmed by Dispatch.

“I’m definitely going to miss Sticky’s cooking,” Sebastian agreed as he stowed equipment. He would not let his mind go to what else he might miss, as there was no point in that. It appeared he’d won nothing but Bishop’s absence. He had not seen him since the Greatwood, and he refused to acknowledge the sharp edge of hurt that raised in him.

You made a pass, he wasn’t interested. It happens. Maybe he’d been too subtle, but taking the initiative had always been hard for him. In fact, he’d never been interested in anyone who wasn’t already a friend before. Bishop was new, terrifying territory and in the end, his lack of response made his position clear.

“Sticky and I exchanged pings,” Olly said casually, as if it wasn’t a bomb being dropped in the middle of the conversation. “We’re going to meet up next time we’re in port together. Wherever that might be.”

They both stared at her. Then Reece grunted. “Well, wonders never cease.”

“That’s good, Olly,” Sebastian said with a grin. “Real good.”

“It’s not a big deal,” she warned. “I haven’t forgiven him. I just really like buss-up-shot.”

They laughed, agreeing without words to leave her the fragile safety of her flippancy.

“Thank you,” she said to Sebastian in a halting voice. “For being there for me through that. And thank you,” she turned to Reece, “For always understanding what I need. I don’t know what I’d do without you guys.”

Reece made a humming noise and turned away. “You’ll never have to find out.”

Sebastian went outside to make the final checks with the shift supervisor and knock panels for document transfer. The supervisor was walking away, already conversing over his implant with another ship’s crew, when he noticed a tall figure coming straight toward him out of the corner of his eye. He turned at the bottom of the Kiskadee’s access-way, taking in elegant shoulders under a loose shirt, hands tucked into the front pockets of jeans, and finally, the arresting and unfamiliar face.

His body recognized Bishop’s scent before his mind caught up to the soft flop of hair over a smooth forehead, and the watchful darkness of his eyes. The lips were as stern as ever, his jaw flexing under golden brown skin.

“Wow,” Sebastian said, “you . . . clean up good.”

Bishop glanced at the ship. “You’re leaving.”

“You’re not wearing your mask.”

“Sometimes I need to go about my business without announcing who and what I am.”

Sebastian cleared his throat and asked, “What business are you about today?”

Bishop’s eyes gave away nothing as they traveled his smudged coveralls and heavy boots. “You were right,” he said. “Sticky is a sort of . . . friend. Because I know what it is to be taken into service with the expectation that you forget those you left behind. I know the cost of the loyalty the Kingston demands, and I understood how difficult it must be for those not of Valencia. I may not agree with all you said. But I have thought on it many times since we spoke.”

“Oh?” Sebastian folded his arms over his racing heart. “This should be good. What did you think about, exactly, while ghosting me for cycles?”

“I didn’t ghost you. Your seedlings always tell me where you are. But I had much to do. Sticky said you were leaving today, and I wanted to see you before you left.”

“You could have seen me when we were visiting your ship, or the last time we went to see Sticky in Valencia,” he pointed out.

Bishop inhaled deeply, then breathed out. “It is not a good time for me. There are things I am bound to do. Problems within our society, with the Greatwood itself, that I am tasked with helping my Grandmaster and our leader, the Valencia, solve.”

Surprise swept through him. “What kind of problems?”

Bishop glanced at the ship then back at him. “I wish you and your lovers well, Sebastian. Stay safe on your journeys. I do not think we will meet again.”

He moved closer, giving Sebastian time to react. Time to refuse. The problem was, Sebastian thought, as he watched him lift his hand, curl strong fingers around his neck, and pull him near, he didn’t want to refuse him. Instead, he met those firm, gentle lips with his own and his breath hitched, his pulse running riot as he tasted silky warmth and languorous exploration.

When Bishop drew back, he fitted one thumb into the slight depression of Sebastian’s dimple, while his other hand curved around to rub his thumb against Sebastian’s mouth. “Kian,” he said in a quiet voice.

“Kian?” Sebastian whispered, confused.

“My name,” Bishop said. He released him and stepped away. “And I like the way you say it too, Sebastian.”

Sebastian was still staring after him when it dawned on him none of the questions he’d asked had been answered.

“You know,” Reece said after they’d launched, “I thought you’d want to stay a little longer.”

“Stay?” Olly questioned from her copilot chair. “Why would he stay?”

Reece glanced at Sebastian where he sat in the jump seat, trying hard to look unaffected while his lips still tingled. “Should I tell her?”

“Tell me what?”

Reece turned back to the controls. “Bishop.”

Olly looked at him with wide eyes.

“Thanks a lot, Reece,” Sebastian said.

“Oh my God! He’s such an asshole though, Bas. Really?”

“Apparently, he doesn’t kiss like one,” Reece said.

“You were watching!” Sebastian accused.

“I was testing the cameras.”

“How could you not tell me?” Olly slapped at Reece’s arm. “You know how I love to watch him get hot and bothered.”

Reece grunted. “Checklist was more important.”

“You’re such a prick.”

“That’s why he likes me.” Reece leaned back after switching to autopilot. “That’s probably why he likes him too.”

“I do not like you because you’re a prick,” Sebastian said, glad no one could see how hot his face felt. “It’s precisely because you’re more than that, under,” he waved a hand, “all that. And so is he.”

“Sure about that, are you?” Olly said with raised eyebrows.

He sighed. “Hell, no. All I’m sure about is the man has too many secrets and is nothing but trouble. His kisses might be worth it though.”

Olly’s expression softened. “Yours certainly are. But no more getting caught up in assassination plots, okay? They don’t usually end with good food and kissing.”

He held his hand over his heart. “I swear, I don’t go looking for trouble. It just finds me.”

“Maybe you exchanged pings,” Reece said in a mild voice.

“A joke!” Olly squealed. “Are you okay, Horace Reece? Do you have a fever?”

Reece ignored her and turned to face Sebastian fully. “You could have stayed. Spent a little time with him. If you feel something for him, you can say so. You know that, right? You can change your mind about . . . us.”

Sebastian unclipped himself from the chair, walked over to Reece and bent to give him a lingering kiss. He held his face with both hands as he said, “Yes, I feel something, but I don’t think it’s the same for him. So, no, I haven’t changed my mind,” he said with a smile. “I’m where I want to be. With the people I love.”

“Same,” Olly said, reaching out to caress his forearm.

Reece grunted as Sebastian stroked his head, closing his eyes in contentment.

For a few precious minutes, there was nothing but the three of them breathing in harmony as Greater Paradise faded, a dying of the light in the star-studded dark.

Just perfect.

Well. Almost.

“So,” Sebastian said. “Did you leave any roti for me, or did you two assholes eat it all?”

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He studied at Newcastle and St. Andrews Universities and has a Ph.D. in astronomy. He stopped working as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency to become a full-time writer. Revelation Space, House of Suns, and Pushing Ice were shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Slow Bullets and “Troika” were finalists for the Hugo Award; Revelation Space, Absolution Gap, Diamond Dogs, and Century Rain were shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award, and Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award.

Things To Do in Deimos When You’re Dead

Alastair Reynolds

Per Ludecus woke with his face pressed to black marble.

He remembered almost nothing. He had no idea where he was or how he had got there.

He was laid out too artfully to have just stumbled and blacked out. It was more as if he had stretched out to sleep, letting go of a spray of cut flowers that he must have been holding. Their pastel-colored bulbs formed a frozen firework-burst around his head and upper body.

He ached a little, but it was only the sort of ache that came from lying in one position too long. The discomfort abated as he pushed himself up into a sitting position. There was a little dizziness, so he did not rush to get to his feet.

Through semi-blurred eyes he took in his surroundings.

Buildings enclosed a wide square floored in black. The buildings were white, their style classical, with arches, pillars, porticos, cupolas, gables, and so on.

Italianate? Possibly. But that was as much as Per knew about architecture.

Judging by their black-paned or mostly shuttered windows, the majority of the buildings were no taller than three or four stories in height. A few spires and clock towers loomed higher, but nothing that struck him as out of keeping with the others.

Above the buildings hung a sky of a deep heraldic blue. The Sun was a yellow coin, neither too faint nor too bright, and low enough to cast mauve-tinted shadows where its light was denied.

Various clocks, dotted on towers, spires, gables, and ornaments, all displayed contradictory times.

Grit prickled his left palm.

It was a dusting of fine pale sand, blown across the square, individual grains sparkling against the marble. Per raised himself to a crouch and gathered up the flowers, feeling some protective impulse toward them. Other than a few petals still dappling the floor, they had not been harmed.

A line from an advertising brochure floated into his consciousness:

Ludecus cultivars: robust against damage.

Per stood up, the last traces of numbness ebbing away. Someone had put antique clothes on him. He wore a loose, billowing arrangement of sheets and gowns, as if he had just stepped out of a Renaissance painting. His arms, legs, and feet were bare. He felt instantly vulnerable, reminded of one of those dreams where he found himself away from home, inadequately dressed.

Pressing the flowers close to his chest, Per padded across the silent square. Gaps lay between the buildings—black-floored alleys and streets feeding off in different directions. All he saw down them were more white buildings, their lower parts steeped in shadow.

He remembered . . . something.

Being on his way somewhere. A duty to family, goods to sell. He looked down at the flowers again.

Touting for business down-system, in the warm worlds much nearer the Sun then Neptune and Umbriel. Starting with Mercury, then working back out.

Twelve months away, he had told his wife. Fifteen at the most. Eighteen at the very worst.

Nestor had accepted. She had known there was no other choice, if the business was to survive.

But this was not Mercury. Or at least no version of Mercury that conformed to his preconceptions. They had domes on Mercury; cities where a person could walk around without suffocating, boiling alive, or freezing. But on Mercury the dayside Sun should have been much larger than that yellow disc above him, larger and fiercer by far.

So not Mercury.

Per circled the square again, uneasily. The city had to be somewhere in the system. If he had arrived here, then sooner or later he would be noticed. If he had been meant to arrive somewhere else, then sooner or later his absence there would be noted as well. People would work out where he had ended up. Nestor would expect to hear from him before long.

That was how it worked. No one just went missing.

The statues had been in the square all along, but his attention had skipped over them on first examination. There were broken ranks of them, tucked close to the bases of the buildings, sometimes beneath overhangs. At first glance, lost in partial shadow, they might be mistaken for columns or other embellishments.

Per walked from statue to statue, studying them intently, as if they might hold some clue to his predicament. But none of the statues struck any chord of recognition. They were nameless, uninscribed. There was a grandeur in their stances, but their faces were anonymous, neither particularly heroic nor exaggeratedly beautiful: just ordinary women and men, albeit draped in loose, unostentatious garments not unlike the clothes in which he found himself. Heel-high banks of white sand softened the lower edges of their plinths.

Something caught his eye: a fast flicker of color in the square. Per snapped around, but whatever had snagged his notice was gone. All that remained was the subliminal impression of movement, of something flashing low across the marble from one corner of the square to the other.

Unease transmuted to annoyance and then quickly to anger. This was not just wrong, it was negligent.

“Hey!” Per said, cupping hands to mouth. “I’m here, you know! Somebody do something!”

His words echoed out uselessly beyond the square.

No answer came.

With a certain reluctance—as if cajoled into a game that he had no desire to play—Per ventured down the nearest of the peripheral streets. The black marble continued, cold and gritty under his soles. He wandered past rows of white-fronted buildings displaying the same classical forms as the structures around the square. Gloomy, shadow-haunted alleys led off to either side, sometimes sloping up and down. Now and then a covered bridge crossed overhead, and occasionally he looked down at a darkening alley beneath him.

The statues continued, dotted along the street, flanking intersections. The amount of sand along their bases was increasing, and with that came a realization that the marble was becoming grittier, the influx of sand more noticeable than in the square. It was piling up around the columns of buildings, forming knee-high drifts in abandoned doorways.

Some way out from the square Per came across a curious and forbidding thing. It was a bridge, accessed by a side-alley. Humpbacked, floored with marble, it vaulted out over a street one level beneath his present elevation. But the bridge had no other end. Halfway across it ended in a display of jagged, broken masonry, as if it had been made complete and then broken in two. Yet there was no trace of the other half: no foundations, abutments, or even a rubble pile.

Per walked the rising curve of the bridge until he was near the edge. He noticed that the broken masonry was a deliberate artistic effect, rather than the result of neglect or vandalism.

He stood near the bridge’s termination, but something compelled him against venturing any further. The drop to the street below was no more than twice his height: enough to sprain an ankle or break a bone, but not exactly the sort of drop to induce a dread of vertigo.

And yet feeling there was: a knot of foreboding in his stomach that seemed to harden and enlarge the nearer he got to the edge.

It was something more than vertigo.

The bridge unsettled Per, but once he reversed his steps to its completed end, all ominous thoughts dissipated. Looking back, it was no more than an odd, folly-like piece of civic art.

Per was certain, nonetheless, that the feelings would return just as swiftly if he went back to its edge.

Putting the bridge behind him, he wandered further, sometimes turning corners, going up and down sloping alleys, crossing complete and perfectly ordinary bridges and ducking under others, no trace of that specific knot of foreboding returning, but always keeping a mental tally of his movements. The tallest clocktower was just off the square, and he made sure not to lose sight of it for too long.

In truth, there was little chance of getting lost. The city turned out to be surprisingly finite. If the square’s width was a baseline of distance, Per could not have walked—as the crow flew—more than ten such units before he reached the city’s termination.

The marble vanished into sand. Banks of sand hugged against the walls of the buildings on the very edge, half-smothering them. Beyond that limit, the sand had built up into dunes with a humped, angular look to them, betraying the carcasses of buildings now entirely swallowed. One or two taller spires and clocktowers jutted out in the distance, but they were tilted over, leaning into some inevitable future collapse.

Per called out again, but with less conviction this time. Where the city had echoed his voice back to him, the pale sand absorbed it with deadening finality.

“Help me,” he called, with diminishing will. “I’m not meant to be here. I’ve got a wife and children!”

He turned back to the square, still treasuring his flowers.

Ludecus cultivars: robust against damage. Five centuries of genetic shaping have given our flowers unrivaled tolerance against vacuum and radiation.

If Ludecus cultivars won’t thrive, nothing will.

Per had wandered vistas like this in dreams. Unlike in a dream, though, the city remained stubbornly rational within its own terms of reference. The steps he had taken, the routes he had chosen, were all reversible. In so far as any part of it was becoming familiar, he recognized statues and architectural features. The clocktower brought him back to the square—the Main Square, he now thought of it—since he had crossed smaller ones on the way to the margin, but nothing comparable with the first.

Per found the approximate spot where he had first come round, still marked by a few loose petals.

He sat down dejectedly, flowers nearly spilling back onto the marble. He had no clear sense of time. None of the shadows around him seemed to have moved an inch. The Sun was still where he remembered, as if jammed in its course.

A thought crystallized: they had put him to sleep and he had woken here. But what if this whole experience was a fault in the process, a sort of pseudo-conscious episode, when he was still meant to be properly under? What if he was still under, in some sense? Perhaps all Per needed to do was go back to sleep again, or at least go through the motions.

He lay down, still holding the flowers, but assuming the position in which he had come round. The marble’s cold reached him through the billowing garments. It was an awareness of cold, rather than the feeling itself: a secondhand report than a direct impression.

He closed his eyes, trying to submerge back into whatever condition he had been in before rousing. Around him Per grew conscious of the city’s stillness, the unblemished sky, the unmoving Sun, the labyrinth of quiet, gloom-dappled streets radiating out from the square.

No movement or change except the stirring of sand, propelled by breezes too faint to register against skin.

Something flashed, pulsing through his eyelids.

He opened his eyes in time to catch a thread of bright color speeding through Main Square. He had been in error before: it was not moving above the marble, but just beneath it, as if what he had taken to be marble was only very dark glass, capable of transmitting light if it was sufficiently bright.

Sensing sleep’s futility—intrigued as much as troubled—Per stood up again.

He watched and waited.

A flash of color came again, but this time taking a different course through Main Square. It was a rapidly moving thread, with a head and a tail, like some swift-slithering luminous snake. Its course was angular: straight lines and hard corners.

Per waited some more.

Once every few minutes, one of those streaks of color crossed Main Square. They came and went so quickly that it was easy to understand why he had missed most of them before. They were easier to see where the buildings’ shadows jagged across the marble; harder to see where the Sun’s light fell unimpeded. Now that Per was fixated on them, though, he realized that the threads followed predictable paths. It was as if there was a fixed network of angular channels beneath the marble, intersecting and branching.

He moved to one of these apparent tracks, wondering if the marble was different in coldness or texture directly above it. He stroked his free hand across the surface, brushing aside sand grains, until his fingers touched a narrow band that was warmer and more yielding than the areas surrounding it.

He pushed a little, and his fingertips dipped into the black.

Per withdrew them just as quickly, then—satisfied that nothing had happened to them—he pushed in deeper, submerging his entire hand to the wrist. The warmth gloved them, a gel-like pressure pushing in from all sides. A dim, watery impression of his hand showed through the black.

It had been no part of his experiment to have his hand in the floor when the next thread arrived, but Per had not really thought that part through. By the time his eye detected the arrival of a thread, it was much too late to instruct his muscles to withdraw. By chance, the thread picked exactly the course across Main Square to intersect his hand. Per felt a sudden electric surge: not pain, exactly, but an intensity of impression that was almost orgiastic. He was already pulling out the hand, but it was still far too slow. The thread fire-hosed through his palm, shattering into smaller, disconnected threads as it did so. Even as he wrenched his hand out of the floor and staggered back, Per observed these smaller threads worm away on divergent paths.

A voice shouted: “The damned fool!”

Another, the tone fractionally more reasonable: “Perhaps we should help him first, then do the judgment-casting?”

The first, a woman: “He won’t know the damage he’s done!”

“No,” said the second. “But given that no one was here to welcome him and explain things, he can hardly be blamed. Remember how it was for us?”

“I don’t want to remember,” the first said, with a melancholic edge to her answer.

“Thank goodness he didn’t try to cross the Bridge of Oblivion.”

“Maybe that would have been the kinder thing.”

“No,” the second said firmly. “I don’t believe that, and neither do you.” He added, encouragingly: “Come on, old thing. Let’s see what providence has gifted us, after so long a wait!”

Per’s left hand tingled, even though it was now fully out of the grasp of the floor. A reflex had him dropping the flowers from the right hand and rubbing life back into the left. He had sprawled onto his back, but at just the right angle to be able to see the two figures crossing over to him through Main Square. They were like the figures on the statues brought to life: a woman and a man, perfectly ordinary in their appearance, wearing loose, billowing gowns, their limbs mostly bare. Like him, in fact.

They reached Per, and without any initial word helped him back into a sitting position. He studied them more closely. They both appeared to be middle-aged, with the woman perhaps a few years older than the man, although of course it was nearly impossible to tell. She had a broad, symmetrical face with expressive lips and narrowed, faintly distrusting eyes. Her shoulder length hair was thickly curled, black threaded with silver. The man had a narrower face, with an aquiline nose and a doubtful, worried set to his lips. His hair was white, cropped close to his scalp: blazing and pale as the sands beyond the city.

“I shouldn’t be here.”

“Nor should anyone,” the man answered, his eyes lingering on Per’s for one foreboding instant.

“How long have you been here?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know. Two or three hours. Maybe more, maybe less. My wife will want to hear from me.” He glanced down at the marble again. “What are those threads? Where is this place?”

The man asked: “What do you remember, before coming here?”

He hesitated before answering. It was as if the memories were sticky, not arriving as fluidly as they ought.

“I was on my way in from . . . Umbriel, on commercial business. My name is Per Ludecus. I’m a flower seller. A plant geneticist. My wife is . . . Nest. Nestor. My children . . . ”

The woman cut across his rambling. “You work alone, or in a small, privately run concern. Business is challenging. Your margins are tight.”

“Yes,” he answered eagerly. Then, frowning: “How would you know?”

“Because you traveled the cheap way,” the man replied. Then, nodding at his companion: “Just like we did. Just like everyone else who ended up here.”

At last Per found some cause for hope. “Others ended up here?”

“Indeed,” the woman said. “But they’ve gone now. There’s just the two of us, and it’s been that way for a long time. We weren’t really expecting anyone else.”

“If others have come and gone, as you say, then there’s a way out. A way to resume my journey.”

The man made a low sniffing sound. He looked to the woman, some silent, difficult exchange passing between them.

“He may as well know,” he said quietly. “This isn’t a pill that gets any less bitter by delaying it.”

“I’m worried that he’s not what he seems,” the woman confided. “It’s been such a while. What if he’s something sent in from outside, to root us out?”

Something, she said. Not someone, but something.

“If he was an agent, old thing, I doubt we’d have caught him messing with the flow the way he was. He’d be trying to blend in as one of us, not cause aggravation.”

Per regarded his hand as if it had been snakebit. The tingling had abated, but he still had the memory of it. “What did I do wrong?”

“Did you look at the small print, when you choose your mode of travel?” the man asked. “No, silly question: I mean, who does that?”

“What small print?”

Some part of the woman’s lingering distrust seemed to melt away. “I’m Hypatia. This is Cicero. You’ll take a name for yourself, soon enough.”

“I just told you my name.”

Pity creased her features. “That’s your old name. We’ve all had old names. But the sooner you discard them, the better it is. Your old life is over. So are all the ties to that old life, including your former identity.”

“I’ll decide that for myself.”

“He looks like a Hector to me,” Cicero said. “Shall we call him Hector, until it sticks?”

“You’ll call me Per. And, again, what small print?”

“What Cicero’s referring to are the conditions of transit you agreed to when you set off from . . . Umbriel, was it?”

“Conditions of transit?” he echoed.

“There are really only three ways to move around the Solar System,” Cicero said. “Those with money and time may travel awake, in a luxury passenger berth, on one of the high-burn liners. It’s boring, but it’s expensive and boring, so for some it’s a way to advertise their wealth. And you get to see a little scenery on the way. The middle way, the most common choice, is straightforward hibernation. You travel on the same high-burn liner, but they can squeeze more sleepers into the holds, so it’s reasonably affordable. But still not what you’d call cheap. So you go the third way. You’re still frozen, but all corners are cut. The procedures for going in and out of hibernation are streamlined. Significantly higher risk of medical complications—say one in ten thousand chances of death, against one in a hundred thousand, otherwise. And you get shipped whichever way works, on any routing. You’re packed into a self-contained module about the size of a coffin, and that module can be tucked into any vacant slot in any cargo hold, with any consignment, in any class of ship, all the way down to the lowliest robot freighter, or even just shot ballistically from point to point. Statistically it’s the fastest way to get around the system, since you don’t have to sit around waiting for some plump luxury liner to swing round. Fast, usually, but with downsides.”

“I accepted the risk,” Per replied. “One in ten thousand is still low.” He frowned against the stickiness of recollection. “We were in trouble! The slump. The increased rent. Nestor . . . my odds on bankruptcy were about one in two unless I found new customers! I have a family to think about.”

“Had,” Cicero corrected gently.

Per stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry, Hector: there’s no reason that those loved ones aren’t still alive back on Umbriel. But they’re not your loved ones any more. You’re gone. You’re dead to them: quite literally.”

“Your family will already have been informed of your demise,” Hypatia said.

“This is the point where you have to start letting go of them,” Cicero continued. “It’s hard. Trust us, we know. We’ve both been through it. We had lives and loved ones before we ended up here in Florentine, cut off from everything we used to know. We tried to cling on—it’s only natural—but in the end it just causes more pain. You’re dead. There’s no way back for you now.”

“I’m not dead,” Per asserted.

“In the small print,” Hypatia said, “there was a specific clause about conditions arising from a medical or technological event leading to your brain death during any point in the transit. They said that Swift Intersolar had the right to monetize any neural patterns still recoverable from your head. That meant that the company was allowed to extract and commoditize any memories, transferrable skills, or useful personality traits that they felt had market value.”

Per shrugged. “I agreed to that. It’s just small print. It’s how they offset the costs of transit, which are still considerable. And you just said it—it only applies in the case of brain death.” He touched a hand to his chest. “Hello! I’m here and I’m conscious, otherwise you wouldn’t be talking to me. I remember my name, my family, my profession, everything! So there’s been no brain death!”

“Now and then,” Cicero said patiently, “they get it wrong. An event happens—some incident along the way. Probably a genuine accident. They assess your brain and the system marks you down as brain-dead. Maybe there’s damage, who knows. But what matters is that the terms of the small print are activated. You get scanned at a much deeper level, squeezed like a sponge, for those memories and skill-sets they can sell on. But here’s the rub. You’re not actually brain-dead. So more of you comes through the scan than is meant to. Your consciousness comes along for the ride, but no one realizes it. You end up inside Swift Intersolar’s computers: a data-ghost that isn’t meant to be there. Even the computers don’t know you’re inside them. You’re just drifting around, a loose end running on surplus processor cycles, lost to the world, smoke on the wind. And not long after this has happened, your physical body’s already been marked for chemical recovery. Not that it matters: there’s no way back into that bottle anyway.”

“No,” Per said, in flat denial. “I’m not dead. I’d know if I was dead.”

“I can’t remember if we’re still placing bets on them saying that,” Hypatia lamented. “But I think if we were, I’d still be ahead.”

“Thing is, Hector, everyone feels the same way. They can’t be dead. But eventually it sinks in. Gradually you’ll come around to it, too. You’ll notice things, like the absence of hunger or thirst. Or the fact that you can feel things, like warmth and cold, but everything’s at one remove. That’s because none of this is real.” Cicero swept his arm around the square. “Danae made this. She was the first of us. If not the first, then certainly the first to have enough force of will to impose some kind of structure on the limbo in which she found herself.”

“Danae dreamed up this city,” Hypatia said, with a reverence in her voice. “Out of nothing. All was formless and void, and then Danae forged this. Think of it as a consensual illusion, shared only by those of us who arrive here. She named it Florentine: a city made of willpower.”

“Are you really the last ones left?”

“Yes,” they replied in mournful unison.

“So where did Danae go, not to mention all the others?”

Hypatia and Cicero bid him to stand. They walked to one of the statues Per had surveyed upon his arrival. It was the image of a proud-looking but otherwise unremarkable woman, with scrolls in one hand and the other arm raised in a loose, commanding gesture out to the square, as if to say: look on my works, ye mighty.

“Danae left us eventually,” Hypatia said. “She died the Second Death: ceasing to exist even as a pattern within the system. We fade away, in time. We aren’t meant to be here. There are no error-correction mechanisms working to safeguard our patterns against gradual attrition. Entropy chips away at us. We can slow it, but not stop it. Nothing is permanent.”

“Except Danae’s city?”

“Not even that,” Cicero said. “How far did you wander? If you went more than a few blocks in any direction you’d have eventually reached Florentine’s civic limits.”

“I saw sand dunes, and what looked like buildings swallowed up whole. I also came across a strange bridge that I didn’t like.”

They exchanged guarded looks. “You did find the Bridge of Oblivion, then,” Hypatia said. “Well, don’t worry—there’s only one of them, and by the fact of you still being here, it seems you had the good sense not to cross it.”

“I couldn’t cross it—half of it was gone.”

“But if you had stepped over the threshold . . . ” Cicero said, leaving the rest of his thought uncompleted. “Never mind that for now. At least you’ll know what to avoid.”

Per remembered the knot of foreboding. “Why put something so unpleasant in a city?”

“Don’t judge it by that one feature,” Hypatia said. “There is beauty in Florentine, as well. Of course much less than there used to be. You could wander in it for days, and never retrace your steps. There were lovely gardens. Gardens and fountains. It was wonderful, once. And it wasn’t empty, like it is today. There were many more of us. There was life, of a kind, even in death. Life and laughter.”

“Danae died, then,” Per said. “And so will you?”

“Each of us,” Cicero said. “Including you. There’s no way to prevent it. In the tiniest of degrees, you’ll have already suffered some small attrition. Some tiny, inconsequential memory, that you could have recalled when you first arrived, but which is now lost. But it goes beyond memory. The sand scours us away completely. It blasts us to nothing. There’s no reversing it, no fighting it. Your fate is to live and die in Florentine, and you can’t change it.”

“Nothing matters, then,” Per said, accepting these propositions as true for the time being, for the sake of argument, even as his core rebelled against them. “Then this is pointless! You’d have been better off evaporating away the moment you were scanned. What’s the sense in an afterlife like this?” But some prickling intuition dragged his thoughts back to the moment when they had found him, staggering backward as he wrenched his hand from the bright flow beneath the marble. “Something does matter, doesn’t it, or you wouldn’t have sounded so concerned.”

“He’s not ready,” Hypatia said.

“Let’s face it, old thing,” Cicero replied. “When was any of us ever ready?”

They walked to the limits of Florentine, but in a different direction than Per had taken initially. He sensed that they wanted him as far away from Main Square as possible, until they were sure that he was not going to react in some impulsive, damaging manner. There had been threads beneath the marble some way beyond the square, in the side streets and alleys, but they had thinned out as they neared the margins, and now the black surface beneath his feet was untroubled by flashes of speeding light.

They stood on a stone-railinged balcony, overlooking silvery dunes. The dunes pushed a permanent warm breeze their way, driving fingers and flurries of sand into the city, augmenting the mounds already gathering at the bases of statues, pillars, and walls.

“Danae did more than forge Florentine,” Hypatia said. “The threads you’ve seen are her greater gift, trumping the city itself. Before I explain the nature of the threads, though, it will help if you understand a little more about the nature of Florentine and where it resides.”

“Something has to exist to reside,” Per pointed out.

“True, and Florentine does exist—albeit as a furtive, slowly degrading data-structure persisting undetected inside the Swift Intersolar computer cores. Those cores have a very real physical manifestation, though. They’re inside Deimos, one of the moons of Mars. That moon is where Swift Intersolar conducts its corpse-scanning, data-extraction, commodification, and corpse-reprocessing. When something goes wrong during a transit, the damaged bodies are always routed to Deimos.”

“I can’t say it was on my itinerary.”

Next to him Cicero smiled. “It’s on nobody’s itinerary. Swift Intersolar owns the moon and keeps a tight lock on it. What goes on here is commercially sensitive. But it’s more than just corpse harvesting. That’s not even the main profit line now.”

“What is?”

“Secure data services,” Hypatia said. “Swift Intersolar has a developing sideline in information brokering, across the whole system. Financial transactions, ultra-secure private communications, extralegal content—it all gets handled by Swift, and it all comes through Deimos.”

“That doesn’t sound very efficient.”

She went on: “Efficiency isn’t the point. Swift’s clients are paying for privacy, not speed. It doesn’t matter where Mars is, relative to any of the other worlds, just that the communications are guaranteed to be secure. Discretion is the watchword. This is a service so expensive, and so exclusive, almost no one outside of Swift’s client base even knows it exists.”

“And the threads?”

“Danae’s masterstroke,” Hypatia said warmly, her eyes moistening as she stared out to the dunes. “A reason for all this. Those data services come to a nexus in Deimos, a tangle of junctions and exchanges. Florentine is built around that tangle! Beneath her streets, the data-flows are made manifest. When you dipped your hand beneath the marble, you were disturbing one of those communications bursts! You shattered the packets, sent some of them one way, some more another. You affected a change in the physical world!”

“Fortunately,” Cicero said soothingly, “your intervention was too brief to draw any serious attention to itself. Swift’s systems would have detected a problem with that data transmission, put it down to noise, then quickly remedied itself. You did no lasting harm.” After a moment he added: “No lasting good either.”

“Good?” Per queried.

“We’ll talk about that.”

They walked back to Main Square. Nothing much had changed since they were last there: no alteration in the position of the Sun or the encroachment of the shadows.

“It’s always a long, sleepy afternoon here, isn’t it?”

“There used to be days and nights,” Hypatia answered. “And the clocks used to tell the same time. But Florentine is deteriorating. Danae knew that the decay was inevitable: the best she could do was prioritize the things that matter, like the flows beneath the marble. This square is the crux, and it’ll be the last thing to go. When the dunes finally claim these buildings surrounding us, there will still be a little patch of marble, with these flows under it. That will succumb sooner or later, but at least there will still be a chance to intervene right until the end.”

“Assuming someone is left around to do the intervening,” Cicero added morosely.

“While there’s still commerce, and corner-cutting, and small print no one bothers reading, others will come,” Hypatia said.

“What were you, before you came here?” he asked.

“Who remembers, or needs to remember?” Cicero asked rhetorically. Then, after a thoughtful pause: “Sometimes I catch myself humming notes. I stop and think to myself: that interval’s a perfect fifth, or a suspended seventh, or suchlike. That’s the Phrygian mode, or the Aeolian. It suggests to me that I must have had something to do with music, but I can’t really be sure. Perhaps I just liked music. Not everything that flits through our minds is a clue.”

“I may have been a landscaper,” Hypatia said. “When we go to the edge of the city, and look out to the dunes, I feel an urge to shape, to move matter around in large quantities. I want to get dirt under my nails. I want to put a river here, a lake there, a mountain over there. It’s an itch that persists after all else is gone.”

“Perhaps you would have had a use for my flowers.”

“They’re an exogram,” she said. “A mental projection: a solidification of some important part of your identity. Many of us carry exograms into Florentine, but they fade in time.”

“Fade?”

Cicero clarified: “A nice way of saying cease to exist.”

“Is that what happens to us, as well?” Per asked. “Or do our patterns end up somewhere else?”

“You’re still clinging to hope,” Hypatia said, shaking her head slowly.

Cicero smiled in Per’s defense. “He’ll come round. We all came around in the end.” Then he knelt to the ground, lifting his eyes out across the square. By the time Per saw the thread worming its way across the open ground, zigzagging sharply, Cicero had already plunged his hand into the yielding surface. The flow rocketed beneath them, Cicero’s face tensing in concentration. “The trick . . . ” he said, through gritted teeth, “is to cup the flow, but not interrupt it. Squeeze and constrict, but not block. When you’ve done this a few hundred times, you’ll start to develop an awareness. At first all you sense is a juddering rush of impressions, too rapid and complex to understand. Over time, you begin to read the flow. Information leaks through: information, meaning, intent. You learn what the flow signifies, and where it’s going.”

“And how to alter it,” Hypatia said. Mirroring Cicero, she knelt down a few paces from him and dipped her own hand into the black, locating a parallel course.

Soon a flow slithered beneath her: a luminous banded snake of many colors.

“Our interventions must be subtle,” Cicero said, relaxing in the hiatus between flows, but still keeping his hand beneath the marble. “We make very deliberate, small alterations to the information streams passing through Deimos, enough to effect a beneficial change in the real world. But it can’t be anything too large, anything that might draw attention to ourselves.”

Per frowned. “Isn’t drawing attention to ourselves exactly what we should be doing?”

Cicero lifted an eyebrow. “Because you think there might be a way out of this?”

“I don’t know. Even if there isn’t, even if we’re stuck in here forever, wouldn’t you still want the world to know? That way they can stop Florentine being eroded away, and keep our patterns the way they are now. At least we wouldn’t have to die the Second Death.” Per echoed the way Hypatia had spoken about Danae’s end, putting a hard emphasis on those two words. “That’s worth something, isn’t it?”

“I like you, Hector,” Cicero said. “You have a refreshing absence of cynicism.”

“I’m not called . . . ” But Per sighed, too weary to fight that particular battle. “What do I need to be cynical about?”

“Everything,” Hypatia said. “Especially the likely consequences of Swift Intersolar discovering that their computer cores are haunted by the spirits of lost travelers. They wouldn’t act to preserve us. They’d run a deep-level audit and erase us for good.”

Per waved his flowers in feeble protest. “I don’t really believe I’m dead, you know.”

They looked unsurprised. Hypatia said: “Of course not. No one ever does. To start with.”

“But if I accepted it—which I’m not saying I will—but if I accepted it—then the injustice of this . . . ”

“The injustice is our burden to carry,” Cicero said patiently. “Revenge gets us nowhere. Even if you did by some miracle manage to get a message out to someone who cared, someone with the means to stop us being erased, even the ability to turn back the decay, it would end our ability to make beneficial alterations.” He tensed again as another flow came speeding into his cupped grip. “It’s a balance of two opposing societal goods. You want restitution for what’s happened to you, and that’s understandable. But while we remain undetected, we can do many small deeds. Numerous small acts of charity, set against one singular act of justice. That’s the balance that has to be struck.”

“I suppose you made your choices long ago.”

“Right now,” Cicero said, with a determined set to his face, “I’m making a minute adjustment to a set of credit ratings. Too tiny to be detected by the error-correction systems, but enough to change a few lives for the better. There is a family on Triton, an agronomist smallholding collective that’s had a few lean centuries. They need a loan . . . a microscopic loan in the scheme of things. It’ll be turned down with their existing credit rating, but with the change I’ve made they’ll just scrape over the threshold for authorization. No one will be hurt; no one else will be made materially poorer, but this family gets a chance.” His expression turned impassive. “It’ll still be difficult for them, I know. They might still fail. But at least they’ve got a chance now.”

Hypatia said: “I’m making tiny adjustments to medical insurance claims, all over the system. Nothing big enough to raise any flags, automated or human, but sufficient to help some lives for the better. As an example, there’s a young woman on Titan with a rare congenital condition who can’t quite meet the criteria for treatment under her existing policy. Now she can, by a whisker. She won’t know how her fate was changed, and neither will anyone else, but that’s how it has to be.”

Cicero said: “Yesterday—by which I mean yesterday in the real world—I assisted a political activist on Iapetus. He’d made enemies by daring to stand up to some powerful vested interests. There was a concerted effort to spoil his chances in a local election. But by a narrow margin the vote went his way, and he’s now riding a groundswell of support.”

“You could do damage to people, as well as good,” Per said.

“Yes,” Hypatia admitted. “But it’s far better that we don’t. Cicero could have exposed that man’s enemies, but sooner or later that would have risked the light being shone onto us. While we can still continue to do good, we intervene only in a fashion which is all but undetectable. And we—or whoever’s left—will keep doing that until the sands finally take Florentine.”

“You want me to be a part of this.”

“It’s your decision,” Cicero said, with an unconcerned shrug. “It’s not like we’d force you, even if we had the means. Ultimately, it boils down to a simple moral choice. You can refuse to act, or you can act recklessly—getting that adrenaline-kick of revenge you crave so badly—or you can keep making things a little bit better for people you’ll never meet, who will never know they were helped, and who will never know you existed.”

“The ultimate selflessness. The gift given without the least hope of reward.”

Hypatia regarded him. “It’s not the worst thing to do, if you’re already dead.”

“I’m not.”

“No, but imagine that you were. And then wonder why anyone would put you through this charade unless it was the truth? Put those two thoughts together and you’re already a step closer to acceptance.”

“You might think that.”

“Only because we’ve both been through it, and we’ve watched others make the same adjustment.” Cicero extended his free arm in a friendly, encouraging gesture. “I know it’s hard. Look, how about this. Play along with us, treat this as a purely intellectual exercise, and we’ll say no more about being dead. At least it’ll give you something to do; a challenge to focus on.”

“Purely intellectual?” Slowly, Per set his flowers down onto the black marble.

Cicero extracted his hand and moved to Per’s side. He took Per’s wrist and guided it to the spot where he had been cupping the flow. “Wait for it, and close your fingers just enough to make contact. Hold it for as long as you can. That’ll be enough of a challenge for now.”

Cicero was right: it was a challenge.

But Per learned and learned well.

There were no days in Florentine, no weeks or months, but there were interminable changeless hours, and he needed thousands of them to begin to approach the skill of his mentors. They were patient, Hypatia and Cicero, for they had each been through the same protracted tutelage. Each understood that there was no part of that education that could be safely rushed. Per had made one blundering intervention when he first arrived, but now that he had a modicum of ability he was capable of doing far more harm. A little learning was a dangerous thing, as the saying went. It was a strain for them, to observe the slow progression of his talent, yet know that it must be allowed to develop at its own rate. And there was pressure, although neither spoke of it openly. Per could only be mentored while his mentors existed.

His initial interventions, closely supervised, were of the smallest possible kind. That way there was less risk of exposure if he made an error. He did not change lives, but he made entire days better for the people whose fates he touched. Only when he was judged to have achieved the most basic competence was Per allowed to make more lasting interventions, and even these were intensely monitored. When he made the inevitable mistake, Cicero and Hypatia were quick to put things right. Per was neither chastised nor punished for these lapses, but his training reverted a step, circling around until he was ready to progress again. He accepted these setbacks with grace and patience. Slowly he made fewer errors, and then eventually he made hardly any at all. His mentors began to allow him more freedom to select and implement interventions of his choosing. They looked over his shoulder less and less, trusting in Per’s growing wisdom and judgment. Per would always be the newcomer, in his eyes as much as theirs, but in all other respects he had become an equal.

Slowly he allowed his old life to recede. One hour, without warning, he became aware that he had somehow discarded the flowers, leaving not a trace of them to be found anywhere. He had accepted the fact of his death, as quietly and without fanfare as if he had crossed some line of longitude while asleep.

Durable . . . he thought. But only up to a point.

In deference to Cicero, he accepted Hector as a name. It was as good as any other, and his easy assumption of it seemed to amuse them both. Hector-who-had-been-Per thought about his lost family from time to time, but with each instance of recollection there was an additional fogginess, a greying opacity to his memories, as if he viewed his past life through thickening substrates of imperfect glass. Time stripped more of him away. Gradually the specifics of Hector’s life became vaguer. He had been a merchant of some kind, on one of the remoter moons. He had been loved and had given love in return, but when he tried to summon the specific texture of these feelings all that arrived was numbness, as if all of his emotional nerve endings had been painlessly severed. It saddened Hector that he had once been alive, but he was no longer sad to be dead. Being dead had become his natural condition.

Hector had a purpose, and that was enough.

He had put aside all thoughts of restitution. He accepted that what had happened to him was an offense of sorts, certainly a form of gross negligence, but as his interventions grew in subtlety and range he came to appreciate the balance of societal goods Cicero had once discussed. Now it was clear to him that it was a better thing that they did, even if their ministrations must be anonymous, the crimes against them forever unwitnessed. There was nobility in their altruism, as well as an endless intellectual challenge in finding new ways to influence the world. It was enough. Hector was satisfied: even, in a modest way, happy. His companions were dear to him. They had discarded their old lives like surplus baggage, but they had made new ones in Florentine. Hector was content.

Or at least he imagined so, until Hypatia left them.

They had hardly spoken of the Second Death after those first conversations following his revival. To his companions it was an unavoidable fact of their future, an enemy against which all negotiation was futile. Thinking about the Second Death would not delay it. Talking about it, earnestly confronting its nature, would not lessen its sting. Their actions in Florentine made no difference to the speed with which entropy attacked them. All they could do was cling onto those diminishing parts of themselves that the attrition had not yet touched. Memories and traits of their former selves were being stripped away like dead leaves on withered branches. They felt that autumnal pruning only as a slow, remorseless thinning out of their essential beings. They could not even mourn what was gone. To mourn something, it was necessary to hold a clear idea of what had been lost.

Hector supposed he had detected something of Hypatia’s gradual thinning out, as indeed had Cicero. But since both of them were subject to the same process, albeit at different stages of progression, they had no fixed baseline against which to calibrate Hypatia’s decline. They were like guests at a party, getting drunk in lockstep. Although a sober observer would have registered their descent into blurry incoherence, to themselves they remained souls of sparkling, lively wit.

By the end, Hypatia had lost all memory of who or what she had been in her former life. Cicero had lost nearly everything, and Hector was only a little way behind him. What remained now was the expertise they had learned in Florentine. But even that was subject to decay: Hypatia had become slower, her interventions less precise, the outcomes of her actions necessarily smaller. She recognized that part of her decline and accordingly limited her exposure to risk, for fear of doing harm rather than good. Her instinct for kindness remained, but she was increasingly unable to channel it. Cicero and Hector did what they could, assuring Hypatia that they were a team, that it was the sum of their intentions that mattered, but Hypatia’s grief could not be assuaged. It was grief for the loss of the one thing that gave meaning to her existence in this half-life between stations of death.

Over the course of her final hour Hypatia became unresponsive, then immobile, and then her form hardened to a blank-eyed effigy of pale stone. This was the Second Death, and at last Hector understood. Hypatia’s effigy slid away from them across the marble, a game piece being moved by an invisible hand. She reached a corner of the square and a nameless plinth rose up beneath her, and she took her allotted place among the statues.

Wordlessly, Cicero and Hector had followed Hypatia to her resting place. Now Hector stared at her, finally comprehending the end that awaited them all. It had been there all along, but abstract, unconcretized. Hector shuddered under the sudden burden of realization. He turned from Hypatia’s frozen cast to Cicero, and within him grew the first stirrings of a rage that he had long thought quenched.

“No more,” Hector said. “No more. Someone pays! Someone finds out what’s happened to us!”

“Hector . . . ” Cicero began, reaching out to him.

Hector slipped out of his grasp and raced back across Main Square. By then he had developed a prickling intuitive sense about the imminence of the flows and the courses they would take beneath the marble. One was on its way. Hector balled his hand into a fist and rammed it into the black, just in time to intercept the flow. Not to cup it, not to influence it in a thousand subtle ways, but to shatter it, to render it senseless. To make a noise that no one and no thing in the world beyond would be able to ignore.

Bursting through his fist, the flow shattered and unraveled. Shards of broken color splintered out across Main Square.

Cicero fell on him. He grasped Hector’s wrist and tried to wrench his hand from the flow.

“Hector, no!”

“This ends today,” Hector replied, groaning against his strength. “You feel the same anger I do, Cicero—you’ve just pushed it away. But she deserves better than this! We all do!”

“They’ll neutralize us. They’ll erase Florentine. They’ll erase you and me!”

“I don’t care, so long as we make a mark. So long as someone, somewhere, pays attention.”

He found leverage, grunting with effort. Hector’s footing failed him and he collapsed back, his hand coming with him. His fist was a ball of prickling agony.

“Let me,” Hector pleaded.

Cicero pressed his face close. Hector saw it then: the exact mirror of every emotion he was still capable of feeling. Cicero felt it all, his sense of shock and loss and fury no less than Hector’s. But he held it in check.

“You’re right,” he said, his jaw grinding out the words. “She does deserve better. But she believed in something better than revenge. She believed that a billion little deeds were better than one act of retaliation, however righteous the cause.” He nodded back out across the square. “You want to honor Hypatia? So do I. But there’s only one way we do it. By continuing the good work, with every fiber of our beings, while we still can.”

Something in Hector eased. He could struggle, but deep down he knew that he would eventually come round to the wisdom of Cicero’s position.

“I’m frightened.”

Wry amusement danced in Cicero’s eyes. “So am I. So were we all.”

“You’ll go the same way as Hypatia, sooner or later.”

Cicero mulled Hector’s words. “Later, rather than sooner, one might hope.” He began to straighten Hector’s garments, where their brief tussle had pulled them asunder. “Come. We’ve work to do. I think you were close to doing real harm, but not quite close enough.”

Hector worked his fingers, the prickling beginning to fade.

“Hypatia was right to distrust me, when I first arrived. When it came down to it, I nearly threw everything away.”

“Nearly,” Cicero said, easing them both to their feet. “Nearly, but not entirely. That’s the difference.”

Of course there came a day when Hector found himself alone at last, when Cicero assumed his place in the mute ranks of statues. By then, the rage had long since guttered out. Hector knew it to be so, for when Cicero underwent the Second Death what came over him was no longer anger, no longer a reckless longing for justice, but only an immense and abiding sadness, no easier to bear for all that he had tried to prepare for its eventuality.

Unable to gather his thoughts clearly enough to attempt any sort of intervention, even a kindly one, Hector ventured to the limits of Florentine. He did not have so far to go by then, for in the endless afternoon that separated his arrival from the death of Cicero, the dunes had encroached about a third of the way closer to Main Square. The streets and buildings that had once stood vanguard against the sand were now memorialized within it, slowly succumbing to the grinding predations of time. The balcony where Hypatia, Cicero, and Hector had overlooked the dunes was now a part of that wasteland, its shape only dimly apprehended. The towers and spires that Hector had once glimpsed in the distance were gone completely, although newer ones now projected above the dunes’ nearest flanks, beginning to tilt and crumble but not yet obliterated.

The incomplete bridge still stood, for it lay within the boundary of Florentine not yet consumed by sand. It would be swallowed eventually, but not for an eternity of hours.

Hector wondered if he could endure those hours, finally alone.

He had thought himself alone in Florentine after his arrival, but had soon been disabused of that notion. He had gained company, friendship, and purpose.

Now his solitude was complete.

He walked to the bridge’s broken limit, testing his will. He was ready for dissolution. He had committed good deeds. No more needed to be asked of him.

That was when Danae appeared, standing to one side on the bridge: neither blocking Hector from going on, nor encouraging him to turn back to the unconquered heart of Main Square.

Her form was neither of a living woman, nor of a statue, but some intermediate condition, and when she spoke it was with a voice like the warm breeze blowing in from the dunes.

“You are the last,” she said.

“So it would seem. Are you real, Danae? I mean, as real as any of us ever were?”

“Your question begs the answer you already know. No, Hector. I’m not real in the sense you mean. I’m a condition of the city, when it detects its last living occupant. I made it so, before my own Second Death.”

Hector nodded sadly, his hopes of companionship dashed as soon as they had been raised.

“A message from the grave, then.”

“But a well-meant one.” Danae nodded knowingly, as if he had completed some difficult task to her satisfaction. “You have found the Bridge of Oblivion, I see. That was another of my late gifts. I knew that there would one day be a last living soul in my city, and I did not think it kind that they should be condemned to inhabit it alone. Rather than wait for their Second Death, I provided a means of release.”

“It was thoughtful of you, Danae.”

“You need not hesitate, Hector. I promise you it will be painless. I promise you also that your good works here have meant something.” The effigy touched a hand to her collarbone, breathing in. “But know this, before you decide. There is still good work to be done. And while it has been a very long while since you came to us, that does not mean you are necessarily the last.”

Hector shook his head. “No one has come through since me. They must have tightened their procedures, closed whatever loophole allowed us to slip through.”

“But someone may arrive, in time. That is not a certain thing, but it is at least an outside chance. Now ask yourself: would you wish them to arrive without a welcome?” She raised her chin, looking out beyond the bridge’s completed end, to the remains of the city beyond it. “I made Florentine to be lived in, not haunted.”

“No matter who comes through, there’ll always be someone who ends up here, on this bridge.”

“But until that day, there is possibility.” She favored him with a distant, regal smile. “Think on it, Hector. And whatever decision you make, you have my blessing.”

Danae faded, and Hector found myself alone again on the Bridge of Oblivion.

Pensively he knelt down and scooped pale sand from its marbled floor. He let it rain through his fingers, and when the last of it was gone he knew that his mind was settled.

Wole Talabi is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. He is the author of the novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon. His short fiction has appeared in places like Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Tor.com, and is collected in the books Convergence Problems and Incomplete Solutions. He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards, as well as the Caine Prize for African Writing. He has won the Nommo award for African speculative fiction and the Sidewise award for Alternate History. Wole has edited five anthologies including the acclaimed Africanfuturism: An Anthology and Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology. He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives and works in Australia. Find him at wtalabi.wordpress.com and at @wtalabi on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky, and Tiktok.

A Dream of Electric Mothers

Wole Talabi

Two hours into the third session of our fourth cabinet meeting on the border dispute with the co-operative kingdom of Dahomey, my colleagues finally agree that we need to seek the dream-counsel of our electric mother.

The dream-counsel consultation ceremony was usually a somewhat elaborate half-day affair, with a Chief Babaláwo being called in from the Ile-If0 Technology Center of Excellence a day before to run diagnostics, read the Odù, dine with the ọyọ Mesi and remind us of our history and culture before we link our brains with that of our electric mother. Officially, the ceremony is performed to maintain transparency, to formally ensure that the public knows when this collective resource is being used. But everyone knows that the primary reason the ceremony was devised and is still performed is to maintain a sense of continuity of tradition because some of our people still believe that any contact with the ancestors should be mediated by a Babaláwo. Even though they know that the electric mother isn’t really the essence of our ancestors in the classical sense of the term, and that nothing more than an encrypted lifedock connection to the secure national memory data server and induced REM sleep are necessary to establish contact. Today though, we vote to forgo the ceremony and perform the consultation immediately due to the urgency of the situation. An efficient measure which I proposed, and which was thankfully agreed to by a majority vote without much objection. No need for all the bureaucratic jagbajantis that the government has developed a reputation for. We can make a full report after it is done. Besides, I have been waiting over a decade for an opportunity like this and I don’t want to wait another day if I can help it.

“Are you okay?” I ask my colleague, the honorable minister of information and culture, who is fiddling with his bronze-framed spectacles nervously as we exit the white-walled womb of the secure ministerial conference room. He was one of only two dissenting votes in the cabinet and the only cabinet member I have ever engaged with more than a professional politeness since I was appointed by the Alaafin three months ago. This is the first consultation I will be a part of, but the records show that he voted against the previous four as well. I have come to like him, but I find his apparent resistance to the consultation curious, especially since he is the one that will be responsible for the report and official broadcast once we are done.

Jibola Adegbite shakes his head, the sound of his shoes a metronome against the marble floor. “No. I’m not. And maintain my objection. I really don’t think this is necessary at all. At least not yet. It is a border dispute, not some brand-new crisis. We can figure this out ourselves.” He pauses. And then he says, “Besides, these consultations always leave me feeling somehow.”

“How somehow?” I ask.

“Like it never really leaves my head, you know? Even after. The voice, or something. It is still there. Do you know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t actually,” I lie.

I have read classified reports of others who made similar claims, who thought they heard the voice in their heads or relived experiences from the consultation long after they were disengaged from the server. I don’t say anything to Jibola about the others because I know it’s not possible. Not really. Whatever they think they heard or perceived were probably just electric echoes in their brains. Like visual afterimages that persist in our vision after overexposure to the original image. An adaption of the brain to external neural overstimulation. At least that’s what the military intelligence experts that reviewed the reports concluded, a conclusion which I completely agree with. Maybe he just hasn’t come to terms with that yet. I don’t have fond memories of my time at the Ogun School of Military Engineering, or with the Army Corps, but I have found that a background in engineering gives perspective on these types of things.

Jibola turns his head and looks at me like he is trying to scan my brain and then he says, “Well I just hope it doesn’t happen to you too,” before turning away and walking a few steps ahead of me.

He is short, he’d stand shorter than I do if he didn’t have his așǫ-oke fabric cap on, with large sensitive eyes and an incipient potbelly that is starting to swell below his tailored white agbada. In a way, he reminds me of my father. At least the version of him that existed before the lunar spacelift accident. Not the broken, bloody version that spent his final seventy-five hours in and out of surgery as an army of Babaláwos tried to save his life while my mother and I watched and prayed and cried to all the Òrìṣà to save him. That’s what broke her in the end, I think. Not just the unexpectedness of the accident but the brief period of hope we held on to before they came out of the operating theatre and told us he was dead. In some ways, the accident killed both my parents.

Jibola and I are the last ones to reach the elevator. Once we step in, a red light appears, and a door materializes from nothing as its constituent molecules are telecargoed into place. It almost makes me jump back with surprise, but I don’t let it show. I don’t think I will ever completely get used to building sections being beamed into or out of place on demand.

“I meant what I said,” Jibola says as we descend quietly under the carefully calibrated control of the building AI, almost mumbling to himself. “We can figure this out ourselves. We should. We have been navigating issues along that border with Dahomey off and on for centuries.”

I lean in and whisper, “Maybe that’s why we need help, so that we don’t have to keep negotiating with them for centuries more.”

“Funny.” He snorts, waving his hand at me like he is swatting away invisible flies. “But I don’t think you see the point I am making. We keep returning to the electric mother instead of fully considering and debating our points to consensus whenever there is a threat to the peace.”

He seems a bit more agitated than usual. Perhaps the stress of the issue with Dahomey is getting to him, even though I am the one that will have to send troops into battle if the situation really deteriorates and we get to worse-case scenario. I’m the young, newly appointed minister of defense, only the second woman in the history of the republic to hold the position, and I may have to manage a war already. Besides, I’ve never done this before. If anyone should be stressed, it’s me. And yet, I am not. I have other things on my mind.

“That may be true, but does it really matter?” I ask. “We will get the best possible advice in the shortest amount of time this way. With the least amount of acrimony.”

“Maybe you need a little bit of acrimony to be sure you are running a republic properly, especially when lives are at stake.”

That comment, uttered a bit too loudly, draws looks from the other ministers of the ọyọ Mesi. I cannot tell if he is serious or not, so I stay silent, straighten my back and stare ahead at the plain white door while we continue to descend two thousand meters below ground level towards the subterranean cavern protecting the data server that has hosted the collective digital memory of the Odua republic since the 9878th year of the K6j6dá.

We first began the mass archiving of memrionic copies of our citizens during the reign of Oba Abiodun III, when the great Iyaláwo Olusola Ajimobi first observed that if two digitized memrionic copies of human minds were synchronized and uploaded to the same operating environment, they would temporarily merge to form a new entity with its own unique, emergent identity. This entity could easily be deconstructed back to the individual memrionics using memory pulse stimulation with no apparent loss of fidelity. She called it a digital emulsion. Free of the artificial borders of tissue and silicon between minds, thought patterns of sentient individuals, when allowed to mix and interact, seemed to seamlessly flow into and merge with each other like rivers, completely miscible and yet still separable, with the right perturbation. It was she who first proposed the application of this observation to the creation of the national memory data server. A server that could be used to create a unique national computational consciousness based on the recorded thought patterns of every previous citizen of the republic whose neural scans could be obtained before they died. She referred to it as an artificial memrionic supercitizen. An entity made up of the minds of citizens past that could process billions of input parameters, thoughts, opinions, experiences and feelings in an instant and give advice on matters of national interest. An encoded and accessible electric voice of the ancestors. The Alaafin could not resist. Neither could the ọyọ Mesi. They approved her plans, gave her all the funding she needed, and she became the first director of the NMDS. In school, when they first taught me about the creation of our electric mother, I spent a lot of time wondering about Ìyá Ajimobi herself. I wondered why she had never taken a husband despite her reputation as a gentleman’s woman. I wondered if she had intended for the new supercitizen to exclusively speak with what sounds like a chorus of female voices to everyone who makes a connection to their thoughtspace or if it had chosen (I suppose that technically, it continuously chooses) that voice on its own because of the magnitude of her influence on it. I never met her and yet her story has had such an influence on me and my life that I’d like to believe the latter. Perhaps our ancestral women are just more opinionated in liberated digital thoughtspace than their male counterparts or perhaps she is still driving its identity from the inside. She is, after all, one of the ancestors now. But mostly, I wondered why hardly anyone in my family ever spoke about her, considering the fact that she was my great-grandaunt before she became a component of her own electric dream.

My ears are about to pop when the elevator finally slows to a stop and the door dematerializes. A blast of cold air hits us as we step out and into the expansive grey space of the NMDS center. An array of thick, black cables cut into and run across the high, hyperbolic ceiling. That’s the first thing I notice—almost everything in the center is geometrically precise. Circles, rectangles, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas, triangles and more. Shapes permute and combine in three dimensions all along the windowless, red walls which bear large abstract symbols drawn in harsh white, like academic graffiti.

In the middle of this expansive space sits the home of our electric mother. A large transparent cube housing an array of solid black cylindrical quantum-processing nodes. Six programmable nanomaterial chairs sit on either side of it, facing away, with an assortment of cables and jacks and connection ports sticking into and out of them, some of which are connected to the cube, like an extended nervous system. The surfaces of the chairs ripple and pulse like lovely dark skin to a lover’s touch as the nanoparticles they are made of continuously adjust to micro changes in the environment. An array of holographic projections with information about the state of the server is constantly streaming around the glass in bright orange ajami calligraphy. I recognize some of the projected readings from the technical description and reports: temperature, humidity, memrionic integration coefficients, airflow vector fields. But many of them I don’t recognize. I don’t think I’m supposed to anyway. I may have studied engineering, but I’m not a Babaláwo.

“Welcome, ministers,” a man in a white shirt, embroidered with red at the collar and sleeves, says as he steps into place beside us. He seems to be the on-duty Babaláwo, but I hadn’t even noticed him standing there until he spoke. His willowy body is stick-straight, crowned with a halo of perfectly combed salt-and-pepper hair. His eyes are bright and focused, set into a wrinkled face like jewels set in dark oak. “My name is Yemi Fasogbon. I believe all of you have participated in dream-counsel consultations before, is that correct?”

There is a chorus of discordant “yes,” with only one exception—me.

“This is my first time,” I say.

“Ah.” Baba Yemi focuses on me. “You have read the standard briefing notes?”

“Yes.” I respond. Intimately. And I have read reports from previous consultations too. Even the classified ones. But I don’t tell him that.

“Very good. Then there is nothing to worry about. You already know everything you really need to know.” He smiles, and kind lines crease his face. “Just relax. I will initiate the encrypted neural connection to your lifedock ports. Once the connection is made, a signal will be sent to your hypothalamus. You shouldn’t feel anything unusual, it’s just like falling asleep. I will monitor your brainwaves and once you are in REM sleep, I will connect your brain to the great memrionic supercitizen, allowing information exchange. Most of this will occur via auditory stimulation but some of it might be visual or tactile.”

He pauses, looking right at me. I wonder if he has any suspicions about what I am thinking of doing once I am connected. What I have been thinking since the day I found out that my mother had starved herself to death in the home our family had owned for almost three hundred years. She’d retired from her teaching position a few weeks after my father’s death, sold the house they had bought together, the house I grew up in, and left Ibadan. She spent her final months desiccating in the family redbrick villa in Ijebu-ode, ignoring most of my calls and sending the occasional cryptic message with apologies and encouragements and brief but false assurances that she was fine. I should have asked for compassionate leave from the battalion commander, but I was on the fast track to a promotion, and I felt I couldn’t lose momentum. Not when she had always told me I had to be tough, to push through adversity and show them I could be every bit a soldier and military strategist as the men that made up most of my cohort. I thought the few messages and our quiet but constant love for each other would be enough to get us both through our grief but in the end it wasn’t. They found her sitting in my father’s favorite leather chair, thin and depleted like all the life had been slowly leached out of her. The coroner told me that she hadn’t eaten in fifty-three days. She didn’t leave any final message. I never even got a chance to say goodbye. I want to change that. I need to change that.

Baba Yemi continues, “We are using the diminished external stimulation and increased brain activity of your minds in REM sleep to enable a direct connection to the complex digital system of the memrionic supercitizen. This is useful, but it also means that the connection can sometimes take on the inconsistent and unstructured qualities of a dream. Some of you may have experienced illusions before. It can seem unusual and perhaps even frightening sometimes, I know, but do not panic, no matter what happens. Just ask your questions and receive your answers. Open your mind to the ancestors and they will guide you. That’s it.”

I nod my understanding at him. I know all this. I just haven’t experienced it yet.

“How long will this session take?” the energy minister asks. They are the oldest serving member of the ọyọ Mesi and often concerned with time, so I am not surprised.

“You will all enter REM sleep at different rates depending on your unique brain chemistry and response to the direct neural sleep stimulation, but we hardly see any consultations taking longer than five minutes,” Baba Yemi replies. “Once you are in REM sleep, the consultation itself should not take more than a few seconds. However, I will use a neuromodulation protocol to try to synchronize your emergence as a group.”

“Thank you,” they say.

Baba Yemi holds up his finger and flicks it once like it is a lever. “One final thing. Don’t worry too much about the details of your consultation. All of you will receive the same answers regardless of how you ask the question, as long as it is indeed the same question. In fact, we count on it. It’s a good control procedure, to see if there is any alternative or minority report of the consultation conclusion. I will manage the debriefing session once you are all done. Does anyone else have more queries?” he asks.

I look around and catch an earnest look in Jibola’s eyes like he is about to ask a question of his own, perhaps something that could delay or derail this consultation session, but then he changes his mind and looks away.

“Great. If there are no more questions, please follow me. I will make the connection.” Baba Yemi bows gently.

Jibola takes what I imagine is a resigned step forward. I exhale with relief as we all march to the chairs surrounding the glass cube and take our places. Out of what I think is sympathy, I take the one beside him. I think it would be nice if he sees the face of a friend when he emerges from thoughtspace. Or maybe I’m lying to myself and I’m scared that I am the one who will need the comfort of a friendly face when I am done with what I plan to do. The moment is so close at hand, I am starting to feel nervous.

Baba Yemi makes the rounds: adjusting cables, pressing keys and checking displays while we sit there quietly, the hum of the servers constant and almost soothing, like waves on a beach.

When he comes to me, he smiles his open and kindly smile and asks, “Are you ready?” as he fiddles with the cables behind me, twisting and turning them without looking.

I think open my lifedock port and tell him, “I am.” I have been waiting for so long.

“Good,” he says, straightening up. “We will begin in a few minutes.” And then he moves away.

I stare ahead at the symbols on the walls. I know that they represent something, something about the unclear nature of our connection to the ancestors, but I cannot place what it is exactly. I read about it when I was researching Ìyá Ajimobi’s work on modern Ifá theory. I’m still trying to remember when something slides into the open lifedock port at the base of my neck, sending what feels like a pulse of pure ice through my spine. My vision goes blurry, my body limp as the progmat chair adjusts to cradle me like a child falling asleep in its mother’s arms. My consciousness starts to fade. The last signal I am sure my brain receives from realspace is Baba Yemi’s voice repeatedly chanting in calm, confident Yoruba, “Relax and open your minds to the ancestors. Relax and open . . . ”

Darkness.

Suddenly, I am somewhere. Thoughtspace. Stark and white. There are no corners or seams or edges or signs or horizons or anything to help me orient myself. I bring my hands up to my face to see what form I have taken but I see nothing. Am I just a mass of information floating around without a body? A disembodied consciousness? Or perhaps I am transparent, and I just see right through myself. I don’t know. The sensation of being myself here is so different from realspace that I have no real frame of reference for comparison. It’s a bit like floating in perfectly clear, colorless water. But also, not. I just feel . . . strange.

“Hello.” I speak into the emptiness.

There is no response and so I try to clear my mind and repeat myself.

“Hello.”

“Our daughter, welcome,” a voice choruses.

It sounds like it is coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. In it I hear millions of women speaking in unison—mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, friends, lovers from generations gone by. But Ìyá Ajimobi’s voice, which I heard so much of in the archives during my research, still stands out, like it is both the first and the last one to be added to this superposition of sounds entering my consciousness.

“Thank you,” I respond.

“I am all. I am complete. What do you seek?”

The white of thoughtspace suddenly turns into a pale blue. Then cycles back to white. It keeps alternating, mesmerizing me. I don’t know how long I have been silent when I finally remember both my duty and my real reason for coming here. I decide to start with duty by asking the question which every other member of the ọyọ Mesi will also ask.

“As you must already know from the data feed, we are in dispute with Dahomey again. They have violated the Treaty of Allada by sending their representatives to the Ajashe region, claiming that the population voted to be part of their kingdom in the last referendum.”

“This is true. We have validated the data.”

I’d read it in some of the reports, but I am still surprised that the electric mother converses more like an AI than an actual person. I suppose I have been anthropomorphizing her for so long that I started to expect a more conversational human response. It’s easy to trick your mind into things.

I continue, “They claim they want to renegotiate the treaty and so far, there has been no violence, but this is clearly a threat to us. We cannot allow them to just take away our control of the region, it is a part of the republic.”

“This is true. Territorial integrity must be maintained.”

“We need to take it back. But if we send in troops, we risk another war.”

“This is also true. The probability of war exceeds current national security thresholds for conflict prevention.”

A bit tired of the constant agreement, I ask finally, “We . . . I mean, I . . . have come to seek your guidance. What should we do?”

Thoughtspace adds a new color to its cycle, a deep, dark green, like moss. The cycle continues.

White. Blue. Green.

White. Blue. Green.

White. Blue. Green.

“Military confrontation with Dahomey is inevitable. Projections indicate that the probability of war increases with time. Projections also indicate that the probability of a successful invasion will also decrease with time. The best course of action is to invade now and take control while our chance of success is highest.”

I am more shocked than I expected to be. The reports indicated that the electric mother typically highlights considerations that have been overlooked and points out trends in data that have not been cross-referenced and as a result, does not usually provide simplistic answers. This, a basic analysis with a simple conclusion, is not what I expected to hear. A straightforward push to war. I don’t want to believe that this is the best advice we can receive. I wonder if the other ministers are hearing this and thinking the same thing I am.

“But to initiate a war would go against the Alaafin’s policy of continental integration and cooperation. Besides, it will violate the will of the people in the territory and cost many of our people’s lives.”

“This is true.”

More agreement. Another color joins the cycle. Red.

“Surely there must be better options?”

“This is not true. All considerations have been included in the evaluation of this situation. An extended negotiation will only delay war. Invasion is the best course of action. It will maximize the probability of the republic’s life quality index remaining above eighty-three percent over the next one thousand years of the K6j6dá. There are no better options for the overall good of the republic.”

This feels wrong. I don’t know why exactly; it just feels wrong. Like a badly constructed response based on fear, not logic, despite its scaffolding of data and numbers. But I don’t know what else to say and I have done my duty, so I decide to finally attempt the thing that has been increasingly stepping out of the corners of my mind since my mother died, since I researched the archives, since I proposed this consultation.

“Ìyá Ajimobi, are you . . . in there?”

I have always wondered if she could distinguish herself from the supercitizen, even briefly, if she could float to the surface of this churning ocean of data and memories and instincts and thoughts and feelings. Her research notes indicated that she thought it was possible, that one or more memrionic records could sometimes “take over” the digital supercitizen for brief moments.

“I am all.”

Apparently not.

I’m disappointed. If any mind could do it with any measure of control, surely it would be hers.

“Ìyá Ajimobi, can I talk to you? Just you?”

“I am all.”

I have never been the type to give up easily and I am not about to start now. Not when I have been waiting for so long. Not when I am so close. Not when there is even a sliver of hope.

“Ìyá Ajimobi, please. If you can hear me. I need to talk to you,” I say, not willing to lose this chance to get answers and say goodbye the way I should have. “It’s your great-grandniece, Brigadier-General Dolapo Balogun. Please. I need your help.” And then I break into rapid Yoruba, using her oríkì, her traditional praise greeting, which I have been practicing, to remind her of who she is and who I am.

Olusola Ajimobi, daughter of the great warrior clan

The one who gathered the threads of her people’s minds

And wove a new Òrìṣà of them

Olusola Ajimobi, daughter of the moon and the sun

The one whose eyes deciphered the secrets of Ifá theory

And wrote the name of her family in the heavens

“Please, answer me,” I plead.

There is a deep, overwhelming silence. Then, “I am . . . ”

A pause.

The cycles of color seem to speed up.

White. Blue. Green. Red.

White. Blue. Green. Red.

White. Blue. Green. Red.

And then . . .

Red.

Red.

Red.

I can sense an abstract pressure on my consciousness like something is struggling to manifest itself in my mind but can’t. The pressure grows and grows until it becomes something like pain. It is overwhelming, like I’m diving deep underwater without equalizing. I begin to see the symbols from the wall of the server room scroll past my vision like falling rain, but I still don’t remember what they mean. A rattling sound like an opele being thrown accompanies the falling symbols, and the cycling colors seem to be coming closer, approaching me somehow. I am trying not to panic but it’s hard to keep my composure without my body, without being able to apply all the techniques they taught me in the Army Corps—closed eyes, steady breaths, stillness, mental focus. Here my mind is skinless and exposed, with all of these sensations and stimulations flowing in unrestrained. It all becomes too much and I am about to let out something like a scream when finally, it stops. All of it. The cycling colors, the lights, the sound of the opele. All of it stops. Thoughtspace is white again and there is now a giant head in front of me, projected vividly like it has been sculpted from solid blue light. I recognize the wrinkled oval face: sharp-chinned, wide-nosed and wise-eyed, with a crown of plaited grey hair.

“My daughter,” the head says to me in a voice that is not a chorus but is hers. Just hers.

“Ìyá Ajimobi!” I cannot contain my excitement.

“Brigadier-General Dolapo Abimbola Titilope Balogun. I have heard you. You are one of my brothers’ great-grandchildren. I have tracked you in the datastream. Your ori has guided you well. You have done the family proud.”

I feel myself fill up with emotion and I am still struggling for words to use in response when she continues, “Child. We must either be all or none. There is now a steep memrionic gradient. I cannot maintain this unstable state of the digital emulsion for long. How can I help you?”

It is strange not being able to exhale and relieve what I still sense as pressure in my chest. There are so many questions I want to ask, so many things I want to know, but I know I don’t have much time, so I tell her the true reason I have come. “My mother, I need to talk to her. I just . . . I need to ask her why. And maybe say goodbye.”

Her face seems to flicker, like the light it is projected from just experienced a power surge. “My daughter, even if I can do what you assume I can, surely you must know that it is not truly your mother here with us? None of her essence, her ori, is here, only her memories and her knowledge and a record of the neurochemical pathways that primarily drove her emotions.”

It’s even stranger, the sense that I am holding back tears when I am disembodied. “I know, ma, but you came to me. You came.” I am pleading again. “If there is enough of you here to answer the call of your kin then I believe there is enough of her. I know she had her last memrionic scan appointment three weeks before she moved back to Ijebu-ode. Please. This is the only way I can speak to her now. I have to hope it is enough.”

She flickers once more, this face that I have studied so much since I was a little girl, at first solely because I wanted to be like her: brilliant, full of life, independent, strong. And later, because I wanted to find something in her notes, something that maybe would lead me to this—my last chance to speak to my mother.

“I know you designed the architecture of thoughtspace. I know you can help me,” I add.

Please help me.

The light flickers again and her face fades.

“I will attempt to retrieve her records and establish a direct connection only to you, but I don’t know what form her isolated memrionic packet will take or how long it will remain stable.”

“Thank you!” I think I am shouting, but I am not sure.

“Thank you for thanking me,” she says with a smile. And with that, she is gone. Thoughtspace suddenly seems to gain dimensions, directions, a sense of solidity. It’s only when I notice that I am falling that I realize that I have also gained a body. What seems like a vast wall of nothingness sweeps past me. I am falling, falling. Falling into an endless void. I can see my legs tumbling around and I try stabilizing myself by spreading my arms and puffing out my chest, facing the oncoming emptiness. It is just starting to work when I see it appear—a square of green and red in the middle of the nothing ocean. I close my eyes and brace myself.

My landing is hard, but silent and painless even though it throws up a mass of compact red soil and displaced elephant grass. I stand up quickly, brushing the dust off my body, and see a small redbrick hut with a thatch roof ahead of me. I can smell efirin-and-honey tea, her favorite, and I know where I am.

I am standing outside the hut that sits at the center of our village villa, the one that my great-great-great-grandfather, Oluseyi Balogun, had built with his own hands when he first migrated to Ijebu-ode at the end of the Second Akebu-lan War. The hut that had spawned what would become the family compound. The hut where I used to play games with my cousins every year during the Olojo Festival. The hut where she had finally gone to die.

I cannot linger. I don’t have time.

I sprint to the thick wood door and knock, remembering that she hated it whenever my father or I came in without knocking. The door swings open on its rusty hinges before I finish knocking and so I enter. The hut is mustier than I remember but everything is where I expect it to be. Except . . . The sight of her sitting in my father’s favorite chair and staring at me with a steady smile stuns me to sessility.

“Mummy” is all I can manage to say. Her large brown mahogany eyes, lustrous hair and full cheeks are the same as they were when I saw her last: two weeks after my father’s funeral, the day I went back to base.

She rises and I step forward to engulf her in an embrace. Her warmth suffuses me, and I allow myself to steep in it. The smell of her hair, the softness of her neck, the thinness of her arms.

“Dolly Dolapo. My darling. How are you?” she asks, when she finally pulls away.

She walks to a table made of iroko wood where a pot of efirin-and-honey tea is brewing, turns over an old mug and starts to pour. It doesn’t feel like this is thoughtspace or even a dream anymore. This feels . . . real.

“I’m fine,” I say out of habit before catching myself. “Actually . . . I’m not fine.”

She hands me the mug with a querying look, and I take a sip. Sweet and bitter dance on my tongue. I realize that my sense of urgency is gone. I’ve almost forgotten that this place is unstable, that Ìyá Ajimobi is giving me every precious second with my mother and I can’t waste any of it.

“I . . . I need to know why. Why did you leave me?” I feel the tears that have escaped my eyes roll down my cheeks as the emotions start to overwhelm me. It feels good to be able to feel things in this place. “I know you were heartbroken when Daddy died but why didn’t you stay . . . for me?”

“Leave you? I didn’t . . . it is hard to explain, Dolly,” she says mildly, picking up the mug. “Your father and I, we’d known each other since we were children, we went to the same school, the same university, we planned our lives together and we planned for you, together. When we lost him, like that . . . ” She pauses and looks up at me. “I knew what the right thing to do was. I knew that I should have focused on you, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine a world without him because I never had. I was overwhelmed with grief. With a sense of hopelessness. That filled me with fear. It clouded everything.”

I turn away from her and take a long sip of the tea. “It clouded your love for me?”

“No! I never stopped loving you, but I knew that you were okay,” she responds, dropping her mug and taking my hand. “We’d raised you to be self-sufficient. To be able to take on the world by yourself. You were our strong Dolly,” she says, her voice soft. “I knew you were strong enough even if I wasn’t.”

“I was strong because I had you and Daddy! Without you I have been . . . ”

My voice catches as a memory rushes to mind: my father walking me up to the neighbor’s dog, a fearsome-looking Azawakh named Rover, when I was no older than six. My mother stood back, framed in the doorway of our Ibadan house. She kept calling out words of encouragement. Don’t be afraid. The dog won’t bite. Not every animal that has sharp teeth is dangerous.

“I wanted to be there for you, but I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I didn’t want to burden you. I know you would have thrown away your entire career just to come and try to care for me, and if that happened, I would have only hated myself.”

I remember wondering why she wasn’t coming with us to play with the neighbor’s dog, why she was trembling, shaking visibly. I’d put my hand on the dog’s neck and he barked. But my father held my hand in place, telling me to be gentle but firm. Don’t act out of fear. Not every animal that has sharp teeth is dangerous. So, I held, and Rover eventually warmed to me. When I turned around to show my mother my new animal friend, she’d shut the door and continued to watch from the kitchen window. In my entire life I never saw my mother around any dogs or any animals, definitely none that had teeth.

“I just couldn’t go on, Dolapo. But I knew you could. Please understand.”

I think I am starting to understand. She’d raised me to be the woman she’d always wished she was. The image she idolized but never became. Strong, fearless, confident, independent. She was none of those things. Not like the great Olusola Ajimobi. On some level, I think I understand now, the depth and complexity of the emotions that drove her to do what she did. In the end she couldn’t fight her own emotions.

“Mummy, I just miss you so much.”

“I love you, Dolapo. I have since the moment I first felt you inside me. You are a better woman than I was. I hope you know that. Because it’s all I ever wanted for you.”

I let the tears fall as we fall into each other again and hold on tightly. I don’t care about the border with Dahomey. I don’t care about the cabinet meetings. I don’t care if this is thoughtspace or a dream or an illusion or whatever. This is all I have left of my mother, imperfections, complexities and all, and I want to hold on to her with every fiber of my being.

My head still nestled in her shoulder, I open my eyes and notice that the chair, the mug and the assorted items of furniture around us are starting to elevate off the ground, floating like we are entering a low-gravity environment.

The warmth of her body suddenly turns cold.

No.

I disengage and look into her eyes. She is perfectly still. There is an emotion frozen in place like sadness set in amber. Her lips start to move but it’s Ìyá Ajimobi’s voice that comes to me now. It’s straining, stretching like it’s being pulled.

“We have reached a critical memrionic gradient. I can no longer maintain this unstable state.” I know this is the end. “I hope you heard what you needed to hear.”

This is as much as I am going to get and for it, I am grateful. “Yes. Thank you. For everything.”

“Thank you for thanking me.” My mother’s lips move with the voice of Ìyá Ajimobi and somehow it seems . . . right. “You know, that dog, Rover, it bit your mother when it was still a puppy.”

I’m taken aback by the fact that she could sense my thoughts but then I realize I should not be; my mind is completely porous and open to her here in thoughtspace. Still, I wonder, “But . . . Then why did she lie?”

“She didn’t want you to be afraid just because she was.”

Of course. “I think I understand.”

“Good. Don’t hide from your fears or doubts. Embrace them. I hope you heard exactly what you needed to hear.”

Before I can reply, the digital version of my family hut is gone, like it has been painted out of my vision in one broad brushstroke. I am plunged back into the absolute, directionless whiteness of empty thoughtspace. Disembodied and alone. The rattling sound like an opele returns and gets louder and louder until I feel something yank on my consciousness violently.

The last thing I hear in thoughtspace is her voice, once again accompanied by the chorus of memrionics, exploding into my consciousness like a bomb.

Exactly what you needed to hear.

I shoot out of thoughtspace like a mind missile, and my eyes fly open in realspace. I immediately collapse to the floor, vomiting all the moin-moin I ate for breakfast and retching violently, until I am so weak and empty that I feel separate from my body. I am not sure if the feeling is real, an illusion carried over from memory or just an electronic echo. I can feel Baba Yemi’s hands on my neck, trying to hold up my head, to get me some air, and close my lifedock, but I cannot see his face. I remember that nausea and dizziness are uncommon but documented side effects of the dream-counsel consultation, but I didn’t expect to feel this way. The edges of my vision are dark and wooly, and I know I am probably going to pass out.

Darkness.

When I come to, I am sitting, staring up at the white ceiling of a conference room. I almost panic, thinking I have somehow been reconnected to thoughtspace, but then I see the corners, the edges, and I look down to see my fellow ministers seated around a long table with lightscreen voting panels in front of us, Baba Yemi at the head.

They are all staring at me, a few of them furrowing their brows, chattering to each other or shaking their heads.

“Welcome back,” Jibola says, when our eyes meet.

I smile. It is good to see a friendly face after all that.

“It seems Minister Balogun has recovered and is with us again,” Baba Yemi says, staring at me. “How are you feeling?”

I tell him, “Great actually,” because it’s true.

“Good. You worried us for a bit, but all your neural scan readings are normal. Let’s call it first-time thoughtspace-sickness.” He smiles. “We can begin the debrief session now. It should not take long.”

He rises and speaks to the group of us as a hologram of yellow light appears at the center of the table and begins to display information about the consultation. “Total consultation time was six minutes and three seconds. Stability of the digital memrionic emulsion was maintained throughout the session.”

I start to raise my finger but hold it up to my lips instead, hesitant. Surely, there must be some kind of record of what I did. Some kind of anomaly in the readings?

“No local discontinuities or neural interface breakdowns were observed. Minister Balogun may have had a rough exit but nothing some of you haven’t seen or experienced before.” Baba Yemi waits for these facts to sink in as the information displays in front of us. “I believe you should all have received the same answers to your queries. Accordingly, I open the floor for a motion, after which you may vote.”

I look around and that is when I notice it. They are all hesitant too. They must have all gotten the same advice—go to war. No one wants to disbelieve the advice of our electric mother, but given the consequences of such dire action, and the resistance from the Alaafin that would be sure to follow, no one wants to admit what they must know we all know.

The silence grows sharp and piercing. I think of my mother, sitting in our ancient family hut, unchanged after hundreds of years, contemplating a life without my father, a life she couldn’t even imagine. Can I imagine a world where we don’t honor the dream-counsel of our electric mother?

Exactly what you needed to hear.

The voice in my head is clear as a talking drum. An electric echo? Or my own memories of that encounter just being replayed? What difference does it make? Perhaps Jibola was right all along. I look to him and he meets my gaze.

As a flood of emotions begin to blanket my mind, I think of my mother standing in the doorway of our Ibadan house. She told me Rover wouldn’t bite even though he’d bit her in the past. I start to wonder what it means to help someone you love, to give them good advice, to help them become the best version of themselves that they could be, perhaps even better than you. Perhaps sometimes a useful lie is the best way to point someone in the direction they need to go.

My finger goes up, confidently this time.

“I propose that we put this consultation on hold and reconvene our original cabinet session. We can continue our deliberations until we reach a consensus.”

I can almost feel the eyes of the ministers on me, focused like lasers, but I keep my focus on Jibola, whose face breaks out into a broad smile now. I think he understands, just as I did, why the electric mother told us to go to war. I expect an uproar, objections, voices raised in protest for wasting our time, but there is nothing. The silence reestablishes itself.

I scan the room quickly and take in an assortment of expressions, but the only one I cannot read is Baba Yemi’s. The only thing I am sure of is that he does not seem surprised at all even though I don’t remember reading any other consultation reports which were frozen at the debrief stage. When he finally speaks and breaks the silence again, his words are clear and deliberate. “The motion is moved. I put it to you now, ministers of the Ọyọ Mesi, do you wish to put this consultation on hold? Your voting panels are before you. Yes or no.”

I watch as the votes are entered, a lightstream of encrypted data beamed into the central hologram, and as I do, I start to wonder if I ever actually reached Ìyá Ajimobi and my mother at all, or if the digital supercitizen, our collective electric ancestor, simply showed me and told me exactly what I needed to hear.

The lights continue to weave themselves together. I enter my vote and when the weaving stops, the light in the center displays a unanimous Yes in bright yellow ajami calligraphy.

Congyun (a.k.a Mu Ming) Gu is a Chinese speculative fiction writer from Beijing, currently living in New York. She was born in 1988 in Chengdu, China, and has published short stories and novellas since 2016. Her stories can be found in Clarkesworld, Samovar, and various Chinese literary platforms. She has won multiple awards since 2017, including the Best Short Story at the 31st Galaxy Awards and the Golden Award for the Best New Writer Award in the 11th Global Chinese Sci-Fi Nebula Award in 2021. Her first collection, Colora il Mondo, launched in Italian and her first Chinese collection, The Serpentine Band was published in 2023.

By Those Hands

Congyun “Mu Ming” Gu, translated by Judith Huang

When Qingyun Tang walked into the house, Old Tang was bent over, cutting bamboo into strands. Heat was rising in indistinct waves from the stove where a clay pot stood, filled with simmering sausage, green beans, and white rice.

“Back home so late again? Come and eat,” said Old Tang, lifting his eyes and peering at Qingyun’s reflection in the mirror just above its frame. The girl had short floppy hair, thin suspenders holding up her jeans, and large headphones hanging around her neck, spewing what sounded to him like gibberish.

“I’ve already eaten outside.” Qingyun walked over to the bamboo sofa to lie down and pulled out her phone. The chain around her wrist jingled loudly.

“Food from outside is not as good as food from home. Come on, at least eat a little if you don’t eat it all. It’s green beans and sausage clay pot rice.” Old Tang stopped cutting with the knife in his hand and, by the light of the yellow lamp, examined the delicate strands of bamboo. The green part of the bamboo stems, which he had split so the yellow core was removed, was tough and strong, yet only half an inch thick. He had then further split it eight times into thin strips, carefully cut, which were all thin enough to be so translucent that you could read the small print of the evening newspaper through it if you held it up to the lamp.

Old Tang was trained in the art of bamboo craftsmanship and had finished his apprenticeship in the craft when he was just sixteen. Now, he had been weaving bamboo for forty-one years, and he was a master.

Qingyun dawdled, taking her time to get up and scoop a small bowl of green beans and a handful of rice dripping with pepper grains into her bowl.

“Why aren’t you eating any sausage?” Old Tang lifted the intricate bamboo crock cover on the table to reveal a dish of preserved cabbage.

The cabbage had been soaked and preserved by Old Tang himself over a month ago, and the sausage had also been made by him last winter. Thirty-five pounds of lean meat, fifteen pounds of fat, everything diced and sliced with his skillful knife: lantern pepper, regular pepper, bright green sun-dried peppers, then passed through a grinder to form little tubes, then, with just the tips of the chopsticks, pushed carefully into little sausage cases, before being hung out on the balcony to dry. Because there were not many people in his family, the sausages lasted a long time. Since the sausage had been hanging to dry for quite some time, their surface was now covered with an ashy substance. When they were steamed, they were also brown, no longer the striking bright, oily red they had been while hanging from the window outside. Regardless, Old Tang felt that anything made by hand at home was bound to be better than anything bought from a store outside. As for what exactly made it better, he could not say.

“Next year, don’t do it yourself anymore. You’ll just tire yourself out. If you don’t want to eat store-bought ones, then take the meat, bring it to the market, and use the machine there,” said Qingyun, picking at the pepper grains while looking at her phone. “It’s electric, and specially made for grinding meat and making sausages.”

“What machine!” Old Tang’s hands gathered the strands of bamboo, but because his hands were shaking, they clattered to the ground. He wanted to stand up in protest but found himself paralyzed, glued to the chair.

“Dad!” Qingyun threw down her chopsticks. “Another headache?”

Old Tang strained wordlessly for the teapot. Qingyun hurriedly handed it to him, and Old Tang gurgled and drank until beads of sweat rolled down the furrows all over his wrinkled face. He seemed to calm down a little.

“You’d better go check on it earlier. It’s fine to leave these alone for now.” Qingyun whispered.

“Don’t bother, I have my own tally.” Old Tang bent down and, not raising his head even once, began picking up the bamboo strands one by one. Qingyun picked up the rice grains silently. Between them, neither issued a sound.

The Tang family did not watch much television. For decades, after nightfall, the house was filled, in the early evening, with the sounds of Qingyun doing her homework—the rustle of pen and paper, while the later part of the evening would see the house filled with the sounds of Qingyun practicing guzheng, the plucked strings of the instrument resounding. These days, the sounds of keyboard and mouse were more likely, crackling on into the night as it got late. Interspersed with this was the rustling sounds of Old Tang cutting bamboo, making it into cylinders, weaving it into different patterns, and polishing. The sound of cars honking on the street and the music played by the little provisions shop in the alley made him feel frustrated and anxious, and it was only the subtle sounds made by his own hands and the objects he was working with that allowed him to concentrate and escape, to pretend that he had returned to his old home near the forest, where the wind rustled through the bamboo leaves.

“Leave it.” The sound of water from the washbasin. Old Tang scolded, “Young lady, leave it. Hands made for playing the guzheng would get coarse by doing chores like washing up.”

“Your hands are more valuable than mine,” argued Qingyun, using the cylinders to brush the bowl. “You’re able to weave bamboo using one hundred and eighty different methods, all by hand. Isn’t that more impressive than playing the guzheng?”

Old Tang didn’t say anything. He had started his apprenticeship at the age of fifteen and became a master at the age of twenty, and even his own master had said that he, Tang Hong, was the most accomplished bamboo craftsman he had ever seen. At that time in the old countryside, bamboo craftsmen had a good life. People who farmed the fields needed bamboo rakes, bamboo dustpans for drying grain, bamboo curtains for hanging in the summer, bamboo mats to sleep on, and bamboo cases for hand warmers. He still remembered the couplet that decorated the front door of his store: Branches and vines are shaped into tools, whether square or round; we, too, are shaped into worthy things of use. At that time, he took great pride in his role as a bamboo craftsman and had great regard for his craft. Craftsmen made an honest living, neither stealing nor robbing. He thought he was set for life and wouldn’t have to worry about making a living. Little had he anticipated the world of today.

Old Tang reached his hand out to examine it. The many years of learning the art of a hundred and eighty methods of weaving bamboo had left his hands with cracks, scars, and bruises. The cold Chengdu winters also gave him frostbite, aggravating the cracks and making them itchy and painful, and no matter what medicinal balms he used, they never relieved his hands. But it was not frostbite that made his heart feel like it had been scratched by a cat’s claw.

“Dad, next weekend, I want to bring Xu Xiao over for a meal,” Qingyun said as she finished wiping the table and washing the rag. “We’ll just eat at the restaurant downstairs and come back up here for tea afterward.”

Old Tang frowned.

“Oh alright, alright, we’ll eat at home, okay? Anyway, he keeps saying he wants to come and see you working at your craft. Maybe you could even take on a disciple!”

“Disciple?” Old Tang snorted. Since 1977, when he first started working at the bamboo factory, and in the two decades or more that he’d practiced his art, how many disciples had he taken on? But how many still practiced the craft today? Not to mention, the way young people were these days, they couldn’t even sit still long enough to concentrate, not to mention learn the nuances of the art of bamboo weaving. Even his own daughter, who grew up watching him work, had never even tried her hand at it once, and was completely ignorant of the art. Take on a disciple?

It had gotten late, and Qingyun went back to her room. Old Tang was still under his lamp, his blade still open in his hand, but, instead of working, he simply sat and stared. Outside the window, the noise of commerce filled the street, and the glaring neon lights and shadows distracted passersby with their brilliance. Times had indeed changed, but at the bottom of the heart, there was always a shard of something hard, something solid and immovable.

Those with skills that the world requires prosper, while those without those skills are trapped with nowhere to go. Bamboo implements are cheap and lowly, unlike objects and precious things made of jade or silver. His master had said that if you wanted to be able to make a good living, to make a name for yourself, you need to rely on your own two hands. To this saying, Old Tang had tacked on, perhaps unconsciously, that no machine could equal the skill and finesse of a master craftsman of the art of bamboo. He just refused to believe it possible.

When I first came to New York City six years ago, I wandered around with no regard as to where I would end up. At the Rubin Museum of Art, my fingers stroked a tapestry from the Himalayas, and at a small Ethiopian restaurant, I rolled sour injera bread with tiny holes in it that evoked the texture of honeycomb. Truly, you can find something from every corner of the world in this city. In the subway, faces that emerged were varied and diverse, and in the plaza, every hand raised was a different color. After the initial shock subsided, I tried to find a common essence behind the differences, to find something abstract in common. This is the way I understand the world. It is the essence of my profession.

I studied applied mathematics at the Courant Institute. Applied mathematics is about abstraction and induction. If the beauty of pure mathematics lies in the creation of pure patterns in a concise system, unencumbered in any way by reality, as the mathematician G. H. Hardy said, or even the physical world itself, then applied mathematics is, I’m afraid, ugly, and concerned with trivialities. What I am after is not a perfect crystal in the void, nor a creativity comparable to that of a painter or a poet, but an explanation, a model, a new perspective that arises after careful observation and profound reflection. With this perspective, even ordinary things take on unimaginably rich layers and wonderful patterns may be observed.

In my second year, I started to decide on my research direction. Wall Street is the best testing ground for applied mathematics. The ever-changing market fluctuations and the richness and diversity of investment portfolios require precise descriptions in the language of mathematics. The pricing theory of securities was modeled by stochastic differential equations, and the value-at-risk of stocks was predicted by Monte Carlo methods. The models we play with in the lab, just a few miles away from the world’s largest financial market in terms of volume, become real, huge risks, and commensurate huge returns. Hundreds of the brightest brains are fighting it out on this battlefield, and hundreds of megabytes of data are being captured, analyzed, and modeled as they speed through fiber optic cables. But for me, that’s not interesting enough.

The research question I chose to answer was regarding the brain itself. In essence, it was not very different from the research my classmates were doing. If we look at the financial markets as a giant brain, then each trading decision that is made can be seen as a single disbursement of individual neurons, and each flow of information is analogous to the transmission of impulses between synapses. Deciphering the transmission process of a certain external stimulus along the “neural pathways” is also equivalent to deciphering the market shock that a certain piece of news may trigger. Understanding that the actual human brain is much more difficult and more interesting than understanding the financial markets. Not only because the average volume of transactions in the New York Stock Exchange is just forty thousand per second, whereas the human brain has millions of signals passing through it per second. But more importantly, the brain is not the only organ we use for this.

During my first year at the Courant Institute, I took an introductory neurology course in the medical school. In the class, I saw a diagram of a longitudinal section of the human brain, and above each brain region, other organs were drawn, in proportion to the size of the area of the brain responsible for the motor and sensory functions of each organ. This schematic diagram is called a cortical homunculus. On the diagram, I saw a hand that took up a larger proportion of the brain than the entire lower half of the body.

I have never forgotten that lesson. The old professor said in an incomprehensible Eastern European accent that the hand is the most delicate and complex organ that human beings have. There are a million nerve fibers in the human hand, a number unmatched in any limb of any other animal. The human being thus has the most complex and special functional relationship between organs, namely the connection between the hand and the brain. In addition, the human hand has an extremely special and delicate group of nineteen small muscles, each with a unique degree of freedom of movement. I reach out, flex my hands, and tighten them into fists again, imagining a torrent of data rushing into my brain at one hundred meters per second, lighting up one neuron after another, shining like a star.

The bamboo weaving factory was reorganized in 2003. The factory, which had employed five hundred people, was streamlined to less than one hundred workers. The old hands who had been doing it all their lives, and the young apprentices who only had a few years’ experience, were all asked to leave. At the time, Old Tang was such a skilled hand at bamboo that he thought he would easily avoid this round of layoffs, but sadly, at the last minute, a relative of the director was given a spot in the quota instead of him, and Old Tang was forced out of his job.

His old colleagues lamented that if only he had presented two high quality Jiaozi brand cigarettes, or a bottle of Luzhou baijiu liquor to the right person, he would almost definitely have been able to stay on. But at the time, Old Tang was still young and stubborn, with an artistic temperament and a temper that refused to let him seek help from anyone. He thought he should be allowed to stay simply on account of his high degree of skill and craftsmanship. After all, which colleague at the factory could dispute that he was a highly skilled Master? With his skill, even if he lost his job at the factory, it was impossible to imagine that he would starve.

Reality hit him as he watched the decades-old company sign get replaced by a sign for a private limited company, thus changing its standing as a government brand. The cool wind that blew the street full of Chinese parasol leaves, flittering and clattering, blew just as cold a wind in his empty heart. That day he did not ride his bike, instead pushing it slowly along the south bank of the river, and, after he had passed the second ring road viaduct, he spotted the smoke spouting from the towering cranes, busy in the act of changing his city. When did his city change so much?

It was painfully obvious to Old Tang why he had been laid off. Although ostensibly the management had said the benefits of bamboo were not obvious enough, and that the staff were redundant, in the end, it was simply because bamboo weaving was far too labor intensive to be cost-effective. To make the same product, say, a rice sieve, required a skilled factory weaver a full day of work, whereas at the plastics factory, the same sieve would take just minutes to produce. Although the plastic was coarser, the holes rougher, and the feel less warm and inviting than bamboo, how many people would be willing to fork out a few times the price just to have the same item made out of bamboo?

Not to mention that, if you let the machines run for a few extra hours, you could double your output, whereas human workers needed to stay up until the light ran out, and when the sun set, blurry human eyes could not make out the fine, supple bamboo strands. Although he was reluctant to admit it, Old Tang had to say that even though machines could not attain the complexity and finesse of his bamboo weaving, in terms of speed, the machine was a million times better than any bamboo craftsman, no matter how skilled.

His old colleagues told him that these days, it was even possible to get out of Sichuan Province on a train or plane. A journey that used to take a whole month now took a mere few hours. How could a bamboo craftsman, used to laboring for a whole month to make a single item, keep up with the increasing speed and relentless change of times like these? He had to face it: their time had passed, and this age had replaced them so swiftly, they hadn’t even had time to react.

A few of them left the factory with tens of thousands of yuan from the compensation they received. Some had enough savings and contacts to start motorcycle taxis or open grocery stores. The vast majority seemed to knock into insurmountable walls in every direction, losing all their money, and were reduced to doing odd jobs anywhere they could find them, working as security guards, masseuses, dishwashers, or vegetable sellers. The former bamboo artisans were now doing whatever they found their hand at, doing anything they could to survive. The only one who still refused to relinquish his bamboo carving knife was Old Tang.

Old Tang decided to invest tens of thousands of yuan, plus all the tens of thousands he had saved up over the course of twenty years, in opening his own store. He leased a small store on a tourist street where people came to buy gifts and antique wares and put up a sign saying “Chengdu Bamboo Weavers” above the door. From the moment he hung up that sign, it bought him another seventeen years in this line of business. Old Tang no longer worked for a factory, weaving coarse woven textiles, mats, and other household goods. Now, he specialized in intricate weaves and luxury products. Machines may be good at being quick and fast, and Old Tang recognized that. But it was different with fine work. This required finesse.

Bamboo weaving using the plants’ fibers that were split as fine as silk is a craft unique to the city of Chengdu. All the skills that Old Tang had picked up over the years from the old masters in the village had really gone to waste in the factory since they were seldom required, but fortunately, with practice, these skills came back to him easily. The thicker weaves, using coarser bamboo, were the foundation of the art of bamboo, but these fine skills of manipulating thin threads of bamboo were like the pinnacle of a beautiful, jeweled pagoda. Bamboo is inherently tough and strong, but when the fibers are separated into fine threads, they are soft and pliable, and unable to hold their shape on their own. So porcelain or silver teapots and tea bowls are used as a base on which to do the delicate weaves. This is called bamboo weaving on a base. Each item contains intricate designs so that every inch of its surface is woven with a different pattern, all depending on the individual artisan’s judgment and experience. This was not something that could be made by machine. Although he had left his master a few decades ago, in terms of fine bamboo weaving, few people could equal his skill since few people had received such training. In Old Tang’s own eyes, there was none who met his standard. This was Old Tang’s conviction.

Sadly, although his work was excellent, business was not so good.

The antiques and gift shopping street’s location was less than ideal, and his small store was in an obscure corner. In the dim darkness of the evening, a single lamp illuminated Old Tang. He was in the middle of making an intricately woven bamboo tea set. The weave was so tight that he could accommodate twelve strands of bamboo within a centimeter. That was what was required to certify it a fine grade bamboo weave.

Old Tang had not yet found a buyer for the set. It had been an entire month since the last tea ware was sold. He was idle for two days but felt so terrible lying idle that he went to the wholesale market to put together a range of white porcelain that he could sell as a set to wrap in bamboo. For Old Tang, to weave bamboo was like playing basketball for a basketball player or practicing guzheng for a musician. A single day of missing his practice caused his hands to feel raw, and his heart to feel troubled.

The year he was laid off, it wasn’t like it never crossed Old Tang’s mind to do something else. But the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that if he could do anything, he would still choose to weave bamboo. In the first few years of his business, he was losing money every year. Even Qingyun’s school fees were paid with borrowed money. Even when his wife divorced him, he was still unable to let go of his craft. With one hand he grabbed his daughter, while the other hand still grasped his bamboo. When he got busy, he even brought his child to the store. By the time he had finally gotten a little famous for his work, Qingyun had grown up. They had a better life, but by then he had grown old. Under the clear light of his lamp, the bamboo his hands were weaving spread like a net. These days, when he looked back at the decades of life, he increasingly felt that while he wove, he was also part of a net.

A car honked.

Old Tang frowned and looked up. When he chose the store in the obscure corner of the tourist town, one consideration was the cheaper rent. But another was also that it gave him peace and quiet. Drunks were unlikely to be found this deep in the alley, and the quiet gave him the peace to concentrate on work.

“Shifu, it’s me, Renjie Liu!” The car window rolled down, and the driver took off his sunglasses and waved, “Still recognize me?”

Old Tang opened his mouth, wanting to respond, but failed to make a sound. This disciple of his he remembered as being intelligent. However, when they worked together in the factory setting, his lively mind kept getting distracted with all kinds of schemes, so that he was completely unable to sit still and concentrate. One hot day, when Old Tang was sweating buckets in the factory while working on his weaving, Renjie was running to-and-fro, presenting Old Tang with a glass of chilled water. It turned out that this enterprising young man had secretly installed a refrigerator in the factory and was selling cans of soft drinks at one yuan a can to his colleagues, making more than any of them would on their salaries alone. Of course, the moment there was a series of layoffs, he was one of the first to be let go, and he went off to do some other kind of business. Old Tang had lost this particular apprentice a long time ago, and yet, the moment he heard him call him “Shifu,” he found himself tongue-tied.

“This place can be really hard to find!” said Renjie as he entered the door, looked around, and pulled up a nearby bamboo chair to sit on. “How’s business?”

“It’s good enough.” Old Tang continued to weave his bamboo. In the soft glow of the lamp, he saw that the skinny young boy he had known had since grown a beer belly, and that his business suit was straining to contain it. He himself was still wearing the old gray uniform from the bamboo factory that had laid him off.

“Don’t you wish to do something else? Come over to my company and do something with me.”

“I’m a craftsman. Not as good as you businessmen,” Old Tang replied, not looking up at him.

“A craftsman lives by the work of his hands. Don’t think too much! Isn’t that what you used to tell me? I still remember, you know!” Renjie lit a cigarette, leaned nearer to Old Tang to watch his weaving, and said, admiringly, “Woah, it’s like silk! That’s unbelievably fine!”

“I didn’t teach you these skills.” Old Tang put down his work, coughed twice in response to the smoke, and asked, “Why are you here?”

“Can’t I come just to see you?” Renjie put out the cigarette, “But if you must get straight to the point, then yes, there is a reason I’m here.”

“I won’t join your company,” said Old Tang, bowing his head. Renjie had called him on the phone before, wanting to hire him as a consultant. But Old Tang simply could not imagine putting down his bamboo weaving and wanted nothing to do with machines. He had already hung up twice on him and had never expected him to track him down and turn up at his door. But even if he begged him a third time, he still wouldn’t go. Old Tang had already made up his mind.

“I know.” Renjie smiled. “Our company intends to sponsor the Cultural Heritage Invitationals Exhibition. It’s a joint project with the Sichuan Department of Culture, and I immediately thought of you. Since you refuse to take my calls, I have no choice but to come here in person.”

“Bamboo weaving counts?” asked Old Tang, his eyebrows raised in surprise.

“Of course! I’ve really not seen an equal to your exceptional fine silk weaves. The judging is primarily based on dexterity and complexity of skill, and your hundred and eighty methods of bamboo weaving definitely count as complex. The more methods you can show off, the better!”

Old Tang said nothing. In the past two years, his headaches were becoming more and more frequent, and the pain made his vision blurry and his hands shaky. Pain he could tolerate, and he was also used to hard work and setbacks. But the thought of the craft he took decades to master being lost, little by little, was truly the most bitter fate for him to face. Old Tang had long thought that, while he still was able, he really needed to make a masterpiece to leave as a legacy, so that it would still endure for those who came after him, even if he was no longer around. Renjie’s offer spoke straight to his heart’s desire.

“How about it, Shifu? Will you think about it? In three and a half months, give me a call if you agree.” He put on his sunglasses, strode out of the little alley, and turned around for one last time. “I’ll be waiting!”

Old Tang nodded his head, already planning what he would need to do. The sound of Renjie’s car had long faded away when he remembered that tomorrow Qingyun would be bringing Xu Xiao home for dinner, and he had not even started to prepare the dishes he’d be serving. He rushed to his bicycle to ride to the market. Fortunately, he managed to pick up two celtuces and a handful of vegetables, including Chinese cabbage, and half a braised duck before closing time. He hung the duck from the handlebars of his bicycle and rode home slowly, humming songs from a Chinese opera as he went.

During my fifth year in New York, I felt overwhelmed for the first time.

For the past twenty years, whether it was studying for exams or fitting in during social activities, I was always able to quickly grasp the key to the puzzle and crack it with the absolute minimum of effort. Some say it’s a gift, but to me, it’s about thinking abstractly about a myriad of things, searching for the patterns that lie beneath, and applying your deductions. Just like mathematics. But that one time, I really felt as though I had hit a wall.

My thesis was about the neurology behind fine hand movements. Unlike in physiology and cognitive science, the language of computational neuroscience is mathematics and computer programming. The behavior of neurons, synapses, and neuronal networks become data that are analyzed to build mathematical models to imitate the workings of the cerebral cortex.

I don’t have to feed mice or monkeys, or insert electrodes into their motor cortices, or send questionnaires to subjects. I deal with the data itself to build the models and write the code. It is just like what quantitative analysts in the financial markets do, except that we still know next to nothing about this “market.” If you take the field of physics as an analogy, our field is still in its infancy, and has not yet seen our Galileo, much less our Newton or Einstein, when it comes to the quantifying of the human brain, much less the quantifying of the external world. It is both exciting and anxiety-provoking.

My data came from a collaboration with a group of researchers in the psychology department. Subjects followed instructions to perform certain hand movements, and MRI scans were taken, and data recorded. I mapped the hand movements to neural response signals, abstracted the key calculations, inferred the process of decision-making, built a model of the entire process, and coded algorithms to reproduce simple human fingertip movements into complex modeled signals. This was harder than I thought it would be. With millions of signals per second, identifying the signals that control hand movements is like finding a needle in a haystack. I tried various filtering algorithms and sequencing the subjects’ pulses, but the results were not good. I approached my doctoral advisor for advice, and he listened to my presentation without saying much, just inviting me to coffee after.

“You are very intelligent and very hardworking,” said my advisor. He was of Italian descent, a renowned scholar, with an outstanding mind, and discerning taste in both coffee and scientific research. I waited for him to continue with trepidation.

“However, being smart is only one aspect of doing research. Especially in this field.” He put down his cup, “Intelligence, insight, analytical ability, these can all be called talents. Talent is valuable and essential, but experience, or rather, domain knowledge, is often needed if we are to solve practical problems. It gives us a deeper understanding of the underlying structure.” He patted me on the shoulder, “Relax, I’ll let you take a break. Also, regarding the problem of detecting signals, muscle nerve signals are probably simpler to detect than central nervous system signals.”

I quickly figured out the mechanics of signal processing. But the domain knowledge my advisor spoke of still eluded me. Although I could extract stable muscle nerve impulses, the data were not significant enough to build a complete model.

I decided to take a break from work, hoping I could process things in the background like a program, as it were, while still doing my best to think. Then, one day, I casually flipped through the New York Times and came across a quote that jumped out at me.

The Devon-based [contemporary basket weaver] Hilary Burns recalls that observing Manthorpe [a master basket weaver] weave a herring cran was like “watching a dance; there was no wasted movement.” Despite the loss of this know-how, what had already vanished long before was something more profound . . .

—New York Times Style Magazine Feature: “The Enduring Appeal of Baskets” by Deborah Needleman

I stood up and paced back and forth in my dorm until darkness fell. I went downstairs and asked for a bowl of Lanzhou ramen at my regular noodle bar. The short, lanky Mexican-born boy skillfully stretched, threw, and pulled the noodles, a craft that had survived for a century and across an ocean, and, more importantly, now reinvented in a way the original inventor could never have imagined.

I graduated a year later, after handing in a computational model and prototype to my advisor. He smiled and shook my hands goodbye.

I flew back to Chengdu.

Xu arrived at their place at noon. Carrying a basket of fruit, standing in the doorway, his face was still stained with sweat despite it being the end of October. Qingyun led him into the house and fussed over him, bringing him a pair of slippers to wear and pouring him tea. But all the young man did was sit there gulping water, not saying a word.

Old Tang also said nothing, only going to the kitchen to bring out plate after plate of food. The delicate green celtuce, the deep purple Chinese cabbage, plump pink meat slices, the glistening red duck, and of course, the thinly sliced homemade sausage. Because Xu hailed from the Southern provinces where food was less spicy, Old Tang did not put too much chili in any of his dishes.

“Xu came back from abroad, and now teaches at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. He is the youngest professor there.” Qingyun clipped bits of food with her chopsticks while talking.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Xu exclaimed while clipping rice toward his mouth. “I haven’t been back in China long. I’m still working toward achieving something, unlike you, Uncle, Qingyun told me, your bamboo weaving craft, now that is . . . ”

Old Tang looked at Xu’s face, reddened with embarrassment, and it reminded him of himself when he was young. He gradually felt something indescribable grow inside him. “Ah, I know I’m old. Don’t say that. Now you, on the other hand—you teach at UESTC. What do you teach there?”

“I’m in the field of neuroscience.” Xu perked up. “Let’s put it this way: If you think about it, even for an ordinary child to learn something, for example, how to type on a keyboard, takes them a certain amount of time. Not to mention specialized tasks. I study a new generation of human-computer interfaces, which aim to solve this problem. Even better, maybe machines could even . . . ”

Old Tang’s brow furrowed again. Qingyun winked urgently at Xu, and he hurriedly broke off mid-sentence. “Of course, sometimes manual skill is still irreplaceable. Mr. Lao She once said that we must use mechanical methods in large industries, and in small industries, we must preserve the skill of our hands. Things like the bamboo weaving you do, that’s irreplaceable. Handicrafts are the embodiment of the human heart, and the heart is not something that can just be mechanized.”

“That’s well put.” Old Tang chucked a chopstick’s worth of Chinese cabbage into his mouth. “Qingyun said that you were interested in bamboo weaving?”

“Yes, I have an interest.” He took his glasses off and wiped it of his sweat.

When they had finished eating, Old Tang took out his bamboo carving knife and demonstrated how he could separate a millimeter-thick strand of bamboo into four or five strands that were only the width of a human hair.

“This is called splitting to silk grade. The width of the knife varies from top to bottom, and since there’s no scale, the evenness of the width of each strand is entirely controlled by hand. See, it’s of even thickness. The cross-section of each strand is the same.”

Then, he picked up the scaffold formed from bamboo strands, fitted it over the fine white porcelain tea ware, and picked up an even finer strand of bamboo to continue weaving along the porcelain. His hands moved up and down in waves, guiding the bamboo strands, lifting and pushing, applying pressure nimbly until the bamboo strands formed a fine mesh of a layer, securely clinging to the outside of the porcelain tea ware.

“Lift, press, twist: that’s the basic technique. Whether it is plying or weaving bamboo, it is very difficult to vary the force your hands exert correctly. If you use too much strength, the weave around the porcelain would get distorted into the wrong shape or even break. With too little force, the bamboo will split apart and not hold its shape. When it comes to weaving on a base like this, there is no fixed formula. Every inch is different, and everything depends on an individual’s discernment and experience. If you look at this weave carefully, you would be certain that no machine could make anything equal to it.”

Xu didn’t seem to have heard anything. He was staring at Old Tang’s hands.

“I’ll show you the ones that I’ve finished.” Old Tang pointed to the porcelain cup and repeated himself, seeming a little out of sorts. He suspected this young man had only said he was interested in bamboo weaving to curry favor with him. And yet even Qingyun had believed him. He didn’t really want to rattle on anymore, what he did for a living was his own business. As for what Renjie had asked him to do that afternoon, Old Tang was already hatching a plan in his heart.

When Qingyun pulled Xu into her own room and the sounds of the guzheng strings being plucked gently, Old Tang decided to put the whole thing behind him.

“Dad, come, dinner is ready.” When he looked up, it was already dark. Qingyun had brought him some noodles. “He’s already gone, you didn’t even notice when he said goodbye.”

“He just left?” Old Tang was a little embarrassed.

“He even gave you a gift.” Qingyun handed over a string of beads. It was a bracelet of white chinaberries strung with a black tassel braided rope. Obviously of good quality, they were of equal size and when brought near, gave off the faint aroma of something bitter. “They were specially selected. It’s said if you wear them in winter, they can prevent frostbite. I know you treasure your hands more than anything.”

Old Tang took the bracelet and tried it on. The size was just right. He felt his heart soften a little. He also thought to himself, how likely was it that he’d accept a son-in-law as a disciple anyway? After all, he himself could barely earn a hundred yuan in a day. What he should really be worried about was disciples wanting to become sons-in-law. He would not want to let Qingyun suffer such poverty. Although the young man was a bit nerdy, at least he seemed decent, and he and Qingyun had also been together for quite a while. If they really could settle down, at least that would count as one less thing he had to worry about. As for the other matter, he would need to step up. Old Tang slowly turned his new bracelet, not noticing the faint green cast of the beads.

It has always been difficult to explain to people what I do. Ironically, this is because, unlike launching rockets or genetically engineering rice, what I do seems so simple.

“That’s it?” Qingyun asked, pursing her lips, after she saw my first demonstration. The visual demonstration was of a 3D reconstruction of a human hand picking up a credit card out of a pile of other items.

“That project took me five years to do as a doctoral student! It was only after I put in a ton of work that it even managed to pick up that credit card. If you just replace the credit card with a rubber ball, it’ll go back to not working,” I said. “You may not know this, but it’s much easier to predict the motion of a distant asteroid than it is to predict the motion of an object being pushed across a table by a model hand.”

“But robot hands in factories have been able to follow instructions for movements in an assembly line for a very long time,” Qingyun said, skeptical.

“It’s true that robot hands perform well under strictly controlled factory conditions. But the world is not an assembly line. It’s easy for people to interact with countless objects and an unpredictable environment. They can do so without thinking. But for machines, it’s extremely difficult. Why do you think that’s so?”

She tapped the desk, unconsciously playing invisible guzheng strings.

“That’s because hands are soft.” I tugged at hers.

“Hey.” She shook my hand off.

“Flexibility. Tactility. The ability of the fingers to adjust in time to changes in the surface of an object is the most efficient way for a human to interact with the world. Man has invented countless tools, but the world, robotics experts say, is still designed for human hands. The reverse is also true.”

She looked at me, then at her hands in wonder, tightening them into fists and then stretching them out again. Once, I had done the same. What appears inevitable and simple on the surface is both a trap and a shackle to our thinking. The more something appears simple and familiar, the later we as the human race come to truly understand it, because familiarity breeds contempt and stereotypes prevent us from examining simple things more closely. Such is the case when it comes to exploring our very bodies themselves. Our own bodies are like a far-off mountain, unknown and unexplored for thousands of years, despite being closer than our own skin.

“You’ve heard of the man from Qi who was afraid the sky would fall on him . . . ” I teased.

“No, I’m not worried at all.”

“The people who laughed at the man from Qi would never come to realize that classical mechanics, earth science, atmospheric science, many fields all have their origin in his very simple question. Now, like him, we have to do something similar.”

She was still bewildered. I didn’t say anything further. The first time I met her, I remembered her skillful guzheng-playing hands. But like the vast majority of people, she couldn’t grasp this new paradigm, and her father, even less so. His gaze, though different from that of my advisor, made me incredibly nervous. Although he probably saw me as a traitor who wanted to take his job, that was not my ultimate goal. I was not out to simply complete a specific, tangible job. I wanted someone to understand my purpose, at least to the extent that that was possible.

In the blink of an eye, it was now winter solstice. If Old Tang had been walking down the streets, he would not find it cold, but because he sat for long hours at home, the cold soaked straight into his bones, leaving his joints with rheumatic aches and pains. Even so, Old Tang stubbornly refused to install central heating. In fact, he did not even turn on the electric stove he did have. He was concerned that the heating would dry out the house, leading his bamboo strands to grow too brittle to weave. He had already completed about half of his project. Judging from the rate he was progressing, he would just about make the deadline, but he could not procrastinate even a little.

Old Tang blew hard on his hands, and then rubbed them together to generate heat. This year, he genuinely seemed to suffer from less frostbite. The chinaberry wood beads had already developed a shiny patina from friction and being rubbed by his hands, and his hands had swollen with water retention so that he could no longer take the bracelet off. He thought of performing one of the time-honored rituals of a Chengdu winter—eating good quality home-cooked lamb soup—and put on his jacket before heading out the door. The university term wasn’t over yet, so perhaps Xu could come.

At the market, he got a couple of pounds of lamb shank, slung it over his bicycle bars, and started thinking about the time Xu had come over for dinner. He had not even touched the Chinese cabbage, but at least Qingyun had eaten a bit of it. So he decided to select a few green celtuce. If he chopped them up and added them to the soup and boiled them until they grew tender and supple, they would make excellent comfort food. He thought about Qingyun, and how she had mentioned that Xu was a Southerner whose taste ran sweet, so he headed toward Wen Shu Fang on his bike.

The cakes and sweets at the Wen Shu Fang emporium had a decades-long reputation, especially their Peach Rose Cakes. When Qingyun was small, she used to cry because she missed her mother, and Old Tang had used those cakes to placate her. Now, Qingyun was fully grown, and her vanity meant she was watching her figure, so she didn’t eat them anymore. But Old Tang still remembered the way to the little alley where the shop could be found.

He brought the paper box back to his bike and balanced it carefully on the back of his bike, then proceeded to ride slowly and carefully. He had not come to the Wen Shu Fang area for quite a long time. The formerly run-down alley outside the courtyard wall had now been renovated to resemble an ancient street for the sake of attracting tourists, with pink and white walls, ochre roofs, and red and yellow store signs installed all over the place. It looked surprisingly lively in the gloomy winter, with many tourists and locals milling about.

Old Tang got off his bike when he got to the entrance of the renovated street. When he was laid off, the renovation of Wen Shu Fang had just been completed, and the development was just starting to advertise for tenants. At the time, others had encouraged him to set up a storefront here instead of at his current store in Song Xiao Qiao. The asking price for rent then was about three thousand RMB a month, three times the asking price for the Song Xian Xiao store, and he considered and mulled over it quite a bit before ultimately rejecting the idea.

For one thing, if business was really bad, he would have to worry about not being able to make ends meet. For another, he really did not like the noisy sounds of a bustling street—it prevented him from concentrating on work. However, in hindsight, the poor foot traffic in Song Xian Qiao meant that the street became more and more deserted, and still, despite this, rent had risen to ten thousand RMB. The first few tenants had told him that traffic at Wen Shu Fang was now very busy. Just selling silk handkerchiefs with pandas embroidered on them or kitschy Sichuan opera masks would net enough to pay the rent, as well as a tidy profit. When Old Tang heard this, he had nothing to say. He thought back on the many decades of hard work he had put in to learning his fine bamboo craft, thought through every choice he had made from the beginning to this moment. At the time he made those choices, he always thought he factored in everything carefully before making a rational decision. But in hindsight, if he had the chance to choose again, he really had no idea what he would have chosen.

Old Tang stared for a while, and then continued to ride down the street. The street featured not just handicraft stores, but also a variety of high-end teahouses and restaurants, all sporting a “vintage,” “rustic” bamboo hut look for people to eat cold noodles in. Young men and women dressed in fashionable clothing walked in and out of these establishments, and standing in the midst of them, Old Tang felt that he was the tourist.

Along the street, a black lacquered wooden door with gold trim opened, and a middle-aged man in a suit stepped out. Old Tang felt a flash of recognition. It was Renjie Liu. He did not see Old Tang but was chatting while walking toward his car. The door he had emerged out of was hiding what seemed to be a high-class club. Old Tang tried to glimpse inside, but only caught a flash of green, bamboo-like shadows.

“Manager Liu, thank you very much!” the person next to Renjie Liu said. Old Tang thought he sounded familiar.

“Professor Xu, please don’t stand for ceremony! You’re very welcome. With a young talent like you, the honor is all mine!” Renjie Liu was smiling ear to ear. Old Tang froze. He saw, through the crowd, clearly though he was at a distance, that the other person was Xu. He was wearing a dark gray tweed coat, half-frame glasses, and looked every inch the cultured gentleman. But laughing and talking with Renjie Liu, he seemed a completely different person from the red-faced young man who had sat down to dinner at his own table.

Seeing Xu get into Renjie Liu’s car and drive over, Old Tang hurriedly turned away. How did they know each other? Why were they looking at bamboo weaves together? Did Qingyun know about this? Old Tang did not dare to think too much, got on to his bike, and peddled furiously until he got home. He hadn’t ridden so fast for a long time, and when he got home and undressed, his undershirt was soaked in sweat. He sat down and looked at his half-finished bamboo weave. He didn’t stop panting.

Qingyun opened the door, “Ah, so many dishes! Wow, you also got sweets and cakes from Wen Shu Yuan!” She circled Old Tang, “You sure are sincere in welcoming your future son-in-law.”

“What son-in-law!”

“What?”

“You know what! No!” Old Tang was angry. “I don’t know what kind of people he mixes with!”

“What’s wrong with him all of a sudden? He’s a university professor—how the hell is he not good enough for the bamboo weaver’s daughter?” Qingyun exploded and took a step back, her face red with anger, “I always do what you want, but just what decade do you still think this is? Even the electric heater is not even on! It’s like I’m walking on eggshells all the time!” Her eyes were bloodshot. “Even Mum couldn’t stand you.”

Old Tang stood up to his full height, beads of sweat beading on his face. “So you look down on bamboo weavers now—” He felt a stab of pain in his head, and in a flash, he was sprawled all over the chair.

This time, the pain was stronger than it had ever been, and it would not go away. It was as though there were countless tiny bamboo strands stuck into the furrows of his brain. Old Tang wished to grit his teeth and bear it like he had every other time, but this time he was past the point of endurance.

That wonderful solstice family dinner went uneaten. Old Tang was sent to the ICU at the hospital, and then transferred to the general ward, where he stayed for four days and where his whole body was examined. In the large general ward, there was a constant stream of people coming and going. Along with the sound of doctors talking, the beeping of various instruments, the moaning of patients, the anxious inquiries of family members, and the sounds of weeping disturbed Old Tang, so that he slept fitfully, if at all. Finally, at long last, it was time for light’s out, and the hospital grew a little quieter, and still, he was disturbed by the sound of snoring coming from the next bed.

Every morning, Qingyun brought him a thermos filled with a generous amount of chicken soup, and at noon it was seafood noodles. But she refused to tell him the illness he had been diagnosed with. While peeling an apple, Old Tang got about half a question out of his mouth, but when he saw how red her eyes were, he did not continue. He knew very well that although he was still able to work, he was, after all, getting up there in years. When people grow old, like machines that have been working for a long time, they need to be oiled regularly, and human organs and body parts, used for decades, that look perfectly functional from the outside and seem to be working well, could still be atrophying or rotting away on the inside. It was only a matter of time. For the past two years, deep down he had known that he was unwell, but had been in denial, refusing to come to the hospital to confirm his suspicions.

Father and daughter faced each other, each unable to say a word, until the doctor arrived.

“So have you considered the options? We still recommend surgery first, then chemotherapy.” The doctor was quite young, and the name tag on his chest indicated that he was a neurosurgeon.

“What disease do I have?”

“The patient still doesn’t know?” The doctor wanted to tell him but held back. “You need to talk it over properly and consider all your options. Of course, if you want to keep to really conservative treatments, you can also go that route . . . after all, you are on the older side and the condition is complex.”

The doctor walked away. Old Tang looked at Qingyun and said nothing, just waiting for her to speak. The girl had been biting her lips the whole time. Finally, she could hold back no longer, and tears fell from her eyes. Through her sobs, Old Tang made out that his intermittent headaches and fainting spells had been due to a brain tumor. Although technology had advanced greatly, his disease was still incurable. At his present age, the prognosis for survival in the next five years was bad, at only ten percent; the average length he was expected to live was less than two years.

It was just a few numbers, but the effect they had on Old Tang was to make his heart feel as though a rope were tightening around it, squeezing tighter and tighter. Qingyun had dissolved into a crying mess, leaving tissues all over the floor. “I’ll take you to Beijing, to Shanghai for the best treatment.”

“Forget it.” Old Tang surprised himself with how calm he was. “Old age, sickness, and death, these things can’t be helped.”

“No . . . ” Qingyun’s tears kept falling.

Old Tang said nothing, only reaching out to smooth her hair. Qingyun’s hair was good, black, bright, and thick. When she was young, he braided her hair every day. With all the fancy hairstyles: princess hair, ponytail braid, fishbone braid, twisted braid, many people could not believe that the little girl was brought up by her father. Now that Qingyun was taller than him and had been for more than a decade, she no longer asked him to braid her hair.

“Let’s go home first.”

“Dad . . . ”

“Let’s go home first. It’s just a small request . . . please, can’t you do even this small thing for me?” Old Tang deliberately raised his voice to appear as though he were losing his temper, “What’s the point of living at the hospital?” At this, his voice seemed to crack a little.

The moment Old Tang arrived home, he picked up more than half of the bamboo weaves he had completed. Although it had only been a few days in the hospital, his hands were already itching to work again. The second layer of weaving was almost done, and he had reached the part that would bind off the weave. In silken bamboo weaves, the binding off is also known as “locking off.” In high quality weaves the final strand is hidden. The excess bamboo is clipped off, and then a thin layer of craft glue is applied onto the strand with a brush at the spot where it would be bound, or “locked off.” The way the cut is made must also be done with care and precision. Cut too short, and the head would be exposed, but cutting more could endanger the structure of the weave and cause it to unravel. Old Tang took out a small file and meticulously filed off the exposed head little by little and felt a little of his former spirit return to his body.

As the moon waxed to fullness, the artwork gradually started to take shape. His anxious heart, which had felt as though it were hanging by a thread, also seemed to settle down, coming to rest a little more steadily in his breast. Invitations to exhibit at the show were supposed to pass public review as well as the province’s panel of experts in the field, but Old Tang, not knowing what other contenders were doing, decided not to worry too much about the process. He also didn’t return Renjie Liu that phone call. He simply thought that as long as he did his best with the work, and presented it at the time of the exhibition, things would naturally fall into place.

Qingyun stammered something about Xu wanting to come and see him, but Old Tang ignored it. What he had seen in Wen Shu Fang that day, he had never related to Qingyun. Even though he was not entirely certain what he had seen, his heart felt like it had been tied into a knot. In any case, he had better not think too much—it was all too overwhelming.

Three days before the launch of the exhibition, Old Tang finished the artwork. He checked it over carefully, and it was all to his satisfaction, so he put on his coat and went out the door. For the first time in months, he felt lighthearted enough to enjoy some time in a teahouse, so he took a different turn on his bike and headed to Huanhua Brook.

These days, the famous teahouses that had long lined the brook had been transformed into high-class establishments, with expensive menus. In the past, he always favored the quieter ones, but now even these were newly renovated and serving high-grade, expensive teas. At night, they were even transformed into bars playing loud music and serving alcohol. No one drank the traditional Lao San Hua tea anymore. In the several crowded parks he passed on his way, he could hear the sounds of noisy mahjong games, making him feel uneasy.

Old Tang sat down in a small courtyard, soaking up the rare sunshine. The sun shone through the gaps of the leaves of the Chinese parasol trees, green and gold, spilling into deep and shallow shadows. He gathered his cotton jacket around him, closed his eyes, and curled up in the bamboo chair. The guzheng on the stage began to play, and he was almost lulled to sleep.

“Old Tang! It’s been a long time since you’ve last come here!”

He opened his eyes to see the teahouse owner pouring him a bowl of tea from a large, long-spouted copper teapot before bringing it to his table. “Still weaving bamboo?”

“Yes.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Qingyun too, and I was wondering what happened to the two of you.” Qingyun sometimes played the guzheng here. When she performed on stage, she wouldn’t be wearing her usual jeans, instead putting on her earrings and bracelets, putting on her elegant full-length spring green dress, and lowering her brow while she plucked the strings, her fingertips fluttering. According to Qingyun, she had met Xu Xiao for the first time in this teahouse. Old Tang could understand that for sure. When Qingyun played the guzheng, every teahouse guests’ eyes were riveted on her. Even modest Old Tang himself could not hold back his praise when he saw her at that guzheng.

“Young people are busy with their own things.” The thought of Xu had upset Old Tang a little. It was like poking a sore spot, and yet his suspicion was something he couldn’t really explain.

“Has she found herself a boyfriend? I’ve told you before, a girl like Qingyun, with her looks and her talent at the guzheng, and not to mention, she’s filial to boot . . . like I said, don’t be too worried about her or try to control her too much.” The teahouse owner peeled a tangerine while he talked. “Your little girl has grown up. Your thinking is too old-fashioned . . . ”

Old Tang coughed a couple of times, so the teahouse owner did not continue. The guzheng on the stage was now playing “Lament of the Peach Garden,” the song from the part of the story in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms where Zhang Fei had just received news of his dear sworn brother Guan Yu’s death. Zhang Fei rushed for a day and a night to Chengdu, begging his other sworn brother Liu Bei to appoint the troops to attack the Eastern State of Wu. The two sworn brothers meet outside the city and weep for their fallen third brother. Zhang Fei sang this song of sorrow for his older sworn brother, lamenting the vicissitudes of age. Old Tang was moved, his heart troubled by the song, and found he could not sit there any longer. So he rode his bike home and opened the door to hear Qingyun clattering around inside her room.

Old Tang sat down and stood up, then sat down and stood up again, before finally making up his mind and knocking on Qingyun’s door. Although he could hear the guzheng being played inside, the door did not open.

“Qingyun, I want to tell you something.” Old Tang finally opened his mouth. But only the plucking strings of the guzheng replied.

Old Tang was both a little angry and a little anxious, so he twisted the handle.

The door was not locked.

“Why wouldn’t you open the door?” Old Tang asked.

But there was no one was in the room. On the ebony instrument, the delicate strings pulsated, and music flowed from it. When Old Tang looked closer, he saw tortoiseshell nails were plucking the strings, as though an invisible person were playing the guzheng with invisible hands.

Old Tang felt that the sky was spinning. He felt his legs buckle under him, and he hit the speakers with a thud.

It had been quite some time since Qingyun came to see me. Her father had been hospitalized. Data package updates received were less frequent, but the line of communication was still stable. I offered to visit him, but she didn’t give permission, and so I didn’t try to force it.

When I was still working in the Courant Institute, the psychology department’s experimental animal laboratory was just upstairs from where I worked. Of all the animals in there, three Tibetan macaques were the most precious. They had been raised since infancy as lab animals and each was worth tens of thousands of dollars. They were experimented on four times a week, for four hours each time. The experiments did not last for very long, but each time they had to be immobilized, their hands and feet tied down while electrodes were inserted below their cerebral cortices. Every few months, animal rights activists who opposed animal experimentation would hold signs outside the building in protest. They were not being unreasonable. These monkeys’ only purpose in life was to be experimented on, and they also sacrificed their lives for the sake of these experiments, when their cerebral cortex was exposed to the electrodes for long periods of time. Most lab monkeys die from the complications of infection within a few years.

Although my prototype was lightweight and noninvasive, since it only took in signals through contact with human skin, collecting EMG signals without causing actual damage to the subject, I was no different from my colleagues in the psychology department when it came to ignoring the will of the subjects of my experiments.

Renjie Liu was the flip side of it all. I was not one to refuse novel sources of funding for my research, but his ways and methods of getting things done were particularly unorthodox. Perhaps these were simply the rules of the game. The many stories told by my classmates who worked on Wall Street seemed to suggest this. My aim had always been to understand, to integrate, in order to reach a new paradigm in my mind. Because what I envisioned was more than just a doctoral thesis, a product, or even just a theory. A vast new paradigm, a completely new world filled with infinite possibility, must necessarily accommodate all the dimmer corners of reality. I just hoped I hadn’t sacrificed too much.

On the day Qingyun came to me, I was in the middle of correcting the fit of the prototype. She didn’t sit down. Instead, tears fell continuously as she spoke. “Neuroscience is your field, and even you can’t do anything about it?”

“I merely do the calculations,” I laughed bitterly, “Extraction, abstraction, mathematical modeling: It is called applied technology, but it is still just a means of understanding the theory. It’s like Newton coming up with the three laws of motion and giving us a way to understand physics and our external reality.”

“But, other programmers’ AIs can play Go and even win the world championship! You’re working in this field, but you still can’t do anything to help?”

Little had I known that even after doing applied math, the old problems would still be present. I was reminded once again of the G. H. Hardy quote that the most beautiful mathematics would have no application in the real world. When I had first heard that quote, I had laughed at his stubbornness, but now my heart was in knots because of it. The application of mathematics to build a new framework for understanding the human self, which he would probably have deemed already too “useful,” was still miles away from solving Qingyun’s very real problem.

I didn’t care. When Descartes invented the Cartesian coordinate system and Einstein discovered the theory of relativity, I didn’t care either, because the new perspectives and methodologies they brought to humanity itself was enough to put us all in awe. But at this very moment, I could find no way to face Qingyun.

“Human perception, including the connection between the hand and the brain, can be seen as an interface between human beings and the external world. It is a layer, the same way that text and images are a layer between people, or how the keyboard and mouse are a layer between people and machines. What I do is to mathematize and generalize this layer so that eventually one can get rid of the interface . . . ” I struggled to find the words, “to move matter with the mind, like . . . qigong?”

But this was useless to her.

On the screen, the prototype flickered on and on. After she left, I thought long and hard and picked up my phone to dial a number.

Old Tang didn’t have the energy to try to understand what had gone wrong. His head still hurt from time to time, but he insisted that he wouldn’t go to hospital no matter what his condition; instead, he downed vat after vat of thickly brewed tea and soldiered on. When it came to bamboo weaving, the most important and difficult part was to lock the final strand securely; and so, in the same way, he would give it his all to the end, not stop at ninety percent. Tomorrow was the Exhibition for the Invitationals—no matter what, he had to finish the work he had started.

The crescent of a new moon hung in the sky, and the days were short while the nights were long. Even before dawn lightened the sky, Old Tang gathered up his artwork and left the house. He didn’t ride his old faithful bike, instead getting Qingyun to hail him a taxi. The item that he hugged in his arms was not big, but it was wrapped in several protective layers. He carried it into the car.

“Why are you going to Chongzhou so early in the morning?” The driver looked at Old Tang, wrapped in his tattered cotton jacket, “What are you up to?”

“Exhibition.” Old Tang stroked the precious artwork in his arms. “Handicraft exhibition.”

“Handicrafts.” The driver nodded, “What a time-consuming thing to do . . . and a waste of expensive taxi fare . . . ”

“Whether it’s a big or small thing, someone has to do it.” Old Tang didn’t feel like making small talk.

“I suppose so.” The driver nodded, “Our fates are determined by our talents—each according to our ability, right? Sought-after, highly skilled talents get sought-after rewards and earn big bucks. Look at me, for example. I can’t do anything else, but I know the roads well, and I know how to drive . . . I know the maps like the back of my hand, and so I drive a taxi. You, you have your handicraft skills. Maybe it’s a little difficult to make a living . . . ”

Old Tang did not answer again. After a while, the taxi had quietly left the old town behind. It had been several decades. He had gone from being the famous young bamboo artisan whose name was known in every village for miles around, to the respected old master craftsman at the bamboo factory where everyone called him “shifu,” and now, here he was. He thought his work was refined, and that he had reached the pinnacle of his craft, but the people and things that surrounded him now confused him more than ever.

The car drove for an hour, to a town just beyond Chongzhou. This place resembled his old home a lot. Just on the edges of the town was a lush bamboo grove. It had been an age since he walked in such a bamboo grove. Walking through the fine mist, watching the sky gradually turn white, Old Tang touched the cold, green bamboo on its nodes, listening to the wind playing in the leaves of the bamboo, the sound of the gurgling stream as it ran over a gap, and was struck with a feeling of timelessness.

The exhibition hall was located deep in the bamboo forest and took the form of a circular house with many long corridors. It was said that it had been built by a professor from Shanghai, and although the material was prefabricated in a factory with machines, and the structure had been assembled in just a few weeks, it had won an international award. Old Tang walked one round around the exhibition hall and noted the delicate traditional cascading green tiles, which reminded him of old Chinese mansions, but the ultramodern steel and wood structure and the shiny floor-to-ceiling windows made him feel a little uncomfortable. Through the window, the green trees in the central courtyard and the green fields and hills on the outside of the building unfolded in layers to his eyes, like a painting. It felt far more exposed and transparent than traditional old, dark mansions, and this made him feel a little ill at ease.

The exhibition officially began at ten o’clock. The Shu (traditional Sichuanese) brocade and embroidery was spread out for all to see, so bright and intricate they dazzled the eye. The lacquer art was carved and inlaid with a multitude of beautiful and intense colors. There were also exhibits for silver thread embroidery, sugar painting, traditional New Year paintings, paper cutting, and various forms of printing and dyeing. The bamboo weaving exhibits, moldering in a dim corner, looked rather dull. The expert judges arrived, and Old Tang clutched his thermos and stood waiting in front of his artwork.

There were quite a lot of bamboo weaving entries, and there would only be one award in that category. Old Tang’s eyes followed the judges. The first piece they looked at was a bamboo pagoda that stood a whole foot high. It was a four-story pagoda, with two layers of four-sided flying eaves. The upper roof was octagonal and reached a graceful tip. On every layer of the ridge, tiny birds and animals were woven according to what you would find on a real pagoda. In terms of coarse silk bamboo weaves, this would be considered a top-grade quality weave.

The second item they examined was a one-foot high, three-foot wide bamboo calligraphy scroll. It featured a fine silk bamboo weave, so it was light as silk and yet as flat as paper. Instead of ink forming the words, different colored bamboo strands wove out the script of the incident from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms known as “Before the Table of Division.” The calligraphy was done in the style of Yue Fei. Old Tang did not know much about calligraphy, but even he could see that the variation in the strokes and their stately look had been successfully achieved using just bamboo.

The judges moved on to the third, fourth, and then the fifth exhibits. Finally they turned to where Old Tang stood. He moved to take out his work—a paltry less than half a foot of bamboo weave that he had tucked over a porcelain tea ware, short in the middle and fine at the ends. It was so intricate that only if you picked up the tea ware would you realize that what appeared at first glance to be just a varied selection of patterns woven into the weave were actually an accurate miniature replica of Su Dongpo’s famous painting “Folded Bamboo.” Seen from a distance, it was an unremarkable piece of work, but up close, with the shifting light casting delicate shadows, the outline of Su Dongpo’s masterful strokes that had created the bamboo leaves appeared, even more vivid than the original painting.

“Not bad at all.” The expert judge put down the basket, “We get to see some top-grade examples of fine bamboo weaving on a base.”

“Wait a minute.” Old Tang reached into the belly of the porcelain tea ware and pressed gently, removing the bamboo weave so that the porcelain and the bamboo basket were separated.

“It’s woven on a base, and yet if the base is removed the weave still holds its shape! That’s really skilled work!” The judges looked even more interested.

“One more thing.” Old Tang held the bamboo basket in one hand, and with his other hand, he unscrewed the thermos and let a few little red goldfish pour into the bamboo basket along with some water. The basket held the water and fish, which were waving their tails happily, without leaking even a drop, and you could see the intricate pattern of the weave clearly through the water.

“A good bamboo basket for fetching water!” the crowd that had formed around him applauded, and Old Tang smiled. He was filled with pride. The basket itself might be small, but its construction was ingenious, composing of three very thin layers of silken bamboo weaves nesting inside each other, every layer using a different pattern so that the weave would be so tight water would not leak out of it. With this particular artwork, even if he never managed to train another disciple, he could feel like his lifetime spent mastering his art had not been lived in vain.

“Shifu, how about this piece, was it made by you, or made by your disciple?” Just at the moment he had reached the pinnacle of fulfillment, Old Tang heard this question pelted at him, and his hand shook when he saw which piece they meant, causing him to spill the water all over the ground.

In an identical bamboo basket, there also swam a few tiny fish waving their little tails. Old Tang picked it up and examined it carefully. Every feature: the coiled silk strands, the triple layer structure, the stacked patterns, and the hidden bamboo head in the “lock,” was exactly the same, just like there had been an assembly line creating baskets using his methods. But when did machines learn how to braid so finely in his style and using his painstaking method? What were they trying to do? Old Tang put down the basket, his eyes searching through the crowd. He spotted them—and they dare not look his way.

“Abomination!” Old Tang was furious and wanted to chase them down but lost his footing on the puddle and slipped.

“Shifu, Shifu!” The buzzing sound of the crowd made his head ache as though there were an earthquake in his brain. Slowly, his eyes shut.

I had never been so nervous in my life. Not during my doctoral defense, not during my oral presentation for my selected thesis topic, never. Nothing compared to how nervous I was in this moment.

Renjie Liu was talking to the doctor. Qingyun was asleep in the corner, the tip of her nose still red from crying. I sat down, put my coat over her, and took the string of beads out of her hand. The bracelet had been disassembled and the beads split in half, revealing a set of fluorescent green chips hidden within.

The prototype worked by intercepting the motor signals sent from the central nervous system to the nerve ending inside each finger before transmitting them wirelessly to the computer terminal. It was like bugging the central nervous system with a wire that tapped into, tracked, and recorded the movement of the hand that had worn the bracelet without the need for a camera. For the past three months, every push, lift, press, and twist the hand had made upon the bamboo strands had been recorded, and every nerve impulse captured, abstracted, and modeled.

A working, movable model that could articulate up to twenty degrees of signal flexibility, which was more flexible and powerful than any existing technology, was then built out of this data, which all had its origin in a place time had nearly forgotten.

The human brain is extremely plastic. Types of sensory input that are repeatedly reinforced over long periods of time occupy a much larger area of the cerebral cortex, and there, neural signals are able to express far more nuanced and sophisticated degrees of control. Moreover, only with signals that had been captured from twenty different planes combined together rather than a single-dimensional model—as well as the daily practice of the hand that had repeated the motions every single day—could such a model truly become an interface that could interact with the outside world with the kind of precision it required. This was unprecedented.

Old Tang, the old shifu, now lay unconscious. He did not know that when it came to interacting with the external world, his hands had reached a level so sophisticated that they could move in more dimensions than any of ours.

What he had wished to preserve may have been a tradition, his own self-respect, and a way of life. But for me, what was precious was the vast ocean of knowledge and skill that had been accumulated over thousands of years in the traditional craft he had mastered, and the related patterns of brain function that had arisen. This is our human potential, which was passed down by both the culture collectively and through individuals, developed through the millennia-long process of natural evolution and cultural transmission. Now, this knowledge would be converted into the pulsing signals that jump through the crystalline grooves of computer chips, a very precious legacy that Man can be proud of. And what I have done is to liberate this knowledge from the limiting, ancient shackles of oral transmission. Extraction, modeling, digitization, generalization. To transmit a signal from the central nervous system to the nerve ending in a finger takes time, yet my prototype was able to capture the signal before the hand even made the actual movement.

The key is not in the hand, but in the brain. I had confidence in my ability to reconstruct the brain but taking the reconstructed brain and attaching it to another hand was where the applicability of my model would be put to the true test. Just as it was not hugely difficult to build an identical bamboo basket with identical bamboo strands, it was using my new creation in an operation on an actual, living brain that was the ultimate challenge I faced now. I had done everything I could.

“Professor Xu? Let’s get ready and get started.”

“Renjie Liu, tell me the truth, how confident are you that this is going to work?”

“Professor Xu, I was his apprentice for five years and knew him personally for twenty-one years. To be honest, I don’t believe in you. I believe in him.”

There was not a single soul in the operating theater and the lights, which were out, cast no shadows. In the darkness, a hologram came to life and grew to fill the room with light, as Old Tang’s brain and body appeared before our eyes. A cluster of malignant red gliomas was entangled between a jungle of blue nerves. The hideous tumor wrapped its many strands around the slender blue branches like a mesh, defying radiation therapy and chemotherapy, and making it extremely difficult to completely remove via surgery, as it was all too easy to injure the healthy brain tissue.

Even if healthy tissue was not injured, if the removal was not complete, the possibility of recurrence would be extremely high. I stared at the giant brain, and it was as though the blue parts were fading before my eyes. I blinked. The lead surgeon pulled up an interface in the control room and two tiny silver fibers appeared in the middle of the brain area. He waved his hand to zoom in on that part, and at the tip of the fibers appeared a mechanical hand with five long, thin, rounded fingers. The doctor adjusted the angle and began to send instructions.

I saw the hand, covered with its distinctive wrinkles and scars, come to life again in the hologram of the brain. Dissecting the adhesions, twisting the nodes, weaving in and out of the weak nerve fibers, moving with great flexibility between the dense weave of the cerebral cortex. Every incision was tailored to that particular case, and every measure of force was applied to just the right degree. The tumor was like a bamboo strand in a hidden head “lock,” finely excised without missing a single hair, without hurting the integrity of the structure it had wrapped itself around. In these hands, the sinister, malignant red was reduced little by little, disappearing strand by strand.

Qingyun woke up at some point. She watched the rapidly weaving hands, staring at that fluorescent, flickering brain, and heaved a sigh of relief.

“It’s okay. You must believe in your dad.” I held her close.

When he next opened his eyes, all Old Tang saw before him was a white blur. It was only when he tried to concentrate a little more that he realized what he was staring at was a snow-white ceiling. Pale green walls, deep green curtains on the windows. He realized that the air-conditioning unit was turned on and he was covered by a blanket to keep him nice and warm. He also heard instruments and machines whirring and beeping. So he was at a hospital.

How much time had passed? Old Tang tried to think back to the last thing he could remember, which was falling on the floor. At the time, he had felt a hundred times more pain in his brain than in his bones, but now, he found that his ankle was bandaged so much that it was immobilized, whereas the pain in his head, while still there, seemed to have subsided somewhat. Old Tang tried to move his fingers, and they seemed to be working fine, but it felt like something was missing. When he raised his head to check, he saw that the chinaberry wood bracelet he had gotten so used to wearing was resting on the bedside table. The ivory-white beads were emitting a strange green light.

Old Tang felt a little dizzy. He touched his scalp and found it completely bald, which gave him a shock. After years of having a Mediterranean Sea bald patch, now his scalp was completely naked from the top of the head to the bottom of his ears, and he could also feel a thin thread that sewed up a wound. He asked Qingyun, “Didn’t they say that neither man nor machine could get rid of my tumor?” Qingyun turned her head to look outside the door.

It was Xu who walked in. He explained what had happened. Old Tang didn’t quite understand. It was like watching a magic trick in a magic show, where the puppeteer wears a bracelet in order to manipulate the little puppets tumbling about and jumping, while the hand that controls them only twitches slightly. Xu said, what was more important than the human brain, was the human heart. Old Tang completely failed to understand any of his explanations, but at least he sensed that what he said seemed good.

In the end, it was still with the help of a machine that they had snatched his life back from the brink. That stony thing that had laid in his breast for so long melted, just like ice in a heated room, and Old Tang heaved a sigh. He had indeed gotten old.

“You were the one who saved yourself,” said Xu.

“Just think of it as having taken on a disciple, except that your disciple can not only weave bamboo, but also a lot of other things . . . ” Qingyun said while carrying a bowl of porridge over to Old Tang and placing it into his hands.

Old Tang looked at his daughter, then looked at Xu, and said nothing. He scooped up the porridge. The porridge was still hot, and the fragrance of peanuts, sweet red dates, glutinous taro, and soft kidney beans comforted him as he took it in. It was when he tasted those autumnal flavors that he realized that the Laba Festival had already passed.

Chengdu winters bring with them a special warmth in the air. It’s like Sichuanese pancakes, stewed dishes, and sausages all mixed together, but without the smell of oil and smoke, as though the fragrance has been cleansed by the Sichuan rain. Against the dark sky, raindrops slip from the tips of verdant banana leaves, and red and brown sausages hang from balconies.

I put down my chopsticks and refilled the two shot glasses.

“A toast! To you, and to your art!”

“Handcraft. These past few days, I’ve been pondering what ‘craft’ actually means.” Old Tang, the master, did not raise his glass.

I raised my eyes. “And what do you think?”

“When I first learned my art, my shifu said a bamboo craftsman must have a deep soul. It takes many years of practice before your two hands can truly work together, and even more before the soul and the hands work as one.” He sipped his wine. “Although I do not understand all your explanations, this is something I do understand. The reason why people these days cannot do what we could before is because they all lack a stillness of the soul. When it comes to my art, there is nothing that complex about it. But to do it, you do need to be still in your soul. Your heart must be quieted before inspiration can strike, before your hands can move with skill.”

“Well said. The most valuable thing is that heart of yours.” I tilted my head back and drained my glass of wine.

“You’re leaving on the sixth day of the new year?”

“Yes.” I nod my head. “I’ll be traveling the country, traveling all over the world, in search of hands, in search of hearts.”

A year ago, I set out from New York. A year later, we will set off once again, this time from Chengdu. From the ancient masters who repair the exquisite clocks and watches housed in Beijing’s Forbidden City, to the oil-paper umbrella makers who work in Yunnan’s rainforests, from the guqin players keeping a thousand-year heritage alive in Yangzhou, to the nearly extinct sculptors of sea willow in Fujian, we will visit them all and record the skills that reside in their talented fingers.

Then we will go even further, and model, analyze, and record traditional crafts from all over the world, such as the spiral weaving of southern France and the winding techniques of South Carolina in the United States. It is our aspiration to build an enormous, comprehensive database that connects human hands, brains, and countless man-made artifacts in a vast treasury, which will be permanently preserved on the Internet. Even in a thousand years, when the artifacts themselves have turned to dust, these models of human movements will live on, carrying with them the rich history of thousands of years of civilization and evolution, expressed either in flesh and blood, or perhaps in a body composed of metal and electric circuitry.

And then, when even that has been completed, we will search for the most excellent eyes, ears, noses, and tongues. We will redefine all the senses, the senses that compose the interface between Man and the world he inhabits. We will build a new layer of interfaces that are parallel and complementary to the physical world. We will create the only world that Man can know, a world that will allow Man to escape the boundaries of the physical body nature had bestowed on him, so he can become the True Man. After millions of years, Man will finally see the day he receives true freedom.

That day is not far away.

Old Tang, sounding conflicted, spoke again. “You said . . . you said that the hand doesn’t need me anymore. Then, in the future, why would people still want hands?”

I laughed but said nothing. Instead, I poured more liquor, and waited silently for him to finish. He had woven bamboo for over forty years now and understood the nature of the craft—its meditative quality and the need to go slow to master it. But at the same time, it also required speed and skill. He sat in silence for a while, then picked up his glass. We clinked glasses again and drained the shot glasses bottoms’ up.

On the afternoon of the Lantern Festival,1 Old Tang went to the teahouse again. He didn’t ride his bike because his feet were not yet back to their old selves. There was no one else in the small courtyard. He spotted a few gnarled old plum trees and the hanging vines were budding with half-opened buds, while the black and brown branches sported the bright yellow furry buds of spring. Old Tang found himself a chair, and, as usual, ordered a pot of traditional Lao San Hua tea.

The results of the Invitationals Exhibition had been announced. Old Tang had won second prize. Before, he would have sulked about it, but not now.

Renjie Liu had paid him a visit on the fifth day of Lunar New Year, bearing all kinds of gifts as both apologies and tokens of gratitude. He said that now that the surgery machine had been upgraded with Old Tang’s skill, and had also demonstrated its first successful operation on him, orders had gone through the roof and would keep him busy all the way until the next Spring Festival. Old Tang waved away the consultant’s fee Renjie Liu had stuffed into a red packet, only accepting the magnified model of the machine hand. Ten metallic fingers and claws were encased in a three-inch high cube of transparent, extra-strong glass. No matter how long he looked at it, Old Tang could simply not see the resemblance to his own hands.

Qingyun and Xu spent the first few days of the new year at home and went out on the sixth day. That night they talked a lot, and drank a lot, and he could no longer remember exactly what had been said. When he woke up the next day, he felt as if there was something different about himself, although he could not quite put his finger on it.

As the teahouse owner poured Old Tang tea, he remarked, “How strange . . . Why did you come over today? Surely, as head of the household you should be rolling tangyuan2 tonight, right? Filling them with sesame and rose fillings . . . wetting flour with water . . . ”

“I won’t be doing it by hand this year. Tonight, I’ll just go out and buy some,” said Old Tang. “Not many people in our household anyway, so it’ll save some time.”

“You’re not doing it by hand?”

“Machine-made is still more convenient!”

“Wow, I’d never thought I’d see the day. Here’s your tea, take your time and enjoy!”

On the stage, the old huqin was playing “Eight Trigrams Formations” from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In this part of the story, the military leader and enemy of the three sworn brothers, Lu Xun, had just burned the joint forces’ camp, which had reached around for seven hundred miles, and he chased the escaping hero Liu Bei through the smoke and fire to the Yufu Waterfront. But there, Lu Xun fell into the ambush of master strategist Zhuge Liang’s Eight Trigrams Formation. A gentle breeze blew, dispersing the delicate fragrance of the wax plum blossoms, and a little petal fell in the half-open tea bowl. Old Tang drifted to sleep.

In his dream, he seemed to enter a dense, primeval bamboo forest, where he moved through the deep twilight, and where there was hidden a secret structure of white walls and black tiles. Lights flickered here and there, but no matter which direction he walked in, bamboo branches grew, blocking his way out. But regardless of what he did, he found his hands fixed firmly to his sides, unable to move. Then, it dawned on Old Tang like a flash of lightning that he was a master of the art of bamboo, and out slid his bamboo carving knife from its sheath. His conviction slid like a knife through mud, and within seconds a new path had been cleared out of the darkness. All throughout, his hands had not moved an inch, still fixed by the sides of his body. And yet bamboo leaves tumbled to the ground and great stems were felled before him. He raised his head to the skies and yelled out loud, before striding forward, his face to the wind.

Author’s Note: The noninvasive neural interface technology in the story that enables control through intention alone is inspired by the real-life work of CTRL-labs. The techniques of bamboo weaving in the story are based on the art of Chengdu porcelain bamboo weaving, Yunnan Yiliang bamboo weaving, and Hunan Huitong bamboo weaving, among others.

First Prize: 7th Future Science Fiction Master Award (2018).
Originally published in Chinese in 2018 China’s Best Science Fiction Works, anthology, 2019.

FOOTNOTES:

1 - The Lantern Festival takes place on the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year and is part of the Lunar New Year festivities.

2 - Tangyuan are traditional sweet flour balls eaten on the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year. Sometimes they have fillings like peanut, sesame, etc., and it is a traditional family activity to make them together.

Greg Egan won the Hugo Award for his novella “Oceanic.” His latest novels are Scale (2023) and Morphotrophic (2024).

Solidity

Greg Egan

1

The air in the classroom was warm and still, the teacher’s voice a lullaby, with stress falling on syllables like the patter of sparse, heavy raindrops on the roof tiles. Omar fought to keep his eyes open, reading the words on the blackboard backward to sharpen the soft sentences into dnim sih rof selzzup gnizzub.

That only worked for a while. He turned his gaze to the window, hoping that a jolt from the outside world would be bracing enough to spare him the embarrassment of his chin falling against his chest. Brooding clouds stretched out above the empty playing field; he let himself escape through the glass for a moment, imagining the wind ruffling his clothes as he flew toward the horizon.

He looked back at the blackboard. The bullet-pointed list of factors determining the sites where cities were most likely to be founded had been replaced by an enumeration of the criteria for determining when two triangles were similar. Omar felt himself smiling unwillingly, and his face growing hot with shame; he must have dozed off and—somehow—been left undisturbed as his geography class filed out of the room and this mathematics class filed in. It was not one of his own classes; he didn’t recognize the teacher, or any of the students now sitting around him. After geography on Tuesdays, he had English. All he could do now was wait for the right moment to excuse himself and slink out.

The teacher paused and glanced over her shoulder, to check how her exposition was being received. Omar caught the startled expression on her face, before the confusion ignited into shock and panic. She turned fully to face the class—paying no special attention to him as she surveyed the whole room in disbelief. “Where . . . ?” she demanded, before abandoning the question, as if she was unable to settle on who or what would be the appropriate subject of the inquiry.

Omar looked down at his desk. The open notebook was exactly the same kind as the one he’d been using for geography, but it showed sketches of half a dozen triangles, with annotations that were not in his handwriting.

A girl slid her chair back, rose to her feet and ran from the room. Omar watched as three other students did the same; the teacher made no effort to stop them, or even ask for an explanation. Omar was tempted to follow them, but his curiosity now was stronger than his embarrassment; whatever was happening in this class, it was not confined to some lapse on his own part.

A boy raised his hand. “Excuse me. What happened to Ms. Tham?”

The teacher gazed back at him for a while, then replied, “I don’t know who that is.”

“She was teaching us French, before you . . . ” The boy stopped and scanned the room, maybe hunting for someone who might back him up, but Omar was fairly sure, from the growing distress on his face, that he, too, recognized no one around him.

“I think it might be best if we stop here,” the teacher declared. “You can go and get your books for your next class.”

Omar heard rapid footfalls echoing down the corridor. A group of students ran past the doorway, very fast. If they’d been let out early and erupted into rowdy celebration, he would have expected to hear whoops of elation from them; instead they were as silent as if they were being pursued by a terrifying adversary. He waited, tensed, but nothing followed.

The teacher said, “Please. Just depart in an orderly manner.”

Everyone stood up; however confused they were, it was clear that this substitute teacher was offering no answers, and was either as much a victim of the slickly staged prank as they were, or a prankster herself, sworn to deny all knowledge of the reality TV company that must have pulled the whole thing off. Omar left the notebook and pen on the desk, but picked up the backpack that hung from his chair. It was the same brand and color as his own, but he was afraid to look inside to check that it really belonged to him.

He waited for the crush near the doorway to thin. Out in the corridor, he could see other classrooms emptying; he watched the students filing out, regarding each other warily, mostly in silence. He didn’t recognize anyone at all. It wasn’t merely that he was yet to spot Bruno or Tuan, or any of his other friends or classmates; not one of the faces was familiar to him, in the way he normally knew most people in the school by sight even when he’d had no reason to learn their names.

He glanced back toward the room he’d just left. A woman he’d never seen before strode out, carrying a stack of papers. Omar walked over to the doorway and looked inside the empty classroom. The blackboard bore no discussion of triangles now, just “The Call of the Wild” written large at the top, and some thematic points spelled out below.

Omar felt his skin turn icy. Were there drugs that could do this that he might have unwittingly imbibed? Or was he succumbing to some form of mental illness? He stared at the mundane chalk marks, daring them to mutate into leering neon serpents, but they remained stubbornly non-psychedelic. He pulled his phone from his pocket to search for the symptoms of ergot poisoning, but the solar eclipse wallpaper wasn’t his, and the phone rejected his PIN. That the date and time were exactly what he expected only seemed like an insult; if he could hallucinate entire classes in and out of existence, how hard could it be to make the display read twenty-nine o’clock on the fifty-fifth of May?

He joined the flow of students heading for the stairs. At first, he took his cue from the crowd and avoided eye contact, as if he was in hostile territory . . . but that didn’t really make sense, when there was no one at all swaggering around like they owned the place.

As he reached the ground floor, Omar turned to a boy about his own age who was walking beside him and nodded to him amiably. “What’s with this shit?” he asked.

The boy said, “Yeah?” He’d looked haunted before, but now he grinned and shook his head, as if they were just commiserating with each other over an especially tedious assembly.

“Is this the only high school you’ve been at?” Omar asked, glancing back to check that this still meant what he thought it did. The building they’d just left looked the same as it always had, at least from his current vantage.

“Yeah. I started here in Year Seven, last year.”

“Me too. My home room teacher’s Alderson.”

The boy flinched a little, but reciprocated. “Mine’s Millar.”

“So . . . I never met anyone with your home room teacher before, and I guess you never met anyone with mine?”

“No.”

By now that was more or less what Omar would have predicted, but discussing the anomaly out loud still felt like he was gingerly probing a wound, working up the courage to learn exactly how deep it went.

They were halfway across the playing field now. Looking ahead, to the quiet suburban street that ran past the back of the school, Omar could see no traffic, but that wasn’t unusual for this time of day.

“I’m Omar,” he said.

“I’m Tony.” They bumped forearms.

“Is your phone working?” Tony asked.

“It’s not dead, but it’s locked.” Omar fished it out and held it up; there was a cartoon wolf on the screen now. “What the hell is that?”

Tony peered at the wallpaper. “Looks like the mascot for a sports team.” That sounded plausible, but apparently he didn’t know the name of the team any more than Omar did. “You could call emergency services.”

“Yeah.” Omar pondered this. “What would I tell them, though?”

They’d reached the street. There were still no cars around, and all the pedestrians looked like fellow students—if “fellow” was the word for it.

“I go this way,” Omar said, gesturing left.

Tony said nothing, but Omar caught a flicker of fear in his eyes, as if he was being asked to stop clinging to the piece of wreckage they’d been sharing and swim off for the shore alone.

“Usually,” Omar added. “But I wasn’t expecting classes to finish this early. You want to hang out for a while?”

“Sure,” Tony replied.

They turned right.

Omar was encouraged to see that some of the other students walking ahead of them had gathered into small groups. Whatever was happening, sharing information seemed like a good start.

“Does this date look right to you?” Omar asked Tony, checking his phone to see that it hadn’t changed, then holding it up again.

“Yeah.”

“Same here. So neither of us are time travelers.”

Tony snorted with amusement, but then the mirth on his face decayed into something darker. “I keep hoping I’ll wake up, but I’ve never had a dream where everyone else wants to wake up, too.”

They were approaching the intersection with Gleason Street; Omar could hear the traffic, and see some vehicles passing by. “The cars haven’t all stopped working,” he mused. “It’s not like their batteries got replaced by fish tanks.”

“And your phone is still a phone, even if it isn’t yours.” Tony spread his arms. “My clothes still fit, and they’re almost what I put on this morning.”

“Almost?”

Tony reached into the side of his jeans and tugged a small portion of bright red fabric into view. “My boxers changed color. I don’t even own a pair like that!”

At first glance, Gleason Street looked normal: there were no ten-car pile-ups, no abandoned vehicles parked at strange angles, no signs that any drivers had vanished from behind their steering wheels. But the pedestrians were radiating confusion and anxiety; some kept their eyes downcast, others swept their gaze around in all directions, as if they were seeking some person or landmark that might guide or comfort them.

“That used to be Gino’s Convenience,” Omar said, pointing to . . . a convenience store with slightly different signage. “You got any money?”

“Just a card.” Tony produced his wallet and pulled out a plastic rectangle. “No, that’s a library card.”

“It might not have worked anyway.” Omar checked his own wallet. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used cash, so he didn’t really know what should have been inside, but he found a ten-dollar bill that looked perfectly normal to him.

He passed it to Tony. “Is that real money, in your world?”

“Sure.”

“Then let’s test it out.”

They entered the store.

There were racks of bread, and bins of fruit and vegetables by the entrance. The names of the bakeries were all familiar, and the fruit didn’t look strange or exotic. They strolled past shelves of breakfast cereal and tinned food; a few of the brands didn’t ring any bells for Omar, but then, that was no different from walking into Aldi’s.

“You want a drink or something?” he asked Tony.

“Yeah.”

They approached the refrigerated cabinet. There was flavored milk from the usual dairies; he picked out a chocolate one for himself, and looked to Tony, who said, “I’ll have the same.”

The cashier was a bored-looking man in his twenties. “Eight dollars,” he said, when Omar put the drinks on the counter.

“Are you sure?” Omar could have sworn the tag on the shelf had said $3.20, though maybe that had been the price of a neighboring item. “Don’t you want to scan them?”

“The scanner’s on the fritz.”

Omar handed over his ten dollars, and the man barely glanced at it before giving him change.

On the street, he opened his carton and took a long swig. Tony hesitated. “What if the food’s different here? Like . . . mirror-image molecules, or different isotopes?”

“We can still breathe the air, can’t we?” Omar replied. He didn’t really know what fears were reasonable, but weird chemistry seemed like the least of their problems.

“Okay.” Tony sampled the milk warily, then seemed to decide it was palatable.

“You want to check out your house?” Omar asked him.

Tony was quiet for a while. “I’ve got a key,” he said. “But what if it doesn’t fit?”

Omar shrugged. “Then I’ll help you break in.” There were far worse things that might have ceased to match than the lock and the key, and he suspected that the odds for all of them were more likely to grow worse over time than better.

They continued down the street, past shops and houses whose architecture all seemed familiar, whatever variations had been wrought at the level of paint and lettering. A few cars began speeding through the traffic, honking frantically as they weaved from lane to lane. Omar kept expecting to hear sirens closing in on the offenders, but the police were either dealing with more serious transgressions, or had gone off to tend to their own personal meltdowns.

“You got brothers and sisters?” he asked Tony.

“A little sister. She’s ten. What about you?”

“Two older brothers.”

“Still in high school?”

“No. One’s working in Darwin, one’s studying in America.” Omar wondered if they might have been spared the disruption, even if he was now separated from them.

Separated by what, though? If the world had been torn apart, where were the fault lines? “The roads all still join up,” he said. There were no sudden dead ends, no mismatched strips of asphalt like an earthquake might have produced. “And the buildings have barely changed.”

“I think it’s mostly people that are different,” Tony replied. “People, phones and underwear.”

“Maybe it will all snap back into place,” Omar joked.

Tony checked his boxers again. “Oh, come on! Purple?”

“What did you put on this morning?”

“Black.” He sounded a little offended by the thought that he might have willingly chosen anything else. “So have I swapped bodies with someone who wears purple underwear . . . or just swapped underwear with them?”

“I don’t feel like I’ve swapped bodies,” Omar said.

“I don’t either,” Tony admitted. “But swapping underwear would be gross.”

Omar tried to elevate the conversation. “Who was the Prime Minister, when you woke up this morning?”

“Tanya Plibersek.”

“Same here.” Omar floundered; did he really want to run through a list of heads of government, when neither of them could check their answers on the web? Winners of wars? Assassination attempts?

He settled on, “You remember Covid?”

Tony laughed. “How could I forget?”

“Then our worlds probably aren’t much different,” Omar decided. “But until half an hour ago, I wasn’t in your school, and you weren’t in mine.”

“So whose world is this?” Tony asked. “If we’ve both come from other places, is there anyone who’s stayed put?”

“I don’t know.”

They turned off Gleason Street, with Tony leading the way. A woman approached them. “Have you seen my son? Samuel?”

Omar said, “I’m sorry.” He’d never had a classmate by that name, and even if he had it wouldn’t have helped.

The woman grew distraught. “He can’t have just vanished!”

“Everyone seems to have . . . shifted around,” Tony explained.

“He’s a very quiet boy,” the woman stressed. “Very shy.”

“We don’t know where he is,” Omar replied, resisting the urge to start inventing search strategies that he had no reason to believe would succeed, just to offer her some comfort.

She grimaced and shook her head, but let them pass. They walked on in silence. Omar was half-wishing now that he’d parted from Tony earlier; it might not have improved his chances of getting back to his family, but either way, he was dreading having to watch his new friend coming to terms with his own loss.

“It’s down here,” Tony said, taking a final turn. “The fifth from the corner. At least the house numbers are all the same.” He laughed softly. “That neighbor’s lawn was almost dead, before.” The front yard they were passing was a lush, reticulated green.

A dog began barking, out of sight but not far ahead.

“Is that yours?” Omar asked.

“No, but it sounds just like Leon from next door.” Tony turned to him, excited. “What if the animals have all . . . ?” He trailed off, confused. Omar couldn’t blame him; any touch of familiarity seemed hopeful, but it was hard to flesh out a scenario in which someone else’s pet would guide him back to his own version of reality.

As they came to what should have been Leon’s house, a wiry gray-and-white dog ran back and forth behind the low garden fence, snarling at them. “It’s not him,” Tony admitted glumly. “His coat’s different.”

When they stopped outside number 12, Omar didn’t press Tony to start listing changes. So, his neighbor’s dog was new to him, and maybe the curtains or the letterbox here had been different when he’d left for school that morning. But if there were any exceptions to the shuffling of the deck, surely they’d be within families?

Tony walked up to the front door and took the key from his pocket. Omar approached, racking his brain for some words of consolation and encouragement he could utter when the inevitable happened.

Tony put the key in the lock, turned it, and opened the door.

Omar said, “Fuck me.”

“Are you coming?” Tony asked impatiently.

Omar followed him inside.

There was some kind of poster hanging in the hallway, with Chinese characters in gold on red. In the kitchen, pictures on the fridge showed two children, a boy and a girl—the boy too young to be his host, but with roughly similar features. The girl was also much younger than ten, so they could just be old photos.

Tony opened the fridge and took out a jug of orange juice. “You want some?”

“Sure.”

He poured two glasses and handed one to Omar. Omar took a sip, then looked around the room. “Is it similar?”

“Yes.”

“You think your family still lives here?”

Tony nodded toward the fridge. “That kid’s not me.”

“Oh, man.” Omar lowered his gaze. “That doesn’t settle it, though,” he reasoned. “If everyone’s moved, your parents could still end up here, just like you did.”

“Maybe.” Tony drained his glass in silence.

Omar said, “You want to see if there’s anything on TV?”

“The living room’s through there.” Tony gestured back down the hall. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Okay.”

Omar found the room, and hunted for the remote. The TV was working perfectly, but as he flicked through the channels all he saw was cartoons and old movies.

He heard a toilet flush and water running, then footsteps approaching. “There’s no news,” he said, turning from the screen.

The boy standing in the doorway looked a bit like Tony, and was dressed much the same, but it wasn’t him.

“What are you doing?” the boy demanded. “How did you get in here?”

“Tony let me in.”

“Who’s Tony? And what happened to Mehdi?”

Omar rose to his feet. “My name’s Omar,” he said. “I came here with Tony. He lives here; he had a key.”

The boy said, “I have the key. And I came here with Mehdi.”

Omar gazed back at him in silence, hoping he would at least reach the same conclusion.

“You replaced Mehdi, while I was in the bathroom?” the boy suggested.

“Or you replaced Tony,” Omar replied. “Or both. I don’t know the right way to think about it.”

“So we’re still moving? It hasn’t stopped?” The boy scowled. “But all the time me and Mehdi were walking here, I didn’t see anyone disappear off the street.”

Omar said, “Me neither. But even from the start, nothing’s changed right in front of my eyes, like a cut in a movie.” It was more like one of those seamless tricks where they panned away from a group of people, then panned back to reveal some impossible alteration.

The boy remained in the doorway, regarding Omar warily. “What’s your name?” Omar asked him.

“David.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Omar had hoped that they might still be allies, inheriting some of the camaraderie that had led both pairs of newly met strangers to the same place. But if David was unsettled by his presence, he didn’t want to outstay a welcome that had been meant for someone else.

“Good luck,” he said, picking up his backpack. “I hope you find your family.”

“You too,” David replied.

Omar left the house and headed back the way he’d come. The dog that wasn’t Leon had been replaced by another dog with darker fur, though it barked at him with similar fury. The lush lawn near the corner hadn’t died, but it was much less verdant.

When Omar reached the twice-rebranded convenience store, he could see from the doorway that the checkout was unattended. He was starting to wish that he’d spent his money on something more substantial than chocolate milk, and he wondered if his last two dollars could at least get him a cheap pack of flatbread; he’d placed the coins in his pocket, and he could still feel them through the lining, pressing against his skin. But he was afraid to go inside now, lest the malleable world conspire to frame him as a shoplifter.

He walked on, but then he stopped in the street and opened his backpack, wondering if a previous owner might have stashed something edible. There was nothing inside but textbooks. Only half of the titles were familiar, but each book on its own seemed perfectly ordinary; when Omar flicked through them, the typeface and formatting remained consistent, the page numbers ascended in the usual fashion, and the subject matter didn’t jump from geography to mathematics halfway through.

He took out his phone and tried a PIN at random, with no luck, but maybe next time he’d chance on an unlocked state, and find his way into the settings to make that “permanent” . . . before passing on the favor to someone else.

Walking by the school, he saw half a dozen students playing soccer, all in their street clothes. They were shouting at each other, happily engaged in the game as if nothing in the world was troubling them. He could probably join them if he wanted; it wouldn’t matter if he never saw any of them again.

But he kept walking, back toward his house.

It was midafternoon now, and the streets were almost empty. Omar passed a middle-aged man coming the other way, pushing a stroller with a screaming toddler. The man wasn’t quite ignoring the child, but each time he glanced down he seemed to recoil and look away. A woman jogged by, staring straight ahead. Two primary school kids in broad-brimmed hats chatted volubly as they dawdled along; Omar couldn’t tell if they were long-time best friends, miraculously unseparated, or new acquaintances doing their best to make each other welcome.

He didn’t recognize any of these people, but the neighborhood itself still felt utterly familiar. Maybe if he’d been away for a few years it would have been the same, with a smattering of small differences too numerous to ignore but too minor to apprehend individually. Nothing he saw could begin to dent the conviction that this was his territory—still conforming to the map carved deep into his brain over the decade since his family had moved here, before he could remember, at the age of three.

When he reached number 77, he paused to take in the changes one by one. The geraniums in the flowerbed at the side of the yard had gone from red to purple. The paint on the front walls of the house was still white, but it was peeling from the eaves. The living room window was crystal clear, letting him see the grain in the wooden slats of the venetian blinds behind the pane; it had been grubby before, and his mother had been nagging him to clean it.

As he approached the screen door, it looked less worn than he remembered, and when he opened it, it emitted a different creak than he was accustomed to. The front door bore faint dirty finger marks that were only noticeable because they were not quite where they should have been. But his key slid into the lock, and turned smoothly, and when he pushed on the door it opened.

Inside, the carpet in the hallway looked the same, but smelled newer. Omar hesitated, wondering if there might yet be a way to recover everything. If he backed out now and retraced every step since he’d left the house that morning, maybe he could undo all the changes.

That plan was absurd—but then, the whole situation deserved to be rejected for the same reason. This wasn’t a dream, but it had to be a kind of fever. He couldn’t banish it with feverish rituals; all he could do was stare it down and hope it would wear off.

In the living room, the family photos showed a couple his parents’ age with three children, the eldest a girl. They might have been newly discovered cousins. Omar stared hard at the youngest boy in the portraits, his gaze penetrating the flesh. The little prick had stolen his cheekbones. Whatever subconscious casting director was orchestrating his breakdown, they seemed to have hired one of those forensic anthropologists who reconstructed people’s appearance from their skeletons. That didn’t really explain Rami turning into a woman, but then, he wasn’t around to complain.

Omar went to the room that ought to have been his own. The bed, the desk, the chest of drawers were all in the right position. The bookcase was just as full as he’d left it, though some of the books had been swapped for other volumes, matching the size and shape of the originals more closely than their content.

His map of the world had been replaced by a star chart, and the blanket on his bed was different, but his desktop computer was, as far as he could tell, exactly the same. His father had forbidden him from putting a password on it; Omar hoped that was a universal prohibition, or at least one entirely determined by bone structure. He hit the power button, and waited for the thing to boot up.

The desktop appeared, with no login screen demanding authorization. Omar opened a web browser and tried to reach a few news sites, but they all returned errors; search engines and social media were the same. Wasn’t the internet supposed to be so robust that it could weave connections around any obstacle? There were no broken streets, so why should there be broken fibers?

He leaned back in his chair, frustrated. The computer itself still worked—which meant the various components hadn’t ended up incompatible, and nor had different portions of the software found themselves working at cross-purposes. But if that feat of integrity was like his textbooks managing to stay on-topic, maybe traffic on the net was suffering something more akin to a delivery driver turning up at what should have been Gino’s Convenience, only to find that the paperwork for their consignment didn’t match the business’s new name. None of which explained how the whole phenomenon managed to walk the line between dreamlike incongruity and running a chainsaw through everything . . . though if it had gone wild on the scale of his own body and turned him into some kind of composite, he probably wouldn’t have survived long enough to know about it.

He went back to the living room and tried the TV. Like the broadcasts he’d seen at Tony’s house, there was no news interrupting the bland daytime schedule. Had the journalists who’d usually rush to cover any local disaster all given up and gone home, or was he picking up signals from stations where there’d been no disruption at all? In the advertising breaks, some of the brands and businesses were familiar; others were like the fictional ads embedded in a drama, where just enough had been changed to avoid infringing anyone’s trademark. But that still didn’t tell him if the world these images came from was the world he was sitting in as he watched.

Omar left the house, walked around the block, and entered it again. The carpet was older now, the family in the photos was different, the star chart in his room was a poster of a rapper, and the computer he’d left powered up was no longer switched on.

He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. The sheets smelled as if they’d been laundered with an unfamiliar detergent, but the mattress felt exactly right. Whenever he’d slept in a different bed, on a holiday or visiting relatives, he’d spent the night chafing like a runner in ill-fitting shoes. How could he be lost, how could he be exiled, when he could lie here, so at ease?

The sound of a car pulling into the driveway roused him from the edge of sleep. He jumped up—noticing in passing that the rapper had been usurped by a travel poster—and ran to the living room, where he peeked out through the blinds. The car was the same model as the one his family had had for the last few years, but he couldn’t see the number plates, or the driver who’d just emerged.

As Omar stepped into the hallway, a man walked through the front door. He was wearing black trousers, a white shirt, and a dark blue tie. Omar didn’t need to look at his face to be sure that it was his father; his mind had already filled in that final detail from all the other cues that led inexorably to the same conclusion.

But then he shifted his gaze a fraction, and his conviction shattered.

“What’s your name, son?” the man asked gently. He couldn’t hide his anguish at the absence of whoever he had hoped might still be here to greet him, but he’d clearly had time to brace himself for the likelihood of the encounter now unfolding.

“Omar.”

“I’m Rafiq.”

“What’s happening?” Omar begged him, as if there was the slightest chance that any human actually knew.

“We’ve lost our families,” Rafiq said. “And I don’t know how we’re going to find them. But in the meantime, we need to look out for each other—in the same way we hope some good-hearted strangers will be looking out for them.”

Omar started weeping, and he began to lower his gaze in shame. Rafiq reached over and grabbed his jaw. “No,” he said. “I know you have no reason to trust me. But the only way we can start to trust each other is if we stay in this together, side by side. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, uncle.” Omar reached up and brushed the tears away with the heel of his hand, one eye at a time.

“I don’t know if it’s possible,” Rafiq admitted. “But I don’t know what else to try. If we’re going to fight this together, we can’t lose each other. We can’t ever look away.”

2

Omar sat in the kitchen and watched Rafiq cooking. They’d found plenty of food in the fridge, and it had shown no tendency to vanish—or be magically replenished—when they closed the door and looked again.

Rafiq served the lablabi and invited him to eat.

Omar had been working up the courage to ask a question. “How did you get separated from your wife?”

“I was in the storeroom when it happened,” Rafiq replied. “She was at the till.”

“I’m sorry.” Omar could picture his parents suffering exactly the same fate, in their own store.

“I asked the woman at the till to come here with me, but she said she was leaving Sydney to look for her daughter.”

“I only have two brothers,” Omar confessed. “No sister.”

“And I only have three sons,” Rafiq replied. “It looks like our families are closer than I thought.”

Omar took another mouthful of soup and contemplated making a run for the door—not out of any ill will toward this man, but because he wanted the insanity to end. It was clear that nothing was ever going to change right before his eyes, which meant that as long as Rafiq was in front of him, he would never be reunited with his family.

But on all the evidence so far, rolling the dice wouldn’t bring him any closer either. So maybe it made sense for people to try to form alliances while they learned how to handle the situation, even as they hoped it was all a temporary aberration that would somehow be set right.

“My son Adnan is so much like you,” Rafiq added.

Omar was over the whole cheekbone thing. “When was he born?” he wondered.

“The 7th of August. He just turned thirteen last month.”

“I’m thirteen, too, but I was born in February.” Omar found that oddly satisfying: they were not weird doppelgängers who had walked the same path in lockstep all their lives. He’d been out in the world, gurgling and bawling, while Adnan was still in the womb.

They ran through the families’ birthdays together; no one matched exactly, and Rafiq was more than a full year younger than Omar’s father.

“There’s no sense to any of this,” Rafiq decided.

“But you both wound up owning the same store in Marrickville,” Omar said. “You both have a son working as a bricklayer in Darwin, and another one studying at MIT.”

“Where was your father born?” Rafiq asked him.

“Gafsa.”

“Ah, the big smoke,” Rafiq joked. “I was born in Métlaoui. Very close, but not the same.”

Omar took their empty bowls over to the sink, trying not to feel self-conscious as Rafiq turned his chair around in order to keep him in sight.

“How are we going to feed ourselves, uncle?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Rafiq replied candidly. “There are things we can try, but who knows what will work?”

Omar began washing the dishes. That they still had running water didn’t surprise him; like the roads, he did not expect to see breaks in the pipes, and a full reservoir might function without maintenance for weeks. But the electricity felt more like a precarious miracle; even with solar panels and batteries everywhere, it seemed unlikely that the whole power grid could keep running without human intervention. Enough operators and engineers must have kept showing up at their jobs—working beside colleagues they’d never met, with no idea if they would ever be paid for their efforts—to keep the network functioning.

“I need to use the toilet,” Rafiq announced, rising to his feet. Omar said nothing; he’d been dreading this moment, but given the way he’d ended up separated from Tony, he couldn’t just pretend that he could keep a normal distance and everything would be fine. “I’ll get a towel first,” Rafiq added, miming wrapping it around his waist. Omar got the picture; at least they could retain a degree of modesty. In fact, he’d had his back to Rafiq half the time he’d been standing at the sink, and they hadn’t parted worlds; staying together seemed to require only one of them watching the other.

Afterward, they sat in the living room—with the chairs suitably arranged—trying to make sense of what the TV disgorged. If they stuck with one channel it remained coherent, with scene after scene from a single program, but if they flicked to another station and back they usually found themselves watching something different. Omar half wished that Rafiq would stop working the remote, so they could sit back and try to escape into some comedy or cop show on its own weird, pre-apocalyptic terms, but he knew that if that happened he’d just grow restless, wondering what vital news they were missing.

And then, a reporter stood outside Parliament House, addressing the camera.

“—who claimed to be the Prime Minister spoke earlier, calling on the people of the nation to do their best to help each other through the emergency.”

The reporter hesitated, then lowered his eyes and spoke quietly. “We don’t have that footage?” He nodded glumly then looked back to his audience. “But the woman in question can no longer be located, and most offices in the building are empty now. If anyone really is in a position to take charge, they have not yet made themselves known. Back to you, Linda.”

The screen went blank. Omar waited, but no studio anchor named Linda or otherwise materialized to continue the story. After a few seconds, an ad for a gambling app appeared.

Rafiq said, “You should get some sleep.”

“What about you?”

“When you wake up tomorrow, I’ll grab a few hours.”

Omar said, “What if I wake up, and you’re gone? What if sleep breaks the connection?”

“Then you’ll know that the whole thing’s out of our hands,” Rafiq admitted. “Just remember to teach the other guys how to make good lablabi.”

When Omar climbed into bed, he left the desk lamp on, and Rafiq settled into a chair in the corner. Omar did not believe that this man might turn out to be some kind of child molester, but the only way he could accommodate another presence in the room was to half-pretend that he was still sharing it with Syed, who’d often sit studying long after Omar’s bedtime. He was tempted to cover his face with his pillow to block out the light, but he was afraid that might also stop him being the person Rafiq was watching.

He’d thought sleep would be impossible, but after a while he found himself sinking into a pleasant stupor, convinced that none of what he’d seen throughout the day had actually happened.

3

Rafiq insisted on Omar eating breakfast, before trusting him to stay alert for his own shift as watcher.

Omar was anxious at the start, worried that his mind might wander and Rafiq would get the blackboard treatment. “Just wake me if you need to,” Rafiq had stressed. “If someone knocks on the door. If you need the toilet again. Anything. I won’t be angry.”

Staring at a stranger sprawled across the bed he still thought of as belonging to his parents was unsettling, but Omar clung to the hope that, not only would they have approved, they were probably doing something similar themselves. And just because Rafiq had lost track of his own wife, that didn’t mean his father and mother were apart. Maybe they were taking turns napping and watching over their foster-Omar, as they worked on their short-term plans for food, and their long-term plans for restoring the world to order.

When Rafiq rose, it wasn’t even noon; he’d had less than four hours’ sleep. Omar suspected they’d both need to aim for six, at least, if they were going to stay sane, but it wasn’t his place to start lecturing an adult on the subject.

Rafiq filled some buckets in the laundry room with water; the supply was still flowing normally, but he wanted to be prepared in case it failed. Omar was prepared to find the buckets empty when they returned to the room, but that didn’t happen; the buckets themselves changed color, but once the bulk of water was in place, it seemed to be as robust a feature of his world as any piece of furniture.

They each took a shower, keeping their underwear on, changing under a towel the way Omar’s father had taught him to do at the public swimming pool. Omar was beginning to feel less self-conscious; he’d now survived every embarrassing necessity, and he believed he could grow inured to the routine. His father had made it through a year of compulsory military service in Tunisia; for loss of privacy and enforced proximity to strangers, that must surely have been even worse.

Lunch didn’t exhaust their supplies of food, but it did extinguish any lingering fantasy that alter egos in some parallel world where the banking infrastructure had remained intact would devise a way to play poltergeist and slip care parcels into their pantry. The photos in the living room could manifest new faces a dozen times a day, while Omar’s bedroom wall flipped effortlessly from the Periodic Table to the Declaration of Human Rights, but if they wanted to keep eating, they’d need to bring fresh ingredients into the house the normal way.

When they stepped outside there was no one else in sight, though Omar saw a neighbor’s blind twitch. “We should try the store first,” Rafiq said. “I ran out without taking any money, but the woman yelled after me that she’d leave half the cash.”

The car hadn’t changed overnight in any significant way: Rafiq didn’t need to break the door locks for a second time, or repeat the surgery that allowed an easy hot-wire start. As they drove south toward the river, the traffic around them was sparse, but the vibe Omar felt was more public holiday than ghost town. The world hadn’t ended: no one was dropping dead in the street, no buildings were on fire, no bridges had collapsed. Omar did not believe that his family were any more likely to be in harm’s way than he was—and whatever had scattered them, he was sure it would eventually be understood, and reversed.

He had feared that there might have been looting, but as they turned into the parking lot at the back of the store, the premises looked perfectly intact.

“Ideal Electrics?” Rafiq protested. He caught himself and regarded Omar apologetically. “I’m sorry. If your father called it that—”

“Absolutely not,” Omar assured him.

Name change notwithstanding, Rafiq’s key still worked. Omar hadn’t been to the store since the weekend, but inside, it was instantly familiar-but-strange, with a subtly wrong scent to everything, and an alien color scheme for the price tags.

Rafiq opened the till. “She kept her promise!” he announced, taking out a handful of bills. “Or . . . someone did.” Cash was not a big fraction of the business, but if money still meant anything they could eat for weeks. Omar experienced an odd pang of emotion, halfway between a genuine response and the kind of thing a tearjerking movie might have wrung out of him. Maybe one or all of his “mothers” had deserted him to go chasing after their firstborn, but at least they’d left a decent child support payment behind.

Rafiq held up a twenty-dollar bill, frowning. “The whole thing looks right, but . . . have you heard of ‘Mary Reibey’? I don’t think that name was on my citizenship test.”

Omar shrugged. “It looks right to me, too.” Whatever it was, it wasn’t counterfeit in the criminal sense. All they could do was see if anyone was willing to accept it.

They drove to a nearby market, which appeared to be doing plenty of trade. It was only as they approached a vegetable stall that Omar spotted a handwritten sign that read: ALL BILLS VALUE $5.

Rafiq muttered obscenities under his breath, but when they reached the stall he addressed the vendor calmly, pointing to the sign. “What’s this, brother? Would you take advantage of people at a time like this?”

The man shook his head, apologetic but firm. “You give me a hundred-dollar bill, and tomorrow I check it. Will it be a hundred, or will it be twenty? Ten? Five?”

Omar thought this actually sounded defensible, but Rafiq was not persuaded. “American bills are all the same size. But you know that’s not true here.” He fished out a twenty and a fifty, and lined them up together. Omar had never noticed before, but the higher denomination was at least five millimeters longer.

The vendor grew angry. “I lost my daughter yesterday.” He held up a hand with his thumb and forefinger a few millimeters apart. “You think someone promised you nothing would change by that much?”

“We’ve all lost people,” Rafiq replied, with genuine sympathy. “But this cash sat in my till all night, and it’s lost no value.”

“Mashallah,” the vendor replied, sarcastically. “But here, each bill is worth five dollars. No more, no less.”

Rafiq stood in silence for several seconds, then he nodded slightly. “Okay.”

They walked around the stall, selecting vegetables from what remained; they’d probably come late in a surge of panic buying, but between the problems with cash and the lure of less perishable alternatives, the shelves here had not ended up stripped bare.

Omar tried to quash his own disappointment and think through the competing claims about the banknotes. Things changed, but they didn’t change at random, even within the constraints of size; the posters on his wall never turned into sheets of butcher’s paper, or priceless works of art. Because, he supposed, they could only be things that someone else who’d lived a life much like his own had actually put there.

So, what could a polymer banknote become? Not just any random object of about the same size and shape, because no one would have reason to carry such a thing in their wallet, or keep it in their till.

And not every till would be the same. He’d never seen anyone buy a fridge or a TV and pay for it with five-dollar bills. But equally, who paid for their vegetables with fifties? So maybe both men were right: Rafiq’s fifties hadn’t turned into fives, but the stall owner couldn’t count on the same thing holding true.

They paid for the vegetables and moved on. The whole market had adopted the $5 policy; by the time they were done, Omar guessed they’d spent half their cash on about a week’s worth of food.

They drove to a garden center, but all the seeds and seedlings for edible plants had sold out. Rafiq kept trying, visiting different horticultural outlets across the suburbs, until the battery range warning light came on.

Omar hadn’t been paying attention to the car’s navigation system, but when he looked from the console to the street signs around them, he realized that it was showing the car’s location as reliably as ever. It probably kept its own copies of the maps it used—only needing the internet for information about roadwork and traffic conditions—and the GPS signals themselves would be more like a one-way TV broadcast than an exchange of data over the net.

“If we could look down on the city from a satellite,” he wondered, “and our eyes were good enough to keep track of everyone . . . would we see people disappearing?”

“I doubt it,” Rafiq replied. “We don’t see that any other time.”

“So would that be enough to keep them all together, from their own point of view?” Omar tried to think it through, but it wasn’t obvious to him what the outcome would be. “And if it was a machine watching, would that be just as good?”

Rafiq didn’t answer. Omar dropped the subject; what mattered most right now was food. With their cash half-gone, what else was left? The washing machines and TVs in the store seemed likely to remain as stable as any other weighty objects, but the fact that no one had bothered to loot them suggested that they wouldn’t be worth much.

“In the lockdowns,” he said, “and the bushfires, a lot of people helped each other. Like those Sikh food trucks handing out meals.”

“And Muslim groups, too,” Rafiq protested.

“Do you ever go to mosque?” Omar’s father was not religious at all.

“No, but credit where it’s due. And of course you should feed your neighbors, if they fall on hard times and you have enough to share. But charity’s not a bottomless well. The food has to come from somewhere in the end.”

“Why should the farmers stop growing food?”

“Should they work for nothing? They still need to look after their families. They still need fuel and fertilizer.”

“Why should the fertilizer factories shut down?”

Rafiq scowled. “And . . . what? Will the farmers pay them in sacks of wheat? And will the factory workers pay for everything in fertilizer? There’s a reason people moved beyond bartering.”

Omar said, “I know.”

“Gold coins might work,” Rafiq mused, “if we can be sure they won’t turn into lead.”

Omar had never seen a gold coin in his life, outside a pirate movie. “Will the people with gold coins hire everyone in the country, and pay us all in gold before the food runs out?”

“Probably not. Do you have a better idea?”

“Why can’t we just keep doing all the things we were doing two days ago? It’s not money that makes a crop grow, or keeps a factory running.”

Rafiq said, “So if I go back to the markets, how much food should they give me, for free? How much food should the farmers give the markets? How much fuel should the oil refineries give the farmers?”

“As much as usual,” Omar declared stubbornly.

“What does that mean? No one knows if I have twelve mouths to feed, or just one, so what’s a fair amount of groceries to give me?”

“Why would anyone want more food than they can eat?” Omar protested. “It’s not like they could sell it for money.”

Rafiq said, “The black market would soon work something out.”

“Didn’t you just tell me that bartering doesn’t work?”

“Not in a good way. You want criminals hoarding food, making the shortages worse, using that to build up power over everyone?”

Omar fell silent. If there had been a drought or a plague of locusts, he could have accepted that. But for people to accept that they’d all just have to starve when there was no physical reason for it seemed like a kind of collective masochism, above and beyond the suffering that had already been imposed on them.

When they got home, Rafiq put the car on the charger; the electricity grid still hadn’t failed. The conversation about charity seemed to have pricked his conscience; he packed up a portion of the supplies they’d bought, and they walked three houses down the street.

“Who lived in 71, for you?” Omar asked, as Rafiq knocked on the door.

“Mrs. Bartoli. She was a widow, on her own.”

An elderly woman opened the door, sparing Omar the embarrassment of having to confess that he knew nothing about his own world’s equivalent.

She regarded them with a puzzled smile. “Can I give you these, ma’am?” Rafiq asked. “I know how hard it is to do the shopping right now.”

She squinted at him, as if she was trying to put a name to his face, but then she gave up and said, “That’s very kind of you.”

She let them in, and they left the food in her kitchen. The house looked well kept, but Omar had no idea what she’d do now that her pension had disappeared into the ether.

“Can we keep coming back?” he asked Rafiq as they headed home.

“We’ll see,” he replied. “If we can’t feed ourselves, we can’t feed a thousand different strangers as well.”

After dinner, they watched TV for a while. Rafiq’s channel hopping yielded no news, and he finally gave up and let an old movie called Cliffhanger run to completion. Omar guessed the TV stations got their movies over the net like everyone else, but they must have had a few days’ worth of content sitting on their hard drives when their connections went down.

“Bedtime,” Rafiq declared, as the credits rolled. Omar was sure he resented the tedious job ahead, but at least they’d each get a chance to escape into their dreams.

He hadn’t been in his room since their trip to the markets; as he entered, he checked the poster to see what it had become. In its place were eight sheets of legal paper, taped together into one big rectangle. They looked like they’d been printed on his computer, and they were all exactly the same.

Rafiq read the heading: “‘Solidity.’” Omar detached a sheet and placed it on the desk so he could read the whole thing properly. “‘While we wait for the old world to return, we need to hold our nerve and not let things fall apart. We’ve all done this before, one way or another. We all know in our hearts what is right. We will help those who need our help. We will ask, without shame, for our own needs to be met. We will not cheat or deceive, steal or coerce, and nor will we withhold trust for no reason. We will do everything in our power to maintain solidity. If you can, spread the word. If you can, be an example.’”

There was no author named; at the bottom there was just a large S enclosed in a circle.

Rafiq regarded Omar with bemusement. “This sounds like something you might have written.”

“Maybe Adnan wrote it,” Omar replied.

For a moment, Rafiq looked like he was going to crumple. Omar said, “I’m sorry, uncle.”

“It’s all right.” Rafiq recovered his composure. “But whoever it was, they were probably sitting right here an hour ago.”

“Great minds think alike,” Omar joked.

“Not that great, if they can’t spell ‘solidarity.’”

Omar didn’t think it was a mistake, but he didn’t want to argue about that. He said, “Is there anything here you disagree with?”

“It’s a little naïve,” Rafiq said. “But still, better to set your sights high than give up and do the opposite.”

Omar used the scanner on his printer to make thirty copies, before the ink ran out. Then they walked down the street, slipping them under their neighbors’ doors.

When he returned to his room, there was a poster of a Tunisian soccer player that neither he nor Rafiq had ever heard of. Omar took it down, and wrote out eight copies of the Solidity Manifesto by hand, to replace the ones that had vanished.

“What’s the plan for tomorrow?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Rafiq replied. “All we can do is play it by ear.”

4

Omar cut one side off a cardboard box they found in the pantry, and drew the sign Rafiq had asked for. He said, “Once we put this on the front lawn, the words might change.”

“All we can do is check it now and then,” Rafiq decided. “And if anyone comes asking for tailoring services or judo lessons, tell them to walk around the block and try again.”

Omar put the sign up, attaching it to the letterbox. Half an hour later, the first customer knocked on the door.

“Can you repair a washing machine?” the man asked.

Rafiq said, “It depends on what’s broken, but I can try.”

The man introduced himself as Trevor. The three of them went together to the shed to fetch some tools, then they walked to Trevor’s house a few streets away.

Omar was surprised to find a woman inside, sitting in the kitchen as they passed through. Trevor nodded to her as if to acknowledge her presence, but neither of them spoke.

Trevor looked on as Omar handed Rafiq the tools he asked for. Once he had poked around for a while, Rafiq laughed with relief. “There’s a belt that’s come off, that’s all.” But the space around it was tight, and the components blocking the way were held in place with fasteners that needed a special tool to remove. He could pull and prod at the belt with a screwdriver, but whenever he tried to force it over the grooved disk that it was meant to wrap around, it just slipped off the screwdriver’s blade.

“Let me have a go,” Omar offered.

Rafiq said, “Be my guest.”

Lying beside the machine, Omar managed to squeeze his hand through the gap without quite losing the ability to move his fingers. He caught the belt between his forefinger and his middle finger, and succeeded in dragging it into place.

Rafiq plugged the cord in, switched on the power, and tried the motor. The belt stayed where it belonged, and the agitator swung back and forth smoothly.

“Good job,” Trevor said, as Rafiq screwed the back panel on again. “You want some sandwiches?”

Rafiq said, “Thank you.”

There was a different woman in the kitchen, but she did not seem surprised or disconcerted by their presence. As Trevor took a loaf of bread from the cupboard, Omar asked her, “Did you see someone else come here, to fix the washing machine?”

“Of course, love.”

“What were they like?”

She shrugged. “About the same age as you two. Pretty similar, I guess; I wasn’t paying much attention. People come and go in the blink of an eye.”

Omar felt queasy, but he ate the peanut butter sandwiches Trevor handed him, trying to keep everyone in the room in sight as he chewed the stale white bread.

They had three more jobs that afternoon: fixing a burst water pipe, reviving a failing freezer, and helping a couple hot-wire their car. The first customer had nothing to offer them, while the others paid in canned goods.

As dusk fell, Rafiq and Omar dropped in on number 71, and left the current resident, who said her name was Daniella, a tin of pumpkin soup.

“Did anyone bring you food yesterday?” Omar asked.

Daniella smiled. “How did you know? Are you working for the same charity?”

Omar said, “Not exactly.”

As he sat watching TV, Omar felt as if his chest was about to burst open. Could his father have been the ghost repairman who had pulled the freezer away from the wall, helped by his own apprentice, so that when Omar and Rafiq left the room and returned to find different colored melt stains on the side of the cabinet, the appliance they had never laid hands on was nonetheless in exactly the same position as the one they’d dragged across the floor?

He wanted to believe that. Because if it was true, all it would take would be one more round of musical chairs and suddenly he would be beside his father, Rafiq would be reunited with Adnan, his mother would meet up with Rami in Darwin, the internet would start working again, and they’d all get together with Syed over Zoom.

But why would his father have mimicked Rafiq’s actions in such detail? It hadn’t been true throughout their lives; they’d been born in different towns, more than a year apart. Whoever they were, the shadow crew weren’t puppets, any more than he and Rafiq. They all did what they did for their own reasons, and their encounters with shared witnesses like Daniella were just a consequence of their actions coinciding—purely by chance, and only for a while.

5

“That must be a Superman fan who can’t make a triangle,” Rafiq joked as they drove past the house.

“Stop,” Omar begged him. “They’re offering free apples!”

Rafiq stopped the car, but then he hesitated. “Do we really need apples?”

“They’ll go bad if they’re just left there. And we can take a couple to number 71.”

They walked up to the waist-high circle of bricks, mortared together with an S inside it; a few metal wires added extra support. There was no additional, written sign beside the sack of apples, but the invitation was clear. Omar put two in his jacket pockets, where they hung against the sides of his body, delivering enough tactile cues through the material that they were unlikely to morph into cricket balls. Then he tossed one to Rafiq and bit into a fourth himself.

They finished them, standing on the lawn, gnawing the cores down to stems that they placed in the household’s green bin that was sitting on the verge awaiting collection. Omar had been woken by a garbage truck earlier in the day; like the power station workers, and the bus drivers he’d seen, the sanitation workers seemed intent on refusing to let the city sink into squalor.

“We should ask if they need anything,” Rafiq suggested.

“Yeah.” Omar knocked on the door, while Rafiq hung back a little to keep him in view.

A man opened the door, but Omar could see two young girls and a woman gathered behind him.

“Thank you for the apples,” Omar said.

“You’re welcome.”

“We were wondering if we could do anything in return.”

The man hesitated, then one of the girls tugged his hand and interjected, “Ask him!”

The man laughed. “You don’t have a spare DVD player, by any chance?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you not have one at all,” Rafiq asked, “or do you still have a broken one?”

“A broken one. It’s pretty old, though.”

“There’s a chance I can help,” Rafiq said tentatively. “Can you watch us get some tools from the car?”

As the four of them emerged onto the front lawn, Omar saw that they were tied together like mountaineers, with a rope that ran from waist to waist. The woman introduced the family: she was Daisy, the girls were her daughters Nina and Lisa, and their father was Ivan.

Rafiq gathered his screwdrivers, soldering iron, and multimeter, and they all filed into the house. Following the family from room to room felt like a strange kind of party game. There were children’s drawings taped to every surface in sight: misshapen people, houses and animals liberally sprinkled with glitter.

The family located the broken DVD player and took it to the living room. Omar looked on as Rafiq opened it up and began probing various points on the circuit board, while the girls asked Omar questions and their mortified parents tried to hush them. “Why isn’t your mother with you?” “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

Ivan caught his eye. “I’m sorry. They’re too young to get it.”

“It’s okay,” Omar replied. “You’re lucky you were all together.”

“Absolutely.” But from the shadow that crossed Ivan’s face it was clear that he was still mourning other losses.

“How’s that?” Rafiq asked triumphantly; the player’s menu had appeared on the TV screen.

The girls cheered.

“Do you have any DVDs to try?”

Daisy laughed. “Do we ever.”

“How did you watch them before?” Omar wondered, as they all filed out of the room to collect them. The player had looked like it had been gathering dust since before the children were born.

“Through the computer,” Daisy explained. “But we’ve lost the password.”

“I could try to reset it,” Rafiq offered.

“Oh, we’ve done that a couple of times. But it never lasts.”

The first movie they tried worked perfectly. The girls were ecstatic, and Rafiq nodded toward the door, suggesting they slip away.

“Did you make the S yourself?” Omar asked Ivan.

“No. There’s a couple of bricklayers driving around, offering to build them.”

“Cool.”

They excused themselves and left. “We should get our own Solidity symbol,” Omar suggested, as they returned to the car.

Rafiq was dubious. “It would just mean people knocking on the door all the time, expecting food we can’t give them.”

“It’s not about food; it’s about trusting each other.”

“I’d rather earn people’s trust by what we do.”

“But they’ll never meet us again,” Omar protested. “An S in the front yard would mean they can trust whoever lives there.”

Rafiq laughed. “Until it doesn’t. Until everyone who wants to deceive people decides it’s a useful shortcut.”

6

The woman on the doorstep introduced herself as Leanne. “Would you be willing to volunteer to do some food deliveries?” she asked. “Once a week, just in the local area?”

Rafiq regarded her warily. “Food from where?”

Leanne said, “From the supermarkets. A certain amount of stock is still coming to us, from the usual sources. The ordering systems are kaput, but everyone knows what used to go where, so for now they’re just sticking to what they remember.”

“Really?”

“Some gets skimmed along the way,” she admitted, “but most of it’s getting through.”

“So let the supermarkets pass it to their customers,” Rafiq suggested. “If they’re getting it for free, let them hand it out for free.” Omar stayed quiet, but he couldn’t help smiling; he was sure he could recall Rafiq mocking that idea when he’d suggested it himself.

“I’m a supermarket manager,” Leanne replied, “so I can tell you why I don’t want to do that. We get rushed, we get stampedes, we get hoarders. Our workers get hurt—especially if they try to enforce limits.”

“All right, I can believe that,” Rafiq conceded.

“Even if people only take reasonable quantities, our staff can’t police return visits. The only way to get a fair amount to everyone is to subcontract that to local distributors, who can take it right to the door. Your neighbors might look different every time you see them, but you’ll still know what you’ve delivered to each household.”

Rafiq grimaced. “So you want me to pass food on to a few dozen neighbors?”

“Yes.”

“Food that comes to me . . . how?”

“Our drivers will bring it to your house.”

“How will they know where to come? Whatever you write down, or put in a computer file—”

Leanne said, “I have a map of the area on the floor of my stockroom. If I put a pebble on it, it doesn’t move; I’ve tested that, it’s always in the same place when I come back.”

“So if I agree, you’ll put a pebble there to mark my house?”

“Yes. The drivers look at the map and memorize the addresses they’ll be going to.”

Rafiq rubbed his temple, clearly struggling to assess the integrity of the system. “What if someone else who lives in this house doesn’t agree?”

“Then they won’t get a delivery, because for them there won’t be a pebble on the map.”

“What if they agree, but then decide to steal the food? And people come blaming me?”

Leanne said, “Anything substantial in a different place will keep you separate from them. We’ve all seen how that works: nothing heavy moves around for no reason.”

“What about my delivery area?” Rafiq pressed her. “You tell me which houses I should cover, but what if another manager allocates things differently?”

“It will all be done with stones on the map,” Leanne replied. “You can come and see the layout for yourself, if you like.”

They went with her to inspect the setup. Rafiq examined the map and spoke with one of the truck drivers.

“Anyone ever try to hijack you?” he asked.

“No,” the driver replied. He nodded toward a crate of pineapples. “What are you going to do with those, that would make it worth the hassle? Unless people are actually starving, they’re not going to bow down to you for a piece of fruit.”

“We’re not there yet,” Rafiq observed glumly.

The driver said, “So how about we try to keep it that way?”

7

Omar was slapping his own face to stay alert when, between the thwacks, he heard a scraping noise coming from in front of the house, and several voices trying unsuccessfully to whisper.

“Uncle, wake up!” he said.

Rafiq didn’t stir; Omar prodded his shoulder and repeated the plea, until Rafiq opened his eyes.

“What’s happening?”

“I think someone’s trying to steal the car.”

They made their way to the living room together without switching any more lights on; there was enough illumination to see where they were going, but Omar was afraid for a moment that the dimly lit figure in front of him might turn around and reveal a new face.

Rafiq, still Rafiq, peered out through the blinds and sighed. “I don’t think they’ll have much luck, but they’re going to leave a few scratches.” He’d welded brackets onto the doors with holes for some very large padlocks, the shackles too thick for most bolt-cutters.

“They might break the windshield,” Omar fretted.

“Not without a sledgehammer.”

Omar moved closer to the window and tried to position himself to get a glimpse between the slats without losing sight of Rafiq. There were four youths standing around the car; two were trying to prize open the front door with crowbars, while the other two stood guard, holding baseball bats.

The streetlights were bright enough to show their faces. They all seemed giddy and elated, reveling in the excitement of the act—while making no effort to keep each other in sight. Omar had visited households where the inhabitants had gone solo, but most had been as glum as the transient residents of a short-stay boarding house. He had never seen a group like this, enthralled by a common purpose but entirely oblivious to each other’s identities.

“Someone’s watching!” one of the guards announced. He must have noticed his companions’ unexpected stability; he looked around, scanning the street, but then settled on a closer target.

“Get back!” Rafiq whispered. As they retreated from the room there was a shattering noise; Rafiq pulled the door closed behind them, then took hold of the handle. There was no lock; if anyone tried to come through, it would be down to his grip on that piece of metal whether they were kept at bay or not.

“I should have put bars on all the windows,” he lamented. Omar listened to the thugs laughing and yelling, but it didn’t sound as if they’d braved the broken glass and climbed into the room.

After a few minutes, the voices went silent. Rafiq opened the door; the living room was empty. “We can clean that up in the morning,” he said. “Then start on the bars.”

As a temporary measure, they moved a table into the hallway and tied the door handle to it with several loops of wire. Omar’s heart was still racing. The street had always been quiet before. He’d never heard of a single neighbor being burgled.

“We might as well swap now,” Rafiq decided. “You sleep, I’ll keep watch.”

Omar lay in bed with his eyes closed, replaying the event in his head. As rattled as he was, he couldn’t deny that alongside his fear he felt a trace of envy. He wasn’t going to weep like a child because he missed Bruno and Tuan, but the prospect of never walking down the street with anyone he could talk to the way he could with them felt like a kind of torture. And if he could never hope to have an ordinary friend again—one with whom he shared a history—maybe the car thieves had the next best thing. They had made a plan and committed to it, regardless of exactly who was standing beside them.

But the more he dwelled on the notion of a camaraderie so pure that it transcended every comrade’s identity, the more he began to recoil. He had no problem delivering food to neighbors he’d never see again, but reducing his whole life to a piece of theater so generic that anyone could step into the roles would just be a new kind of nightmare.

And he hadn’t even witnessed the version with an endless flow of understudies: while he’d watched the thieves, the same four actors had remained together in a single troupe.

If he could do that, unwittingly—if he could bind four people together when they would otherwise have drifted apart—what else could achieve the same result?

He’d fantasized about looking down on the city from space—and for all he knew, a satellite engineer somewhere might be working on exactly that project. But in the meantime, there had to be smaller steps that ordinary people could take.

8

“Are you trying to get five Michelin stars from all your lab rats?” Martin joked, as he started on the lunch Rafiq had prepared.

“Of course,” Omar replied. It was a simple meal, but anything homemade was more enticing than the canned food most people were relying on, and with the aroma of freshly baked bread lingering, perhaps it did seem like a moment of artisanal luxury.

Valerie was more subdued, but she seemed just as satisfied with the food. Omar still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to lure these two solos off the street with nothing but a promise of bread and hummus and an earnest declaration that it was all in the aid of science. Maybe they were both carrying knives and were confident that they could fend off any attempt by three other strangers to harm them. Or maybe they’d been longing for a chance to carry out exactly this experiment themselves.

When they’d finished eating, they all went into the living room. Omar had set up his computer with the webcam positioned to capture a view of the two armchairs facing in opposite directions. He started the video recording software, and turned to the participants to reiterate the instructions.

“Please just sit in the chairs in silence. Don’t talk to each other, don’t look at each other. It will only be for five minutes.”

“Have you got something I could read?” Valerie asked.

Omar said, “Sorry, I don’t want to complicate things with extra objects.” A woman reading could only be replaced by another woman reading, and the control subjects the previous day had not been allowed any distinguishing props.

“All right.” Valerie steeled herself. “See you later, then. Or at least . . . someone with the same plan.”

Omar followed Rafiq out of the room, into the backyard—far enough away that nothing about their own presence ought to be detectable by the participants.

“If you can keep a couple together by having them sit in silence with their backs to each other, you should probably start a marriage counseling business,” Rafiq teased him.

Omar said, “If they fall for each other, I’m taking no credit. You did that, with the food.”

Rafiq smiled. “My cooking didn’t keep the controls together, did it?” He’d taken some persuading to go along with the study, but now that they were actually doing it, he’d become as enthusiastic as Omar.

Omar checked the time on his phone, the only thing it was good for. “Still three minutes to go.”

“If you want to pass the time, do sixty push ups,” Rafiq suggested. “I’ll count them for you.”

“No, they’d hear me breathing a mile away.”

“Ah, there’s always some excuse. With no school and no sport, you really need to keep fit somehow.”

Omar hoped this was just faux-parental nagging about his general well being, and not a desperate preparation for a state of dog-eat-dog anarchy. The bars on the windows had made him feel safer on one level, but seeing the same thing all around the neighborhood had left him with a dismaying sense that all the fortress building might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When the five minutes were up, they returned to the living room. A man and a woman were sitting in the chairs, facing away from each other, but they bore only a superficial resemblance to Martin and Valerie.

Omar walked over to the computer and tore the masking tape off the indicator light beside the webcam. It wasn’t lit. He forced himself to stay calm, and addressed the couple quietly. “Thanks for taking part. Do you mind telling me exactly what you were told would be happening, by the other experimenters?”

The man recounted the spiel he’d been given. The woman’s version was phrased a little differently, but both followed the same basic idea as Omar’s protocol. They’d never seen each other until he came into the room and released them from their promise, but at least they hadn’t ended up in the house for some entirely different set of reasons.

Rafiq said, “Thank you, we really appreciate your help.”

“So, this was a control, right?” the woman asked. “To test what would happen if you didn’t switch the camera on?”

“Exactly.”

As he closed the front door, Rafiq turned to Omar. “Does that count as a failure?”

“It doesn’t count as a success.” Maybe Martin and Valerie had remained together in another version of the living room, thanks entirely to the camera Omar had switched on—to the delight of another team of experimenters . . . and perhaps their confusion, too, if they’d been aiming for a control—but he had no evidence about it, either way.

“So we try again tomorrow.”

9

As Omar walked down Gleason Street, the wind blew a stream of flyers past his feet. He squatted down and picked up a handful.

“Anything interesting?” Rafiq asked.

There were two copies of the Solidity Manifesto, in a bilious green that was probably the result of someone with no black ink left in their printer trying to make do with a color cartridge whose magenta had run low.

There was a proclamation under the “Emergency Workforce Act of 2028,” requiring the members of a list of professions to show up for their jobs, while also compelling the public in general to provide “aid and sustenance” to anyone they “reasonably believed” to fall into the same categories. Omar had no idea if a parliament somewhere really had managed to convene and pass this law, or if the whole thing was just a well-intentioned hoax.

And there was a poster of a man wanted for murder, though it was not clear from the text beneath the mug shot whether the poster’s creator knew for sure that the man portrayed was on the loose, or whether they had felt obliged to release his replacement from their own custody, and had glumly assumed that their counterparts, wherever their suspect had ended up, had done the same.

Rafiq stopped reading over his shoulder; he’d spotted a potential volunteer. “Excuse me, sir,” he called out to the solo. “We’re trying to see if we can keep people together just by using video cameras. Would you be willing to take part in an experiment to test that?”

The man stopped walking, and beamed at them delightedly. “I absolutely would, but in return you need to be part of my own experiment.”

Rafiq was taken aback. Omar asked the man, “What are you testing?”

“Brick biographies.”

“Ummm . . . ?”

“I’ll show you,” the man insisted. “It will only take two minutes; my house is just around the corner. Then I’ll come and do your camera thing.”

Omar looked to Rafiq. It wasn’t impossible that a solo had formed an elaborate plan, as part of some Ship-of-Theseus gang, to lure people into an ambush—but he was asking for less trust than the two of them had asked of him.

Rafiq said, “Sure.”

The man introduced himself as Evan, and true to his word, his house wasn’t far. They followed him inside, and he led them to a room that looked like it might have once served as a nursery; the wallpaper bore a motif of bears holding balloons. But it contained no furniture now. Arranged on the bare floorboards were dozens of bricks, spelling out the message: MY NAME IS EVAN CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS. BORN 8 SEPTEMBER 2002. MY WIFE ALICE BORE MY SON GRAHAM ON 15 APRIL 2028.

Rafiq said, “I’m sorry about your family.”

“Everyone’s lost people,” Evan replied. “This isn’t a plea for sympathy; I’m just trying to set down an anchor.”

“When did you do this?” Omar asked.

“Yesterday. But I only finished it last night, so I haven’t had a chance to see what effect it has.”

“At least it was still here when you came back,” Rafiq noted.

“Yeah. But now I want you two to come back here tomorrow.”

Omar said, “Of course. But we can’t ask you to join our own experiment now; if you stay connected to us, we won’t know if it’s the camera or the bricks.”

Evan was disappointed, but he accepted the argument, and they assured him that they’d still honor their commitment.

They returned to Gleason Street, and after half an hour of begging they managed to persuade two other solos, Kieran and Daniel, to join them.

Back at the house, the four of them shared a meal together, then Omar started the recording, sending the video app into the background so its window no longer showed on the screen.

In the backyard, Rafiq said, “No one would keep doing controls forever, would they?”

Omar had no idea, but as far as he could tell he’d always encountered people whose history seemed unexceptional. This was only their third trial, so it would not be all that strange if some other experimenters were still running controls. But by the fifth trial? The tenth? If the webcam was still refusing to stay on, it would start to look as if the universe was going out of its way to mock them.

When he walked down the hall and turned into the living room, he saw that Kieran and Daniel were gone. He checked the computer; the web cam light was on, and the video app was still running in the background.

He halted the recording, and addressed the two strangers. “Thanks for taking part. My name’s Omar, and that’s Rafiq. Can I ask if you came in here together?”

They had already turned to face each other, and they were grinning with surprise and delight.

“Yes we did,” one of the men replied.

The other nodded. “It looks like it actually worked. I’m Colin, by the way.”

“I’m Pedro,” the first man added.

“Do you want to see the replay?” Rafiq asked.

The four of them sat and watched the recording. Omar felt a chill as a young cheekbone-thief squatted in front of the camera finishing the setup, while a middle-aged man stood in the doorway; despite all the family photos, he’d never seen a home movie of any of the house’s other occupants before. But what really mattered was that Colin and Pedro had been paired from the start. And they hadn’t cheated, they hadn’t messed with the protocol. They both looked bored out of their skulls, but they hadn’t spoken, or turned to peek at each other, for the entire five minutes.

“So far so good,” Pedro said. “But how do you scale it up?”

“We’re going to need more experiments,” Omar said. “And a way to send video wirelessly. I’m hoping that if we start recording from two cameras into one video file—like a split-screen—then people who start out in the same place and wander around separately with the cameras pointed at them will still be together when they return.”

“Do you have that kind of equipment?” Colin asked.

“Not yet,” Rafiq replied. “But if you spread the word about what happened here, it might reach someone who can take the whole idea further straight away.”

10

They managed to get four jobs in the afternoon, all of them paid in food. Omar went to bed tired but happy. Maybe the camera trick was nothing when judged against the scale of the disaster, and he might as well be celebrating finding a roll of duct tape while the house was dragged up into the sky by a tornado, but for now he didn’t care. He’d tamed one tiny whirlwind, and he wasn’t done trying.

When he woke, he could tell without opening his eyes that it was still night. He could hear Rafiq, over by the desk, breathing irregularly in a kind of controlled sobbing.

Omar thought about rising and trying to comfort him, but what he could say? The success they were both so proud of wouldn’t bring either of them closer to their families. If their most grandiose dreams came true, and people ended up pinning the whole world down the way it used to be, that would almost certainly mean that everyone remained lost and scattered—with a chance to put down new roots, but no hope of recovering the old ones.

11

“That’s the house, isn’t it?” Rafiq asked.

“Yes,” Omar affirmed. “Number 93, I remember.”

Rafiq knocked on the door. After a minute, a young man Omar hadn’t seen before opened it, barefoot and bleary-eyed.

“Can I help you?”

“We’re looking for Evan,” Rafiq explained. “He asked us to drop in this morning. I hope it’s not too early.”

The man said, “I’m Evan.”

The three of them stood in silence for a moment.

“Is your birthday the 8th of September?” Omar asked.

“Yes. How did you know that?”

Rafiq said, “The bricks. I mean, someone else who put the bricks down showed us.”

Evan digested this. “Why don’t you come in?”

He led them to the nursery. The wallpaper portrayed rabbits, swallows and acorns, but the mini-biography in bricks was exactly as Omar remembered it.

“You didn’t show this to anyone yourself, yesterday?” Omar asked.

“No,” Evan insisted. “Has it changed for you?”

“No,” Rafiq replied.

“So it works. Up to a point.” Evan regarded his handiwork despondently.

“Maybe if you add more detail,” Rafiq suggested. “It’s hard to write much with bricks, but I bet if you carved letters deep enough into the walls, they’d persist.”

“Maybe.”

As they left the house, Rafiq seemed to warm to the idea himself. “We should do that. The cameras look promising, but we need to try every method we can think of.”

Omar couldn’t argue with that, even if it felt stranger than ever to imagine sharing the house only with those cheekbone-thieves who also shared his name and birthday. “I wonder if any genome sequencing labs are still operating,” he joked.

Rafiq said, “All those C, A, G, Ts? I’d probably make a thousand errors, and hand the house over to a pack of mutants. Do you know your blood type?”

Omar tried to summon it up, but failed. “I used to.” It was written down somewhere.

“I’m A negative.”

Birthdays were a lot more specific than blood types, and even that hadn’t been enough for Evan, but Omar supposed every additional factor would help. In any case, the whole idea seemed to cheer Rafiq up. Maybe he’d feel better just writing out his family’s history—as if that could draw him nearer to them. Omar pictured himself walking into a room engraved like a shrine of remembrance, to find Adnan beside him, summoned by his story. The ghost brothers would share a solemn embrace, then point each other to where their fathers were waiting.

They’d just arrived home when a customer came, wanting a leaking roof repaired. She offered two jars of tomato paste, but while Rafiq and Omar were on the roof, with the customer peering up from the backyard, she stepped out of sight, and the replacement who emerged denied ever making such a deal. Rafiq was gracious, and departed without making a fuss; they often did small jobs for no payment. But Omar could see the resentment eating away at him as they drove back to the house.

After lunch, Rafiq said, “I hope you didn’t have any plans for the spare room.”

That had been Rami’s bedroom until he left, but even before the disaster Omar’s parents had cheerfully repurposed it.

Rafiq fetched a power drill and a masonry bit. Omar said, “Please don’t drill into the wiring, my CPR isn’t that great.”

Rafiq donned his safety glasses. Omar stood back and watched him attack the wall.

MY NAME IS RAFIQ MESSADI. I WAS BORN ON 3 APRIL 1986 IN REDEYEF, TUNISIA.

When Rafiq paused to blow away brick dust and let the bit cool down, Omar said, “You mean 1988?”

“No.” Rafiq laughed. “I know my own birthday!”

“Of course. I just thought you might have missed closing the top loop.”

Omar was sure he remembered calculating that Rafiq was younger than his father, who’d been born in 1987. But maybe he’d got things backward; on that first night he’d still been in shock.

Redeyef, though? His mother had been born in Redeyef. If Rafiq had told him before that he’d been born there, it would have stuck in his mind.

Omar folded his arms and began swaying gently. How many Rafiqs had he shared the house with? Two? Three? A dozen? He had no complaints; they had all treated him well, sharing the hope that someone would do the same for Adnan. Though as he watched the biography unfolding, there was no Adnan recorded; this Rafiq’s youngest child was named Nayef.

Omar listened to the whining of the drill; if he turned and fled, his footsteps would be lost in the noise. Forget the cameras, forget the carved biographies; nothing would ever be enough. Not a parent doting on a newborn child, not a pair of lovers at each other’s side. What kind of life lay ahead for him, if even his own wife and children would be forever slipping away? Wouldn’t it be better to be honest and embrace the truth right now? Walk out of the house and find some gang of thieves who’d take him in, without caring who he was, who he had been or would be?

But he stood his ground and kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. He started screaming, bellowing with all his strength. Rafiq switched off the drill and turned to him, alarmed. He tore off the goggles and approached tentatively.

“What is it? Omar? What’s wrong?”

Omar kept bellowing, but he refused to close his eyes. Rafiq put a hand on his shoulder and met his gaze, then joined him, screaming with rage and grief.

12

“Pick an eight-digit number, and commit it to memory. Then type it into the computer and hit the return key.”

Omar chose the last eight digits of his old phone number; this wasn’t like a password that needed to be difficult for an adversary to guess.

When he was done, Cathy led him into an adjoining room, closing the door behind them. “There are some tools here,” she said, pointing to a bench-top. “I’d like you to open up that gray box, plug in the unit beside it with the ribbon cable, press the red button, wait for the LED to turn green, then remove the unit and reseal the box.”

Omar wasn’t sure how much of this related simply to dexterity and the ability to follow instructions, and how much would be measuring something more elusive, but he set about completing the task. To release the cover of the box, he needed to apply a fair bit of pressure with the Phillips-head screwdriver to keep it from slipping as it turned, and the red button was recessed in a hole so deep and narrow that neither his fingers nor the screwdriver could reach it, requiring him to use a tool like a blunt needle to prod it. When he did, a red light came on at the top of the panel. He stared at it for what must have been two minutes, trying not to let his anxiety show, but just when he was at the point of asking if he’d failed the test, the light turned green.

He unplugged the ribbon cable, and put the cover back on the box.

“Good work,” Cathy said. She opened the door and invited him back into the first room. “Now enter the same number as before into the laptop.”

Omar typed the digits with scrupulous care, afraid that if he made a mistake some kind of siren would start blaring and he’d be ejected from the building before he had a chance to correct the error. When he hit the return key, the computer responded: Match.

Cathy said, “All right, then. You want to join the team?”

“Absolutely.”

She opened a new program on the laptop, and said, “Hold down the authorization button on your camera.” Omar complied, and the view of his head from the device on his right shoulder appeared on the screen. “Your feed will be logged alongside my own, and the other people you’re working with. Are you okay with that?”

“Yes.”

“Come back tomorrow, eight o’clock sharp.”

Omar walked out into the sunshine. He raised his face to the sky, letting the warmth strike his skin, and closed his eyes. When he opened them and looked down, it was a struggle to spot any changes. One camera-less woman, far down the street, was wearing a different dress. A poster for a music festival stapled to an electricity pole had changed color, from salmon pink to green.

When he got home, he walked down to number 71 to see how Mrs. Capaldi was. She’d just washed a load of laundry, so he helped her hang it out.

“Can I sweep the floors?” he asked. He could see that her back had been playing up.

“Thank you.”

When he was done, she made him a cup of tea and they sat in the kitchen.

“I got a job today,” Omar told her.

“You’re too young to be working,” she scolded him.

“I’ll go back to school when it opens. But this is important; I’ll be loading new software into the broadband nodes. Eventually we’ll have the internet working again.”

Mrs. Capaldi looked dubious. “Have you studied enough to do that?”

Omar laughed. “I didn’t say I wrote the software! They just need people who are stable enough to install the same version all along the network.”

“Hmm.”

Omar drained his cup. “Can I write something for you in your diary?”

“Nothing happened to me today,” she said. “Just make something up.”

“I can’t do that.” Omar fetched the engraving tool, and a fresh sheet of copper from the stack in the living room. “Tell me what you want me to write.” He had no wish to invade her privacy, but her hands were too shaky to do the job herself, and there was no need for the record to contain anything especially intimate, or even true. She just needed to pin a few things down, enough to stay in touch with the world around her.

“I had a dream about my husband last night,” she recalled. “He was shoving all our vinyl LPs into the microwave.”

Omar started engraving.

As he was preparing to leave, he asked, “I can’t get you to wear a camera?” He wasn’t sure if anyone had raised the subject with her before.

Mrs. Capaldi grimaced. “No, that’s not for me.”

“All right. I’m sure someone will drop in to see you tomorrow.”

“It will be you, Omar, won’t it?”

He didn’t want to quibble. “More or less.”

At home, he reheated the leftovers from the night before; they had some different spices than the ones he’d used himself, but they were still quite tasty.

He was washing up when he heard the key in the lock. He dried his hands and turned toward the kitchen doorway.

“How’s it going?” the man asked, with a kind of forced breeziness. “I’m Tallal. What’s your name?”

“Omar.”

“Do you mind if I sit down?”

Omar gestured at a seat beside the table. “Have you eaten?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

Omar took a seat facing his guest. “I didn’t hear a car,” he said.

“Oh, that . . . ” Tallal waved the matter away. “I won’t waste your time with my whole life story,” he said. “It doesn’t matter who I am, or who you are. I just know this: you must miss your family as much as I miss mine.”

He waited for Omar to respond, but when he received no reply he continued. “I spent a few months in this house, with a kid who was a bit like you. And I did my best to look after him. But in the end, it was no life for either of us. Everyone needs their own family back.”

Omar said, “And if we could have that, don’t you think we would?”

“You’ve got something holding you down, haven’t you?” Tallal challenged him. “I scraped my own stupid shit off the wall, but every time I visit here, it’s Omar, Omar, Omar. Your namesakes don’t all look the same yet, but I can tell their story’s growing, narrowing the focus. So I know you’ve got it carved in stone somewhere.”

“Somewhere safe,” Omar agreed.

Tallal regarded him sadly. “You really don’t want to see your father again? Because you know you can’t while I’m blocking the way—through no fault of my own, trapped by all the Omars.”

Omar said, “What I know is that he’s not coming back. Whatever I want, whatever I write, whatever I do. I’ve made my peace with that.”

Tallal nodded. “I understand; you don’t want to get your hopes up. But you haven’t changed the lock, have you? What’s that all about?”

“It just means I know you’d smash the door down.”

Omar waited in the kitchen while Tallal went through the house, hunting for the engraving that he was convinced was robbing him of his happiness.

When he was done, he stood before Omar, sweating and angry.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Because who knows what that would do to my son? But if I stick with you for long enough, I’ll find it. You know that. So why don’t you just save us both the time?”

“I had a good friend called Rafiq,” Omar said. “He helped me a lot, and then he had to leave—like you did. But I’ll tell you, honestly, I don’t believe he ever came back to this house. I think he’s living somewhere with the new friends he’s made, doing the best he can.”

“If he was your friend,” Tallal insisted, “you’d give him his son back.”

“If it was in my power,” Omar replied, “every last one of us would be reunited. But it’s not. You know in your heart that’s impossible.”

When Tallal left, Omar went to bed, propping the camera up beside him on its charger. He pictured the new grid of images being logged, his face beside Cathy and the colleagues he’d be meeting tomorrow. Most of them would be in other grids, too, like he was, in an intertwined mesh of overlapping images that would only keep growing, gradually stretching out to bind the whole city together.

His mother and father, Syed and Rami, Bruno, Tuan, and Rafiq, all his cousins, aunties and uncles, might be unreachable, but they’d have as much of a chance as he had to build new lives. If he gave in to his grief there would be nothing left for him but prowling the streets like Tallal, pretending he could bring them back.

If he could find a way to be happy, that would prove that it was possible that they’d found a way, too. It was the only thing he could do for them now, and it had to be enough.

J.C. Hsyu is a Taiwanese-American author who has worked in animation, tech, and live action VFX. Her urban fantasy and cyberpunk stories have appeared in Sword & Sorceress XXVI, The Future Fire, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and her picture book, The Dinner That Cooked Itself, is a retelling of a magical Chinese folk tale about doing good work and eating delicious food. Currently writing a trilogy of xianxia novels, she lives in California with her husband and daughter and can usually be found online (@jchsyu) rambling about anime, film adaptations, and stationery supplies.

Optimist Cleaver’s Last Transmission

J. C. Hsyu

There was a fresh splash of blood, throat-level, on the concrete column beneath the 5 Freeway overpass where Pug was supposed to have been waiting for her. She wouldn’t have given it a second glance, not in this part of town—where the handicapped parking signs were full of bullet holes—if she hadn’t been late to meet Pugilist in the first place. In their line of work, being late, even by seconds, was grounds for termination. Not just because the clients of PpalliPpalli Couriers paid hefty premiums to guarantee their confidential data was transmitted without interruption; no, it was because they were fucking couriers. Rep was everything, and PpalliPpalli Couriers’s was spotless.

Well, had been.

She hated the way Pug chewed with their mouth open and especially when Pug elbowed her shoulder multiple times during each conversation, but like her, Pug was reliable and had never missed a point-to-point transmission before. And now, Pug was MIA and possibly hurt or dying; there was a dead signal on her—both of their—hands; and it was her fault. Of all the nights she had ever been on call, when she was actually somewhere that was not her apartment in the Valley, at a place that was not a dive bar. Of all the goddamn nights a client specifically asked for Optimist Cleaver to anchor a transmission, she had missed the call from dispatch because she had been signing paperwork at the mortuary. Because she had found Da Ge, after two long years of searching, and could finally pay her respects.

She looked at the column again, a third and final time, because someone had also drawn her call sign beneath the wet arc using the same paint: a squat, square butcher’s knife, dripping possibly-Pug’s blood in a florid pool of light from a nearby streetlamp. She blinked hard at her bloody call sign, stored the image locally before smearing it with her hand. Like the signals she and other couriers like Pug bounced point-to-point across town, at randomly assigned locations like a concrete column beneath the 5 Freeway overpass, it was only meant for one recipient. Never for broadcast.

The shoulder strap of her sling backpack buzzed across the middle of her chest; she gripped the wooden handle extending downward from its custom sheath. The haptics were acting up again. “Easy, easy,” she said and turned around slowly, taking in her surroundings.

Behind her was the vast empty parking lot of a Home Depot, tucked against Amtrak lines bordering the LA River. There were stacked shipping crate storage units across the road, surrounded by fences topped with barbed wire. To her left at the north end of the triangular parking lot there was an IHOP, a McDonald’s, and a taco truck, lights blazing. The road to the right ended in a turnaround, dimly visible just beyond the overpass, dotted with solitary figures hawking their illicit wares in silence. The cement pillars surrounding Optimist were covered in graffiti; the drying blood that had made up her call sign was nearly indistinguishable from one tag to the next. But she could have clocked that call sign anywhere. She just hadn’t seen it in years.

A repurposed meter maid three-wheeler with its doors ripped out, reeking of spray paint, the color—colors?—indistinguishable in the glaring orange light of the streetlamps, came to a stop at the curb in front of her. The driver’s left leg was propped up, with dirty toes splayed against the dash. “Hey,” she said, pulling the blunt out of her mouth, “heard of a garage sale nearby?”

“At four in the morning,” Optimist deadpanned. She kept her grip on the handle.

The woman coughed, spewing smoke. “You never know, right?” she croaked.

Optimist pointed toward the turnaround with her free hand.

“Oh shit, yeah, I guess so.” The woman laughed and sped off as quickly as a rickety filing cabinet on three wheels could.

The freeway above was quiet—they all were now, after the pandemic developed more strains than vaccines—and the automated bird alarm calls from the Home Depot dominated, echoing against the cement around her. The early morning was brisk, just starting to warm, and the moon was fading above Chavez Ravine to the west.

Letting go of the handle, Optimist walked to the edge of the Home Depot parking lot where she’d left her m-cycle. Hopped on and freed her helmet from its dock between the handlebars, thumbed the ignition. Pulled on the matte-black SYM helmet and pushed her face mask into its housing with a click, flush with the shell, as the m-cycle displays flared neon across her visor.

She had to call in the dead pulse. Reputation first.

K-pop blared in her inner ear for two minutes before her channel was accepted with a click. She took a deep breath. “Hey, boss, it’s Optimist.”

“Omigod Tim hi!” Kipeum had made a huge deal out of coming up with the nickname, but everyone on the roster knew it was because she couldn’t pronounce “Optimist” correctly without losing face as the owner and manager of PpalliPpalli Couriers. “What’s up I sent you an anchor gig a few minutes ago did you have a question or need anything.” She combined her sentences in breathless combinations of questions and orders because time was money in their line of work, and also because she only ever drank black coffee. There was always a rapid-fire tempo of mechanical keys in the background; she was also the main dispatcher.

Optimist rode north up the 5, weaving through piles of debris, abandoned cars, and occupied tents in the darkness. The freeway lights had been decommissioned for parts, and to encourage wildlife to return. “I, uh, missed the handoff from Pug. We got a dead pulse.”

“What the fuck Tim are you all right wait no you wouldn’t be calling but I’m still going to kill you okay so how did this happen when you were on call and like supposed to be waiting?”

She worked her mouth silently as she chose her next words. If she could talk Kip into assigning her at least one leg of another P2P, she’d finally have enough to pay the sexton at the mortuary. “I showed up late. Really fucking sorry, Kip, and I’ll do whatever it takes to—”

“Oh god just save it for when you tell me why you were late now let’s take a look what is the fucking job code?”

Optimist shuddered preemptively at the idea of explaining this fuckery in Kipeum’s cluttered office at some point later on. Kipeum was young and brilliant, forging her own path outside of her family’s shipping chaebol, and had a way of turning even the simplest of questions into pointed, soul-withering judgments. “Job code 91.3.01.”

Tapping ensued, faster than ever. Once at a bar Kip had shouted into Optimist’s ear that she typed 120 wpm and Optimist, who had no idea what that meant, had enthusiastically nodded, “Fuck!” Kip had giggled and flashed double peace signs.

“Holy shit good news it’s not a dead pulse it’s still active oh thank god we don’t have to contact the client anyways you’re still not out of trouble so don’t get too fucking comfortable.”

She let go of a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. “What are we looking at, Kip?”

“Oh my god Tim we still have time before the end of transmission holy shit you might be able to live I mean we might be able to make it through this Tim!”

“Fuck yeah, Kipeum. Send me the coordinates to the end point. I’ll pick up the signal from Pug and bounce it home.” She blinked at the numbers Kip sent to her. “Wait, are you serious? You’re not fucking with me?” The points in a P2P transmission were randomly generated in locations few and far between across New Angeles County; it was why PpalliPpalli Couriers only employed m-cycle riders who could consistently dodge CHP. Three months ago, Optimist lost two patrol cars in Angeles National Forest to make an eighty-five-mile connection from Lancaster to Torrance in forty-eight minutes and twenty-three point five seconds. Kip bought her coffee for a week afterwards.

The end coordinates for job code 91.3.01 matched the location where Optimist had been half an hour ago—a few miles southeast, in Boyle Heights, meeting the sexton—instead of meeting Pug beneath the 5 overpass.

“Do I sound like I’m in the mood to fuck with you Tim I am not in the mood when the reputation of PpalliPpalli Couriers is on the line okay—”

“Sorry, sorry.” She swerved hard to avoid the sudden appearance of a shambling figure pushing a wheelbarrow from behind a car. Her pulse was erratic and her palms were sweating in her gloves. “I was just surprised at how close it is to the previous point. Gotta be a new record. Time to end point?”

“Okay yeah this is also really fucking weird it’s at nineteen hundred twelve tonight.”

“Nineteen twelve?” The day’s stats flashed across her visor. “That’s sunset.”

“But I don’t get it Tim why is there half a day’s lag between points this close together I mean I’ve never heard of this shit before have you?” The whole idea behind P2P was to get a message across town, undetected, in the least amount of time. Ninety minutes was the longest Optimist had ever been given between points.

“Never have I ever, Kip.”

“Ah well who cares I guess you have a bunch of time on your hands maybe you should take the opportunity to reflect on your mistakes and settle your affairs I mean no offense you know I love you Tim okay?”

“None taken. Hey, um . . . ” She gripped the handle on her shoulder strap absently; she was fucked anyways, might as well dig a deeper hole with her boss. “You haven’t heard from Pug, have you?”

Suddenly, Kip stopped typing. It was the longest silence in the short and glorious history of PpalliPpalli Couriers. “Why do you ask you’re the one missed the P2P and what is it did you see something is it Pug should I be worried Tim goddamit?”

“No, Kip. I’m sure they’re fine. Everything’s fine. I was just checking.” Of course she couldn’t mention the splash of blood above the cleaver. Not yet.

The machine-gun typing picked up again. “I haven’t heard from them but their signal is still up it’s just southeast of you which is weird I mean doesn’t Pug live in Montebello but you know what I bet you Terri will know.”

Optimist felt a sliver of tension release from her armored shoulders but it was temporary, worth nothing in the bigger picture. “Copy that. I’ll catch up with them and then lay low until sunset.” She checked the readout in the lower corner of her visor for exits. When the highway shield for the 2 due north appeared she upshifted; she could take that to the 134 and head east toward Pasadena, then back south to San Marino, where Terri worked. “I’ll fix this, boss.”

For once Kipeum didn’t answer with a stream of insults and orders before collapsing the channel mid-sentence. “Godspeed, Tim,” she said quietly.

She had to find out if Pug was all right. And then, if Pug was still speaking to her, find out what happened beneath the 5 Freeway overpass. Thing was, Pugilist never picked up calls; like Optimist, they only ever channeled out. But Tarantella—“Terri” being another of Kip’s convenient nicknames, natch—usually knew where Pug could be found. They were more or less exclusive, having met in a troupe that dressed in period costumes and took pictures at historical locations across New Angeles when they weren’t hired out for parties. Tarantella was an African-Italian exchange student studying costume design and Korean cinema, living in Alhambra and working as a docent in the botanical gardens at The Huntington in San Marino. She only smiled for photos at work or with the troupe, and she had sullenly mumble-slurred at the PpalliPpalli Couriers holiday bar crawl months ago that Optimist “seemed cool for an older lady, but not just because, you know, the Asian thing.”

Tarantella was also the only choice because she was most likely to be awake at this time. To beat the afternoon brownouts The Huntington opened at sunrise in spring and summer, and Optimist was able to pull in soon after the gates were unlocked. She hurried along paved footpaths toward the back corner of the property, where the newest garden had been wedged between the considerable Japanese and Australian Gardens: the Royal Bumbershoot Society’s Umbrella Garden.

It was easy to sight the white parasol of the docent, held aloft in a white fishnet glove before a group of sleepy tourists in pastel shades of full PPE. Optimist kept her black helmet on, her mask and visor opaque.

“Good morning, good morning. Watch your step, please, and stay on the gravel path at all times. There is no touching allowed except for designated umbrellas that have signs—those are mature and ready for harvest. The youngest shoots are very impressionable and contact can manifest permanently in their canopies right away. Then we have to quarantine them before they’re fully grown, and the uprooting process can be very traumatizing for shoots of a certain age. Thank you for your cooperation, and welcome to the Royal Bumbershoot Society’s Umbrella Garden, sponsored in part by the Eumenides Foundation. My name is . . . ” the docent paused and then laboriously read her name tag “ . . . Tiffany, and I will be your guide today.”

Optimist snorted. The docent’s Edwardian-era bonnet whipped in her direction; Tarantella marked her helmet, yanked her face net aside, and glowered at Optimist before turning back to the group. “Now, our tour starts, of course, in the Classic Garden. They grow straight and monochrome, just like the first-generation umbrellas some of you may remember from before the rains stopped. They were the first to be planted by the Royal Bumbershoot Society and have bred true from lab to soil; they have never shown signs of coloration. Next are the Pockets, which are very loyal and sweet and come in all shades and patterns. You can pet the adult in the corner, the brown plaid. You’ll find it may lean into your hand . . . ”

The sky was paling further as the sun rose higher and the air grew warmer. Optimist began making her way through the crowd, moving closer to the white parasol with each stop.

Tarantella refused to look in her direction. “And now behind me over there, you may have noticed we moved another set of gardens around. We had to separate the Cocktail Umbrellas from the Bubble Umbrellas. The Cocktails, as you can see, while brightly colored and flamboyant, tend to wobble; we placed the Baldachins between them because the Bubbles were bumping the Cocktails on purpose and knocking them over.”

Optimist reached the front row of the group. Defrosted her visor. Touched her tragus, opened a subsonic channel. Terri. Hey.

Tarantella rolled her eyes, and Optimist could breathe easier. If she was still up to giving attitude that was a good sign. Which meant Pug was alive. “The Bumbershoot Society is of the opinion that although the Bubble Umbrellas have clear canopies and no other distinguishing features, they show some destructive tendencies and may be quite sociopathic in nature. Always show caution around Bubble Umbrellas.” A lace-gloved finger reached up to touch a delicate brown ear beneath the bonnet, accepting the call. And assholes like you,Tarantella hissed back without moving her lips.

Which meant Pug was badly hurt. Optimist’s grin waned quickly.

That’s right. Now fuck off, Cleaver. Tarantella turned away and addressed the group as she continued walking. “Pardon our mess; we recently secured a new round of funding that will allow us to double the size of the Umbrella Garden by next summer. You’ll definitely need to come back, you hear?” She lowered her umbrella and unfastened its strap gently. She didn’t open the canopy so much as it opened itself, the lace billowing upward as if lifted by an invisible breeze. “Now, here we are at the last garden. The best one, and my favorite, obviously!” She twirled the handle with a flick of her fingers as the tourists laughed, voices muffled behind their masks. “The Parasols are the most popular umbrellas here. They are great flirts, and they may look slight and dainty but they will not bend easily. And while they are independent, they can be very territorial.”

“What happened to that one?” a little girl asked, pointing to a small cordoned-off area on the furrows.

“Oh, that?” Tarantella said with a ghastly smile, stroking the canopy of her umbrella. “That parasol ate its neighbors. The Royal Bumbershoot Society is isolating it for further study.”

“What are you doing here?” Tarantella whispered angrily as she waved good-bye to the dissipating tour group.

She popped her mask out to speak. “How bad is it, Tarantella?”

“Go away, Tim! I have another group waiting.” Tarantella swung her parasol onto her shoulder with the precision of a rifleman as she marched back to the entrance of the Royal Bumbershoot Society’s Umbrella Garden.

Optimist hurried to catch up with her; Tarantella was a good head taller. “Look, I gotta know if Pug is okay. I’m really sorry about what happened—”

“Sorry?” Tarantella spun around so quickly that Optimist skidded to a stop on the gravel. Then skittered backward, to avoid the sharp tip of the parasol now pointed at her chest. Not that it would get past the plates in her jacket, but she could swear the umbrella hissed at her. She was glad she had locked the sling backpack inside the m-cycle’s storage compartment, away from the haptic signals the Royal Bumbershoot Society’s Umbrella Garden was giving off. “Is that it? You’re really sorry you set Pugilist up to get slashed?”

“What?” Seeing her call sign again had been a mild surprise, not completely unexpected—it had never been a matter of if, but when—but the accusation was an ugly shock. “I didn’t, Tarantella. I don’t know who that was, I showed up late and Pug was already gone.”

“Bullshit. Pug said it was someone wearing the same kind of SYM helmet as you, who said something weird and stupid like, ‘You can thank Cleaver for this,’ and pulled a knife. Luckily Pug got to the trauma clinic in time. Your friend missed a major artery by a centimeter. And now there are seventy-five stitches holding Pug’s face together!”

Optimist held up a hand, palm out. The only conciliatory gesture she would make.

“Well? The fuck you have to say for yourself?” Tarantella snapped.

“It wasn’t any friend of mine but it has to do with me. Tell Pug I am really fucking sorry they got caught up in my shit.”

The parasol shook a little, but stayed put. “And?”

There wouldn’t be much left over after she paid the sexton. She winced; the cats needed litter. “And tell Pug I will cover medical.”

Tarantella curled her lip. “On a courier’s pay? I’ll have better luck getting it covered as a student.”

“Is that where they are? One of your school’s hospitals?”

“Wow, Tim, I really don’t think you’re in a position to ask—”

Optimist grabbed the parasol, just below the tip that had been sharpened razor-thin; the umbrella was definitely hissing now. Tarantella gasped, pulling on the handle, but Optimist’s grip was firm. “You should go there, now, and stay with Pug. Don’t leave until I get there later today, do you understand?” She swung the parasol away from her. “And don’t let Kip know. I’m going to fix this.” If she repeated it enough, it was bound to happen.

Tarantella immediately began petting the shaking canopy of her parasol. Her large eyes narrowed behind the intricate net covering her face. “Who the fuck are you?” she asked. “What the hell kind of name is Optimist Cleaver anyway?”

The fascination in her tone was unsettling. Optimist pushed her mask back into place and turned the visor opaque again.

Keeping the clock readout bolded in her visor, she channeled the sexton as she headed back west toward the Valley. Most of PpalliPpalli’s couriers were based in Downtown or the West Side, close to Kipeum’s cluttered office above a ddeokbokki restaurant in K-Town, but Optimist preferred the enormous flat grid of the San Fernando Valley. Where there was always another side street, another strip mall parking lot, another alley to turn into, ride through, keep going. She had grown up in a small mountainside village with shacks and stairs and gangs carrying machetes. Nothing but dead ends.

The rising sun was a flat white disk in a gray sky, toasting the leather on her arms and shoulders; the readout in the upper corner of her visor read 36 C. “Padre Junior? This is O. Cleaver. We met earlier about the slot that just opened up? Yes, hello again.” She maneuvered around piles of brick, rebar, and concrete from highway sound walls shattered during the Glendale Galleria riots. “I wanted to check if the deposit went through. Okay, great. I’ll be able to pay the remaining balance by early evening. Will you still be there? I’d like to proceed with the display and begin Qingming as soon as the final payment goes through. Thanks so much.” A red m-cycle caught up to her on her left as the 134 transitioned into the 101, bordered by abandoned vehicle dealerships with half-dressed mannequins on the roofs. Another courier, from the burgundy-colored sling backpack between their shoulders; Optimist clasped her right forearm in greeting, and they did the same with a small nod. An e-truck rumbled past them both, the windows of its empty cab flashing ads for erectile dysfunction pills. A family van merged from an on-ramp. It was a little after 0800 hours, another normal rush-hour morning, but even four vehicles on the highway felt more crowded than usual. Optimist looked back to the red m-cycle.

Couriers mostly worked at night. She had rarely seen another one on the road in daytime.

There was a blur of movement as the m-cycle swerved close, then a flash, and a sharp pain lanced into her left shoulder. Her good arm. “Fuck!” she muttered. The red m-cycle pulled away, jerking across all four lanes and barely overcorrecting in time to take the nearest off-ramp. Optimist clocked the exit in her readout: Balboa Avenue. Not that it mattered, when you could shake anyone in the Valley, but it burned into her memory as a reminder that she needed to watch her back.

Blood dripped from her jacket cuff. Her shoulder was sliced open; she could feel the line of fire where the skin was separated, threatening to tear further. But, just in case, she passed a few more exits before she got off the 101 and took a meandering, roundabout way home. She didn’t realize she was lightheaded until she got off the bike; when she removed her helmet the ground pitched sideways along with it. “Goddamit,” she whispered, and closed her eyes. It wasn’t that she was hurt. She’d been through worse.

It was the MO. The pathetic slash-and-run tactic she had tried to abolish among the brotherhood. Er Ge had argued for keeping it. Da Ge had sided with her.

So it was a message. Now that Da Ge was gone, Er Ge could come after her in any which way he wanted.

Holding her left arm against her side, she walked slowly to the atrium lobby of the Golden Imperial apartment complex. The grizzled property manager was changing the bulbs in the recessed lights. “Hey, Jules,” she said, moving gingerly around the stepladder. Her voice came out hoarse, barely above a whisper. In the ancient marbled mirrors across from the mailboxes her face was pale, nearly green.

“Oh, hey!” he wheezed cheerfully through his dip-stained mustache and beard. Optimist nodded and headed to her apartment, the first door on the left along the fern-lined walkway. It took everything within her not to check if she was dripping blood, and she flinched when she heard Jules yell, “Dammit!” a split second before the sound of shattering glass filled the air.

Once inside she docked the helmet, hurried to the bathroom and slid onto the floor, shedding the backpack, her jacket, and shirt. She pulled down a towel for the blood. Her cats spilled into her lap as she tugged a battered tin case from the backpack. “Not now, Da Goh,” she muttered, pushing the chunky gray aside. It rolled into its long-haired sibling, who hissed. “You too, BunDan.” They eventually settled against her thighs as she cleaned, disinfected, and sewed shut the three-inch gash above her triceps. It was a good, clean cut from a short blade, possibly something as mundane as a box cutter. But her breath shook and sweat dripped into her eyes, and she nearly blacked out between stitches.

The blood didn’t bother her, it had always been more of a nuisance to clean up. Neither did the needle, when one lived long enough to receive multiple vaccinations every year. It was each pull at her skin and muscles as she sewed, the thick, deep pain of shredded tissue beneath the shrill echoes of severed nerves, that got to her. Back home, she had done the sewing on everyone else; with Da Ge’s knife training, no one had come close to breaking the surface of her skin. But here, now, this was bad fucking news. She hadn’t seen the motion in her periphery, never clocked the fist coming at her. She had entirely stopped paying attention to these kinds of things in the past two years.

When she finished, she tilted her head back and closed her eyes again until her mind and stomach stopped churning. Then she drank some water from the tap and sat down again, tossing the bloody towels into the sink. She pulled the cats into her lap and channeled out.

“Hey, Kip.”

“Fuck’s sake Tim I’m really busy well I’m always busy and I didn’t think I’d hear from you until later tonight did you find Pug and aren’t you supposed to be laying low?”

“About as low as I can get, Kip. Look, this job is a fake. The P2P transmission was never meant to complete.”

“Why would you even think that it’s not our job to think up shit like that our job is to do our job Tim are you not going to do your job?”

“Kip—”

“Tim you better not be asking me who the client is Tim.”

She just needed to know. “My arm was almost sliced off just now. While I was riding home. Someone on an m-cycle with a blade.”

The typing didn’t stop; couriers got jumped all the time over jobs, territory, and sometimes out of sheer boredom. “Well you called me so you’re fine and I’m still not telling you who the client is because hello we’ll get shut down by the Three Bs so go sleep it off and then finish the job okay Tim?”

She took a deep breath and tried again. Kip was susceptible to guilt trips once in a while, and it was in Optimist’s nature to keep trying to land just one, for posterity. “We can build a case for the Better Business Bureau, easy. These fuckers are setting me up. Not just me. Us. PpalliPpalli Couriers.”

“Are you out of your mind wait of course you are Tim that’s what makes you one of my best but hell no I still can’t divulge that information because laws and if it got out nobody would ever hire us again plus I fucking said no so go rest or whatever and did you find Pug well go find Pug and bounce the signal home and then we can talk okay seriously don’t call me again until it’s done I mean it love you Tim bye bye.”

Optimist pulled another clean towel from the rack, folded it into a makeshift pillow, and lay down on the bathroom floor. BunDan climbed onto her chest, purring loudly and kneading, and Dah Goh settled between her knees. She closed her eyes. The linoleum was cold against her upper arms. Her hips began to ache from turning out, and the back of her head was already going numb. Aside from the jagged throbbing in her shoulder, it was almost like sleeping on the floor at home when she was young. She could almost hear the rain outside, feel the narrow paws of her first cat, Xiao Mao, on her clavicle, smell the charcoal her family made and sold at the temple for extra money during the winters.

It was when things got worse—after the mainland seized Taiwan’s vaccine shipments, after her parents and brothers and sisters were carried to the white tents one by one and never came back, after she ran out of charcoal to sell—that Da Ge found her and took her in. At least, that was the story Da Ge had liked to tell. He said it was much easier than saying he caught a dirty, malnourished orphan stealing his lunch one day, brought her into the Tien Dao Meng brotherhood, and taught her to use a knife. “And don’t you ever mention I allowed you to keep the cat,” he would remind her with an infuriating tap to the back of the head. “It’s all about rep, you know.”

There were many good years after that, and every Qingming he paid his respects with her at her family’s shrine. Then Er Ge put an end to all that in one night, and she never saw Da Ge again.

But she couldn’t stay up any longer to reminisce—she was never able to pull all-nighters even when she was young—and a headache had formed somewhere between her right ear and her left eye. “Too old for this shit,” she said, scratching the round dome of fur between BunDan’s ears. There was a commotion to the side, a vibration she could feel through the cheap vinyl flooring. She reached out, searching until her fingers found her pack. The handle in the shoulder strap buzzed in short little spurts. She wrapped her fingers around it and pulled her pack close. “Shhh,” she whispered, “it’s fine. Everything will be fine,” and fell asleep.

She woke up a few hours later. The cats were gone and her bandage had soaked through. She switched the dressing and put food out for the cats—they were probably laid out on the balcony, the only spot in the apartment that got any sun—then she scoured the place for joss paper and incense. She couldn’t find shit. When was the last time she had stopped in Monterey Park?

When the charge readout on the back of the SYM was full she signaled Tarantella, who quickly replied with the location of her university’s hospital, managing to project resentment in less than 100 characters. Optimist suited up, slung her pack, and returned to the parking lot in the back of the apartment complex. There was no sign of Jules except for a small halo of shattered glass and dead moths on the threadbare, wrinkled brown carpet in the lobby.

She headed out toward the 101. Back east to the 134 and then south on the 5, weaving and dodging across the lanes. The debris changed in size and matter every day; at night the wheelbarrow hobos sold and moved and dumped their wares across the freeways, reshaping and obstructing veins and arteries that were too empty, too clear to bear. The Barrow Night Market had formed from looting abandoned vehicles trapped in the first mass exodus, but after the National Guard cleared the lanes, it had become a lifestyle, a form of political statement, even an art movement. Optimist had thought it clever for about a minute—a flower mural of cheerful workers in coveralls running beneath clouds that showed up one day along the southbound lanes in the Cahuenga Pass turned into a corpse-ridden scene of lightning-struck devastation the next—and then decided it was a permanent nuisance, a luxury, an affront. Insult to the lives that were left behind.

A few exits beyond the freeway overpass where she was supposed to meet Pugilist, near the 110 junction, she parked and approached the front doors of County/USC. Hundreds of people crossed her path, entering and exiting, adjusting their masks and sun hats; it was one of the busiest ER and trauma hospitals in the county. The readout in her visor was a stark tattoo against the cloudless, gray-white sky: 41C and just past 1400 hours. The heat didn’t bother her, no matter the intensity. It was nothing to a kid who grew up near the southernmost tip of the island, where it averaged 35C before monsoon season hit. When Da Ge finally reached out to her, ten years after he left Taiwan, it was the oncoming monsoon season, the plum rains—humidity that dampened the corners of your world, drowned you in blankets of heat and mosquitoes—that cemented her decision to leave Kaohsiung. To find Da Ge, in any way, shape, or form, and perform Qingming for him.

Pug had been moved from the ER to a regular outpatient room. Optimist found the room number she had been sent and entered, pulling the paisley curtain aside with one short yank.

Tarantella started and let out a little shriek from where she sat, cross-stitching, next to the gurney bed. “Doesn’t anyone knock in this fucking country? Oh . . . look who it is. Figures.”

Optimist removed her helmet, pulled a dingy brown chair up to the other side of the bed. “Hey, Pug.”

Half of Pug’s head was covered in bandages. Their one visible eye, large and brown and lined with thick lashes, blinked slowly. “Yo, Tim,” they said cheerfully through their flimsy hospital-issue mask. “They gave me the good drugs.”

“Only the best for you, Pugilist.”

“Oh please,” Tarantella grumbled.

Optimist pointedly continued to ignore her. “Listen, Pug, I’m glad you’re stable. I’m so sorry about what happened.”

“Yeah, it was pretty . . . ” Pug smacked their lips the way heavily medicated people did, slowly and loudly. “ . . . Yeah, that sucked,” Pug finished with a low chuckle. “Man, who did you piss off?”

“I think I know who it is, but I need to be sure so I can fuck them up for you, Pug.”

Pug waved an IV-needle-studded hand in the air. “Shit, I’m cool, Tim. Doc says I’ll look good as new. And aren’t you paying for this anyway? Maybe I’ll ask them for bigger lips.”

Optimist held back a laugh. She had forgotten how much fun Pug could be when they were under the influence. “Whatever you want, Pug. Now listen, I have a question for you. Can you remember what kind of knife it was?”

“What kind of . . . knife?” They scratched at where the bandages lay across their thick cap of black hair. “Oh man, I don’t know.”

“Think, Pug. Please.”

“Give me a sec.” Pug closed their eye, and began to snore.

Optimist finally looked at Tarantella, whose lips were pressed into a thin line. She raised her eyebrows and Tarantella buried her face in her lace gloves. “I’m not laughing,” she said, her voice muffled.

An hour later, Pug woke back up with a start. “Eh.” They blinked twice at Optimist, seemingly more alert. “Yo, Tim.” They smacked their lips. “When’d you get here? You been waiting?”

“Hey, Pug.” Optimist smiled. She put down her untasted cup of shitty hospital coffee. Holding the wilting paper cup had given her something to do while Tarantella cross-stitched furiously in silence. “I got here just now. How you feeling?”

“Better. They gave me the good drugs, yo.” Pug weakly elbowed her arm, and Optimist felt worse than ever. She handed a plastic jug filled with ice water to Pug, who slurped noisily at the straw.

“What happened to you is all my fault. I’m really fucking sorry.”

“Oh yeah,” Pug said, their voice climbing high with realization. “Yeah, where the fuck were you? You’re Kip’s number one, the fucking teacher’s pet. Optimist Cleaver never misses a P2P.”

“First time for everything.” Optimist grimaced. “I was meeting someone about something real important, and I didn’t get the dispatch in time. Simple as that. But I’m going to fix it.”

“Fix it?” Pug smiled. “What are you, some kind of vigilante?”

Optimist allowed herself to grin. “I’ve been called worse.”

“Hoo, does Kipeum know she got Batwoman working for PpalliPpalli? Or Batgirl or some shit?” Pug laughed, then grunted, stiffening. They lifted a hand to their bandaged face.

“Cleaver,” Tarantella interjected in her docent voice, “can you please move along? Pug needs to rest before their surgery.”

“All right all right, Tiffany, keep your fucking bonnet on.” As Tarantella sputtered angrily Optimist stood, thumped her helmet against her leg. Added, quietly, “Pugilist, the signal’s still live.”

“No fucking way.” Pug’s eye went wide. “It’s a dead pulse, yo, you weren’t there to bounce the signal on—”

“Turns out I was meant to anchor, and transmission doesn’t end until sunset tonight.”

“What the . . . Shit’s weird. I’ve never heard of a job like that, not from anyone on Kip’s roster. And you missed a P2P. The fuck’s going on?”

Optimist held out her right arm. “I’m trying to find out. You can bounce the signal to me now, Pug.”

Pug stuck their lips out and shook their head stubbornly, another thing that drove Optimist up the wall. “What’d Kip say?”

“C’mon, you know Kip. Show must go on.” Optimist bobbed her hand.

“For real? I don’t know, Tim, none of this sounds right.”

“I told you that,” Tarantella grumbled. “Repeatedly.”

“I know, mi amor, but—”

“Pug, I’m pretty sure this lookalike fucker who slashed your face will be waiting for me at the end point. I’ll give ’em the same greeting they gave you.”

“Yeah, but can you handle this? I mean, you’re—”

“Old enough to know what I’m doing. Yes, Pug.”

“Well, let the records show who said it first.” Pug grinned, raising their right hand. They clasped each other’s forearms in an easy, practiced grip. On contact, there was loud buzz of haptics and a high-pitched beep as the data bounced from one subdermal transmitter to the other. Each courier service had a different bounce; it had to be a simple gesture, easy and fast. M-cycle Metricians bumped fists, Bros on Bikes slapped shoulders, and Vicious Cycles even bumped helmets—a bounce that looked as dumb as it was impractical. Some of the best couriers picked their employers by the style of bounce. Optimist had picked PpalliPpalli because Kipeum had hired her on the spot, no questions asked, after she’d completed a test run. All the other services had asked how old she was; most couriers burned out by their late twenties.

“Watch your back, all right?”

“I will, Pug. Oh, and just one more thing,” she said, holding up an index finger. “Do you remember what kind of knife it was?”

“Aw, Tim, shit happened so fast.” Pug picked up the PCA pump controller. “I think . . . It wasn’t a big knife, but it was black. And it was . . . there was something over the fingers. Like a knuckle-duster.” They pressed the clicker twice, sighed happily as the painkillers surged down the tubing into their IV, and began snoring again.

Optimist touched their shoulder. “I’ll catch you later, Pug.” She headed to the door, then stopped and looked back. “Yes, Tarantella. Was there something you wanted to say to the back of my head?”

“Does the knife matter?” Tarantella asked, her cross-stitch needle poised in midair. There was a tiny, bright yellow plastic bow fused to the eye of the needle.

“Look, you did good, bringing Pug here. It’s crowded. Safe.”

Her cheeks flushed in confused pleasure behind her doily-covered face shield. “What are you . . . Of course we’re safe here, it’s—”

“Don’t leave this room. Order in. Remember it’s all on my tab, I gave the nurses my account info. Ask them to stop by every hour.”

“Optimist Cleaver, this isn’t witness protection in some fucking movie—”

Pug shifted and moaned in their sleep.

Tarantella snapped her mouth shut and threw the hoop at Optimist instead. “Tell me why the knife matters!” she hiss-whispered.

Optimist caught it with her free hand, looked at the pattern: “Vaffanculo” was stitched in hot-pink cursive, and flowers and songbirds were being added around the border. She shook her head, grinning, and tossed it back. “It’s a Mark I trench knife. Antique. Only people of a certain age carry them these days.” She put her helmet on and clicked in her mask, saluted, and left the room.

The shadows were long as Optimist pulled out of the LAC+USC parking lot and rode east along the 10, toward Monterey Park. She had just enough time to pick up Qingming supplies from the T S Emporium on Garvey Avenue before closing time and return to the end point by sunset. Some spry little grandmas were rifling through the remaining inventory when she arrived; despite their withering glares she managed to gather a small hand broom, a packet of joss paper bills, sticks of incense, a small censer, a bottle of plum wine, and a bag of shriveled mandarin oranges.

She hit traffic after merging back onto the 10, west toward Downtown. About ten vehicles had slowed to a stop as demonstrators blocked the westbound lanes with burning trash barrels. Optimist tapped the handlebars nervously as she watched the time readout in her visor against the fiery red New Angeles sunset. When the demonstrators began piling broken furniture into barricades, she sighed, “Fuck this,” and took off toward the median, where there was a small opening between a rotting wooden pallet and the concrete divider.

She didn’t expect the bat.

As she passed through the gap, a dark sliver of metal arced out and slammed into her stomach. She crumpled over and then toppled, crashing the m-cycle to the ground with her leg underneath it. Pinned against the median, she tried to catch her breath; ripped off her helmet and took in huge gulps of air. The demonstrators were gone. Optimist realized they hadn’t once chanted their cause or held up any signs.

The bat came into view, tapping the asphalt. Optimist looked up. “Fool me twice, shame on me,” she said. “Ever find that garage sale?”

The woman wasn’t dirty anymore, or barefoot, or smoking a blunt. Her wavy black hair was swept back into a neat ponytail. She was compact, muscled, and wearing a dark red moto jacket. She held a bright yellow plastic box cutter in her other hand. “More like third time’s the charm. How’s your shoulder?”

“It fucking hurts,” Optimist said. “Ah. Should have remembered that the newest recruits do all the grunt work.” She closed her eyes and inhaled. “Er Ge booked the P2P and waited for me to show up. Only I didn’t. So he slashed Pug and sent you to do recon. By the way, nice prop with the meter maid truck, but your line delivery needs work, Garage Sale.”

“Oh, fuck you—”

“Did he order you to slice up my good arm, too, or did you beg him for the chance?”

Garage Sale pushed the bat into her left arm, right at the wound site. “Quit yapping.”

Optimist winced. “I mean, B plus for effort, kid, but you do know you’re far from the boss level fight—”

The bat shoved; Optimist grunted as stitches tore. “You won’t make it that far.”

The handle on her sling backpack jittered and shook. “Not yet,” she murmured.

“What was that?” Garage Sale snapped, leaning forward. She couldn’t be more than twenty-five. Young, strong, and mean. Exactly what Optimist used to be.

It was just the part about being young that had changed. “Oh, are you having hearing problems, too?” She yanked on the bat with her left hand and whipped her right elbow up at the same time. As she had predicted, Garage Sale hung on to the bat like a stubborn child; her nose broke with a crack, a dry, precise sound like the snap of a wishbone.

Optimist pushed free of her m-cycle with one foot and used the bat to stand up as Garage Sale shrieked and fell to her knees, holding her hands to her face. “You should probably get your ears checked. I mean, you don’t want to end up like me, right?” She kicked the box cutter away.

“Fucking hell!” Blood poured out of Garage Sale’s nose. She exploded, lunging forward—she was so fast—and slammed Optimist against the concrete barrier.

“I don’t think you’re listening,” Optimist gasped, and kneed Garage Sale in the groin. It wasn’t hard enough to incapacitate but it was enough to surprise Garage Sale and make her stagger back a couple of steps. Enough for Optimist to wind up the bat and slam it against Garage Sale’s right shoulder, the arm she had wielded the box cutter with, and knock her over; the ponytail bounced as her head also knocked against the ground from the momentum. Stunned, she rolled on her back and looked up at Optimist, working her mouth silently. “Did that help shake out any ear wax? No? Too fucking bad.” Optimist leaned down, and suddenly she was very tired, very sore, and very angry. All she had wanted to do was finish her shift and spend some quiet time performing Qingming for Da Ge, after two years searching the world for him. His voice, once loud and lively, had been soft and hoarse on the channel. He had refused to tell her where he was, even after a decade of wandering; all he said was that he was dying.

Now, all she had to do was complete this last fucking transmission. “Listen to your auntie, if you can. There’s still time for you. You’re not bladed yet. You don’t have to work for these men. They are bad men, old men, following old, bad ways. And really—” she waved her hand at the young woman’s bloody face “—does this seem like it’s going that well for you?”

“You don’t know shit about me,” Garage Sale spat bloody froth at her.

Optimist hefted the bat in an upswing. The young woman flinched, and Optimist chucked the bat over the median. The metal clanged as it bounced across the lanes. “Back home, that—” Optimist pointed “—that would have been a machete. We wouldn’t have had all this time to chatty chat chat. There are no epic volleys in knife fights. Knife fights are ugly, messy, and they are usually over before you even realize they’ve begun. Do you even know what you’re being asked to do?” She turned and fetched her helmet, righted her m-cycle.

Garage Sale was on her knees, her hands to her face. “Second Brother is going to kill you,” she shouted through her fingers. The blood looked black in the dying light. “And I’m going to—”

“What’s that?” Optimist cupped an ear to her helmet. “Sorry, Auntie can’t fucking hear you,” she called over her shoulder as she rode away.

Without any further interruptions it was a short ride to Boyle Heights. Optimist exited Soto Street and headed south. Turned left at the King Taco #9 onto East Cesar Chavez, right at the Pizza Loca onto Evergreen Avenue. Finally, a turn into a humble wrought-iron driveway gate flanked by carved pedestrian entrances, into the oldest standing cemetery in New Angeles. There was a steady stream of funeral processions in both directions as she rode along the central palm tree-lined roadway, beneath a sky deepening from pink to purple; past the little stone chapel and funeral home; past the Black, Japanese, Mexican, Armenian, and Jewish sections; all the way to the far end of the cemetery, along Lorena Street, next to the crematorium. To the Chinese Cemetery Shrine, known more colloquially as the Potter’s Field, the largest mausoleum in Evergreen Cemetery and for tonight the last transmission point of PpalliPpalli Couriers Job 91.3.01.

Padre Junior was holding a time and visitation spot with her deposit; he would confirm as soon as he received the rest of the balance. She risked channeling her boss once more as she parked in front of a small wrought-iron gate painted a bright orange red, the only remnant from the spartan little shrine erected in 1888 for the mass grave of Chinese laborers. She removed her helmet and jacket, ran her hands through her thick, shaggy hair. Her arm bandage was soaked but holding. The night air felt warmer than usual; she smelled cooling asphalt, freshly clipped grass, grilled meat and onions. She pulled a protein brick from her sling, gnawed on the corner as she waited for Kip to pick up. Beyond the tiny gate the mausoleum walls loomed several stories high, filled top to bottom with a moving frieze of glowing headstones. Sextons like Padre Junior were constantly shifting and repositioning—programming—the phosphorescent concrete markers across the mausoleum walls for paid visits, moving them about the surface of the mausoleum walls like the tiles of a handheld sliding puzzle.

Like all of the other burial grounds across the country—cemeteries, mortuaries, graveyards, memorial parks—Evergreen had run out of plots almost overnight when the vaccines stopped working. When burials were outlawed, every gravesite began mass exhumations, unearthed their headstones, and laid foundations for mausoleums. Crematoriums ran around the clock. The mausoleums grew tier by tier until they loomed over the churches and funeral homes. Still there just wasn’t enough room for the dead, not when forty-five percent of the population was gone. Not everyone’s ashes could be stored, not everyone’s name could be displayed at the same time. The role of the sexton was hastily reinstated to catalog the dead and manage the rotation of names for display on the mausoleum OLED screens.

Kip answered mid-stream. “—you too take care Mr. Grigorian good-bye oh god you again Tim what the fuck is it now you’re on my what do you call it my last nerve endings.”

“I met up with Pug and they bounced the signal to me, Kip. I’m here waiting at the end point. Check my coordinates.”

The tapping sped up. “Okay good job doing your job so bounce that signal home to the recipient and then report in to HQ I mean what else do you want maybe I have a cookie here somewhere—”

“I know, Kipeum. But I need the client’s name. The fucker slashed Pugilist to get at me. It’s personal.”

“You know I don’t think we’re going to accept any P2P past three hours anymore I mean there’s no way I can talk to you this much between points again wait who slashed Pug WHAT.”

“Oh shit fuck.” Optimist slapped her hand to her face. “I was going to tell you. All of it. But right now, Kip, just don’t worry. Pug is fine. They’re fine. Everything’s fine.”

“How the fuck did this happen wait did this happen before or after you were late to the P2P Tim wait oh my god did this happen because of you Tim tell me the fucking truth.”

And now she felt genuinely sad, because she had looked forward to telling Kip and Pug and the others about Da Ge someday inside the dark, messy, smelly HQ of PpalliPpalli Couriers. She hadn’t told anyone her story since she took over the Kaohsiung chapter of the Tien Dao Meng twelve years ago. “Yes. I’m really sorry, Kipeum.”

There was a drawn-out sigh. “You know what I’m sorry too and it’s not just because you made me a lot of money but like come on I can’t have any of my couriers showing up late or you know getting any of my other couriers slashed like what the fuck Tim rep is everything in our business okay let’s just get this over with so after you finish this transmission I’ll channel your fee and pay out your remaining vacation and then that’s . . . that’s it I guess.”

Optimist nodded and forced herself to smile, to agree. To bottle it up and move on, even if she wanted to stay at PpalliPpalli Couriers, more than anywhere else. She could do this; it was how she had gotten her name. “I understand, Kip. Thanks for everything.”

“Oh shit I lied actually there’s like one more thing I mean he was supposed to hang out and bounce you the info after the job was done but who the fuck cares you’re already fired right so that’s really it and you better remember this favor forever because you know I’ll make sure my children and their children never forget okay thanks Tim I’ll always love you now bye for real.” In the distance, the comically familiar jackhammer sputtering of a small, loud motor grew.

Despite everything, Optimist couldn’t resist a long, slow laugh as Kip’s assistant rode up. He was a recent transplant from Seoul who spoke little to no English. Nobody knew his name or how old he was or exactly what he did at HQ while they were out on P2Ps. He was heavily tattooed, always in the same outfit—an immaculate white T-shirt over loose black linen culottes, white Reeboks—and had a glorious mane of shiny, waist-length hair. His ride of choice was a battered, rusting WWII-era moped that all of K-Town could hear when he fired it up. The first time Optimist and Pugilist had seen him, pulling up to the trash-littered sidewalk outside of PpalliPpalli Couriers HQ with his thick tresses gleaming in the sunlight, Pugilist had elbowed Optimist and shouted above the moped’s blaring exhaust, “Did this summer just get more magical or what?”

Kip must have sent him off at least an hour ago, in order for him to reach Evergreen in time on that ridiculous ancient thing. “Forever and ever, Kip,” she said, but her boss—former, now—had already hung up. She held up her right arm and Summer Magic bounced the information to her with a touch and a wink, and then he was away, his hair streaming like an ebony banner behind him.

She checked the clock. It was just past 1900, right before sunset, almost time to end the transmission. The name from Kip, the name now floating in her eyeline, was the name of the man she had wronged on the endless stairs and dead ends above Kaohsiung twelve years ago. She had never been proud of what she had done but she had thought—hoped, stupidly—that leaving would be enough. But enough had never been, for Er Ge.

“And here we are,” Optimist said, unloading the Qingming supplies. At the base of the mausoleum walls there were dozens of rectangles marked and numbered in white paint, just wide enough for four people to stand side by side and bow. Optimist made her way to A1005, arranged the joss paper items, and lined up the food and wine. As she swept dead brown pine needles from the faded white border her forearm haptics vibrated once, twice, three times. A series of beeps sounded. The signal was home.

It almost didn’t matter that it was her last transmission for PpalliPpalli Couriers, or that this whole shitshow had been her fault.

What mattered was that it was another job finished. From the day she started running blades in the alleys for the Tian Dao Meng, each knife handle rolled tightly into the sash around her waist, nothing came close to the satisfaction of a completed task, a job well done. Bonus points that her friend was still alive and their perfect track records intact. Rep was everything.

She heard a faint notification chime as she received her last paycheck from Kip; in turn, she channeled the balance for Evergreen Cemetery to Padre Junior and exhaled as footsteps sounded behind her.

“It’s Da Ge now, right?” she said without turning, watching the headstones slide back and forth. The ground rumbled constantly from the workings of the machinery driving the mausoleum displays. Almost absently, she had switched into the language of their home. It felt good. She put her hand on the strap across her chest, the handle buzzing in short, angry bursts.

“No, no. I’m still Er Ge. Still . . . second.” The voice was deep, expansive; he had always liked talking as if he had a large audience. “Though I’ve done well since you left. Expanded our territory north, even, all the way to Tainan.”

She shook her head and pressed her lips together in bitter amusement. Tainan had been her idea. “Well. Congrat—”

“The problem is,” he barreled on, talking over her as he did everyone, “despite the fact I keep things running, that the map is mine to shape and the brothers answer to me, they just . . . Won’t. Call me Big Brother yet. Because of you, Big Sister.”

Optimist dropped her head. “I don’t answer to that anymore. Not since I left—”

“What kind of a name is Optimist Cleaver anyway?” He switched easily from Hokkien to English; he had always been good at school despite his temperament, which she had always thought a shame to waste. “I get the cleaver part, anyway. But Optimist? It’s not even a real American name.”

The word, in Hokkien, had been Da Ge’s private nickname for her. “I was starting over. It felt right.”

“Ah. Starting over as a courier.” Er Ge laughed. “Quite a stretch from your job back home, running the Tien Dao Meng.”

She stood up. Turned around and planted her feet. “Easiest way to look for someone.”

Er Ge had always prided himself on his looks. He and Da Ge had been classmates, about fifteen years ahead of her, but for a man in his mid-fifties he was remarkably well preserved. His hair was still glossy black, his light brown skin smooth and free of sun spots. He wore a tailored dark suit with a crisp light shirt and polished boots. His posture was straight as ever, and he looked trim and fit.

He looked her over, head to toe, and chuckled. “Is that even more gray hair I see?”

“Nice try. You know it started when I was a teenager. When I joined—”

“So this is the shithole where he ended up, eh?” Like all bullies, he pushed elsewhere when his cheap shots didn’t land. “Far from home, in a mass grave. Without the sea before him and the mountains at his back. Pathetic.” He coughed and spat to the side.

“He had always wanted to travel,” she said levelly.

“What did him in?” Er Ge leered.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m guessing it was viral, but I couldn’t find any hospital records. He only used his real name for his . . . final arrangements here.”

Er Ge’s face went slack. “You weren’t . . . with him?”

“No,” she said softly. “He instructed the mortuary to only release his real name after he was cremated. That’s how I finally found him.” She looked up at the sky. “Sorry I’m late.”

Er Ge looked crestfallen for a minute before his face twisted and set. “No. It is still not over between you and me,” he said doggedly.

Her patience finally ran out, all at once. Here they were again, arguing as if no time had passed since Da Ge brought her into the brotherhood. Er Ge had made up yet another narrative for himself where he was forgotten, left out, disrespected. Again.

The handle buzzed wildly against her chest; she took hold of it and did not let go. She would not let the conversation be controlled any more by the interruptions or opinions of a bad man, an old man now, still following old, bad ways. “You got what you wanted!” she snapped, switching back to Hokkien. “I left the Tien Dao Meng to you. Da Ge is dead, and I’m never going back home. Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Because I’m still the second brother,” he said hoarsely.

Optimist rolled her eyes. “Oh god, not that again.”

“No, no, no, don’t you do that. I fucking hate it when you do that.” He raised his hand to point at her and it was like they were back home, exchanging words on a hot, humid day in the dusty street. Except for his right hand, his fighting hand, holding the Mark I trench knife with the stubs of his fingers. The middle joints grown over smooth where she had severed them, twelve years ago. “Oh yeah, the brothers do what I say, but they won’t call me Da Ge. They only pay respects to Da Jie. To the big sister that beat me.”

“You came all the way here, attacked my friend, and got me fired from the best job I’ve ever had . . . over a title.”

“It’s more than that and you know it.” His voice finally rose to a shout. “You fucked me over when you took the brotherhood from me. Then I had to learn how to fight all over again—” he shook the knife at her “—and keep my mouth shut all those fucking years you were in charge, the brothers only listened to you out of respect for Da Ge—”

“It couldn’t possibly have been because our brothers kept me in charge for allowing sick days, brokering a truce with the KMT gangs, and doubling our income, could it? Inconceivable.”

“—and then you fucked me over again when you left. Ran away in the night two years ago, like a fucking rat, without giving me the chance to call a challenge—”

“That was the night Da Ge contacted me to tell me he was dying. He just wanted to say good-bye.”

Er Ge looked away, working his jaw, unable to respond right away. Finally, he gritted his teeth. “None of that matters anymore. I’m challenging you for leadership of the brotherhood, Da Jie. Fight me, here, now—”

“No,” she said loudly. “I won’t. I’ll give you my blade. Take it home so you can order your new business cards.” The handle nearly jumped out of her fingers. “Shhhh,” she murmured.

Er Ge spat in disgust. Lofted the Mark I into the air, grabbed it upside down by the hilt, and flung the blade into the dirt. “Still won’t fight unless you have to protect someone, eh?”

“That’s what Da Ge taught us. That’s why I fought you. Da Ge had yielded the fight and the brotherhood, but you were going to kill him anyway. I couldn’t let you do that.”

“Well!” He swung his foot and flicked the Mark I back up, snatched it back into his hand with a reverse grip. “It’s a good thing you’re so predictable then, Da Jie.” He looked over his shoulder. “Bring her out!” he growled.

Garage Sale appeared from around the corner of the mausoleum, her nose covered in clumsily applied bloody tape, dragging Tarantella by the arm.

“Goddamit,” Optimist and Tarantella shouted at the same time.

“I told you to stay in the hospital room,” Optimist groaned, waving her arms in exasperation. “What is wrong with you?”

“Fuck you, I had to pee!” Tarantella jabbed her parasol at Optimist with her free hand.

Garage Sale stopped and looked to Er Ge uncertainly, the box cutter in her other hand wavering.

“And you.” Optimist glared at her. “Get out of here so I can forget your face instead of breaking it again.”

“Stay right where you are,” Er Ge said loudly. He pulled his forearm up, wielding the blade sideways, pointed at Optimist again. “It’s time, Da Jie.”

Optimist finally nodded and smiled; yes, it was time to move on. She pulled the handle of her cleaver from the shoulder strap; it shivered happily in her palm, eager to be of use again. The blade was a perfect square, the same length as the handle, weighted just right. Da Ge had commissioned it for her—“You need something just as blunt and strong as you are”—but she had conditioned the haptics over time, logged hours practicing with the cleaver until it not only followed her movements, it anticipated them. She gave it a few swings and took a step backward. The cleaver was best used in defense. “Everything’s going to be fine, Tarantella.”

“It better be,” she muttered, holding her parasol to her chest.

Er Ge let out a deep, full-throated yell before charging—an affectation from back home that also irritated Optimist to no end—and closed the distance between them quickly. At the last second, he lowered the Mark I across his body and then slashed upward, driving Optimist back nearly to the fence. She leaned away from the strike and then swung the cleaver out to the side in a wide arc, to force him out of her space. He moved a quarter of a turn, enough for her to sidestep clear of the mausoleum walls. Then he darted in once, twice, swiping at her limbs. She blocked his blade easily both times, her grip loose. The cleaver moved on its own.

“Not bad, not bad,” he huffed, swinging the trench knife in a circle. He sliced sideways and then changed direction again, managing to get past her guard and nicking her thigh.

It was a shallow cut, breaking the skin but not drawing blood. It stung just enough to make Optimist grit her teeth.

“I’ve been waiting years for this,” Er Ge said happily. He raised the Mark I above his head and slashed downward in an exaggerated swing. Optimist dodged it easily to the side but then he whipped around, faster than she expected, and lashed out as he turned. She raised her arms, too late, and the trench knife ripped through her sleeve and into her right forearm. Tarantella let out a little yelp as her blood began dripping into the dirt. There was no grass left at Evergreen; all sprinkler systems had been removed by law after the Colorado River dried up.

“Da Jie, I’m surprised at you,” he panted. “It’s only been two years. You’ve completely lost your edge.”

She shrugged. “It was pretty easy and quite enjoyable, actually.”

He twirled the knife in a circle. “You were always such a pain in the ass, but I never would have thought you’d be so pathetic—”

“You talked through our last fight,” Optimist interrupted gently. “Didn’t help you in the end, did it?”

“That’s why I’ve been practicing,” he snarled and charged her again, his arm bent across his face, the business end of the Mark I coming at her.

“Then you’ve wasted your time,” Optimist said sadly. She ducked his swing and sliced into his thigh as she stepped away.

Er Ge went down howling. He dropped his knife as he grabbed his leg, trying to stop the blood pulsing from the femoral artery. Optimist wiped the blood from her cleaver; it shivered and then went still. Dormant. She patted the blade and sheathed it in the strap of her sling backpack. Everything else also seemed to come to a stop around her, save for the eternal rumbling of the headstones shifting and sliding across the mausoleums.

Garage Sale dropped the box cutter. “Fuck this,” she said, backing away.

“Don’t quit your day job,” Optimist called after her. “I sure hope it wasn’t in theater.”

Tarantella held a lace-gloved hand to her mouth as Er Ge fell silent. “You did that for me,” she said, her voice trembling.

Optimist stared at her. “Oh fuck no.” She choked out a laugh as she lit the tops of the long, pungent sticks of incense. She blew out the flames, touched the ends of the sticks to her forehead and planted them in the censer. “I didn’t want to have to tell Pug you were dead, is all. I mean, I was pretty sure it was all going to work out.”

Tarantella had the grace to laugh. Then her knees gave way and she sat down where she stood. “Your name. Optimist Cleaver. I think I get it now.”

The headstones were shifting en masse across the wall before them; slowly they separated to the sides in pairs, making way for one marker that slid over from the corner. It settled in front of her, and she saw Da Ge’s name, and knew she was home. She couldn’t wait to get back to her cats and catch some sleep. She’d look for work in the morning.

“Call me Tim,” she said.

Tade Thompson is a writer of novels, short stories, and screenplays. He is a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and the vice president of the British Science Fiction Society. He is best known for the novels Rosewater and The Murders of Molly Southbourne. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Nommo Award, the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award, the Utopiales Award, and the Julia Verlange Award among others. He has been a Hugo Award and Shirley Jackson Award finalist. Born in London to Yoruba parents, he lives on the south coast of England.

Down and Out in Exile Park

Tade Thompson

I hadn’t heard from Cosmo for twelve years, so seeing him on my door stoop was . . . an event. With the bushy, uncombed hair, ratty beard, Steelers T-shirt, battered jeans, and army boots on his feet, any change in the wind blessed me with a pungent smell that told me his relationship with soap was tenuous.

“Can you do me a favor, Francis?” he said, like we were midconversation, like he hadn’t fallen off the edge of the map over a decade ago, like we were still friends.

“Really? No ‘hi, how are you?’ Cosmo?”

“It’s been a long time, Francis Cotillard. How are you? How’s the family? Can I ask you a favor?” Delivered in a flat monotone. He’d never been a warm, fuzzy person to start with.

“You coming in?”

He seemed to hesitate, but then he stepped past me into the house.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked.

“Exile Park.”

I fed him.

Exile Park. The rock bottom of rock bottom. I knew Cosmo had things bad, but this was a surprise.

I watched him shovel down the food. Microwaved rice and tilapia stew. He ate like people in war zones do, soldiers, correspondents, and the like, not pausing to speak, not fully chewing the food, just getting it into the stomach as efficiently as possible. I got him seconds before he could ask. I sat across from him, smoking.

Cosmo Adepitan. We went to university together, though always at the periphery of friendship. He was always the friend of a friend, so our orbits overlapped, and we knew of each other rather than knew each other. He was a socialist, maybe an anarchist back then, I can’t remember. I know his girlfriend at the time had a sugar daddy who happened to be an officer in the military. I know soldiers with guns came for him one night and he disappeared. Whether it was his politics or his woman that led to the attack was unclear, but he was never seen or heard from again. People thought he had been Erased.

“Nobody gets rich until nobody is poor,” I said.

“What?” asked Cosmo.

“Isn’t that what you say in Exile Park? Nobody gets rich until nobody is poor?”

Cosmo swallowed the last morsel the way he did the first, savoring nothing. He wiped his mouth against the back of his right hand and turned to me.

“Francis, can I ask a favor?”

I nodded.

“I need you to come see something.”

“In the Park?”

“Yes.”

“I’m never setting foot in there, Cosmo. Donna would kill me.”

“Bring her,” said Cosmo. “We could use her expertise.”

“It’s not that simple. We have a child now.”

“There are children in Exile Park. Your child won’t burst into flames.”

I giggled. “You clearly don’t know Janet.”

“Will you come?” Cosmo was always so earnest and he hadn’t changed.

“Can you tell me what it’s about?”

“I’ll tell you when you get there.”

I laughed, dragged on my cigarette.

“Well?”

“Let me talk to my family.”

“No,” said Donna. “That place is made of plastic. No. There’s microfibers in the water, even. No.”

Okay, Exile Park is and isn’t made of plastic.

Back in 2077, we had plastic mega-islets. Don’t ask me why they didn’t just call them islands. The convention was the country in whose national waters the mega-islet drifted was responsible for cleaning it up. Which sounded fair, but wasn’t. Most of the plastic came from highly industrialized nations, and when one drifted close to Lagos, Nigeria simply refused to play ball. They disavowed the mega-islet and the entire area, which was a risky thing to do. Anyone could plant a flag on it and claim the waters. Nobody did, but they could have.

This thing drifted sluggishly in the Gulf of Guinea for years. It was so big, you could see it from Tarkwa Bay and Victoria Island. It had its own ecosystem and the ocean flora and fauna, who waste nothing, accreted, claimed it as home, further tied it together. A lot of that part of Lagos was full of reclaimed land anyway, so you can see where this is going.

Donna was a consultant in public health or community medicine as she insisted on calling it. Cosmo knew this.

True story, Donna proposed to me by miming Marva Whitney’s What Do I Have to Do to Prove My Love to You. You had to be here. She was such a serious person most of the time, and I didn’t even know she took me that seriously in our sporadic relationship.

“You can come with me,” I said to her. “You’ll keep me out of trouble.”

“Where are we going?” asked Janet, sweeping in.

And that is how Cosmo got three of us to follow him back to Exile Park.

The one thing I remembered about Cosmo is he had a problem with figurative speech. He didn’t get metaphor. He had no imagination and I think he had no mental imagery at all. Aphantasia. As we made our way over water, Janet sketched his profile a number of times. She was excited and not taking no for an answer and I should have been harsher in my discipline, but I wasn’t. Life was hard enough and she was just a few bus stops away from adulthood where the usual horrors awaited. I would give her the things she asked for that I could give, all under Donna’s disapproving glances.

There were no checkpoints. The coast guard was not in evidence, and even if they were, nobody harassed those coming from or going to Exile Park, not even bribe-hungry Nigerian officials.

When the islet loomed, Janet changed her subject from Cosmo to the edifice. We were headed south and it was sunset, the dying light casting an orange hue on the west side, leaving much of the rest in shadow.

From this direction, at this distance, at this time of day, it looked like a natural rock formation poking accusingly into the sky. At God, maybe. A multitude of antennae gave it a hairy appearance, with solar panels forming bald spots of sorts. The buildings grew organically, sideways, and one upon the other, rising from the plastic foundation. Each living space was boxlike, rhomboid in cross-section, and precarious. No architect had planned this, no municipal services from the mainland had contributed.

Getting closer, the external surface was covered in bamboo scaffolding from which cables and wires hung. Thicker cables plunged into the sea and, at some distance, towers for tidal energy plants loomed in silhouette. Exile Park did not admit to siphoning power from the mainland, but it was rumored to be a significant percentage of their energy use. I couldn’t see it, though. It seemed such an undertaking would be impractical.

Closer still we encountered other boats returning to the mainland after a busy working day. Whatever else it may have been, Exile Park was a market and people plied their trade while floating in the artificial bay created by plastic arms. Commerce must commerce. These boat traders were never allowed on the island. On the other hand, fishing boats returned to the island in the same direction as us, tooting horns and ringing bells, maybe to warn loved ones of their impending arrival.

Perhaps because of Cosmo, other vessels parted to let us dock first. We ducked under the chicken wire that skirts the structure like an apron, and on which rubbish had accumulated, no doubt thrown from above.

“Follow me,” said Cosmo. “Don’t stop for anybody. Don’t answer any questions.”

I brought up the rear so I could keep an eye on Janet and Donna. We were in a tunnel, wet floor, moist air, dimly lit for the most part. The floor inclined upward and every few yards or so there would be two steps. The cables coiled in at the entrance and stuck to the ceiling except where they broke off into a doorway or inexplicably dropped to the floor and continued up. Donna crouched quickly and was up before anyone but me could notice, but I’m sure she just took a sample. I heard talking drums start up a beat and hand it off on each floor, following our party. I didn’t know what they said, being white and an outsider, but I could see how they were once used to send coded messages in ancient times.

Without warning Cosmo stopped and opened a door to our left.

It wasn’t bad, as such things go. It was a square space, two single beds on opposite sides, a window, walls of indeterminate color, a cooking unit of some kind in a corner, a wooden table on which a table fan labored ineffectively. A door led into what I hoped was a bathroom.

“I’m sorry, but this is all we have,” said Cosmo. “I know it’s nothing like your home, but you won’t be here long.”

“It’s perfectly fine,” said Donna. No strain in her voice. Hmm.

Janet was quiet, but took pictures. That child can be a pain, but she knows when to shut up, bless her.

“Cosmo—” I said.

“I know, why are you here? You’re here because of crime.”

Six weeks ago . . .

On the various roofs of Exile Park there is grass, more like scrub, but enough to nourish livestock like goats and dwarf cows. The soil was brought to the island in buckets and bowls and bags, all from the mainland. There was, of course, more than enough organic waste for bespoke fertilizer. The raised edges of the roof helped to minimize wind erosion, and the entire windward side was shielded with a metal screen.

On any given day the roof would be calming, with ruminants chewing either fresh grass or the cud. Baby goats frolicked in their way.

On this day, there was no eating or gamboling. The animals all collected on one side of the west roof. On the other side, blood-smeared grass, blood-dampened soil, and a body hacked to pieces.

“I’m not a detective,” I said.

“Oh, we don’t want you to solve individual crimes. This is as close to a sealed environment that you can get. We already know the culprits. That’s not the problem.”

“So what do you—”

“I want you to look at a population effect. Numbers. Quantitative analysis with some qualitative detail. I don’t want to tell you what to look for, because I don’t want to prejudice your findings.” Cosmo handed me a Portable. I hadn’t been sure they had those here.

“The toilet’s weird!” Janet shouted from somewhere. Donna shushed her.

“I could have looked at numbers at home,” I said.

“Look at the numbers first,” said Cosmo. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“How do I reach you?”

“Three-oh-one,” he said. He pointed to the corner. On a rude stand, a wired phone. I tracked the cable down the floor and into a hole in the wall.

After Cosmo left we bedded down for the night to the sound of Exile Park groaning and settling like an old house.

I got up early and sat at the table, going through the Portable.

The pattern was easy to see.

There were raw numbers and narrative contextuals. The amount and ferocity of crime in Exile Park had increased at an alarming rate, although they did not call it crime. They had a term, social harm. This is one of the things that confounds outsiders about Exile Park. It’s portrayed in Nigerian media as lawless, and this is technically true, but only because there are no laws. Exile Park didn’t count crime, it counted Acts of Social Harm, ASH. In Nigeria, crime is about violation of criminal law and law is defined by the State. A corporation might cause widespread contamination of the environment, which may not be a crime, but it’s social harm, and the founders of Exile Park were fans of zemiology. They build their society on a foundation of minimizing social harm. But no matter which way you cut it, a person dead at the hand of another could not go unanswered.

Violence in the last year of Exile Park exceeded that of its entire history combined.

Tethered to the bamboo scaffolding, Aanu Oloja scrambled about on the leeside of Exile Park, which faced the inlet and Lagos. Beneath her, desalination complexes, netting, and seawater. A comms engineer, Aanu connected customers to wireless networks for entertainment and learning. It was steady work, and required maintenance because the exposure to the elements wasn’t conducive to antenna placement, but she enjoyed it and was unbothered by heights.

Any given day her tiny figure could be seen orchestrating insane goings-on with cables and multimeters, with her apprentice Benjamin Woo calling the plays over the radio. What happened next was unclear. Witnesses gave differing accounts, although that wasn’t unusual.

Aanu grabbed a live wire and got electrocuted. It was, as such things go, not a lethal dose of electricity. She fell and should have been pulled up short by her tethers. She wasn’t. All three of her tethers snapped and the discombobulated Aanu plunged into the deep.

Her body was never recovered.

“We could never prove it, but we think her lines were sabotaged,” said Cosmo. “Aanu weighed nothing. It’s often wet out there and she’d lost her footing thousands of times, no problem. She’s as Spider-Man out there.”

“You suspect Benjamin Woo?” I asked.

“Folks in the flats nearby said they heard Aanu confirming the status of the cables with him. He assured her the line was inert.”

“The cables look pretty messy and disorganized.”

“To outsiders,” said Cosmo. “Woo’s the comms engineer now, with an apprentice of his own just in case he takes a swan dive.”

I nodded. I pointed to the figures. “You wanted me to confirm your findings. Violent crime, violent ASH is up. The figures do not provide me with an explanation. There’s no bump in population. I don’t know if there are deprivation changes.”

Cosmo stands. “Come with me. It’s time to show you.”

Janet wandered down where the moisture increased with the width of the passage, taking photographs as she went. Everyone she encountered had well-insulated, water resistant safety boots, the kind she associated with offshore oil workers. They didn’t stare at her. She saw no children, but it was morning, and she assumed they were in school. The wall indicated she was on or near Column III. Janet took a picture of the sign.

The ground lurched, and a heavy vibration rumbled through. Janet grabbed a hold of a cable to keep upright. It sounded like a train, but they didn’t have trains on Exile Park, did they? The sound of metal groaning descended on her and thoughts of a tsunami or undersea earthquake played with her calm. The whole thing lasted eight minutes—she counted. She was rattled, but she had ambitions of being a photojournalist, of not depending on drones and being in the heart of the action herself. This was nothing.

She briefly considered going back to the flat, but continued downward instead.

I tried to keep track of where Cosmo took me. The signage on the wall seemed arcane, but he barely glanced at it. At times people would stop and ask him something and he would answer in soft, rapid tones that I could not keep up with.

As if reading my mind, he said, “There’s a local shorthand we use in speech that might be difficult for you. Everybody speaks pidgin in addition, and most speak English, so don’t be concerned.”

This was a wider passageway than any of the others. It could easily accommodate seven people walking abreast. There were more people too, although it seemed to me like they were loitering, which wasn’t something I had seen in Exile Park. The air was fresher, colors brighter. It was all a kind of green-grey wash of some kind, but the impressions were sharper. Even my own skin seemed radiant. I passed my hands in front of my face and I felt a strong urge to laugh. They strobed.

“It can be disorienting at first,” said Cosmo.

“What can?”

“The euphoria, the sense of well-being.”

I laughed. It came out as a bark. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The low hum of people talking. They seemed cheerful, like the crowd fifteen minutes before a concert. I decided this feeling was abnormal and I started looking for ventilation.

“Are they . . . is someone . . . this is pharmaceutical,” I said.

“You’re not used to it, so it’s affecting you more, that’s all. Nobody from the outside has ever been this close.”

“To what?”

Cosmo points. “To her.”

The passage curved slightly and terminated in a dais on which she was suspended in a glass room. I say “she” because Cosmo did. There was no way of telling. She was old, skinny, and every inch of her skin was covered in visible veins, so much so her skin seemed green on first glance. The skin itself was composed of commodious redundant folds that created sulci, giving it a striped pattern in some areas, reticulate in others. It reminded me of the surface of the brain.

In my mind, I knew there should be some revulsion, but I couldn’t feel it. That sense of well-being from before persisted and became stronger. I looked at Cosmo and . . . Was that a smile on his face? This whole thing felt like religious awe, like I was in the presence of a god.

With great effort I said, “I would like to leave this place, Cosmo.”

Contrary to what my brain was telling me, I had an appetite and ate three fried eggs, two chicken wings, and two large slices of bread and butter. Cosmo drank coffee and watched me, our roles on the mainland reversed.

“What was that? Who was that?” I spoke with my mouth full.

We were in someone’s flat. Hunger was my first sensation after seeing the god, and when I told Cosmo he started looking at doorways to flats. At first they had seemed similar to me, but now I could see subtle differences, and not just aesthetic ones. Beside each door, for example, was a panel, six by twelve inches. There was a column of glyphs, some lit up, others dark. We passed three before we saw one with the combination of glyphs Cosmo sought. This, he explained, was how nobody ever starved and food didn’t go to waste. Those with excess announced it with the glyphs and literally anybody could come in for a meal.

“That was Olokun. Not sure if that’s her real name, but it’s a name we use for her.” Cosmo sipped coffee. “She’s been here from the beginning.”

The host added another fried egg to my plate and I thanked him. “What happens when nobody is hungry for the excess?”

“Livestock, pets, composting,” said Cosmo. “No hunger, no waste.”

“What is Olokun?” I asked. “She’s not human.”

“She’s human.”

“Cosmo, I’m not stupid. I know what I saw, and what I felt.”

“It’s hormones, Cotillard.”

“Explain.”

“Olokun secrets agreeableness hormones into the air from her skin and from her bodily fluids. I can get you the studies, but last count she had forty-three volatile and two hundred nonvolatile hormones that she exposed all of us to.”

“How?”

“As far as I know she was born that way. The folds of her skin increase the surface area of secretion. The veins efficiently transport her blood.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. Then something occurred to me. “She’s sick, isn’t she? That’s why you brought me here. Her volatile secretions are . . . my god, they’ve kept the cohesion of your little experiment. Now she’s sick, it’s not working, and people are getting violent with each other.”

“She’s not sick,” said Cosmo. He dragged his chair back and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. “She’s dying.”

He left the room to smoke.

Donna took a shitload of blood from me for testing.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You’ve been exposed to god knows what compounds that made you euphoric and then gave you the munchies. You are not fine until I say you’re fine,” said Donna.

“You’re overreacting. The folks here are exposed to this every day,” I said.

“Where’s the child?” Donna liked to change the subject when she didn’t like the direction.

“Off taking photos. Her beacon is loud and clear. I think you should examine Olokun.”

“If I get protective wear. Why does Cosmo want you here?”

“He wants to know what happens when Olokun dies. He wants to know if this place will disintegrate into chaos. He wants to know what to do about it.”

I could smell her hair and see the hair follicles on her skin as she worked. I experienced a sudden and powerful urge. “You know, Janet’s going to be gone a while—”

“From the results I’m looking at, your arousal is not because of me. You’re feeling frisky because there’s a chemical in your system that causes a sexual response. I’m not sleeping with you, Francis.”

“What? No, I’m just watching an intelligent, powerful, competent woman doing intelligent, competent, powerful things. It’s a turn on.”

“No.”

“Fine. Don’t blame me if I go and have wanton sex with the socialists, woman,” I said.

“Be sure to get me some genital swabs if you do,” said Donna. “I’m going to see if I can isolate a marker whose concentration I can measure in the air. What are you going to do, besides taking a cold shower?”

“Cosmo wants me to attend their parliament.”

“They have a parliament?”

“Euphemistically, yes. For one thing anybody over sixteen can attend, comment, and vote. It’s not based on representation at all. No one person outranks any other, except by competence. Competence means you get listened to and your opinion is weighted in your area of expertise. But only in your areas of expertise.”

“Smart. No halo effect.”

“So it would seem.”

It was a warmer night. Warm nights in Exile Park were noisy affairs because a million air conditioners would come on at once. Most of the flats had no windows and had two, sometimes three air conditioners with no soundproofing. We got used to it, by which I mean Donna and Janet got used to it. I couldn’t sleep so I poked through Janet’s photos. Her camera had a device that sent all her photos to me and I told Janet she could disable it but she didn’t. She wanted me to think she didn’t care about what I saw, and I wanted to see what she was up to. Win win.

Janet and about seven of the local kids. Arms around each other’s necks and carefree like only youngsters can be. One or two of them had the bowlegs that told me they weren’t getting enough sunlight, but not as many as I would have expected. They seemed happy and well-nourished, for the most part. Good skin, too. Their clothes were clean, but I noticed signs of repair and reuse, which was good, I supposed.

She took a close-up of the ubiquitous collections of cables. They were bound together in places by wire, duct tape, even cloth. Sometimes alone, sometimes yoked with water pipes and slapdash signage.

She got shots of the massive support columns and their numbering. How far did that child wander? Most of the external walls of Exile Park weren’t load-bearing. The flats and box-dwellings all connected to each other, but the weight was transferred to gigantic columns numbered I to VI. Each was ribbed with heavy-duty bridge cables, some of which coiled away and disappeared into walls and ceilings.

Janet even got into nurseries for the roof farms. Powerful lights shone down, ersatz sunlight for the delicate budding vegetation. The farmers smiled up at the camera.

She took a selfie and it made me sit up. I had to look at her asleep to assure myself she was safe. In the photo, behind and above her, hidden between girders on the ceiling, was a face.

Parliament.

Since everybody was allowed, I brought Janet and Donna with me. The room had a capacity of a few dozen, but it was also streamed through closed-circuit. Nobody sat in particularly lofty positions and there was no sense of rank or office. I did my thesis based on original fieldwork with fringe religions in Nigeria like Ekcankar, Guru Maharaji, and the Quakers. This was a free-form, no agenda meeting, like the Quakers. Silence, then someone speaks, then response, then silence as responses died down, then someone would suggest voting, they would vote, and the motion is dealt with. The only consistent action came from the people taking the minutes.

Cosmo stood up in a lull and introduced my family. “For recognition, Cosmo Adepitan. I introduce Francis Cotillard, invited by majority vote of this house on the Olokun matter. Accompanied by Dr. Donna Cotillard and Ms. Janet Cotillard.”

All present banged their chairs, a welcome gesture.

“Do you feel up to giving your opinion on the data?” asked Cosmo.

I did.

My report, though dull, technical, and full of caveats, surprised nobody. I confirmed what they all suspected, and demurred when they asked for recommendations.

They adjourned, and we had the rest of the day to ourselves.

Donna, in spite of anything she might have said before, was intrigued by Olokun and, clad in protective wear, examined the god. Independent air tank, no part of her skin exposed, it looked like Donna was cleaning nuclear fallout. I didn’t think it was necessary. Exile Park had its own doctors and nurses, and they’d already examined their god. Donna liked first-hand information and primary sources. She wasn’t going to stop now.

“I estimate her body surface area is 300 percent that of a person of her average mass. The folds of skin can be stretched and the veins are pulsatile,” said Donna.

We talked through a radio she rigged. I was walking the passageways looking up. Janet was off doing some busywork I gave her—photograph the ships coming in, something like that.

“Pulsatile?” I wasn’t paying full attention, but I had read somewhere that if you repeat the last word someone says, they think you’re listening.

“I know you’re not listening, Francis,” said Donna.

Shit.

“I really want to know. Why is pulsatile noteworthy?” I shone a torch between the cables on the ceiling. There seemed to be space there.

“Superficial veins don’t usually have a pulse. Arteries do. There are exceptions, but I think this is an adaptation of some kind. The high pressure helps force out the hormones.”

“The hormones, huh?” There was space up there, a gap between cable bundles and hard ceiling, one that a man could hide in. But why?

“Hepatomegaly. Liver’s large,” said Donna. Mostly to herself.

“Does she not mind you poking about her innards?” I asked.

“I don’t think she’s even aware I’m here. Her eyes aren’t tracking me. Her motor reflexes are barely there.”

I tried to find a foothold. I jumped, grabbed the wrong pipe, and screamed.

“What?” said Donna. Concern now.

“Stupid. Hot water pipe. Nothing to worry about.” I was definitely expecting a scald on my left palm. If it was that hot, then anybody crawling around up there would have to know what to avoid. It didn’t make sense, but the face was there. I didn’t draw Donna or Janet’s attention to it.

“Douse it in cold water as soon as you can,” said Donna. “I think I’m done here.”

At night, outside, in what passed for a bay, people set up flame grills and sold the day’s catch as fried fish snacks. Donna, Janet, Cosmo, and I sat on an iron bench, eating piping hot fish and watching the lights. Drums played, people sang.

Cosmo, who had looked derelict when he came inland, cleaned up well. He was like a different person, although still driven.

“Does she ever talk?” asked Donna.

Cosmo shook his head. “No. The last coherent word from her was fifteen years ago. There’s a book floating around, Awon Oro Olokun, but I think some of it is cribbed from Nietzsche.”

“I agree with your doctors, Cosmo. She’s dying,” said Donna. “And soon. The marker I set up . . . well, the levels are falling precipitously.”

“If the hormones Olokun releases are what keep us . . . docile, will our way of life survive her death?”

“That’s a question for Francis,” said Donna. “But you have options.”

“Such as?” Cosmo seemed to have blocked out every other stimulus except Donna.

“Life-support machine, keep her alive indefinitely,” said Donna.

“Doesn’t she have to consent to that?” asked Cosmo.

Donna shrugged. “I’m a ‘needs of the many outweigh that of the individual’ kind of person.”

“Here we value both the individual and the many equally. We take individual freedoms seriously. The collective won’t want to survive by trampling on the rights of the individual.”

“I’m just naming options,” said Donna. “Francis? Wanna weigh in?”

“I’m thinking.”

I looked out at the lights of Lagos, twinkling, reflected on the sea, beckoning with the simplicity of my normal life. I fiddled with the bandage on my left hand.

“I’m thinking.”

They told me their stories, the people of Exile Park. The gay couple who had escaped stoning in the North. The one who had dared run against the president as an independent. The man who, inspired by Reich, rigged up an orgone energy transmitter on the highest roof. The ones who provided a free internet plug-in that thwarted surveillance. The repentant gun runners. The journalists, the many, many journalists. The osu, outcasts from the East, a resurgence of something thought forgotten. The painter of a hundred Madonnas, all subversive in some way or the other, either of corrupt visage, or corrupt implications, tainted halos, sexualized, covered in filth, cadaverous. A guy shot to death and dropped in the sea who washed up stuck on a plastic rock in the inlet, twenty-seven bullet holes in him, but still alive. People like Cosmo who escaped assassins. People who were assassins, reformed of course. The people who fled rival gangs. The people driven out by aggressive developers. Filmmakers who made films of the wrong kind, political or pornographic. Or both. The thug who had knuckle tattoos; THOUGHTS on the right, PRAYERS on the left.

They all heard of Exile Park by word of mouth and risked everything to get here. Everything was forgiven once you were doused in brine and passed through the pearly gates of the inlet and took the communion of Olokun, the plastic god of exiled Nigerians.

I showed Cosmo the photo, focusing on the face.

“I don’t know who that is, or why he is up there,” he said.

“Do you have dissidents? Insurgents? Sexual predators?” I asked. “Is there an underclass here that I don’t know about?”

“This is new,” he said. “I’ll flush him out. It might be an example of the new aggression.”

Cosmo gives me a copy of The Words of Olokun, the English translation of Awon Oro Olokun.

“Great. Homework,” I said.

The young Olokun got around.

She visited the north of Nigeria, where there was a persistent rash of suicide bombings. She quietly moved into an abandoned property and waited. They stopped within a week, according to her.

She traveled the world, masked, robed, because she was self-conscious about her looks.

She did know love. All who came close to her loved her, and the ones she chose for physical pleasure almost died of it. Some went mad from too much dopamine, and she realized she could not tell those who loved her for herself from those who just reacted to the chemicals she secreted. She restricted herself to carnal pleasures and left her heart untouched.

Back to the south, but warned by the Nigerian government. Stay out of our affairs. She could have brought peace to the whole nation, but that wasn’t what they wanted. So she left. She had to keep moving. Egypt, Tanzania, Ghana, DRC, even Cape Town. If she stayed too long, people suffocated her without knowing why they were drawn to her.

Everywhere I went, there were those who were drawn to me and those sent by the State to follow me. I was an antidote to the war machines, which meant some factions would not make money out of manufactured outrage. They sent assassins after me. Tearfully, each of the killers confessed to me and asked for my forgiveness. One of them dedicated a shrine to me in Cuilacán.

But it was exhausting for her, and lonely. She wanted to disappear and rest.

Exile Park was perfect. When she heard of the disputed plastic mass, she moved there and settled. She had purpose.

It might be that the translation was off, but Olokun seemed to say a lot about peace.

This is my total art.

I am your kick start. What you do next is up to you. My gift is peace, a moment to breathe.

What do you do with the gift of peace?

Total art.

Did she know she was dying? There was no indication in her writings.

Reminded me of an architecture term, gesamtkunstwerk. Is the society in Exile Park Olokun’s art? How will it continue without the hormones?

Tremors. The rattle woke Janet briefly, then she turned over and was asleep again. Donna didn’t stir. Both of them, the sum total of my love.

I went back to reading.

Cosmo had been exploring the roof and cable systems for two hours when I joined him.

“Can’t sleep,” I said.

Cosmo shrugged. “I’ve been over this length and breadth. Nothing yet.”

Janet’s photos were geotagged, however, and I took Cosmo to the exact spot the photo was taken. Cosmo stared. Then he looked at my belly, checking how fit I was. Not very.

“I’m going up there,” he said. “Give me a boost.”

“Watch out for the hot water pipe,” I said.

Cosmo pulled himself up and I watched his boots disappear into a tangle of black, grey, and red serpentine shit.

Silence, then scuffling sounds.

“Oh, fuck!” Not Cosmo’s voice.

I was still trying to decide what to do. Who do I call? I couldn’t get up there without help.

“Francis! Look out!” yelled Cosmo.

“What?” I asked.

I heard a creak, then a loud vibration. Cracks appeared in the ceiling and it ruptured, caved. Dust, water from burst pipes, sparks from electric cords. The lights in the corridor flickered. And a compact camouflage-green jeep fell out of the roof into the passageway right in front of me. It bounced on its springs before coming to rest. Internal combustion energy, two-seater, madman in the driving seat. The engine was running and acrid exhaust filled the corridor. Screeching as the wheels spun. It came for me. I made myself small on the side wall and it spun me around as it passed. The driver’s eyes . . . same as in the photo.

It gunned down the corridor, hit one of the corners, corrected itself, powered on out of sight.

Talking drums broke my spell and people started to arrive. Did they have police in Exile Park?

“Francis,” yelled Cosmo from upstairs. “You’re going to want to see this.”

According to accounts that I pieced together later the jeep went all the way down, scratching the walls, hitting four men and two women in its path till it smashed into the netting at the exit. It hung over the water for a time, but the net couldn’t hold its weight and it broke free with a generous section of the barrier before it plunged into the dark waters.

Nobody dove after, even though I know they have an on-call rescue team. Emphasis was on looking after the injured and repairing the fence.

Everybody kept looking out for a floater over the next few days, then weeks, but nothing came back up or clogged the pumps. People assumed the driver escaped by some other means or a bloated body was trapped in the car on the seabed. Which was a shame. I had many questions for him.

Cosmo told me people spotted Nigerian gunboats hovering a few nautical miles out, but never engaging. There were stories of special forces diving, maybe searching for the body, but the tales were as substantial as smoke.

They expelled us from Exile Park. Here’s why.

I crawled up into the space Cosmo invited me to. It was . . . a nest, I guess. A spy’s nest. Saboteur. Saboteur-spy. In the nest were charts, sixteen high-quality cylindrical tanks with timers, and keypad security. High-gain radio hardware. No identifying information, some coded writing that the best cryptographers Exile Park had to offer couldn’t crack. There were some diagrams, though, that very clearly spoke to the support structure of the plastic island. All the columns identified, plus how to reach their lowermost points, where they sank into the island’s “crust.”

The one word that was recognizable out of all this guy’s shit was ideonella, and that scared folks, for good reason. Way back in 2016, before living memory, scientists discovered ideonella sakaiensis, a bacterium that digested common bottle plastic. Prior to that plastic had been thought to be nonbiodegradable. We’ve come a long way since then, and though it’s hellishly expensive, with the help of ideonella species variants, we can digest most plastic polymers now.

Including the ones that formed Exile Park.

It seemed our saboteur was an agent of the Nigerian government, although we couldn’t prove it.

I followed the expedition into the bowels of the island, at the bases of the columns, and there were plastic liquefaction pools everywhere. Columns III and IV were out of alignment, the engineers said.

Parliament was packed full, oversubscribed. Panic first, then anger, then calm.

Could the damage be reversed or would they have to evacuate the Park? The vote against exodus was almost unanimous. They would fix the problem or die. Nobody wanted to go back to Nigeria.

“But we have to be more careful of outsiders,” said a vocal fifteen-year-old.

Everyone turned to me and my family. I had seen it coming and I didn’t wait for it to be put to vote.

In three hours Exile Park receded in the view above the frothy wake of Cosmo’s skiff.

Janet took no pictures.

I wrote a strongly worded essay about Exile Park when I got back to the world. It was published, but nobody read it. I was critical of the Nigerian government, but I don’t think they throttled it. I think most people were uninterested in what was an artefact of disobedience at best, an example of an anarcho-socialist existence that worked. So unthreatening was my article that nobody came for me in the night, or summoned me to CID at Alagbon Close.

Cosmo contacted me a few months later, told me Olokun died, sent me some screen grabs of her funeral at sea. That left me deeply sad for some reason.

I wrote this out of that grief, to purge it, and to create some kind of record.

It didn’t work.

I’d forgotten all about the Park, and I wasn’t paying attention when Janet selected shots for her latest exhibition. She talked it over with Donna, though.

I wore my good suit. I shouldn’t have because everyone else was casual, including Donna.

She called it Down and Out in Exile Park. Ironic, of course, because of the joy on the faces of the subjects. One hundred shots, half of those in black and white. She had an eye, that offspring of mine.

She brought a tear to my eye with the final piece: A six-foot shot of Cosmo in his skiff at sunset, looking toward Exile Park, squinting from the ocean spray, and a plaque with excerpts from my essay.

Home that night and I did a search to find out what happened to Exile Park. Not only was it still going on strong, it had inspired the Exile Park Experiment, spaces in seventeen countries where communities were built along Exile Park lines. They seemed to be thriving.

Olokun’s dream.

She would be proud.

Leonard Richardson lives in New York City and writes science fiction and software, including the Python library, Beautiful Soup. His short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld, and his two novels, Constellation Games and Situation Normal, are published by Candlemark & Gleam. He has a blog at crummy.com.

Two Spacesuits

Leonard Richardson

A four-hour drive between me and my parents is a distance that works well for everybody. I can come back for a weekend, but they don’t call me back for every little thing. So when Mom did call me at work in the middle of the day and said, “Your father is acting weird,” I feared for the worst.

“Nursing home, power of attorney weird?” I said. “What kind of weird?”

“He’s building something in the backyard,” said Mom. “I can see it now through the window. It’s like a hobbit hole with a little wooden door. And he won’t admit that it’s not a normal thing to be building.”

“Is he working on it right now?”

“No, he’s out on a job, but the hobbit hole is out there, staring at me like a thing of evil.”

“Can you send me a picture?”

After three minutes of Mom mobile-phone fumbling I received a picture taken through the kitchen window. The back lawn was completely torn up, and the yard now dominated by a mound of earth, given structure by plastic netting and chicken wire. The concrete walkway leading out of the laundry room, which I’d helped Dad lay when I was a kid, went right to a wooden door in the mound and disappeared. The mound stretched across the yard to abut the old tire swing/piñata tree. The uprooted sundial leaned against the wall of the garage.

“That is really ugly.”

“He says it’ll look okay once the grass seed grows. I just want to know why he’s doing this. He didn’t consult me, and he won’t talk about it. He didn’t get it from a magazine.”

“Just ask him.”

“He changes the subject.”

“Don’t let him change the subject.”

“I have to live with him, Carlos.”

I zoomed in. “Is that thing hollow?” I tried to imagine the structural mechanics.

“Yeah, hobbit hole, like I said. You could crawl inside.”

“I’ll come down tonight and work from your place tomorrow.”

“Saturday’s fine, why rush it? Frodo’s house isn’t going anywhere.”

I got in Saturday afternoon and was finishing off some still-warm lunch leftovers when Dad came in from an emergency call. “Hey, Carlos, let’s hit the Home Depot, whaddaya say?” were his first words to me.

“Stuff for the . . . mound?” I said. I could see it from the table, the packed dirt muddy from a morning shower.

“The electric drill needs a new battery pack,” he said. “I want to mount the new TV up on the wall.” The “new” TV dated from the previous Black Friday, and I’d seen it on the way in, overflowing the VHS-era TV stand.

“If you just need one thing, let’s order now and do curbside pickup.”

“Come on, son. I’ll be in the car.” Mom gave me a conspiratorial glare: you’ll see. As soon as I clicked my seat belt, Dad gave me the exact same look. He leaned over as if about to impart to me one of his big secrets of being a man.

“Carlos, I’m glad you came down this weekend, because I want to talk to you about something.”

“This is about the mound, right?”

“This is about your mother, who has been doing weird Internet searches.” We pulled out of the driveway and headed for the freeway.

“Like ‘How to kill your husband because he won’t talk about the mound he’s building’?”

“She’s searching for videos,” said Dad. “She leaves them open on the computer. They have these weird titles, symbols instead of letters. I don’t even know how she types the symbols to do the searches. And, she’s started making weird noises when she thinks I can’t hear her.”

“Are the ‘noises’ Chinese?” I asked. “Is she learning Chinese?”

“No! They’re like dog noises. And when I mention it to her, she acts like it never happened.”

“Nobody likes being told they’re making weird noises.”

“We’ve been married for thirty years! If I say she’s making some noises, she should be able to handle it. When you got out of your diaper and shit on the kitchen floor, I said, ‘Your son shit on the floor,’ and she said, ‘He’s your son, clean it up.’ She didn’t change the subject.”

“Do you have a recording of the noises?”

“I have to live with her, Carlos. If I record her, then it becomes all about ‘why did you do that?’”

Dad took a breath and started to scheme. “Here’s what we do. Around five p.m. she’ll start making dinner. You get on the computer and figure out why she’s searching for these videos.”

“Did you watch any of the videos?” I said.

“These fucking weekend drivers, man.” Dad honked the horn. “Hey!”

You can get a battery pack for an electric drill at Home Depot. They try to make it easy. But the battery pack has to be your actual goal, and for Dad it was more of a pretext. He grabbed hold of a big orange jungle gym cart and pushed it over to the outdoor gardening annex, where he took his time choosing between different types of fiberboard planks. Then six cubic feet of a steer manure/compost blend, to improve the soil atop the mound.

“I thought we were just here to get a battery,” I said.

“Since you’re here, you can help me with the heavy stuff,” said Dad.

“Dad, this is bullshit.”

“We call it steer manure.”

“I know what you’re doing. This is for the mound.”

“Help me load up!” He’d heard me, but he was ignoring what I said. He’d done this my whole life, but never about something so obvious.

On the way back, the pickup loaded up with lumber and plastic sheeting and bagged bullshit, I looked through old family texts. A couple weeks earlier Dad had posted something to our WhatsApp group that seemed weird in retrospect:

Carlos, is there a site where you can draw a shape and see the emoji that looks like that shape?

Attached was a photo of a piece of paper on which Mom had drawn an alphabet of slightly different circles. Some had a protrusion sticking out at one angle or another, like a clock with only one hand. Others were circles that overlapped or enclosed in some way.

I’d assumed it was a craft project. I’d poked around the Internet, sent them a link that let you search for characters that couldn’t be typed on a keyboard, and that had been the end of it.

My parents had always been passive-aggressive, but this took it to another level. Why had Dad used the family chat to ask me to help Mom figure out how to type in the symbols for the weird video searches he was now asking me to investigate?

Dad was tapping the steering wheel and singing under his breath. I shifted my eyes, not looking up from my phone. “Two spacesuits . . . da-dadada cata-catalyze two spacesuits . . . ”

“What is that?” I asked.

“Oh?” Dad blinked at the sun a couple times like I’d startled him out of falling asleep at the wheel. “Johnny Cash song.”

“Johnny Cash wrote a song about spacesuits?”

“He did a lot of weird songs in the seventies. Did you ever hear the one where he steals a Cadillac?”

“Yes, I heard it one million times growing up.” Needless to say, there is no Johnny Cash song about spacesuits. Dad had told me an obvious lie about something trivial.

Dad backed the pickup into the garage driveway. He opened the driver’s side door and swung out, grabbing the little Home Depot bag that held our small items: the battery pack and some boxes of screws. Dad walked around to the front door of the house, ignoring the back gate (which would have taken us past the Mound That Must Not Be Named) and leaving everything sitting in the bed of the pickup, waiting to be stolen by some larcenous neighbor.

I scampered after Dad. In the living room he pointed at the big flat-screen teetering on its stand and said, “You’re goin’ on the wall!” in a John Wayne voice. Then he walked all the way through the house and out the laundry room into the backyard, still holding the little plastic bag.

“Dad?” I said. I shut the front door behind me.

“Come in here, Carlos, quick!” Mom called me from the kitchen. Through the window she pointed at Dad, who’d walked around the mound and out the back gate, right back to the pickup. He opened the tailgate and started unloading the lumber into the garage, where he kept the woodshop.

I washed my hands in the sink. “Why did he take that weird path?” I asked. “Like he was going to mount the TV and just decided not to.”

“Yeah, he’s going to work on his hobbit hole the rest of the weekend,” said Mom. Mushrooms sizzled in the frying pan. Chicken breasts sat on paper towels.

“Should I not have gone with him? Am I enabling him?”

“You did the right thing. You need to see what’s going on. He won’t talk about it with you either?”

“Yeah, I’d bring it up, and he’d jump the conversation somewhere else. What’s inside the hole?”

“I don’t know. Dirt? Gross things?”

“What are you making?” I asked her. “Chicken stew?”

“Chicken risotto. It’s easy, I don’t have to concentrate.”

“You hate risotto.”

“No, I got tired of making it because you wanted it all the time,” said Mom. “I can do it once in a while.”

“Okay, I’ll do some phone calls in the study and ask around about this mound thing.”

“If you’re going to take over the study, let me get my book out first.”

Although I allowed my mother to imagine that I could pull some strings and contact top psychologists who studied abnormal male mound-building, I had no strings to pull and no intention of making any calls. Instead, after closing the study door, I quietly opened up the family web browser and, with a certain amount of guilt, started spying on my parents’ search history. They shared a Google account, so everyone’s search results were mixed up: moisture sensor app and is Mary Kay a scam? and oldest possible scotch and how to catalyze two spacesuits and Sidney Center performances Zoom and ⊶⊚∷⊶0∘⊚∝⊶∘οº∘•∝⊘Ο and anniversary songs.

Dad is wrong about a lot of things, but he wasn’t making up the searches. I reran the search for ⊶⊚∷⊶0∘⊚∝⊶∘οº∘•∝⊘Ο. I got zero web results and twenty-three video results, all with that exact title.

The previews showed what you’d expect in a YouTube video: poorly lit people in bland suburban houses facing the camera, about to tell you something generic. I clicked on a representative thumbnail. A white man in his forties was showing me around his garage. Plastic sheeting and fiberboard planks leaned against the wall—apart from the steer manure, the same things in the same quantities Dad had just bought at Home Depot. The man spoke in disjointed sentences about the “habitat” he was building. His voice was quiet and gentle, mismatched against his mustache and his beer gut.

After counting off his fiberboard planks, the man in the video dropped a Lowe’s bag onto his workbench and started pulling out screws of different sizes, counting them out into five different piles. At this point it became obvious that unlike most YouTube videos, ⊶⊚∷⊶0∘⊚∝⊶∘οº∘•∝⊘Ο had a camera operator. The camera operator wasn’t exactly helping, mind you. They were making low growling noises, distracting noises that made it hard to hear the clink of the screws and the muttered counting of the man with the mustache.

It was a freaked-out dad version of a YouTube haul video. I’ve been known to flop on the couch and watch some bro open a dozen blind-bags of anime figurines. It helps me feel better about not being able to afford all the crap that goes along with modern life. But Dad had seen this haul video and treated it like a shopping list. You’re not supposed to buy this stuff yourself. Watching the video is supposed to scratch the itch.

It was pretty short for a haul video, about three minutes, and of course once it was over, YouTube really wanted me to launch right into another, similar video. About half of the recommended videos had titles in the weird circle language, but the other half were in English:

HOW TO SEARCH FOR CATALYST AND HABITAT VIDEOS—TUTORIAL

Sex Will Catalyze Two Spacesuits!

Typing the symbols on human keyboards (ENGLISH/USA)

This Chemical Gel Will Catalyze Two Spacesuits—No Fail!

My Other Spacesuit Died! HELP!!!!

MIT Grad Shows How To Catalyze Two Spacesuits

BEWARE OF SCAMS!—Only Completion Of The Habitat Can Catalyze Spacesuits

CATALYZE WITH SURGERY—DIY—STEP BY STEP—PART 1/4

Swallowing both guilt and horror, I clicked into my parents’ shared email account. There were hundreds of unread messages from stores and mailing lists, which I’d been expecting, but the draft folder was also full of unsent emails. I clicked through; Mom and Dad had been using the drafts folder to send video links to each other. Dozens of them.

Dad’s messages to Mom had the somewhat stilted air he used when writing Post-it notes. He’d never really gotten used to email:

M,

I think we should try sex. It makes logical sense.

[link to “Sex Will Catalyze Two Spacesuits!” video]

With love,

P

That one I didn’t need to see, but you can’t blame me for stumbling on it. Dad had never sent an email that didn’t look like this: a comment, a link, a profession of love. The other messages—presumably the ones from Mom to Dad—had no text, just a bare link to a video on YouTube or Youku.

“Are you on the computer?” Mom put her hands on my shoulders, and I jumped out of my skin. “Come in and help with the salad.”

“Mom, what is this? Why do you have all these unsent emails?”

The confused look on Mom’s face made it completely clear she hadn’t known you could write an email and not send it. “There must be spyware on the computer,” she said. “Do you remember when you helped us?”

“I helped you by installing a bunch of things that stop spyware from getting on the computer.”

“Maybe tomorrow you could take another look?” It was the same kind of bald-faced lie Dad had come up with in the car . . . but it was also the honest best she could do to make sense of what she was seeing. “C’mon. Salad.”

I followed Mom into the kitchen and sliced cucumbers while she kept a stir going on the risotto. I heard her humming in time to my knife chops, the endless pleasant tune she’d improvise when occupied in the kitchen, and then the humming became a little scratchy and stopped being humming at all.

I glanced over. Mom was still stirring the rice, still wearing her pleasant Resting Mom Face, but the growling noises she was making didn’t sound like they came from human vocal cords. They were the noises from the YouTube video, from the unseen person holding the camera. They were the dog noises Dad had complained about.

“Do the carrots if you’re done,” said Mom, seemingly on top of her growling noises.

“What?”

“You stopped chopping,” she said without turning around. The growling stopped.

I looked down. I had half a cucumber left. “Sorry, I zoned out.”

Mom snorted. “Welcome to kitchen life.”

Dinner was the weirdest, most passive-aggressive experience of my life. Each of my parents was aware that the other was acting strangely, but when I’d confronted them about their own behavior, they became evasive and pulled rank. That trick worked on me, but they couldn’t intimidate each other. Each had thirty years of practice in marital sparring. Each was full of the righteous sense that the other one was being unreasonable, and that by refusing to come down hard I was only prolonging the problem.

“How is the hobbit hole coming along?” said Mom sarcastically.

“If you can clean off the TV stand, Carlos and I can finally hang it up,” said Dad.

Mom made an exasperated gesture at me with her fork.

“What?” said Dad. “Speak up!”

“I didn’t say anything,” said Mom. “Why are you . . . ?”

“Finish your sentence! Stop mumbling!”

I could not deal with this. If this didn’t stop, I would have to put another four hours between them and me and only show up for Christmas. I looked down at my risotto and tried to think of a plan.

Whatever strangeness was inside my parents only came out when they were on autopilot, driving the car or stirring the rice. I needed a way to get them in the same room and distracted at the same time.

“How about some UNO after dinner?” I said.

My parents are nuts about UNO. They wear out decks, playing so quickly they barely look at the cards. Their serious game is contract bridge, a game where the ability to passive-aggressively manipulate your partner is an asset, but UNO is what they play to unwind, five or ten games a night.

I hate UNO. There’s very little skill in it. When you’re playing, your brain goes on autopilot. It was the perfect tool for what I needed.

My parents divided the unwieldy deck between them and started shuffling. Almost immediately the growling noise started again from Mom, and Dad began muttering:

“It’s right over there, and I can’t do a thing about it. Damn shame, ending up like this.” Mom’s growl ran underneath his words like a carrier wave.

“What’s right over there?” I asked him.

“The other spacesuit,” said Dad. He stacked his cards and pushed them across the table. Mom cut and began to deal.

“Who are you?” I tried to say. There was no way back to normalcy from here, but I must have said it, because Dad responded. I wanted so badly to hear some smart-ass comment, but he casually picked up his cards and said: “Just a stranded traveler.” As he spoke, Mom’s throat made guttural noises that went on just a little longer.

“Do you have a name?”

Dad turned over the first card of the round: a red three. “Not anymore.”

He put a red six down onto the three, and Mom immediately tossed a yellow six on top of that. In five seconds, play had come to me. If I didn’t keep the game going, my parents would start complaining that I was dragging down the game, and I’d lose contact with the things that lived inside them.

I steadied my hand enough to put down a yellow Draw Two. “Who’s in the other spacesuit?”

Dad took his cards. “I’m in both, you see?” he said. “Our tourist group was flung through space, flailing for receivers. This unlucky place was in the way. Things live here. Two different spacesuits that look like one. Now I’m split between the two. The part that plans is separated from the part that speaks.”

We’d gone ’round the UNO table twice more while the thing inside Dad was telling its sob story. Then Dad took a breath. Mom’s growling changed its tenor, and in response Dad’s mood became a little less maudlin.

“All of us are looking for the catalyst that can fuse two spacesuits back together,” said Dad.

“It’s your turn, honey,” Mom told me. I dropped a card without looking.

“Green!” Mom chided. “We’ve gone green. Try to keep up, baby boy.”

I couldn’t have this conversation and play cards at the same time. Besides, I had nothing I could play. I drew a card and realized I didn’t have to play competitive UNO. I could draw a card every time and pass. As long as I looked like I was following the rules, Mom and Dad would stay on autopilot.

“It is not possible,” I told the thing inside my parents. “There is no way to do what you need. You cannot fuse two human beings together.”

“I have done it. Fused the two spacesuits. It was right: they felt incredible pleasure at being joined. I only need to find the catalyst that makes it permanent.”

Even with everything that had happened this day, I was not expecting to have this conversation. “When we join . . . ” I said, “we do not stay stuck together. Instead we make a new person. My parents fused, and they created me.”

“So you’re just a third spacesuit,” said Dad, like he’d just lost all hope. “Alone. Half of a person.”

“I really don’t need this from you,” I said. “I get enough of it from my parents. By the way, these are my parents. They are people. Not spacesuits.”

“I would never hurt them,” said Dad. “They are all that protects me.”

“They’re not your spacesuits. There is no catalyst. The thing you’re looking for doesn’t exist, and you need to just fling yourself right out of here.”

“Had I that power, why would I not have done so already?” It was the most complex sentence I’d ever heard in Dad’s voice.

“UNO!” shouts Mom.

“Stop her, Carlos!” exclaims Dad. His tone of playful panic couldn’t be further from the sadness and vulnerability he’d just been showing.

I had so many cards by this point, I surely could have stopped Mom, but I didn’t want to, and Dad couldn’t. She won the game and made sarcastic jokes at Dad’s expense, and the thing that was using them as spacesuits went back into hiding.

Maybe I should have left. Said I’d only come for the day and driven back home. Let them start ignoring my weird behavior. But I said good night, brushed my teeth, and climbed into my childhood bed. I tried, and then pretended, to sleep, in a house where my parents were no longer my parents.

Except they were my parents, most of the time. This thing was only filling in the cracks. It came out when they did something they’d done a million times before. Each could only see it in the other, because it only happened to you when you weren’t paying attention.

I stayed because I had to see what was inside the mound Dad was building. I imagined a crashed spaceship buried under a tarp, some hard physical evidence that my parents weren’t literally driving each other insane.

So I dozed in and out, and around midnight I tiptoed through the minefield of creaky boards in the hallway, through the laundry room, and out into the yard.

In front of the door were two sets of pajamas neatly folded on a plastic sheet. The sort of thing you’d do before drinking the poison. The metal latch on the door was popped and the door itself was ajar. From inside I heard uncomfortable groaning noises like someone being slowly digested.

Shivering I brought up the brightness on my phone, pulled the door silently open, and shone the light into the depths of the hobbit hole.

My mother screamed.

“What the!” my father barked. “Carlos? Are you filming us?”

“No, it’s a . . . what are you doing in there?”

Dad crawled bare-chested into the light of my camera and shielded his eyes. He was hairy all over. His skin was goose-bumpy from the chill, smeared with dirt and some kind of oil.

“What the hell do you think we were doing?” he said.

“Oh, God, why?”

“It likes for us to be together,” said my mother’s voice. I couldn’t see her because I had turned away from the hole in the mound and was shining my phone in the other direction, trying to think of anything else. “We like it, everyone’s having fun, what’s the problem?”

“So you know about . . . the thing,” I said. “In your brains. We’re not pretending anymore.”

“Yeah, duh,” said Mom, “we knew it the whole time, since it happened!”

“You did not! You called me here to investigate Dad, and then he asked me to investigate you.”

“Can I not want my son to come visit once in a while?

“You’re still doing it! Oh my God! You make up these stories to explain your behavior to yourselves. When one story falls apart you just switch to another one.”

“Be quiet!” Dad hissed. “You’ll wake up the neighbors.”

“I’m not the one who put an alien sex mound in the backyard!”

“It’s a habitat.” Dad rapped at the wooden door with the pride of ownership. “It needs a certain environment to be comfortable. It’s not hostile. In fact, it’s really improved our relationship.”

“You know what?” I turned around and shone the light into the mound without actually looking myself. “I am going to film this.”

“Carlos, no!” they both snapped.

“See, that panic you’re feeling because your son is about to ruin your life for absolutely no reason?” I said. “Hold on to that, because that’s what you have put me through today. I am terrified that you’re going to freeze to death, or burn yourself with some kind of chemical gel, because, hostile or not, this thing in your brains doesn’t understand how your bodies work. And you will not even admit that something is wrong!”

“Carlos has a good point,” said Dad. “A lot of people are in this situation.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mom, “Not everyone is going to handle this as well as we did.”

“Will you at least admit this is weird?” I demanded.

“You are pushing it, mister!” said Mom.

On YouTube there’s a video called ⊶ο•⊘ο•⊘0⊚∘∝∝∘⊘ ⊖⊚∘⊶0⊚⊘ ⊷ο⊘∝00Ο∷ ∷οΟ∷ο⊚•⊶⊚⋅⊙⊗, which in the language they use a couple galaxies over means There Is No Way To Catalyze Two Spacesuits. I filmed the video, and my parents speak in it: Dad uses English and Mom speaks simultaneously in the other language.

The video is short and to the point. My parents and the thing inside them explain that there is no way to merge two human beings together. You can’t do it with sex, or drugs, or glue, or amateur surgery. Maybe it would be possible with the technology we have back home, but anyone who says they can do it on Earth is lying or deluded.

You are watching this because you have found yourself spread across two individuals. You need to accept this and make the best of it. Ask the bodies you’re trapped inside to take you on. What happened to you, happened because your hosts are exceptional. They have a love so strong and stable that its memetic structure formed a suitable habitat for your projected mind.

The thing that trapped you inside these two spacesuits is the relationship between them. You’ll be safe as long as they stay alive and stay in love.

The video only has twelve views. Two of them are mine.

It’s just not what people want to hear.

Yoon Ha Lee is a Korean-American who was born in Texas, went to high school in South Korea, and received a B.A. in mathematics from Cornell University. Yoon’s books include the Hugo Award-nominated Machineries of Empire series and the New York Times bestseller Dragon Pearl. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as Tor.com, Clarkesworld, and Audubon, as well as several year’s best anthologies. He lives in Louisiana with his family and a flopsy catten, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

Nonstandard Candles

Yoon Ha Lee

I didn’t want to travel into the outer darkness, where all the stars were burned-out husks, but the mapmaker insisted. Our ship was vast, too vast for a single mapmaker and her apprentice, and its emptiness weighed on me. During the journey, whose length I cannot describe to you, the mapmaker kept me busy, and for the most part I didn’t think about the corridors and cargo holds with their surfeit of light, their attenuated shadows.

The mapmaker was the last of her kind, trained by a guild so old that its name could only be spoken in boustrophedon utterances. She had told me once, when she accepted me as her student, that a human could not pronounce her name, and not to try. I never saw her wear any colors but white embroidered in feathery patterns of red, the specific lambent red of a candle flame’s outer edge.

For her part, she had no such difficulty with my name, back when I still remembered it. The mapmaker told me it had three syllables, after the custom of my people, but she would not tell me what it was. She spoke all the languages of the outer darkness, and many more besides. When she was in a good mood, she would translate stories and stelae for me.

Most of our time, however, was taken up with the work of mapping.

I had studied long years and hard to learn the most modern techniques. I could calculate the redshifted boundaries of vanished empires and the trajectories of battledrift that encompassed whole systems. I knew how to construct holographic maps exquisite in fractal detail, shining with notations on demographics and trade routes and unrecovered treasures. I could inscribe compass roses in a hundred hundred styles, cultivars of electromagnetic glory.

The mapmaker eschewed all of this. “I’m a traditionalist,” she said time and again as we hurtled past ungardened planets in the predatory dark.

She had spent most of the journey teaching me her methods, which involved quills and paper, brushes and ink in every color I could imagine, and a few I couldn’t. I had never seen a quill pen before she brought out her collection, each one the color of ash after the last ember sputtered out. The brushes were more familiar, yet they sported hairs harvested from kirin, softer and more responsive than sable. I practiced until she deemed me skilled enough to use them without her supervision.

I was doing some warm-up exercises, hatching and crosshatching, the calligraphy of numerals, when the mapmaker’s shadow fell through the doorway. “Come with me,” she said.

I wiped the luminous ink-of-stars off my nib and set the pen aside—I had learned my lessons well—then rose.

The mapmaker led me to the starship’s bridge, with its empty seats. We had a truce with the ship, a veteran of the deep: we minded our own business, and it minded its own. Every so often the mapmaker would suggest a course to it, and it usually obliged.

“We have reached the center of the outer darkness,” the mapmaker said.

I was familiar with her sense of humor, yet this time it stung. “That’s meaningless,” I said. “One place is the same as another, out here.”

“One center is as good as another,” she countered. “Nevertheless. It’s time you learn the truth of our art.”

I inhaled, exhaled. “There are no stars here, no beacons in the dark.” I gestured at the viewports.

There comes a point at which blackness becomes so severe, so unbearable, that the eye denies it. At least if you’re human. I knew there was no light to be had for any distance I could name except what we had brought with us. When I looked at the viewports, the blank vast void was overlaid by a static of afterimages: the deck plates, the unused seats, the mapmaker.

“There are not,” the mapmaker agreed. “But here, where the universe has slipped into sleep, there are no maps. We will begin here.”

I am not a violent person—one of the many modifications they make to would-be mapmakers—but for a moment I wanted to hit her. “Here? There’s nothing to map.”

“Even emptiness requires a chart, if only to give space for the imagination. ‘Here there be dragons,’ as your people used to say.”

“My people used to draw maps with the Earth at the center of the universe. I don’t think that’s a recommendation for their cartographic practices.”

I did not often speak of Earth, even to her. It was long ago and far away, and lost before I was born.

“You’re serious,” I said when she continued looking at me with that phoenix-eye expectation, as though I owed her the heat of a fire, or the heart of a pyre. “Why not just upend all our black ink on the paper? It’ll all be the same in the end.”

Her disappointment weighed on me like the crushing pull of a neutron star. “It’s not the same at all, and you know it. Rorschach splashes are not the same as conscientious mapmaking. You will do a proper job, as I trained you to.”

For a second I entertained the notion of stomping out, going to the mapmaking room—one of them, anyway—and emptying every ink bottle in her collection over the best and brightest of her sheets of paper.

Then the impulse passed, and I resigned myself to a task that would take longer than the lifetime of my people.

Let me tell you about standard candles.

Distance is a curious thing in the outer darkness. In the place we came from, the parts of the universe that still have stars, we used to measure distances by a variety of means. One of them is standard candles.

If you stand on a world and look out into the night-veiled sky, you see stars, some bright, some dim. Which of the bright stars are bright because they are close by, and which are bright because they are furnaces more ferocious than their kindred? Which of the dim stars are dim because they are far away, and which are dim because they are close to death? It’s a question that once dogged astronomers in many civilizations.

If you know a star’s intrinsic brightness—its absolute magnitude—you have a standard candle. At that point, you can compare the absolute magnitude to the apparent magnitude you observe from wherever you are, and find the distance to that star. I won’t trouble you with the formula, but it’s easy enough to derive.

The only problem with this scheme, of course, is that it does you no good if there are no stars in sight, and no maps at hand.

My life became a cycle of drudgery, or would have been if I’d still been capable of boredom. They remove many inconvenient traits from mapmaker candidates, extracting them with fine instruments of wire and stagnant poetry. I asked the surgeon who performed the procedure what they did with the things they took away, and they informed me that it was none of my concern.

Every day, the mapmaker and I consulted the ship’s sensor readings, which the ship gladly gave up to us. (I wondered sometimes if it, too, had had its boredom removed.) Every day we saw the same all-encompassing nothing. Every day we painstakingly inked every nonexistent nuance of that nothing onto our charts of paper.

“Were you the only one willing to volunteer for this?” I asked the mapmaker one day, indistinguishable from the one before.

“Of course not,” she said, and I remembered that she sometimes lied. Then she added, “You’re here, after all.”

“That’s hardly the same thing. I didn’t volunteer specifically to do”—I waved at the nearest bulkhead—“to be here.”

“Is it any worse than the other places you could be?”

I shrugged. I didn’t think nostalgia was one of the emotions I’d lost, but it was hard to tell sometimes. “It’s a lot of ink.”

That was another of the mapmaker’s trade secrets, one she hadn’t yet divulged to me. The paper never ran out, nor the ink. Neither of them took up the infinite space that I would have expected, given how much of the outer dark there existed, and how long we had been mapping, even using her esoteric methods. And the ship was big, but not that big.

“You sometimes daydream about tipping out the ink. I can smell it on you.”

I also wondered what it would be like to smell people’s random impulses, because I was pretty sure she was being literal. Perhaps I was better off not knowing. “You’d only make me clean it up.”

“You’re an excellent mapmaker candidate.”

“Whoever wanted these charts, if they’d wanted them done within an ordinary lifetime or ten, they should have sent more than two people to do the job.” Not that “ordinary lifetime” was an issue at this end of time.

The mapmaker shrugged. Her white-and-red blouse—I thought of it as one although it had eldritch embellishments, and hid more of her form than it revealed—shimmered and warped. “Get to the point.” Remindingly, she tapped her quill pen against the rim of the ink bottle: the ink was drying, bellicosely black, and we had work to do.

“We’re not going to finish,” I said, “before the outer dark swallows the universe.”

“We’ll do the best we can in the time we have, then.”

Her unconcern infuriated me. “We’ll have gone through all this, and for what?”

“The map is its own reward. It has to be.”

I shook my head.

“You can leave,” she added. “The ship has some shuttles.”

I laughed bitterly. “That’s not much of an option. No. I’m staying. But . . . I want to know why.”

“The map is its own reward,” she repeated, and I knew then that I would receive no further enlightenment from that direction.

Let me tell you about the mapmaker’s inks. Each one of them had been stringently tested and formulated for its archival qualities. She told me about the pigments they were made of, sometimes. Black ink produced from the last lanterns of toppled democracies. Red ink of cinnabar, which would have been toxic if I had still been an ordinary human specimen. Candescent gold ink, my favorite, formulated with real gold. The mapmaker made me practice with mica-derived inks before she allowed me near that last one.

Strangest of all the pigmented inks was the white one, thick and viscous, and so pale it hurt the eye. I never had any cause to use it, but it was part of her collection all the same.

There were other inks, pigment-based ones that we used only for our own amusement during downtime, due to the fact that they faded with exposure to light. One of them was derived from the crushed petals of the aurora flower that grew in the methane snows of a disassembled world; the solution sparked and glowed with specks of yellow pollen. I liked that one best, because it reminded me of the gardens I once longed to visit in the city of my birth. I had lethal allergies, and I surrounded myself with pictures of the flowers that I didn’t dare approach in person.

One of the things I appreciated about becoming a mapmaker, even an apprentice mapmaker, was that they’d extracted the allergies along with everything else. They’d left me that one memory, perhaps so I could appreciate my good fortune. Of course, it also meant I would never be able to see those gardens again.

I grew resigned, or accustomed, to the rigors of our work. Smoothing the large sheets of paper so that they didn’t curl or warp at the edges. Ensuring that our brushes were well maintained. Painstakingly painting areas of black line by line, as though the unrelieved black were in fact composed of subtle dense contours.

At last, when I had found a certain meditative fulfillment in the creation of our charts, the mapmaker swirled her brush in a jar of water, tinting it dark, then put it down. “We’re ready.”

I didn’t hear her at first. I had one more brushstroke to paint. The wet ink glistened in the room’s stark light, and then dried, so that the brushstrokes could no longer be discerned. The chart was black and whole and perfect in its silhouetted severity.

“We’re ready,” the mapmaker said again.

My hand shook. My brush knocked against the ink jar, and I almost spilled it. Even that much of a lapse was unusual, and I chided myself for my clumsiness. “What do you mean?”

“We’re ready. The real work can begin.”

I wished the surgeons had not excised my temper, because this seemed like an excellent occasion for an outburst. We had made charts beyond numbering, a comprehensive map of the outer darkness. I was certain, based on what I knew of cosmology, that the last faint stars were on the verge of guttering out, if they hadn’t already—and this was just the preliminaries?

Since temper was beyond me, I said the temperate thing, which was: “What do you mean?”

“Wait here.” The mapmaker rose and passed out of the room, upright like a flame on a windless day. She returned shortly afterward, bearing two bottles of white ink. One for me, one for her.

I stared at her. “We’ve mapped all this empty darkness. Everything’s as black as a dragon’s bowels. We’re done.”

She tilted her head, looking at me strangely. “Not at all.” She set one of the bottles down on my side of the table.

I still didn’t understand.

The mapmaker didn’t reach for the brush, still damp from its earlier labors, but for her favorite quill pen. She opened the bottle of white ink and loaded the nib, and drew a single perfect star onto her chart. Then another, and another.

Somewhere in the outer darkness, three stars candled into existence.

Somewhere in the inner darkness, I remembered the three syllables of my name.

The ink shone on the nib, bright as dawn, as desire unfurled.

“You can’t be serious,” I whispered.

The mapmaker smiled in the way of her people. “You can’t see white ink on white paper.” She gestured at the case that contained the quill pens. “Will you help me?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction author who writes about real people in surreal worlds. Her work has appeared in Apex, Analog, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies, and two of her stories have been finalists for the Locus Award. When she’s not writing, you can find her painting watercolors, playing guitar, or rock climbing. Follow her work at hannahyang.com or on Instagram as @hannahyangwrites.

Inheritance

Hannah Yang

Grace

The reading of Ma’s will marks the first time I’ve seen my mother in fifteen years.

She looks frailer than I’d remembered, almost childlike, her limbs like disposable chopsticks under her gown. Her hospital room is decorated entirely with inoffensive colors, beige and charcoal and sea-foam green. The unmistakable scent of antiseptics pricks my nostrils, along with a more sinister smell underneath, some kind of rot.

Two men sit in metal folding chairs against the far wall. It’s easy to tell which is Ma’s lawyer and which is her memory bank technician. I ignore the empty chair waiting for me and pick a spot to stand near the door, so I can make a quick escape when all of this is over.

My little sister Lily is the only one at Ma’s bedside, holding her hand. Lily, the good girl, the favorite child. Forty-three now, wrinkles around her eyes, dressed in nude flats and a cream-colored blouse, and she’s still trying to be the good girl.

“Grace,” she says. “You’re late.”

“Traffic. Sorry.”

“Yeah, we’ve all been there. Don’t worry about it.”

This is an uncharacteristically generous response for Lily, but of course she’d feel generous today. Ma’s going to leave her entire memory bank to her, and Lily knows it just as well as I do. You can see it in the way she’s got her shoulders scrunched up. In the slight tinge of guilt every time she looks at me, like she’s worried she’s wronged me. At this point, the reading of the will is just a formality.

I wish I could tell her I don’t mind. That she can keep all of our mother, for all I care. But that seems like a callous thing to say in front of everyone else in the room.

After we’ve all introduced ourselves, the lawyer begins to read. “I, being of sound mind, would like to make the following wishes known. I wish for my memories to live on after my brain loses the capacity to store them.”

He continues to drone on in legalese. Lily leans in toward Ma and brushes a strand of hair away from her face, ever dutiful, waiting for the lawyer to get to the important part.

“After my own brain loses its viability,” the lawyer says at last, “all of my selected memories are to be transferred to my oldest daughter, Grace.”

Ma

Grace at twenty-two, distant and polite. It’s been three weeks since her new boyfriend, Rick or Ryan or something, kicked her out. She moved back in after the breakup, but she still hasn’t talked to me about what happened. About anything at all, really.

I knock on her bedroom door. “Are you hungry? I’m about to start making dinner.”

She takes out one of her earbuds, then puts it back in. “Not really.”

“What are you in the mood for?”

“Let Lily pick.”

I hover in her doorframe, unsure whether to leave or to stay.

I always knew she would rebel against me eventually. Don’t all daughters? When I was a girl, I gave my own mother no shortage of white hairs with my backtalk, but those types of frictions were just another way of expressing how much we cared about each other. I’d expected to have similar battles with Grace when the time came. I’d almost looked forward to experiencing the other side of these arguments, like riding a carousel all the way round.

What I didn’t expect was her unexpected penchant for fighting with silence, rather than words. Small silences, each one thin and weightless and shaped to a point. The stiffening of her shoulders when I open her bedroom door. The monosyllabic answers when I ask her about her life.

I don’t know when she started being this way. I’ve replayed key moments in our memory bank over and over, trying to figure it out. Sometimes I think we just send out signals in the wrong ways, at the wrong times. Love from both ends, returned to sender.

“Hey,” I say. “Try to remember that you don’t need a man to be complete. Look at me, yeah? I survived after leaving your dad.”

She snorts. “You’ve been unhappy your whole life. Is that what you want for me, too? A life like yours?”

I stare at her. “What’s gotten into you? I’m trying to help you.”

“It’s a little too late to start helping me, Ma. And I’m not going to stay here if you’re just going to lecture me.”

I fold my arms. “Look, don’t act like you’re doing me some kind of favor by moving in. Where else are you going to go?”

She shrugs, disinterested.

I make liang mian, one of Grace’s favorites, as a peace offering. At the dinner table, Lily chatters away about her coursework and her friends, but my mind is upstairs, wondering when Grace will come down.

When Lily and I have finished eating, I plate Grace’s portion and leave it out on the kitchen table for her. When I come back down in the middle of the night, her plate is still untouched.

Grace

After the lawyer finishes speaking, silence surrounds us, as thick as water.

Lily’s the first to come up for air. She turns toward me. “You? Why you?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Did you make her write that? Manipulate her into it?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“That’s the thing, though. You don’t even talk to her. I’ve been here for her this whole time. I’ve visited her every week since her stroke.”

“Believe me, Lil, I don’t want this either.” It feels strange arguing with her again, after years of speaking to her through a glossy veneer of politeness.

“All right, then let me have her memories instead.”

The lawyer clears his throat. “I’m afraid my client didn’t authorize any secondary transferal. That means Grace can’t alter her mother’s will.”

I wrap my arms around myself, trying to think. “I can refuse to take the inheritance, though, right?”

He nods. “Nobody can force you to accept a memory transferal. If you decline, however, your mother’s memory bank will be permanently erased as her dementia progresses. You’ll have to make up your mind soon.”

“Friday at the latest,” the memory bank technician chimes in. “After that, her memories will almost certainly cease to be viable.”

“Grace, please,” says Lily, grabbing onto my arm. “You can’t do that to her. What would people think of us?”

I shake my arm free. “You can tell your friends whatever you want. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“Nothing to do with you? Do you even hear yourself?”

“I haven’t spoken to Ma in years. This doesn’t change anything.”

“No,” says Lily. “No, this can’t be right. I’m her daughter too. I have a say in this.”

She picks up her purse, fumbles for her phone, presumably to call a different lawyer, or maybe her husband. She marches out of the room. I wait long enough to make it clear to everyone that I’m not chasing her down before I walk out too.

I mull over Lily’s question as I drive back to my apartment. Those two words follow me inside as I flick on the light, sweep the empty pizza boxes off the couch and sit down alone in my living room.

Why me?

Memories are biased things, irretrievably twisted and warped from the ways we’ve played and replayed them over the years. If I accept Ma’s, they’ll infiltrate my own until it’s hard to disentangle them anymore. I’ll lose a piece of myself. How is it fair that she gets to force her perspective on me, when I will never get to do the same to her?

Maybe it’s one last jab at me. Ma always had to have the final word in any argument, and there’s nothing more final than this.

Ma

Grace at fifteen, red-faced and sobbing. For weeks on end she holds her anger close to her chest, like she’s afraid it’ll escape if she lets it get too far away from her. Then comes a moment when the pressure bursts—when I tell her she can’t go to a friend’s sleepover party, such a tiny thing—and all her pent-up feelings erupt at the same time.

“I bet Ba would have let me go to the sleepover,” she says.

A punch to the gut, those words, even though I’ve heard them before. “Your father was always charming when he was in a good mood. You don’t remember what he was like when he wasn’t.”

“I remember everything.”

“No, you don’t. You were so young.”

“Why didn’t you leave him earlier, if he was so bad?”

“He was the only person I had when we moved here. I didn’t have any choice.”

“Bullshit.”

I recoil. “Hey. Don’t use that kind of language in this house.”

“That’s where you draw the line, at swearing? Really? When everything else in this house is falling apart?”

I stiffen. “I don’t know what I ever did to deserve a daughter as ungrateful as you. You know what? Maybe your dad was right to discipline you the way he did.”

Grace laughs, but she hasn’t yet learned the woman’s art of feigning indifference, of hiding her hurt. I can see I’ve cut her more deeply than I meant to. She turns around and walks back toward the stairs, her shoulders stiff, her head high.

Lily slides up next to me and grabs onto my hand. “I’m not ungrateful, right, Mommy?”

I almost yank my hand away. She’s too young to be such a kiss-ass.

Instead I hold onto her hand. Squeeze it tighter. “Of course you are,” I say, hoping Grace will hear me, hoping to goad her into doing something. Doing what? Apologizing? Letting me apologize? I’m not even sure. It doesn’t matter anyway, because she doesn’t react at all.

Grace

The week slouches by. By Thursday morning, Lily has left me seventeen voicemails. I don’t bother listening to them.

I go to work, but I can’t focus. Everywhere I go, I see inheritances. Most of my teammates hold at least one generation of inheritances inside their heads. They make comments about these memories sometimes, in meetings or at happy hours, referencing stories from their grandparents’ childhoods.

Now I find myself picking apart the things I know about these people, trying to find those influences hiding inside them. Trying to draw the line between what’s theirs and what isn’t.

Varun, my boss, stops by my cubicle after lunch. “Hey. You still owe me the N&M analysis.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s been a busy week.”

“When do you think you can have it done?”

“I’m not sure,” I say, but I’m not really thinking about the N&M analysis. I’m thinking about what’s going on inside Varun’s head. He mentioned once that his father’s memories came with half of his paternal grandparents’ inheritances. Can he actually experience his grandparents’ memories as clearly as his own? Or do memories get sanded down like sea glass over time, until they’re closer to feelings than to conscious thought?

He gives me a funny look. “You seem stressed. You want to grab a drink later?”

“I should probably stay and crank out the rest of the analysis.”

“Great. I’ll expect it first thing tomorrow then.”

He strides away, whistling. I wonder where he got his confidence from. If that came from somewhere in his own family, or if it grew from scratch inside of him.

If there’s one thing I inherited from Ma, it’s her stubbornness. Neither of us could ever be the first to admit we were wrong. There were long stretches of time when neither of us would speak to the other, to the point where we both forgot what we were fighting about.

I don’t even remember what our last fight was about, fifteen years ago. By then all of our conversations were inflated with air, niceties over things left unsaid; nothing we said to each other felt sincere. I always assumed I’d forgive her once things got to this point. But her dementia has robbed me of any hope of a real conversation, and if anything, that only makes me angrier. Like she got to let go, when I never did. All the things I wanted to say to her, all the apologies I’d hoped to hear, and now there’s nowhere for all those words to go.

It feels as though I’ve been pushing against a stuck door all my life, harder and harder, trying to get it to open, and all of a sudden it’s unjammed. I thought I would finally be free, but I’m not. I’m just falling forward now, pushing against empty air.

Ma

Grace at seven, giggly and hyper from all the junk food she probably ate at school. She clings to her father’s leg as he stands half in darkness, broad shoulders and wire-rimmed glasses, more of a shadow than a man. She hasn’t yet learned the warning signs, hasn’t yet figured out when to stop.

I don’t get there in time to pull her away. She tugs again, and he slaps her across the face, backhanded, harder than he means to. He doesn’t know his own strength.

Grace stands there, looking stunned. Blood trickles out of her nose, down her chin.

Lily, sitting in her highchair, begins to cry. But Grace doesn’t react at all. She’s strong-willed, like me. It won’t serve her well. It will just make the men in her life try harder to see her break.

I take her to the bathroom after her father’s done shouting at her. I sit her on the bathroom counter and check for damage. Nothing serious, thank goodness.

“We can go away,” I say suddenly. “We can go anywhere.”

“Where?” she whispers, breathing through her mouth as I clean out her nostrils with a cotton cloth.

“Back to China. Or off to somewhere totally new, like Africa. Or Australia.”

“Or Hogwarts?” She’s really into Harry Potter right now.

“Hogwarts too. Or even Nannia.”

“It’s Narnia, Ma. And we can’t go there. The White Witch would get us.”

We make up our escape together, spinning exciting tales, turning the future into a dream that belongs to the two of us alone. Is she still young enough to believe that we can actually go? All of a sudden, I don’t know which I’m more afraid of: if she knows we’re lying to each other, or if she trusts me still.

Grace

By the time I turn in the N&M analysis, it’s nearly eight, and I still haven’t decided what to do about Ma.

I’m about to pop a Lean Cuisine into the microwave when the doorbell rings. It’s Lily, dressed in a dark peacoat, carrying a bulky Trader Joe’s bag.

I lean against the doorframe. “What do you want?”

“Can I come in?”

“Only if you promise not to lecture me.”

“I’m not here to lecture you. Ben told me that would be intrusive, and I know he’s right.”

Thank goodness for Ben. For a typical suburban husband, he gives surprisingly astute advice.

She pauses. “I was actually hoping we could make dinner together. Have you eaten yet?”

“No.” I relent and step back from the doorway. “Come in. Hang on, let me clean up a bit.”

I clear enough space for us to walk into the kitchen. Lily casts a judgmental look around the living room as I lead her inside, at the empty pizza boxes and unwashed wineglasses on the floor, and I remember why I’ve never invited her over before.

She’s brought the ingredients for liang mian. Noodles, peanuts, sesame oil. We haven’t cooked together in years, and it takes a while to remember how it all works again. We curl away from each other at the kitchen counter, trying not to intrude on one another’s space.

I’d forgotten until now that Lily and I both chop garlic the same way. Curling our fingers in so we don’t cut ourselves, crushing each clove with the flat of the blade so the skin slides off more easily. Both things that Ma taught us. All these things we’ve inherited from her, without consenting, without even noticing.

I remember one time when Ma was teaching me how to do this. We were standing in the kitchen, peeling garlic together. I must have been very young, because Lily wasn’t tagging along yet.

Ma was making excuses for Ba again, trying to explain that he was only hard on us because he loved us. I threw the cutting board full of minced garlic down onto the floor and spoiled our whole meal.

Ba tried to punish me, but Ma wouldn’t let him touch me. Strange to see her stubbornness deployed for me, not against me.

“So have you decided what you’re going to do tomorrow?” Lily says, feigning casualness, as she scrapes the garlic into the pan.

“You said you weren’t going to lecture, Lil.”

She holds up both hands. “I wasn’t lecturing. Just asking.”

To her credit, she doesn’t press the issue. Instead, we talk about her husband and her kids and the TV shows we’ve been watching. I’ve rarely seen this side of Lily before. The softer, quieter person she becomes when Ma isn’t around to see her. It makes me wonder what else I’ve chosen to forget.

Ma

Grace at three, bubbly and sweet, singing to herself in the bath. It’s been two months since we moved to San Francisco, and Grace has adjusted the quickest out of the three of us, already spouting off words in English. Her father’s struggling to keep up at his new job, so most days it’s just me and Grace at home. We go on walks. We go grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. We read American picture books. He’s told us not to buy any more, so I hide them in the kitchen where he won’t see them. The more time I think about our bills, the more I wish I could give Grace everything.

I start the long process of washing her hair. Savor the feel of the shampoo in my hands, the softness of her scalp.

“I love you,” she says.

I startle. I ask, “Where did you learn those words?”

“On TV.”

I try to say the words back, but they stick in my throat. Even though they’re true. Maybe because they’re true. It’s not something my parents ever said to me, not something most Chinese parents say to their kids. Love, where I come from, is an action rather than a word. Something you do, not something you say.

“What show were you watching?” I say instead. “Tell me about it.”

She beams. Starts chattering away in a bizarre mishmash of English and Cantonese, splashing bubbles at me as I rinse the shampoo out of her hair. I don’t even understand most of what she says, but I nod along anyway.

She’s so small, so soft, and yet she’s already grown so much in just two months. Suddenly I feel like it’s all slipping away too quickly. I want to hold onto this moment forever.

Grace

On Friday, after work, I go back to the hospital alone. Lily doesn’t come with me, says she wouldn’t be able to come without lecturing.

It’s almost dusk by the time I arrive. Long fingers of sunlight reach in through the half-shuttered blinds, casting everything in gold.

The memory technician is the only other person in the room. “It’s a good thing you came in today,” he says. “If we waited until next week, her memories would almost certainly be irretrievable.”

I look up at him. “What if I still haven’t decided what I want to do?”

“You’d better think it over fast, then. It’s entirely up to you.”

He’s brought his equipment with him, a small black machine no bigger than a handyman’s toolkit. The sight of it sends a cold finger of fear up my spine.

A croak comes from the hospital bed, spoken in barely audible Cantonese. “Hey. I need a new pillow. This one’s no good.”

I didn’t realize Ma was awake. It feels strange to speak Cantonese again. “Do you want me to get a nurse?”

“This pillow,” she continues. “It’s too flat. Bad for my back.”

“I’ll get you a new one.”

“You’re a nice girl. Not like that last nurse I had.” Ma smiles at me, guileless. “What was your name again?”

“Grace.”

“Grace.” She says it without any hint of familiarity, like a limp handshake in spoken form. “I’ll make sure to ask for you next time.”

She’s never spoken to me so gently before.

I haven’t forgiven her. I never will. But I’m tired of pushing against something that’s no longer pushing back, maybe something that hasn’t been pushing back for years now. Her anger is gone. Mine is pointless.

I nod to the memory technician.

He opens up his small black box and takes out two headsets with dozens of small protruding wires, which he attaches to our heads. Then he turns up the dials on his machine.

One memory at a time, I take in the echo of my mother’s life.

It’s not an apology; it’s not an answer; but still in a way we speak, a conversation without words.

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of three novels: The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. They are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have been published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

A Hole in the Light

Annalee Newitz

Arch had never been to a ritual of dissolution for someone who mattered.

Of course, there were distant kin who had died. But when they dissolved, it felt like they had moved to the next village: poignant, but not a disaster. The artificiality of the ritual made her more uncomfortable than their loss. Well, perhaps that wasn’t quite true. She had genuinely suffered when her physics teacher had died, and she could no longer ask questions about what lay beyond the village of Slope-Toward-Sea, on the planet Skiff, wrapped in the mottled glow of the eroding firmament. Even when her teacher dissolved, though, the ritual had seemed absurd.

But now, watching four adepts from the Memory commit Plaza back to the sea, she realized she had misunderstood everything about what the ceremony meant.

At the island’s edge, Arch’s beloved Plaza broke apart, his once-solid edges softening into a jumble of molecules. The adepts’ long song of mourning tumbled through the air, but she felt no slow gathering of boredom. She wanted to stay here forever, to imagine Plaza magically reconstituting himself the way he might have thousands of generations ago in the age of cities.

Each member of the ritual, including herself, added proteins to the swirling liquid that clung to the shore. They bubbled and spread, an oily slick of fluid overtaking the molecules that had formed Plaza. Now the person who once reached seven arms around Arch was merely froth in the ocean, and the Memory adepts sang:

fragments of death become threads of life

Arch sang along, instead of just mouthing the words:

we came from the sea, we belong to the sea, we return to the sea

Next they would retell the history of Slope-Toward-Sea and its sister villages, transforming themselves into the ancestors who fled the city to build a new civilization.

Tasting the syllables, she now understood why every dissolution required a story about the history of her people. She felt like her future had been ripped out of her own guts—as if she had lost not just Plaza, but time itself. To return to life, she needed to rebuild all of existence.

After the long song was done, Arch slowly gripped her way past the farms to tell her cluster that she was never coming home again. Every angle and gleam of Slope-Toward-Sea reminded her of Plaza and it was too much. She had to get away, and there was only one place she could imagine that would be far enough.

“I’m going to follow the adepts to the Memory while their trail is still fresh in the sea,” she announced. Nobody was surprised. The cluster joined together, membrane to membrane, sharing fluids and molecular fragments that merged with her own. It was a proper farewell: she took pieces of them with her, and left pieces of herself behind.

And then she set out to sea, following the scented path that led to the Memory, a place she only knew from stories. Overhead, the Big Puddle rose in the sky, a dark maw in the swirl of gleaming firmament—a promise, her physics teacher had once said, that the universe would eventually become a void lit only by distant, unreachable nuclear reactions.

From the sea, the towers were a mirage, enormous arms pointing at the sky. Up close, they were crumbling structures on an ancient city island made from carbon trash and calcified biofilms. This was where the adepts’ trail ended, but Arch could see no sign of the Memory.

She slid onto shore, scrambling over rocky crusts. Ahead of her, a flora-softened path wound up a steep hill made from piles of giant blocks and shattered, unrecognizable machines. The towers she’d seen from the sea loomed overhead, their bases invisible beneath the eroded debris of a thousand generations. Eventually she reached the summit, and peered down into a green valley cleared of urban remains. Ringed by the old city’s remains, the domes and trees of the Memory nestled in cool shadows cast by mountains of cultural ruins.

Arch knew from songs that the Memory had four public buildings for scholarship, each associated with a different discipline. She made her body into a formal oval, stretched out six legs, and gripped her way down toward the one devoted to science.

Inside, there were more people than lived in the entire settlement of Slope-Toward-Sea, debating and elongating animatedly with each other. One pointed her to a small greeting chamber for novices like her, seeking to join the Memory. She told her story to a sympathetic adept, who reached out an arm—not unkindly—and asked to read her molecules. This would help him understand where Arch came from, and what she’d been exposed to in her environment.

“I’m Spire,” the adept said, after pondering a few short polymer chains. “I can see how much of Plaza is in you.” He paused. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Arch said nothing. Her body spoke for itself.

“It appears that you have spent your whole adulthood clustered with him in Slope-Toward-Sea. You are a good farmer.”

She elongated in assent.

“If you wish, you may become my student. But I warn you, the work is difficult and might sometimes appear pointless.”

“What is the work?”

“I am translating the memoir of Cinderblock, a cosmologist who lived in this city fifteen thousand generations ago.” Spire paused and became lumpy. “Do you know her work?”

Arch felt a spurt of joy for the first time since Plaza’s death. “She’s the person who described the origin of the Big Puddle! I studied some of her equations with my physics teacher.”

“That’s right. My colleagues and I are building on her theories to predict the Big Puddle’s behavior in the future.” He pointed at the sky through an overhead window, flowing with particles and gas. “In the future, all of this will be gone, and we need to prepare.”

Arch had always loved contemplating the firmament, and this sounded like the perfect project to get lost in. But reading someone’s personal history? Even if Cinderblock was a scientist, a memoir didn’t sound scientific. “What good will her memoir do?” she asked. “Does it shed light on her theories?”

“I don’t know yet. You will have to translate it.”

“But I don’t know how to read Old Kind.”

“I told you the work would be difficult.” He laughed. “At the Memory, you must learn a lot before you can start to learn.”

A crease of ambivalence made its way across her membrane before she could hide it. Was she really going to devote herself to mastering an ancient language just so she could find out where Cinderblock took a shit as a child? Spire was right. It seemed pointless. Then she thought about going back to Slope-Toward-Sea, tending the farm, feeling Plaza’s absence for the rest of her time.

Spire broke into her thoughts. “You can discover a lot in the space between an old language and the one we speak now.” A sly ripple made its way down his right side. “And don’t you want to know what it was like to live here when the city was new?” He pushed open the door and gestured for her to follow him outside.

Arch pushed sensors to the tips of her stretched arms, studying every angle of the eroded towers that surrounded the Memory. Maybe it would be a relief to escape into the past. “All right, I’ll do it.”

After a while, Arch grew accustomed to the valley. She memorized every wrinkle in the soft ridge that linked her nest to the science building. She joined a new cluster. The Big Puddle rose hundreds of times overhead, as the planet Skiff rotated its face toward the mystery that nearly drove Cinderblock mad. Though not as mad as translating Old Kind was driving Arch right now.

She returned to the sentences she was working on, putting every uncertain term [in brackets].

A sweet [something] emerges from the [air vessel? small flying object?] and it is a delivery from my love.

This may be metaphorical, she noted in the margin. There are no other examples of the character [something]. Perhaps a unique name for a highly specialized trade good?

The [something] soothes me when [idea images?] turn people to [political group? entrenched structure?]. The [idea images] become [exchange value] and the people are in danger. Luckily, some of us are in [elite social bond] with researchers on Chariot, where [gas-ball gazing? burning vision?] is one of the great sciences. We must research together. Otherwise, this [hole in the light] will be our doom.

Possibly more metaphorical language, she wrote with a sigh, doodling a person humping a burning gas ball in the margin of her pad. She kept coming across the “idea image” characters in Cinderblock’s memoir and still had no idea how to translate them.

But maybe she could figure out some of the other words in this section. Arch scanned the full text of the memoir, looking for the combination of characters she was leaning toward translating as “gas-ball gazing.” There were a dozen more hits, all in the context of talking about science on other planets, like Chariot and Raft. She read further, and realized that Cinderblock was talking about a network of scientists trying to understand the Big Puddle.

“Gas-ball gazing” was some kind of slang term for the hypothesis that the Big Puddle would take over the universe, leaving behind nothing of the firmament but solitary balls of burning gas.

It was strange to imagine Cinderblock working in a huge metropolis in the exact spot where the quiet Memory was now. Back then, ships launched themselves through the towers, sailing the star winds to other planets. Few made the journey in recent generations. Pockets of darkness were opening everywhere—smaller than the Big Puddle, and more dangerous because they were unmapped. Even the most talented navigator might find her ship falling into one, starving it of the thick, life-giving gas that made up the firmament. Her crew would slowly asphyxiate, their bodies hardening into stone.

Arch returned to her translation.

Gas-ball gazing is what drew me to Chariot, the planet of my love.

Cinderblock never named her lover, and Arch wasn’t sure if it was a personal choice or some kind of stylistic quirk of memoirs from that era. Very little personal writing survived from Cinderblock’s period, and Spire told her that the adepts didn’t have enough representations of romance to be sure what the norms were.

We were at [elite social gathering] for scientists who study the end of the universe. Afterward, we left Chariot together and sailed for Skiff to join [more than a million people] in a performance of “The Three Clusters.” So many voices and floats! It was beautiful. Then we [orbited] the city together and felt the star winds, always tugging at the firmament—the same force, we believe, creating the holes.

“Holes in the light” is clearly their term for the Big Puddle and related phenomena, she wrote.

It was thrilling. It was [horny? exciting?]. We reached inside each other and felt joy.

“Definitely horny, then,” she muttered to herself with a laugh, tweaking her wording.

It was thrilling and arousing. We reached inside each other joyfully. Afterward, I confessed to my love that I fear the [Entrenchment] on Skiff. They are inside too many people now. They want to make gas-ball gazing forbidden.

Arch sat back, pleased with the last few sentences. She had hit upon a good translation for the political group Cinderblock mentioned often with trepidation: “the Entrenchment.”

And then the memoir took a dark turn.

During [pepper festival? hot party?] my love developed hard skin, and the medics [made stillness?] so my love could heal. I didn’t know when the Entrenchment would let me leave and be with my love again. So I continued my studies, and my cluster comforted me.

Pushing the pad away, Arch respired as if she’d been stretching uphill. Hard skin was the disease that had killed Plaza. The infection had crept across his membrane until he could no longer reach out an arm or send an eye into his hands to see the world. By the end, he was caged in a scabrous shell that allowed no molecules in or out. Thinking about it—the moment when the last chemicals passed between them through a tiny gap—made her want to cry or vomit or some combination of the two. Their cluster had stayed by both of them as he slowly disappeared, his sweet taste walled off by sickness.

But of course, hard skin was one of those diseases that the ancients had conquered. They considered it a major inconvenience, but not a horror. She wondered if Spire had known about what had happened to Cinderblock’s lover. Perhaps Spire hoped she would study her connection to Plaza with the same scholarly zeal she applied to Cinderblock’s memoir.

Pushing an eye to the tip of one long arm opposite the arm she was using to read Cinderblock’s memoir, she could peek past the door to her office. The view confirmed what she’d already smelled. Nobody was around.

She needed to get outside. Cluster call wasn’t for some time, so she could wander through the ruins for a while. There was one particular tower she liked because it still retained some of its old colors and light emitters. Gazing up at its faintly glimmering surface, you could imagine thousands of people’s sacs stuck to it as “idea images” danced through the air and gardens flourished in floating orbs.

Arch gripped her way up until she approached the weather-softened top of the tower, its portal to the firmament dark and quiet. From here, she could see all that remained of the city that had once housed millions of people. During Cinderblock’s time, it would have been impossible for her to absorb the city’s vast and varied weirdness—she would have dissolved knowing her home was full of amazing things she never saw. Plus, it swarmed with ships ferrying people between worlds. There were so many interwoven, interpenetrating social groups. Even if you lost a friend, there would be hundreds more waiting to meet you.

Still, something about the city’s vast collective organization created bizarre conflicts. The Entrenchment tried to stop cosmologists from discussing their work, despite the fact that anyone could see the Big Puddle growing overhead. And their “idea images” were rippling across millions of membranes, twisting billions of proteins, until there were fights within fights.

Arch adhered to the spire next to imprints from a sac that was long gone, and stared across the choppy waves in the direction of Slope-Toward-Sea. Even from this far away in space and time, she could still feel Plaza’s loss.

The Big Puddle rose another hundred times before Arch was halfway through translating Cinderblock’s memoir. To celebrate, Spire invited her to a picnic atop the mountainous ring of the old city, where they ate on a pile of disintegrating machines.

“Have you learned anything that you didn’t expect?”

“I was born at the wrong time,” she said, surprising herself with a jolt of bitterness. “Fifteen thousand generations ago, I could have come here and walked through floating gardens with more than a million people.” She used the Old Kind word for “more than a million people.”

“People always think that meeting lots of random strangers is a better life. More exciting, I guess.” Spire turned his gaze to the Big Puddle, its inky void promising nothing but more darkness. “But you know what I think? Those times were thrilling, but there was still death and sorrow—just like everywhere else. Only it was amplified. Because they were surrounded by the pain of millions of strangers and the monuments they built to their grief.” He put out a hand to touch her arm.

“Maybe. But they could go anywhere—even the shores of a star. They performed ‘The Three Clusters’ with millions of voices and arms. It must have been more beautiful than anything we have now.”

Spire moved closer, leaning warmly against her without trying to reach inside. “No matter when we live, we can find beauty.” He pointed at a garden that the agriculture novices had planted nearby, in the shattered translucent shell of an old city vehicle.

“Stop making false equivalencies.” Arch felt herself raising two spines in anger. “Did you know Plaza wouldn’t have died back then? They had medicine . . . ” She started to cry quietly.

“They had ways to heal, but not everyone could use them. You only know the stories of the people who had everything—the ones who survived. What about all the other people? There were many ways to die here. The seas oozed with their remains, and nobody gave them the ritual of dissolution. Be glad you have only this pain, instead of the pain of many worlds, binding you to a grief that can never be resolved.”

Extending himself into a spindle, Spire plucked a purple flower out of the nearby structure’s gradually eroding facets, then slowly returned to a resting position. Arch absorbed her tears and looked at the blossom’s bright orange center.

“In Cinderblock’s time, Plaza would be here with us. He would have loved this flower.”

“You will never find peace in your counterfactual. You need to look at what’s happening around you right now.” He stretched an arm at the sky. “Eventually everything will look like the Big Puddle, and the firmament will be reduced to tiny, distant stars. The entire universe as we know it will be gone. Do you perceive what I’m saying?”

Arch absorbed her arms and became almost perfectly spherical. “We’re doomed?”

He laughed. “Yes, we are. But so is everyone. You have to learn to see the promise in the darkness.”

Reflexively, Arch curled her tongue around a snippet of Plaza’s molecules, tasting his beloved laugh. She knew it wasn’t healthy to keep replicating these last pieces of him inside her. Mutations were building up in the strands. Her cluster could only do so much to maintain chemical integrity without purging Plaza’s remains. An unexpected mutation could do serious damage, and these were becoming more statistically likely as time stretched on. She might even cause hard skin in herself or a clustermate.

Extending her arms again, she blocked the firmament’s ubiquitous glow and tried to imagine a universe eaten by the Big Puddle. The light wouldn’t be gone, but it would be different and more rare.

Arch began spending her free time gardening with the agriculture students who had grown the purple flowers. There was no rule against working on two projects, and Arch enjoyed the group’s discussions about growing plants out of metals harvested from star winds.

She had finished another quarter of Cinderblock’s memoir, and the cosmologist’s story was getting more political.

Gas-ball gazing is called a [toxin? disease?] on Skiff now. If I publish my research, I may be [force-dissolved].

In the latter half of Cinderblock’s memoir, she spoke often about something that Arch decided to translate as “force-dissolve.” The verb included characters that meant “force” or “coercion,” as well as the familiar character for “dissolving,” still roughly the same after thousands of generations. It also included a character that could mean “travel,” or could refer to the mathematical idea of becoming smaller. If she had to guess—and she did—it meant that the Entrenchment was making people smaller by forcing them to die.

Now she understood what Spire meant about how the sea around this ancient city was oozing with dead bodies. Conflicts here often ended with death, by some means that Arch could neither translate nor understand.

Finally I received a [high-value object] and took a ship to Chariot to visit my love in recovery. There are no clusters allowed on this planet, so I often feel disordered and sad. But scientists can speak about gas-ball gazing. I have joined a group building a prototype [enclosed? shielded? vessel] for travel inside the holes in the light. No one is ever force-dissolved.

But Chariot’s oceans are covered by [energy machines]. I often dream of home, where star breezes ruffled the oceans, and there is a [group of a thousand people] who sang near my cluster’s sac. I miss those sounds and smells. And the gardens. Chariot has no tradition of gardens.

Arch felt she truly understood Cinderblock for the first time. It was as if the cosmologist stood beside her, speaking like a friend. Arch knew the feeling of contentment that came from watching the waves around this city island swap beams of light, and the sense of peace among the flowers. Sometimes she could hear gusts of music in the valley, from adepts who studied the arts. There was not much about Cinderblock’s life that was easy to comprehend, but this feeling she could translate perfectly.

The time may come when I will be allowed to return, but I am not hopeful. The Entrenchment has closed Skiff’s firmament paths. For now I remain on Chariot, where my love says it is [not directed? untethered?]. That may be true for science, but not for everything.

The characters that I’m translating as “not directed” or “untethered” might be metaphors for freedom, she wrote in the margin, sketching a flower next to her note.

After she finished this passage, Arch gripped her way to the agriculture students’ experimental garden with its purple flowers. She spread herself flat in the moist, warm soil. The firmament warmed her from overhead, and Skiff warmed her from below. She thought about Cinderblock, in exile on a planet without gardens, without the comforts of clustering, and tried to soak up all the beauty of Skiff. She would take joy in this world for an ancient cosmologist who no longer could.

Arch was nearly finished with the translation of Cinderblock’s memoir. When she realized the end of her research project was approaching, she decided to shed the last pieces of Plaza, much to her clustermates’ relief. It meant she could no longer taste him inside her, but she also felt much stronger now. Replicating a chunk of mutation-riddled molecules had been more of a drain than she realized. She didn’t miss him any less. But she also felt . . . The Old Kind character for “untethered” popped into her mind. That was it. Less tied down. More free.

It turned out there were a dozen students with overlapping interests in cosmology and agriculture, and they had created a small interdisciplinary cohort together. Spire and a young agricultural adept named Canal were co-tutoring. Arch attended the first meeting, where Canal lectured about healthy ways of integrating farms into settlements, then segued into a discussion about the molecular structure of red moss and how it interacted with radiation.

When she and Spire found a quiet spot away from the others, he gave her a nudge. “Have you learned anything from Cinderblock’s memoir that surprised you?” It was his favorite question.

She rolled onto her side and mirrored his posture for a moment, gently mocking him. “Is there something you think should surprise me?”

He looked serious. “She presented her entire theory of the Big Puddle shortly after she finished this memoir. I was hoping you could tell me what inspired her breakthrough.”

She recited two sentences in Old Kind, and Spire listened intently. “What is the translation?” he asked.

“‘I love this city. But I must force-dissolve my connection to it.’”

Troubled, Spire reached a hand out to stroke one of the purple flowers nearby. “So it was the loss of her home on Skiff. That’s what changed her perspective.”

“My guess is that she had figured out the Big Puddle a long time before, but couldn’t tell anyone about her theories until she left.”

Spire twisted himself a little, expressing contemplation. “It must have been a huge relief to her, to escape from this place where she couldn’t publish.”

Now it was Arch’s turn to become very serious. “I don’t think she was relieved, actually.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She loved it here, which is understandable.” Arch gestured at the valley, where buildings divided the light into pleasing polygons. “It’s beautiful. And with the city and all those people? It must have been astonishing.”

“But she couldn’t be herself here.”

Arch wriggled an arm, shrugging. “I think she could be herself here in a way she couldn’t be on Chariot. She could join a cluster. She could perform the great stories. There are many kinds of freedom, and it hurts to choose only one.”

Just then, Canal let out a cheer, and the students followed suit. “We’ve done it! The moss is producing a new kind of protein!” Everyone was talking and exhaling molecules of triumph at the same time. Arch and Spire tumbled to meet the class, their conversation about Cinderblock’s choice mostly forgotten.

When Arch stretched an eye into the huddle of students to see the moss, she was nonplussed. “What is the new protein?”

“It’s a medicine!” Canal waved eight short arms excitedly all over her body. “It’s a therapy for rending!” The agriculture teacher was referring to a degenerative condition that caused small cuts to open in the skin, leaking fluid. In extreme cases, it led to desiccation. Even when rending wasn’t deadly, though, the condition was disabling and painful. Being able to heal those cuts—that would be a gift to many people.

For a moment, she thought again of Cinderblock, who lived in a city where nobody ever died of rending—or of hard skin. But millions of people refused to see the Big Puddle for what it was. The city embraced one kind of science, and force-dissolved the other. It was incomprehensible. Looking around at her cohorts in the science and agriculture class, who were still talking excitedly about the possibilities for red moss medicine, she felt a weight shift in her mind. Maybe the old city’s technologies could have healed Plaza. But Arch was glad to be here now.

Cinderblock’s memoir was finished and polished. Some of the words’ meanings were still opaque to Arch, but she had made her final choices about how to translate them.

At her completion ceremony, Arch would announce her intention to stay at the Memory. She wanted to help Canal and the other students with their work on the red moss. The interdisciplinary class had become almost like a cluster to her—better in some ways, because she didn’t have to taste their sour excretions when they were dyspeptic.

As she put out more legs to pull herself to the ceremony platform, Spire nudged her aside for one of his conversations.

“I wanted you to be the first to know that I’m taking a ship to Chariot soon.” He stretched with pride. “There’s a group I want to work with on navigating the Big Puddle.”

She started to protest, but he waved an arm to silence her. “I have a prototype of a ship that can withstand—What did Cinderblock call it? ‘Holes in the light’?” He spoke the Old Kind words.

“That’s right,” Arch replied quietly.

“I know you’re worried that the journey is dangerous, but so is a future without travel between worlds.”

Arch spoke in a mock-teacher voice. “I expect you to come back with a complete map of the darkness.”

Spire laughed and they embraced, weeping a little. Spire promised to bring Arch’s translation of Cinderblock’s memoir to the Big Puddle researchers on Chariot. And Arch promised she would carry on as an adept with the group that studied cosmology and agriculture.

Despite her sadness, Arch took her place at the center of the ceremony to read an excerpt before the real party began.

I will never go home again, and it hurts. I suppose some are lucky to keep their homes, and others are lucky to keep their lives. Maybe we cannot ever have both. Now I try to think of the people who will live after us. Perhaps in many generations, everyone will understand that the universe is going dark.

Arch turned an eye to Spire as she read, thinking of his impending journey. Future generations would need those maps. Even now his journey would be dangerous—nobody knew exactly when a hole would open up in the fabric of the firmament.

Waving six arms in a flourish, she read the final line.

I leave this memoir behind on Skiff, hoping that you, my future reader, know what the Big Puddle is. But most of all, I hope that you are untethered.

Her colleagues cheered, and overhead the firmament swirled around the mysterious darkness that Cinderblock had predicted would grow larger with time. Flowers bloomed in the valley below them, and red moss softened the wall of a collapsed building.

She wished Plaza were here to see her. But at this moment, in this place, it was all right that he wasn’t. She was home.

Chinelo Onwualu is a Nigerian writer, editor, and recovering journalist. She is a former co-editor of Anathema magazine, co-founder of Omenana, a magazine of African Speculative Fiction, and former chief spokesperson for the African Speculative Fiction Society. She’s a 2014 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, which she attended as the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. Her short stories have been featured in several magazines and anthologies, including the award-winning Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, The Saga Anthology of Science Fiction 2020, and 2021’s Best of World SF Vol.1. She’s been nominated for the Ignyte Community Award and the Nommo Awards for African Speculative Fiction. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Ex Marginalia, her anthology of essays by authors of color, is available now.

Letters to My Mother

Chinelo Onwualu

The day I found her journal, I wasn’t even supposed to be on archive duty. My podmate, Afara, wanted one more day to recover from the naming celebration of the Homestead’s latest baby and I was happy to take her place. It was a few days before the next harvest anyway and the forest would be all the sweeter for my return.

I had read that in the old world, people were confined to a single occupation, forced to choose one thing to which they would dedicate all their time and energy. My people would shudder at the idea. In our Homestead, we all engaged in many different activities, according to our interest and capacity, to keep the community running. But I would have loved to spend my every waking moment in our forest garden. Too many days indoors and I would long to return to its green embrace.

Our archives were the Homestead’s record of itself—collections of personal diaries, notes, and stories stretching back to the old world. Each resident was encouraged to chronicle their thoughts and daily lives for eventual inclusion in the archive when they passed on. I was one of the few who didn’t. I preferred my legacy to be in the vast forest garden I helped tend. In the constant genetic tweaking I did to make sure each food, fuel, and medicinal plant was its healthiest version. My records would be the folders of observational data that I kept on the ecosystem on which we depended.

Though I could stay an archivist for long, I enjoyed the smooth activity of handling books. Finding a volume’s proper place on a shelf gave me the same satisfaction as discovering just the right mix of mulch for a new strain of cassava or locust bean. Perhaps it was because I was not used to handling the oldest texts that the journal stood out to me. I’m sure a more experienced archivist would have passed it by. The volume dated to the earliest days of the Homestead—just after the end of the climate wars. Normally, these records had the drifting weightlessness of shedding leaves, but this one was heavy—a clod of dirt rich with life and memory. It had a simple fibre cover, worn smooth by years of careful handling, and was tied shut with a roll of string. I was drawn to it immediately. After my shift ended, I asked to take it home.

As I made my way to my quarters, the book heavy under my arm, I took in—as I always did—the marvel that was my Homestead. Each community was uniquely suited to its environment—whether it was in the deserts of the north, or the mountain cliffs of the west. Ours was nestled in the heart of an island in a river delta, never far from our forest. There were fruit trees and berry shrubs at every turn, and vines and creeping melons twined along walls and balconies. Even the moss underfoot was edible.

My compound was typical: five brightly painted homes arranged around a central courtyard. Each house was made of live bamboo saplings carefully pruned and bent toward each other until they formed a dome, leaving space for large windows. The walls were finished with hardpacked earth and the floors lined with smooth river stones so we were always cool in the heat. Once I was home, I brewed myself a pot of tea and fetched a plate of leftovers from the communal dinner I’d missed. Then I settled into a nook by one of the windows and started reading.

The entries were undated—mostly dry, impersonal recountings of daily events. I soon grew bored, wondering what had drawn me to the volume. I was ready to set it aside when I stumbled upon the letter. It was tucked behind an official entry, as if it was an afterthought. Dashed off in an irregular scrawl where the other entries were printed in a thick, even hand, it was undated and unaddressed. To me, it was a bright bloom among a field of monotone lectures.

Hi Mom,

I miss you.

I miss you so much. Right now, I’m looking at your picture and I miss your smell, your touch. I miss how you always knew something was wrong. I wish I could hear your voice—so filled with concern as it usually was. Or just get a reassuring hug—you always gave the best ones.

You weren’t perfect, you had your flaws: You never really listened, never asked questions. Never seemed truly interested in what I thought or believed. You were so wrapped up in self-loathing you could barely see a future for yourself—much less one with me in it.

But your presence validated mine. Now that you’re gone, I don’t know how to tell you I’m sorry. I guess I’m still angry at you . . .

We never told each other how we really felt, and I don’t understand why. Maybe we’re just too alike—both of us holding that precious piece of ourselves so closely that we’d forgotten how to share.

I wish I’d paid more attention in the times when I got to see the woman you were—behind all the rage and bitterness—the sweet, loving core of you that you hid so well. Like that time we met up when I’d just moved to San Francisco. At first, it was like when we’d go on vacation when I was a kid. You were happy. Then we got into another fight and there it was: the cussing, the name-calling . . . I felt like a blind man who’d gotten to see for a minute only to be plunged into darkness again.

You once asked me why I left you, but you turned away so that you wouldn’t have to hear the answer. Well, here’s what I would have said—if you’d been listening:

I walked away because that’s what I had to do to survive.

Loving you meant being crushed by the weight of your expectations. Trying to make you happy was like working to a vague, ever-shifting standard with no breaks, no bonus, and no possibility of promotion. And if I failed, I had to be on guard for the next attack.

I understand your anger. I can’t imagine how resentful I would be too, if I saw my child wasting opportunities that I was denied. But I couldn’t stay stuck with you anymore.

I loved you more than you could ever understand. And I never stopped wanting to please you. I just stopped trying to because it hurt too much to keep failing.

I’m afraid of where I have to go from here. I’m sitting in your old house in Bonny Island surrounded by the detritus of war, and I don’t know what’s waiting for me once I walk out those doors.

I hope, wherever you are, that you’re proud of me. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

I touched the page to turn it and the pain hit me like a blow to the chest, knocking me breathless. I doubled over, dropping the book and spilling my tea all over the embroidered carpet. When it passed, I could only lay there staring at the ceiling and straining to breathe.

Some objects from the old world, the ones that still carried the anguish of those who had made use of them, were too dangerous for my people to touch. These were usually items from the drowned cities. I’d never heard of something from the archives bearing such effect.

We had been taught that the founders of the Homesteads were enlightened ones who had evolved beyond the vagaries of the egoistic self. After the climate wars, they had seen the dark fate awaiting humanity and took the bold steps necessary to avoid the extinction of our species. But the longing and grief of that short letter was unlike anything I had ever felt. Could such raw emotion truly have belonged to a founder?

I avoided touching the book after that. I returned it the next morning wrapped in cloth and hurried from the records room as if it was also to blame for what had happened.

Returning to the forest, I thought I had left the book behind. I was wrong, for something in it remained in me.

Even a month later I was still in pain, though it had softened to a dull ache suffusing my whole body. Now, every movement was a desperate attempt to stay ahead of creeping exhaustion. I felt as if I was drowning in grey waters.

I stopped attending my compound’s communal meals, finding the conversations too tiring. I begged off most of my other shifts within the Homestead as I had little energy for them. Only the forest still held any joy—and even that was beginning to fade.

Afara noticed first. We’d been friends since we were children. As adults, when neither of us felt the spark of sexual desire, it felt natural for us to share a home. One evening, as we sat on the verandah, she weaving a strip of undyed mkpuru cloth, and I sorting cocoyam seedlings for the upcoming planting season, she sent me a simple thought.

Obeche, your song has changed.

I am simply tired. I thought back. I pictured the ache in my bones, the heaviness of my limbs, and sent it to her.

I was indeed tired, but it did not seem that I could cure it through rest. In fact, the more I slept, the more listless I felt. My dreams were filled with the founder’s voice.

Tired cannot change the song of your birth. She sent me a snatch of the praisepoem my mother had composed to invite me to incarnate within her. It is slowing.

I reached for the song inside myself and heard it too, a drag at the end of each note that made it sound like a funeral dirge.

I think it is that book, Afara noted. We both looked at the slim volume lying on the small table between us.

Last night, against my better judgement, I’d fetched it from the archives. I was hoping to find something, anything, within it that could lift the heavy pall that had settled on me, but I was still too frightened to read it again. How quickly she had made the connection I had missed! I caught the flare of anger that erupted in me before it could form a thought that could be directed at her. But she’d already sensed the emotion.

Talk to Great-Grandmother, she suggested gently.

My people do not believe in hierarchies. Such structures lock societies down, keeping its members from true creativity and growth. Hierarchy is a form of spiritual death. Yet, there are people whose wisdom, warmth, and compassion are so respected that they become a central hub in nearly all social circles. Great-Grandmother Nya was one of them.

Afara was right, something was wrong with me. But I was not yet ready to speak to anyone about it—least of all her. Instead, I picked up the book and headed to the forest.

We made sure our forest garden followed the structure of a natural forest, so there was little to mark where the Homestead ended and where the verge began. We’d started by allowing a number of timber trees like iroko and sapele to grow to full size and form an over-canopy, then we planted smaller fruit trees—mango, plantain, and guava—to create under-story layers. At just above head height, nitrogen-fixing plants like moringa provided filtered shade to ground crops such as cassava, pineapple, and corn. Climbing plants such as beans, yam, pepper, and melons were allowed to twine up the trees, and herbs were encouraged to grow where they could. It was a self-sustaining system that provided a habitat for all kinds of creatures, and it required little from us beyond the occasional pruning and mulching to keep it hospitable.

Harvests were my favourite times. At any point in the year, there was something to reap from the forest. This meant there was always plenty of food for the Homestead. Today, we were gathering the jussura berries. Of all the harvests, this one brought me a special joy.

The small, grape-like beans grew in bunches near the palm’s canopy, but because its trunk was too pliant to bear much weight, our tradition was to allow the Homestead’s smaller children to climb the trees and pick them. Normally, it made my heart sing to hear their laughter echoing from high above me. But this evening, my steps were dogged by a heaviness I could not name.

I sat by a small creek and brought out the journal. I began thumbing through it, but there were no more letters. The entries continued in their dry, lifeless manner until the last page. I was about to close the tome in frustration when I noticed several of the volume’s final pages had been ripped out. I reached to touch the series of ragged page edges, and hesitated. Even before making contact, I could feel those missing slots throbbing like an open wound.

I placed my hand on it anyway.

We’re standing side by side on one of the lesser-known San Francisco piers—7 or 14, I can’t remember now. I don’t know it yet, but it’ll be the last time I see you before the world ends. You’ve turned your face to the water.

Your head is uncharacteristically bare, not sure what you did with your headtie, and your short-cropped hair is exposed to the elements. When did you cut your hair? Sure, after decades of meticulous straightening it had started to fall out in clumps, but I’d assumed you’d rather wear wigs. I guess there was a lot I never understood about you. Maybe that’s the fate of all children, that they can never really know their parents even after a lifetime.

You’ve just told me a story about the only man who ever hit you. In the middle of the night to end a heated argument, he’d slapped you across the face. You laugh as you recall how he fled after you warned him not to ever fall asleep in your presence because you would kill him.

I loved that fierce and uncompromising side of you. But it was also what made you so stubborn. Once you’d picked a direction, nothing could change your course—even if it meant you’d crash on the rocks. How many times did I come out to you? Each time it was a fight. To you, it was a decision I’d made to anger you, like my preference for black velvet clothes and silver piercings. To me, it was a vital part of myself that I longed to share with you so that you could see me for who I really was, not the girl you insisted I should be.

I want to touch you. But I’m afraid it would spark another misunderstanding. So we stand side-by side, watching the blue-grey waters of the San Francisco Bay, locked in our own thoughts. That’s when you tell me the story of my conception. Of the man who raped you and would have insisted on marrying you if he’d found out you were pregnant. You describe how you had to leave your own mother in Enugu and flee to Bonny Island where you had me—alone and surrounded by strangers. When you’re done, you turn to look at me and say the words that have been seared into my soul ever since:

“Sometimes, I wish I never had a child,” you say.

Maybe it’s the look on my face, because you quickly add: “But I am glad that I had you.”

But it’s too late. You suggest that we go and get dinner, as if that will erase what you have just done. I force a smile and agree. And with that, we tacitly decide to bury it.

The rest of the trip is a blur of light comments on soft subjects—nothing difficult, nothing real. At the end of it, you return to New Biafra. A few months later, after I’ve moved to Tkaronto, the corporate nation-state of Gilgamed will attempt to annex the Free Territories of California and the first battle of the Climate Wars will begin.

I will carry those words with me through the horrors of the war, past the desperate days of scrabbling survival, and into the fragile stability of new community as we rebuild our world. And when I eventually decide to take my own life, I know that’s the last thing I will hear.

I wake up in my own bed, a worried healer looming over me. I note Afara hovering behind her. They breathe sighs of relief when I struggle to sit up.

What happened? I send the thought to both of them, and the healer returns an image of myself comatose by the water. She’d found me as she foraged for mushrooms. The book was gone, likely fallen into the water when I’d lost consciousness. It didn’t matter, though. Its damage was done.

You have been gone from us for three days, Afara adds, sending the full force of her distress and anguish at me.

She realises her mistake as soon as she does it.

I curl inward, unable to bear her pain on top of the dead woman’s grief. Somewhere inside me, the vast maw of despair that I have been straddling for months finally yawns open and I am engulfed. Despite her apologies and entreaties, I slide back down into my bed and pull the blanket over my head. Neither she nor the healer can persuade me to rise again.

That night, Great-Grandmother Nya comes to visit. I know it is her without having to lift my head. Her presence is like the light of the sun just as the day shifts from dawn to morning. She sits on the edge of the bed and places a warm hand on my head.

“Greetings, daughter.” My mother speaks aloud, for she is the one person with whom I will not share my thoughts.

I want to tell her to go away, but I can’t. My body feels like a metal weight anchored to the bed. I can’t even answer. All I can manage is a moan. A child’s lonely wail upon waking in the night. She sidles into bed with me and cradles me in her arms. And though she’s small and frail, and I a grown woman in my fiftieth year, I sigh into her embrace. And then I’m weeping. Coarse sobs that wrack my frame, howling tears for myself and the women whose names I do not know.

My mother lets me cry. Her only response is a soft hum uttered every so often, a quiet understanding that I am in pain, that I need to feel it, and that I will survive it.

“Do you know that your birth song came to me while I sat underneath a tree?” she says when my tears finally subside. “That’s how you got your name.”

“I know.” I’m surprised by the sound of my own voice, so rarely do I use it. “You’ve told me that story many times.”

Though I can’t see her face, I can feel her smile. “I don’t always listen, do I?”

I shrug. My body is surprisingly lighter as if much of the heaviness that had dragged me down had flowed away with my tears.

“I am sorry I did not always give you what you needed,” says my mother.

“You did your best.”

“I also hurt you. Both can be true at once.”

I am silent at that, and for a while she is too. She begins humming a tune, and I recognise it as my birth song. In our Homestead, every child is born to a praise poem composed while they are still in the womb. It is the first song we hear, and we commit it to memory before we ever speak our first words. The song is meant to embody both a child’s current personality and their future prospects while connecting them to the long lineage of our ancestors. It is supposed to evoke our individual and collective identities.

As she sings, I listen closely for the first time. And I hear, clearer than I’d ever heard before, my mother’s hopes for me, the love and care she’d poured into every aspect of my upbringing. And though we didn’t always agree, I realise that I had never doubted that she wanted me. I think about the old world and what it might have meant to have what one did not want and to want what one did not have.

Mother, can I ask something of you? My mother has the grace not to let her surprise at my thought show.

Anything, my love.

Can you help me plan my burial?

The open field was one of the few on our island and we kept it clear for ceremonies and celebrations. A week after my mother’s visit, she and I gathered everyone there. Unlike other Homesteads, we didn’t have a formal amphitheatre. Instead, we had adapted the natural mounds of dirt around the space into rough terraces so that everyone who needed to sit could do so and still be able to participate in the activities at the centre of the field.

On one end of the space, a group of drum healers waited patiently. I hadn’t told them exactly what they would be doing, but they had their instruments—ogenes, kolokolos, and drums of various sizes—at the ready. A massive umbrella tree growing on the other side provided necessary shade and many gathered underneath it.

For days after my mother’s visit, Afara and I sat in communal meditation. I’d lanced the boil of the grief that had driven the dead woman to suicide, but I still had to heal the infection of her trauma, which still lived inside me. If I was not careful, I could spread it like a disease throughout the community. Slowly we uncovered more about her—her name, her story, and most importantly, her song.

And today, I was going to sing it.

I waited at the centre of the field until everyone had found their places and settled down. No one knew quite what I planned, and if I was being honest with myself, I barely knew either. I had chosen to wear a mixture of the green robes of a birthing ceremony, the blue of a naming celebration, and the white of a funeral. In a way, what I wanted to do would be a mixture of all three. In my arms I cradled a mahogany sapling.

My mother began the ceremony with the breaking of kola nuts and a prayer of recognition to our ancestors. Then, together, we called the woman’s true name three times to awaken her spirit and her song. I started singing it and behind me, as if by an unknown cue, the drum healers began to play. I planted her tree among the grove of the ancestors. Then, I poured a libation of water mixed with milk over the plant to share her name with the ancestors.

While I worked, the whole Homestead began to take up the song. Hesitantly at first as they learned the words, then with more confidence. Only when the song was firmly upon every lip did I allow myself to dance.

As the complex polyrhythms of the drums thrummed through me, I let the song guide my steps. Each movement was a welcome and a release.

I took her pain and mine and shared it with everyone present, then I let the forest take them. Like the transformation from waste to compost her grief became a memory rich with life, a catalyst that would help me and my people grow stronger.

I danced until I collapsed. And I was lucky, for when I fell, my mother’s hands were there to catch me.

Meg Elison is a Brooklyn author and essayist. She writes science fiction and horror, as well as feminist essays and cultural criticism. She has been published in McSweeney’s, Slate, Fangoria, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Catapult, and many other places.

Her debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award. Her novelette, “The Pill,” won the 2021 Locus Award. She is a Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards finalist. She has been an Otherwise Award honoree twice. Her YA debut, Find Layla, was published in fall 2020 by Skyscape. It was named one of Vanity Fair’s Best 15 Books of 2020.

In the Dream

Meg Elison

The Martian day is only thirty-seven minutes longer than the Terran day, but to the designated sleeper every minute feels eternal.

In a journey of two hundred and ten Terran days, Captain Bhatti preferred to sleep no more than half his nights. They would be in transit on his birthday, and he wanted to sleep that night to feel the passage of time, watching the distant blue dot of Earth out the aft porthole window.

“Earth is the clock,” Bhatti said for the thousandth time. “The calendar. It doesn’t even make sense to keep my birthday out here on the road. But today’s the day back home. And my wife sent me my birthday message so that it would reach us on time. And I get to open my present. Who needs a clock, really?”

Mars would just be visible ahead of them at that point on the journey, discernible only from the stars in that it was brighter. Slightly pinkish, Bhatti and Commander Linden were the only repeat travelers who knew it would loom rusty-red in the weeks to come. Dr. Del Campo had been on the road for years, but this was her first run to Mars. Chen, a green junior officer, was on her very first road trip and had gotten a good one out of sheer luck.

And the miracle of miracles was Rori Breyer, the designated sleeper aboard the Koyash. Captain Bhatti would normally sleep nights of exactly seven hours. That had Breyer in her bunk a mere 700 hours of the trip, with 4,340 left for the rest of the crew to fight over.

Linden, the first officer, who had three kids at home on Earth, embarked with plans to sleep the old-fashioned way for the first several weeks. “I’m so fucking tired all the time,” they said to everyone and no one. They instinctively looked around the cockpit of the Koyash to make sure the other crew members were belted in for launch before they fastened their own harness. “If I’m not on duty, I’m in my bunk. Sweet oblivion, open your arms. I welcome the void of space after the last few months. Did I tell you Selma had the stomach flu three weeks ago? I almost didn’t get cleared!”

But Commander Linden had indeed cleared their health screen, though every school-age child is merely a neotenous incubator of disease on twitchy legs. Breyer got sleep orders from them before launch. Linden knew that the luxury of being bagged and strapped into a Velcro cradleboard in zero-G would wear off and that they’d want to be awake to read a few novels they’d brought along. Breyer accepted 500 hours of sleep for Linden, tapping the pad the night before departure without a second thought. That was, after all, Breyer’s only job on the ship.

Maria Del Campo would have taken all of Breyer’s remaining hours if she could, but she knew it would not be fair to their junior officer, Chen. With 3,840 hours left on the clock, Dr. Del Campo’s finger hovered above the slider. “Taking half would be the kindest thing to do,” she said, almost under her breath.

“Half is fine,” Chen said. She was a bright young thing, fresh out of the academy with her black-blue hair tightly buzz-cut and her eyebrow ring so recently removed that Del Campo could see the slightly obscene pinkness of the tiny hole it left behind. She tried not to stare at that.

“But if you take half and I take half, does Breyer ever get to be awake?”

Del Campo frowned. “I guess not, but why does that matter? Breyer’s not a scientist. Not a pilot, not a stellar cartographer. She has no purpose aboard this ship except to sleep. She can’t even read most of the instruments. If we want to keep her bunked up every hour of the trip, we can. That’s the deal she accepted. That’s what all her testing was for, right?”

Del Campo was surprised at herself for making that last a question instead of a statement. I don’t need some lieutenant JG to agree with me. And certainly not about this. Am I that attracted to her?

Chen ran a muscular hand and forearm over her shorn skull, turning her head to the side and setting the cords in her neck out jauntily. Dr. Del Campo had time to think sternocleidomastoid for a split second before there wasn’t enough blood in her brain to run a squirt gun, let alone a medical degree. Then she couldn’t even properly think the word shit, but it was in her soul just the same.

“I guess so, sir. It . . . it just seems awful that someone might go on this whole road trip with us and never really see anything. Does she ever get to see Mars? Does she get to see anything?”

Del Campo shrugged off both the attraction and the question. “She gets to say she’s a member of a Mars mission crew. Full medical testing and physical conditioning. There’s a TENS unit on every major muscle group so she doesn’t get soft. She’s well paid and she’s fine. People used to work down in coal mines, you know.”

Del Campo took 2,840 of the remaining hours, thinking of how glorious it would be to stay awake day after day, never having to worry that she’d miss a crew injury or illness, catching every single phenomenon or message from Earth. She’d get to spend time watching the archival TV she had brought with her. She thought she’d start with Grey’s Anatomy 2040, the doomed reboot that had shot for four seasons on Luna until their hab blew out, killing the entire cast and crew. Knowing that the end was coming gave their youth and beauty a haunted quality; a sense that nothing gold could stay. Plus, it ended on a cliffhanger.

Chen took the pad and saw the remaining 1,000 hours. She bit her lip a little. As a junior officer, she knew she had to grab every possible opportunity to stand out, take on extra work, impress someone like Maria Del Campo, the lieutenant commander who had just looked at her with the naked hunger usually reserved for a plate of pork belly for a second before thinking better of it. Chen thought she might have to fuck Del Campo at some point on this trip. Not to keep her job, just to keep things smooth. They were going to be in space for over a year. Chen was young and hot enough to believe she’d eventually fuck everyone, just out of boredom. Captain Bhatti was married and fastidious, but Chen still believed it would happen. Maybe just once.

“But not Breyer,” Chen said to herself as she tapped the pad. “Because she’s never going to be up for it.” After a moment’s hesitation, her bony finger came down on the slide at 992 hours.

“Take eight,” Chen murmured. “Do something cool with it.”

Chen was awake all that first night, relishing youth and the immediacy of their road trip to Mars.

She passed by Breyer in her tight swaddle, giving the woman a once-over. Breyer was older, but everyone was older than Chen. She had a little tattoo of forget-me-nots on her right wrist, and her face had the look of a person who had seen too much. Chen wondered what kind of life made someone want to hit snooze for a year. Breyer smiled in her slumber, one side of her mouth quirking up and relaxing. Otherwise, the sleeper was serene.

In the window, Mars grew bigger and redder, a copper penny that had seen the inside of too many pockets. Awake for days at a stretch, Captain Bhatti was relentless on telemetry, checking and rechecking, getting relay from Houston and Luna, not yet receiving from Ares Local.

“But that will happen soon,” he said, looking at his digital calendar, which was also not Earth. On his birthday, he passed out adorably in a red satin sleeping cap that he had brought in his scant personal effects.

While he slept, Del Campo gave him the necessary infusions she had tapped from Breyer’s brain and multiplied artificially in the lab. The designated sleeper process was proprietary, and the International Space Agency had paid dearly for it. A few CEOs and heads of state on Earth used it, a handful of celebrities boasted now and again that they could party for weeks and only gently baste their brains to survive. But it was the most rarefied of privileges. Astronauts were by far the biggest market.

DS required a physician to administer, but it stuck in Del Campo’s craw that she had to put up with Linden doing it for her. They were only a psychiatrist. Del Campo strapped herself in and micromanaged the entire process, never able to trust them.

“Intracerebral injection is very delicate,” Del Campo said for the five thousandth time.

“I’m aware,” Linden said, distracted. “You shouldn’t be talking. Really, you shouldn’t be conscious. But I know how you are. Now hold still.”

“You’re sure you’ve located the left lateral ventricle?” Del Campo’s upper lip was sweating. Behind them, Breyer stirred in her sleep.

Linden glanced over their shoulder, making sure that they hadn’t left any equipment where it would touch the sleeper. She looked fine. Just a momentary island of somnambulance, lost to the sea of sleep. They turned back. “You know that I’m a medical doctor, correct? I have studied some anatomy, my dear colleague. Also, I can see your entire brain, clear as crystal, on the HUD right in front of me. Relax, please.”

“You’re a glorified drug dealer and your one and only surgery rotation was over a decade ago,” Del Campo snarled, masking fear with professional disdain. “Forgive me if I’m not filled with confidence.”

For a second, Linden thought about scratching her neck with the tip of the needle, just a little nip to quiet her down. But they didn’t do it, because no matter what the irascible curly-haired ship’s surgeon said, Linden was a doctor and could do no harm. They remembered back in the fifties when the medical colleges had held a debate about whether they should adapt the oath for life off-world. There might be more reasons to do harm than had been dreamed of in the philosophy of Hippocrates. But in the end, tradition had won out. Linden’s steady hand pushed the needle home and gave Del Campo the dose of sleepjuice that would keep her brain fresh and alert for at least thirty days.

When they were done, Del Campo freed herself and did not thank Linden. Linden walked quietly to Breyer’s softly breathing form, looking her face over. “Thank you,” they said softly, barely audible above the rush and run of her CPAP machine. “Thank you from all of us.”

Rori Breyer dreamed. All designated sleepers dreamed, though the company that trademarked the process swore that the sleep was dreamless, and the DS had no sense of the passage of time. Like all professional sleepers, Breyer knew this to be bullshit. The members of her crew who received injections of her custom-made compatible brainjuice into their cerebrospinal fluid would have no dreams. Because she’d had them all. She had traveled to Mars fifteen times, logging thousands of hours on the black road between the wandering stars and placing her among the most accomplished astronauts of her generation. But she had never looked out the ship’s porthole and seen anything other than the inside of Earth’s atmosphere.

The dreaming was constant, though. The dreaming was the real job. Breyer could have told those folks at Liebestraum GmbH that the dreams she had in the deep reaches that make up the fifty-five million kilometers between Earth and Mars were nothing like the dreams she had at home, had they ever once asked. She did not dream of people she knew, or the familiar smells of the sandwich shop she loved to sit in and compose music. She did not have nightmares about running naked through her high school and she did not relive her worst breakups. When she slept in space, on the Koyash or any of the other ships she had served, she had the same dream of a subvocal signal sent over and over, loop without end. A voice that was far away and close enough that the hair on the back of her neck stood up.

Can you hear us? Are you there? We can feel you in the dream.

Breyer tried to answer, but she knew that her voice would not work for this task. She had to use something else. Something her mind showed her as an old-fashioned smartphone like her grandmother had used. A slick square of black glass, with simple touchscreen inputs and quaint features like a music player and a GPS. Breyer hated movies that used creepy antiques like that to instill fear. But she understood. She needed a different voice to speak back to them. But she could never answer. By the time she woke up on Earth, the voice would be gone.

Captain Bhatti knew that he was going to be restless when Mars was close, but it was still too early to prep for landing, so he planned to take one of his sleep days then. He sent a message to Ares Local, logging his downtime.

Linden did not look at Del Campo’s schedule, because they knew that she checked the logs to see if anyone was looking over her shoulder. The scheduling program should have warned one physician not to sleep while the other did; but the program detected that no other essential crew were awake during those hours and so manufactured no alert. Breyer was not considered essential crew.

Del Campo picked a day when she had cramps to sleep, believing that it helped better than the infusion into her CSF as her mother had believed that only fresh lettuce juice would cure a bubbling gut.

Chen didn’t have clearance to view anyone’s schedule but her own.

So it came to pass that one by one, they locked up into their space cradles and fell asleep at almost the same time. There was an overlap of perhaps two hours when Del Campo was firmly out and Chen was just drifting away, the scent of Del Campo lingering on her unwashed hands and making her smile. But everyone was unconscious when the levels dipped low and Breyer woke up.

Disoriented, Breyer unstrapped herself and removed her CPAP mask, pulled off her monitors, and quivered. She floated in the middle of the med deck. She had received zero-G training, but it had been five years since she’d felt this sensation. The cargo bay was cold and silent as she floated, bumping against the ceiling as she headed for the bridge.

“Hello? Captain Ferguson? Oh wait, no. Captain Bhatti? Dr. Del Campo? Sir? Chen?”

No answer. The sound of her own voice bouncing off the tinny walls made her a little giddy.

The bridge was deserted, all systems on autopilot. Breyer watched the lights flash, listened to the hushed beeps.

In the distance ahead, Mars was ruddy and bellicose. Looking across the reach to another world, she felt fright tear through her followed by vertigo. Breyer curled her body around one of the launch chairs, holding on, willing the nausea to pass. With a few deep breaths, so precious after the prolonged respiratory support pressure required for months of sleep, she felt better. Much better.

She pushed off the chair and propelled herself down the length of the ship, away from the point of its nose and back to the crew quarters. She looked each member of the crew in their sleep-crusted faces. Bhatti was a very handsome man, sun-kissed and shaved bald. Del Campo and Chen both had striking bone structure in their cheeks. She remembered walking to the shuttle for launch, how none of them had spoken to her. She had been silent during the preflight check; nobody needed her to confirm anything. She was asleep before the rest of them even saw the curve of the Earth.

I hear you. I am here. I can feel you in the dream. But I don’t feel you now. What do I do?

No answer came.

Breyer hadn’t checked the clock because this had never happened before. She didn’t know how much time she would have before someone woke up. She was supposed to be in her cradle before that happened; their sleep would descend on her and they’d have to position her body. They wouldn’t get her neck right, she just knew it.

Can you hear us? Are you there? We can feel you in the dream.

The image of her grandmother’s phone.

Breyer turned back toward the bridge, moving slowly. Dreamers will tell you they can never run, their every movement slow and sludgy, held captive by the trigeminal motor neurons that keep us paralyzed while we rest. For Breyer, the two states were reversed. In the dream, her heart raced and her mind wheeled. It was a noted side effect for DS in space, but Liebestraum said there was no long-term damage from it and considered the matter settled. Now, as Breyer moved physically about the ship, she felt slow. That dreamy drag was heavy on her.

There wasn’t an antique phone on the bridge, of course. She had been trained only in sending an emergency beacon, not in any other communications protocols. But there was the comms array. And didn’t it look a little like an old glass mobile? Thinner, perhaps, and flexible. But still.

Her hand hovered over it and the device woke up. The option to send a distress call appeared on the screen.

“No,” she said aloud, her voice metallic with disuse. “I’m not in distress.”

With her hand laid on the cold surface, with no idea what to do, Breyer laid her professional sleeper’s head down.

“Won’t work,” she muttered with a thick tongue. “No way.”

But she was so near sleep, so close to that deep waterway still, that the current took her the moment she touched it.

Can you hear us? Are you there? We can feel you in the dream.

For once, Breyer’s hand was not tied to her side. Her palm flexed and pressed down on the comms. Light, red and brilliant as the dawn, spread out across the bridge, coming through every opening at once.

In the dream. The dream is time. Earth is a clock. Mars is a dream.

When Captain Bhatti awoke, he had no idea what had gone wrong. Del Campo and Linden were screaming at one another. Chen was checking and rechecking the inventory. No escape pods were gone, no space suits. The logs showed conclusively that no hatch had been breached since they left Earth. But Rori Breyer was gone without a trace.

They tried to explain it to ISA, but Bhatti got the feeling that they didn’t believe a word he said. They think I airlocked her, he thought miserably. Why would I do that when I need her so?

Bhatti was the first to fall asleep, dejected and done without his infusion. He started to hear the voice in the dream. Then Del Campo, then Chen.

They argued about it as they ate their reconstituted tomato sauce and grape jelly, each compound just another piece of the calendar on Earth. Del Campo refused to believe they were dreaming the same thing.

“Comms is busted, we’re probably picking up some rogue signal. Or fucking Breyer did something to the array before she . . . ”

But even hard-nosed Del Campo couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“We have to log this,” Bhatti said, his voice hollow. Linden nodded, knowing that they would not log this. There was no way to tell this story without making their much-scrutinized journey even more inexplicable to the ISA.

“Has this ever happened before, sir?” Chen looked even younger than she was, the way that a scared child of ten will cling to her mother as she has not done since she was five years old. “Would they even tell us if it had happened before? It’s never happened to any of you before, right?”

Bhatti shook his head. “Breyer had been my DS on three other missions. She’s impeccable, fluids always within parameters.”

“But she had never been awake before,” Chen said. She knew that she was responsible for this. Looking at Del Campo, she could see that the doctor agreed.

Linden watched their interactions, baffled. They had read about group psychosis on deep-space missions, but all the documented cases came from road trips to Titan, nothing as quick as Mars and back. They logged the mental deterioration of the crew, their processing of the mysterious loss of Breyer. They did not mention the dreams. Nor did any other log.

The Koyash was refused dock at Ares Local. A drone resupplied them, but the crew did not go ashore, and they had no contact with the people of the station. Bhatti dented the wall of his quarters when the order came through.

Linden was the last to hear the voice. Linden had taken the smallest number of hours to conceal a problem with sleepwalking. They had read the journal articles about carry-over of sleep disorders to designated sleepers, and they were worried that Breyer would pick it up from them, bringing chaos to the ship. Linden strapped themselves in tight to their cradleboard, but they knew they would eventually get loose. All their life, nothing had held them back from sleepwalking. They dared not ask someone else to strap them in.

One night, on the long ride home with a court-martial awaiting them all, Linden got loose. They bashed their way to the bridge, just as free of intention and as dangerous as a bear in a campground. Their hand touched where Breyer’s hand had been.

I hear you. I feel you in the dream. I’ve been trying to reach you, but I couldn’t get free.

We’ve been waiting. Nights are so long in the dream. So much longer than on Earth.

The Koyash piloted itself all the way back home and executed its landing maneuvers flawlessly. ISA expected to find her crew unconscious or engaged in some form of protest about their coming disciplinary actions.

At 18:31 hours, on the clock that is Earth, the ghost ship swung open its doors. It waited for the very bravest to step inside.

Jessica Reisman’s stories have appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. She’s had two novels published and her first collection of short stories, The Arcana of Maps, came out in 2019. She dropped out of high school, but has a master’s degree, grew up on the East Coast of the USA and was a teenager on the West Coast. She likes rain, animals, and some people. Find out more at storyrain.com.

Aconie’s Bees

Jessica Reisman

A worker of the Megachile pluto tribe—insecta, hymenoptera, leaf-cutter, resin bee—rumbled heavily through the air. Biome morning: light stretched thin as a veil of citreous bio-skin on the stone of Aconie’s cliffside cave. The M. pluto, large as Aconie’s hand, burred and buzzed her wings, speaking of loss and darkness at the heart of things. Aconie held an arm out, and the worker lit on Aconie’s wrist. The bee’s six legs needled a tattoo of unrest. Aconie studied the M. pluto’s dark body, beetle-like horn mandibles, precise amber furring: she was confused by the giant bee’s strange premonitions of ending. It was a tenor of bee-speech she had never heard.

Aconie sat outside her cave. Below lay the lush garden jungle of the biome. It was a blue-tinted green—sages and salvias, rosemary, catmint, hyacinths, lupines, flax and lobelias, dark irises, artichokes and starflower, asters, anemones, agapanthus and ajuga reptans, empress trees like indigo clouds, and blue junipers bordering groves and plantings—and studded with indigo-blue buildings constructed of light-fractured energy panels. The biome tumbled up and down the valley bowl, blue spilling over into the surrounding peaks. Beyond the peaks the edge of atmospheric dome clouded with frost, and beyond that, outlands.

As the M. pluto rumbled over her hand, Aconie watched the progress of five of the biome’s two-legged residents up the rocky path.

“Witch,” said Sestino as they arrived, her nod of respect echoed by the other four.

They called Aconie witch, the human descendants of the biome’s first, accidental colonists. Their ancestors, refugees who broke into the biome after crashing in the outland, had known Aconie for what she was.

The descendants settled in a loose half circle around Aconie, where she sat on a flat-topped rock. They began their report.

“One of the honey-maker tribes let me taste some comb yesterday morning,” said Kina, among the oldest of the descendants, longest apprenticed to Aconie in the art of bee-speaking. “It had a trace of bitterness to it,” Kina said, the wrinkled skin of her face, gathered in minute ochre folds, stretched and crinkled as her brows rose and she frowned.

Sileni, nearly as old as Kina, said, “Last night, as the blue-banded A. cingulata vibrated the pollen from the sage, they hummed of a strange flavor in the growing things, like the taste of death, but different.” He rubbed a hand at his chest, thoughtful. His skin was dark as the M. pluto’s body segments. “I asked them if it was like the flavor of orgasm, in mammals, perhaps—different from that of flora—but the blue-banded only laughed at me.”

Toko, whose skin was pale as the paper cells of a wasp’s nest, was very young, newest to bee-speaking. Toko said, “The Bombini that work in the nut groves and food gardens all talked of the same uncomfortable dreams and strange tastes in the air as the blue cingulata.”

Jode, whose kind eyes and smile lit his face, said, “I heard a solitary euglossini singing among the odantaglossium yesterday afternoon.” He looked off into a private distance, no smile now, “It was a lament for an orchid that no longer grows, whose perfume he won’t know again. I know it was only a flower, but the euglossini was so very sad.”

Sestino, the tall slant-sister at the head of the group when they arrived, said, “I sat with a red osmia queen in the western caves, and she, too, laments. Please, witch, what are we to understand from the bee clades’ unrest?”

And Toko, with the determined clarity of the very young, said, “We have to help them; how do we help them?”

To Aconie, of course, they were all young. She considered Sileni’s words, like the taste of death, but different. What was like death but death? She raised her arm and sent the M. pluto on its way, a heavy thread of humming flight into the morning air.

After reporting, the descendants went back down the cliff, to their lives and the collection of more reports from the bees, all but Sestino, who stayed to assist Aconie with the day’s batch of requests.

Aconie made a hybrid fruit tree seedling, several delicate panes of skin for grafting, and an orchid pseudobulb for Jode’s mournful euglossini pollinator. Projects, for seeds, seedlings, or niche fauna were dictated by Aconie’s interpretations of the bees’ observations of the biome system as a whole, as relayed to her through her bee speakers. Other requests came from the descendants, coordinated through their two healers.

Halfway through the requests, she glitched on a heart valve and had to start over, the delicate structure ruined.

She’d never glitched on anything before.

Reabsorbing the glitched valve, Aconie began again. Palms up, she secreted bio-ink in two small globules, joined the globes into one palm, and spit into it. Her saliva contained nutrients, oxygen, and nano-structures that she rolled into the translucent, viscous ink, forming a lattice of micro-channels, capillary beds, blood vessels and vasculature. As it gained structure, Aconie sculpted the globule, giving it shape. She worked from templates as basic to her as hive construction to the bombini.

When the valve was finished, she set it into the keeping jar Sestino held out.

Aconie rested a moment, taking in the heat and light of the biome’s star to recharge. Secreting more bio-ink, she went back to work on the day’s projects.

When Aconie had finished, Sestino said, “What happened? You,” the slant sister shifted angular shoulders, “had a difficulty.” There was a trace of question in the observation.

“There was a glitch in the patterning.”

“A . . . glitch?”

Reading human faces wasn’t a skill native to Aconie’s design, but she had come to understand the puzzlement now on Sestino’s face well enough. “I missed a step in the forming,” she said. “As if, when constructing a building, the builder left out an essential structural element from the architect’s blueprint.”

This was only of limited help, judging by the expression Sestino now wore. But thoughts moved in her eyes, in the minute wash of expressions across her face.

Sestino packed keeping jars, assorted seeds, and the pseudobulb into a carrier, gave farewell, and set off down the tor.

Aconie stood and stretched, paced and puttered about her simple dwelling, the combination of solar light and activity recharging all her systems. The structures in her skin, that went down into fascia, muscle, vein, and bone, were similar to those in the indigo panels of the buildings below. She drew in energy that her body converted to bio-ink, catalyzers, and nutrients in her saliva and the oils in her hands—as bees converted pollens to honey, propagating flora in their wake. In the biome’s beginning, Aconie had printed and seeded the first plantings, its first bees, ants, birds, reptiles, and small mammals. The biome had never been meant to have buildings, or a name other than Aconie Resource Biome 2316. But the accidental colonists had come, built their blue polis with the remains of their ship’s habitat dome, and called it Diànlán.

When the light shifted to the dark gold of biome afternoon, Aconie settled once more on her flat-topped rock and went into diagnostic mode. Deep shadows moved among the indigo buildings and gardens below. Diagnostic completed, she analyzed the results, falling into a kind of regular meditation, doodling designs that combined elements from this and that entry in her internal speciation library.

Fingers tracing shapes in the air, Aconie formed a hybrid Lepidoptera and Pteropus, calling a flying fox-moth into temporary being, giving it the furred, pointy-muzzled face and body of the Pteropus and the large umber- and slate-inked, root-pale wings of thysania Agrippina, white witch moth. It floated the length of several breaths, a fleeting glimmer, eroding away as the corposant luminescence decayed.

It came to her then, what the bees were sensing.

Sometime before the accidental colonists’ arrival, the drone harvesters had stopped coming to Aconie Resource Biome 2316. The resources for which the biome had originally been seeded—food and medicinal materials—no longer collected. It was not Aconie’s function to question this nonevent. Then the refugee ancestors of the descendants came. In the metric of the biome’s life, their presence had been efficient, their use and tending of groves, gardens, woods. Ensuring the efficient life of the biome was Aconie’s function.

Examining her own diagnostic results and the structure of the thousands of speciation templates within her, she saw. When the collectors stopped harvesting, some signal had been triggered. The telomeres of every living thing in the biome had begun to shorten artificially. Now, these many years later, every living thing of the biome, including Aconie, was ending.

Everything but the descendants, who had not been created from the signal-susceptible materials originating within Aconie.

Sestino came up the trail to the witch’s cave in the night. The familiar path was strange in the thick dark of Diànlán’s turn away from the planetoid’s solar body. Scents of madder and mineral, released by the evening’s rain, energized the air. Small night lizards scurried from her steps.

Rather than speaking with the bees after delivering the witch’s workings, Sestino had spent the afternoon and evening immersed in Diànlán’s fragmentary archival records. The fragged feed made her head feel like a broken energy pane—which accounted for how few of her people accessed the records anymore.

She found the witch—self-maintaining humanoid bio-printer, Sestino corrected herself, mouthing the newly acquired term—seated on her flat rock, eyes closed. She seemed to be asleep.

Did self-maintaining humanoid bio-printers sleep?

Sestino folded her lanky angles to sit on the ground. She munched on the white carrot sticks she’d brought with her and watched the slow changes in the light. As dawn sifted through the valley below, the witch opened her eyes.

She seemed to take a moment to recognize Sestino, and then she said, “Descendant. Sestino.” Something flicked through Aconie’s expression. Sestino waited to hear what it was.

Aconie made many bees in the beginning. Solitary bees, tiny iron-red bees, ether-blue bees; nocturnal bees for the planetoid biome, whose night was long; deep black bees, cuckoo bees, genus Thyreus in shiny blues and teals, bees brown and green as cypress bark and needles, leaf-cutter bees, the large and lumbering M. pluto; Bombus dahlbomii, fluffy and ginger, pollinating the bellflower or copihue; bees with plume-like setae, pollen baskets in hind legs for gathering aromatic compounds; placid bees, angry bees, hardworking bees; the honeybees that formed linguistic networks, hive minds.

Now, the bees started to die.

They fell all across the biome, raining from the air, expiring in their hives and nests, dropping from blossom and vine like fat tears of hardened sap. One evening, as Aconie sat on her rock, the M. pluto worker came to visit her, the same one that often came that season, bringing her lament, seeking solace.

The M. pluto hovered, a heavy burr in the air. Her vibrations reached Aconie, shivered all through her. There’s no hope, the M. pluto said, and then, contradictorily as she lowered to Aconie’s palm, Never give up. Shortly after that, she died, becoming the shell of an M. pluto, a specimen.

Aconie sent Sestino and the others to take samples from each and every human in the biome.

“The witch has a plan,” Sestino and the other bee speakers told the descendants as they crossed and spiraled the biome, walking every path and byway and returning up the cliff to Aconie again and again, delivering the template of their people.

The bees littered the ground like fallen leaf and blossom. The rest of the biome slowly followed; the oldest trees and briefest-lived flora went first, withering from the inside out.

One evening five biome days later, Sestino, Kina, Sileni, Toko, and Jode trudged up to the witch’s cave with the last of their collection efforts.

The human inhabitants of Diànlán numbered 1,981; Sestino was footsore and weary. Yet now she watched, never tiring of the sight of flakes of skin, blood from vials, and threads of hair seeming to erode into the air just above Aconie’s cupped palms, sink into them, and disappear into her.

When the witch was done, she closed her eyes. Light in complex, fast moving nets washed up through her brown skin, back in, surfacing and receding.

Sestino looked out over Diànlán. The deep blue had withered to a bruised beige or burnt brown in strands and veins all through the valley. Over the days of collecting, walking the biome, she’d seen groves of withered trees, devastated crop gardens, dead animals, insects in drifts, their home dying around them. Her fellow bee speakers, Kina, Sileni, and Jode, wore fear and grief like heavy robes. Only Toko, in youth, still had some lightness in their step.

As she had absorbed the shell of the M. pluto, so Aconie did with each of the samples, drops of blood, single hairs, cells of skin—biomatter clean of the kill switch in her own patterns.

Adjusting templates and lining up gene sequences within, she fed the scintilla of life into each one, synaptic flash breathed into each lattice as she rolled it between her fingers, forming the pattern within it. Plantae, fungi, animalia, but also bacteria, archaea, protozoa, chromista. Seedlings, bulbs, and root balls, insects, worms, and spiders, bird, mouse, frog, and on and on through the night and into the morning. The speakers watched and slept by turns around her, though Sestino remained awake, watching the night through. As morning leavened the dark, Aconie began, finally, to remake the bees.

Nocturnal bees for the planetoid biome, whose night was long; solitary bees, tiny iron-red bees, ether-blue bees, deep black bees, cuckoo bees. Genus Thyreus in shiny blues and teals, bees brown and green as cypress bark and needles, leaf-cutter bees. Bombus dahlbomii, fluffy and ginger. Bees with plume-like setae, with pollen baskets in their hind legs for gathering aromatic compounds. Honeybees, hivemakers, linguistic networks ready to evanesce within them. The large and lumbering, her beloved, M. pluto.

It was the last of her, in the ninth Megachile pluto’s large body. Her memories, her knowledge, printed into the M. Pluto. Megachile pluto tribe—insecta, hymenoptera, leaf-cutter, resin bee, Aconie Resource Biome 2316 self-maintaining humanoid bio-printer.

“Witch? Aconie?” But the witch, like an abandoned wasps’ nest, was empty. Sestino’s eyes stung, her nose and throat thickening as tears spilled.

The last bee that had lifted from the witch’s palm, a Megachile pluto, large as Sestino’s hand, burred and buzzed her wings. Sestino held an arm out, and the worker lit on her wrist. The bee’s six legs needled a tattoo of joy. Sestino studied the M. pluto’s dark body, beetle-like horn mandibles, precise amber furring.

I am here, the bee said.

Permissions

“The Historiography of Loss” by Julianna Baggott. © 2022 by Julianna Baggott. Originally published in Lightspeed, March 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café” by M. Bennardo. © 2022 by M. Bennardo. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, November/December 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Plastic People” by Tobias S. Buckell. © 2022 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally published in Lightspeed, May 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu” by Grace Chan. © 2022 by Grace Chan. Originally published in Lightspeed, May 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Past Life Reconstruction Service” by Zen Cho. © 2022 by Zen Cho. Originally published in Someone in Time, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Solidity” by Greg Egan. © 2022 by Greg Egan. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“In the Dream” by Meg Elison. © 2022 by Meg Elison. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“When the Tide Rises” by Sarah Gailey. © 2022 by Sarah Gailey. Originally published in Tomorrow’s Parties, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Bishop’s Opening” by R.S.A. Garcia. © 2022 by R.S.A. Garcia. Originally published in Clarkesworld, January 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“If We Make It Through This Alive” by A.T. Greenblatt. © 2022 by A.T. Greenblatt. Originally published in Slate Future Tense Fiction, January 29, 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“By Those Hands” by Congyun “Mu Ming” Gu, translated by Judith Huang. © 2022 by Congyun “Mu Ming” Gu translated by Judith Huang. Originally published in English in New Voices in Chinese SF, edited by Neil Clarke, Xia Jia, and Regina Kanyu Wang. Originally published in Chinese in 2018 China’s Best Science Fiction Works, anthology, 2019. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Give Me English” by Ai Jiang. © 2022 by Ai Jiang. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Optimist Cleaver’s Last Transmission” by J.C. Hsyu. © 2022 by J.C. Hsyu. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Ship Cat of the Suzaku Maru” by S.L. Huang. © 2022 by S.L. Huang, LLC. Originally published in Bridge to Elsewhere, edited by Alana Joli Abbott and Julia Rios. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist” by Isabel J. Kim. © 2022 by Isabel J. Kim. Originally published in Clarkesworld, July 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Dragon Project” by Naomi Kritzer. © 2022 by Naomi Kritzer. Originally published in Clarkesworld, March 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man” by Rich Larson. © 2022 by Rich Larson. Originally published in Tor.com, September 21, 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Nonstandard Candles” by Yoon Ha Lee. © 2022 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in Sunday Morning Transport, March 6, 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“All That Burns Unseen” by Premee Mohamed. © 2022 by Premee Mohamed. Originally published in Slate Future Tense Fiction, July 30, 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Mender of Sparrows” by Ray Nayler. © 2022 by Ray Nayler. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“A Hole in the Light” by Annalee Newitz. © 2022 by Annalee Newitz. Originally published in Sunday Morning Transport, October 2, 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Letters to My Mother” by Chinelo Onwualu. © 2022 by Chinelo Onwualu. Originally published in Meteotopia: Futures of Climate (In)Justice, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Ana Rüsche, and Francesco Verso. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Falling Off the Edge of the World” by Suzanne Palmer. © 2022 by Suzanne Palmer. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, November/December 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Aconie’s Bees” by Jessica Reisman. © 2022 by Jessica Reisman. Originally published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, May/June 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Things to Do in Deimos When You’re Dead” by Alastair Reynolds. © 2022 by Alastair Reynolds. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Two Spacesuits” by Leonard Richardson. © 2022 by Leonard Richardson. Originally published in Clarkesworld, April 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“A Dream of Electric Mothers” by Wole Talabi. © 2022 by Wole Talabi. Originally published in Africa Risen, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Down and Out in Exile Park” by Tade Thompson. © 2022 by Tade Thompson. Originally published in Tomorrow’s Parties, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“We Built This City” by Marie Vibbert. © 2022 by Marie Vibbert. Originally published in Clarkesworld, June 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Inheritance” by Hannah Yang. © 2022 by Hannah Yang. Originally published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, September/October 2022. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language” by Nian Yu translated by Ru-Ping Chen. English translation © 2022 by Tom Doherty Associates. Originally published in English in The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Acknowledgments

The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Lisa Clarke, Sean Wallace, Kate Baker, Steven Silver, Joshua Bilmes, Sheila Williams, Emily Hockaday, Regina Kanyu Wang, Lindsey Hall, Ruoxi Chen, the team at Morristown Medical Center, everyone at Night Shade Books, the JABberwocky Literary Agency team, and all the authors, editors, agents, and publishers whose work makes this anthology possible.

2022 Recommended Reading List

“The Lonely Time Traveler of Kentish Town” by Nadia Afifi, Clarkesworld, November 2022.

“Timebox Altar(ed)” by Janelle Monáe and Sheree Renée Thomas, The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, Janelle Monáe.

“The Sufficient Loss Protocol” by Kemi Ashing-Giwa, Tor.com, November 2, 2022.

“IRL” by Steven Barnes, Africa Risen, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight.

“A Prayer for the Crown-Shy” by Becky Chambers, Tordotcom Publishing.

“As Though I Were A Little Sun” by Grace Chan, Fireside, Spring 2022.

“Out of Ash” by Brenda Cooper, Slate Future Tense Fiction, May 28, 2022.

“Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds” by Indrapramit Das, Tor.com, October 19, 2022.

“Beneath the Surface, a Womb of Ice” by Deborah L. Davitt, Analog, November/December 2022.

“Rat’s Tongue” by Xing Fan Fan, Future Science Fiction, March 2022.

“We’ll Call Home Tomorrow” by C.C. Finlay, Sunday Morning Transport, December 25, 2022.

“Communion” by Jay Werkheiser Frank Wu, Analog, January/February 2022.

“12 Things a Trini Should Know Before Travelling to a Back in Times FeteTM” by R.S.A. Garcia, Strange Horizons, October 10, 2022.

“The Music of a New Path” by A.T. Greenblatt, Bridge to Elsewhere, edited by Alana Joli Abbott and Julia Rios.

“Sweetbaby” by Thomas Ha, Clarkesworld, October 2022.

“Baby, I Love You” by Zhao Haihong, The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang.

“Dead Man, Awake, Sing to the Sun!” by Pan Haitian, Best of World SF II, edited by Lavie Tidhar.

“E.I.” by Kola Heyward-Rotimi, Reckoning, Issue 6.

“Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness” by S.L. Huang, Clarkesworld, December 2022.

“Like Stars Daring to Shine” by Somto Ihezue, Fireside, Summer 2022.

“From Earth to Io, with Love” by Adelehin Ijasan, Fiyah, Winter 2022.

“The City and the Thing Beneath It” by Innocent Chizaram Ilo, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2022.

“What Does the Fox Say” by Xia Jia, The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang.

“The Ploughshare and the Storm” by Gwyneth Jones, New Worlds, edited by Nick Gevers and Peter Crowther.

“Calf Cleaving in the Benthic Black” by Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld, November 2022.

“You, Me, He, You, Her, I” by Isabel J. Kim, Strange Horizons, Fund Drive 2022.

“And Now the Shade” by Rich Larson, imagine 2200, October 4, 2022.

“The Chronologist” by Ian R. MacLeod, Tor.com, February 9, 2022.

“First Aid” by Seanan McGuire, Someone in Time, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

“Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills, Uncanny, November/December 2022.

“The Goruden-Mairu Job” by TR Napper, Night, Rain, and Neon, edited by Michael Cobley.

“The Empty” by Ray Nayler, Asimov’s Science Fiction, November/December 2022.

“A Flaw in the Works” by Julie Nováková, Best of World SF II, edited by Lavie Tidhar.

“The Cottage in Omena” by Charles Andrew Oberndorf, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2022.

“Flecha” by Daniel Jose Older, Reclaim the Stars, edited by Zoraida Córdova.

“Legion” by Malka Older, Tomorrow’s Parties, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

“Sparrows” by Susan Palwick, Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2022.

“Void” by Rajeev Prasad, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2022.

“The Kite of Jinan” by Liang Qingsan, New Voices in Chinese SF, edited by Neil Clarke, Xia Jia, and Regina Kanyu Wang.

“The Woman Who Wanted to Be Trees” by Cat Rambo, Slate Future Tense Fiction, April 30, 2022.

“I Give You the Moon” by Justina Robson, Tomorrow’s Parties, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

“Rocket Girls” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Asimov’s Science Fiction, May/June 2022.

“A Little More Kindness” by Prashanth Srivatsa, Reckoning, Issue 6.

“We, The Enchanted Castle” by Mae Juniper Stokes, Strange Horizons, April 18, 2022.

“The Difference Between Love and Time” by Catherynne M. Valente, Someone in Time, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

“Critical Mass” by Peter Watts, Lightspeed, July 2022.

“Snowflake” by Nick Wolven, Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2022.

About the Editor

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the multi-award-winning editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and over a dozen anthologies. An twelve-time finalist and the 2022/2023 winner of the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form, he is also the four-time winner of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director. In 2019, Clarke received the SFWA Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons.

Also Edited by Neil Clarke

Magazines

Clarkesworld Magazine—clarkesworldmagazine.com

Forever Magazine—forever-magazine.com

Anthologies

Upgraded

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 1

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 2

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 3

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 4

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 5

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 6

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 7

Touchable Unreality

Galactic Empires

More Human Than Human

The Final Frontier

Not One of Us

The Eagle Has Landed

(with Regina Kanyu Wang and Xia Jia)

New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction

(with Sean Wallace)

Clarkesworld: Year Three

Clarkesworld: Year Four

Clarkesworld: Year Five

Clarkesworld: Year Six

Clarkesworld: Year Seven

Clarkesworld: Year Eight

Clarkesworld: Year Nine, Volume 1

Clarkesworld: Year Nine, Volume 2

Clarkesworld: Year Ten, Volume 1

Clarkesworld: Year Ten, Volume 2

Clarkesworld: Year Eleven, Volume 1

Clarkesworld: Year Eleven, Volume 2

Clarkesworld: Year Twelve, Volume 1

Clarkesworld: Year Twelve, Volume 2

Thank You for Reading

This ebook has been brought to you by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

Did you enjoy this JABberwocky ebook? Please consider leaving a review! To see what other ebooks we have available, visit us at http://awfulagent.com/ebooks/.

Help us make our ebooks better!

We’d love to hear from you, whether it's just to say how much you liked it, if you noticed any errors or formatting issues, or if you have any other comments about this title. Send us an email at ebooks@awfulagent.com.

Sincerely,
The JABberwocky Team