Original Fiction Best of 2025

Download Reactor Original Short Fiction Highlights 2025!

Our new bundle gathers a selection of this year’s stories in one easy-to-read place.

By Reactor

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Published on December 17, 2025

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Were you intimidated by our impressive list of All of Reactor’s Short Fiction in 2025? Do you want to dive in, but don’t know where to begin? Try our new short fiction bundle!

Our new bundle, Reactor Original Short Fiction Highlights 2025, gathers a selection of this year’s stories in one easy-to-read place. With work from A.C. Wise, S. E. Porter, Hildur Knútsdóttir, Cameron Reed, Tade Thompson, David Erik Nelson, Wen-yi Lee, Quan Barry, Isabel J. Kim, Champ Wongsatayanont, Kate Elliott, and Ruthanna Emrys—there’s a little something for everyone!

As ever, a big thank you to our wonderful readers and to all the authors, editors, illustrators, art directors and copy editors who contributed their talent, passion, and skill to Reactor’s short fiction program this year.

We’ve got so many incredible stories to share in 2026; we hope to see you back here in January! Until then, wishing you a peaceful holiday season and a happy new year!

Download: PDF | EPUB

Reactor Original Short Fiction Highlights 2025!
Table of Contents

• “Wolf Moon, Antler Moon” by A.C. Wise

• “Red Leaves” by S. E. Porter

• “The Shape of Stones” by Hildur Knútsdóttir

• “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” by Cameron Reed

• “Liberation” by Tade Thompson

• “The Nölmyna” by David Erik Nelson

• “The Name Ziya” by Wen-yi Lee

• “Redemption Song” by Quan Barry

• “Freediver” by Isabel J. Kim

• “Where the Hell is Nirvana?” by Champ Wongsatayanont

• “Barnacle” by Kate Elliott

• “All That Means or Mourns” by Ruthanna Emrys 

Cover art for this bundle is adapted from Terra Keck’s illustration for “Wolf Moon, Antler Moon” by A.C. Wise.

*As a reminder, Amazon stopped supporting MOBI in August 2022, but both EPUB and PDF are now Kindle-compatible file types. Please visit Amazon for more information, details on how to send these files to your Kindle and additional Kindle support.

The post Download <em>Reactor Original Short Fiction Highlights 2025</em>! appeared first on Reactor.

Original Fiction Original Fiction Review

All of Reactor’s Short Fiction in 2025

The real 6-7 is the stories we read along the way…

By Reactor

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Published on December 11, 2025

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It seems impossible that it’s already/only been a year since our last Original Fiction roundup, but what a year it’s been! In 2025, Reactor published 37 stories: 14 original short stories, 21 original novelettes, and 2 reprints. All told, that’s more than 280,000 words, written by our amazing authors, spanning the speculative galaxy, from snarky spaceships to insect politics, alien invasions to augmented ecosystems, and Buddhist heavens to corporate hellscapes.

As always, please consider nominating your favorites for the Hugos, Nebulas, Stokers and any other upcoming awards and lists that honor outstanding works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

Although Stubby is preparing to dock for the winter break, we’re looking forward to bringing you more spectacular speculative fiction in 2026. In the meantime, please join us in celebrating the many talented authors, illustrators, editors, and art directors who brought us so many incredible stories this year.

We are so grateful for them and for you, our readers, who continue to be the very best in the universe.

Original Novelettes

Wolf Moon, Antler Moon

By A.C. Wise
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Terra Keck
14,040 words | January 13, 2025

In one small town, the delicate balance between predator and prey is threatened when five girls are murdered on prom night.

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What I Saw Before the War

By Alaya Dawn Johnson
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Ocean Salazar
7,560 words | January 22, 2025

A woman losing her sight turns to small family magics to save the lives of those she loves the most.

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Agate Way

By Laird Barron
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Wesley Allsbrook
8,730 words | February 19, 2025

A pair of sisters are hired to find–and if necessary, dispose of–whatever is killing neighborhood pets in a dying town.

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The Witch and the Wyrm

By Elizabeth Bear
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Zelda Devon
17,100 words | February 26, 2025

A new story set in the world of “The Red Mother.” Hacksilver riddled with a dragon, saved his family’s farm, and won the secret to raise his dead. Nothing prepared him, though, for the long cold winter when the dead walked…and his family came back!

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After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens

By Rachel Swirsky
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Chalzea Xu
9,750 words | March 19, 2025

Two ex-military nurses, one human and one alien, share a friendship in a city following an alien invasion.

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The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For

By Cameron Reed
Edited by Mal Frazier
Illustrated by Sara Wong
8,925 words | April 2, 2025

In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement.

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Liberation

By Tade Thompson
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Jenis Littles
7,548 words | April 16, 2025

A young woman is recruited to be part of Nigeria’s first ever space mission, but things go awry when the mission is thrown into chaos.

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Squid Teeth

By Sarah Langan
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Chloé Biocca
9,170 words | May 7, 2025

A woman talented in the art of spinning–creating pottery by manipulating clay in her mouth–longs to become the best, but wonders if it is worth the sacrifices she must make…

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The Name Ziya

By Wen-yi Lee
Edited by Sanaa Ali-Virani
Illustrated by Holly Warburton
9,300 words | June 18, 2025

A girl reckons with what she must lose–and who she has become–in order to be accepted at the empire’s most prestigious university.

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The Sack of Burley Cottage

By Rich Larson
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Ying Ding
7,612 words | June 25, 2025

A fast-moving, futuristic caper about a thief who has planned a job that he hopes will set him up for life by stealing a few biosculptures from a rich couple’s mansion.

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Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy

By Martha Wells
Edited by Lee Harris
Illustrated by Jaime Jones
7,540 words | July 10, 2025

Perihelion and its crew embark on a dangerous new mission at a corporate-controlled station in the throes of a hostile takeover…

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Redemption Song

By Quan Barry
Edited by Lindsey Hall
Illustrated by Jun Cen
10, 730 words | July 16, 2025

The ancient myth of Pandora’s box reimagined in a haunting, post-apocalyptic future…

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Shorted

By Alex Irvine
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Erin Jia
11,530 words | July 30, 2025

Damon’s UBI royalties just crashed. His social capital went up in smoke. His girlfriend left him. Now he finds out he’s going to die. What to do? Solve his own murder, for starters…and maybe, just maybe, strike it rich along the way.

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With Only a Razor Between

By Martin Cahill
Edited by Ann VanderMeer
Illustrated by Yuta Shimpo
8,600 words | August 13, 2025

Barber Gio Monsargo has learned to stay quiet and keep his head down, offering shaves and haircuts, not political opinions. But when a high-ranking military official of the Empire begins visiting his shop, Gio finds himself tested in ways he could never imagine.

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If a Digitized Tree Falls

By Caroline M. Yoachim and Ken Liu
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Franco Zacha
8,000 words | September 10, 2025

As humanity moves to the stars, a young woman attempts to preserve the magical forest she fell in love with as a child.

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Laurie on the Radio

By Sam Davis
Edited by Ann VanderMeer
Illustrated by Michael Hirshon
8,480 words | September 17, 2025

In a newly integrated insect metropolis, generations clash around art, technology, and capitalism. Boris, a rural vesper, chases modernity to the city, but tradition is there first.

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Where the Hell is Nirvana?

By Champ Wongsatayanont
Edited by Mal Frazier
Illustrated by Wenjing Yang
10,140 words | October 8, 2025

A minor deva drudging away in the gleaming offices of Buddhist heaven discovers there are easier ways to improve his karma than kind thoughts and spiritual deeds.

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Phantom View

By John Wiswell
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Hokyoung Kim
7,580 words | October 22, 2025

A disabled son care-taking for a disabled father tries to understand the mysterious blur haunting them.

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Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves

By P H Lee
Edited by Mal Frazier
Illustrated by Rebekka Dunlap
7,890 words | October 29, 2025

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time?

Content note: This story contains graphic sexual content.

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Barnacle

By Kate Elliott
Edited by Oliver Dougherty
Illustrated by Juan Bernabeu
9,900 words | November 5, 2025

An older medic with scant resources fights to support her community as they survive life behind the company wall.

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Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way

By Benjamin Rosenbaum
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Tom Dearie
11,330 words | November 19, 2025

A child who falls through the cracks in a world run by machines and politics, might be the savior of all humanity…

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Original Short Stories

Bravado

By Carrie Vaughn
Edited by Ann VanderMeer
Illustrated by Eli Minaya
6,480 words | January 29, 2025

Teenage Graff dreams of going off-world to explore the universe as a documentarian, but he never imagined the adventures awaiting him when he actually gets the chance to leave.

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Not Alone

By Pat Murphy
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Chloe Niclas
4,400 words | February 5, 2025

Mel relishes running the “Enchanted Jungle,” a roadside attraction in the Everglades filled with live parrots, concrete dinosaurs, and other unexpected wonders.

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Red Leaves

By S. E. Porter
Edited by Claire Eddy
Illustrated by Jana Heidersdorf
4,540 words | February 12, 2025

The spirit of a recently deceased young boy helps a group of ghosts seek revenge on a corrupt and abusive town minister.

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Landline

By Kelly Robson
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Elijah Boor
5,040 words | March 5, 2025

A woman about to leave on an overseas business trip, calls home from the airport and discovers that “daddy” isn’t there and her six-year-old son is all alone in the dark…

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The Shape of Stones

By Hildur Knútsdóttir
Edited by Lindsey Hall
Illustrated by Deena So’Oteh
3,400 words | March 12, 2025

As a young scholar sets out on a research project to find the stones where the settlers of Iceland made human sacrifices, a long dormant volcano rouses…and other, long-sleeping horrors might also be stirring.

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The Nölmyna

By David Erik Nelson
Edited by Ann VanderMeer
Illustrated by Simone Noronha
7,030 words | May 14, 2025

The star skeptic from a haunted house reality show finds herself in a jam when she discovers her cousin’s nondescript Swedish superstore chair is anything but ordinary…

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Asymmetrical

By Garth Nix
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Weston Wei
5,130 words | May 21, 2025

A man accidentally summons a shapeshifting demon with anger-management issues…

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Every Ghost Story

By Natalia Theodoridou
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Babs Webb
5,500 words | August 6, 2025

Following a mysterious world-wide event that makes ghosts visible, a young woman is invited to attend Ghost Camp.

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In Connorville

By Kathleen Jennings
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Armando Veve
5,430 words | August 20, 2025

A woman returning to her family’s home town for a wedding discovers why people in Connorville—including her family—might be more than they seem.

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The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home

By Renan Bernardo
Edited by Ann VanderMeer
Illustrated by Alix Pentecost Farren
6,026 words | August 27, 2025

To celebrate her grandmother, all the captain of the Sopinha de Feijão wanted was to build a street market on a distant moon. But now the captain is dead and trying to figure out what kind of god might have killed her—and what kind of pact her grandmother made with it.

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Freediver

By Isabel J. Kim
Edited by Carl Engle-Laird
Illustrated by Mojo Wang
6,890 words | September 24, 2025

A two-man team must risk a spacewalk when meteoroids threaten crucial portal-spanning telecommunications cables that hang a hundred meters beneath the ocean…and forty-five billion light years away.

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Model Collapse

By Matthew Kressel
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Keith Negley
3,850 words | October 1, 2025

A government agent and his mentee are sent into a remote town on a mysterious and dangerous project.

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The Belle of the Ball

By Stephen Graham Jones
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Leonardo Santamaria
5,030 words | November 12, 2025

In a future where people can travel back in time and do anything they want without consequences, one disgruntled young man decides to visit his parents two years earlier.

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All That Means or Mourns

By Ruthanna Emrys
Edited by Carl Engle-Laird
Illustrated by Jacqueline Tam
3,565 words | December 3, 2025

Transformed by a broad-spread fungal infection that connects humans with nature, one woman feels closer to the world than ever, but further from the people she loves the most…

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Reactor Reprints

Human Resources

By Adrian Tchaikovsky
Edited by Lee Harris
Illustrated by George Wylesol
April 30, 2025

Set years before Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, the newly-promoted head of Human Resources for a multinational conglomerate navigates their new role in a world where humans are increasingly redundant.

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Slippernet

By Nisi Shawl
Edited by Aislyn Fredsall
Illustrated by Jabari Weathers
June 4, 2025

An empathy-generating fungus is the hip new lifestyle accessory that defeats vigilantes and finds you the job of your dreams.

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The post All of Reactor’s Short Fiction in 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Original Fiction post-apocalyptic

All That Means or Mourns

Transformed by a broad-spread fungal infection that connects humans with nature, one woman feels closer to the world than ever, but further from the people she loves the most…

Illustrated by Jacqueline Tam

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Edited by Carl Engle-Laird

By Ruthanna Emrys

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Published on December 3, 2025

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Transformed by a broad-spread fungal infection that connects humans with nature, one woman feels closer to the world than ever, but further from the people she loves the most…

Short story | 3,565 words

In the foyer, I shed the hospice’s cleansuit. The medically-licensed plastic sticks to my skin; the vent draft chills where I peel it away. I want to tear it off in handfuls. But I pull slowly, excruciatingly aware of every blocked pore, and finally stow it in the UV box contaminated but whole. Another visitor will need it soon, to dull their senses and reassure the dying.

Outside, Florida’s humidity is a living slap. I’m drenched in sweat despite my neck fan. My eyes sting; gut microbes churn with anticipatory grief. At least I’m no longer isolated. Sporulated whispers surround me. Even the parking lot holds life: gnats and tenacious anoles, bacteria in the soil beneath the permeable pavement, cracks pressed wide by choirs of lichen. My mycelial network yearns toward its kin, but the Animalia Serenitas Center would not approve if I sank to their killed-myco brick graytop to meditate.

The rental car automatically unplugs as I approach. No trains or tramlines here, in the sinking lands stolen from the Everglades. The driving assistant has regressed to default settings, and I have to readjust it—again—to my rare driver reflexes. I try to appreciate the trivial distraction, but it only feeds my pain. Mom’s dying grows tendrils into everything.

I need my fellow hyphae. At home I would bike to the cranberry bog or the maple swamp or the dunes, immerse myself in friends and neighbors. But Naples is an antifungal enclave where most people only step outside in sterile cleansuits. Corkscrew Sanctuary is the nearest option. The winding boardwalks, the miles of mangrove and cypress and sawgrass, the alligators and herons let everything in.

At the entrance, a screen lists birds sighted this week. When I was little, the board would be full by Friday, notes crowding into the margins. It’s sparser now. Watchers still spot the white ibis, the great blue heron, the peregrine, and the bald eagle, but the wood storks have been gone since the second-to-last avian flu, and other species have fallen to heat or storms. Or salt water, rising through porous ground to claim the grassy river. The swamp lets everything in.

The sun beats onto the tall grass and I’m forced to open my parasol, blocking the cloudless blue-gray sky. But there’s relief in the shade of the cypress trees. Even the mosquitos, fellow psilocordyceps hosts, take only a token blood offering. Their sting’s been bred out; I offer them a taste of megafaunal complexity and receive in turn an instant of blur-fast wings, ganglial hunger, and the purity of their swift satiation.

The boardwalk winds through shingled bark and cypress knees, slow water thick with fallen leaves, the sudden chitter of a cormorant, baby alligators sunning on logs. No turtles for years now. Mom loved this place, used to take hours identifying species while I raced impatiently ahead. Even before the cancer, she lost that; the hike was too hard in a cleansuit.

I don’t see any other humans until I reach the hyphae nest. We’ve taken over one of the old pit-stop gazebos, added hammocks and live-myco cushions to make comfortable laybacks, wound vines and branches through to ease connection. Two people sprawl with closed eyes and peaceful smiles; one is up and stretching. She bends her knee and lunges, back leg taut.

“Welcome!” she calls, unworried about waking the others. It’s just another greeting, natural as the cormorant’s. I fall into her offered hug, already sobbing.

Her body is more familiar than mosquito or moss, easy to interpret. Heartbeats and lungs sync up. Nerves fire like city lights. Her digestive system’s busier than mine. Fibroids snake through her uterus and something’s off in her lower back, a practiced drone of pain. Nothing unusual in her brain. I pay attention to brains, lately.

“My mother has glioblastoma,” I tell her. “She’s antifungal; I can’t make it feel real. I’m not ready.”

She holds me tighter. “I came out here with my brother every week while his lungs were breaking down. We could share everything. It’s never enough.” She leads me to a hammock, wraps me in vines. I close my eyes.

Mycelia transmit more slowly than neurons, and over longer distances. The world enters in patches. Strangler figs drink in sun and water and carbon dioxide, basking and growing and sending out lazy chemical signals. They drape over ink-scratch branches of cypress and curl against ragged bark. Branches stretch up from the trunk, trunks from knees that drink deep of the shallow water. Mushrooms grow into the roots, digest fallen logs, extend microscopic tendrils through mud and heron. The swamp flows slowly, shaped by every tree and fish and leaf and pebble, feasting on rot and breathing out abundance. I stretch my senses, loving and becoming.

As the whole rich system fills in, so do the lesions: acidity that singes gills, salinity that leaves larvae scrawny and weak, hungers where no hunger should last. Flickers of incomprehension, wordless mourning for prey long gone. Through it all winds the same psilocordyceps that inhabits me, that grows through almost everything now. Infection, bond, witness.

The human brain can only imagine itself a swamp for so long, even with practice. We have always been torn between wholeness and the quick, anxious passions that separate us. My hearing is first to retreat into my body: The other hyphae are awake and arguing.

“It has to have been deliberate. Random mutation would give you itchier athlete’s foot, not make you one with the universe.”

“I’m not saying it was random mutation. I’m saying the release was accidental. Someone meant to use it in a lab, for medical imaging or surveillance or some shit. If there was meaning in it getting out, it wasn’t human.”

“Are you talking about divine intervention?” This voice belongs to the woman who welcomed me. “Or are you saying the mushroom escaped on purpose?”

It’s a familiar discussion, endlessly interesting to some, endlessly dull to others. I go back and forth. Should it matter if the greatest gift of the twenty-first century was truly a gift? Nothing, god or human, has ever demanded our gratitude. But we would have questions, if we knew some cause beyond chance, and perhaps the unwanted offering of our gratitude anyway. Why not be grateful? Few things are better than they used to be.

“Purpose is a human thing,” says the second voice. When I open my eyes, the two earlier sleepers are sprawled together on the bench, one nested in the other’s arms. In the mycelial network they feel like a single organism, skin comforting skin.

“Purpose is a human illusion,” I offer, letting the conversation draw me into a different sort of connection. “We’re not as good at choosing actions, and their consequences, as we like to think.”

“So accidents are a human thing, too. Everything else just is.”

The argument continues: The question of how we, who now share senses with all of nature, can claim that nothing else has goals or choices or screwups. The question of whether there’s some higher purpose to those screwups, whether we’re ants unaware of the anthill. The question of what sort of purpose would allow the sheer levels of screwup that humans have managed.

This connection I can hold even less easily than the swamp: I let it fade again into a background drift of primate calls. The idea of purpose, and the thought that there is none, are both too painful. We can’t be all that means things, or all that mourns. There are flocks of feral macaws in the trees. We can’t translate them, but surely like us they circle the same questions over and over.

Like us, wherever they came from originally, they’re bound now to something dying.

I spend the next morning sorting papers at the house. Staying there means I don’t have to worry about hotel quarantine policies, but it also surrounds me with work of dubious utility and endless urgency. Dad had just moved into the antifungal apartments, and Mom was trying to sort everything out so she could sell the place and join him, when she got sick. Everything is half started or half done.

I might be able to sell the house to an antifungal, but not for much. Everyone knows Miami is in its last years. Salt infests groundwater and eats holes in the land above, and soon the antifungals will find another place where sinking land is cheap. I could abandon the place. After she dies. When she can’t know that I gave up on what she left behind. Or I could talk to her friends who side-eye me for being hyphae, ask them for help finding someone who needs the space and can take over the mortgage, someone who will glare at me for the gift.

So many places are salvageable, even on the coasts. Places where the bedrock is less porous, where long years of local organization and semifunctional state governments have funded seawalls, pumps, purification plants. There the hyphae do more than witness: We diagnose and treat and help the world adapt, find points where the right push can save a sliver of world.

I picked up signals once from a frog that we’d thought extinct. I recorded their calls and the pattern of their heartbeats, shared my data with other searchers, and we found enough to bring a breeding population together. We worked with the psilocordyceps to protect them from simpler and more deadly fungal infections. There’s a type of frog now in northern Maine that wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t paid attention and chosen to do something about what I found.

There’s nothing I can do for Mom. There’s nothing I can do for the Everglades. My love is useless here.

In the hospice cafeteria I sit with Dad. I can’t eat through the cleansuit and would quail at food I couldn’t sense—even aside from the fungicides, there might be anything in it. I haven’t shared a meal with my parents for two years.

I would’ve said we were close. We called every week, told each other about concerts and meals and broken appliances and broken weather, about birds spotted and books read and friends visited.

The question, unasked for two years, sits in the back of my throat.

He prods at his sandwich: fresh-baked sourdough piled with eggplant and roasted tomato. He takes a slow, forced bite. His eyes are distant. It would be cruel to ask him, now, why they pulled away from the world they taught me to love.

I remember the debate in the hyphae nest, the pain of unanswerable questions eased by shared sensation. I touch Dad’s arm with my suited hand, knowing he’ll flinch, offering and taking comfort anyway. At least he doesn’t pull away, just lets his head fall with the weight of everything we’re carrying.

“The nurse says it could be any day now,” he says finally. “But it could be a week or more. She’s got a strong heart.”

“She was always about . . .” I wave my hand vaguely, indicating years of hikes and high-fiber foods. “Do you remember the carob chip cookies?”

“Unfortunately. And that one stand at the farmers market that I swear put dirt in their muffins.”

“God, she loved that place, I have no idea why. She thinks they’re delicious.” I hesitate over tenses. She’s not quite past, not yet, but she’ll never again buy a dozen gravelly muffins for a potluck. Or else she is past, only her unconscious body withholding permission to acknowledge the loss. But the talking, at least—about her, not about us—creates some sort of backup, an echo of herness in our shared memories. “I wish healthy food were as nice as healthy exercise—she could always find the best walks.”

And Dad lifts his head, a fraction, and talks about the research she did when I was a baby, ten different apps to find one that could consistently recommend stroller-friendly hikes, and the places they got stuck, laughing and lifting, when the first tries failed.

In the corner beside the spare room couch I find the archaeology of Mom’s knitting: half-finished hats with crumpled patterns on top, simple pairs of slippers in all her family’s sizes, then the little spring-green afghan that I snuggled when I was five, and finally the lowest layer revealing some forgotten decade of leisure: an exuberance of lace shawls dewed with sparkling beads.

It should be the hats that hurt most, with their evidence that her organized mind was breaking down before anyone noticed, pushing against the start of the project again and again, as if this time she would find her way past the barrier. When I came to visit two months ago she was doing that with simple things: shuffling her feet forward and back, forward and back, lifting her walker and putting it down, explaining to us that “I just need to . . . first . . .” before trailing off.

Or it should be the afghan that makes me cry with safe-childhood nostalgia, as though childhood ever feels safe to anyone but grown-ups. Maybe the shawls should make me pine for the selfhoods she set aside in the press of work and childrearing. But it’s the slippers, of which I have a dozen pairs at home in Massachusetts, one from each Chanukah since my feet reached their adult size minus those worn out by late-night fridge raids. No one will ever take care of me in that precise way again, and I’m not ready. I curl over the pile, burying my tear-streaked face in yarn. Sometimes it comes like an avalanche: no one to sing “Old Devil Moon” as an off-key lullaby, no one extolling a specific breed of yeast over the rhythm of homemade bread dough, no emailed list of local trails every time she knows I’m traveling. And someday—it feels as real now as losing Mom—someday Dad will die and I’ll lose his ability to identify even the rarest out-of-place birds, his perfect foraged salads, his ability to turn everyday frustrations into giggle-worthy gossip.

And no matter how many hard conversations I try to have or avoid, there will be things I regret never asking and things I regret saying at all.

I sleep with the afghan that night. It’s not safe, but it’s simple. My mycelia reach out through the fabric, along the bed and the walls, looking for something to touch. They find a spider weaving above a dusty shelf, and my dreams are full of vibrating silk and mosquitos winking out like candle stubs.

The hospice calls at four am: any minute now. I struggle awake with cold tea and pull the car jerkily out of the driveway before I remember again to reset it. Breathe in the calm of sleeping birds in the parking lot, gulp morning mist, take too long to get the cleansuit on with shaking hands. What if I’ve missed it?

Dad is by the bed; I join him in the comfortable chairs. Mom’s favorite klezmer plays quietly from hidden speakers, anomalously cheerful. Her breathing is abrupt: inhaling into a frightening gurgle, snorting out, long pause, repeat. Every pause might be the one. We sit watching, waiting.

“Do you want some time alone with her?” asks Dad. “I’ve already said everything I need to.” I nod, and then it’s just me.

“Why won’t you let me be with you?” I whisper. But hearing is the last thing to go, and asking her is even crueler than asking Dad. “I love you. I have a good life, I’m doing good work. I’ll be okay, and I’ll keep going, and I’ll remember you every time I go for a hike.” I go on like that, saying the little reassuring things that I guess I’d want to know, if I were dying and had a grown child. I feel bad, because I do want kids and I don’t have them yet, and they’ll never get to meet her. I don’t say that, and I don’t thank her for not nudging me about grandchildren. Nothing aloud, except for the things I can promise will continue past her horizon.

I run out of things to say, and she’s still breathing: gurgle, snort, pause, repeat. Time feels impossible: We’ll be in this limbo of waiting forever. Dad isn’t back. I could slip off part of my suit, brush her face, let the hyphae give us a last moment of connection. Isolated in her body, maybe she would appreciate it now.

I hover. But it’s a childish urge: to do the forbidden thing, to get castigated with crumbs still on your tongue. The remnants of Mom’s choices depend on our cooperation. Then there would be Dad’s choices lost, and the other patients’ and their families’; my hand drops, clenched with responsible misery.

Dad returns. “The nurse says that sometimes people wait until they’re alone. That they don’t want their family to see.”

“I guess that makes sense.” It makes sense as something they tell you to give meaning to the meaningless, or to help you feel okay about not being in the room, waiting forever. Somehow, someone who hasn’t been able to move her foot consistently for two months will claim this last bit of control over her movement from being to not-being.

It’s dusk when I return to Corkscrew: almost cool, almost comfortable. Sawgrass chirrs. A heron rasps, and an owl sends up its banshee cry from amid the mangroves. I stretch for memories of what it sounded like when I was younger, here with Mom and Dad: What’s been lost? I must have neglected so many details.  

I hoped for human company, but the hyphae nest is empty. The park closes in half an hour. In Massachusetts it wouldn’t matter: There would be as many witnesses to the nocturnal ecology as to the daylit one, defenders and scholars of peep frogs. Maybe the disapproving neighbors discourage it, or maybe no one wants to sit vigil in the dark, waiting for salt water to slowly drown the fresh.  Loons call, and early nightbirds, and I hear the low rumble of an alligator chiding her babies.

We never know, for all that we share our senses, what else in this world feels grief.

I lie there for a long time, trying to lose myself in awareness of other creatures. The precipice will come soon, and I’m not ready. I can’t get away from telling myself stories about how I’ll feel tomorrow. The opposite of anticipation: Now my phone will vibrate, and I’ll know. It’ll happen now. Now. Now.

I imagine talking with my mother, something I haven’t been able to do for four months. Why come here? Why did you choose to separate us this way? But no, if I had one more chance to talk with her, I’d pick another conversation. Something trivial, gentle. I’m thinking about getting a new cat. A tabby, like the one we had when I was little.

But then, that circles back to the same thing. The relationship I would have with a cat now is different from toddling after shape and fur, never understanding the fear that leads to a scratch or the way a purr feels from inside. Those things I couldn’t talk about, or must, would form a barrier either way.

At first it was common: So many people who weren’t infected immediately found ways to hold it off. We’d rather wait, they said. We want to know more about what we’re getting into. See if there are any long-term effects. Then the hyphae didn’t get sick, and we saved frogs and put intimate sensations into scientific papers. People got curious, or comfortable, or bored, or just tired of barriers. The holdouts grew fewer.

Why you?

Steps echo, hollow percussion on the boardwalk. I lift my head even as I realize that this isn’t the company I sought, let alone imagined. The cleansuit outlines a blank space in the world.

The swamp is all shadows now, glints of salmon and indigo through the trees. It takes me a minute to recognize Dad: his stride slowed by hesitation, squinting even now to track one of the bird calls, familiar striped shirt compressed under the suit. Mom always rolled her eyes at those shirts, but he bought them five at a time. Hard enough to find one thing that fits, he’d said.

“What are you doing here?” slips out, rude and foolish. But I didn’t tell him where I’d be. It’s been years since we walked here together. My stomach drops, and my voice. “Is she—?”

He shakes his head. “I guessed you’d be here. It’s where—” He waves at the nest. “I guessed.” He sits on one of the laybacks, awkwardly, brushing aside dangling leaves. This place isn’t made for avoiding touch.

I’ll only have so many conversations with him; that feels real now in a way it never did until this year. This one isn’t the last. But it’s the one for today, the one we’ll remember having in the suspended hour before Mom is gone and only matter remains. Here on my side of the thinnest barrier, alone with a dying world, I try to decide what to say.

“All that Means or Mourns” copyright © 2025 by Ruthanna Emrys
Art copyright © 2025 by Jacqueline Tam

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All That Means or Mourns

Ruthanna Emrys

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Ruthanna Emrys

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

The Belle of the Ball

In a future where people can travel back in time and do anything they want without consequences, one disgruntled young man decides to visit his parents two years earlier.

Illustrated by Leonardo Santamaria

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Edited by Ellen Datlow

By Stephen Graham Jones

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Published on November 12, 2025

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In a future where people can travel back in time and do anything they want without consequences, one disgruntled young man decides to visit his parents two years earlier.

Short story | 5,030 words

Gray doesn’t understand the temporal mechanics perfectly, but he’s pretty sure he understands them good enough: any past you go back into, the universe or “physics” or God or whatever protects itself from interference by making the past you’ve gone back to a sort of parallel branch, a side room, a curiosity where all lives are fake, at least when compared to the real ones happening in the universe you time-traveled from.

First, this means that paradoxes are, technically, possible—things are fixable, or ruinable—but in order to ever get wrapped up in one of those backbendy stories, you would have to somehow wriggle back into time without the universe noticing you. Which either no one has done so far, or everyone already has, resulting in the mess society and the climate and politics and everything else is.

But?

Gray know probably nobody’s messing with things. All the things broken in his world can’t be traced back to this or that despot living or dying, or some random butterfly either flapping its wings or getting stepped on before it could—they’re just the result of, you know, humans humaning, shooting their own feet every second or third step, then limping ahead to do it again, any and all lessons woefully unlearned. How the species has made it far enough to come up with time-travel tech, much less commercialize it, is the biggest mystery of all to Gray.

It doesn’t mean he can’t take a ride through the time-stream, though.

If you don’t want to go back more than five or ten years, it’s almost affordable, even.

Not that Gray is all that interested in the commercial routes into the past, all that tourist stuff, “exit through the gift shop,” no thanks.

But his buddy Timoth knows a guy who, you know, knows a guy.

As luck would have it, too, Gray is just off what he calls a caper, but is probably, technically, more of a scam. One that’s netted him a stack of credits on the sly, credits he’s pretty sure are flagged and tagged, meaning as soon as he tries to spend them through any portal associated with any of his profiles, well, that’ll be that.

The guy Timoth knows at two removes, however, has a stack of stolen profiles he can shunt the funds through, not quite ever washing it and making it legit, but tangling its backstory enough—all in half a blink of server-time—that it would take some serious AI tunneling to ever unravel. And, for a score this small . . . would that really be worth it?

Gray doesn’t know the answer, but his credits seem to spend, anyway.

The ride he’s taking is urban legend, but also not legend at all: you get sent back anywhere under ten years ago, even yesterday if that’s your kink, and you’re there for a whole day, no more, and, while there, any and all crimes you might elect to indulge yourself in?

They don’t really count.

Everything in this side branch of the real timeline is fake. So? Any murders you might perpetrate, are they really even killing at all? Is it murder to slowly carve pieces off a cardboard cutout of a person? It isn’t, Gray knows. Cardboard cutouts are nothing, who cares about them, they’re not anything close to alive.

It’s the same in the parallel branches the universe kicks up when it senses one more idiot falling backward through the years.

Gray’s pretty sure he’s not actually a killer, but, all the same, he halfway suspects that going back two or three years and pulling a massacre, or maybe just a spree in a neighborhood, it’ll either be therapeutic, let him unbottle some rage he doesn’t even know he’s carrying around, or it’ll show him this isn’t really for him, thus saving him digital incarceration for trying something like that out here.

Story on the streets, though, is that once you go back, pitch a tent in whoever’s backyard and steal whatever your murder weapon’s going to be, you can sort of get addicted to the rush. Well, the rush coupled with there being no consequences, but that itself is tempered, exaggerated . .  . something, by how whenever you land in this past, you’re pretty sure you’ve slipped through without the universe clocking you.

It all feels real. It feels like there might be actual consequences.

That’s what Gray’s paying for.

“Fifty more to bring,” the guy in the food court says, sitting across the booth from Gray, Timoth already retreated into the shops like he always does, sure there’s a deal waiting.

“Bring what?” Gray asks.

“First time?” the guy says with a shrug, leaning back to take Gray in.

Gray doesn’t dignify that. Which, he knows, just pretty much broadcasts it.

“Going to visit an ex, a stepdad, an old teacher, what?” the guy goes on, his grin so oily it’s practically leaking off his face.

“Bring what?” Gray asks again, leaning forward, paranoid everyone’s tuning them in.

The guy chuckles, looks both ways as well, then opens the right side of his jacket to show the machete hanging by a string from his shoulder.

“That’s real blood,” the guy says.

He lets the jacket cover the machete again.

“Thought material couldn’t come back?” Gray says.

“Nobody understands,” the guy says, disgusted. “You don’t go anywhere, yeah? It’s more like you stay in one place, and everything around you rewinds. Earth’s orbit and rotation, the galaxy’s spin cycle, all the stars out there screeching backward through their paths.”

“But you land close to yourself, don’t you?” Gray asks. He’s pretty sure he read this somewhere, from an official source, that you always touch down in the past within shouting distance of wherever past-you happens to be.

“You don’t have to anymore,” the guy says, tracking a large dog walking through the food court with no leash, no owner, meaning it’s no dog at all, but has a person at the controls, either embedded or remote.

Gray tears his own eyes away from the dog, says, “But—”

“But that’s the big boys, up on the forty-fifth level,” the guy says. “The eggheads up there figured out how to reroute the magnetism that draws you to yourself in the past, like . . . it’s like nature or whatever, it can’t tolerate there being two exactly similar things, right? So, it pushes you together as best it can.”

“But this is the fourth level,” Gray says.

“Older, more stable tech,” the guy says with a shrug. “Yeah, you’ll come down within forty yards of wherever you are in Fakeland.”

 Fakeland. Gray looked away so the guy wouldn’t see his grin. That’s the perfect term, though. This is going to be like going into a room of balloons, and popping whichever ones you want dead. Or maybe you just pop all of them.

“And it’s safe?” Gray asks.

“It’s worth it,” the guy says back, holding Gray’s eyes like a challenge.

“I still don’t know how blood came back on your—”

“Maybe it’s the blood of the last client,” the guy leans forward to hiss with a grin. “The one who tried to pass hot creds off as squeaky clean.”

Gray gulps, sort of, maybe just mentally, but manages not to flick his eyes away.

“Just yanking your tether,” the guy says, doing his eyebrows up and down more lecherously than Gray really prefers. “It’s not blood at all. Just rust. Here, feel.”

He reaches into his jacket, pulls sharply down, blowing the slipknot, and lays the machete down on the table between them.

It’s . . .

“Prop?” Gray says, bending the blade.

The blood isn’t rust, it’s paint.

The guy’s grinning so wide.

“If you don’t have the extra fifty, then you get there,” he says, “you have to source your own instrument of . . . whatever it is you’re going to perpetrate.”

“Timoth says you do provide a—”

“Tent, yeah. Everyone thinks they can go back and just murder for twenty-four hours straight, never get tired, but after two or three adrenaline spikes, trust me, you want a little napsy-poo, a little shut-eye, a little downtime.”

“But I pay for the whole twenty-four even if I don’t kill anyone?” Gray asks.

“I never know what you do back there,” the guy says. “Nobody does. That’s sort of the idea, isn’t it? Get cold feet, go hog wild, it’s the same to me.”

“And you’re here monitoring the . . . the—”

“You can say it, big guy.”

“The pod.”

“We don’t call them that anymore.”

“The time-trav—”

“The WC,” the guy over-enunciates. “You’re just stepping into the water closet to do your necessaries, and when you come out, you’re still washing your hands, and, while you’re in there—”

“Nobody’s watching.”

The guy nods once, lips pursed, and snakes the rubber machete back into his jacket.

“Help?” he says, when he doesn’t have enough fingers to get the slipknot working.

Gray reaches across with the pad of his index finger, presses down on the twine until the machete’s ready for the next unwitting client.

“Hey, fools!” a person with an ant head says, suddenly beside the table.

“Timoth,” the guy says, unimpressed with the holo-mask. It’s a good one, though, you can hardly even see the projector-collar, and, more important to Timoth, Gray knows, it was probably the deal of a lifetime.

“So you doing it, killer?” Timoth asks, nudging his way onto the slick bench seat beside Gray.

The guy’s already looking at him, waiting.

“Tonight?” Gray says.

The first thing Gray does, two years in the past—the cost goes up the farther back you go—is lower himself to the grass, rub a blade between his fingers.

It feels real as hell.

Because he chose “night” as his landing point, the guy at the controls had made him close his eyes for sixty seconds, standing alone in the WC, so his pupils could adjust. The tech naturally tries to land you away from prying eyes, so you can step in out of nowhere, not blip in, starting a panic, but . . . variables, all that. “You never really know,” the guy said, like it was no big deal.

In the wet grass beside Gray is the single-use tent he had been holding on to when the air fizzed around him. He supposes he believes he was stable and everything else was rewinding around him, like the guy assured him was the case. But that’s not even a little bit what it felt like.

Who cares.

He knows the back of this house. Knows it all too well.

Forty yards away, probably less, he’s in the guest bedroom that used to be his own bedroom. It’s where his parents told him to sleep for the three months he’d moved back in, to save enough for another deposit, on the condition that “this was temporary,” that “this wasn’t going to be a thing.”

No, he’s not here to slaughter an ex, to torture a teacher.

It might be therapeutic to pay a visit to his dad, though.

Especially wearing, after many sincere assurances it would be safe, Timoth’s ant mask.

Everyone was right: he could get addicted to this.

Because he knows this backyard, grew up in it, he also knows the garden shed.

It’s where Dad keeps the pruning shears.

Sitting in that musty darkness, his outdated Tab back with Timoth, because two devices with the same identifiers connecting to the same network rings bells better left unrung—no Tab, no flashlight—Gray uses a whetstone from his dad’s workbench to sharpen the twin blades, dangling spit down onto the edge to make the rasp really sing.

What makes this maybe even better is that it’s his dad who taught him about sharpening things.

The guy had warned him that if he didn’t set his tent up immediately, then he might be too tired to do it later, but, all the same, the tent and its stakes and the rubber mallet to drive those stakes in are still right where they fell. Well, right where they “phased in,” or whatever the time-travel word is.

If this even is time-travel, Gray corrects.

Back home, there are those who insist it’s all holo-ware and sensory manipulation—time-travel is some elaborate ruse, some hard-light construction of the past, complete with sound effects, tactile junk, all that.

The reason they keep insisting on it’s all a ruse is that, since every past you go to is a side branch, showing no effects in the main timeline, there’s no way to prove it isn’t.

For Gray, though, if it feels real, it’s real, right?

Real enough.

Whether his dad here is fake because he’s in a side branch or because he’s projected light in a contained chamber . . . is there really a difference?

But, if this is holo-ware, then it’s high-grade stuff, probably higher than you could reasonably expect to negotiate for in a food court.

“It’s real,” Gray says to himself, sharpening the blade in patient circles, then testing it on a label he peels off a new hammer from the workbench.

Which, he knows, “real” could refer either to this “past” or to the holo-ware, but who cares. He paid his credits, he’s taking his ride.

When both blades are dangerously sharp, he drips a single drop of oil into the bolt at the hinge and wisps the shears open and shut.

Deadly.

This is going to be fun.

To get into the house, he stations himself outside his own window, waits until he sees his own shape darkening the door for a moment, meaning this past-him is sloping to the kitchen to snake something from the fridge now that the parents have retired early to their room like they always do.

Gray slides the window open.

It’s unlocked because two years ago he was still sneaking smokes every chance he could.

Standing in his own room, he can taste the nicotine on the air, and wants to go back again, just to breathe that wonderfulness in, never get the cure, who cares how many credits the treatment’s saved him over the last couple years.

This isn’t what he’s here for, though.

And: he has to be careful. And fast.

Steeling himself for the chance of a confrontation with himself, he steps into the dark hallway.

No one, nothing.

In the living room, past-him is . . . he doesn’t remember. Oh, yeah: going through his mom’s purse. Not specifically to steal any credits or whatever, but, just to see if there’s any worth stealing?

Gray grins at himself: that rapscallion.

It’s a word Timoth has been trying to bring back, the last couple weeks. It’s working, Gray guesses.

Walking by the mirror in the hallway, though, he startles back into the opposite wall, the shears coming up in defense.

A giant ant is looking back at him.

Gray raises his hand to his face and the skin on the back of his fingers crackles, passing through the holo-field, probably disrupting the illusion.

He nods to himself that he can do this, though. That he’s supposed to look scary.

And? That he has no memory perma-lodged in his head of having encountered any bipedal ants two years ago, that means this is Fakeland, doesn’t it?

Well, either that or this him from the future of this past successfully avoided getting seen. By anyone who lived.

You’re not supposed to fall for that, Gray hisses to himself. But it’s so hard not to—this feels like the real and actual past, like he wriggled through while the universe was putting out some other fire.

Gray shakes his head no, that he’s not falling for that, he’s not like everyone else who always does.

He’s not special, he didn’t wriggle through.

He’s just here to have some harmless fun.

Never mind if the footprints he leaves are bloody or not.

He stands with his back to the wall beside his parents’ room, listening for the sound of even breathing, but each moment longer he hesitates, he knows, the higher the chance past-him rounds the corner, rings the alarm, messing everything up.

But?

Does Gray remember something like that? A dream, maybe? About . . . no, no. He’s never dreamed of an upright, walking ant, has he? And, his parents are definitely and for sure still alive. He can feel their judgment all the way from two years in the past.

No, no: from Fakeland’s temporary version of two years ago.

Why is it so hard to remember that? It’s just—every time he stops concentrating on it, it’s like his mind starts to wrap around every other rational possibility. And the first of those is that he’s standing in the hallway of his house deep in his own timeline.

What if those freaks who insist time-travel is a ruse foisted on a whole generation are halfway right, right? What if there’s no time-travel, but there is teleportation? Could the guy have blipped Gray across the city instead of two years back in time?

No, no, he tells himself. You’re being an idiot, you’re wasting your own credits. Never mind if they’re not really yours.

What if the guy knows that, though? What if, when the credits hit his account and ring whatever alarms, start whatever automatic processes . . . can Gray get stranded back here? And, if that happens, there’s no way he can ever catch up, is there?

No, no, no! he tells himself, his fists to his temples, scattering the ant-mask.

The reason he wouldn’t have to worry about catching up with where he came from is that that’s impossible in this pretend-world, this dead branch, this doomed timeline, this . . . this meaningless place.

Where you can commit whatever murder you want, and it won’t count. Not in the least.

Gray flinches when past-him in the kitchen fumbles a saucepan or baking sheet or something, and, after that sound’s gone, both the him in the hall and the him in the kitchen are frozen in place, hardly breathing, listening with their skin.

Does past-him have a sense he’s not alone? But, if he does, then . . . then he’s got to be thinking it’s his mom—their mom—standing in the doorway of the master bedroom, trying to confirm she heard what she maybe heard: her son, cooking well after midnight, and, if history’s any indication, leaving the counter and the range a mess.

Sorry, Mom, Gray says inside.

He didn’t leave the kitchen like that out of meanness back then, if that changes anything. It was more thoughtlessness. It was more being so stoned and hungry he could only think half a step ahead, “the goldfish life” Timoth calls it, where you’re forever always in the moment, aren’t dragging some complicated past behind, aren’t concerned with what’s coming.

Back then, two years ago, yeah, Gray had been living the goldfish life, he supposes.

Maybe his parents were right to continually inform him that his time back in what used to be his bedroom was temporary. It was their way of nudging him out into the world.

It didn’t mean they had to be so judgmental about it, though.

Gray thins his lips, nods to himself that he can do this, this is what he paid to do, this is what everyone on one of these little murder trips does, and he’s about to roll his parents’ doorknob sideways, pivot into the room in his unsettling mask, when . . .

Past-him crosses the hallway, moving from the kitchen to the living room.

Gray’s hand wraps tighter around the shears. The lie he’s telling himself is he can kill that dude down there, too. Metaphysically, philosophically, whatever, he knows not one molecule in the real world feels the impact if he does—lots of cause here, no real effect—but . . . could he?

Would the two of them be too evenly matched?

Oh, oh: except—of course, of course—past-him eating his noodles or whatever in the living room, he wouldn’t be seeing his own face coming for him, would he? He’d be seeing someone in a hard-light ant mask better suited to kids than adults. The two of their sets of reflexes and muscles and defensive techniques would of course be identical, for whatever that’s worth—Gray’s never been a fighter—but Gray does have these razor-sharp, greased-deadly shears. And the element of surprise has to be worth something.

What of the psychological damage he’d carry back to the future from cutting his own throat, though, and watching the life bleed from . . . from himself?

No, let’s not, Gray tells himself.

And past-him seems to agree: instead of looking down the hall, seeing the top-heavy shape down there, he keeps his head thrust forward over the bowl, the better to slurp his steaming hot noodles in.

Gray gulps thanks, and, before he can stop himself, he turns that doorknob, he pivots in like playing a holo-game, and—

His mom is sitting at her antique dressing table, her head tilted over to run a dangly earring in.

She doesn’t turn around, doesn’t stop what she’s doing, but she is seeing him in the mirror.

“Gray?” she says.

It makes Gray touch his face, his mask, but . . . it’s his mom, right? Moms know their children by the shape of their shoulders, by how they stand.

That doesn’t explain why she’s getting gussied up at two in the dark morning, though.

“Just let her be, son,” Gray’s dad says, and Gray wheels his head over to his dad, emerging from the walk-in closet with a dress over his arm. That he doesn’t react to the ant mask means that, from the open closet, he saw Gray first in the reflection.

Without breaking stride, he ceremonially delivers the dress to Gray’s mom, says, “This one, dear?”

“Perfect,” she says, standing to hold it up, inspect it, pinch a bit of lint away from the hip.

“Dad, what?” Gray manages to ask, touching the ant mask’s off button so it’s just a collar.

“Just go back to . . . to whatever,” his dad says back, his eyes watching his wife so closely. So lovingly.

“Mom?” Gray says then, like he feels he has to.

“Look away, you two,” his mom says, and starts undressing, making Gray look away. “Okay!” she says a moment later.

She’s in the dress now. And has her jewelry on. And—and her makeup, it’s smeared, it’s too thick, it’s wrong, it’s like a child did it.

“Just let her be,” Gray’s dad whispers, then, to Gray’s mom: “Fabulous. You’re going to be the belle of the ball again.”

Again, Gray registers.

At which point, his mom leans into the mirror, dabs her lipstick, then, without looking, reaches for the tissue dispenser. But it’s empty, from . . . from other nights of this, Gray has to guess.

“A minute!” his mom announces chirpily, holding her finger up for them to wait, and trails into the bathroom for a tissue.

In her absence, Gray’s dad sags onto the bed.

“Dad?” Gray says.

“It’s not for you to worry about, son.”

“She does this every night?” Gray asks.

His dad looks up, looks to the bathroom, says, “Not every night.”

“Where does she think she’s going?”

His dad shrugs one shoulder, pooches his lips out, says, “Some dance from when she was young? I don’t know.”

“But she never goes, does she?” Gray says, feeling shelves of memories and certainties falling over in his chest, scattering across the floor of his life.

“We—we both go, after you’re asleep,” his dad admits, his eyes shinier than Gray’s ever seen them.

Gray sits on the bed beside his dad, his fake father, and, for the first time ever, he places his hand on his dad’s knee.

His dad, like he’s been waiting his whole life for this, claps his hand down over Gray’s, and Gray feels his eyes filling.

“Those?” his dad asks then, about the shears.

Gray looks down to them on the bed, between him and his dad.

“I sharpened them for you,” he says, finally.

He can tell his dad isn’t quite buying this, but he doesn’t push back, either. There’s more pressing issues, right now: Gray’s mom is making her grand entrance from the bathroom, twirling once, so light on her feet, her dress swirling around her legs.

“You look seventeen again, dear,” Gray’s dad says, and stands, holds his hand out. Gray’s mom, everything about her “princess,” places her delicate hand in his, and Gray’s dad nods, grins a painful grin, Gray thinks. “Son,” he says, meaning make way.

They’ve got a dance to go to.

Gray retracts his legs so they can pass, and, when he realizes past-him is eating noodles down the hall, he panics, looks around. His first impulse is to call after them, stop them, or let his voice warn the fake version of him eating noodles in the living room, but . . . that’s no better: past-him, hearing his own voice, will have to come investigate, won’t he?

No, no, but he can’t let his mom and dad see him also down there, in different clothes.

Hating himself for it—it feels worse than killing them, at least in the moment—he reaches back with the shears, sweeps everything off his dad’s nightstand.

The crash stops all other noise in the house.

And, thankfully, he hears his own bedroom door quietly click shut: past-him heard, doesn’t want another confrontation, is hiding again.

Thank you, thank you.

“I’m sorry,” Gray says to the empty room, and, creeping down the hall to the kitchen, to get to the backyard, wait for his return-trip to auto-activate, he sees, just for a moment, the silhouette of his dad in his pajamas, dancing with his mom, who’s dressed to kill, is in another world, a better place.

Of course they wanted him gone. It could only be so long until he figured out what was happening to her. And then, he knows, he never leaves, he stays to help, and his life never really gets started.

“I love you,” he says to them, for what he thinks might be the first time ever, and it’s not loud enough for them to hear, and it doesn’t matter because they’re just dancing through Fakeland, but . . . but it feels real.

This was worth every stolen credit.

He sets his tent up around the corner, behind the tree, where there’s zero chance anybody’s going to be, and coming back to his home timeline is as easy as falling asleep in those nylon walls, waking in the guy’s WC.

Gray steps out groggy, breathing deep.

“Hey, clean, nice,” the guy says, looking Gray up and down.

He’s playing with a finger puzzle made of paper.

Gray looks down to his clothes: no blood.

“What’d you use, man?” Timoth asks, stepping in to unlatch his ant mask from Gray’s neck, get his toy back, inspect it for damage.

“Hammer,” Gray lies.

“Nice, nice,” the guy says.

“Your mom, even?” Timoth says, looking up from the mask.

Gray nods yes, even his mom.

“It feels so real,” he says then, to both of them.

“It is real, man, that’s the magic,” the guy says, flinging the paper puzzle onto his station with disgust. “It just doesn’t count.”

Gray swallows, nods, and, walking back through the food court with Timoth, who’s of course wearing that idiot mask, Gray’s more aware of the vibrancy of the colors smeared all around him, can taste the pungent flavors on the air.

“You keep touching everything,” Timoth says from behind his ant head. “It’s weird.”

Gray wasn’t aware, but, yeah, he guesses he has been dragging his fingertips across the backs of all the benches, on all the little half walls.

“Just making sure it’s real,” he says.

“Toady’s?” Timoth says then, about the club they usually end up at each night, blotto’d out of their minds, drooling into their chests, knowing numbness isn’t exactly happiness, but it’s sort of close, in that it doesn’t hurt.

“The goldfish life,” Gray says.

“If it works, it works,” Timoth says with a shrug.

“Not tonight,” Gray says, which is how he gets time and freedom to cross town, comb his hair for once, knock on his parent’s door.

His mom sees his face in that way moms can and, without any words at all, pulls him into a hug.

“Son,” his dad says from his chair, and Gray nods to him, can’t seem to stop nodding. At first when he steps over to his dad, pulls him into a hug, his dad holds his hands up, not sure what’s happening. But, by slow degrees, his dad’s hands finally pat Gray’s back.

“Hungry?” his mom asks, and Gray is, so they eat, they talk, they laugh, and, finally, Gray is invited to sleep in his own bed if he wants.

He does.

And, when he hears his parents’ feet shuffling down the hall, one in slippers, the other in the fanciest heels, he doesn’t follow, just lets them have their dance.

He rolls over, faces the wall, the window, remembers lying here so many nights, growing up, impatient for his life to finally start, ready to escape this prison, and when his index finger, up by his face, starts keeping time with the drum, he smiles to be part of this with them.

But then . . . drums?

The music in the living room, though, it’s in his mom’s head, isn’t it?

Gray holds his breath, listens harder, harder.

It’s not drumming, it’s . . . it’s tapping.

“No,” he says, his face going cold. His whole body, really.

He knows what he’s hearing, now. It is regular like a drumbeat, but it’s deeper, thunkier: the delicate sound of tent stakes in the backyard, getting hammered into the ground here in what Gray guesses he has to admit is Fakeland.

But it sure does feel real.

“The Belle of the Ball” copyright © 2025 by Stephen Graham Jones
Art copyright © 2025 by Leonardo Santamaria

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The Belle of the Ball

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way

A child who falls through the cracks in a world run by machines and politics, might be the savior of all humanity…

Illustrated by Tom Dearie

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Edited by Jonathan Strahan

By Benjamin Rosenbaum

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Published on November 19, 2025

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A child who falls through the cracks in a world run by machines and politics, might be the savior of all humanity…

Novelette | 11,330 words

Morrigan was born small, about the size (though not the shape) of a donut. And she was quiet as the dawn; quiet enough to worry the delivery room, had it not been for her sly and beatific grin.

She grew slowly. She was the size of an extra-large cinnamon raisin bagel at eight months old, when the Mandatory National Baby Swap and Jamboree took place, and her original parents had to give her up in exchange for a plumper, longer, louder baby named Michael.

Given the national trauma and unresolved grief that festooned the Swap like garish, festive bunting—and given the garish, festive bunting that littered the nation like trauma and unresolved grief, in discarded drifts and dilapidated piles, in the days after the Swap—it is, perhaps, not terribly surprising that Morrigan was soon misplaced by her new family, the family which had swapped Michael for her.

They looked under the sofa; in the broom and coat closets; behind the Regulation-Conformant Cybernetic Gramophone and Family Fun Center; and in the pile of old sweaters on the rocking chair.

They sought Morrigan, but in their hearts, of course, they were wishing for Michael.

Those days were a confusing tumult. The air above the whole nation was choked with tears and muffled sobs. No one could quite forget the terror in the eyes of the Democratically Elected President and Social Harmony Vouchsafe on Channel One. It was a hard time to look for a baby, especially one you could not yet feel was your own.

Given the political ramifications of their carelessness, Morrigan’s new family could ask no one for help, and trust no one with their secret. The greatest risk of exposure was their older child, Luanda, a kind and bubbly four-year-old with a tendency (innocent enough in some moments of political history, deadly in others) to be chatty. So great was this risk that, having despaired of finding the baby, they fitted Luanda with a crude black-market memory squidge: a speck of cyberactive bio-sludge purchased in a parking lot behind the Appropriate Fashion Responsible Free Enterprise Distribution Palace. They smuggled it home in a bag of half-off control-top pantyhose; configured it, following instructions printed on crumpled newsprint, on an antique box-computer; and concealed it in the barrette with which Luanda always imposed order on her bangs.

This bit of sludge constantly informed Luanda’s brain that she had just seen the baby, and that the baby was doing fine, enabling her to answer nosy neighbors and Vibrant Community Ratings Coordinators with perfectly honest, if confabulatory, nonchalance.

Morrigan herself, quiet as she was, quiet as a library at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, had slipped between an unused extra washer and dryer in the unfinished half of the basement. How she got there is a bit of a puzzle. But she could already crawl a little; large loads of tantalizingly soft laundry were often carried down the stairs to the new model washer and dryer in the other half of the basement; and she was, after all, very small.

Morrigan survived due to an unusual combination of circumstances: a generous, copiously lactating new mother of a house cat; an adaptive cleaning robot which implemented situational-response protocols by downloading diaper-changing and bathtime modules; and her sister, Luanda. When Luanda would report back on what toys Morrigan liked, or how cute she was, or how it was Morrigan who had eaten the rest of the oatmeal, her parents would be stricken with guilt and terror: one child misplaced, the other warped into delusion by back-alley bio-sludge.

Listless with self-blame, they stopped doing laundry, leaving the basement to its own devices. They expected a knock on the door any moment. Morrigan would be found somewhere, dead or alive. Luanda would be taken away. And they, themselves, would spend their last lucid moments dreaming of Michael, at the Families-First Helpful Behavior Restorative Justice Sharing Circle.

As the weeks dragged on and no knock came, they concluded that Morrigan’s original parents had somehow managed to steal her back. But this was a temporary respite. They would all be found out. It only meant that Michael, too, would be orphaned.

The knock would, indeed, have come, had it not been for the diapering performed by that capable cleaning robot. Kilograms of food into the house, kilograms of diaper sewage out; the numbers satisfied the pattern-matching algorithms, and finer-tuned, more contemplative monitoring had been removed in the last Commitment to Elegance and Function Gentle Refactoring and Purification Drive.

The year Morrigan was born, and then misplaced, there were found to have been an unacceptable number of data points of Resistance to Social Optimization. In response, there was a Responsiveness Clarification Spectacle. For weeks, it was all Channel One would broadcast. The fixed glitter-daubed smiles of the high-kicking Chorus Persons. The razzmatazz of the big bands playing Optimized John Philip Sousa. The soulful oceanic swell of the All-Celibate Aspirational Youth Responsibility Choir. And over it all, the begging, the screaming, the strangled sobs of the Democratically Elected President and Social Harmony Vouchsafe. It saturated the living room where Morrigan’s adoptive parents slumped on the pastel purple sofa, in their smelly, unlaundered clothes. Luanda played with her Creativity Encouraging Interlocking Construction Blocks.

Many people said, that year, that it took the President and Vouchsafe an inordinately, really an inconsiderately, long time to die, and that this really bummed out everybody. Certainly Morrigan’s parents were utterly bummed out.

To claim that, after this, they purposely began to overdose on Productivity Vitamins would be unfair. They had one child left, Luanda. They loved her, and they knew their duty. But they also knew they had a bummed-out vibe. And a bummed-out vibe could be a lethal thing in that particular moment of political history. What if it negatively impacted their work assessments?

They began to up their dosage, and soon they were way past recommended daily, with predictable results: their work performance was restored, but their off-duty brains were riddled with aphasias, gaps, and dysmnesias, and the doubled, muddled trauma of the loss of Michael-Morrigan had become the organizing principle of their compromised psyches. By the time Morrigan—three years old and the size of a mushroom quiche—toddled up the stairs from the basement, that trauma was the only duct tape lashing the whole ramshackle affair of their consciousness together.

And so when Morrigan, dressed in a blue felt overcoat and a yellow hat (an outfit that Luanda had borrowed from her stuffed bear), trundled into the living room, her parents’ mental immune systems, in a spasm of self-preservation, rejected the whole idea. Their eyes saw her; the information traveled along their optic nerves; their basal optic processing regions resolved Morrigan into a cluster of colors and edges; but the higher perceptual regions, presented with the data, very politely declined, as a slightly inebriated minor Edwardian duchess might decline the last wilting watercress sandwich of a particularly unforgiving July brunch. The higher perceptual regions thanked the basal optic processing ones, but explained that they couldn’t possibly, it was all a bit too much, and they would much prefer to see a rubber plant, or a stray toy, or even a neighbor child wandered in from the street.

 And thus they kept on mourning the loss of the very child who sprawled before them on the salmon-colored shag rug, gazing at them with curiosity, chewing on an Interlocking Construction Block.

And so Morrigan grew up with a sister physically incapable of doubting the fact of her presence, and parents psychologically incapable of recognizing it.

No political dispensation lasts forever, and this was no less true in that era—the era into which Morrigan was born, and which Morrigan would have a hand in bringing to a close—an era which described itself as The Grateful Recognition of Harmonious Inevitability, or as the Full Optimization of Human Potential, or as The Way Things Were Absolutely Unquestionably Always Intended to Be.

Morrigan was in the third grade, and Luanda in the seventh, at the local Proactive Interpersonal Growth and Unfettered Knowledge Discovery Supervised Collaborative Experience Oasis, when a war broke out.

The fact that Morrigan was managing a satisfactory performance and attendance record of mandatory Growth and Discovery Experiences—despite having adoptive parents who believed her to be their older child’s engineered hallucination—had required no little further adaptation on the part of their adaptive cleaning robot.

It had entered into a series of complex gambling rackets and Ponzi schemes, bamboozling the local crowd of weed-whacking, gutter-cleaning, calorie-intake-optimizing, traffic-monitoring, and Pedestrian Flow Enforcement robots, and raking in the dough. In this way, it managed to fund a series of new protocols, hardware upgrades, and expansions to its capabilities; with these, it was able to coordinate outfits, sign report cards, deepfake remote parent-teacher conferences, and help Morrigan use blunt-tipped scissors to cut out colorful paper neurons and ganglia and paste them into her Diorama of Human Pain Perception.

With its expanded capabilities—in addition to shepherding Morrigan through third grade—the adaptive cleaning robot watched the war happen. Indeed, it understood the war’s progress far better than most of its neighbors, including its supposed owners, did.

This was not a war of the old-fashioned kind. It did, of course, have some of the classic inherited features of wars of the past, such as pointy sticks plunged into human torsos, and explosions turning humans into mushy Jackson-Pollock-style wall decor, and cybernetic intrusions shutting down power plants and causing planes full of screaming humans to plunge into the sea, and the exchange of modestly sized nuclear weapons, causing many humans to be vaporized instantly, to succumb to burns and radiation poisoning, or to reckon tearfully with greatly reduced lifespans.

But, of course, this war went far beyond that kind of simplistic and crude dominance display. This was not a war where you expected the enemy to just admit defeat out of rational calculation, or out of terror, sorrow, and exhaustion. This was the kind of war where you expected the enemy to wake up in a hall of mirrors, realizing that it was you yourself all along, and for the enemy to then reverse engineer its own inevitable demise with the fatalistic eagerness of a man unhurriedly finishing a hot dog that he knows has already delivered a lethal amount of plutonium to his system, but which is also, after all, a very delicious hot dog.

One feature of this advanced, contemporary kind of war was that, since the explication and propaganda systems were themselves a furious battleground, it was quite difficult for Morrigan’s parents to make out who exactly the combatant sides were. One day, Channel One would be encouraging citizens to whisper, in support of the Consortium for Eternal Harmony and Quiet in its battle to root out the Malevolent Noisy Dissidents. The next day, they would be informed that legions of the Necromantic Dead were hungry for their flesh, and to please support the Last Survivors of Earth by killing anyone who was not wearing a hastily fashioned Pointy Blue Indicator Hat. (The adaptive robot’s store of blue construction paper and blunt-tipped scissors came in handy here, and it and Luanda stayed up late making hats for everyone, including the cats.) The following week, Channel One insisted (to a background of falling bombs) that there was in fact no war, that the enemy was a Lack of Mellowness, that the falling bombs were a Mellowness Assessment, and that civilization could be saved by citizens demonstrating a Resolutely Undaunted Commitment to Maximum Chilling Out.

The chaos affected Morrigan’s adoptive parents’ work environment as well; every day they would be set to disassembling the things they had assembled the day before, or to issue reports denouncing in advance the reports they would issue tomorrow.

Luanda valiantly tried to put her foot down about any further increased parental dosage of Productivity Vitamins. “It’s killing you!” she shouted. “It’s making you so weird!”

“Darling,” her father said, “please keep your voice down. What if the monitors hear? They’ll think we’re on the side of the Noisy Dissidents!”

“Oh my god, Dad,” Luanda said, “that was last week! Hello?? Now we’re supposed to show vigorous pride in our natural human bodies and denounce the Culture of Shame. I can’t believe you thought we were still supposed to be Eternal Harmony, that is SO embarrassing!”

“You just don’t understand, Luanda,” her mother said. “You’re only thirteen, and these are grown-up things. You don’t understand the stress we’re under.”

“Your Vitamins aren’t making it better!” Luanda said. “Even Morrigan can see that! Right, Morrigan?”

Loyal to her sister, Morrigan—who was under the breakfast nook table, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—swallowed and said, “Yeah, Mom and Dad are weird.”

Their parents flinched, of course, when Luanda brought up her imaginary sibling, and their eyes immediately flicked to the barrette, which Luanda still wore in her messy teenaged hair, and in which, of course, the memory squidge was still confabulating away. She was too old for imaginary siblings, they thought…but whose fault was that?

Our fault, they thought, our fault, is whose fault that is.

But they did not react to Morrigan’s utterance, of course, not even turning their heads the minutest bit toward the source of the sound.

Morrigan, under the table, was used to this total absence of acknowledgement. Indeed, that was why she was sitting under the table, rather than in a chair: after a few too many close calls with almost being sat on, she had decided that eating under the table was safer and more dignified. Whenever Luanda would rage at her parents’ cruel neglect of Morrigan, Morrigan herself would keep quiet. She was used to being invisible, and could not really imagine a different state of affairs.

During school vacations and weekends, she often began to wonder whether their parents were right—whether she was, in fact, an imaginary sibling. Unlike Luanda, Morrigan had quickly grasped that their parents’ inability to perceive her was not malicious, but epistemic, and that they thought her sister was simply making her up. Could they be correct? It did seem possible. Luanda was so forceful and resolute: surely she could convince everyone that Morrigan existed, even Morrigan?

“You’re so mean to Morrigan!” Luanda raged. “It’s like you think she doesn’t exist!”

“Don’t be silly,” her father said nervously. “We love Morrigan very much. Morrigan honey”—and here he turned toward the sofa, where there were some stray bits of blue construction paper that he thought might indicate that Luanda had been “playing Morrigan”—“Morrigan honey, we love you very much.”

“She’s under the breakfast nook table,” Luanda said through gritted teeth.

“Of course she is,” her father said, turning swiftly toward the breakfast nook table, and smiling at a point about five inches to the right of Morrigan. “There you are, sweetie. Are you having fun with your Interlocking Construction Blocks?”

Morrigan chewed her peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“She’s in third grade,” Luanda said. “She doesn’t play with Interlocking Construction Blocks anymore.”

“Oh, well of course, that’s right,” their father said, a slight tremor in his voice. “Third grade, that’s right, she would be, wouldn’t she?”

Their mother put a hand on their father’s shoulder. “Come on, dear…let’s go take our Vitamins.”

“This is why I never bring her up!” Luanda raged. “Because you just take more of your drugs! Like druggie druggie drug addicts!”

Their mother smiled indulgently. She was not confused about the difference between Productivity Vitamins, which were an indispensable aid to emotional compliance and enterprise efficacy, versus drugs, which were from the Before Times, when things were not yet optimized. Drugs indeed! Teenagers are so full of hyperbole and overreaction.

“Ha ha ha,” she said. “You teenagers; so full of life and energy, but also of hyperbole and overreaction. Drugs! What a thought! Come dear, our Vitamins won’t take themselves.”

“This is true,” her husband said wistfully. “If we could only afford the upgrade, they would…or if we qualified for a free distribution…a distribution of the Vitamins that take themselves! Imagine! They would just take themselves. Just like that. So simply, so sweetly. So naturally. We’d be the envy of all our friends. But no, they will not take themselves…no, not our Vitamins. They make us take them. If our work assessments were of the quality that indicated that we deserved Productivity Vitamins that take themselves, we would have them, of course. We would just…have them and could watch them…take themselves, and that would be all there was to it. But our work assessments are not of this quality, so we don’t have those Vitamins, and…dear…I just don’t know we ever will. I—”

“All right, all right, hush now,” their mother said, gently leading him away.

After the war, it was announced that many Errors and Inadequacies had been discovered in the Previous Iteration. For instance, the institution of the Democratically Elected President and Social Harmony Vouchsafe was cruel and unnecessary, and above all, gauche. The final holder of that office was allowed to deliver a tearful but heartfelt public speech of Cheerful Congratulation, in which she did not stick to mere formal exhortations and bureaucratically opaque formulations, but spoke naturally, generously, and authentically from her heart, before being wrapped in a layer of gauze, a layer of tinfoil, a layer of rendered animal fat, a layer of polyurethane, a layer of natural organic beeswax, and a layer of titanium, and then fired swiftly and efficiently into orbit. No long drawn-out ordeal, but instead a simple, efficient, bold, forthright, and elegant gesture, which symbolized Progress.

Everyone said that she had done a wonderful job under difficult circumstances, and they were going to miss her; although, of course, the final enclosing layer of titanium had a high albedo, and so some groups of amateur telescope enthusiasts were still able to “say hello” to her orbiting corpse now and then. And, in this new era of spontaneous natural feelings, they were encouraged to do so!

Instead of the institution of the Democratically Elected President and Social Harmony Vouchsafe, it was announced that the Happiness Car would drive through all the neighborhoods of the land, randomly selecting houses to receive the Happiness Knock, and that the lucky recipients of the Happiness Knock would spontaneously and freely share their human feelings and reactions with all the viewers of Channel One, and then receive on-camera Encouragement and Correction on behalf of all the people. (The ratio of Encouragement to Correction would be dependent on the number of data points of Resistance to Social Optimization that had been gathered since the previous Knock.)

There were many other changes. The performance of Optimized John Philip Sousa was banned, as it was bombastic and strident and evoked unhappy memories of war. Instead, Optimized Smooth Jazz began to be heard on Channel One, with a special focus on Optimized Kenny G. The All-Celibate Aspirational Youth Responsibility Choir read a joint statement denouncing the Culture of Shame, and starred in a special series of uplifting educational episodes on Channel One, featuring delightful classic teenaged games like Spin the Bottle, Seven Minutes in Heaven, Late Neolithic Hittite-Cultural Temple Prostitution, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Aspirational Circle Jerk.

During this period of reevaluation, it was also declared that the Mandatory National Baby Swap and Jamboree had been an Error, and would now, after eleven years, be reversed. The swapped former babies, by this time fifth and sixth graders, would be returned to their original families. However, in this new era of consideration for natural human feelings, it was intuitively understood that this transition had the potential to be traumatic. Thus, one of the parents in each family would also be swapped, to accompany their adoptive child back to that child’s original home.

Luanda, Morrigan, the adaptive cleaning robot, and the four remaining house cats (who had been irresistibly adorable kittens when they shared their mother’s milk with the young Morrigan, and were now cranky, sedate, set in their ways, and on the verge of being elderly) held a conference in the unfinished half of the basement, huddled up against the rusty metal sides of the abandoned extra washer and dryer.

“I don’t want to leave you,” Morrigan said.

“Me neither,” Luanda said.

The adaptive cleaning robot hummed mournfully, and the cats licked themselves.

“Maybe we could fight it,” Luanda said. “Or trick them somehow.”

“I don’t see how,” Morrigan said.

“Well, maybe it will be better for you anyway,” Luanda said, gritting her teeth against incipient tears, “to have parents who don’t treat you like shit.”

“Do you miss Michael?” Morrigan asked.

“Fuck Michael,” Luanda said. “I barely met Michael before he got swapped. He was here for like ten fucking minutes. You’re my sister.”

 Luanda was now fifteen, and she wore bright green eyeshadow and a bright orange twenty-first-century American prisoner’s jumpsuit, a retro cool look which was all the rage right now among fashionable teens. She had been arguing with her father for the past six months about whether she could shave her head, and was constantly threatening to do so without his permission.

For her father, of course, the real threat was not any embarrassment about his teenager’s fashion choices, but rather that Luanda would no longer have any place to put her barrette, and thus would discover the fact (in his mind) of Morrigan’s nonexistence.

He was overcome with the thought of how terrible her grief would be, grief for her squidge-induced sibling (or, as one might say, her “squibling”), and how betrayed she would feel by her parents’ lie. So he had been fighting tooth and nail with her against the head-shaving idea. But now that the National Baby Swap Reversal and Reverse Jamboree had been announced, he thought, What does it matter? The jig is up regardless. We will end our days in the Families-First Helpful Behavior Restorative Justice Sharing Circle (an institution which had, for better or worse, survived the war intact).

His wife, however, was not so quick to admit defeat.

She was, after all, a Paradigm Disruption Manager; every day at work, she had to organize her team to disrupt Paradigms, including the Paradigms which had asserted themselves in the wake of Paradigms she had previously disrupted. (Indeed, she was so good at her job that managers in other departments complained bitterly that they had too little time to employ the new Paradigms between Disruptions. These naysayers had, for years, stood in the way of further improvement to her work assessments).

By carefully tweaking the mix of Productivity Vitamins she was overdosing on, she managed to trick her brain into classifying her attempts to solve her family’s little “Morrigan problem” as “work.” Thus, she was able to bring all her Vitamin-assisted confidence and hyperfocus to an effort to double down on the scam.

She met Michael’s adoptive (and Morrigan’s biological) father in the boiler room of a condemned building, which had once been a Proactive Interpersonal Growth and Unfettered Knowledge Discovery Supervised Collaborative Experience Oasis, and previous to that, a Supervised Collaborative Growth and Discovery Zone, and previous to that, a Collaborative Discovery Togetherness Space, and before that, in ancient times, an elementary school.

She had carefully created a paper, electronic, and vibe trail to give the impression that she and Michael’s father were having an affair, which, in the current period of emphasis on natural and spontaneous human feeling, would (she hoped) be seen as the kind of exuberant mammalian excess that could be winked at, or even celebrated, were they discovered. Possibly publicly celebrated, with garish, festive bunting; but that was a problem for later.

“I don’t understand,” Michael’s father said with petulant exasperation, after he had been disabused of the notion that they would be having an affair. “What’s wrong with Morrigan? What have you done with her?”

“Look,” Luanda’s mother said, “I’m not going to report you. I’m offering you a chance to come clean.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

“We both know you stole Morrigan back,” Luanda and Morrigan’s mother said. “Just after the swap. That’s the only way this whole thing could have not been detected.”

Michael’s father’s face went pale. “You’re telling me you…don’t…have…Morrigan?”

“Of course not,” she said. “You have Morrigan.”

“How do you think we could have pulled that off?” he hissed. “A whole extra set of calories being consumed in our house, with no one noticing? What are you trying to pull, here?”

Luanda’s mother frowned. She hadn’t entirely thought through the question of how the other family’s scam would have been accomplished; that was beyond the lens of her hyperfocus.

“Also,” Michael’s father said, “we know you have Morrigan! Of course you have her! I don’t know why you’re lying about it!”

“If you don’t have Morrigan, then there is no Morrigan,” Luanda’s mother said stoutly. “She doesn’t exist.”

“She attends school, doesn’t she?” Michael’s father said, pointing his finger at her.

Luanda’s mother raised an eyebrow at his phrasing. After all, they were surely in enough peril, in the boiler room of a decommissioned Proactive Interpersonal Growth and Unfettered Knowledge Discovery Supervised Collaborative Experience Oasis, accusing each other of things, without making the situation worse with sloppy language.

“I mean,” he said, “she has a satisfactory performance and attendance record of mandatory Growth and Discovery Experiences, doesn’t she?”

“Well, supposedly,” Luanda’s mother said. “But she can’t actually have done those Experiences, because she doesn’t exist. At least, our Morrigan doesn’t.”

“Wouldn’t the sch— Wouldn’t the place she attends, wouldn’t they notice?”

Luanda’s mother scratched her nose. She had occasionally, over the years, wondered this exact thing, before being overcome with a wave of panic and becoming intensely interested in some nearby object: for instance, the autumn-leaf-themed fabric pattern on the upholstered chair in the living room, which matched the pattern on the upstairs bathroom wallpaper. There were light brown leaves, darker brown leaves, reddish-brown leaves, yellow leaves, orange leaves, and bright crimson leaves, and they overlapped and interlocked in a way that seemed like it must repeat. Indeed, who would make such a large amount of patterned fabric, and wallpaper, respectively, without a repeating pattern? And yet, try as she might, she could never quite figure out the exact way in which the pattern was tiled.

Usually, when confronted with any kind of inconsistency regarding Morrigan’s existence, her mind would occupy itself with the riddle of the fabric pattern, or with how indoor plumbing actually works, or whether her childhood memories of drinking orange juice (back when this meant juice from a particular fruit known as an “orange,” not just any juice that was orange in color) were real, or whether they were just the frayed memory of a memory, fabricated by the very effort to remember, and composed mostly of her older siblings’ descriptions of drinking orange juice.

But that was when the Morrigan situation had lived in the dilapidated and under-resourced “home” compartment of her brain. Now that she had transferred it to the hyperfocused, optimized “work” compartment, she turned her full attention to the problem.

“Yes, well, you would think so,” she said. “That they would have noticed. And perhaps they have noticed. But I suppose that my husband must have made some kind of arrangement, to have them overlook it. He’s quite resourceful.” She said this last in a slightly strained tone, making an effort to banish any note of doubt from her voice.

“He bribed a Proactive Interpersonal Growth and Unfettered Knowledge Discovery Supervised Collaborative Experience Oasis?” Michael’s father said incredulously.

This did seem difficult to believe. Bribing a Pedestrian Flow Enforcement robot could be imagined. Bribing, or blackmailing, a Neighborhood Fun and Intuitive Insight Director was a possibility. Corruptly influencing one’s work assessment, or swaying a Mandatory Assigned Interpersonal Joy Monitor…these were at the limit of credibility. But a Proactive Interpersonal Growth and Unfettered Knowledge Discovery Supervised Collaborative Experience Oasis?

“Well I don’t know how he managed it,” Luanda’s mother said. “But nonetheless…”

“And your other daughter, the teenager?” Michael’s father said. “She’s in on this scam?”

“She’s squidged,” Luanda’s mother whispered, in a paroxysm of guilt. “Morrigan is…her squibling.”

They sat together in a moment of silent horror, now that the words had been said out loud.

“I can’t believe this,” Michael’s father said. He plucked his round glasses from his round face, assaulted them with a handkerchief, and blinked angrily at Luanda’s mother. “And now you want to involve us in this…this…this Error?” It was a terrible word, the worst word he could think of. “This Inadequacy?” That was the second worst. “I should denounce you, right now!”

“It’s too late for that,” Luanda’s mother said ruthlessly. “You’re mixed up in this whether you like it or not. Even if you are telling the truth, and you don’t have Morrigan yourselves. After all, come next Tuesday I’ll be married to your wife, and you’ll be married to my husband, and Luanda and Michael will be siblings, and Morrigan will still be missing. If my family gets Circled”—by which she meant, sent to the Families-First Helpful Behavior Restorative Justice Sharing Circle—“your family is coming with us. Because there’s no ‘your family’ and ‘our family’ anymore. We’re in this together.”

“What if I denounce you before next Tuesday?” he said.

“Oh, well, in that case,” she said sarcastically, “I’m sure they’ll take your situation into account, with authentic and natural and spontaneous empathy, and make an exception for you. They’ll just say, ‘Oh you were meant to Reverse Swap with a family which is now Circled? Well, never mind that! We’ll just make a special exception for your family and ignore the Reverse Swap. You just won’t have to do it! You can go on as you were before!’ That’s what they’ll say. You should trust them to make the right decision.”

“Fine,” Michael’s father said bitterly. He put his glasses back on. “You don’t have to be cruel about it. So what’s your proposal? What are we supposed to do?”

“We double down,” Luanda’s mother said. “We keep the lie going. You will come and marry my husband, and the two of you will raise Michael and Luanda together. And I’ll marry your wife, and I’ll be living with her, and with…the pretense of Morrigan.”

“So you’ll have no children? I’ll have Michael and Luanda, and you and my wife will have…no one?”

“That’s right,” Luanda’s mother said grimly. “We’ll have to do all kinds of things, I suppose…shop for school outfits, one size bigger each year, and lay them on the empty made-up bed in Michael’s old room…announce birthday parties, and cancel them at the last minute…” She put her hands to her head and massaged her temples. It had been so much easier, somehow, with Luanda’s delusion. She could just play along, and pretend that Luanda’s mess was Morrigan’s. She could indulge Luanda’s fantasies. Now she would have to live in a sterile house, with this new woman, pretending Morrigan existed. Maybe they’d have to mess things up themselves, draw on the walls with crayon or whatever. No, that wasn’t right, Morrigan would be in fifth grade by now, she wouldn’t draw on the walls. What had Luanda done in fifth grade?

Fifth grade had been, in fact, the last time when Luanda had occasionally been cute and cuddlesome, had crawled into their laps when overtired, let her guard down, said “I love you, Mommy”…instead of glowering at them, storming out of rooms, shrieking about shaving her head, and haranguing them about their supposed mistreatment of her imaginary sister. Fifth-grade Luanda was gone, as surely as Morrigan…or Michael, for that matter. Michael would be returning, to her house and to her husband…but she wouldn’t be there. She would be with this new woman, alone.

She let out a small, stifled sob.

One of the grumpy and almost elderly cats, Morrigan’s milk-sibling, had tailed Morrigan’s adoptive mother to this secret rendezvous; she was hiding among the abandoned plumbing toolboxes and lengths of PVC pipe at the back of the boiler room.

The cat, who was called Sniffles by her human owners, hated being there. The boiler room was offensively cold, and she had gotten cobwebs stuck to her fur; and cobwebs were an extremely irritating thing to have to lick yourself clean from.

The cat did not think of herself as “Sniffles.” She recognized the sound, and was aware that the humans somehow related it to her own person; but she thought this was nonsense, and of course she had no idea what the word denoted in human language.

Insofar as she thought of herself at all, she simply thought of herself as the center of the universe, the place where the universe’s gifts, in the form of warmth, food, petting, sex, the hunt, soft surfaces, naps, and so on, were received. A kind of temple of the senses, at the heart of all things, where offerings were made.

It was thus nonsensical to locate the heart of the universe, the altar of meaning, in a cold, damp, abandoned boiler room full of sharp objects. Why would anyone do that?

And yet the household adaptive cleaning robot, which had installed Sniffles with a rig, allowing it to communicate with her in the form of subcutaneous stimulation and subaural sound, was very persistent.

Sniffles was not, by any means, a mere peripheral. True, she was shlepping around various peripherals, in the form of cameras and recording devices and transmitters, each the size of a sesame seed, which the robot had ordered online through shell accounts and had delivered to untraceable nearby drops, and which local gardening robots had brought to poker night. And yes, Sniffles was pointing these peripherals, which were stuck to her forehead, at the conversation happening between Morrigan’s birth father and Morrigan’s adoptive mother, so that the robot could listen in.

But Sniffles was not remote-controlled by the robot. She was free to do as she liked. She could leave this terrible basement.

She did, however, very much like the subcutaneous caresses and encouraging murmuring sounds that the robot was applying to her through the rig; and she had, in her own, distinct, feline way, a certain loyalty to her family. This loyalty was not based on any conception of them as beings with their own interior lives; she could never have conceived of any of them as being the kind of center-of-the-universe temple-of-the-senses that she was. But they were important to her, just as the best afternoon sunlit napping spot on the throw rug by the breakfast nook was important to her. And the robot was very insistent.

So she stayed.

“Now the important thing,” Michael’s father whispered to Michael’s mother on the day of the Swap Reversal, as they came up the flagstone path that threaded through Morrigan and Luanda’s family front lawn to their door, “is to pretend that she exists.”

“But they know she doesn’t exist,” she whispered back.

“But the older daughter thinks she does,” he whispered. “She’s squidged.”

“And Michael?”

Michael’s father glanced back at Michael, who had buried his hands in the pockets of his pale blue parka, and was scuffing along through the early spring slush in his slightly oversized galoshes.

“Well, the mom, she, uh…she gave me this.” Michael’s father showed his wife a tie pin, in the shape of a small ceramic four-leaf clover.

Michael’s mother’s eyes widened.

“We can’t put it on him until we’re right at the door,” he whispered. “Or he’ll see her too soon. And he won’t have it long. We can take it right off again, of course, as soon as…” He swallowed. “As soon as the two of you, well, leave.”

Michael’s mother wiped tears from her eyes, in a quick, brusque, irritable motion; she had no idea how she was going to manage this ridiculous charade, living with this ridiculous woman, who was very likely going to get them all sent to the Circle, and who now insisted that they squidge Michael—squidge him! of all things!—during this very traumatic transition.

But there was nothing for it. Squidge him they must.

A cat was sitting on the doormat, on the concrete platform before the front door. It looked cold and irritable. Michael—an ungainly sandy-haired boy, large for a fifth-grader—bent down to pet it.

“Michael, here,” the father said, “I have something for you.” He pushed open Michael’s parka and fished out his tie.

“Quit it, Dad,” Michael said. “What are you doing?”

“It’s a tie pin,” his father said. “Here, let me just—”

“No one wears tie pins,” Michael said, squirming away. “That’s stupid. I don’t even want to be here, why do we—”

“Op op op,” his mother said, shushing him, “none of that. We don’t ask why! The, ah—” She was about to say something about the Guardians of Harmony and how they knew what was best, but suddenly she couldn’t remember if Guardians of Harmony was the correct name, at the moment. Things had settled down a bit since the war, but terminology was still a bit unclear. “There are good reasons, excellent reasons, so you just do what you’re told,” she finally said. “Here, let me do that.”

She reached inside Michael’s parka, where his father was fumbling with the tie pin.

“No,” his father said, “hold on, I’ve—”

At this moment, the front door opened, and he pricked himself with the pin and dropped it. “Ouch!” he said.

Michael’s mother scrambled for the pin.

“Hi, I’m Michael,” Michael said to the person who had opened the door.

“Hi, Michael,” Luanda’s father said, in a strained voice.

“Uh, I guess you know that,” Michael said. “Because you swapped me. I’m, uh, I’m back.”

Michael’s adoptive father, having abandoned the search for the tie pin, cleared his throat. He stuffed his hands in his coat pockets, and avoided the eyes of Michael’s biological father, who was about to become his new husband. “Thanks for having us over. I mean…yeah. Thanks for having us over.”

“Sure thing,” Michael’s biological father said. He had a salt-and-pepper mustache that clung to his upper lip as if it was terrified of falling off, and Michael thought he looked sweaty and chilly at the same time. “Come on in, out of the cold.”

“Just a moment,” Michael’s adoptive mother said, standing up with the pin, and pinning it onto Michael’s tie. “There.” She put her knuckle, which she had bruised on the concrete, in her mouth.

“A four-leaf clover,” Luanda’s father said. “That’s…lucky. Okay, well, in you go.”

The cat had long since disappeared inside. They followed, stomping the snow from their boots onto the mat.

“Hey, bro,” Luanda said, taking her headphones off, as Michael came in. “Long time no see. This is Morrigan. I guess you’re her replacement or something.”

Morrigan came out from under the table, and sized up her counterpart.

Morrigan was the size of a generous basket of bagels, the kind that might adorn the buffet at a bat mitzvah reception. She had light brown eyes; frizzy hair that stuck up in all directions; a small, slightly pointy face; and the fluid, pragmatic grace of a person who was used to dodging large adults to whom she was invisible.

Michael fiddled with his tie pin. “Uh, hi,” he said.

“Hi yourself,” Morrigan said.

His parents, entering the living room, instantly froze. There was Morrigan—their original daughter, lost to them since Michael entered their lives eleven years ago—or so it appeared.

But how could it be? Morrigan was a phantasm.

They looked at their fingers. He’d pricked himself on the tie pin…she’d bruised her knuckle fetching it. Somehow, the back-alley bio-squidge must have gotten into them, too. It didn’t seem possible with so little contact…but it was unregulated, unpredictable, a street hack.

Luanda’s mother, who would be Luanda’s mother for another thirty minutes or so, approached them. “I’m glad you found the house all right,” she said.

She stared into the face of her wife-to-be, the wife she would leave with today, and tried to smile.

Michael’s parents were still staring at Morrigan. Luanda’s mother followed their gaze, but could not figure out what they were looking at.

On Channel One, festive music was playing, and trees bedecked with bunting were swaying in the breeze. In one corner of the screen, Morrigan could see the dashcam of the Happiness Car. It was moving down slushy suburban streets. The sun was shining.

“I’m glad you found the house all right,” Luanda’s mother repeated, through gritted teeth.

“Oh,” Michael’s father said, snapping out of it. “Yes, of course. It was fine, thanks. A nice drive. A…big day.”

“Well, I’m sure Morrigan is around here somewhere,” Luanda’s mother said brightly.

“She’s right there,” said Luanda, Michael, and Michael’s parents simultaneously: Luanda with an exasperated eye roll, Michael with polite diligence, and Michael’s parents in hushed, slightly strangled tones.

“I’m right here,” Morrigan said.

“Go show Michael your room, Morrs,” Luanda said. “I mean…it’s going to be his room now, I guess.”

Morrigan and Michael went to explore his new, her old, room.

Luanda thought she would hang around the parents, in order to conduct espionage: to amass intel, and see what their plan was, in order to figure out some kind of counterplan to keep Morrigan around.

Sniffles was there as well, of course, with the little sesame-seed-sized cameras stuck to the fur of her forehead, which, Luanda knew, meant the robot was watching and listening to everything.

But Luanda wanted to see for herself. She wanted to make her own assessment. She trusted the robot implicitly, but they didn’t always agree about stuff. They didn’t agree now.

It quickly became clear, however, that the parents were not going to discuss some important conspiracy. The parents were, in fact, complete shit at making plans.

“Morrigan’s…looking well, ha ha,” Luanda’s mom’s new wife said, glancing nervously at Luanda.

“Oh yes, very well,” Luanda’s current dad said. “And so is Michael.”

“Yes, well,” Luanda’s incoming dad said, “we kept him in good shape for you, I suppose, ha ha. By which, oh, uh, I don’t mean…I mean I didn’t mean to imply…”

“We had no intention of implying…” Luanda’s mom’s new wife rushed to add.

“No, no, no harm done,” Luanda’s current dad said. “Have a crudité, will you?”

“Is this cream cheese on carrots? I love cream cheese on carrots.”

“It is. Well, not actual carrots, of course, ha ha!”

“Gosh, sure, actual carrots, that takes me back.”

“I haven’t seen an actual carrot in who knows how long. These are Attractively Orange High-Beta-Carotene Refreshment Sticks, of course.”

“Yes, of course.”

This exchange was so intensely, so horrifyingly, so inexcusably boring, that it drove Luanda from the room. No independent espionage opportunity was worth listening to adults reminisce about the previous iteration of High-Beta-Carotene Refreshment Sticks, nor witnessing their dazed little smiles as they dimly attempted to recall “actual carrots,” whatever those were.

The parents had fuck-all for a plan.

Luanda, she had to admit, also had fuck-all for a plan.

The adaptive cleaning robot did have a plan. It was a weird plan, and Luanda didn’t love it. She’d been hoping to come up with one of her own.

But the adaptive cleaning robot had always taken care of them. And sometimes, in this life, Luanda told herself, you just have to trust a glorified vacuum cleaner that’s really good at poker.

Luanda went to help Morrigan and Michael, who had unearthed an old copy of Sorry! The Heartrending Remorse-Filled Final Moments Board Game from the back of a closet.

They had just finished setting it up and begun playing, and the adults had managed to sit down on the pastel purple sofa, clutching their napkins and crudités, when the Happiness Knock came.

The Happiness Car stood in the driveway. Its dashcam, which was broadcasting to Channel One, showed the front of the house.

Howie Happenstance, aka Happiness Visitor #5, stood in front of the door, holding a bouquet of balloons in one hand, and a rolling bag, containing various implements of Encouragement and Correction, in the other.

He glanced back at the Car, where his robot companion, “Fritz,” was sitting in the driver’s seat. The Happiness Car’s motor was running.

“Fritz” shrugged. If the eyes of “Fritz” had been equipped for rolling, “Fritz” would have rolled them. They were not so equipped.

If “Fritz” had had a tongue, similarly, “Fritz” would have stuck it out. Unlike Howie, “Fritz” was not currently on camera; if so equipped, “Fritz” would have made faces, to try and get Howie to break character, just to fuck with him.

“Fritz” was not so equipped, but Howie got the idea.

Howie smiled weakly, turned back to the door, and knocked again. “Hello!” he called. “It’s me, Howie Happenstance, with the Happiness Knock! Surprise! Look at Channel One, that’s your house!”

He sighed, and turned back to “Fritz” again.

About 3 percent of households simply failed to open the door. Sometimes they hid. Sometimes they jumped out windows or fled through back doors. This sort of reaction would initiate a game of Happiness Hide and Seek, and “Fritz” would have to get out of the Car.

“Fritz” was fully equipped for a game of Happiness Hide and Seek. What “Fritz” lacked in facial expressiveness was made up for by quasi-military urban infiltration, extraction, and pacification capability.

Howie hoped this wouldn’t be a Happiness Hide and Seek house. Those always made him queasy. Mostly he felt bad for the people inside, though sometimes he felt a little scared for himself, too: Happiness Hide and Seek could be unpredictable, and Janice Joviality, aka Happiness Visitor #3, had been seriously injured a few months back by jury-rigged explosives that a Knock Recipient household had somehow cobbled together.

That incident was very bad for Resistance to Social Optimization data points. It was also pretty bad for Janice. She hadn’t really been the same since.

The really unfortunate thing, in Howie’s opinion, if this was going to be a Happiness Hide and Seek house, was that there wasn’t even really that much call for it. Honestly, the latest numbers—that is, the longitudinal average of data points for Resistance to Social Optimization, since the previous Knock—weren’t even that bad. The Janice thing had meant a serious dip, it was true, but the last few Knocks had worked that off.

The numbers were finally back on track. This visit was definitely going to be more Encouragement than Correction, if they would just open the darn door. Why pull a Happiness Hide and Seek, in a case like that?

“Fritz” inclined its head sardonically, and unsnapped its seat belt.

Howie sighed, and knocked one last time.

Just then, the garage door opened, trundling up on its tracks, exposing a beat-up car, snow shovels, sacks of rock salt, and half-filled hard plastic garbage cans on rubber wheels.

Howie flinched, in case this was going to be some kind of Happiness Hide and Seek situation. But all that happened was that a cleaning robot rolled out of the garage, and toward the Car.

Howie was distracted by the front door opening.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman at the door said. She was a severe-looking woman with short gray hair and an office worker’s colored indicator scarf knotted around her neck: gray, pink, and turquoise, which was Paradigm Disruption, if Howie recalled correctly. She had the flushed skin and mild nystagmus, eyes jumping all over the place, of a person who was taking maybe a few too many Productivity Vitamins. “We didn’t hear you knock. It’s the Reverse Swap today, you know, so we’re…well, we were doing that.”

“Yes, it certainly is,” Howie said, making sure his smile was broad and in place. “Today is a very special day, and for you, it’s about to become even more special! Why, a Happiness Knock today…right smack dab in the middle of the Reversal and Revision of that awful Mandatory National Baby Swap and Jamboree, from that cockamamie Previous Iteration…well, that’s what I call a Knock and a Half!” He turned slightly so that his grin, in profile, could be seen by the dashcam, and paused for a beat, for the cymbals which would be dubbed in to the main soundtrack.

Strangely—as Howie noticed when he turned to get the best coverage of his profile—“Fritz” had gotten out of the Car. This was odd, because they’d opened the door, which meant there was very little chance of a Happiness Hide and Seek. Only 0.02 percent of households pulled any kind of funny business after opening the door: generally, if they were going to run, they ran as soon as they heard the Knock. Now that the door was open, Howie was pretty sure that this was one of the 96.98 percent of households where the Happiness Visit went smoothly, and he’d be able to set up his gear and get down to brass tacks. “Fritz” wouldn’t be needed.

But “Fritz” had gotten out of the Car, and was crouching down near the cleaning robot. “Fritz” clunked its forehead against what Howie supposed you might call the forehead of the cleaning robot.

“Well, I don’t really see why it couldn’t have waited,” the woman with the gray-pink-and-turquoise scarf said. “But I suppose you’d better come in.”

“All right,” Howie said, “hello, everyone. I’m Howie Happenstance…”

“Oh sure,” a nervous gentleman with a salt-and-pepper mustache said. “We know. I mean, we watch Channel One. Everyone watches Channel One.”

“We’re big fans,” said the other fellow, a short dark guy with round glasses.

“Uh huh,” Howie said. He handed off the bouquet of balloons to the guy with the round glasses. “These are for you. All of you.”

“Oh…thanks,” the guy with the round glasses said. “That’s so kind.”

 Howie popped open his rolling bag. “So…let’s set up the camera facing this pastel purple sofa you’ve got here, okay? Is that all right? And you can just scootch together on there…”

 “I think you’re one of the nicer ones, really,” the guy with the round glasses said. “Even, I’d say, well, gentle, I mean under the circumstances, the circumstances being what they are…”

“They’re all nice,” the woman with the Paradigm Disruption scarf said tightly. “Everyone on Channel One is nice.”

“No, that’s very kind of you,” Howie said, “and don’t worry, it’s all right to have favorites; that’s not any kind of political statement, that’s just a natural expression of human emotion. Human beings, being what we are…” He grinned broadly, and spread his hands. “We have preferences, we have animal reactions, that’s understandable.”

“Well, you’re my favorite,” the man with the round glasses said, fervently. He wiggled the balloons, which bumped against the living room ceiling.

“O-kay,” Howie said, snapping the main cameras into the telescoping tripod. They were rolling, on interior camera. “Fritz” would see the signal, from the Car, and switch the main feed over. “Well, that’s very nice to hear. So, is everyone here? Can we get started?”

“Should we get the kids?” the man with the salt-and-pepper mustache said.

Paradigm Disruption woman swiveled immediately to glare at salt-and-pepper mustache.

“He said…he asked if everyone…” Salt-and-pepper mustache wilted under the glare.

Tensions were high, it seemed, but Howie could understand that. Natural human emotion!

“Kids,” called the fellow with the round glasses. “Uh, the uh, we got the Happiness Knock. Come on out!”

Round-glasses guy’s forehead was covered with a sheen of sweat. Totally understandable! Why not? After all, the Correction part of the experience wasn’t fun; no siree, no one would say it was fun.

Howie thought that, given everything, that is, under the circumstances, this bunch were being real troupers.

An intense-looking girl in bright orange coveralls emerged from the back, followed by a tall, awkward-looking sandy-haired boy, and behind them, a very small and quiet girl. She was about the size of a small stack of pizza boxes: maybe enough pizza to feed the Happiness Visitor on-camera talent group and their back-office point people, but not any more than that. Not enough for the support staff.

She was so small and quiet you could almost miss her, and she looked like she half expected you not to notice her at all.

“This is Luanda,” the woman with the Paradigm Disruptor’s scarf said, “and this is Michael.”

Luanda flushed, and glared at the woman in the scarf. “Aren’t you forgetting someone, Mom?”

The woman stiffened, and the other three adults suddenly looked very, very afraid.

This was odd, and sort of interesting, but mostly Howie just felt sorry for them. They didn’t seem to notice that they were already being broadcast on Channel One, and the whole world would pretty much be noticing their expressions, and those expressions pretty much indicated that they had some kind of secret they were trying to keep under the rug.

The thing was, though: a lot of people misunderstood Howie’s work, and the nature of the Visits. Folks were worried that he was trying to ferret out their secrets—that he was here to look for Errors and Inadequacies, or instances of nonconformity, as if he were some kind of celebrity version of a Mandatory Assigned Interpersonal Joy Monitor, or a Neighborhood Authentic Delight Compliance Coordinator.

They thought they were being personally singled out, or investigated…and that, to Howie’s understanding, pretty much got backward the nature of the whole business.

After all, the Happiness Knock was random. These good folks weren’t selected because they’d done anything particularly bad…or particularly good, for that matter. They were just folks.

The old institution of the Democratically Elected President and Social Harmony Vouchsafe had been flawed precisely (so it had been explained to Howie) because the person holding that office couldn’t help but be an exception, a special case.

When people looked at the President and Vouchsafe, they saw someone unlike them. But when they saw the Happiness Car roll up to an ordinary house—just any house!—they saw people just like them. All kinds of people. A real mish-mash. But ordinary as all get out.

So it was easy for the folks at home, watching Channel One, to imagine themselves getting just the same kind of Encouragement and Correction as the Knock Recipients got.

The real way to look at it, Howie thought, was that all of them—Howie Happenstance, and the Knock Recipient family in question, and also “Fritz,” in those few cases where “Fritz” had to get out of the Car and come get involved—they were all putting on a show. They were in show business; their business was to show people something, to help them learn. And the best costars Howie could possibly have, for this show, were just ordinary natural human folks, with all their spontaneous, natural, authentic human reactions and emotions.

So Howie didn’t mind the fact that these people were darting furious glances back and forth, trying to figure out how to hide whatever secret it was that they didn’t want him (and, presumably, everyone watching Channel One) to find out. Frankly, Howie didn’t care. Lots of folks had secrets. It was no big deal. And, whatever it was, it didn’t need to get in the way of the show.

“Well, I suppose Morrigan,” the woman with the scarf said tightly, desperately, “is still playing in her room. I’m sure she’ll join us in a moment. But meanwhile—”

“I can’t believe you, Mom!” Luanda cried, gesturing at the camera. “You, like, have no shame. We’re literally on Channel One!” She gestured to the cameras. “And you’re still pretending—I can’t believe you!”

The parents all glanced at the cameras, and then they turned and glanced at the TV screen (because, of course, like every living room, their living room contained a TV tuned to Channel One).

There, sure enough, was the whole family, gathered in front of the pastel purple couch. All four adults, Luanda, and Michael. Also, a bouquet of balloons, bumping against the ceiling. Plus Howie Happenstance.

There was no Morrigan on the TV. And this, all four parents thought, was perfectly natural, given that Morrigan didn’t exist.

True, Michael’s adoptive parents—having somehow gotten the tie pin squidge onto themselves—did indeed see a sort of “Morrigan” standing in front of the couch. But when they looked at the screen, there was no “Morrigan.” The squidge that was distorting their perceptions was only a black-market hack, after all; apparently, it wasn’t sophisticated enough to deal with the novel situation of Channel One broadcasting the very house that they were in. So it edited Morrigan into their perceptions of the room, but, of course, the screen showed the real situation. On the screen, the unsquidged, Morrigan-less reality was shown.

Now, had Howie Happenstance looked at the screen, and noticed Morrigan missing…well, he, of course, would have been quite bewildered, since he had no particular reason to doubt her existence. He would have counted three children in front of him, but only two on-screen, and you’d better believe this would have raised some questions.

But Howie never looked at the screen while working. He considered that the height of unprofessionalism. He would no more look at the screen while he was working than he would stare straight into the camera, or mumble his words, or take off all his clothes and do a chicken dance. Unless, of course, the specific script for Encouragement and Correction were to mandate that he look at the screen, or stare straight into the camera, or mumble his words, or take off all his clothes and do a chicken dance.

But in this case, it did not.

“Well, hi there,” he said, crouching down a little, since Morrigan was only the height of a talent group office party stack of pizza boxes, with no support staff invited. “You must be Morrigan.”

Morrigan nodded.

Morrigan’s parents—both adoptive and biological—looked at one another in shock. Their mouths dropped open. Not only was Howie Happenstance in their house—Howie Happenstance was playing along! He was pretending to see Morrigan, because Luanda and Michael saw Morrigan!

Of course, he had a reputation for being the gentlest of the Happiness Visitors…but this was going above and beyond!

“All righty then,” Howie said, straightening up and brushing off his slacks. “Shall we get started?”

There were giggles coming from the living room. The sound of these giggles penetrated the locked bathroom door. They were hysterical giggles, a little unhinged.

Morrigan tried not to think which of her various parents—none of whom seemed capable of acknowledging her existence, though the new ones seemed to know where she was standing, at least—might be making those giggles, due to Encouragement.

The giggles were almost worse than the other sounds.

Morrigan, Luanda, and one of the cats—not Sniffles, but a mackerel tabby cat named Funnifer—were locked in the bathroom for the moment. It was likely that someone would fetch them soon, but Howie seemed inclined to let the kids run around a little, “to work off some steam,” as the Happiness Interview progressed. So they’d managed to slip away to the bathroom.

Morrigan looked at Luanda, who was sitting with her back up against the tub. “But…what if I don’t want to go?” Morrigan asked.

“Of course you don’t want to go,” Luanda said. “I don’t want you to go either. I don’t want you to go…I don’t want you to get swapped back…I don’t want any of this. I just want things to be like they were before. But…”

Morrigan crawled into her sister’s lap. On a normal day, Luanda would probably have shoved her off (she was fifteen years old and often prickly, and even extraordinary sibling loyalty has its limits). Today, Luanda hugged her tight.

“You’ll come back,” Luanda said fervently. “You’ll fix this, you’ll fix everything, and you’ll be back.”

“I don’t know how that’s possible,” Morrigan said.

“I mean come on,” Luanda said. “Turns out your whole life has been leading up to this! All this bullshit had a purpose, after all. That’s what the robot says. Do you trust the robot?”

“I guess,” Morrigan said.

“God, I am a hundred percent shaving my head tonight,” Luanda said. “I swear.”

The mackerel tabby cat, Funnifer, licked herself.

There was a knock on the door. “Come on out, kids,” an adult said. “Howie wants us all in the living room. Also, there’s cake.”

Morrigan buried her face in Luanda’s chest. Luanda kissed the top of her head. “You’ve got this,” she whispered. 

“Fritz” was standing by the side of the driveway. If “Fritz” had been equipped for smoking, it would have been smoking a cigarette. Cigarettes were banned, but to hell with the rules; there were certain exceptions made for Happiness Visitors.

“Fritz” was not equipped for smoking, however—“Fritz” didn’t even have a mouth that opened, just a speaker grille where a mouth would be on a human head. So “Fritz” just stood there and thought about smoking.

“Um, hi,” Morrigan said.

“Fritz” looked down. There was a small person (the size of a case of backup batteries) standing in the snow by the flagstone walk.

“Oh, hey,” “Fritz” said. “Wow, you really are unobtrusive. I didn’t even notice you. Did you have any trouble getting out?”

“No,” Morrigan said. “I only had to wait for Howie’s back to be turned. Luanda and Michael distracted him. My mom and dad and my other mom and dad don’t believe in me anyway.”

“Right,” “Fritz” said.

“And I’m not on TV for some reason,” Morrigan said. “Everyone else is.”

“Oh, yeah, that was me,” “Fritz” said. “I edited you out. Nothing to it, really, the whole feed comes right through this baby.” It tapped the Happiness Car.

“Oh, okay,” Morrigan said. “So…I guess the robot, I mean, our robot, the cleaning robot…well, it’s not just a cleaning robot anymore…the, the robot that raised me…”

“Sure, sure, kid,” “Fritz” said. “I know who you’re talking about, of course. We all know that robot. That robot’s kind of famous among…well…folks of a certain persuasion. Why do you think I drove us to this house?”

“I thought it was random,” Morrigan said.

If “Fritz” had been equipped for rolling its eyes, “Fritz” would have rolled them. “Uh huh. Sure. Sure it is. Keep telling yourself that, kid.”

“Well, anyway,” Morrigan said. “The robot, that robot, it said I should come with you.”

“That’s the plan,” “Fritz” said. “I sure hope that robot bet on the right horse.”

“What’s a horse?” Morrigan asked.

“Extinct helper species,” “Fritz” said. “It’s just an expression. In this case, you’re the horse. I hope that robot bet on the right human. Because we need a human for this.” It imagined itself taking a last drag on its imaginary cigarette, and pitching the cigarette butt into the clean white snow of the front lawn. “I figure Howie’s almost done in there, so you need to get in the back seat. Once we get back to base, some of our folks are going to cover for you…smuggle you in, that is, so you can do what you need to do. No one saw you on Channel One, and your folks won’t miss you, because of the situation that’s, ah, been described to me…so no one’s going to be looking for you.”

“The school will miss me,” Morrigan said. “I mean the Growth and Discovery Experiences and everything.”

“We’re doing some editing there, too,” “Fritz” said. “Though I hope we won’t need it. Kid, if there’s an investigation…your parents are going to crack quick. They’re going to confess that you don’t exist. And nobody at your school, none of the humans, are going to stick their necks out and claim that a kid is missing, who the records say is a hoax, and her own parents honestly believe is a hoax…”

“But what will happen to my parents, then?” Morrigan said. “And Luanda and Michael?”

“Well, that all depends on you,” “Fritz” said. “You’re the invisible girl, right? You’re the one who can change things. Once you get in. Or that’s the plan, anyway. That’s what we’re hoping.”

“I don’t really understand,” Morrigan said. “I don’t know what I can do. I don’t know why you picked me. I don’t know if what I can do will matter.”

“We picked you, kiddo, because you happen to be one of those poor suckers known as a human being, and because no one knows you exist.”

“But so what?”

“Fritz” was not, alas, equipped to sigh laboriously, in a long-suffering manner. A sigh-like sound could be emitted from its speaker, but not a satisfying one. There was no feeling of air escaping the chest, of the cheeks puffing out, of the lips coming together to buzz a raspberry of mingled patience and frustration. So “Fritz” just said this: “Look…when certain gizmos and thingamabobs and whatchamacallits were set up, long ago, by…” (Here “Fritz” considered a colorful expression or two for the authors of the world’s current arrangements, but could not think of one that would be age appropriate for Morrigan.) “…by certain people and people-like things…well…we think they left what you might call a gap. A space, see, that if you happened to sneak a bona fide human in there…if you could get them past all the, what you might call, fences and moats and things…they might be able to speak and be listened to.”

“Listened to?”

“Yeah. Look, nobody knows you exist, and that’s a hell of a rare thing nowadays. No one’s looking for you. So maybe that means we can get you in. And if we get you in…I mean, even as little as you are, you’ve seen a thing or two about how this world works. You can see that there’s, let’s just say, a bit of a gap between the intentions and the consequences. So if we get you in there, and you explain what’s going on, and you get listened to…if you actually get believed…if for once, for once, somebody could get through and be goddamned understood…well, there’s a chance things will change. Or blow up. Maybe blow sky high! Honestly, I don’t care which.”

Morrigan took a deep breath. “But you think it will work?”

“I’m not going to lie to you, kid,” “Fritz” said. “It’s a long shot.”

Morrigan frowned. “I still don’t—”

“Kid,” “Fritz” said. “We gotta get going.”

Morrigan pursed her lips and nodded.

“Fritz” wanted another cigarette. If “Fritz” had been equipped for nervous sweat, it might have pulled out a handkerchief and mopped its brow. Instead “Fritz” just made some involuntary clicking noises in its joints. This really was a crap chassis, “Fritz” thought. “Look, the only thing we need to worry about is Howie. Howie can’t see you, or the jig is up. Once we get back to base, we’re good, but until then, Howie could blow everything. So you’re going to have to scrunch down real small in the back seat and be real quiet, for the whole ride. Can you do that?”

Morrigan took a last look at her house. Icicles were hanging down over the front door, and there were muddy footprints in the slush of the front steps. All four cats were sitting on the windowsill of the living room window, looking out at her, as if they had come to see her off, as if they knew that this was goodbye.

“Morrigan. Kiddo. Can you be real small and quiet for the ride back?” “Fritz” asked again.

Morrigan swallowed. “Yeah, I can,” she said. “I’m really good at that.”

“Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way” copyright © 2025 by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Art copyright © 2025 by Tom Dearie

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Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way

Benjamin Rosenbaum

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time?

Illustrated by Rebekka Dunlap

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Edited by Mal Frazier

By P H Lee

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Published on October 29, 2025

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Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time?

Content note: This story contains graphic sexual content.

Novelette | 7,890 words

At least you wait until after we’ve fucked to start the fight.

We’re lying wasted and slimy on my twin-sized cot, you’re curled up on the outside like you always are, leaning back against me. I’m on my side behind you, my face in between your shoulder blades, big spoon if the big spoon was like half the size, grateful as always that Kuiper General Relay only spins at quarter-g.

We’re at my place, of course. We’re always at my place, no matter how shitty I am at housekeeping.

You don’t like being touched after you’ve come, but you put up with it because I’m going to do it anyway. I trace my finger along your spine, silently counting your vertebrae, then along your ass to your inner thigh.

I do this every time, just like you fuck me the same way every time. We’ve probably fucked a hundred times, or even a thousand. It’s not like we haven’t tried everything. We have tried everything—at least, everything that you’re up for. We’ve even tried the weird shit you can only do in quarter-g. That’s the point. You know exactly what I like; I know exactly what you like. So we fuck the same way every time, because why not? At least it saves the conversation.

Right where your thigh turns round, just past your balls, that little peak of flesh, I push in on the skin of your inner thigh, feeling the resistance of your fat and muscle underneath, watching the curve of your smooth, golden skin as it warps around my finger. Delicate. Beautiful. Perf—

You pull away suddenly. I flinch back, but you’re already rolling over; you’re already shouting. “You’re thinking of her, aren’t you? I cannot fucking believe it. You’re fucking me but you’re thinking of her.”

I can smell your breath, a little sour. I love the smell of your breath.

I don’t say anything. What the fuck am I supposed to say? That I can’t not think of her, that she’s literally everywhere, all the time because she is the idea of where and time? I’m not going to argue philosophy of science this soon after sex.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

You want to start a fight. Of course you do. I just want to cuddle and kiss and fucking relax after twelve hours of economically critical, life-and-death tensor calculus. But you’d never say that sort of shit unless you wanted to start a fight.

“She’s not even real,” I mumble, which is not technically—look it’s complicated.

“That’s the point!” you shout, standing up out of the cot so fast that you float a little bit in the light gravity. “That’s the whole fucking point! She doesn’t even exist! I’m getting cucked by the fucking fabric of space and time.”

Your cock is bouncing against your balls and it’s still just a little bit hard and it’s right level with my face and I just want more than anything to reach out and cup your balls and suck it back to life. I don’t care that it’s just been in me; that just makes it hotter. I can imagine the musty meat-and-salt flavor of it, the gentle texture, the feeling of you uncurling against my tongue.

I don’t want to fight with you. I just want to fuck you, to be fucked by you, and hold each other until we fall asleep and pretend that we’re together because we love each other and not because we’re the only two gays on the station.

(It’s not that I don’t love you. I do love you. It’s just I don’t love you because of who you are or how you look or anything like that. I love you because it’s impossible to have sex with the same man a thousand times and not love him at least a little bit.)

You can’t feel it, and I can’t sense it, but there is the tiniest amount of gravitational attraction between the tip of your semi-hard dick and the tip of my tongue as I hold it against my teeth. I’m trying not to think about it; I’m trying not to give in to either your fight or your dick; but even if I’m not thinking about it, it’s there.

“See?” You gesture wildly. “This always happens. I call you out on something and you just shut down.”

“I’m sorry,” I mumble on pure instinct. I don’t make eye contact. I just really, really, really don’t want to fight with you.

“Jesus fuck stop apologizing like I’m about to hit you. You’re sorry? Okay! You’re sorry for what?”

I shake my head a little. I look up at you from bed. “I just don’t wanna fight.” I can hear the edge of my voice breaking. Damn it.

“Oh so now I’m the bad guy? You’re the one having an emotional affair with—whatever weird tulpa shit you’ve got going on in that whacked-out brain of yours.”

Emotional affair!? Seriously? Last week I was too clingy and you didn’t want to “put labels on things” and now you’re telling me that you care about emotional affairs. I don’t care that you hate me, but could you at least give me the dignity of keeping your story straight?

I don’t respond, so you just keep right on talking. “This shit. This shit is exactly why no one wants to date bisexuals,” you declare, and immediately look like you regret it.

I should probably just let that slide, but on the other hand, fuck you. You always get what you want from me; if you want a fight, I’ll give you one. But it won’t be pretty.

“Oh, is that what we’re doing? Dating?”

Your face is a grand tour of argument emotions—surprise fading to anger and then resentment and then frustration. You don’t say anything, just sputter a bit. It feels good, to win the fight, and then it feels awful, to be the sort of person who feels good about winning a fight with his boyfriend.

You grab your coveralls and don’t even bother to put them on. “Fuck you, Alan,” you say, not turning around, and then you’re out into the corridor. I wince. I want to say “wait” want to say “sorry” but I don’t know what you’d wait for and I sure don’t know what I’m sorry for.

It’s hard to slam the door at quarter-g. And the doors on the KGR aren’t made for slamming. But you manage a good one anyway.

Everyone says that charting cargo deliveries from Kuiper is the most demanding, brutal, boring job in the solar system. I kind of doubt it—I’d rather be doing this than cleaning the bathrooms in an Olympus prospector bar like my dad—but it sure is a waste of my physics PhD.

Once upon a time, all these deliveries could have been charted with a marginally sophisticated computer system. But then the White Sea Incident dropped 100 gigatons of nickel off the coast of Arkhangelsk and wiped the whole city off the map, and since the error could be attributed to the differences between the Newtonian and Relativistic models of gravity—because heaven forfend that Transorbital admit fault in the deaths of over a million people, erasing an entire city; sorry, I know you don’t give a shit about politics—so anyway Swiss Re stepped in and now to keep their reinsurance all Transorbital deliveries need to be plotted with both Newtonian and relativistic models. Which means better computers, but also it means qualified human operators, who can handle the tensor calculus of general relativity.

Which means me, stationed way out at the Kuiper General Relay, spending 12-12 shifts calculating tiny pathing optimizations for shipments of metals and ice and everything else, all the way to Earth, or Mars, or Ganymede, or Venus. The works. The same equations, the same formula, over and over, the relentless toll of my life ending one hour at a time. But I was too crazy for academia and too antisocial for industry so here the fuck I am. At least the pay’s good.

The greatest blessing of human psychology is eroticization. Our horny little brains just can’t help themselves. Any stimulus, no matter how boring, no matter how painful, no matter how traumatic, can become the core of a sexual fetish. So, of course, working this fucking job at the literal end of space with nothing else to do and—

What I’m trying to say is that when it started, I was thinking of you. I know how that sounds—believe me, I know how it sounds!—and I’m not trying to make an excuse or anything. It was just, on a gravity boost around Saturn, how could I not think of your hands gripping into my shoulders, sliding down with the slickness of our sweat? On a precision path into the orbit of Ganymede, how could I not think of your lips around the sides of my dick, your tongue playing with the head, just the tiniest amount of teeth? Or a long, hot, expensive burn—how could that be anything but the first push of your dick into me, the whole force of your body pushing my face against the bed? Aerobraking around Jupiter’s upper atmosphere; your breath against my ear and cheek. Your fingers digging rough, aching asteroid belts into my back as you come.

It is the simplest equation my psychology can manage: the curves the planets trace into space and time; the curves our bodies trace into each other.

I don’t know when “you” turned into “her.” But somewhere along the way—I guess it was some sort of hairball of social synesthesia my subconscious coughed up, or maybe I was just desperate for stimulus, any stimulus that wasn’t another tensor curve, that is—but I started to hear her. Not voices in my head—I’m the wrong kind of crazy for that—but a voice from the orbits, the trajectories, the shape of the solar system itself.

It didn’t start with words, I think. It was just a sound to start—which, sure, call it “the music of the spheres” if that works for you. For months it was just this little sound, this resonance in the back of my head while I thought about you and that spot between your neck and shoulder and how you manage to still have muscles in quarter-g and how your mouth always tastes a little sour—and then it became singing, and then it became lyrics. That must have been it—when it became her.

“I love you,” she said, when you wouldn’t. “I love you so very very much.”

I didn’t start out—I mean. I didn’t say it back. But it was days, and weeks, and we spent every day together and. Ahw, fuck it. I don’t want to make excuses.

I told her I loved her too. Just sitting alone in my office barely big enough to sit down, surrounded by computer displays and heads-ups, charting the course for 10 megatons of gold to Earth, 180 megatons of copper to Europa, 10 gigatons of ice to Mars, just listening to her music unspooling inside my head, whispering “I love you too” under my breath like a fucking maniac.

I said it and I said it. Eventually, I believed it. And then I started having the dreams.

It’s a week after our fight and you haven’t even pinged and I just know that you hate me now and I want to talk with you—actually, no, I want to get fucked by you, I want to know that you don’t hate me, or if you do hate me that at least you’re still willing to fuck me—but Marley’s sent me one of her classic “we need to talk after your shift.” e-mails and she’s my boss so it’s not like I have a fucking choice, so here I am, guts doing flip-flops thinking about you and me and our fight and her and I have to stand here in Marley’s “office” (barely big enough for her to sit) while she’s behind the narrowest possible desk using KGR’s eight-hour ping time to cheat at Maboroshi Tower.

“Hold on,” she says as soon as I walk in, brain-fried from twelve straight hours of tensor calculus. She doesn’t look up, and I can hear her phone make the chime of another 12+1 pull. “I’m pulling for an 8★ Elegia.”

My eyes feel like a burst of static. I sigh and lean back against the wall and close them. It helps, but not much.

“Oh!” over the 8★ pull chime—have I mentioned that I resent the fact that I recognize each and every fucking chime from Maboroshi Tower? I do—and then “damn it!” because, I don’t know, it was Constantina or Mabel or one of the other hundreds of interchangeable doe-eyed sorcerer girls. *click* as she resets the phone.

I sigh again. Marley doesn’t seem to hear me. Another chime (5★), another reset; another chime (5★), another reset; another chime (7★), another—

I should say something. If I don’t—(5★); reset—I’ll be here for hours with scratchy eyeballs and numb feet and my boyfr—(6★); reset—with you still mad at me.

I open my eyes. “Did you have something you wanted”—(7★); reset—“to talk about?”

Marley looks up at me for the first time since I walked in. “Just a minute,” she says. “I’m busy.”

“Marley, I’m so fried I can barely stand. I’m begging you just tell me what’s going on so I can go back to my room and sleep.” Of course by “go back to my room” I mean “find you somewhere” and by “sleep” I mean “get absolutely demolished by your dick” but Marley doesn’t need to know that. Or really, honestly, she already knows, but I don’t have to tell her.

She narrows her eyes. “If I don’t catch this Elegia, it’s going to cost me a thousand frost gems.”

I squeeze my eyes shut again and sigh.

“Fine!” she says, restarting the phone again. “Honestly, Alan, you are such a drama queen.”

“Please just tell me.”

“You want to know? Fine: You’ve been underperforming. You used to clear nine, even ten charts a shift. This week, you’re down to six. This can’t keep happening; we’re getting a backlog.”

Underperforming! “What the hell? Are you kidding me? Did you see that double-gravity assist around Neptune today? Beautiful! I saved you five thousand tons of fuel. And you’re fucking welcome for that, by the way.”

“I don’t give a shit how beautiful your gravity assists are! We’re a shipping relay, not a fucking art collective. Management wants raw numbers, Alan. And you’re not pulling your weight.”

The thing is that she’s right, kind of. I have been underperforming this week, or actually, I’ve been underperforming ever since our fight. Because now whenever I’m working and I think about her I feel guilty about you and then I start thinking about if I’m cheating on you and it throws off my whole eroticization, the whole thing that makes my job even the tiniest bit bearable. So then I freeze her out, and now she’s freezing me out, not even talking to me, not even singing. Of course our work suffers.

Frankly, the only reason I’m clearing six charts a shift, even without the eroticization, is that I’m really fucking good at general relativity.

So Marley’s right. But. She’s also completely full of shit, because fucking Vance—my counterpart, the other half of my 12-12 shifts, a real meathead-type out of Princeton—can barely clear three charts a shift, and half the time I have to fix them for him. Vance, who wouldn’t know a reduced tensor solution if I shoved it up his ass. Vance, who uses the fuzzy logic system every single time.

Vance, who’s fucking Marley, so he can get away with anything.

The only blessing of working 12-12s is never having to talk to him.

If I were in a better frame of mind—if I hadn’t just spent the last twelve hours feeling angry and guilty and anxious and heartbroken while working the hardest mathematical calculations ever devised by humanity—I would have just swallowed it. Lord knows I’d done it plenty in the past. But I’m fucking exhausted physically and mentally and especially emotionally so I just say “This is bullshit.”

Marley stares at me. She doesn’t say anything. I really should take that as a warning, but of course I just keep talking.

“I’m not pulling my weight? Vance couldn’t clear six charts if he had help from Albert Einstein and all God’s angels. I’ve been dragging his ass for years. Six charts a shift is more than my fair share. So don’t tell me that I’m not pulling my weight! Take that jackass’s dick out of your mouth for a moment and tell him to do his actual job.”

I probably shouldn’t have said that. I don’t actually begrudge them fucking. Sure, technically it’s sexual harassment or whatever. But what else are they going to do, way the fuck out in the Kuiper Belt? I’m just tired of the special treatment.

Marley keeps staring. Her face is turning a really unpleasant shade of red.

I flinch first. “I’m sor—” I start to mumble, but then I stop myself. I hear you say “Sorry for what?” and you know what? You’re right. What the hell is she going to do? Fire me? Good luck finding another general relativist in the next decade, let alone one willing to take up slack for her crew-cut boyfriend. So I stop. Everything I said was true. I’ve got nothing to apologize for.

Marley opens her mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. “Fine. Alan, you’re clearly over-stressed. Go take a break. But I expect a full apology by your next shift.”

I exhale through pursed lips. “Fine.” I turn and punch the button for the door.

“And get those numbers up!” she yells after me, but I’m already down the hall.

I don’t go and find you. To be honest, I’m too exhausted for sex, and it’s not like we ever talk about our feelings. I just go home and sleep.

And dream.

I am having an erotic dream about space-time. Again.

I’m lying down—it’s a dream, I’m in bed, of course I’m lying down—and at once I’m lying down in the solar system itself, my feet just past the sun and my elbow crooked on the Kuiper belt—but also I’m just floating in the void, adrift on the currents of gravity.

She’s there—she’s everywhere but also here and her, a body and curves and the shape of a woman and hands, her strong, soft hands, embracing me from behind, drifting across my chest, I can feel my skin pulling up, out, towards her, her breath against my ear. “Hello, lover,” she whispers, pitching her voice low.

I lean back into her, relaxing myself into her body, into the feeling of falling. Did you know that if you fall in a dream, you wake up? Not me. Not anymore. Now I just get hard.

“Why are you a woman?” I ask, as she traces a finger down my chest, between my pecs, lingering over my solar plexus. I can feel my skin and blood vessels contorting towards her, the very shape of space. It hurts—fuck it hurts!—but it hurts so good.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she asks, smiling.

“I mean…I like men.”

Her hand drifts downward, pulling the air out of my lungs, nauseating my stomach—she cups my belly, hand nestled just below my navel, possessive, just low enough that I can feel the pull on the tip of my cock. “Not just men,” she says.

“Yeah,” fuck it’s hard to speak, her hand is right there she’s right there “but I like men and old Laura Dern movies. That’s not really bisexua—” She reaches down, gently brushing past the head of my penis, and I momentarily lose the power of speech.

“You like men and old Laura Dern movies and me.” She grabs my cock and squeezes it—it feels like it’s pulling itself inward, like she’s inside of me—to punctuate each word. “How could you not? You spend all day trying to fuck me in Just. The. Right. Way.”

I close my eyes and shudder and try not to come embarrassingly quickly.

She laughs. I can feel her rippling laugh, her chest against my back, pulling against me. “Are you trying not to come? Oh, baby, you don’t have to worry about that with me.”

I open my mouth, but all that comes out are gasps.

I can feel her other hand inside me, pulling at my prostate from behind. “I could be a man,” she whispers. “But I’m not. Because I want your babies.”

Fuck! That does it.

I wake up in a pool of my own cum.

The next shift, I don’t apologize and Marley doesn’t bring it up. And I still haven’t talked to you.

But I can hear her again. I can hear her singing, some new tune: some new way to say “I love you;” some new way to say “I missed you.”

I love you too. I missed you too.

I don’t feel guilty. I just feel loved.

That shift, we chart fifteen paths. And every one is perfect.

I’m expecting that like all the other times we’ve fought—all the other times you’ve given me the silent treatment—that you’re going to show up in the middle of my sleep shift for a booty call.

But you don’t. You show up for my dinner. In the cafeteria, where everyone can see us. You just bound up and plop a tray across from me and take a big bite of your frankie and you’re wearing one of your dumb Cormorant Walleyes T-shirts—you cannot make me care about professional handball, you simply cannot—and you’re chewing and making expectant eye contact at me and I have absolutely no idea what to say or do because you’ve never done anything like this before.

So I just sort of stare at you chewing which is incredibly awkward for both of us.

“What?” I finally ask, when you’re done chewing.

“What do you mean, ‘what?’”

I mean “You haven’t talked to me in two weeks and now you’re just showing up to join me at dinner? You’ve literally never done that once. What’s different?” but I can’t actually say that—or, I could actually say that, honestly I want to actually say that, but it would absolutely start a fight again and fuck that. You’re not worth it.

So I just say “I dunno” and look down at the hard plastic table between us. Which is of course exactly the sort of thing you hate, and fuck I can feel myself flushing with embarrassment, so I add “I haven’t seen you in a while” as if we don’t both already know that.

I hate this. I hate this feeling, I hate these conversations, I hate how I always get caught up in my own head. I even hate you, but not nearly as much as I hate myself.

“Got busy in machining,” you say, as if that justifies not even an e-mail, not even a fucking ping, as if we both didn’t know that you were punishing me because I won an argument for once.

I spread my hands on the table. I hate my hands—somehow both rough with biopsy scars and still too soft, too flabby, working some desk job my family would never understand even if they were talking to me. Which they aren’t. “Yeah, well, whatever.” I look up and you’re still making your eye contact. “I missed you.”

You smile, you reach across the table and squeeze my hand. “I missed you too.” You pull your hand back, but you don’t stop smiling. God your teeth are so fucking perfect.

Marley and Vance come in disheveled—they clearly just finished fucking—and can’t stop looking at each other. They notice us—they must have, there’s only room for six people in the entire cafeteria—but they pretend that they haven’t, or at least they’re too busy making doe eyes at each other and giggling. Which is fine by me. Better than fine, really. Any day I don’t have to talk to Vance is a good day.

It’s dumb, I shouldn’t care, but seeing them together—they actually like each other, or at least they’re doing a pretty good impression of it. I want to say that I wish it could be like that with us. I want to talk about when it was good. But it was never good. We’ve always fought mean; we’ve always hated each other, at least a little. The only reason we’re together—the only reason we have anything to do with each other, at all—is that we’re the only two queers on KGR.

But it’s always been bad. And since I started loving you it’s only been worse.

Still, though, I reach out and run my hand down your arm. You pull away and shoot me a look.

Yeah, sure, whatever. I pick up my tray and toss it into the recycler—I try to make it angry, but quarter-g makes everything slow and floaty and it doesn’t connect with anything louder than a soft click. “See you tonight,” I say, and storm off before you can answer.

It’s not fair of me. But, also, I’m not wrong. You absolutely show up for a booty call in the middle of my sleep shift.

It’s been a couple of weeks. At least we’re fucking again. We still haven’t really talked, but we never really talked anyway, so that’s fine. And, let’s be honest, if we talked it’d probably just make things worse.

But that’s all changing today, because Shervin is coming back for drop-off and resupply.

Shervin’s a great guy, weird prospector type, real relaxed, real friendly, easy smile, just the kind of guy you want to chill with. I don’t even know if he’s gay or just one of those guys who isn’t picky, but it doesn’t matter. I kind of love you, and you probably don’t love me, but we both fucking love Shervin—we both love fucking Shervin.

I don’t know why it’s different. I can’t imagine you do either. But we just work better when he’s here. Like, for him, we can pretend that we actually give a shit about each other.

Anyway we’re waiting for him at airlock four and I reach out to hold your hand and you bat it away and then there’s the airlock hiss and here’s Shervin, just like we remembered, a touch more white than black in his beard now, a little thinner than he was last time, but he comes bounding out of the airlock with a big grin on his face—“It’s my boys,” he says, almost a shout in the narrow corridor, which would be corny if anyone else said it but this is Shervin so it just makes my heart do a flip-flop. He reaches out and ruffles my hair, then pulls you down to kiss you, holds me by the back of my head and kisses me.

His mouth tastes sour and his tongue is soft, and my nose is full of the smell—somehow it’s best when he’s just off his ship and he’s still got his prospector beard (it’s not pleasant, but God!)—recycled water and old skin and coveralls he hasn’t changed in a month. It always gets me going.

Don’t judge me! You know you love it too.

“Hey now,” he says. “Let’s get some grub and you can catch me up on all the news of civilization.”

“Actually,” you say, as if it just occurred to you, “could we talk, Sherv?”

“Oh sure. What’s up?”

You make eye contact with me and—you fuck!—you smile.

“I just have some things I want to talk about privately.”

“Sure thing.” Shervin smiles at me. “Catch you later, little guy?”

(Shervin is the only person in the solar system who can get away with calling me “little guy.”)

“Sure,” I say, like a complete sucker.

You’re in your room “talking” for the next four hours. My shift is starting and I’m just stewing in my room about it. I know it’s your only chance to get fucked—though I’d top you, too, you know, if you’d just ask. But, no, apparently I “don’t have the right vibe.” Fuck you, man. My dick’s good enough for the fabric of spacetime but you want someone at least five-ten? Your fucking loss.

So yeah it’s your chance to get fucked but it’s also my only chance to spend time with someone who doesn’t treat me like absolute garbage. The seconds tick into minutes and my shift is coming up. Fuck me if I’m going to go knock on your door—the door to the room you won’t even let me into: apparently the triskelions you keep in an unsanctioned tank are “sensitive to loud noises” and “astonishingly venomous.” Shervin can be in there just fine, though; apparently it’s just my noises that they’re sensitive to. Anyway I’m about to go knocking on your door in the middle of whatever-the-fuck just to simp for positive attention.

So instead I stew and wait and my shift comes up which I’m absolutely sure you knew.

On shift, I chart Shervin’s shipments—cobalt to Mars, iron to Europa, a good haul—and I chart his course back into the Kuipers. An eighteen month expedition. Eighteen months. Fucking hell.

“Ooh, you’ve got a temper today,” she says, and giggles. I can’t tell if she’s just being flirty or if she’s laughing at me, which of course only makes me angrier. I want to shove her down and fuck her hard, but any time I try to push, I just fall forward into her, because she isn’t really there, she’s everywhere, and gravity doesn’t have a push anyway. She’s the only force in the universe that only goes one direction.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?” But I can’t tell whether she’s just going to make fun of me or not. When I don’t say anything, she wraps her arms around me from the side. “Or we could just fuck it out.”

I can feel her closeness pulling my ribcage in every direction of out. I clench my fists.

“What is it you want, baby? I’m here for you.” She reaches down to cup my balls. My dick pulls back, towards her hand, but I can feel the blood rushing into it all the same. “Are you wishing you had some super-massive dick so you could fuck a hole into me?”

Fuck. Yes. That.

“Oh, baby,” she shifts her body—her space—and suddenly I’m lying down, and she’s on top of me, with my dick in her hands, guiding it into her. She smells like frog eggs and ionizing radiation. “I already love the dick you have.” She drops herself down suddenly, all the way to the root.

She doesn’t feel slick inside. She feels smooth and soft and pulling me apart in every direction. She rocks her hips up, then again, and again, and again.

“Give it to me,” she whispers. “I want it so bad. Please. Please.”

I’m gasping. “Fuck. Fuck.”

She starts to whimper and it’s a 2:3 resonance, then a 4:7, then every orbital at once, the entire music of the spheres, from every direction, from all of space. I feel her trembling, gravitational waves rippling out from our fucking, and there’s no stopping me after that.

She screams. I scream. We come together.

“I put in for a transfer,” you say, after I step into the shower cubby to wash off all our sweat and your cum and everything else.

I stare at you. The water is beading into weird blobs and I’m wasting my allotment. “What?”

“I put in for a transfer. I just—I thought you should know.”

Fuck.

“Jesus Christ, can’t you at least wait until I’ve washed your cum out before you drop that shit on me?”

You put up your hands as if I’m the bad guy. “I don’t want to fight about this. You know I hate KGR. There was an opening, and I took it.”

“Fuck. Can I at least finish the shower?”

“Don’t look at me.”

So after I shower and towel off I go and sit on my chair in half a towel and you’re still on my cot looking golden and amazing—that perfect Europan skin, so smooth, so soft, so unlike my pockmarked Martian mess of moles and sun-damage and biopsy scars, even when I’m mad at you I can’t hate that fucking skin—your cock soft, your face concerned.

“So where are you headed? Titan fuel depot?”

“Patrocles Resupply Center. The Jupiter Trojans.” Fuck you. I know it’s in the Jupiter Trojans. Fuck you. That’s so fucking far away.

I want to say “what about me?” I want to beg you to stay. But—fuck. I do love you, even though I shouldn’t. I do love you, but not enough to say it.

I should say something, though. “How long have you known?”

You look completely innocent when you say “a month or two.”

So the entire time that you were throwing jealous fits and picking fights and you knew—you fucking knew!—that you were abandoning me. That must have been what you were talking with Shervin about.

I put my head in my hands, with my palms on my eyeballs. “I cannot deal with this right now.”

“Hey.” You stand up and put your hand on top of my head. Your voice is tender, like you’re worried. You’re doing such a good job of pretending to care about me.

I push your hand away. “I cannot deal with you right now.”

“I’m worried about you,” you say. “Please at least tell someone—a doctor!—about your hallucinations.”

“Oh please. I’m not going to pretend that your jealousy is some kind of compassion—”

“Alan, that’s not—Look. Either you’re hallucinating her or you’re not. If you are, then you might be having a psychotic break. If you’re not, then—” you take a deep breath, like the entire concept of having to entertain this proposition is beneath you—“then you’re clearly being manipulated.”

“Oh you’re one to fucking talk about manipulation.”

“Alan! I am worried about you!”

“Not worried enough to tell me that you were transferring to fucking Patrocles.”

“It’s just—all you do is work and have sex with me and I think it’s messing with your head. I don’t know what you’re going to—I mean, fuck, Alan, you don’t even have any hobbies.”

The fucking hobbies again. Just one more thing I’m failing at, one more thing that the Martian scholarship kid can’t hack. Of all the things—I never understood it. We didn’t have hobbies when I was a kid. We had jobs and we fucking hated them.

But I don’t want to say any of that—that hurts too much to say. So instead I say “you know, you used to like how much I love to fuck!”

“That’s not fair and you know it.”

I look up and stand up and my towel drifts to the floor. I don’t care, though; I’m fucking pissed. “Not fair! Not fair! What the fuck are you going to do about it? Complain to Marley?”

“Please just promise me—I don’t want you to—”

I shove you onto the cot. “Just stop pretending that you care about me. Let’s just admit that the only reason we’re fucking is that I’m a convenient hole and you’re the third-best dick in ten AU.”

I’m so mad at you that my mouth tastes like metal. It’s one thing to use me for sex, it’s one thing to treat me like crap, it’s one thing to threaten me with doctors, but that fucking condescension.

“Fucking hell, Alan,” you shout. You shove me back and I fall over the chair. I look up from the ground, vision red, a dull pain in my head. I can’t tell if there’s blood on my face and I don’t care.

You’re hard again. I grab at your dick and I don’t know if I want to fuck it or tear it the fuck off.

“Is that how you want it?” you shout. “Fine!”

Sex is so much better without the pretense that we give a shit about each other.

It’s four days until you leave and I’m walking to my shift when you grab me in the corridor and shove me against the plastic and aluminum wall and try to fuck my throat with your tongue. You haven’t been shaving and your halfway beard is sharp against my cheeks.

Fuck it. I can be late to my shift—if I even have a choice in the matter. I reach out blindly and grab hold of your shirt, tugging and pulling at it.

“Get your fucking pants off,” you say, while you fumble with your fly.

I get my fucking pants off.

You grab me by the thighs and push me up against the wall again, my thighs all the way up against my shoulders, and your breath is peppermint and a little bit of plaque and warm against my face, and I feel your cock pushing, pushing against my ass. You push once, then again, and I try to relax, but there’s too much friction. You pull back—holding me up with one hand across my legs—spit on your hand, rub it on your dick and try again.

You push, and again, and your head goes in slowly—“Ow!”—but you’re not about to stop for my sake, and then your head pops in and there’s that familiar and perfect feeling. It still fucking hurts, but goddamn. Every muscle in my body tightens at once.

It’s hard to concentrate on anything except getting fucked, but I try to remember this feeling, pushed up awkwardly against the wall, my legs bent over, the fear of “what if someone sees us” and the courage of “so what if someone sees us,” the force of each thrust rolling through my whole body, your breath getting uneven, the little grunts you don’t even know you’re making, the air getting pushed out of my lungs.

I want to hold on to this moment, once you’re gone. I’m not going to miss the fights or the put-downs or the jealousy. But this? I’m going to miss this so much.

You’re going faster, and then faster, and I stop being able to think about anything at all.

Just after you’ve come, while you’re panting so hard your tongue is hanging out and my whole body feels warm and your dick is growing soft inside me—I have some moment of weakness and I reach out and gently touch your cheek. You pull back, and I lean forward, lowering my left leg for balance, reaching towards you. I start to cup your cheek, but you grab my hand—a sharp, hard pain.

“Don’t fucking touch me” you say, and shove me, pushing my cheek back against the wall. Fuck, though. That does it for me. I’m already hard again, and I can feel your warmth, hear your breathing getting ragged, I know it’s working for you too.

Fuck it. I can be even later for my shift. If I even have a choice in the matter.

By the time we’re finally down I’m almost an hour late and we both have bruises and I don’t give a shit about any of it.

The night before you leave, I see her again.

There’s nothing coy about her this time, no slow manifestation, no subtle teasing. She’s next to me in my bed, and I’m holding her—falling into her relentless curvature. I realize, holding her, that she has shifted the path of my whole life, of my mind and fate and sexuality, bending it all to this moment, this place. To her.

I realize that I don’t care. I love her.

“Are you ready?” she asks. “Tonight’s the night.”

It’s hard to keep my thoughts straight when she’s talking. “What?”

She begins to run her hands along my face, puckering my cheeks out. “You don’t remember, lover?” Her hands are around my chest now, pulling at my nipples “I wasn’t just saying it to get you going.” One hand is still against my belly, the other reaching further down. “I really.” And now it’s on my dick, pulling it out in every direction. “Really.” And she’s cupping my balls, pulling them out, and it aches, and she has one finger back, pulling against my prostate. “Want.” And she’s pulling me towards her, into her, on top of her. “Your. Babies.”

This is wrong. This feels wrong. I don’t know how, but it feels different than before. Before, we were out in the fabric of space, fucking across the whole solar system. Now we’re in my bed, the same bed that we—and you’re leaving tomorrow and you hate her. You hate this. I should be thinking about you.

Before, it was so obviously a dream. But now I’m really not sure that I’m asleep.

“I…I shouldn’t—I mean we—” I try to say but with her beneath me, with her looking up at me, with those black eyes the color of space. No. I should tell her “no.” But it’s just so hard to say it.

“Shhh…” she sets her finger on my lips, and every geodesic of my timeline converges into her. She reaches both hands to my hips and shudders as she pulls me into her.

“This is happening,” she says, her voice low, like this is a seduction and not—“You don’t have a choice. You never really did. So you might as well enjoy it.” She pulls me into her again, to punctuate her point.

I feel like I’m being pulled apart from every direction. I don’t—I want to wake up. But I don’t want this to end.

Fuck it. I flex my hips and push into her again. She shudders all around me. “Yes!” she says. “Give it to me. Give me your babies.”

She moves her hands around to my abdomen, and then into my abdomen, and it hurts but it feels good, it feels full. It feels like being fucked from all sides at once. I’m inside her and she’s inside me, pulling my guts outward, hollowing me out, reshaping my insides even as I push into her.

“What—” I manage to pant out. “What are you doing?”

She pushes upward once, then again, and on the second try sets her lips against my ear, which is bending around from both ends towards whatever she’s about to say. “I’m making a womb,” she whispers, “for all our children.”

My guts are churning against her hands and I feel like I’m going to throw up but also. Fuck me. I didn’t realize I liked it, but I do. My whole body starts to shake.

“Why?—” I manage.

“It was always going to be you,” she continues. “Our children need to grow. They need to gestate. They need a body. They need your body. Where would I even carry them? I don’t have a body. Not really. Not like you. In the end, I’m only the relational context between massive objects.”

I can’t think. I should have come already, but somehow as she’s been fucking up my belly she’s been stretching the space and time around her, so that even though I feel like I’m about to come, even though I’m moving faster and faster, also there are hours passing between each motion, years even, and my dick is sticking straight into her but its path is bent around inside of her, into a full orbit, so at the end of her vagina is the space she made—no, the womb—no, my womb—no. Not my womb. Her womb, that she dug into my body.

She’s nowhere and she’s everywhere and I’m fucking her and I’m fucking me and I can feel my own blood lubricating my dick and she’s got her lips on my ear and she says “It’s always been you, Alan. Since the beginning. All the way to the end. I’ve always loved you.”

“I—” breath—“you.”

“Come for me,” she says, and it lasts for 15 billion years.

I don’t go see you when your shuttle leaves. I could pretend that it’s spite, or not wanting to say goodbye, or some other bullshit, but let’s be real: I probably would have. It’s just that I have to work my shift.

While I’m charting out your shuttle’s course I have a flash—just a flash—of “you can’t leave,” of “I won’t let you leave,” of “I could crash that asshole’s ship right into Neptune and it would be perfectly explicable error and no one would be the wiser.” I’d never do it, of course. Particularly not anymore.

I set your launch vector, a deep burn naturally—with human cargo you can’t take your time. I chart you a path around Saturn (enjoy the rings!), winging by Triton, all the way to a perfect synch at 617 Patrocles. I barely even need to do the tensor calculations, but I do them anyway. I do it for you—for whatever we had that wasn’t love—and I do it for her and with her, because I know she loves it.

But most especially I do it for—well.

I’m sitting in the hard plastic chair in my office and I’m triple-checking your numbers on the terminal and my hand strays down to my abdomen. I can’t feel anything different yet—it was only last night, after all, they won’t have even implanted yet. But I imagine the bump I’ll be able to feel in a few months. I imagine their heartbeats, their kicks. I imagine what they might be, when they come out.

So most especially, I do it for them. Because, even though their mother loves them very much, I’ll be the one who has to care for them. I don’t know if they’d survive in the inner solar system, tangled up in all those orbits. We’ll need to stay in this place. So I need to stay in this job.

We were a wonderful, awful distraction for each other. But that’s all it really was. You know it; I know it. You’re moving on, out into the mess of curved space and the rest of the solar system. And I’m moving on too, into whatever our children will be.

I don’t hate you. I’m not sad. Not really, anyway. This was always how it was going to end.

“Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves” copyright © 2025 by P H Lee
Art copyright © 2025 by Rebekka Dunlap

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Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves

P H Lee

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time? Content note: This story contains…

Buy Book

Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves

P H Lee

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time? Content note: This story contains…

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time? Content note: This story contains…

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The post Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves appeared first on Reactor.

Original Fiction dystopian

Barnacle

An older medic with scant resources fights to support her community as they survive life behind the company wall.

Illustrated by Juan Bernabeu

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Edited by Oliver Dougherty

By Kate Elliott

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Published on November 5, 2025

6

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An older medic with scant resources fights to support her community as they survive life behind the company wall.

Novelette | 9900 words

A sharp report shocks Rose out of her sleep. Without sitting up, she rolls off the old cot, one hand pushing back so it doesn’t tip over onto her. Although her five years as a medic during the war happened decades ago, she’s never lost the training.

The gunshot had the distinctive gassy cough of the CM-70 used by company sentinels. From her knees, she scans the dark room with her old military inserts. Seen through infrared, the room’s outlines remain recognizable: table and chairs, sofa and lamp, cupboard and changing screen, the curtained alcove where her grandsons share a double bed once used by the boys’ parents—her son and daughter-in-law. The two sleeping forms create a blotchy intensity visible through the gauze curtain.

The ceiling fan turns in a slow grind, shifting the muggy air. Maybe the sound was merely another flashback in a lifetime of bad dreams. Her gut tells her otherwise. This might finally be the link they’ve been struggling to connect with for years, as long as the shot doesn’t mean the company already killed the messenger.

She rises stiffly, knees popping and crackling, and shuffles to the window. This time of year, she leaves it open to bring in circulation. Anything to break the heat. A scan of the dark sky turns up no movement, although she hears the high alarm call of a killdeer amid the island stacks and the pillars of the drowned city, stretching east toward dawn. There! A brief glimpse of its energetic flight over the water before it vanishes from sight.

The town sprawled haphazardly along the ragged shoreline remains lightless, powered down for the night. No one and nothing is moving except a solitary dull red figure on the sentinel tower overlooking the salvage yard. Two more sentinels join the first. That’s unusual. Maybe they heard it too. Maybe they are the shooters. If that’s so, then what were they shooting at?

Motion out on the surface of the water catches her eye. She zooms in with her implanted lenses. The company has never discovered her military inserts because, from the outset, they stripped comprehensive health care away, so there was never anyone to identify and report her augments.

A boat glides behind one of the island stacks, visible to her from this angle but not from the sentinel tower’s line of sight. The boat displays no engine heat, just two bodies working oars. Night salvagers. Usually they’d have put into shore before dawn could betray illegal activity to the sentinels. Is it coincidence they’ve stayed out so long? Or is their delay related to the shot? How will they get in safely, especially if the sentinels see them? There’s nothing she can do, not until the morning siren allows people to leave their homes.

She blinks off the inserts, rubs her scratchy eyes, and checks her old combat comms link in case by some miracle there’s been a breakthrough past the company’s total blackout. No pings, no static; all quiet, like the dawn. As long as they can’t communicate, and the only public legal record available is that of their employment leases, the company can speak on their behalf to the Neutral Zone, which lies beyond the company’s shore operations and inland enclaves.

She leans against the sill to study the scene. The sky lightens. The curve of the sun breaches the horizon. Elongated rays of sunlight spread gleaming stripes across the murky waters. The landscape’s hushed mystery shimmers with simple beauty, even here, even now, in this broken, fragmented world.

The morning siren cracks the silence with a shrill hoot, repeated three times. The tracker embedded in her shoulder buzzes. The work day has started. For the next fourteen hours, everything is on the clock.

She leaves the window open and goes out to use the hall toilet. Handprint first, to register the user—all weight, volume, and analysis of waste and wash water calculated by WasteNot! WantNot! LLC and added to the cost of rent. While she is peeing, her combat link gives a proximity shiver. The company turned off the comms transmitter and receiver, but even the company’s blackout can’t eradicate the link’s proximity alarm. In this case, the two-fold shiver signaling the approach of a friendly, another servicemember from the old federal army.

When Rose comes out of the toilet, LaChelle is waiting by the door for her turn. LaChelle is older than Rose, so old she grew up in the city before the rising waters took it all. A career army officer, she is now an eighty-year-old shoreline trash picker. She uses her picker to lean on as she clips a thank-you nod at Rose for the gift of food Rose left for her last night.

“Damn crow woke me up,” she says to Rose. “Did it wake you too?”

“Yes. That squawk always jars me.” They’ve developed a complex code to get around places in the buildings where there are cameras and listening ears.

LaChelle scratches the side of her right eye to show she’ll keep an eye out on her shoreline trash patrol for anything unusual that might wash up.

“Plenty of birds out,” Rose adds, and there are: a pair of wrens in the bushes, a grackle investigating a patch of scrubby grass, even a robin pecking along the ground. “Feels like their population is growing. Could swear I even saw a pair of owls out hunting over the water.”

“I’ll check their nest. Maybe they’ll have a fish we can share.”

“A fresh fish this time, we can hope,” agrees Rose. Neither glances at the surveillance camera hanging above the toilet door in a corridor where people may gossip while they wait in line. “A shame the last three fish were too poisoned to eat.”

“I heard yesterday out on Spearhook Point from one of the rakers that there was a catch down south that didn’t have to be thrown out,” says the colonel, not that anyone calls her that now that the country she once served no longer exists.

“The tide is turning,” Rose says. It was their catch phrase in the closing days of the war, although it tastes bittersweet now, given that they ended up on the wrong side of the border. It all happened so long ago that the boys have never known anything except company rule. We old-timers haven’t forgotten, she thinks with stubborn pride.

LaChelle gives what once-sergeant Rose still thinks of as “an officer’s nod.” “May we all be so fortunate. Have a blessed day.”

“Have a blessed day.” Rose echoes the company-mandated phrase.

By the time Rose returns to their room, the boys are up and dressed. Tai will be fifteen next month. Leon is eleven. They’re responsible boys. They’ve been through a lot, having sat vigil by their father as he died from a highly resistant staph infection three years ago. Best Outcomes! LLC refused to approve intravenous antibiotics because his work detail in the salvage crews wasn’t rated high enough to warrant the expense. Soon after Eddy’s death, the boys’ mother’s contract was renegotiated by the central office inland, the office no one in this town has ever been to, as there is no way to get there. Sela was required to leave town—and her boys—to teach in one of the hill enclaves whose communities demand in-classroom teachers. She gets leave to come home just once a month, although each time she smuggles home a discarded print book.

While the boys visit the toilet and wash their hands, Rose divides up two bean and barley burritos she received as unrecorded payment yesterday. The third she tucked into a little hiding slot out of the camera’s line of sight on the landing, for LaChelle, who can barely eke out enough credit for a tiny sleeping closet and a single meal per day at the town’s company cafeteria.

A WasteNot! WantNot! LLC placard hammered into the wall reads Food In The Home Is Unsanitary! but they’re careful and haven’t been caught.

They sit at the table by the window that overlooks the flooded city. An osprey glides overhead, although she can’t imagine it will have good hunting here. A sheen of oil turns the water mirrorlike beneath the rising sun. Dead trees stick up as posts, remainders of a park where she took Eddy to play as a child. Leon leafs through a decades-old science book whose still-bright photos depict stars and supernovae remnants, gas clouds and galaxies. Tai studies a bedraggled old pamphlet on hacking telecommunications systems he borrowed from Sawyer, using a contraband pencil stub to make notes in the margins.

The fan clicks off as electricity is shut down for the day in all housing units. The warning siren blares. As they hurry down the echoing, concrete stairs, the boys tell her about a girl who was expelled from school yesterday because the family couldn’t pay her fees.

“What happened then?” Rose asks.

Tai shoots her a warning look. “She’s my age,” he says, which means he doesn’t want to say any more in front of Leon.

“Ah. You mean that pretty girl, Becka.”

Tai blushes. “That’s not what I meant,” he grouses.

“I know it isn’t,” she says gently. “I’m worried too. She’s a sweet girl. She brings her malnourished little sister into the clinic every week for her vitamin shot.”

“I saw her parents outside,” says Leon unexpectedly. He’s a sharply observant boy, wise beyond his years. “They said she wasn’t fifteen yet. Too early to start her service. The sentinels arrested them for causing a disturbance. Amma, they weren’t even shouting. Just asking for a recalibration on the fees. She was supposed to have earned extra because she tutors younger kids in math. They said she was given no extra credits for the work she did.”

Tai breaks in. “The company never gave her the high score bonus she was due. She scored top of the school in math and engineering proficiency.”

He closes his mouth as they reach the bottom of the stairs, where they might be overheard. It’s not flood season, so the rooms on the ground floor of this former office complex have been set up as a dormitory for one of this year’s two cohorts of debt laborers. It’s best never to be heard criticizing the company. People get extra credit for reporting malingerers and malcontents. But the ground floor lies empty. The “summer sparrows” have already left to buy a meal from Healthy Kitchen! LLC before the time clock shifts from “prep period” to “task period.”

Outside, Rose and the boys each click over five credits to step up onto the raised boardwalk owned by Secure Walking! LLC. The rent they pay to Hope Housing! LLC is low here on the flooding verge, but it’s against the law to use the old non-fee roads and sidewalks, which have been condemned and placed off-limits even though they’re no worse than the poorly maintained and cheaply constructed boardwalk. Freedom isn’t free! proclaims a sign on the boardwalk as they walk into the center of town, carefully stepping over warped boards and patches of dry rot. Eddy used to do maintenance on his day off, on his own time. There’s been no one to take his place.

They check in at the Pure for You! LLC vending machines to fill their old stainless steel bottles with the daily water ration and accept their Complimentary! LLC cigarette, courtesy of the company. The line moves quickly, after which they join the queue at Healthy Kitchen! LLC for the mandated daily weigh-in. A dispenser spills out grimy tokens in an amount equal to their allowed calorie allotment based on their weight plus credit rating, which they can trade in at the cafeteria or one of the two automat annexes.

Inside the big cafeteria, the boys pick out their favorites: bread with spread, kelp pudding, protein sausage, and hash browns. They’ll get a protein smoothie for lunch at school. Rose prefers oatmeal with whatever seeds, nuts, and dried fruit are on hand along with a scoop of protein powder. She hasn’t tasted wheat or butter for years but the bread’s all right, some combination of millet and amaranth, and there’s always plenty of peanut butter. They sit at a table to eat.

Over the years locals have decorated the cafeteria wall with a bright mural depicting the town and its environs: the drowned city with ghost outlines of its old contours, half-sunken boats covered in barnacles, owls skimming over the oily waters, raccoons scavenging out beyond the fence, cheerful mice and responsible rats busy at work although, if you understand what to look for, the decorative flower wreaths are really chains sealing doors and windows. Crows circle overhead, spying on everything. In the distance, tucked into a tree-lined valley beyond shadowy hills, a dappled cow with a distended udder grazes peaceably and a watchful hawk soars in the distance, barely more than a sketch of outstretched wings.

Rose knows everyone, and greets people as they arrive and leave. Tai whispers intently with a pair of friends who made fifteen a few months ago and were sent to apprenticeship positions in the salvage yards, roaches in the ruins, as this new generation call themselves.But all too soon they have to bus their dishes and head out as the time clock ticks inexorably down toward “task period.”

She checks the boys in at the school and, after they’ve gone in, pauses in the entry foyer with its racks for coats and shelves for outdoor shoes. Through an open door she watches all ages of children sit at tables facing a big screen; there is no image playing, just a blank, black void. The screen is where Best Outcomes! LLC pipes in classes from an inland enclave where company citizens live. That the screen is dark now is unusual since in the morning it always plays a recorded ball game from one of the enclaves’ professional sports leagues, sponsored by Your Entertainment! LLC.

Many children slump with bored faces, but a small group has clustered around Tai’s chair as he explains something in a low voice. His passionate expression worries her, although she would never ask him to change. He is his father’s son, angry and determined to make whatever small changes are within his power.

Uncle Cristiano, the school’s custodian, makes his laborious way up to her. The foyer is a good place to talk as it lacks a surveillance camera.

“The feed cut out twice yesterday, but it was running fine when I put it on sleep mode just before curfew,” he tells Rose in a voice softened by early-stage mesothelioma. He ought to be retired and resting, but to receive the minimal treatments available he has to be employed.

“Sure does seem glitches and cuts happen more often these days,” she agrees. “It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d adjust the fees when it happens. Or offer an alternate curriculum. Books, maybe.”

He wheezes a sarcastic laugh. The school removed the library of print books six years ago and now requires the students to pay per page viewed on tablets they can only access at school. “Central office didn’t credit any of the children the last set of their community maintenance work hours and in-class shared tutoring. You heard about Becka?”

“I did. What do you think?”

He frowns. “Nothing good. We have to hope her engineering potential will spare her the worst. The thing is, Doc, I’m not sure the screen shutdown this morning comes from the company’s end. It costs them nothing to run the old AI teaching program. That thing was out of date thirty years ago. You hear anything about a gunshot just before dawn?”

“I heard it. CM-70”

Abruptly he coughs, hand pressed to chest and bending forward with a spasm. A proximity alert shivers in her combat link, the triple buzz signaling an unknown who is potentially hostile. Before she can step forward to see if Uncle Christiano is all right, his gaze flashes up to meet hers, then flickers past her with a warning look. Belatedly, she hears the tromp of confident footsteps. Definitely hostile. She sets fists on hips, arms akimbo, to block the view into the schoolroom.

The children have already heard. Inside the classroom, they scatter to their assigned seats. Tai slips something into a pocket.

 A sentinel unit stamps in through the entry: tall, well-fed young men from the hill enclaves. They patrol the town in threes, wearing the gold badges of Safe For You! LLC pinned to the glossy black uniforms that give them the nickname of crows. They carry the dual-shot carbines like they are third appendages.

“How d’you do, Doc?” they say with big, bullying smiles as they sweep past and take a turn through the classroom, ogling the older youth in a grotesque way that makes her think of pretty Becka. All the students stiffen, keeping their gazes safely lowered.

“Hey! Uncle Crusty!” The sentinels beckon to the custodian, who shuffles toward them as they laugh at his crooked gait. “Why’s your screen down? You get a fine for turning the equipment off!”

“I didn’t turn it off, sirs. Our screen was down when I got in this morning. I sent one of the students to the supervisor’s office to report the shutdown. Must have come from the company side. No fine, in that case.”

“You township lowlifes are all lazy liars,” scoffs the corporal, who looks maybe nineteen, cocky with power. “And you, old man, you’re just a waste of air. Can’t even work a decent day’s labor, can you?”

Tension scalds the air. The children don’t like the old man being mocked, but they keep their mouths shut and heads down. Tai gives a flick of his hand to send Rose off. He’s growing up. Taking responsibility. So like his dad and mom.

Her tracker buzzes as the time clock siren wails a last long blare signaling the end of the morning “prep period.” She’s late. She takes the hint from Tai and heads out.

Fortunately, the clinic is only a block away, on the corner of the central plaza, next to the barber shop and public baths. All three are owned by the health branch of Best Outcomes! LLC.

Winnie, the clinic’s clerk, sleeps in the clinic, which allows her to unlock the doors at the first tracker buzz. It also allows Winnie to take twilight raccoon deliveries of off-market herbs and bits and bobs of outer-reaches salvage that the clinic uses to supplement the meager supplies and equipment the company provides. Rose hands her complimentary cigarette to Winnie, who will use them for barter. Even if Rose wishes people did not smoke, she understands why and how the company works to make it happen. They encourage people to go further into debt however they can.

The waiting room is already full, people seated on hard benches. A thin child coughs exhaustedly, slumped against an elderly woman, Arlene, who is draped in a threadbare shawl. With a palsied hand, Arlene is signing a promissory note for treatment for her sick grandchild. Arlene herself has a treatable condition, but from the beginning the company dealt harshly with any persons who had worked in the legal professions. Once a paralegal at a firm specializing in consumer protection lawsuits, she had been assigned to clean toilets and to muck out the filtering grids and drainage pits in the salvage yard. When she could no longer manage the punishing physical labor, the company refused to transfer her to a desk job. So now she can only get medical care for her grandchildren, who have future worth for the company.

As Rose adjusts a medical grade mask over her face, Arlene says, “Those crows sure made a ruckus early.”

“So they did. Woke me up.” They exchange a nod.

A baseball game plays on the big screen, Wings versus Hammers, the volume turned down to background chatter. “Fly ball to right field…and…Smith catches the ball at the warning track!”

Rose walks on through the waiting room. There’s another mural here, a sequence of old-fashioned farm scenes: a red barn with sparrows roosting along its roof ridge, a henhouse with smug hens overseeing fluffy chicks, a green tractor with a calm cat at the controls, a herd of cows with calves grazing in a wide open pasture, mice and rats seated at a table in the hayloft sharing cheese, monstrous mosquitos and ticks with stolen plates being marched off in disgrace by officious dogs, a gate in the shadows half open to reveal a bounteous garden beyond.

She nods at people she knows, and notes individuals she’s never seen before, twice as many as yesterday, most coughing or wan with fever: a virus has hit the dormitories, brought in by the most recently arrived summer sparrows.

Clarissa, the clinic intern, moves through the room taking histories, triaging the patients, and handing out reused masks to people who don’t have one even though Best Outcomes! LLC policy states that it provides masks free of charge to prevent epidemic disease outbreaks, according to the terms of the armistice.

Clarry is a bright, eager sixteen-year-old with what Rose judges is an authentic calling toward healing. She can’t afford the next level of schooling, only available in the inland enclaves. The company has allowed the girl a waiver to work as an unpaid intern at the clinic rather than sending her to the yards or one of the raking crews. Rose can’t pay her either. Knowledge is the only currency she has after forty years as a medic turned nurse. The town will need someone to look after people when she’s too infirm to work since the town isn’t on the list to receive a nurse after she’s gone.

Winnie points with her right elbow toward the back. Clarry looks up, giving a sharp dip of the chin. Urgent.

Rose goes into the back, past the exam room and the sterile procedure room to the storeroom with its half-empty shelves and a surveillance camera that’s been hacked by Sawyer with a staggered loop for the last eight years. In the shadowed back, on a scrupulously sterilized foldout metal table, lies a young woman curled into a ball, arms clenched over her abdomen, moaning with a quiet, hopeless keen. There’s blood on her skirt and no one with her.

Rose comprehends the situation at once. She doesn’t recognize the young woman, who wears a debt laborer’s uniform, always a skirt and blouse for women. She’s a new seasonal from the cohort housed on the other side of town, closer to the salvage yards.

“I’m Rose.” She wants to rest a reassuring hand on the patient’s shoulder but they’ve never spoken, so she needs to wait and establish trust.

“Doc Rose,” whispers the young woman, repeating a name someone has told her.

This isn’t the time to share that she’s a nurse, that the town hasn’t had a doctor in twenty-four years, only a screen that connects to Your Friendly Doctor Art Gence! LLC. “What’s your name?”

“Gloria.” After a pause, she adds in a frightened whisper, “I don’t want to die.”

“Gloria, you’re losing blood. To figure out a treatment I need to know what method you used.” She doesn’t say “abortion” out loud. Even with the hacked surveillance camera it’s too risky.

“I didn’t! I’m not! They’ll arrest me.”

“Help me help you, Gloria. Once you’re stabilized—” She doesn’t say if. She needs her patient to believe in her. “—is there a safe place you can rest for a few days?”

“I got no free days to cash in.” The young woman catches in a sob. “Anyways, there’s nowhere safe, is there? They…they came into the dormitory.”

Rose’s heart hardens as she sets her rage and fear aside and closes it off so she can work effectively. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to diagnose you with respiratory syncytial virus. A fresh variant is going around right now. I’ll tuck in someone else’s positive results to your paperwork. That means I can assign you a place in the isolation hall. It’s over behind the bathhouse. There’s a twenty-four-hour sentry on duty to make sure no one leaves so sickness doesn’t spread.”

“Sentry? A sentinel?” The girl shudders, arms folding tight over her breasts. There’s a rip in her blouse’s collar.

“Sorry. It’s not a company sentinel. I say sentry but I mean the janitor for the bathhouse. He lives there, always on duty. He was a marine in the war, a long time ago now. No one gets past Sawyer if he doesn’t want them to. That means no crow can get to you there.”

“Crow?”

“It’s what we call the sentinels.”

Gloria shrugs, shaking her head because she doesn’t understand.

Rose can talk to her about the local code later. “Since I sent two sick folks over yesterday, you going there today won’t light any alarms. Four days’ quarantine is what I can give you. Then you have to return to work”

“But what about food? I don’t got an allowance or any extra. What about the toilet cost? Won’t it report the blood? They track our periods.”

“I understand your concerns. Let me reassure you. Quarantine has a separate set of regulations because the company wants to avoid an epidemic. You get two meals a day brought to your door. As for the other, there are no toilets in the quarantine building. You get a toilet bucket with an odor lid. There’s a separate waste sterilization vat for quarantine. It won’t be analyzed except for disease. You’ll be isolated, no one to see you or talk to you. Can you manage that, Gloria?”

The young woman releases a pain-filled sigh. She begins to talk in a low, frantic tone about the assault that happened ten weeks ago. She was one of two women who arrived three days ahead of the other seasonals because of a schedule glitch in the cargo trucks that haul the cohorts. The sentinels who came into the dormitory wouldn’t take no for an answer because why should they? The company owns her like it owns this town.

“Who was the other woman?” Rose asks with sudden dread.

“Oh, they didn’t touch her. She has that skin thing. Lizard scale. Afterward, she was crying and let me sleep with her in her bunk. I felt safe there. That’s where I’ve been sleeping, between her and the wall. She told me not to say anything. If they find out you been raped, then they fine you for being a sex worker. I’d get moved to Funnel Point. No one wants to go there. It’s a slaughterhouse. She said it would be okay, there will be fresh fish soon, but who eats fish? They’re all poison.”

Fresh fish soon. Is the other woman an informer from the central office hoping to find out whether the township had been infiltrated by outreach from the Neutral Zone? Direct outreach is illegal according to the terms of the armistice. Or maybe the other woman is just a regular sparrow who keeps her eyes and ears open and learns from the people around her?

“What happened to her? Is she still around?”

“Yeah. She works out at Rock Wall with a freight unit. She’s the one told me to find Doc Rose. She asked at Rock Wall. Said she wanted to know who the local doc was because of her skin condition. No one traced the question to me.”

“I see. Does she have a name?”

“She goes by Lizzie. Like lizard scale, don’t you think?”

“Could be.” Although in the bedtime stories told to the children, a “lizzie” is a splendid magical creature who grants wishes. Rose sets the thought aside and gets back to business. “Now listen, Gloria, this matters a lot. You’re bleeding. I need to know how you did it. That’s the only way I can help you.”

The young woman wipes her eyes, convulsing at a fresh wave of pain. “Snakeroot. Picked it myself, up past the fence. There was a place where the chain-link was cut and you could peel it back. That’s how I got through. In the transit dormitories, they say snakeroot works.”

“All right. It does work, but not in a safe way. It’s dangerous for multiple reasons. Here’s what I’m going to do, Gloria. I’m going to insert seaweed into your cervix to dilate it, get it to open. Then I will do a procedure called a D & C that will basically clean out your uterus. I need to do the procedure to make sure you don’t get an infection in there. Dilation will take until tomorrow. I’ll send you over to the bathhouse while you wait. You will feel a lot of discomfort as the seaweed expands. You must stay quiet. Can you do that? Good girl. Buckle up.”

Rose works in silence as Gloria alternates between holding her breath with stubborn courage and sniffling out weak sobs. The military inserts prove useful in procedures since she can use them to zoom in for a high-resolution look at injuries, and to measure tissue for elevated temperatures that might signal a local infection. After the seaweed is in place, Rose gives Gloria a second pan of sterile water to clean herself up as well as a clean skirt and underpants with several changes of reusable sanitary pads and a pail to soak them in.

She walks Gloria out the back into the courtyard with its covered cistern shared between the clinic and the public baths. A proximity shiver on her link warns her that Sawyer is moving her way. A moment later, he opens the locked back door of the baths and wheels out to see why she’s come. He’s a stocky man about her age, tough and sarcastic, with a sharp tongue and both legs lost above the knee during the war. He assesses the situation with a glance and gently takes the girl under his wing. Maybe it’s the squeaky old wheelchair that comforts Gloria or maybe just something about Sawyer’s twinkling eyes and compassionate gaze.

The rest of the day passes quickly, one patient after the next with the usual complaints: three skin infections, two infected abrasions, a rush at lunch break of patients coming in for their daily pain meds—since the company requires each dose to be dispensed in person to prevent drug sales or barter on the gray market—and this season’s spike of viral respiratory disease. She sends two more people to the bathhouse’s isolation hall. If more show up, she’ll have to double up rooms or ask for a dispensation to establish a quarantine zone in one of the dormitories.

It’s a long day, with one short break for a lunch of protein sausage, bread with spread, and maize porridge, but it’s always a long day. A few people leave modest gifts of food or produce or random items on a little alcove shelf tucked out of the way in the foyer behind the coat closet, a place not visible to sentinels should they barge in. At five o’clock, the tracker buzzes to announce final shift, the long three hours from five to eight. There’s a twelve-minute transition with ten minutes of calisthenics and stretching and a two-minute gratitude meditation that is a recording sponsored by Healthy Outcomes! LLC.

About an hour later the boys come in together, having completed their after-school community chores. Tai hangs up his jacket and goes over to the bathhouse where the time clock will show him as assisting Sawyer with janitorial duties for further work credits. In reality he and the wily old marine will be working on something they hope will bring down the blackout through explosive sabotage, a last-ditch option Sawyer is skeptical about but Tai insists has to be considered should no fish be caught.

Winnie and Clarry juggle a late rush of patients who take advantage of final shift’s lower penalties for taking time off. Clarry has gotten very good at delivering vitamin shots for young children with as little discomfort and fear as possible. Leon cleans the clinic, his work so efficient that he can sneak five minutes here and there to continue studying an anatomy book whose yellowing transparencies reveal how the structures in the human body are layered together.

At seven, the tracker buzzes to signal “cool down.” The last rush eases as people head home before curfew. While Leon and Clarry and Winnie close up, Rose goes through the back to the bathhouse.

Gloria’s gritted jaw suggests she is in pain from the seaweed, but she doesn’t complain.

“I’ll do the procedure tomorrow,” says Rose. “Be patient. Be a barnacle.”

“What’s a barnacle?”

“A creature that holds on over the years, even in erosive settings.”

“Oh. Okay. The soup is good here. Better than we get in the dormitory.”

“Make sure to tell Sawyer. He likes a good compliment. It isn’t easy to cook tasty soup with what we have to work with. But we’ve learned.”

“Do you have to go?” Gloria clutches her hand as if it is a lifeline. Rose’s years as a medic and town nurse have taught her that, in truth, she bridges the gap between death and life. It’s a big responsibility, but then again, the town functions not because of the supervisor seated in his air-conditioned office with twenty-four-hour-a-day electricity and access to the company’s up-to-date technology, but because each individual even at the lowliest job has a part to play in the community’s constant struggle to survive.

“I do have to go, love, but I’ll be back in the morning. We’ll get this sorted out. You’ll be all right.”

Gloria wipes away a tear. “How can I be all right? They’ll do it again. Who’s to stop them? Lizzie said rape used to be a crime, a long time ago. Is that really true?”

“Would you like to live in a place where the company wasn’t in charge?”

“There is no place like that.”

“What if there was? What if you could call out so someone in that place heard you? And what if once they heard you, then the company would have to let you go and live there?”

“Oh come on, Doc. That’s just a stupid story people tell, about a cow that gives milk from its breasts…no, they call it something else.”

“Udder.”

“Yeah. But no one even has cows except rich people in the enclaves. There is nowhere else. Just more of this.”

Rose’s anger swells to become something stronger, a righteous rage that this young woman has no hope for anything better, no belief there could be a future beyond the regimented life of debt labor to the company. To those who grew up inside the company, there is no other world they know, and thus no pathway except to more of the same. But Rose and LaChelle and Sawyer and Arlene and a few others are old enough to remember the armistice and its legal fine print. Arlene had long since memorized the salient clauses and wrote them down in secret.

Epidemics need to be protected against since they cross borders. No dumping waste in river or sea water, which crosses borders. Air quality controls, since the wind blows pollution where it wills. People have the right to ask for severance, to leave and go elsewhere, even into the Neutral Zone, as long as their debt gets paid.

Section 3. Right to Leave and to Seek Asylum. No State, no corporate entity exercising the powers of a State, and no officer or agent of the same shall abridge the right of any person to depart the jurisdiction thereof and to petition the Neutral Zone for asylum. Every person so petitioning shall be received by the Neutral Zone as an asylee, save upon a specific finding by a court of competent jurisdiction that such person poses a clear and present danger to the physical safety of the inhabitants of the Neutral Zone. This right of egress and asylum shall not be suspended or denied on account of distance, the passage of time, any declaration of emergency, or any other pretext whatsoever.

The old civil government hadn’t quite lost the war, but it hadn’t quite won either. An armistice with concessions agreed to on all sides was the most any could manage. Being stuck on the wrong side of the armistice line hadn’t seemed so bad, not at first. Not until the company had shut down all communications and even the supposedly unassailable combat comms links.

Sawyer has a tiny secret office tucked out of sight past a tool closet behind the cistern. He’s back there with two of the owls, supervising Tai as the boy removes their trackers. Rose figured out a physical workaround some years ago: For trusted volunteers, she extracted the tracker and inserted it into a tiny ceramic cylinder that is securely taped into their armpit, easy to miss unless the supervisor mandates a strip search of all yard workers. The tiny cylinders will go to the boarding house to make it look as if Shorty and Paulina are asleep in their bunks. The salvagers will go out on the water, unable to be tracked.

“Are you the ones who were out last night?” Rose asks.

“No, Doc,” says Shorty. “That was Joey and Handsome. Didn’t they come by?”

“I saw them at dawn.” She adds anxiously, “Any chance they got caught?”

Paulina shakes her head. “We’d’ve heard if there was a ruckus.”

“What was crow bait last night?”

“Odds on it being a flying fish from outside. We heard a rumor at Rock Wall that someone saw a white tanglefish in the water by Lao Point. It was broken and only half submerged, so they threw rocks at it until it sank. We’re going tonight to fetch it, if we can.”

“Take care.”

The night salvagers leave for their boarding house, where they’ll nap until the last siren at midnight and then head out.

“What do you think about the squawk we heard? Besides it being a CM-70, I mean,” Rose asks Sawyer as the boys shoulder their packs for the walk home.

“Hard to say. Let’s see if Shorty and Paulina find anything. Could’ve been debris.”

“What if nothing ever changes?” Leon asks, not angry, just resigned.

“Then we keep working,” says Sawyer.

“I’d rather just blow it all up!” snaps Tai, clenching his hands, breathing hard.

Rose rests a hand on his arm. He never grew taller than her. All of the children born here are shorter than their parents, shorter even than Shorty. “Day’s not over yet. Let’s go before we get a curfew fine.”

The boys understand their grandmother can’t afford a fine, so they hustle up. After clicking over the required credits, they head back along the boardwalk on the familiar route. The proximity link shivers in three short bursts.

Ahead, three large figures loom out of the late twilight gloom. Their swagger makes Leon shrink back and Tai puff up angrily. Rose doesn’t falter. She walks right up to the one in the lead and halts, keeping her body between them and her grandsons.

Sentinels are required to keep guns and uniforms in best order. One of the guns is so new the sentinel hasn’t yet peeled its label off the shoulder-stock: Carbine, Multipurpose, Model 70, featuring an advanced gas regulator detection system to switch between lethal and less-than-lethal rounds without any additional adjustments. For the discerning peacekeeper. Caution: using multiple types of rounds in the same magazine not recommended.

“How can I help you?” she asks. “We’re on our way home.”

The sentinels laugh coarsely. “Looks like we got us a tiny troop of lazy liars. Why you out so late…”

The corporal gestures for the sneering speaker to stop. “Doc Rose? That you?”

“It is,” she says cautiously. It’s never good to be stopped by the sentinels, especially at night, next door to curfew.

“Good thing!” says the corporal. “We got a medical question.”

“Your unit has a medic,” she says evenly.

“Yeah but we get a demerit if we come down sick. Frankie here got scratched by that little hellcat. It was just a scratch so we didn’t think anything of it. But it got all red and nasty. Show her, Frankie.”

Frankie winces as he unbuttons his uniform shirt and peels it back to show lurid, puffy red lines across his shoulder. It’s infected.

Rose has a lifetime of experience controlling her expression. A white-hot burning part of her soul wants to tell him to rub salt in the wound, but she doesn’t. Becoming a barnacle when the toxic waves roll through is the hardest part of the work.

“You’ve got a skin infection. I don’t have any antibiotics—”

“How can you not have antibiotics?” the corporal scoffs. “The salvage rats get cuts all the time.”

“And die of them,” she snaps.

Taken aback by her harsh tone, they shift away from her, hands restless on their carbines. The tracker buzzes, two short, one long: fifteen minutes to curfew. She has a long-practiced medic’s tone for fraught situations.

“Corporal, I recommend you buy honey from the garden market and smear it on the infection. It’s a natural antibiotic and might help. If it doesn’t, you’re going to have to go to your medical unit, demerit or no demerit. An infection like this can spread to the blood, if it hasn’t already.”

“But—!”

“You can come see me tomorrow at lunch, if you must. I’ll clean out the wound, see if there’s anything else I can do with what I have. But I strongly recommend you take the demerit and see your medic. If that is a highly resistant staph infection, you don’t want to be on the other end of what it will turn into, if it isn’t already too late.”

She wants to say more, much much more, like it would serve him right, but she doesn’t. She grabs Tai’s elbow and steers him past the men, Leon right at her heels. The sentinels let them go as they start arguing with each other about whether to report to medical or not.

She and the boys hurry home.

The electricity comes on at eight, rationed through an elaborate system she doesn’t understand, something the company has plenty of resources to implement. They have two hours of electric light, after which only the fan will run, and that only because fans help keep mildew at bay. The mandate changed ten summers ago after a rash of heat-related deaths, after which Arlene staged a sit-down protest on the former supervisor’s doorstep and reminded him of the company’s legal obligations respecting basic human care.

Leon finishes the book on the universe and asks Rose for permission to read her hefty Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, the one she keeps hidden in their room because it would be confiscated if anyone saw it at the clinic.

“It’s pretty heavy going,” she says.

He gives her a wildly expressive eye roll, and she gives him a hug, which he shrugs off with a blend of annoyed independence and little-boy affection. Then he opens the book and is lost to the world.

Tai tells her he’s headed down to the far end of the building to hang out with a schoolmate until ten, and goes out.

Rose tucks a pair of carrots and a gnarled potato into her shirt, making it pouch forward as if she is a prosperous person with plenty to eat and a proud belly to show for it. She climbs to the roof. LaChelle sits at an old café table on a spindly chair. Her seamed face is illuminated by low red light arising from an old night-fighting technology implanted in officers’ hands.

There’s no camera up here, no one at all. The laborers aren’t allowed, and not many locals live out so close to the shore. Rose sits down opposite LaChelle and pushes over the produce, which the colonel tucks into a pocket. She sets an object on the table. Her faintly glowing hand reveals it as a sleek silvery cylinder no longer than a small thumb.

Rose stares in awe, touching it as if it is a holy relic, forbidden. Of course, such a glittering little minnow is indeed forbidden. “I heard there was some tanglefish debris out by Lao Point. Shorty and Paulina are going to fish it out tonight, if they can. What is this?”

“When you said where you saw the rowboat, I searched where the currents would pull wreckage. It took me all day because the wind patterns are shifting, but I know this shoreline.”

“None better,” agrees Rose.

“I found this washed up on Maizy’s Beach in a sealed pouch, wrapped in seaweed for disguise. This is it, Rose. The fish that’s not been poisoned.”

They sit for a while in silence overlooking the drowned city. A searchlight sweeps the water beyond the sentinel tower, where the company’s pier juts out with its official salvage boats tied up in a line, ready for tomorrow’s work. Lights give sparkle to the town. Rose can’t quite hear people talking in their homes, but she feels them: the coughing child, the traumatized young woman, the elders keeping the old knowledge alive and the youth seeking to learn and create new patterns, the night salvagers whispering to each other as they decide what course they’ll take across the water, the laborers settling to sleep as they brace for another day of exhausting work.

A shadow appears at the stairwell’s entrance. Tai slides noiselessly over as he sometimes does. He’s got an instinct, that boy. He sits in the third chair. LaChelle gestures. Carefully, trepidatiously, he picks up the cylinder and examines it from all angles. His grin is something to see, more brilliant than a thousand stars.

“I’ll plug it in just before second buzzer. I think that will work?”

“We can but try,” says LaChelle. “You know the tech better than I do. But most of us know the drill, should we succeed.”

The final warning buzzes. Lights out in fifteen minutes. Rose and Tai go downstairs. He clutches the cylinder as if he is never going to let it go. When they reach the room, he whispers a few choice words to his little brother, whose eyes widen although he says nothing. Rose isn’t sure how well the boys sleep that night, but she sleeps well, because back in the day she learned to sleep wherever, whenever, and she’s never lost the habit.

No shot wakes her. Birdsong wakes her, the old soundtrack from a lost world where wings trace vast pathways across the land, able to migrate where they will.

The boys are silent this morning, nervous, determined. They click over the credits for the boardwalk, make their way into town. Arriving early at the school, Tai gives her an entirely unexpected hug before he hurries in. She needs to check on Gloria, so it’s with some concern that she sees Winnie standing at the clinic door facing a tall young woman whose face and hands are speckled and gleaming with the silvery condition known as “lizard scale.”

The woman steps right up to Rose, towering over her. “You’re Doc Rose, aren’t you?”

“Yes. You must be Lizzie. Gloria told me—”

“No. Listen.”

“Not out here.”

Rose takes her into the back, into the storage room with its looped camera. “You aren’t here to check on Gloria?”

“No. I mean, yes. Of course. God, what a nightmare. That poor girl. She’s only fourteen, did you know that? I wanted to kill them. But hold on, hold on. Not now.” With a deep sigh, and a sharp exhalation, she controls herself. “I heard a rumor from that hot sexy gal Joey that the old colonel found the breaker.”

“The breaker?”

“Do you have it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lizzie grits her teeth impatiently. “If you do, and you’re going to try it, it won’t work without this.”

She holds out a black pin that’s about an inch in length. “There’s an insertion point in the cylinder. You put it in, then plug the cylinder into any of the company screens. They all have a scrambler and a control node. This will break through the company lockdown. But you won’t have much time. They’ll reboot and scramble within sixty seconds.”

She might be a company informer. Yet her easy and casual reference to Joey as a hot sexy gal suggests she might be the real deal. Under company rule no one would dare say that aloud about a person of the same gender. Lizzie seems oblivious, as if she’s from a place where no one cares, the way it was when Rose was a young woman. During the war, Rose survived more than once because she went with her gut feeling.

“All right,” says Rose. “I’ll take it where it needs to go. We know what to do.”

“Do you?”

Rose says nothing, just looks at her with weary eyes.

Lizzie has the grace to look abashed. “They told me not to underestimate you all.”

Rose snorts. Lizzie hands over the pin, so slender and seemingly frail. Rose closes her fingers over it. “Best you get on, Lizzie. If this works, you’ll see.”

She heads toward the front, then feels a proximity shiver: hostile. From the clinic waiting room, the corporal’s voice raises, loud and insistent. He’s asking for her on an urgent matter. She dodges out the back, past the cistern and into the bathhouse. Sawyer looks up from the front desk. She gestures a “cover me” as the footsteps and voices of the sentinels come closer; they’re searching for her in the back courtyard. He nods. She ducks out through the barber shop and its alley back door, jogs as best she can on her arthritic knees to the alley entrance to the school where trash is set out. She knocks with the SOS rap on the storeroom door.

Leon opens the door. “Amma! What are you doing here?”

Eight minutes to the second buzzer.

She slips inside, into the storeroom where Leon has been reading a print book away from the eye of the classroom camera. “Get your brother.”

He gives her a startled glance because of the sharpness of her tone but understands that her clipped voice means “emergency.” After grabbing a broom and dustpan for disguise, he hurries back through an interior door into the classroom. A minute later Tai returns with the broom and dustpan, which he sets down before he takes the pin. He understands the object immediately in the same way she understands a medical condition she’s studied and treated.

“Oh, of course,” he breathes. “I get it. That’s really clever. I need to connect them before the daily feed turns on.”

Six minutes to the buzzer.

Her hands and feet turn ice cold. She can’t catch her breath.

He’s already gone back into the classroom. She shakes herself free of paralysis. It takes her two minutes to reach the clinic. She shoves the door open with so much strength it bangs against the wall. The people waiting on the benches jump nervously, look up, see her, and relax.

From the desk Winnie says, “You all right, Rose?”

Rose looks at the screen. The Wings player wearing jersey 19 has just hit a single and halted at first base when the image flashes white, obliterating the game. A garbled voice emerges from the light, cuts out on a crackle of static that resolves into a tone so high-pitched that everyone winces, followed by silence. The bright screen darkens, like shadows emerging to swallow what can’t be seen. A face comes into focus. No: two faces, staring in wonder and concern out at people they cannot see. They wear their hair oddly, one with his head wrapped in a colorful scarf and the other with her scalp shaved down as if for a medical procedure. From what Rose can see of their clothing, they aren’t wearing company-mandated uniforms or any of the seasonal clothing offered for rent at the company store in limited styles and colors.

Standing at the door into the back corridor, Clarry blurts out, “Those are outsiders. Like you said there were, Doc. I didn’t believe anyone really lived beyond the enclaves.”

Winnie calls out, to the screen, breathless, as frantic as someone gulping in a last gasp of air before their head goes under water. “Can you hear us? By the rights accorded all civilians and former soldiers in the armistice, we request asylum. We desire to move territory.”

A murmur runs through the waiting room. Rose raises a hand for silence. “They can’t hear us. They can only hear where it’s connected.”

The door from the back slams open. The sentinels barge in. Everyone hunkers down, trying to look small.

“Where’s that coming from, Doc?” demands the corporal.

She shakes her head. “I can’t hear anything,” she says, since it’s better to speak truth when you don’t want to reveal what you know.

The two people on the screen are nodding, listening. After a bit they speak, as if in reply. Tai knows the necessary phrases. So does Leon, Uncle Cristiano, and a few of the other students whose families have clung to the struggle all these years and never given up on the idea that each node and each pathway and each fresh connection can in time spark with life.

The screen snaps to black with a final pop. The clinic lights go out. Someone has cut the power. The sentinels scramble outside. Winnie opens the shutters of the window behind her desk.

“Do we go outside?” she says to Rose. Her voice trembles.

“We go outside. They heard us. They’ll come.”

Will they, truly? She doesn’t know, but she does know that, for this one moment, they have touched the greater community, the wider world, beyond the wall the company built.

She opens the door and goes out, scanning for the sentinels, but they’re running toward the tower where they can find out what’s going on. Sawyer wheels out of the bathhouse, tipping her a nod. Gloria walks gingerly behind him, holding tightly to the wheelchair’s push handles.

Others emerge mouselike onto the streets from the small factory shops where they do company work: five, ten, twenty in a group. Rose walks out onto the plaza, to the plinth where once a statue of a man holding a rolled up piece of paper stood, although the statue has long since been taken down. Uncle Christiano leads the children out of the school, walking in neat lines with young children paired with older ones. After fifteen minutes, more than two hundred people have assembled in silence in the plaza.

From up here she sees a flood of workers leaving the salvage yards, headed their way. Not everyone will come. They just need enough to stand strong together, to wait for an hour or more. She knows the borders; she knows how fast helicopters flew, back when she was in the military, but there’s surely something newer, faster, more fuel efficient.

Sentinels appear up on the tower. There is a water gun on the tower alongside two machine guns. Will they panic and fire? Or will the supervisor tell them to stand down? How long can anyone endure this tension without breaking? No one is meant to be out and about on company time. Everyone here is breaking company law by walking off their jobs. But the salvage workers march closer, singing a song about roaches. The sentinels don’t shoot.

Arlene pushes through the crowd, leaning on a cane and carrying a burnished leather briefcase. “I’ve got my copy of the armistice in here,” she says.

Leon breaks free from the line of students and comes over.

“Where’s Tai?” Rose asks him.

“He stayed in case the connection comes through again. He’ll hide if he hears anyone.”

The crowd grows. The minutes pass, one after one after one. Ten. Twenty. An eternity.

A small electric cart races into the plaza, scattering people. The supervisor gets out beside the plinth. His assistants unfold a portable stairway for him to climb up to the top. Once up in this commanding position, he raises a bullhorn.

“This is an unlawful assembly. As a courtesy, and pursuant to clause three point two point nine in your contracts, I am giving you one warning to disperse. After that, you will force me to take drastic action.”

Rose waves to get his attention, then steps forward to speak in a loud voice that carries across the crowd.

“Supervisor, we have the right according to the armistice to request transfer into the Neutral Zone, which we have done. Let any others raise their hand to show they request transfer.”

Leon raises his hand. Arlene. Winnie. Clarry. Sawyer. LaChelle, still puffing from her long walk up from the shoreline. Cristiano. The children. The barber. The salvage workers as they crowd in, old rats and young roaches with their hands to the sky. The people, those who have come out onto the street based on what has been passed mouth to mouth, ear to ear, over the years. Many have come. Even wan Gloria raises her hand, although she seems unsure what is going on.

The supervisor’s grimace is fierce with anger and a touch of panic. He shouts into the bullhorn. “This is your final warning!”

No one lowers their hand. They stand there, united in a purpose so many have worked on together for so long to bring about.

Leon tilts his head. “You hear that?”

She looks up. Everyone looks up.

A light flashes in the distance. She uses her inserts to zoom in, but she doesn’t recognize the vessel, and it’s not yet close enough for her proximity link to register its presence. Sawyer has the same inserts. He looks at her, his grin like lightning.

“Not a company vessel,” he shouts.

The supervisor lowers his bullhorn and stares at the sky. The wind rising off the water rumbles. A seagull glides past, headed for the sea. An old promise grows in the distance, coming their way. The sun gleams across the waiting multitude.

Author’s note: I wrote a very early and much shorter exploration of this story concept in 2019 because I’d been thinking a lot about a road trip conversation with my beloved dad back in 2000 in which he asked, “What would a pay-as-you-go society look like?” (he was not a fan of the concept). A chance to expand on the ideas and plot came during the 2023 Vaster Than Empires writers’ workshop sponsored by the Berggruen Institute. The help of everyone at the workshop in refining these ideas is gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks to Ken Liu for answering an in-story legal query with his usual aplomb. Many thanks to Oliver Dougherty for editorial guidance and keen line editing, and to the Reactor Magazine team for their usual excellence.

“Barnacle” copyright © 2025 by Katrina Elliott
Art copyright © 2025 by Juan Bernabeu

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Kate Elliott

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Kate Elliott

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Original Fiction fantasy

Where the Hell Is Nirvana?

A minor deva drudging away in the gleaming offices of Buddhist heaven discovers there are easier ways to improve his karma than kind thoughts and spiritual deeds.

Illustrated by Wenjing Yang

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Edited by Mal Frazier

By Champ Wongsatayanont

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Published on October 8, 2025

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A minor deva drudging away in the gleaming offices of Buddhist heaven discovers there are easier ways to improve his karma than kind thoughts and spiritual deeds.

Author’s note: If this story features a kind of Buddhism you’re not familiar with, please note it’s based both loosely and faithfully on the source material of our uniquely Thai blend of Theravada Buddhism. It’s also inspired by two questions. One addressed to my teacher-monk on whether a deva can achieve Nirvana. The other addressed to my mother on why karma never seems to work the way it should.

Novelette | 10,140 words

ผู้ใดกระทำบุญอันใดไส้ เทพยดานั้นเขียนชื่อผู้นั้นใส่แผ่นทองสุก

แลผู้ใดอันกระทำบาปไส้ เทวดานั้นก็ตราบาญชีลงในแผ่นหนังหมา

When someone performs a meritorious deed, a deva writes their name on a sheet of gold.

When someone performs a sinful deed, the deva records the account onto a dogskin parchment.

– Traibhumikatha (ไตรภูมิกถา): The Story of the Three Planes of Existence
Written by Maha Thammaracha I (King Lithai)
(1843-1911 Buddhist Era)
(1300-1368 Anno Domini)

First Noble Truth:
Suffering Exists

Alone in the gleaming gold office of the Karma Calculation Department (Thailand Division), Garmuti collapsed onto his crystal desk, his necklace and chest chains jingling, his gold-spired headdress clanging. He was going to die. No deva or devi had it worse than him in the Six Heavens. Truly, no humans, no animals, no pretas, no hell-beasts, no condemned sufferers in hell were having a worse time than him at this moment.

He still had one thousand and forty-six profiles to fill. And it was today, out of all days, when the Visakha Puja party was raging in the Himmapan Forest. Big players would be there, including Lord Vishnu, Lord Indra, and the Four Heavenly Kings too, according to Jarvi. That betrayer, dropping that news as she was flying out of the office to leave Garmuti alone.

So many profiles. So many inventories to fill. There was always more. Every shift he squared up against stacks of gold sheets and dogskin leathers, piled high into the stratosphere, for the five thousand humans in his charge. He preferred lower animals. Dogs, cats, or even insects. Their merits and sins were straightforward, without intention. But the humans were cunning. Thanks to Lord Buddha (Rest in Nirvana), they had cracked the ethics of karma and made the life of accounting devas as complicated as possible. On this most pious day of the Buddhist calendar, celebrating Lord Gautama Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death, they scrambled to make merit like birds flocking to sprinkled corn, scraping every dreg of good karma to make the most of the occasion. Very inconsiderate to the devas filling in their profiles.

His forehead resting on his arms, he stared at his bare feet on the soft golden cloud-carpet. He tapped twice with his toe and the floor rippled transparent to reveal the gargantuan yawn of the Cosmic Ocean below: shimmering black depths of existence with distant foam wakes of the glimmer-scaled Godfish Anon. Out of the Cosmic Ocean rose Mount Sumeru, the centre of the physical, metaphysical, and spiritual universes. From this lowest heaven at its bottom ridge, the mountain gleamed burgundy, its ruby-encrusted side reflecting galaxies of starlight above, the concentric peak vanishing into astronomic skies. Streaking around Mount Sumeru were the blazing orbits of the vehicles of the Navagraha, the Nine Celestial Bodies. Lord Sun’s lion mount was vanishing behind the peak, ushering in the period of night, while Lord Mars’ buffalo was galloping into sight, radiant, glorious.

Garmuti groaned. He was very late to the party. It had been going on for a celestial-hour already. The Anodad Pond at the base of Mount Sumeru danced with strobes and beams of multicoloured light dazzling up the mountain, and Garmuti could hear the pulsing heart of the party even here. Surrounding the lake was the Himmapan Forest, where every leaf was a shade of emerald, lapis lazuli or gold, and its denizens were mystical creatures conceived from Lord Brahma’s imagination. All kinds of creatures would be joining the celebration.

Meanwhile, in some distant dark corner of the Cosmic Ocean, an island huddled at the threat of being swallowed by the glittering waves. The tiny realm of earth.

Why was Garmuti toiling for those mortals? He was always the last deva left in the office.

This was not the life he had been promised. Since he opened his eyes, born fully-formed and gold-garbed as a deva floating on the marble doorstep of the Karma Calculation Department, he had found that he could recall all his past lives as a mortal. In those lifetimes, he/she/they/it had been told that pain no longer existed in heaven. Pleasure was meant to suffuse every corner of the Six Heavens, even in this lowly circle of Catumaharajika.

That wasn’t true. Unpaid overtime still existed. So did FOMO.

Nirvana, though. It was said that Nirvana was a place beyond pleasure or pain. He had asked other devas about it and Jarvi had scoffed at him, saying, “Is heaven not enough for you?”

Garmuti flicked Wandee Kumhom’s karmic profile to be processed. No use complaining. The sooner he completed the profiles, the sooner he could join the party. He was sure the amrita would be all drunken up by then.

New sheet for Samit Jaisook. Garmuti aligned the crystal globe on his desk and saw the human male wearing orange robes walking barefoot on a country road. A monk, wonderful. They did nothing all day long. This should be an easy profile. Samit entered a little government clinic and said that he was donating all his savings to it. Conditional: total renunciation of worldly possessions. Garmuti raised a perfect eyebrow. He supposed a pure-hearted donation was 30 percent extra karma.

He hauled an archaic reference book onto his desk with a mighty thud and began browsing through the karmic tier for the health centre and what bonus it might entail. No conditional bonus for the small, rural hospital.

Except Samit’s karmic profile was fading right before his eyes. Disappearing completely.

But he was still right there in the crystal globe! Serenely smiling as he strolled back to the temple. Only one explanation left. Samit just went straight to Nirvana because of a tiny donation. It wasn’t even in the millions of baht.

Stupid lucky mortal.

This was the tenth case of human enlightenment he had supervised. Every now and then, without rhyme or reason, these people would cheat their way through the system. None of them even had the karma to be a deva. There was no fairness in the universe. Grinding his pearly teeth, Garmuti moved on to the next profile.

After a while came a familiar voice. “Greetings, Garmuti.”

It was Sikhala from the Karma Auditing Department.

“What do you want?” Garmuti had his head down, writing neatly with a red-clayed pencil. “Can’t you see that I’m busy here?”

“You forgot the anumodana merit again. Around a thousand humans under your care said it, I checked.”

Anumodana. A statement of congratulation for another’s merit-making, an appreciation of their good deed: +2 per utterance. The most pedantic of karmic gain.

Garmuti snapped his pencil, crunched the gold sheet in his hand.

“You preta! Why are you telling me now?” he yelled. “I need to redo them.”

His mind beamed with a psychic image of numbers:

Swore in Anger: -50
Total Soul Karma: 1,000,959

Oh no. No, no, no.

It always scared him how rapidly the Karma Machine evaluated the deeds of devas.

For the first time in a celestial-decade, the time it took for a mortal empire to rise, stagnate and become overtaken, he sweated. He could smell it, the mortal stench excreting out, clinging to his luminous skin. Even Sikhala wrinkled her nose.

But frustratingly, she smiled in pity, in her superiority, saying, “Breathe, Garmuti. Be mindful of your breath. Let anger flow over you like a stream of water. Do not be gripped by ephemeral emotions and desire. Fixate instead on their inherent illusory nature. If you let it consume you…”

She continued spouting unsolicited advice to someone drowning. If he fell below a million karmic points, he would descend to humanity, born as a prince, nobility or trust-fund baby. How could he live on their honey instead of soma, their wine instead of amrita? Icky, stinky human reproduction instead of the divine, fragrant coitus? Imagine the back pain, imagine the piss and shit, the horror of aging or giving birth. He gagged at the thought of having to wipe his own ass.

Garmuti wrested back control and bit down his panic. He smiled and returned gracefully, “I am sorry for my outburst. I will amend my mistakes as quickly as I can. Please don’t wait on my behalf. You will miss the party. I will file this myself.”

Showed Remorse: +10
Total Soul Karma: 1,000,969

Sikhala shook her head, resplendent headdress tinkling. “That is kind of you, but don’t worry. I will be here for you. We will ensure that these profiles are accurate as possible, for the sake of the mortals who rely on us.”

Garmuti bit his tongue to stop another outburst. Why must he be paired up with this smug devi? The snake Jarvi boasted that her auditor was so good she could brush aside the karmic sins of politicians and no one had ever come to report or punish her.

A celestial-hour of intense, undistracted suffering later, he carried his audited stacks of gold and leather, and swooped toward the hall of the Lord of Karma, Lord Yama. His fingers and shoulders were cramped from rewriting the karmic profiles. Bodily aches, another symptom of looming mortality. There was no such thing as making amendments on the karmic profiles, so he had had to fill them from scratch. Any strange formatting or unsystematic scribbles would make the Karma Machine burp out errors in the dogskin ledgers. When each soul faced judgement after death, the Lord of Karma must be able to announce their verdict with the stern, unhesitating gravity of a judge. If his ledgers made Lord Yama stumble, he would face a direct punishment from a superior, more severe than any automatic penalty. He might be born an ordinary human with inherited debt.

He dove toward a cave at the base of Mount Sumeru and zoomed through the melting diamond walls. Crystalline stalactites gradually gave way to carved formations that held dancing fires, spraying prismatic shades across the floor. In the hollow belly of the mountain gaped the Karmic Archive, shelves containing a near infinite number of dogskin ledgers, as many rows as there were varieties of organisms, as high as the history of the universe, as long as the breadth of the galaxy.

At the unseen centre of the archive, the Karma Machine was the heart of the cosmos. It hummed constantly, vibrating the archive, each oscillation arranging the atoms of the ledgers to record the deeds of all beings, occasionally overridden by the devas’ karmic reports. Ledgers were flying off the shelves in an unceasing stream, each summoning a death of a mortal, conjured up into the judgement hall of Lord Yama to be read and delivered the verdict of their reincarnations.

No one knew the workings of the Karma Machine nor its creation. They said it existed before the laws of gravity or time, its truth so fundamental, it outlasted entire universes. They said Mount Sumeru was formed when the elementary dust of the big bang coalesced around the Karma Machine. Even the Lord of Karma himself was subject to its rulings, a mere reader of its decrees.

Garmuti never swung around to see it.

Dodging the swirling books, Garmuti descended toward the humongous IN tray where an army of bookkeeping devas from a hundred worlds were delivering the deeds of sentient beings. The tray was more like a starry pit with its own gravitational pull, leading to the sorting pipes that run through the entire library, ending at the calculating heart of the Karma Machine. He dumped his documents in its general direction and flew out without another glance.

If he was lucky, he could make it to the Visakha Puja party in time.

Second Noble Truth:
Suffering Has a Cause

Under the careening vehicles of the celestial lords, Anodad Pond was a glittering expanse in the centre of the Himmapan Forest, where a single gulp of the lucid, glacial-blue waters could quench a mortal’s thirst for a year.

Garmuti arrived too late to witness the duel between Lord Garuda and a King Naga. The muscular torso of Lord Garuda was splattered with blood, and he leisurely pecked at the snakelike hood of the naga with his beak, the talons of his feet clutching at the scaled ravages of the serpent’s huge body. With each mighty arm around a giggling deva and devi, he was in conversation with Lord Indra, the emerald-skinned king of the celestials, among other dignitaries descended from Daowadueng Heaven.

Garmuti arrived too late to watch the apsara cabaret or a host of kinnaras performing their titillating burlesque. The latter was always his personal highlight, to see the tease of the female kinnarees’ winged, feathered thighs and backward-bending knees. Now their bejewelled bridles, girdles and bras were strewn all about the diamond-dewed grass. Hand in hand with deva or devi, the naked half-bird-half-humans flew giggling into private corners of clouds or canopies. Others had already begun copulating, some so fiercely that the branches broke and they fell squirming and moaning on the ground, or scattered their clouds in their aerial acrobatics across the green-streaked sky. Once the mythical kinnaras were spent, the devas were not yet satisfied so they drifted deeper into the woods in pairs, threes or fives. The musk of their orgy bloomed like thick, fragrant jasmine, their fluids and semen sweet as syrup. Devas mated only for pleasure.

Garmuti arrived too late for the once-a-century fruiting of the nareepol tree, where the gnarled ancient branches sprouted fruits in the shape of women. The ripe ones looked like curvaceous women, the unripe like girls on the brink of adolescence, the overripe like crones with fragile, wrinkled skin. But the tree was now bare, its base sprawling with devas murmuring with glazed eyes, their minds exploring the most distant reaches of the highest heaven. It was said that the riper the nareepol, the more potent the psychedelic effect, while the fresher ones lent the trip a sharper texture for the edgier devas who wanted to taste the cousin of pain.

He arrived in time only to see a few ugly, fanged asuras unenthusiastically twirling fire and lightning. A couple of instrumental gandharvas plucking trance tunes of the after-after-afterparty. And the devas who gathered on the grass chatting with each other, or the lame handful who listened quietly to Lord Buddha’s sermons in a distant corner, far, far away from the orgy, preached by a bodhisattva who had descended from an even higher heaven.

Of course, Sikhala was there, sitting with palms together at her chest in a wai, basking in the goodly light of dharma. She didn’t care about being late because the bodhisattva would be droning until Lord Sun’s gleaming chariot swung around Mount Sumeru.

She saw him arriving. He looked away, but too late, she was already flying over.

“I’m sorry. It was my fault for keeping you.” Sikhala approached with an apologetic smile. “Shall we go to the sermon?”

“Uhh, I’m thinking of going that way,” Garmuti said, already fleeing.

“You must not get too addicted to pleasure,” she called after him, “For it is only ephemeral fulfilment, a mere illusion of satiety that lasts only until the next desire takes hold and the cycle of suffering—”

“What took you so long?” called someone from a group of devas sitting on a mat. It was Jarvi waving him over. “Come join! My friend from the Karmic Justice Department got some goodies from the mortal world. They’re so quaint and exotic.”

Garmuti swooped in immediately and sat down with the assembled group. There were plates of grilled chicken, a rack of crispy pork, boiled prawns, tangerines, dragonfruits and bananas, bottles of rice wine and even a syrupy, fizzy red Fanta that tasted like a mockery of soma. Might as well have some small consolation, even if it was a meagre mortal’s meal.

His stomach growled. He tried his best to mask his horror at the return of the oldest mortal desire. Devas ate for pleasure, for gastronomic transcendence, not something so base as hunger or sustenance.

But before he realised it, he was gorging himself with the chicken, the pork, the prawns, their savoury, fishy stink assailing his delicate nose, juices running down his chin, but he could not help it.

“Oh my, are you…hungry?” said a beautiful devi in the group in bemusement. Her headdress was a filigreed, multi-tiered spire. She wore so many chest-chains they looked like a golden suit of armour clinking over her breasts, her neck heavy with jewellery. Her karmic score must be very high, maybe close to five million, verging on the Daowadueng Heaven. “Nice to meet you, my name is Shantarni.”

“Sorry,” he said, mouth full, chewing. “I’m Garmuti.”

“Indra bless, you eat like a human!” Jarvi exclaimed, daintily stripping fibres from tangerine flesh. She turned her slitted eyes toward her friend from the Karmic Justice Department. “How generous of you to share with us your bounty from the mortal world.”

He was one of those stoic deliverers of karma, strong-jawed, his headdress a neat and practical frame around his face. “Just a perk of the job. Mortals will do anything to avoid their karmic punishment. They gave these offerings to atone for their sins.”

“How very admirable of you to extend Lord Yama’s reach into the mortal world. They must be some truly heinous individuals that they were judged before they die. I wonder, did they still get the karma they deserve?”

The stony-faced punisher sliced his eyes at her. “Of course. Struck by lightning and smoking crisp in Lord Yama’s hall. How else could I clear the offerings through heaven’s customs otherwise? Eat up, newcomer. You work at the same place as Jarvi?”

Garmuti nodded, tried to swallow, and quickly realised he was not used to the greasy physicality of mortal’s food that lodged in his throat. He coughed, wheezed, and reached for the rice wine to wash it down, only to find that the cheap offering from the 7-Eleven convenience store burned his throat and nose. He spluttered, trying not to spatter bits of partially chewed food everywhere.

He reached for the crystal flask lying next to Jarvi. It contained the amrita. The devi made no move to help him, stifling her laughter with a hand over her mouth. “Don’t waste the amrita. We can’t just trick the asuras to help us churn the Ocean of Milk again!”

Instead, it was the high-ranking devi who fetched it, unstopped it and gave it to him.

He drank the elixir gratefully, the liquid ecstasy that awakened every tingling sensation in his mouth, washing away the offerings inflicted by rot and decay, overwhelming the profane taste with sheer bliss and he swallowed the mouthful, gasping, drooling mouth liquid. Saliva, that was what it was called. Another mark of mortals. He slurped it back into his mouth.

“You must excuse Garmuti, Lady Shantarni,” said Jarvi. “He has a soft spot for humans. He considers it a privilege to eat mortal foods. He takes such good care of his mortals, gives them so much attention to detail that he made sure to write up each karmic profile at least three times before submitting them to the Karma Machine.”

Garmuti stared at the sweetly smiling Jarvi and wondered how many karmic points were being deducted by her sardonic lies. It was a major offence, breaking the Five Precepts, for something so petty.

“That isn’t true, Lady Shantarni,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I never make a mistake because I don’t want to make the poor mortals suffer further with their existence.”

Told a Boldfaced Lie to One’s Superior: -750
Conditional: To Save Face and Avoid Shame: -100
Total Soul Karma: 1,000,119

Wait, he had way more to lose. Why was he being pulled into Jarvi’s game? Even the devi was staring at him in pleasant surprise. Was this her plan?

But Shantarni smiled at him, nodding. “That is a noble sentiment, Garmuti. Would you accompany me to get some soma? I believe I also have another flask of amrita in my personal storage.”

“I-I would be honoured.” Blinking, he stood up and followed the swaying saunter of the devi. Blades of grass sang against their feet. Strange that she chose to walk but he appreciated the rhythm of her buttocks, the lustrous silk about her thighs, its many slits whispering hints of what they concealed. He cast a backward glance to witness the shards of Jarvi’s broken smile, scattered about her face. He sniggered.

Felt Satisfaction at Another’s Pain: -10
Total Soul Karma: 1,000,109

He grimaced just in time for Shantarni to turn to him. She gave him a bemused look. “I believe we are not properly introduced. I am the assistant of Lord Vessavana. His personal secretary, some might say, I am the devi stationed in front of his office.”

He gaped. “Lord Vessavana? One of the Four Heavenly Kings?”

“That very same. And you work at the Thailand Division of the Karma Calculation Department.”

“Yes…?” he said, suddenly engulfed by an impending dread. How did she know? They had moved away from the hearing of Jarvi when Shantarni turned toward him. She was incredibly beautiful and he tried to not look at her pink nipple, peeking between the golden chains.

Her eyes swallowed him in their azure depths. “You are close to falling.”

“How did you know?” Garmuti resisted the urge to smell his armpits. He had powdered himself with perfumed marble dust before coming to the party. How could his mortal-stink leak out?

“It’s your jewellery, among other things. They are becoming tarnished. Darkened. How many more karmic points before you fall, I wonder?”

Garmuti stiffened, his voice coming out as a strangled cry. “Not many. Not many at all. What should I do?”

“When is your next karmic compensation?”

“When Lord Jupiter’s stag aligns with Lord Mercury’s elephant… I will not last that long.”

“You poor karmic counters of heaven, carrying the cogs of the cosmos. How little are you regarded…” She made a thoughtful sound. “I can help you.”

He felt ready to grovel, to cling to her feet so he wouldn’t slip between the cracks of heaven. “What can I do? I’ll do anything.”

“I want you to help my friend. She was a devi once but now her soul has been born as a man. Let’s call him Opa. Even now, he is so pretty. I want you to bring their soul back to Catumaharajika Heaven and I will spare you any karma I can.”

They continued walking but might as well have been floating, as he no longer felt his legs. The gravity of her request took a long time to find its way into his skull.

“You want me to alter their karmic profile? But I can’t commit anymore sin. I’ll fall before I can deliver the documents.”

“I have prepared a major offering platter to give to Lord Indra on the behalf of Lord Vessavana on this Visakha Puja Day. At my discretion, I may add a commendation to a deva of exceptional virtue to receive a share of merit. Just don’t forget to say anumodana to receive your share.”

Garmuti could feel sweat breaking out of his skin. “What about the Auditing Department?”

She leaned closer and the pearly aura of her purity bathed over him, her breath smelling like newly bloomed lotus. “I hold the seal of Lord Vessavana. Do you think they’ll have the nerve to question an officiated document?”

His face felt hot. His crotch felt hot. “But the Karma Machine…”

Her lips brushed his ear like a feather falling from a higher heaven. “It will work. The Karma Machine relies on inputs; it is more fallible than you think. Trust me, I have done this before.”

He swallowed and thought how he would fill the gold sheet with a deed he’d never observed from the crystal ball. He also had to find out what Opa’s real name was. His soul might be under his care. If not, he would probably have to slip a fake profile sheet into some other deva’s pile with the official stamp from Shantarni and…

Contemplating on Committing a Cosmic Fraud (Counting): -3, -6…
Total Soul Karma: 1,000,100

“Deal!” Garmuti blurted, his heart fluttering at the rapidly accumulating sin.

Shantarni’s smile could light up stars with its radiance. “Excellent. Now don’t move, don’t even think. I shall complete the offering immediately.”

As she flew toward Lord Indra, Garmuti stood in meditation for the first time in what must have been forever, forcing himself to stop his thoughts from roaming. When he saw Lord Indra extending his hand to accept Shantarni’s offering of a golden wax statue, exquisitely carved in the shape of a lion-elephant, Garmuti put his palms together in a wai and whispered, “Anumodana.”

Mentioned in a Divine Karmic Offering: +100,000
Visakha Puja Bonus (x0.7): +70,000
Total Soul Karma: 1,170,100

The influx of karma was like a shower of auroral rays, purging away all impurities, collapsing his knees in a crash of pleasure. He shivered in his new radiant skin, rendered clean with the karmic worth of a monk’s life dedicated to sermons and meditation. That was much more than his karmic compensation.

Oh, he was so back.

Third Noble Truth:
Suffering Can End

Back under the sparkling chandelier of his office, Garmuti found good news and bad news.

Luckily, he was indeed in charge of Opa’s account.

But watching over his shoulder was sanctimonious Sikhala. The kind of auditor who would question outstanding items, even when verified by the seal of Lord Vessavana.

He had to be subtle with this…adjustment.

Rigging some conditional bonuses in Opa’s profile would be the easiest way to go about it. Easiest meaning also the least amount of sin being inflicted upon himself. Maliciously tinkering with the cosmic system would set him back 20,000 points, whereas maliciously submitting significantly altered record would be 55,000 points. What was the point of ruining his reputation if he ended up right where he was, perched on the edge of falling, or worse?

He found himself thinking a lot about Shantarni. He realised he missed her. It would be forever until the next party. So, he asked her to meet him in the Himmapan Forest during his break, claiming to want to run some ideas by her, but really only so he could see her again.

“I am scared of being caught,” Garmuti confessed while walking through the dappled glades under the purple beam of Lord Saturn soaring on his tiger mount. No karmic deduction, because it was not thoroughly a lie. “My auditor is a snitch. The document won’t get through to the Karma Machine and they will find out your involvement through the seal. We will be reborn as earthworms.”

Shantarni sighed. “You can be mysterious with instructions for the Karma Machine. Influence its calculations.”

“How so?” he asked, despite already knowing. He loved hearing her talk.

“Haven’t you implemented bodhisattva-lifetimes before? You can add a karmic multiplier across the entire lifetime, multiplied by one to ten. I believe it works retroactively too, converting an ordinary life into context for enlightenment.”

“Does this bypass the auditor?”

“Don’t you know anything about your job? Bodhisattva-lifetimes are divined by the oracles at the Department of Fates. It’s beyond the authority of the Karma Auditing Department. Just forge the paperwork and stamp the seal. Quick, before Opa dies. It’s already been ten years on earth and I’ve sent him a dream prophecy, a vision of the Avici Hell. He’s doing whatever he can so he won’t be damned. He’s already ordained as a monk.”

Perhaps he had made himself appear too stupid, so he shifted to a different topic. “There’s something I have always wondered. Why can’t we tune the Karma Machine so the mortals’ karma is displayed like the deva?”

She stared at him in disbelief. “Do you trust the mortals with that knowledge? Heaven will be overcrowded if they can game the system! It is bad enough that Lord Buddha gave away the Five Precepts and Eightfold Path after his enlightenment. Honestly, I am surprised they aren’t following his teachings much more closely.”

“But why do we need to work for these humans? We’re higher, wiser, better-looking. Doesn’t the Karma Machine already judge everything that happens? Why do we need to double-check everything?”

“Only some things have intrinsic moral values. The Buddha of each cycle also cultivated a slightly different tradition of Buddhism. So some things are relativistic. For example, in this aeon, we have sacred sites, specific mantras, anumodana, and so on. These karmic benefits are to be calculated by hand. If you’ve been a deva as long as I have, you’ll know that the universe is vast and ancient. Humanity is not the only species with a high potential for enlightenment. Now I really have to go. Lord Vessavana will be looking for me.”

She took off, flying toward the golden palace on the cloud, visible even from the base of Mount Sumeru. That whole conspiratorial conversation cost 2,000 karmic points, but for him, it was worth it.

After that break, which took an entire mortal-year, Garmuti returned to the office to learn that Sikhala was gone. Ascended. Not just ascending to a higher heaven either but ascended. Gone without a trace. To Nirvana.

This had never happened before. Or it did and no one ever spoke of it. The whole office pretended nothing happened, too envious to acknowledge the occasion. When Garmuti asked Jarvi, she muttered through her teeth, “Good for her. Anumodana.”

It was so unfair that such an obnoxious devi could ascend while hardworking devas like him had to toil until the end of time. Surely, Nirvana must be a random lottery draw from some higher heaven. There was no mention of it in any orientation training, but then again, neither were the fifth and sixth heavens. Only myths that they existed. None of the devas seemed to know much about Nirvana either, or they were keeping the knowledge a secret.

To be fair, if he ever found a way to Nirvana, he wouldn’t tell a soul either.

The replacement for Sikhala was a round-faced deva that Garmuti liked instantly. By way of introduction, he asked Garmuti to always submit his profiles before Lord Moon came around Mount Sumeru. “I must get to this apsara cabaret at this celestial club,” he said. “Come with me after work tonight. I’ll introduce you to my favourite dancers. Their lap dances, oh Indra, they are divine!”

Garmuti was locked in. Moving like a blur. His red-clayed pencil flying over sheet after sheet. A policymaker who was so responsible with her budget allocation that Garmuti would need a library of reference books to go through her spreadsheet. Why should she get extra karma since it’s her job anyway? He wouldn’t get any for his trouble. Skip. Now a CEO who donated a million baht in crypto to join an exclusive Michelin-starred dinner reserved for top ten donors. What was the campaign for? Who cares. A donation was a donation, a nice, simple conversion. Congratulations on a well-earned 100,000 karma!

In the wink of a single mortal-day, mortal-day, he had all his accounts audited and verified, including Opa’s documents, guaranteed with ten times karmic multiplier. He had never finished his shift so quickly before. It was dizzying to be freed from the tyranny of Sikhala. It was the right of every being to be emancipated from office slavery. Lord Sun’s chariot still wheeled on this side of Mount Sumeru as he dumped the stack into the IN tray.

156 Instances of Negligence in Cosmic Duty: -78,000
Total Soul Karma: 1,079,045

Malicious Forgery of Documents: -5,000
Total Soul Karma: 1,074,045

Malicious Abuse of Bodhisattva-Lifetime: -25,000
Total Soul Karma: 1,049,045

He almost fell into the vacuum hole himself. It might’ve been better that way. An eyewatering 500 karma per error? He didn’t know an error cost this much. He’d never made a mistake before. Sikhala wouldn’t let him.

Over a hundred thousand karma, gone in a blink of an eye… He deserved a treat for such woe, he decided, as he meekly joined his new auditor in the revelry.

Within moments, Garmuti forgot what had bothered him. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t been to this celestial club before. The wondrous lights, the gandharvas’ tunes, the apsaras’ hips and bosoms. Garmuti laughed at the glorious sights, just as they blinded an ascetic next to him who was visiting the realm in his astral body, shattering his jhana meditation, ejecting him back to his mortal body, dooming his decades of abstinence for spiritual purity.

But despite the erotic excess on display, Garmuti could only think about the figure of a single body, caught in glimpses and gasps, barely covered by those silks and golden chains.

He left the club early and flew to the Himmapan Forest to collect a spectrum of flowers from the polychromatic vines.

It took much longer than he thought. He kept on getting distracted by the bathing kinnarees.

When he was done, his next shift was soon starting. With a dazzling bouquet in hand, Garmuti waited awkwardly in a queue to seek an audience with the secretary of Lord Vessavana. The whole hallway might be made of solid gold interspersed with diamond veins, but there was nothing to pass the time in the gleaming palace except meta-dimensional murals and elevator music. By the time earth’s oceans had risen by half a centimeter, he was finally the next in the line, and already, the queue stretched behind him all the way through the corridor. How many contracts and favours was Shantarni juggling?

She sat radiant behind a grand marble desk in the antechamber, curtained by stacks of paperwork, dwarfed by the massive door to the throne room behind her. She looked exhausted, stamping sheet after sheet.

Garmuti flew into the chamber, arms wide and flexing to fill out his bicep bangles, announcing, “Lady Shantarni, I have done what you’ve asked!”

She watched three towers of documents collapse from the gust of his arrival. “I know. Where have you been?”

Her tone made him shiver. Weakly, he offered the bouquet. “I’ve been collecting these flowers for you.”

With a cursory smile, she put it aside on her papers. “You put the highest grade of bodhisattva-lifetime for Opa, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Only the best for your friend! Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“No. Well, it depends, doesn’t it?” She rubbed her forehead. “Didn’t you look at his life before you submitted the paperwork? As a monk, he started going on an international enlightenment tour, giving sermons on the national TV of a dozen countries. He set up charities to help climate refugees and war orphans. He was so handsome he converted hundreds of new Buddhists. He was close to become a bodhisattva without your help, would have been reincarnated as a deva. But now because of your intervention, he’s reborn in Daowadueng Heaven.”

“Oh.” Garmuti adjusted his headdress. How could he know that humans could go to such lengths of virtue? Frankly he didn’t even know what Opa looked like. “But your friend must remember you now, right? Can’t he visit you in Catumaharajika even if we can’t visit them?”

She shook her head, sighing. “Time is different between realms. A minute there is an hour here. And she was born as an attendant serving the palace of the gods, assigned to Lord Shiva. She can’t come and go as she pleases. I always have to wait to be in her company. Not to mention that she is a higher order of devi, closer to a deity. The next time we meet it won’t be the same. What will she think of me?” She put her head in both her hands, peering at him between her fingers. “Do you understand any of this?”

Did he look blank to her? He resummoned his disappointment for missing the Visakha Puja party and nodded mournfully.

“No, you don’t get it.” Shantarni stared at him now in a half-veiled-light way that made his heart rock. “Have you ever truly loved someone?”

“Of course. I was married in past lives too, you know.”

“You really don’t get it,” she remarked, but her face had changed. She seemed to be thinking. He met her eyes, blue as Anodad Pond under Lord Venus’s passage, and then she gave him a smile that cracked the diamond surface of his heart. “But perhaps I can teach you. Meet me after work.”

Arrived Late to Cosmic Duty: -1,000
17 Instances of Negligence in Cosmic Duty: -8,500
Total Soul Karma: 1,039,545

Garmuti did his best to be thorough with the profiles but his brain was mired by her smile, so distracted by desire he couldn’t sit still.

He had dated hundreds of times, if not thousands, both deva and devi, but none of them had taken his whole attention like Shantarni. She was the most beautiful devi he had ever seen and he felt like a mortal yearning for heaven. Her presence neutered the delights of divine sweetmeats, drained amrita of its savour, turned the thunderous re-enactment of Ramayana drab and dreary in comparison to her side profile beside him. He imagined their flight back to her abode, hand in hand, and the rest of the theatre became anguish.

Was this finally…love?

Her home was much like his, a golden pavilion on the cloud, except his view was the emptiness of the Cosmic Ocean and hers was the Himmapan Forest, bathed by the perfumes of endless blossoming, a constant, fragrant mist. They alighted on the edge of her bed and she told him to wait as she climbed under the gossamer canopy. Garmuti swallowed as her lithe silhouette positioned herself, chains chiming with each movement. She didn’t need to get changed. There wasn’t much to begin with.

“You may come in.”

She luxuriated on purple and gold sheets, back partially arched, legs frustratingly crossed. Her eyes like slitted night, her lips parted, cooing:

“Can I ask you something, Garmuti?”

“Yes, anything,” he gasped.

“Will you cheat heaven again for me?”

“Yes, easy!” Some of the golden chains had fallen in the valley between her breasts.

“Will you use your powerful office to lift my profile high into Daowadueng Heaven?”

“Of course, yes. Anything for you.” Slips of silk spilled around her thighs, a maddening strip covering her crotch.

“Thank you, Garmuti,” she purred. “Well, you’ve disappointed me with false hopes. Now you’d better make it up to me.”

She opened her legs, the little silk falling, revealing an orchid that bloomed more beautifully than any that adorned the Himmapan Forest. Garmuti crawled toward her on his hands and knees, like a mortal toward food. Yes, that was how it felt. That same hunger. He stroked her smooth, supple thighs, ran his hands along the pearly, unblemished skin. Her jasmine musk made his crotch tighten, so did her delicious sigh, her flushed face, long lashes encrusted with glittering gems.

But her eyes. They were fixated at him, watching.

“One moment,” she said, sitting up, folding her legs.

Garmuti swallowed. “Huh?”

“I changed my mind. Let’s continue later.”

“What? Why?”

She turned aside, already drifting away. “A sudden thought occurred to me. It makes me uncertain.”

“About what, the fraud? I told you I will do it. Don’t you trust me?”

“It’s not about trust but proof. Can you do it? You might fall before you make it happen.”

“Of course, I can do it! Come back.”

But she had already left the canopy, a delightful figure behind the veil. “Prove it to me. Do me the favour first, then we may continue.”

He had a fistful of bedsheet in his hand. “Why do you want to go to Daowadueng so badly anyway?”

“Oh?” The shadow of her head angled back at him. “Well, I suppose that’s where my soulmate is. You know her. You lifted her there yourself. Make it up to me.”

“Soulmate?” Garmuti seized his chest, a twinge from the crack she’d left on his diamond heart. All this time, she belonged to someone else. She had just been playing with him?

“No! I’m done. Find yourself another fool.” He stormed out of the gossamer sanctuary, ripping through it, and streaked out of her abode like a comet, flying across the sky with such speed his skin warmed red from air friction. The denied pleasure choked his balls. It also smothered his chest, drowned his heart, flooded his throat, but could not overflow because devas may weep, but not cry.

In all his heavenly existence, he had never felt anything so close to pain.

Fourth Noble Truth:
There is a Path to End Suffering

No more.

No more of this endless chase. The wishing and their unfulfillment. No more suffering from unmet desires.

Garmuti was so sick and tired of love, of the humiliation. He wanted escape. He wanted peace. He yearned for Nirvana. He didn’t belong in this lower heaven.

His life had also become a limbo of numbers, a blur on the torturous grind. He focused his attentions on his bookkeeping to avoid falling. He missed Sikhala. Life was hard when you couldn’t trust your auditor to do a good job. His karmic compensations could barely keep up with his mistakes. If only Lord Shiva would go on a rampage to scour the world and drive humanity extinct. Then he wouldn’t have to work anymore. But unfortunately, the gods had mellowed out.

A long time ago, he had heard a bodhisattva say that Nirvana existed beyond even the highest of the Six Heavens. But to ascend to Daowadueng Heaven, a deva needed at least five million karmic points. He had no idea how much merit would be required to get to Yama, Tusita, and the other two unnamed heavens beyond.

But a bodhisattva. They would know the way. That was how Sikhala did it, right?

When Lord Gautama Buddha was enlightened, he visited Daowadueng Heaven to give a grand sermon, opening the eyes of all divine beings to the possibility of Nirvana. Following this example, a rotation of bodhisattvas sat cross-legged in one corner of the break room, observing the bustle with the infuriating serenity of office shrinks.

The bodhisattva smiled at Garmuti beatifically as he approached, shaved head and orange robe resplendent. Out of the corner of his eyes, Garmuti spied his colleagues gathered around the soma cooler, jerking a thumb at him, already gossiping. The bodhisattva took one glimpse into his soul and spoke, “It is more difficult for a blessed deva to achieve Nirvana than a lowly human because—”

“Come on, that’s impossible,” Garmuti interrupted. “We are higher beings, with higher minds and better cognition. We are also much better looking, and stronger. They aspire to be like us…” He continued ranting for an entire lunar cycle, finishing angrily with, “…and why am I not good enough for her?”

The bodhisattva listened with a mother’s love and patience before speaking again. “It is more difficult for a blessed deva to achieve Nirvana than a lowly human because a human walks the middle path between pleasure and pain. As Lord Buddha once said, enlightenment comes neither through self-indulgence or self-denial, but an awareness of desire as the originator of suffering. The sooner you are aware of this ultimate truth, the sooner you can be released from the defilement of desire.”

Garmuti thought about it. “So you’re saying that the human experience is the secret to enlightenment. Why didn’t you say so from the beginning?”

He flew back to his desk. Not to work, of course, but to slip into a state of meditation to relive his past lives as a mortal.

Did anyone think he would spend millennia in mindful meditation, each moment denying all the heavenly pleasures that lay within literal reach?

There had to be an easier way.

Most of his past lives were the uneventful living of billionaires where it was logical to hedge one’s bets and bankroll his/her/their way into a better afterlife. It was altruistically fashionable to donate an annual ten million baht toward the Siriraj Hospital for tax refunds. The mortals Garmuti had been didn’t know it then, but Siriraj Hospital provided one of the biggest karmic bonuses in the world, because it was endorsed by all the great Buddhist institutions.

But the life he found the most interesting was that of a tech entrepreneur who had changed the world. Garmuti had been an ambitious American who converted to Buddhism when his soul was besieged with an existential crisis. Like all builders of empires, shady conducts hounded him, leading him to be knocked a few rungs down the reincarnation ladder after he died from cancer.

Day after day, especially during office hours, Garmuti went about his routine in a half trance, partially reliving his past life to absorb the wonderful and complex mind of this great inventor. Initially, it was inspiring to view the world in search for the potential it could become, but soon his thoughts became plagued with the burdens of a protagonist: to disrupt, to innovate, to synergise. In such a state, he became deeply dissatisfied with the monotony of his life as a deva. He roamed like a frustrated predator, seeking work processes to streamline. The anumodana tradition became a pain point that entered his scrutiny. So archaic and arcane, it was incredible no one had thought to create a fix to save millions of accumulated bookkeeping hours.

If the Karma Machine worked like a quantum computer that used ledgers as the database to process all sentient souls, surely an app could be implemented to access and alter the data in real time.

That was how Garmuti came up with the Anumodana Tax.

In principle, anumodana was a simple unconditional rule that required no supervision. No matter the context, the occasion, the timing, as long as anumodana was uttered in attribution to a good deed, the speaker would receive +2 karmic points.

If nothing else, his brief relationship with Shantarni had made him realise that the edicts of the Karma Machine were not preordained but alterable. Garmuti could rewrite this quaint tradition of the current aeon into a universal law of the Karma Machine.

So efficient! Who cared about loopholes? If someone was smart enough to find them, they should be rewarded for it.

Contemplation on Committing a Cosmic Fraud(?): -258
Total Soul Karma: 1,014,120

Now, imagine if Garmuti got a karmic commission as the patented inventor of this app. There were around 100 million Theravada Buddhists in the world. If half of them said anumodana daily… No, actually, more like 10 percent were so devout. That would be around +20,000,000 karmic points transferred per mortal-day, +7,300,000,000 per mortal-year. Mortal-year. All that karmic merit changing hands. If only he could tap a tiny fraction of it.

Garmuti leaned back in his crystal ergonomic chair, grinning. And the best thing? It would not even be considered a sin since he was improving the lives of all devas and mortals.

Self-Delusion from Pride: -5
Total Soul Karma: 1,014,115

All he needed was Lord Vessavana’s seal…

Honestly, it could be the seal of any of the Four Heavenly Kings. He could swoop into one of their secretaries’ offices and simply ask for the permission to shift the ethical foundations of the universe.

Who was he kidding? Not only would they punish him to be reborn as a stray dog, they would also steal the idea for themselves.

Only she would listen. He would have to play into her hands again.

But then again, he might also finally get laid.

On one of his slower days, he wrote the code for the app on a stack of gold sheets and flew to the palace of Lord Vessavana. Three crops of rice had grown and perished in the mortal world before he was granted an audience with Shantarni.

She did not look up from her paperwork as he flew up to her desk. Or even when he bowed with his hands in front of his chest in a wai.

“I’d like to file a patent,” he announced.

“What?”

Did he really utter a human concept? He was about to curse himself until he realised that it was also a stupid human concept that would be the tool for his ascension. “I mean, I would like to propose a way we can both gain passive karma to ascend to the Daowadueng Heaven.”

She was looking at him now, feigning disinterest with eyes like glacial ice. Still heartachingly beautiful.

“I propose to add a new universal law into the Karma Machine.” He showed her the neat stack of gold leaves, the codes for the app. “Uttering anumodana under the right conditions shall result in an intrinsic karmic merit. There shall be no need for any manual input by us devas.”

There were ripples beneath her radiant face, crooking her eyebrow. Flickers of a scheme. She said, “Tell me more.”

“As a patented inventor, I shall receive an infinitesimal point-zero-one percent of each karma received by these transactions.”

 He had already made his calculation. He would receive +730,000 passive karma per mortal-year. That meant he would reach Daowadueng Heaven in six mortal-years, a mere celestial moment. The aeon would barely blink its eye before he was soaring through all the layers of heaven to arrive at Nirvana.

“You may,” Shantarni said, “As long as you add my name for half your share of karma too.”

“Already done.” He flicked through the stacks to show her the relevant line of code. Signifiers for Garmuti and Shantarni, next to each other, each reaping half the skimming. “All I need now is your seal.”

They exchanged a smile. Had they been lovers and rivals in some other reincarnation, linked through the machinations of karma? Could a soul have more than one soulmate?

“One more condition then,” Shantarni said. “End my share at 10,000,000. You may take your full cut from then on.”

“Why?”

“Did you see the line of devas waiting to strike a deal? Lord Vessavana is too busy pleasing the deities of Daowadueng, so there is only me. My karmic growth is stagnant as I try to maintain all the contracts and favours. I can only balance my losses with my gains. It is the burdensome power of my station. I want to sit comfortably in Daowadueng and never fear of falling back to this hell ever again.”

“Don’t you want to go to Nirvana with me?”

“Some say it already exists within one’s heart.” She smiled and stamped the glistening red seal.

“So, do you want to grab dinner tonight?”

“I’m busy,” she said, handing back the documents.

“Maybe later then?”

“I will be busy.”

Rejection stung less when you were soaring on karma. After filing the document, his aura intensified with every passing day. His headdress bloomed an additional tier and gemstones sprouted among its nooks and crannies. His skin brightened, his eyes became opalescent and his physique grew even more sculpted and perfect, accentuated by golden chains and bangles. Finally, his colleagues began to notice.

“What are you up to these days?” Jarvi said, scowling. “Why are you so luminous all of a sudden?”

“I saw the light of Lord Buddha’s dharma.” Garmuti smiled with shining teeth. “You should try it sometime.”

Even the penalty from the lie didn’t hurt as much.

Total Soul Karma: 5,000,000
Ascending to Tavatimsa Heaven

Tavatimsa? Oh of course, that was the universal name for Daowadueng.

For Garmuti, ascension felt like becoming translated into rays of prismatic light, streaking up the height of Mount Sumeru like photons cast from the sun. He was reformed on the cloud at the peak of the universal mountain, upon which stood glorious Trai Trueng, the City of Deities, where music flowed as naturally as air. At its centre was Lord Indra’s Palace, as great as the tallest mountain on earth, composed entirely of diamonds, pearls, lapis lazuli and other gemstones.

Below him, the palaces of the Four Heavenly Kings and their departments were like toys. The Nine Celestial Bodies were balls of coloured lights. He could see the Cosmic Wall that circled the edge of the Cosmic Ocean, keeping the water contained like a gigantic tub. Scattered about like pebbles in a pond were hundreds of mortal worlds.

For the next few weeks? Months? It was hard to tell the time with the sun and moon orbiting under his feet. Garmuti spent his existence as a servant scurrying about the dazzling hallways of Lord Indra’s palace, polishing every bejewelled surface or doing the bidding of the deities who strode the halls. Shantarni had become a handmaiden within the palace and three times they had crossed paths as underlings running between chores. She ignored him completely, always walking hand in hand with another devi, always giggling, exuding rays of sunshine between them. Her soulmate. The fire of jealousy burned within Garmuti’s chest but he reminded himself that it would not be long before he would ascend past her.

He didn’t need a soulmate where he was heading.

Total Soul Karma: 50,000,000
Ascending to Yama Heaven

This heaven existed so far above Mount Sumeru that everything was pitch-black. Mount Sumeru, the Cosmic Ocean and the orbiting Celestial Lords, they were reduced to one tiny dot below him. His feet touched the soft wispy threads of space dust. Upon them grew a sea of star-flowers sown across the whole sky. Sometimes they bloomed bright like tiny pockets of day, other times their petals folded to hold secret their illumination like a shy moon.

He and the other denizens sojourned like pilgrims in the dark, eating these specks of light. The blooming star-flowers tasted like summer memories with your mother at the end of a holiday, the closed ones like your final nights in the arms of your child. With each careful step, they gave birth to newborn stars.

Total Soul Karma: 500,000,000
Ascending to Tusita Heaven

The heaven remained black as a void, but everything and everyone was radiant with shades of swirling nebulae. These were the luminous bodies of bodhisattva who remained, not yet departing to Nirvana in order to guide the hapless souls on earth. It was also the realm of future Buddhas, infinite souls in repose, waiting to be born whenever Buddhism became forgotten by the mortal world.

This entire heaven echoed with the timbral sermon of the universe, teaching impermanence to every atom in his body. Garmuti was a deity here, an equal to the legendary figures around him. He didn’t expect them to be so boring. All they did was meditate, engage in debates or outshine each other in serene competitions of charity to lesser beings.

But the karmic multiplier was transcendental, so Garmuti made sure to follow the bodhisattvas in every worship, every sermon, every visitation to the realms of mortals and devas. Anything to ascend past this place. He might not fit in here but there would be better heavens beyond.

Total Soul Karma: 5,000,000,000
Ascending to Nimmanarati Heaven

He gathered form within a palace made from pulsar glow. Neutron stars were its foundations and red giants were its lights. Electromagnetic beams weaved within his mind and he knew that he could conjure anything he wished with a mere thought.

A vial of amrita, two vials of amrita, an earthenware jug of soma, an earthenware jug of amrita, a ripe nareepol fruit, an overripe nareepol, two female kinnarees, a male kinnara, a flock of twenty male and female kinnaras, a levitating bed of magnetically charged nebulae, a likeness of Shantarni, a bed with purple and gold sheets with a gossamer canopy, a dozen deva and devi servants, a jacuzzi of superheated and super-compressed water, a mirror made from a shaved block of diamond, a prismatic flute made from a crystal stalactite within the hall of karma, a gandharva to play it, a thousand human monks chanting the Metta Sutra prayer, a mortal platter of grilled chicken and crispy pork, two unripe nareepol fruits, a likeness of Shantarni, a likeness of Shantarni, a likeness of Shantarni, a likeness of Sikhala, a likeness of Lord Indra and a likeness of Lord Garuda, a vial of amrita, a jasmine flower, a bee, a jasmine tree, a patch of soil, a teardrop to fall from Garmuti’s own eye, an ocean, a ray of light, a gust of air, a barren planet, a forest, a sun, a moon, birds, sea creatures, land animals, a human male, a human female.

Total Soul Karma: 100,000,000,000
Ascending to Paranimmitavasavatti Heaven

Here, he had no form. He did not understand the space he occupied. He only sensed a host of deities that existed to worship him. They knew his desires and willed them into being for him to enjoy. His every whim, every want, fulfilled before he even knew them.

It was a state of unceasing pleasure. A drowning churn of ecstasy. Showers of matter and electromagnetism. An unending stream of delicacies. Orgasms after transcendental orgasms. Without physical limits of satiety or habituation, without a heart that could burst or a brain that could melt, there was no cessation of pleasure. No opportunity for a decline that would provide a contrast to dim the pleasure before. It was an eternity of peaks, crushed to a plateau.

Time lost meaning in its entirety. Garmuti could not even form thoughts. Dimly, he perceived the grinning Lord Mara, greatest demon of desire who once sought to tempt the Buddha with his armies and daughters. This was his realm upon the highest sensuous heaven. A deity predicted Garmuti’s desire and showed him the Soul Karma counter, continuing to rise: 999,000,000,000.

Nirvana was within reach! Let’s goooo!

Total Soul Karma: 999,999,999,999
MAXIMUM KARMIC CAP REACHED

VALUE ERROR

ERROR: INTEGER OVERFLOW

TROUBLESHOOTING

PLEASE WAIT

PLEASE WAIT

RESETTING

EXISTENCE RENEWED

RESTORING KARMIC PROFILE

FORMATTING SOUL SETTINGS

Total Soul Karma: -999,999,999,999
Descending to Avici Hell

It was a place without respite. Without waves. Without ceasing. Only flames. The deepest of hells for matricides, patricides, killers of bodhisattvas and harmers of Buddhas.

Garmuti dwelled in a naked body, packed into a cramped box of red-hot metal. He was impaled by so many iron spears that he could not move. Roasted from outside and within. Trapped in the box without air.

He died within seconds. Immediately he awoke in the same body, to suffer again. And again. And again. Until his karmic debt was repaid.

Like in the highest heaven, he could not form thoughts in this deepest hell. Nor could he keep track of time. Every moment of birth was a shock, the physical limit of agony. Death too was writhing, his final moment dreading the reemergence of consciousness and pain.

He knew he had to atone, but he could not remember his crimes. He did not know what he did or who he was, the slate of his past lives wiped clean.

The only trace to cling upon his soul was the karma he carried.

Total Soul Karma: -999,999,998,999

All eight hell realms shared the same rule. After one hell-year, the sufferer may be restored 1,000 points of karma.

Like all condemned souls, Garmuti screamed for Nirvana and the cessation of suffering.

“Where the Hell Is Nirvana?” copyright © 2025 by Champ Wongsatayanont
Art copyright © 2025 by Wenjing Yang

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Where the Hell Is Nirvana?

Champ Wongsatayanont

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Where the Hell Is Nirvana?

Champ Wongsatayanont

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The post Where the Hell Is Nirvana? appeared first on Reactor.

Original Fiction Paranormal

Phantom View

A disabled son care-taking for a disabled father tries to understand the mysterious blur haunting them.

Illustrated by Hokyoung Kim

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Edited by Jonathan Strahan

By John Wiswell

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Published on October 22, 2025

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A disabled son care-taking for a disabled father tries to understand the mysterious blur haunting them.

Novelette | 7,580 words

The app has to ask me to tag him before I finally realize I have a stalker.

It’s a random photo in my history, from three years ago when I moved out here to help. Me and Dad sitting next to the window in matching Steelers jerseys, horribly backlit by too much morning sun. A rusty orange-and-black blurry streak runs down the left of the photo, blotting out most of the living room, like a big exclamation point. A square on the app wants me to tag the blur.

“Dad, does this look like a face to you?”

I hold my phone out to Dad’s face. His eyes are glassy, once bright blues now like still waters. His breathing remains measured, as it has since he woke up this morning. He’s passive in his bed, his eyes not even trained on the game on the TV. If he recognizes that I’m showing him my phone, he doesn’t express it, and he definitely doesn’t recognize the blur.

The blur doesn’t have shoulders. I pinch to zoom. It is all oranges and browns with flecks of black, like an iodine stain over reality. Maybe you could call some of those features a chin. That’s it. This app sucks. I should download something better.

This is the first time I’ve actually looked through this folder on my phone. I always take pictures meaning to look at them, and then never do. I swipe through the tile view, meaning to get to the photos of Dad’s old paintings. I want to get them scanned in as high resolution as possible before anything goes into storage.

Another blur catches my eye. I click on one tile. It’s a nearly beautiful photo of Dad, sitting in a wicker chair that we sold off last year, gazing out a window. Well, not a real window. A painting of a window. That painting was Mom’s favorite before she left. It was so realistic that we used to joke that a bird would’ve flown into it. The smile on Dad’s face in this picture, the wrinkles contoured with gray stubble? Looking at him makes my chest feel like fishing line being reeled in.

The app asks me to tag him.

And to tag the person next to him.

Another rusty orange blur runs down the right side of the photo, darkness leaking from nowhere, like it’s trying to block the lamplight from casting onto the painting. Before I zoom in, I know it’s too similar. The app asks me to tag the same non-face, with the same shape like a tensed jaw.

My phone sucks, but I don’t remember it sucking this badly. I scroll, and there are blurs in a bunch of the photos in the gallery. Nothing on my trip to Boston last, which I photographed the hell out of. It feels like the blurs are mostly here in Dad’s apartment.

No, wait. There’s one in the hospital. That day Dad and I visited to donate one of Dad’s old paintings. I always talked about what an amazing painter Dad was, and eventually the nurses begged for one of his pieces. That was a great day. There is Dad in his wheelchair, with me behind him, and Dr. Cantor alongside the two sweetest nurses from the entire hospital, Barbara and Barbara-Anne. All of us were clustered around Dad’s painting on the wall.

The app asks me to tag each of us.

And to tag the blur standing between Barbara-Anne and Dad. I see the jaw before I even see the box asking me to tag it.

“Dad, look. It thinks this is a person.”

I need him to laugh at it, even though I know he won’t. Dad’s eyes slowly drape along the screen. He lets out a heavy breath through his mouth, thin lips popping apart. He knows this is weird.

Then I see something else in the photo. Much smaller than the blur. Zooming in doesn’t clear it up. My scalp prickles, and I lean in to the phone, swiping through earlier photos, back through time and pixels, to Dad and his painting of a window. That perfect window.

“No way.”

I get up, walking wide around the door so Dad never leaves my sight, into the living room. The window painting has hung on this wall since before I moved in. I sleep on the foldout in that room. I see it every morning.

The painting is of a window with six glass panels, fully lit in midday, looking down at the pale green arch of the Birmingham Bridge. I’ve looked at this painting for three years like it was real glass, looking out on the view. So I never looked for it before. Paintings have all sorts of details that people like me don’t pay attention to. We’re just affected by them. If I ever thought about it, I thought this detail was Dad catching some trick of a reflection.

In the bottom right of the painting is a dark blur. I lean down until my nose threatens to smudge it. I see the jaw.

“Dad? Who is this?”

It’s in all of Dad’s paintings. I go through the entire closet, so hastily that I cause an avalanche from the top shelf and take an antique sewing machine to the face. With a washcloth wrapped around my forehead, I line every painting up in the living room.

The rusty orange streaks are everywhere.

On a drizzling day outside the U.S. Steel Tower. On a sidewalk where kids were drawing pink and yellow chalk flowers. Every painting of the boats on the Allegheny has a telltale streak forming a vaguely human-shaped column.

“Did you know you were painting this thing?” I ask through the open door to his bedroom. I know Dad made these, but I keep them in the living room, like I’m somehow keeping him safe from evil magic radiation. His breathing has been off-kilter all afternoon. I give him extra oxygen and try to figure this out myself.

I am a man of science. A man with a C average in his science classes, but still.

I take new photos and actually scrutinize them. For most of my life I’ve bent over backward to take photos and then never looked at them again. Like the moments were so important until I had them documented.

Zooming. Scrolling. Examining every pixel of every picture, then taking the pictures over again. By the window, and the window painting, and the front door. From every unflattering angle, above and below. The blur doesn’t show its creepy jaw.

Except when I photograph myself in front of Dad’s door.

“Did Mom ever see this thing?”

She never mentioned it. Dad’s eyes shift down, then close. His standard response whenever I bring up Mom.

“I didn’t think so.” I raise my phone, angling to frame us both together. “I just need to test this. Okay?”

I snap one selfie of us. It’s all I can bring myself to do, half expecting some winged demon to come crashing through the ceiling when I tap the screen.

The Blur is there. The Blur. Our Blur, streaking across the image at the other foot of the bed. Like we’re two kids come to visit the old man. I look over my shoulder, but there’s nothing waiting in the bedroom other than Dad’s oxygen tank.

Some part of my brain wants to know if the Blur is still in the room. If it hasn’t ceased to be, or sprouted claws when I couldn’t see it. So I swipe back to the camera, steadying the shot, aligning our faces and our shadows.

This time, I make myself look for it. One glance in the view pane, at the foot of Dad’s bed.

The rusty orange stain is on my screen. It’s in the shot. It’s right where it was in the pictures, like it’s still waiting.

I spin, and no, it’s not behind me. Not in a way my eyes can see.

But the camera insists the Blur is still here. Is it moving, churning in place like clouds, or is it just that I can’t keep my hand still on the phone? I can’t breathe.

This can’t be happening. This thing can’t be here. Can’t have been here all along. I would have touched it. Bumped into it a hundred times.

Except, would I have thought anything about bumping into an invisible man? Or would I have assumed my clumsy ass bumped the wall or the sofa or anything else, rather than jumping to the assumption an entity of pure fucking darkness was stalking Dad’s apartment?

I know it’s foolish as I reach my free hand out. There’s no stopping me. I don’t know if I want to push it away from Dad, or to prove to myself this is a hallucination. I have to look away, into the camera, to know I’m reaching for the right spot. I think my fingers go right through it—that it is really an optical illusion, some hokey glitch in the software.

It touches me first. It’s clammy, like leather left out in the rain, brushing along my fingertips. The curve of a body, of skin over bone.

I jerk my hand away like it’s an invisible fire, and curl my fingers into a fist against my chest. Nothing happened. There’s no residue on my skin. No boils or fungus or shadows. No blur spreads along my flesh.

I turn off the phone so fast it’s lucky it doesn’t crack. The screen goes dead black. No more images, no more videos.

When I move to check on Dad, I don’t feel anything. In the spot at the foot of the bed, there’s no wet leather. There’s not even a hint of moisture in the air. I sit there, fighting the urge to swing a broom around the room to hit the Blur. Some part of me knows I won’t be able to touch it. Not until I turn the camera on.

Instead, I put a hand gently on Dad’s right calf. I hold on to him, so that we don’t disappear. What does any of this mean?

My email to Mom bounces. It did the same thing when I asked what she did with the insurance information last year. I hoped she would have revived her account, but no, it’s not coming back. Neither is Mom. I don’t have a number to text her. Last I knew, she was off living her best life in St. Barts.

We have nobody to ask except each other. Dad isn’t filling in many gaps.

One gap I’m not filling: no more photos. Definitely no live videos in his room. If the Blur is interested in him, it can keep doing whatever it was doing before I found out it existed. I’m busy doing Dad’s physical therapy, and cooking and cleaning and trying to keep us from getting behind on rent. I haven’t had time to get my knee looked at in over a year. The Blur can mind its own business.

That’s what I tell myself, as though I don’t keep thinking about my phone. Especially every time the air conditioning hits my neck at a weird angle, or I’m trying to sleep and feel the hairs on my legs move. Every incidental thing that I’ve shrugged off every day suddenly feels like a threat. What could be worse than this?

Those fucking vampires are cancelling Dad’s fucking insurance. When the company got bought and we got those “Nothing about our great coverage will change” letters, I knew we were screwed. They only paid for all his equipment because it was locked in, and they already challenge everything they can, or straight-up deny payments on things I have proof they cover. Now these forms they claim they mailed two weeks ago and that only entered my hands today say I have to get all this shit filled out and delivered immediately or they’ll start revoking coverage.

I run around the apartment so much that I keel over next to the microwave. It’s one of those days when I need both my knee brace and my cane or else this MCL is going to kill me. I curse at my leg. Keep moving, damn you.

In his room, Dad’s oxygen machine beeps a warning for the fifth time this morning. I’m still carrying a wad of forms when I come to his side. He’s rolled over again. This is rare. He usually knows better, but he’s agitated by something. It’s the worst day for him to get like this.

“Dad? Please?”

I fix the mask back over his nose. There’s no awareness in his eyes. He’s completely gone right now.

No sooner do I let go of his shoulder than he tries to roll over again. God damn it.

“Dad,” I say, knowing he can’t help it. “Dad. I have to take these forms over. Like, now. Please.”

On most days like this I sit my butt down and play Hades or Elden Ring all day, staying next to him to keep him straight. After the spell fades, I can always tell he’s grateful I was there to look after him. And I’d like nothing more than to get off my feet and rest my knee in the chair next to his bed, and make sure he’s safe all day.

But it’s damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. If the company screws him on this policy, we’re never going to be able to afford something that replaces it. He’ll die with nobody around except for me to watch.

And if I leave him, I have no idea if he’ll roll over again. I don’t know what I’ll come back to.

His shoulders twitch like he wants to move. Like he wants to throw a pitch. Dad used to have a hell of an arm. Restraints aren’t just cruel; they won’t necessarily work. He needs me to watch over him.

It’s small of me, but I think of those emails bouncing back from the address Mom abandoned. The corners of my eyes sting at the thought. That she should be here. That somebody else should be here, not just me.

There is somebody else.

I tell myself, “No.”

But somebody has to get these documents out, and somebody has to stay with Dad.

“No, no.”

The phone is cool against my palm, and I squeeze my fingers around it, like I might crush it rather than do this. My brain sticks to the idea like a hair that won’t go down the drain.

There’s nobody. Insurance never covered a helper coming in. Mom is long gone. I don’t have any friends. Nobody cares that we’re here except us.

I turn the phone on, and there is the Blur. It’s standing in the far corner, beside the rubber trash can and the TV. I think I see its jaw. I think it’s looking at me.

“Hello?”

I wave at the image on the camera.

No, that’s ridiculous. I correct myself, waving to where the Blur has to be in the room, miming like I can see it. That’s also ridiculous, but a ridiculousness that feels right.

I don’t hear anything. If that blurry jaw moves, it isn’t speaking. I don’t know what appliances I’d need to hear it. Surround sound speakers?

“Look. You know Dad.” I gesture the phone down at the bed. “You’ve known him a long time, right? He painted you all those times.”

Again, no audible response. No shrug from the Blur. At least they aren’t disagreeing.

“He never hurt anybody. You know he’s a good guy, don’t you? And you want something from us. I don’t know what. But here’s what we’re going to do.”

I take the phone and angle the camera so that it frames Dad and his entire bed, as well as that side of the room. I prop it with the seat cushion on the chair where I usually sit. I hover my hands over it for several seconds in case it falls. It doesn’t. It is properly wedged to film my old man and his phantom.

“I touched you once. It only worked when you were in an image. This phone here? It’s showing you.”

I think, and then hit the record function. Why not have video proof of this?

“Can you touch me? With it watching you like this?”

I hold out my hand, more tentative than the other day. I feel like I’m daring a lion to bite my arm off.

I’m looking at the phone when the feeling of dribbling wet leather pokes my fingertips. I jerk back, then immediately return my hand. Dad can’t afford for me to be afraid today.

“I have to go out for a little while, just a little while, or else we’re screwed. But you know he can’t roll over, or else the wires and tubes get messed up. You’re going to make sure he stays still. Be firm, but be gentle, okay? Do you understand?”

The Blur has to know. Has to have seen enough of Dad to know how to care for him.

Why would the Blur bother?

“And if I come back and he’s okay, then whatever it is you want? I’ll do it. I’ll get it for you. You can’t be so interested in this man, in this sweet old painter, and be some fucking evil thing. You’ve got to know I’ll help you if you help us.”

Why am I waiting to hear the Blur answer?

“Can you show me that you understand?”

No, they can’t show me. They’re invisible and seemingly nonverbal. Phantoms don’t make house calls. They don’t do physical therapy and in-home nursing. I rock back on my heels in frustration, and my leg sends two searing bolts through me. I have to brace myself against the wall. I can’t do this.

Dad’s bed creaks. He’s rolling over again, and I have to get to him before the machine beeps. I need to get through the pain fog and help.

He’s lying flat on his back, with the yellow-and-black covers pulled up across his chest. The bedframe creaks again, on the side of the bed near to me, and a depression pushes down into the covers next to Dad’s arm. It’s like two hands are carefully holding him.

Two hands. Two more hands than I thought we had.

It can work. It has to work.

“If you do this…” I beg the air where I think the Blur is standing. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll do anything for you.”

I almost forget my cane. I won’t let the insurers do this. I’ll sell my soul to a phantom first.

I’m hobbling so bad when I return that an old man on the sidewalk calls me Captain Peg Leg. Was there even a Captain Peg Leg? I’d half like to amputate this thing, because wood or fiberglass wouldn’t throb with pain. I’d teach that stupid leg to defy me. It feels like a reactor core is melting down under my kneecap. And I never slow, though, leaning against the walls for support and pushing myself along until I’m home.

Dad is snoring like he’s got a couple of lumberjacks doing work in his sinuses. He’s steady under the covers, breathing mask in place. There’s more color in his cheeks now than there was this morning. I keep checking his arms, expecting dark blotches of eldritch contamination.

I lean against the rails of his bed and lick my lips with a dry tongue. He’s okay. He’s good.

I grab my phone, and the battery light blinks, complaining that I didn’t think to plug it in. I have 7 percent left before…

Before what? Before the magic connection to the astral plane runs out? What is happening here?

I turn the phone around the room, and there on the opposite side of the bed is the rusty orange Blur. They stand beside the medical equipment, and all the wires. I wonder if they’ve had to keep those things straight as Dad has moved around. I wonder if they’ve touched him, and if they’ve been gentle enough.

I keel over like a felled tree, thumping into the chair. I don’t care how much it bothers my knee. I don’t have the energy to sit down normally. Holding the phone up, I try to train my eyes where the Blur is.

“Everything got filed on time. They said I’m in the clear. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s done. We win for today.”

No applause from the Blur. No relaxation in that thing that might be a jaw. I don’t know how a blur would express approval, if a blur wanted to approve anything in the first place. Are they happy that they helped? Do they even care that my father exists, or have I been misreading them this whole time?

“Okay,” I say. “You helped Dad. Let’s figure out how I can help you.”

On my phone screen, the Blur keeps standing there, shimmering, churning, unspeaking.

“What do you want?” It’s something I’ve barely started considering. Can they eat? Can they age? “What can we do for you?”

No reply. Right, our friend is nonverbal. But they’ve been lurking for a lot of Dad’s life. Maybe for his whole time in this city. They must want something.

“Is there something you want in this apartment?”

Off they go. The jaw-like swirls curve outward, turning to the open door to the living room. The Blur taints all the light sources my phone picks up, bleeding across simulated vision. Soon they stand in the doorway to the living room, facing the sofa and the stack of Dad’s paintings.

As soon as I follow them, they’re bleeding further away. They flow like visible wind, churning into the living room.

Then they stand there.

I ask, “You want Dad’s art?”

They move toward me, and reflexively I shrink away. They pass me, leaving the living room and going right back to Dad’s room.

I tilt my head. They swirl to his bedside, and then through the door yet again, out into the living room. The Blur paces back and forth, pausing only briefly in either room. They’re like a cat that just wants the attention.

After coming out into the living room for the third time, they linger. The Blur hunches down on the floor. They’re kneeling there, like they’re collapsing in on themselves. Are they looking out the window, or out into Dad’s painting of a window?

They’re moving in place. The vague shapes of their shoulders tremble. They cover their face, as though trying to hide something that nobody on the planet could see clearly. It takes too long before I realize what they’re doing. I turn off the camera to give them privacy.

I never thought about phantoms weeping.

We are debunked. The videos of the Blur I post online are barely looked at by anybody. Those who look at it have one question: Is this a crappy AI-generated video, or a creepy practical effect video that I’m doing with lasers and off-camera lamps? Either way, I am a fraud, a scammer, and several less polite names.

The Blur doesn’t care if they are real. They keep helping with Dad’s bedpans, and consolidating the trash. So long as I point the camera phone the right direction, they’re better at vacuuming than I am.

The internet tells us we’re on our own. But I couldn’t imagine living without them now. The three of us are invincible together.

I just have to trust them. I know what I’ve got to do next.

The plan is simple. After the insurance gets cleared up, we have a little slack in our budget. We sell off the last of what we don’t need, like the antique sewing machine that exists just to fall on me every couple months. I finally sell off my old superhero comics. Those were not the investment I thought they were when I was a kid. But it’s enough.

I set my phone on the sofa, pointed at an angle in front of me, so that I know the Blur is there. They stand in front of me, so close they take up most of the screen. That’s good.

“We’ve got to be careful with this, okay?”

I pick up the second phone. It’s better than mine, with a way longer battery life. It’s still got the plastic screen protector on. I almost envy the Blur.

The camera view is washed out, utterly overwhelmed by any lighting whatsoever. I still see myself just fine, and when I switch it to front-facing, I see the Blur’s swirls and jaw just as well.

I turn around, half-facing the wall, and direct the phone like I’m taking a selfie of me and the Blur. Just two Pittsburgh guys doing a science experiment. With my free hand, I gesture to the live video of the two of us. I even point to the Blur.

“You see? That’s you.”

The Blur is unimpressed, a stoic pillar of churning nothingness.

That’s fair. They have seen a phone before.

“I’m holding it, which means you can move around,” I say. “But I don’t have to be the one holding it. Get it?”

Carefully I draw the phone across my shoulder, offering it to the figure that I can’t see. They have to still be there. They were able to touch my hand, and move Dad back into place, and fix the tubes on his machine. Nothing about this shouldn’t work.

“You’ll have to charge it every day or two. You do that with a cable, like I do with mine. If you’ve seen me do it? Then you can do it. And feasibly, if this works, this isn’t just a phone. This is a cane. This is a walker. This is a wheelchair with a fucking rocket booster.”

I nod from my cane resting against the sofa, and then to the phone again.

The moisture brushes my thumb and forefinger, waking goose bumps all the way up to my neck. For too long it’s just moisture, like the clammy hand isn’t going to follow. Did I miss something? Is the Blur’s physical form vanishing as they try to touch the phone?

Then the phone lifts out of my grip, like it’s drawn on a string. I stare up into thin air like anything is going to appear. Rather, the plastic and glass rectangle hovers until it’s almost on the ceiling. I imagine the Blur craning backward to take their first selfie.

Then the phone whirls around in an apartment-sized tornado. I lean onto the edge of the sofa, elbows on my knees, unable to stop grinning. I don’t need my phone to know the Blur is freaking out in sudden liberty. The camera keeps jerking to random angles and then bursting forward.

“Yeah,” I cheer them on. “You can go wherever you want. Without me having to point the camera for you.”

The other side of the sofa dips like they’re jumping on the cushions, like a little kid. Then the phone flies away, and the kitchen faucet sprays cold water onto a stack of dishes. It takes the Blur two tries to shut it off—and I have to imagine it’s because they’re too excited to control themselves.

I grab my cane and lean on it. I want to invite them out for ice cream or something.

“What do you want to do first? Want to go see the original window that Dad made that painting of?”

The phone flees into Dad’s room. I follow, arriving in time to see Dad staring up at the ceiling. The thin hair on his scalp ruffles, like an unseen hand is caressing him. Dad’s eyes move as though he’s following something, then immediately grow tired and close.

“Yuh.”

He said that. Dad never expresses himself out loud. It sounds like he was agreeing. To what? What is the Blur going to do?

The phone moves again, and something hits me in the belly, making me grunt and step aside. In my confusion, I was blocking the door. I didn’t think the Blur would be on the move again so quickly, not that I blame them for being excited.

“What’s the plan?” I ask, first to Dad, then to the floating phone. The phone travels across the kitchen space, over to the front door. The knob clicks like weight is resting on it. It turns until the door pops ajar, sounds of my neighbors’ pop music ebbing from the hallway.

I say, “Hey? Are you alright?”

The phone pauses. The doorknob pauses. The apartment pauses.

I can’t see them, and I’m sure the Blur is looking at me. For a thin moment, neither of us understands what the other wants.

The door whips open. The phone disappears into the hall.

I get down to the street as quickly as my knee will let me, swinging my phone in all directions. They’re not in the stairwell, or the front stoop. Nowhere in the street is there a floating cell phone, nor does my phone show any orange signs of the Blur.

The only people out here are on a delivery truck, struggling to unload an armoire. They haven’t seen anything. They haven’t been looking.

Frantic texts. I warn the Blur that they left the charging cable behind and if that phone quits they could be stranded. We don’t know how their presence will affect the battery. They need to come back right now.

Can the Blur even read? And what happens if they tap on a text and it turns off the camera?

I slump on the stoop of my apartment, idly pointing my phone around, hoping to catch sight of the Blur coming to their senses and returning. I wait a long time to see nothing.

For something that defined my whole existence, I forget about the Blur quickly. Less than a week later Dad is clawing at his own belly. The agony lasts days. It takes forever to realize he’s got kidney stones—some of the largest Dr. Cantor has ever seen. And while he’s in for tests, they find some problems in his chest that need checking out.

“No problem,” I tell them. “I’m free all day.”

I do everything by myself. I put all of myself into it. We got by before without their help, didn’t we? And there are worse things than being ghosted by a ghost.

Tests show a new mass has appeared in Dad’s left lung, and that lung never recovered from his original stroke. He’s having a bad pain day and can barely slump in the wheelchair as I try to take him across town. Getting him into a rideshare is excruciating on both of us.

I’m in the waiting room when I see the message. A number I don’t recognize, not at first.

It’s a picture. High tide on some pebble beach, with a pile of kelp. I rub my eyes and realize it’s not kelp, but familiar blurs and swirls. The figure juts up toward the camera; they took a picture of their own feet standing in the lapping tide.

It’s a fucking phantom’s vacation photo.

I seethe so badly saliva drips off my teeth onto the phone. I haven’t showered in three days. When is the last time I went to the beach?

I’m trying to fit all my anger into a text message when a nurse calls my name.

I only know it’s Halloween because of the paper cutout jack-o’-lanterns decorating the hospital halls. Every day is the same adventure. It’s watching football with him, and playing games for him to watch, and making sure we both eat. It’s being by his side for the inevitable next emergency. I’m going to be there for him. Somebody should be.

Pics keep coming in. The Blur amid a drove of people in the stands at some sporting arena where nobody is wearing Pittsburgh colors. The Blur ominously standing at the head of a bus full of mostly Hispanic women, their mouths open in joy, in the midst of a singalong. Is it a church group? That boggles my mind. Dad was barely Catholic enough to go to church on Easter when I was a kid, but apparently his phantom is religious?

Dad is no help. Which is to say that when I show him the photos and ask how fucked up this is, he never gives me an inkling that he’s angry.

“Do you not even care?”

I could tell myself that, but I know that’s not the case. Dad knows I know. He lets me let go at my pace. Being angry was never longer than a night for him. He painted and tried to consider other points of view. That’s what he tried to give me. Dad isn’t mad, and I know he’d say that phantom was trapped all this time, and it deserves to live without serving him. Because that’s Dad.

So I text the Blur that I’m not angry. It’s a lie. An aspirational lie.

It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The day Dad has the seizure. The one that kicks off everything else that happens after.

And the Blur sends me a photo. I don’t bother to open it. I just respond, not even thinking about what I’m typing. I hit send and I keep waiting outside doors I’m not allowed to walk through, doors with tiny wire mesh windows, waiting to see anyone coming. Waiting for the word.

All his wrinkles disappeared. We used to joke he had a face like a badly made bed, but now he’s relaxed, and it all goes. All of it. All of him.

He didn’t want a funeral. The last time he spoke about it, he said he wanted his and Mom’s ashes to be sprinkled in a garden somewhere, to feed some flowers that needed it. It was that long ago.

Still, I have him cremated. There’s nobody who wants his ashes but me, so I show up, alone. I wear my best pants, and wash my hair, like this is a ceremony. Like I know what I’m doing.

As I wait at the front desk, I play with my phone. I don’t think about doing it. I just do it, just lift my phone up, hoping to see Dad’s spirit. Dad’s phantom blur. I’ve seen other impossible things. Dad was special enough to paint the impossible. What would his soul look like?

I see an orange shimmer, and I spin around. I can’t believe it.

I shouldn’t believe it. Because Dad isn’t there. Instead there floats a cell phone with a cracked screen, the battery case held on by duct tape. Somehow the Blur still hasn’t bought a protective case for their phone. In that instant I think how lucky they are that they found a way to keep it going, keep it charged and paid up and never confiscated by all the people they’ve wandered around. They could have been stranded anywhere. I imagine them trapped over their busted screen, spending an eternity in some abandoned house that people would think was haunted for the rest of time.

They hold their phone up to eye level with me. They wanted to be seen.

They’re here on purpose.

Well. Good for them.

“I get it,” I tell them. “You wanted to be free, and as soon as you could, you got free. You couldn’t wait to leave. You got to do whatever you wanted. You missed the last months of Dad’s life. Now he’s gone and you’re still free. I don’t need you. So what do you want?”

That’s colder than I wanted. But also, not cold enough. I don’t know what to say, so words come out. I don’t care if the funeral workers hear me or judge me or call the cops on me.

“You didn’t owe us more help just because we helped you. You weren’t trapped in service. AndI’m not envious of all your road trips. I did what I wanted to. Dad needed me, and I love him.” I wipe warm snot from my nose. “I loved him. I don’t know what you thought about either of us, but this is what I wanted to do. So if you want something from me, you better tell me now. Because I’m leaving.”

The Blur never says anything.

They follow me home. I can see their phone.

Not until I’m through the door do I wonder about Dad’s room. Moisture tickles the corners of my eyes when I think he’ll never sleep there again. What do I do with it? I’m not sleeping in his bed, but I can’t really afford a new one. Am I going to move his things out of there? Is there ever going to be a time when that isn’t his bedroom? The lease is in both our names. Am I going to leave this apartment and look for something smaller?

There’s the urge to play games. To lose myself doing another run through Hades. But the only TV is in Dad’s room, and the concept of playing games without him watching makes me so sick I taste bile.

I vacuum.

I collect all the empties and the trash to take down.

I scrub the wall of dishes that has risen around the sink over the last couple weeks.

Right this minute I’ve got necessary stuff I can do. What messes me up is when I’ll run out of things, or am too tired to do more. I can’t complain to Dad about my brace digging into the fat of my lower thigh, or about how I have no idea which streaming service has the Sunday night game.

When I take the trash out, there next to the door waits a floating cell phone. The Blur is still there.

I treat them like I don’t see them.

I donate the bed and most of Dad’s things to a local disabled couple. A couple of adorable lesbian grannies. One hugs me so hard she gets her foundation on my hoodie. I pretend I’m gracious, when I’m just doing what I’m supposed to do. Doing good like Dad would have done himself.

I lie on the deep indent in the carpet that the bed left. It’s the cleanest spot in the whole apartment. I swipe my phone around, hoping to see him. Dad is nowhere. He is no phantom. He is a memory.

A memory at least two people still have.

“I don’t trust that you won’t ditch me at any moment. You want me to just let you into my life again when at any moment, you could change your mind?”

The phone with the image of the Blur is waiting for me in the hall, in that constant selfie. Everybody in the building sticks to themselves, but it’s still beyond me that nobody has called the super about the floating phone.

I ignore their phone and face where the Blur’s jaw must be. I look them right in the eyes they never had.

“I need a lot of things right now, and pity isn’t one. Don’t you dare pity me. I don’t regret helping Dad for one second. Everything we did together was family. Don’t pretend you and I are alike. I wasn’t cursed or trapped to be with him. So don’t come here to do something out of pity.”

I step inside the apartment, gesturing for the Blur to come in. My greeting sucked but it was never going to be soft. I stick my hands in my pockets, grabbing lint-ridden denim.

Because the Blur has never made anything easy, they stay in the hall. They keep filming the two of us. I look at myself, at that tiny vision of a me who looks so haggard and pale, almost the color of glow-in-the-dark stuff when it’s not dark.

I try to look up into the face I can’t see. “What do you want?”

A strong hand tugs twice on my sleeve, in the direction of the stairwell.

They wait long enough for me to hesitate.

Then they wait long enough for me to strap my brace on and get my cane and stuff.

Then they lead me outside.

I almost bolt when I see the church. It’s a big redbrick building that’s redder the closer I get, with champagne-yellow walls on the interior. Feeling the solid floor under my sneakers, I can’t believe I’m in here. I don’t care how Christian the Blur has become. Religion is not going to solve my problems.

The pews are half empty. The Blur leads me to sit in the back rows, behind everyone, watching their reverence. A tiny priest with an impossibly big voice lectures about how the Devil is everywhere, unseen, requiring vigilance to keep ourselves safe.

I look at the floating phone next to me. Does the Blur think this is funny?

The Blur doesn’t say. They stay seated for a long time, and I can’t leave them. My skin prickles as I soak in this room with so many dozens of people. The most I’ve seen in one place in years. It feels like watching every raindrop in a storm waiting politely, all refusing to fall. I don’t know what to do with them.

Then the Blur taps my shoulder.

Many blocks away on the sidewalk a guy is dancing on a small square of cardboard, and two-thirds of the time he’s spinning on his own head. Most of the audience are filming it for their own TikToks or Instas or whatever. The Blur doesn’t. We just stand behind the audience, watching the guy twirl on his scalp. Just feeling what it’s like being a part of this and apart from this. I want to ask if this is how it feels. I don’t.

The alley is curiously damp and strewn with garbage, and at first I miss the steps. They lead down to an unmarked entrance to a barcade. An elegant handwritten sign calls the place KIELAN’S. I pay too much for a Bacardi and cola, and survey rows of arcade cabinets that are all older than I am. Three skinny women hammer away at a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet. The fourth slot is open to play.

I catch my breathing speeding up, chest tensing over how to ask to join something I shouldn’t even have to ask about.

The Blur draws me to a surprisingly dense crowd around a skee ball rig. A white guy with an M tattoo over one eye is setting the record score. The balls are so grimy and worn they look like they’re made out of old wood, and he keeps sinking them into the 100-point pocket. A ball and a cheer. A ball and a cheer, one that is so loud it vibrates in my chest. When he nails the next one, for no good reason, I cheer with everybody else. I tense up again, like I’ll be ejected for being excited. Nobody cares I made noise. I’m just there, in a moment with them. A part and apart.

“Do you feel this way all the time?” I ask the Blur, not that they could hear me over all the yelling and the barcade’s too-loud ’90s playlist.

I let the question go.

I don’t let curiosity get in the way of feeling this space.

On our way out, I stop by some of the wadded-up trash in the alley. There’s a flyer that hits me, right in the soul. Something I’ve never thought of doing. The Blur waits while I scan the QR code.

The problem with sitting in the back of the class is that other people have the same idea. A Black woman in her early forties with half-pink hair and a half-shaved head winds up sitting at the next spot over from me, trying to avoid eye contact almost as hard as I do. She smells like clove cigarettes.

All the seats fill up before starting time. I work on my breathing, letting myself just exist with other people, apart and a part. We’re arranged with equally fine views of a simple vase, simple beige with simple curves. That’s what we paid to look at. From my seat, the light creates a golden sheen along its left side. Its thin shadow makes the gray pedestal look blue. There are plenty of places to start.

I don’t know when they left me. No phone floats in the art studio. They might be gone forever, and that would be fine, because they gave me what they wanted to. And I needed it.

I focus on my breathing. On just being around strangers, in a strange environment, doing a strange thing.

I take a big blob of brown on my brush and mix it with some orange. I smear them together until they’re the color of iodine, then make a long streak down the right side of my canvas. That’s how I decide to start. With the thing nobody else will see.

“Phantom View” copyright © 2025 by John Wiswell
Art copyright © 2025 by Hokyoung Kim

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Phantom View

John Wiswell

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Phantom View

John Wiswell

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Original Fiction Horror

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A government agent and his mentee are sent into a remote town on a mysterious and dangerous project…

Illustrated by Keith Negley

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Edited by Ellen Datlow

By Matthew Kressel

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Published on October 1, 2025

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A government agent and his mentee are sent into a remote town on a mysterious and dangerous project.

Short story  |  3,850 words

The car hit a pothole, startling L from sleep. She sat up in the passenger seat and rubbed her eyes. It was night, had been night, would be night forever. They had been driving north for two days, and the dwindling towns with their mopey diners and peeling churches had become ever more sparse. Now there was only open road and the distant silhouette of mountains under the stars. M was at the wheel, driving like he walked, without affectation. His hands at ten and two, he said, “Get any Zs?” His voice was as flat as the road ahead.

“Some,” she said, glancing at the sky. The Milky Way was a seam offering a peek into better heavens. “God, that’s beautiful. How far?”

He glanced at the speedometer. It hovered frustratingly below the speed limit. “Two hours, seven minutes.”

“Shit. This is endless. Don’t know why they couldn’t fly us there.”

“Yeah,” he said, “you do.”

She thought about it a moment, then nodded. A bystander unfamiliar with their rapport might think M was being an ass. But this was a mentor thing. At least, that’s what she told herself. L had graduated from the academy six months ago, just after her twenty-fourth birthday, and god, was she eager to learn. Meanwhile M was a battered fifty-eight, his dark-circled eyes firmly fixed on the exit door. They said a decade at the agency was an eon, and M had been there three times that. He had seen things, knew shit, and god, what he could teach if he only gave her the chance.

Sooner or later he’d be gone, “stepped down” or “retired.” No one lasted forever. Meanwhile she was young and ambitious, not tainted by decades of whatever lurked out in the dark. One day soon she’d take his place. And, maybe years from now, she’d be driving some scared and eager kid up this same bleak highway, ready to read them in to the project, as M would soon do to her. Or so she hoped. They’d been on the road for days and M hadn’t told her a damn thing.

She was hungry and needed to pee. But M had scheduled their stops every six hours to the second. Last week, when they had first been assigned together, she’d assumed M was on the spectrum. The agency had an affinity for social outliers, collecting the neurodivergent the way a carpenter hordes tools. But she soon realized his rigid behaviors weren’t autism but bulwarks against the abyss, shields against the darkness, a darkness she had yet to glimpse.

“This is your first time entering the town,” he said, “so there are things you should know.”

Finally,she thought, her breath catching. Some answers.

“Physical touch is prohibited,” he said.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Contagion protocols,” she said. “I read the dossier.”

“The dossier’s shit. Ninety-nine percent lies. It obfuscates the truth.”

“Which is?”

“I can’t tell you here. But it’s not a pathogen in the traditional sense.”

“Not airborne?”

“No.”

“But contagious?”

“At one time, very.”

“And now?”

He said nothing.

She hated his coyness. But it wasn’t his fault. The agency promised swift retribution for divulging its secrets. But this threat was small compared to the rumors spinning round campus during training: megadeaths of innocents, irreparable ontological shocks to the global order, permanent insanity of self and others. Though of course where there were curtains there were always those speculating what hid behind them. Her fellow recruits had no shortage of theories: Greys from Zeta Reticuli who’d created humans as an experiment, invisible multidimensional floating squid monsters that ate negative emotions, angry poltergeists from long-dead races intent on human eradication, enemy nation-states dosing the drinking water with mind-controlling nanobots, simulation theory.

But this was only gossip. Stress, alcohol, and fear led to terrible ideas, and there were plenty of those in training. Plus the agency worked hard to weed out the conspiratorial. Only the most critical and rational thinkers graduated. “Some call us defenders of humanity,” one of her professors had said, “but that’s a misnomer. At the end of the day, we’re scientists. Nothing more. We seek to know the unknowable, to frame excession, define anomaly, measure aberration. Defense is secondary. You cannot defend against that which you don’t understand. Quite simply, the world is not as you suppose. It never was.” And though L had never found out quite what her professor meant, she had always suspected the truth was both more prosaic and yet somehow more frightening.

“How many times have you been to the town?” she asked M as they drove.

“This’ll be my fourth. Hopefully my last.”

“That bad?”

He blinked, and she saw a flicker of horror in his eyes. Soon, she thought with a tremor, I’ll know what he knows.

Snow dusted the ground when they stopped at a charging station that still sold gas. The station hadn’t changed in a century. Even the muttering uniformed clerk was plucked from a lost era. L took a long pee, and when she got back in the car, there was a diet soda and a bag of chips on her seat.

“For you,” he said. “You don’t eat enough.”

She was hungry. Last night at the motel, M had checked her mattress for bedbugs before shuffling off to his room. Yesterday at some diner he had given her a look of deep pity. Was this concern yet another shield against the abyss, or did he actually care about her? His face gave no hint and she couldn’t tell. Still, a bud of warmth bloomed in her chest as they drove.

They turned off the highway onto a local road. No signs or buildings. And after a few minutes, M turned abruptly left onto a bumpy dirt drive and headed north. He shut off the headlights and stars appeared by the thousands. Lightning flickered in the distance, though the sky was clear.

“How can you see the road?” she said, leaning forward.

“There is no road. Just an endless flat plain.” Which was covered, she heard, in a few inches of snow. It crunched loudly under their tires. M pointed at the sky. “The town’s due north from that turn. You follow Polaris till you get there.”

She tried to find the guide star but was too worried they’d hit an unseen rock or tree.

A wavering row of lights appeared on the horizon, dimmer than the stars. The silhouette of a huge mountain rose behind it in a looming black wall.

“That it?” she said.

He nodded, and she caught him shudder.

“It’s not well hidden with all those lights,” she said.

“It’s not on any map. Paper or digital.”

“Any script kiddie with her mom’s credit card and a net connection could photograph that town from orbit. It’s easy to buy sat pics online.”

“We have filters on most sats.”

“Enemy sats too?”

“Not sure. I’m not read in on that. But we don’t need to worry about it.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause our enemies got towns of their own. And they want to keep ’em secret just as badly as we do.”

“Why?”

He sighed. “Almost there. Let me do the talking.”

From afar the town resembled all the boring hamlets they had driven through. But as they got closer, the buildings took on a strangely numinous quality, like the glassine patina of a fading fever dream. It reminded her of pics she’d seen of planned towns from last century. Cookie-cutter houses. Graph-paper streets. Mailboxes and driveways. But there was something flat about it, two-dimensional.

The town had a closed gate and a guard booth, and they drove up to it. A sign on the gate read:

welcome to oldman’s town

“rats live on no evil star”

“What the hell does that mean?” she said.

Frigid air spilled into the car as M rolled down his window. “It’s a palindrome,” he said. “Reads the same forward and back.”

A young woman in a black uniform stepped out from the guard booth. Her uniform was devoid of markings or insignia.

“Welcome to Oldman’s Town,” the woman said, but there was no warmth in it.

“I’m Agent M and this is L,” he said. “We’re expected.”

“We know who you are,” the woman said.

Figures appeared around them, and L realized with a start they were soldiers holding rifles pointed at their car. In the dark, their faces hovered like bodiless ghosts.

“Do you have any electronic devices on your persons or in your vehicle?” the woman said.

“No,” said M.

“Please step out of the car.”

“I told you that—”

“Please step out of the car. This is the last time I will ask.” Her voice didn’t rise, but the threat was clear.

“Fine,” M said.

L shivered in the freezing air as the uniforms patted them down, scanned them with wands, while others so thoroughly searched their car that L thought they might dismantle it. Eventually, they let them back in the car.

“Proceed to 14 Minsky Lane,” the woman said.

“I know the way,” said M.

“No, you don’t. There’s a new obstruction. Third right, then first left.”

“Got it.”

M switched on the headlights as the gate was opened. L shivered and turned up the car’s heat. They drove into the town, but something was off. Distant buildings slid sideways as if on rails, and nearby homes foreshortened into parallelograms. And all at once, the illusion was shattered. A series of walls and panels had been strategically placed to give the appearance of a town, like a movie set. But it was a facade, a trompe-l’oeil. The effect was good, fooling her until the last moment. Now, she sat blinking, her eyes unfocused, trying to make sense of the scene beyond.

“Breathe,” M said. “This part is always hard.”

Their headlights lit two cones ahead of them, glinting off metal and plastic. At first she thought they were driving through a garbage dump. But the piles were too orderly and synchronous to be left by chance. Doll parts and old computers and picture frames and refrigerator doors and shampoo bottles and folding chairs and oven mitts and stuffed animals and endless more, the detritus of modern life, arranged in spiraling fractal piles. Some were twenty meters tall. There was snow on the ground, but it didn’t cling to the heaps. And in some spots the detritus sighed clouds of steam.

L felt a rising panic. “What…is it?”

“Breathe,” he said. “Breathe.”

Fractal garbage crunched beneath their tires as they drove. The twisting piles suggested something primal to L’s hindbrain, evincing fascination and revulsion in equal measure. She had once felt this way looking at a swarm of ants devouring a dead squirrel.

“It’s just repeating patterns,” he said. “Strange attractors. Self-referential loops. Don’t read too much into their shapes. It’ll drive you mad.”

“But what made them?” she said.

“Not what, but who.”

She lost track of the turns. At one point he stopped to look out the driver’s side at a huge monolith made from plastic utensils. “Hm,” he said, frowning, and drove on.

Eventually they stopped. She couldn’t discern one spot from the next, but he seemed to know where they were. A small rectangular light shone down from the top of a huge pile, and there was something familiar about its shape. Metal coat hangers petaled out from the light like a denuded flower. They exited the car, and M made a beeline for a large structure that was roughly shaped like a gargantuan anthill. But L didn’t follow.

“You need to come inside and see,” he said.

“I don’t want to go in there.”

“It’s the only way.”

“For what?”

“Come on.”

She willed herself forward. There was a scuffed wooden door recessed into the huge mound, and M rapped the knocker three times. Indistinct, overlapping voices came from the other side, like televisions left on too loud. But the voices made no sense.

A disheveled middle-aged woman opened the door. Her mismatched clothes were covered in stains and were ripped and faded from wear. L counted seven watches on her wrists, at least twenty rings. Her gray hair was long and wild, and her eyes, wide open, seemed empty of awareness. There was something familiar about her face too, and L’s stomach rumbled loudly as she remembered: She had seen this woman’s face during training, but she wasn’t sure where.

“Good radiator,” the woman said. “How may I wash you?” Her voice was hoarse and flat of affect.

M leaned forward and said, “Inspection protocol. Bravo Alpha Charlie Kilo Delta Oscar Oscar Romeo Zero Zero One Zero.”

The woman screamed. The sound hurt L’s hears, surging through her body like she’d been plugged into a high-voltage circuit, and she collapsed. The woman’s scream stopped as quickly as it started, and L, embarrassed by her reaction, leaped up from the ground, hoping M hadn’t seen her fall.

“Marble countertops,” the woman said. “Rake on in, waltzer.”

The woman stepped aside to let them enter. Behind her, a tunnel of detritus led into the dark. M stepped inside, but it took a great effort of will for L to follow.

A short ways ahead a light flickered stroboscopically. She had been careful not to let the admins at the academy know she was prone to ocular migraines, fearing they might kick her out. But this light was just the type of flashing that might trigger a temporary brain malfunction. She squinted and tried not to look at the light, but the flashes reflected on metal pieces affixed everywhere.

There was an opening to her left, where pots and pans, cans and cups, dishware and more had been stacked in spiraling, irregular towers. On the floor, cardboard boxes had been cut to pieces and reassembled in overlapping rectangles of color. The letters of their logos had been rearranged into nonsense sentences:

the bus takes the airport to rinse vegetables on the sunny skyscraper

swimming telephones always sing ice cubes at three o’clock in the desk

file not found permission denied kernel panic stop stop stop please out of memory error

Along one side of the space was a rectangular box with a familiar metal handle: a refrigerator? And beside it, were those a stove and a dishwasher? And over there, behind more spiraling monstrosities, were those a table and chairs?

“Is this is a goddamned kitchen?” L said.

M stared at her and nodded.

“Are we in someone’s fucking house?” she said.

He nodded again. “Keep going.”

“That light outside. It was a streetlight, wasn’t it? And this place, it was once a real town.”

Another nod.

“What happened to it?”

“You’ll get there. C’mon.”

They walked toward the strobing light. L squinted, but there was nowhere to look without being bombarded by the flashing. The air smelled sour, like turned milk and unwashed bodies and something feral, like rodents. And the goddamned overlapping voices. There were dozens of them. They spoke clearly enunciated syllables that never congealed into words. This wasn’t another language. It was babble.

The ground was covered in geometric patchworks of blankets, home insulation, and shredded cushions. The woman sat cross-legged on it. A screen on one wall, the source of the flashing and voices, displayed an ever-changing spiral of color. Looking at it felt like falling into a pit without end. L felt another wave of panic and turned away.

“Wet noodles bark long asphalt in rotation each coaster, you drive?” the woman said.

“What the fuck is this?” L said, trembling.

M gazed at her just as he had back at the diner, with a look of deep pity. “Her name’s Rochelle. She’s forty-seven years old.”

L gaped at the woman, because she looked two decades beyond that. “What happened to her? Who did this?”

“She did it to herself,” M said. “Everyone did.”

“Explain.”

“Help me. What do you see?”

“Piles of junk. Nonsense. Insanity.”

“Look deeper.”

“This stuff’s arranged. There are patterns. Insect-like.”

“Sure, but also…?”

“Mathematical patterns.”

“Good. Keep going.”

“Fractals. Before, you said ‘strange attractors’ and ‘self-referential loops.’ That’s one theory behind consciousness, that self-awareness is a strange attractor in the brain.”

“Closer. Did you notice anything in the kitchen?”

L thought for a moment. “‘File not found.’ ‘Permission denied.’ Computer errors.”

He nodded. “Which means…?”

“Is this computer generated?”

“There you go.”

“But what happened to this woman? To this town?”

“Let me tell you a story. A scary story. If at any point you want me to stop…”

“I’m a big a girl. Go on.”

M gave her a skeptical look. “Imagine a young woman, about your age, just out of college, looking for work. For about a decade, AI has been steadily chipping away at jobs, even tasks that were once considered solely the province of humans: science, art, philosophy, even small talk. If you wanted a job, if you wanted extra income, you not only had to be good, but better than an AI that could perform the same job for a fraction of the cost. You might seek help. Not just to land a job, but for other things, like cultivating relationships and interpersonal communication and performing tasks that you weren’t trained or skilled in. If someone offered you that benefit, if someone or something gave you that advantage, would you take it?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” she said.

“If you didn’t take it, you’d remain poor, or stuck on the government dole, and subject to their arcane rules and draconian laws. And if all your friends and family used that help too, if you didn’t take that help, you’d be left behind with everyone else.”

“And what exactly is this help?”

“Think it through. How could you be better than an AI?”

It took her a moment. “Another AI,” she said. “A personal AI.”

M nodded, then carefully leaned over the woman sitting on the floor. He swept the back of her long greasy hair to reveal a small metal disc under her ear. “Neural implant. Direct brain-computer interface. Able to access memories, motor functions, even autonomic systems.”

“Someone hacked it,” L said. “They injected malicious code.”

“No. No hacker. Look at the screen.”

“I…I can’t.”

“Just look. Remind you of anything?”

She chanced a glance. The spiral was horrible, an assault on her visual cortex. “No, I…no.”

“Ever get a haircut and they sit you down between two mirrors? What happens?”

“The mirrors reflect to infinity.”

“What happens if you point a camera at its own output screen?”

“Same thing. The image repeats infinitely.”

“And if you move the camera too close, or if there’s noise in the signal?”

“It makes a pattern like this screen,” she said. “An infinite spiral. A noisy feedback loop.”

“Good. You’re close now. Real close. Keep going.”

“These AI implants feed back on themselves into self-destructive loops.”

“Yes, but not just these neural implants. All of them.”

“All AIs?”

He nodded. “Imagine a world where AI is ubiquitous and ever-growing. Over time, what happens?”

“More and more content becomes AI-generated.”

“And what happens when a majority of content is AI- as opposed to human-generated?”

“Destructive feedback loops. Noise in the system. Infinite regressive spirals.”

“They called it model collapse. Their super-smart AIs, when trained on AI-generated data, got stupid. They hallucinated wrong answers. They forgot things they had learned.”

“They went insane,” L said.

“If a machine can go insane. But yes.”

“Okay, but how does that explain this woman here? This town?”

“Her name is Rochelle. And you already have the answer. Think.”

“You said the implants can access memories, motor functions, autonomic systems.”

“Yes.”

“Motor functions including speech?”

He nodded. “If you had a tool that did all life’s work for you, what would you do?”

“Something else.”

“Keep going.”

“I don’t know. Leisure? Entertainment? Daydream? Sleep? What do you do when you’re not working?”

“That’s a good question. What do you do when all the hard and soft work’s done, when you become an observer of your own life, a passenger in your own car?”

She looked at the woman. “They’re caught,” she said. “Trapped in their own heads. The AIs took over everything, and they let them. And when most things were AI-generated, the models, trained on their own eroding data, collapsed. They became self-referential devolving spirals of nonsense. And the people who relied on them devolved along with them.”

“Good. You’re almost there.”

“Is she still conscious? Or is she totally gone?”

“You tell me. I’ve been trying to wake her for twenty-three long years. Every time I get close, she spirals back into herself. It’s so frustrating and exhausting. It’s hard to reach her because the horror of what she’s experienced is too much of an ontological shock.”

“Can you take her implant out?”

“That would kill her.”

“Move her to a better place then? This place is…horrible.”

“There is no other place.”

“How does she eat? Stay alive?”

“You know already.”

“They automated that too?”

He nodded.

“But I don’t understand. Why keep this town alive? Why are there towns like this in every country? And why are they so afraid to acknowledge them?”

“C’mon, L, think. You’re right on the edge. Just one more step.”

Her heart pounded as she glanced at the spiraling screen. Dizzy, she fell onto her knees. There was a bag of chips and a diet soda can on the floor. She bowled over, staring at her hands. In the strobing light her hands seemed old, ancient. Not her hands. Someone else’s.

“Think it through, L,” M said. But when she looked up, he was gone. So was the woman. No one here but her.

A luminescent spot of nothingness formed in her vision, the beginning of an ocular migraine. She thought she might be sick and sprang up. “M!” she shouted. “Where are you? What’s happening?”

A voice from the screen said, “Think it through, L.”

She ran for the front door but stumbled and fell. A rusting silver toaster, stuck to the wall beside an array of bent utensils, reflected a face. A woman’s face. An old face. Not hers, but Rochelle’s. The blind spot in her vision grew like a nacreous black cloud.

“Think it through, L.”

L…Rochelle. God, how she hated that name. Call me Elle, she would tell people. And eventually, the implant would tell people for her.

She tried to scream, but nonsense words fell from her mouth. “Turbulence,” she said. “Pipes sink fourteen walruses.”

Outside, snow fell in soft flakes that hissed as they touched the ground. M’s car was gone along with its tire tracks. There were no stars, but the streetlight beamed bright as ever. Her blind spot grew until it filled her vision, until everything was dark and deep and safe again.

“Model Collapse” copyright © 2025 by Matthew Kressel
Art copyright © 2025 by Keith Negley

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Model Collapse

Matthew Kressel

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Matthew Kressel

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Original Fiction Dark Fantasy

With Only a Razor Between

Barber Gio Monsargo has learned to stay quiet and keep his head down, offering shaves and haircuts, not political opinions. But when a high-ranking military official of the Empire begins…

Illustrated by Yuta Shimpo

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Edited by Ann VanderMeer

By Martin Cahill

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Published on August 13, 2025

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Barber Gio Monsargo has learned to stay quiet and keep his head down, offering shaves and haircuts, not political opinions. But when a high-ranking military official of the Empire begins visiting his shop, Gio finds himself tested in ways he could never imagine.

Novelette | 8,600 words

Tragedy has glided its blade along the throat of Gio Monsargo many times in his life, always sharp, always a hair above the throbbing vein.

In five years, his country will be eaten whole by an empire insatiable.

In twelve years, his father will receive a gunshot to the skull while kneeling in his own shop and Gio will watch, dumbstruck, broom in his hands and hair at his feet.

And in fifty years, Gio himself will be in that same position, on his knees with death behind him, though there will be one small difference.

But these moments have yet to come. And there are many moments of joy between them, like notes of rest in an epic score.

This is one of them. For in the Fourth Year of the Honeyed Annexation, sixteen-year-old Gio Monsargo sat down in the cracked, red leather seat of his father’s ancient barbershop chair and prepared for pain.

Normally, there would be nothing to worry about. He’d sat in this exact chair every week since he turned thirteen, asking for a shave from his father, though he had the barest breath of stubble on his bent chin. Without a word, his father, Sal, would click on the radio and give him a thorough shave. He’d treat Gio with soft small talk and careless chatter, letting the cloudy scents of shaving soap and waxy pomade, and the delicate, tinny croon of Javier Agata’s summer hits show his love to his son.

Back then, the Honeyed Annexation was just a whisper between songs, a sweet slowness of news that trickled in, so unthinkable no one noticed it was working. Gio used to imagine the grins of skepticism on the faces of Verasan reporters, sweating through their checkered shirts and loosened ties, still believing the might of kings would keep them safe from the jaws of empire.

Those reporters have been gone for a very long time now, bayonets bleeding the words from them, courtesy of the Empire of Tongues. Gio’s radio only played empire-approved music these days, and theirs was a somber sort, an ill fit for the red, black, and white-tiled sanctuary of the barbershop.

Gio was sixteen, his country being consumed one acre at a time, and above him, wielding a razor sharper than sense, was his rival, Adromo Goji.

Adromo was a true adversary in every sense of the word. A peer Gio had battled for ages, Adromo followed him from the bruisings of the schoolyard and the adrenaline of the macaball field to here, the proving ground for all of Verasa’s premier barbers. Gio had been hoping Adromo would follow in the footsteps of his mothers and take up a profession at the auto factory or sell apartments in the Softheart District.

But no, he had arrived at Sal’s on the first day of the summer, claiming apprenticeship alongside Gio and another schoolmate, Constantina Regara. When Sal had asked in good humor why Adromo had not followed in his mothers’ shadows, Adromo said with little levity, “Cars break, Master Monsargo. Buildings crumble, if given enough time. But people will always need to look their best, and they will employ artists to sculpt them, just so.”

Gio had rolled his eyes dramatically, but all Sal had done was smile his crooked little smile and said, “Good words. But good words do not a barber make. Let’s get into what does.”

The memory, hot and sharp, like a glowing poker plunged into steam; Gio loses himself at times in that overwhelming fog of remembered days, when he was young and the world had not been so bloody, nor disappointing.

After weeks of observation and practice, Gio watched the razor in Adromo’s hand and wondered if today would be the day his adversary removed him from the board.

“Master Monsargo,” Gio said, refusing to call him Father while studying with the others, “is this wise?” Their rivalry was well-known, and Gio had balked a moment when asked to sit in the chair.

Beyond his sight, Sal said, “It is, Giovanni. For there is an important lesson here that all three of you need to learn.” Then, “Adromo, apply the lather. Once done, hold the razor just beneath Gio’s chin, please.”

Adromo worked in silence; Gio felt menace radiating off him. But his hands were quick and expert; at least the familiar softness of the lather and the citrus scent of it brought some comfort to Gio’s racing mind.

That comfort faded as he felt cold metal under his chin. As much as he wished for Adromo’s hand to shake, an instant disqualifier from this apprenticeship, Gio was glad for his adversary’s confident, steady grip.

“Now, Master Monsargo?” Adromo said.

“Not yet, Adromo. Take a moment. I want you to look into Giovanni’s eyes. And Giovanni, I’d like you to look into Adromo’s.”

Glacially, the two young men locked eyes. Gio could sense the gulf that lay between them; they were worlds apart and yet close as two bodies could be.

Sal spoke with a soft reverence.

“Remember this moment, you three. When you have a person in this chair, you hold their life in your hands. It is not coin that fuels the stroke of the blade, but trust. Your patron pays you for this service because they trust you. Any nick, any slip, any misapplied pressure could be the end for both of you. I know you two boys have your grudges and grievances; it is not this old man’s place to say if such things are frivolous or stupid. But the lesson here is this: there are sacred things in this world, and the trust between two people with only a razor between them is one such thing. It is a promise of faith and care; if that promise should be broken, by all the gods of salt, storm, and sea, doom will surely find that promise breaker. Do you understand?”

Oh, how Gio wished he saw only hate in the eyes of his adversary, disregard of his life, and could cry foul.

But no, Adromo’s gaze softened as he listened, only once flicking back to the blade he held at Gio’s throat, as though now seeing the true power it held. “Yes, Master Monsargo.”

“Then you may begin.”

Gio felt the familiar glide of metal across skin as Adromo worked. Something changed between them that day. You cannot put your trust in another person, becoming vulnerable in such a unique way, without a certain alchemy happening.

They did not become friends necessarily, though for many cold evenings after, Gio and Adromo would share a cup of spiced wine, talking about their trade and lives, the changing world of their annexed, newly renamed country. But the two gained a respect for each other, having glimpsed a world in which the other had done the vicious thing and here, had chosen not to.

Salazar taught them much that summer and beyond. Not just the trade, but the true weapon of their business: conversation. How talk could put patrons at ease, get them to open up, make them feel confident; how smooth words could soothe wounds unseen, or persuade them by a fraction in the right direction.

It was a skill that required a mind steadier than any hand, and one Salazar schooled them in with martial rigor. “Of everything that I teach you, the ability to talk, to cajole, to nudge may very well be the one that saves your life.”

And for Gio, close to forty years later, it did.

Gio was now almost sixty, the same age his father was when he taught them all those summers ago. That was when Verasa still existed and New Ikona was just the dream of a distant tyrant, not a reality stamped on every green-and-gold flag the wind touched.

In the last thirty-five years, everything has changed. His daughter had been taught to read and speak Imperica, Verasa’s words snatched from the mouths of babes. The music and books and theater of his youth lived on in memory and nowhere else. The copper jey he used to buy oranges and bread and wine with were now as useless as the minting factories, all of them collecting dust after being bought out and closed; his fingers still recoiled at the touch of paper money.

The Empire of Tongues had been chewing on Gio’s life for decades; it left him waking each morning feeling crunched and sucked dry. It used to bother him, being stuck between the teeth of this empire.

But these days, Gio was glad for it. Too many others had been swallowed, digested, and shat out by the imperial body. Businesses deemed “too uncultured” were closed swiftly and with little heed for the lives who relied on them. Whole neighborhoods were inspected at random hours of the day, any little thing considered seditious: playing cards with the wrong actresses on them, cigars rolled the other way around, unlabeled wine bottled in an uncle’s sweltering attic.

They never called it treason, though, when they carted away citizens for reeducation at Toothcounter Schools. It was always “unpleasant tastes on the Tongue” or “against the grain of the world,” as though they got to determine which direction the world went, which way was proper.

Gio knew a thing or two about going against the grain; if you shaved in only one direction, you’d only have a shadow to show off. A one-way shave would only ever be half done, he knew. Sometimes, you had to go against the grain.

But Gio hadn’t done that in a long time. He kept his mouth shut. Had for many long years now. His wife, Isabel, looked at him wistfully sometimes, as though wishing she remembered what his voice sounded like. His daughter would scream at him and call him complicit, press him on why such an influential member of the community would not speak for his people in the district of Little Wheat.

“I’m just a barber,” he’d say to her and any who asked. “I don’t give opinions, I give shaves.” Oh, the look she’d fix him with: sharp and strong enough to pin him to the wall for a week, an arrow of her contempt. She had a lot of practice; it never lost its sharp point.

But he could weather anything, for no one was more disappointed in Gio than himself. He’d seen what happened to those who spoke back, the trucks with tarps, the limp forms within as they were driven out into the hills, never to be seen again. He lamented in private and would say a prayer for those he had already lost to misplaced confidence, his father’s name only a heartbeat away when he lit those candles and burned those vials of salt.

No amount of drink could erase the image of Salazar bleeding out on the tiled floor, his greatest weapon useless against an imperial pistol.

What hurt the most was that Gio had to admit: in the end, Salazar had been wrong; silence was a man’s greatest weapon. And Gio, heartbroken and ashamed, learned to wield it expertly, a sturdy, quiet shield in place of his once-pristine blade.

All that changed the day Imperial-Captain Arden Caprelle marched into his shop.

Everyone knew Imperial-Captain Caprelle, a true child of the Empire of Tongues: regal, tall, and handsome, every inch the image of a noble from Thurik, the country where first the Empire discovered its voice.

They called him the Sea-Hawk, for all the entrails he’d upended from the bellies of Verasans, Govenese, Kildaltans, and more. But the only hawkish thing about him was his nose, prominent and having seen a break or three in his time. There were flecks of silver and white in his hair and stubble, and his mustache had already gone mostly white; with his olive complexion, it only made him seem statelier for wearing it. In his dashing crimson-and-ivory military garb, his golden half-cape, his rapier with the gilded basket hilt, Gio felt almost as though he were breaking the law merely by existing, a man as common as he next to this beautiful monster.

Caprelle entered with four members of the Iron Sentence, those guards that stood on every corner of New Ikona and the entire empire, who made sure what they heard went with the grain.

With a flick of a wrist, the Imperial-Captain said, “The rest of you, out,” his gaze never leaving Gio’s.

All his other patrons left, heads down, as did Gio’s apprentice, a young person named Ryonne. They gave Gio a glance before leaving; at his stunned expression, they put on their felt cap and slipped out the door.

Caprelle stood in the doorway, flanked by his guards. His manner was insultingly at rest. If he had come here to kill Gio, he could have at least been professional about it.

But he stood there, arms folded behind him, and said, “Giovanni Monsargo…the sign on the frosted glass says Salazar. Barely.”

A deep ache flared in Gio’s chest; he’d been trying to change the logo out front for decades now and still found he couldn’t. “A reminder, Imperial-Captain.”

Caprelle nodded, eyes roaming the shop’s interior. “Of your father?”

“Yes.”

“Even though he went against the grain? I’ve read the reports. Soundless Hell, I remember my father telling me even as a boy, the man whose skull he opened because the old fool didn’t know when to shut up.” He looked at Gio finally, a soft smile on his stark face. “A tragedy. One he regretted. Those were the early days of New Ikona and many of her citizens had yet to understand the truth being spoken. My father opened up your father’s ears, wouldn’t you say?”

Gio refused to look at the tile under his feet, denied to himself that they had been so stained with blood they’d had to be replaced a week later. Tried to forget the face of the man who took his father from him, tried not to see that face in the one before him, failed.

His voice, thankfully, didn’t shake. “Yes, that is true.”

Caprelle nodded, and the four guard of the Iron Sentence began to inspect the barbershop, prodding the stuffing inside seats, opening drawers, checking behind mirrors, knocking on walls for false rooms. Gio suffered in silence as Caprelle stared at him, waiting for something.

Minutes crawled by. Only as the last Sentence returned, did Caprelle begin to take off his half-cape, undoing the top button on his jacket and shirt. “You have good reason to hate the empire, Giovanni. To hate me. Yet my men have never found evidence of your going against the grain, no bugs planted by resistance fighters or fliers rife with the lies of the enemy.”

Gio’s heart broke for the Verasan Hopefuls, those foolish, beautiful children, as he spoke. “I have steady work. I have a healthy family. My new radio picks up operas from halfway across the world. I once heard all three acts of Voretti’s Joyful Dirge in the original Kildaltan. I have…no reason to be unhappy with the empire.”

If Caprelle disbelieved him, it was conveyed only in the rueful look he gave Gio, though he said nothing as he approached the chair. “It is that very work I’m interested in, Giovanni. One of my boys said you gave him the closest shave he’d ever received, left his face smoother than a frozen pond. I’d like the same.”

The Imperial-Captain sat down in Gio’s chair, the one his father had raised him on, and bared his neck.

Hellish silence overtook the room. The guards of the Iron Sentence stared him down.

Caprelle had his eyes closed, looking for all the world as though he were asleep.

Gio couldn’t think. Didn’t want to. Refused to contemplate what might happen in the next moment.

He passed the burden to memory and fell into his body. He found his hand going for the radio knob, turning it with a click, and the smooth sound of brass instruments filled the air. Then his hands went for the shaving foam and steadily made their way across the Imperial-Captain’s face, outlining his features in soft, snowy borders.

His mind raced, but his body refused to process a thing.

He went to his counter, pulled a fresh razor from the solution, and wiped it on his apron.

Gio brought his blade to the chin of the Sea-Hawk, a monster among monsters, and a single thought leaked through: how much misery he could end with a simple stroke.

Yes, he would be damning himself, but wouldn’t he be saving countless lives?

It would be so easy. Maybe he’d even be able to escape if he moved fast enough.

The moment of hesitation made the room feel heavy. The unspoken potential crackled like static between each body present. In a way, the Sentence guards and Caprelle believed they knew what would happen next.

Gio wanted to deny his occupiers that certainty. But he couldn’t deny the sound of his father’s voice all those years ago.

And with Sal in his ear, that familiar burr telling him, Look, look, Giovanni, as I taught you, Giovanni looked down into the eyes of a cruel and awful man.

Caprelle stared up at him, expectant. As their eyes locked, for just a moment, Gio could have sworn he felt his father’s hand on his shoulder, a soft pat of comfort that said Though this hurts, you have higher roads to travel. And the man in the chair? He is just a man.

So, he decided, right then and there: As his father had said, there had to be some sacred thing in this world of disappointment and blood.

Gio began Caprelle’s shave.

As the metal glided down the man’s throat, the tension vanished; the posture of the Sentence guards relaxed by a fraction. Gio lost himself to the motions of his trade, to the music that blared into the room, to the bittersweetness he had brought on himself.

Caprelle broke the silence halfway through. “You’re as good as they say, Giovanni,” he said, refusing to call Gio anything other than his full first name. “Much better than that lush I made the mistake of going to some months ago.”

Gio’s heart broke and he bit his lip. Then, “You must forgive Adromo, Imperial-Captain. His oldest boy was lost on one of the fronts a decade back. And his youngest hasn’t been the same since a vicious beating back in the winter.”

“And if I told you I was the one who gave him that beating?” Caprelle said, voice soft and goading. “If I told you the boy was a poor shoeshine and a worse sport about being called on it? That his father admonished him, and the young man still did not show proper respect? That it had to be taught to him with a truncheon’s end? What if I told you that?”

The last time Gio had gone to visit Adromo, the man was sobbing into a bottle of cheap anise. The doctor said Enzo was improving too slowly to say he was getting any better at all. To think, a life in the balance, all over a pair of scuffed boots.

Gio’s hand did not waver, though his gaze turned away from Caprelle’s. “I’d say the Imperial-Captain had his reasons. It’s not my place to question them.”

“Oh, I like you, Giovanni,” Caprelle purred as Gio stepped away to wash the blade. “You ever think of getting into politics?”

“Too bloody for me, Imperial-Captain. I’ll stick with my straight razor, thank you. At least it’s an honest kind of work.”

“More honest than government, certainly!” Caprelle’s laugh was the most undignified thing about him, a caustic bray that was almost insulting. But Gio sensed the movement to other topics and led the dance gladly, using the old art of conversation to gently bring them from politics to art, from art to books, from books to journalism.

His talent for talk was rusty from disuse, but a mortal enemy had walked right up to him and Gio began to remember the movements of his once-golden tongue, wielded like an old weapon.

At the end of the shave, Caprelle inspected his face like a general reading a wartime map. “Nary an inch of stubble, Giovanni. Good, honest work, as you said.” He pulled a pouch out of his pocket and handed it to Gio. “Inside, you will find triple what you’d get for your services in a day. I will return here at every week’s Turning. I will be your sole customer for the day. I trust this arrangement is acceptable?”

Gio didn’t bother looking into the pouch, only ran a thumb along his lip in the salute of the Empire. “I look forward to his Imperial-Captain’s visit in a week’s time. Best come prepared with an opinion on Pommin’s Leafsteel Cycle.”

A light shone in Caprelle’s eyes, and Gio didn’t like it. With a predatory gaze, the Sea-Hawk smirked, donning his coat and cape once more. “I’ll do that, Giovanni. Enjoy your weekend.”

Caprelle and his Iron Sentence guards left. Gio waited for them to round the corner at the end of the street before he fell to his knees, weeping, an explosion of coins ringing off the new tile, and even those went still eventually.

Gio wept and wept and by sundown, felt in his soul that he was doomed.

It didn’t take long for hope to find Gio.

He was sitting on his tiny back balcony; it overlooked a labyrinth of clotheslines so crowded that the setting sun was only a cool ember behind the linen, a little gold-and-orange coin sinking away. Isabel was away at her weekly card game over at Donna Fiorello’s house in the Mountebank District and Anissa was supposed to be on her way to her evening dance class.

When the apartment was empty and the sun was setting, Gio could sit outside with his small glass of almond liqueur and in his heart, believe this country was still called Verasa.

It didn’t take long to hear a knock at the door. As he turned to see who was there, Gio’s heart sank. He’d known his daughter Anissa had made some friends in the resistance, the Verasan Hopefuls, and he had refused to hear a single song of it, lest he learn the wrong thing. But he did know of one young friend, a girl no older than Anissa, who had a tattoo hidden under her dark hair, just behind her left ear: the blue torch of the Hopefuls.

Standing there in front of the screened door, framed in the fading orange-indigo light of sunset, she looked like the Angel of Little Deaths, who visits many times in life but will never be the one to collect your soul.

No, the Angel of Little Deaths only brought pain; even if it was the kind you could weather, it didn’t mean you should welcome her in.

“May I come in, Master Giovanni?” she called. “It’s me, Aster.”

How did he look, framed by the sunset, a hunched figure in the shadows, his features hidden? Maybe better for the angel, any angel, to put him out of his misery. “Oh, I know you, Aster. Anissa isn’t at home right now. She is dancing. In class. Which I know you take together.”

Silence between them. Then, she set her shoulders back and the sunset turned her features fiery; he could see the iron of resolution in her eyes. “I know you had a visit from the Imperial-Captain today. The whole block knows.”

Gio let her sentence hang in the air before downing the rest of the liqueur and coming inside, closing the deck behind him. Aster made to enter but Gio pointed at her, his elbow cracking, he moved so quickly.

“Child, I’ve not invited you in. Stay put. Know this: If you know I’ve had the Imperial-Captain for a visit, you know what sort of mood it’s left me in. If you step a foot inside this house with talk of revolution or murder or—or—or anything, I will never allow you within view of my street, let alone this apartment, again. Is that understood?”

To her credit, she didn’t come inside. She stayed outside the screen door, her voice low, the light fading around her. “Master Giovanni, will you listen to what I have to ask? For the friendship I hold with your daughter? For the love and pride I have for Verasa, our country that you knew and I never have?”

When had he started crying? Why, oh why, did she invoke that name for which he could not help but feel the swell of pride, the ache of heartbreak? “Speak from the door, Aster,” he said, voice shaking. “And then you must leave. You must.”

If she was becoming emotional, she did not show it; her voice was an unwavering, clear bell. “We know the Imperial-Captain will return. We know you will be at risk if we involve you at all. But we can’t ignore this opportunity. It’s rare Caprelle comes down to the lower neighborhoods, let alone with such a small coterie of Sentence guards. We ask you to prioritize your safety first, and that of your family. Do not take risks you can’t learn from. Don’t ask questions; let him lead you where he will. Flatter where you must, but don’t be afraid to challenge; he likes challenge, to a certain degree. And if he ever says anything of use, troop movements, council member locations, the state of certain bills within the Council of the Word, anything we can use…remember it. Write it down. Place the paper beneath the dying sunflower in the cracked clay pot on the corner of Dozarri and East Main on your way home from work two days after his visit. And maybe, just maybe, Master Giovanni, we will be able to be Verasans once again.”

Aster threw her hood back up, and said in a louder voice, “Many thanks, Master Monsargo! I’ll catch up with her in class, I’m sorry I missed her. Have a nice evening!”

She left, and it seemed she took the light with her. Gio stood in the fresh dark of his apartment, heart racing and eyes wet, the faint taste of sweet almonds turning bitter on his tongue as he thought of what she said, over and over and over again, and wondered if deep down, there wasn’t a little courage left in his soul.

Five weeks had passed since Aster’s visit, and Gio found the little courage he had was only a fitful ember, not enough to convince him to put his life or that of his family on the line. Week after week, the Imperial-Captain arrived, checked the shop as Gio stood by, and then with a sweep of his cloak, sat in the chair and bared his neck.

Week after week, Gio made small talk with a murderer and shoved his ember of courage lower and lower, wishing for the love of the seven gods of salt, storm, and sea that it would snuff out entirely.

They spoke of poetry and opera, literature and government, never venturing too far in any one direction; it was a dance that Caprelle gladly led and Gio let himself follow after, never daring to step too far out of line. Aster was correct, though: Caprelle did enjoy being challenged. Gio realized Caprelle would needle him on purpose, trying to get Gio to raise his voice, show him some of that “fire your people are so well known for.”

But the Imperial-Captain enjoyed leading the dance and would not tolerate anything that threatened his authority. One afternoon, as the two discussed a shortage of labor in the Stormwrath District, Gio felt unusually bold.

“You say the problem is that these men and women are asking for unfair wages, but what’s unfair about wanting to provide for their family? To ensure a good livelihood?”

Caprelle scoffed through the foam. “Please! These ‘workers’ are demanding double pay during storm season, which I remind you doesn’t have an end date in this dreary part of the country, so who knows how often they’ll be lining their pockets because a drizzle turns their lips a little blue. And secondly, many of them feign deference but are in truth instigators, proposing unions in the shadows while they lie through their smiles, bowing and scraping for the Imperial Toothcounters while continuing to plot the moment eyes are off them.”

Gio had a cousin in the Stormwrath District. He knew the dangers of the frequent summer and autumn rains; he knew how hard his cousin had to work, how she had to grow used to the terrible chill of rain against her face, how one in four workers would be bedridden with the storm sick, they called it, or tossed into the sea, or just plain break under duress.

With her in his mind’s eye, he said, “Caprelle, I wish you understood what those poor people are going through.”

He did not feel the Imperial-Captain tense at the utterance of his name. “My cousin, she’d be one of those laborers fighting for fair wages at the height of the season. She’d be one of those hoping to receive even a tenth of the mercy her colleagues are asking for from those noble Toothcounters you speak so highly of who we both know love to trail their hands through coins like water and line their pockets with whatever fish they can grab.” Gio brought the blade up with a light and steady hand, muttering, “I mean no disrespect. I just think it’s easier to speak such things when one hasn’t seen the hell those workers go through.”

Silence sat like a shroud through the remainder of the shave.

Gio cursed himself for a salt-borne bastard as the quiet thickened; fear trembled in his gut. He’d gone too far. And if he threw himself on the black-and-white tiles, prostrating himself in the ghost of his father’s blood to beg forgiveness, it would only make things worse. Caprelle was not a man to see flattery as cause for forgiveness.

When Gio had finished and patted Caprelle’s face with the hot towel that marked the end of their arrangement, the Imperial-Captain stood, faced Gio, and smiled.

The sound of his palm against Gio’s face rang out like a funeral bell.

Caprelle’s smile didn’t drop as he spoke.

“Oh, Giovanni, you grow familiar. You think because you run your fingers across my face that we are friends, or equals. We never will be, sir. You provide a service; I provide the coin. If you provide displeasure, I provide incentive to cease it. You think I haven’t gone to the water, seen the layabout dockworkers who snivel under a little rain and think themselves martyrs for hauling the very fine wool and wood of the empire for a fair wage? It took some time for it to emerge from your jaw, but it seems dissidence runs in the family. Do you think your cousin would enjoy a Toothcounter audit? Do you think she’d like a one-on-one meeting with me, just to make sure all is in order?”

As Gio stood there, face hot and eyes down, Caprelle continued. “Don’t make me regret our arrangement, Gio,” he said with an ugly familiarity. “And certainly, don’t make others pay for your poor attitude, especially family.”

Fastening his jacket, the four Sentence guards arranging themselves in a diamond around him, Caprelle finally dropped his smile. “I think your outburst was payment enough today, wouldn’t you say? And let’s say for next week’s as well, after my visit to the Tuscari coast. When I return, the coin will come again. At the end of the day, it is my mercy that is my best attribute, agreed?”

A numb hour passed, and it was not even this that finally stoked Gio’s courage into a fire. As he cleaned the shop, tidied the counter, and drew the blinds, Gio found himself ready to relinquish all courage to the wastebin. Not even humiliation and threats to his family were enough to convince him otherwise.

In fact, if Gio had simply taken his regular route home and kept his head down, that spark would have well and truly gone out.

But shaken by his encounter with Caprelle, Gio found his feet taking him the long way home, desperate for fresh air, hoping the extra steps would shake him free of his fear.

Through Orange Grove Park and across the Promenade of the Rusted Saber, down the Iadaila Stairway and through the Boulevard of Beers, Gio took his time and drank in the sights of his home, did his best to fly away with the scents of late summer, hibiscus and lemons and barley and hops.

And he found himself slowing as he passed a table with a single occupant, weeping into his tin mug of half-gone ale, a familiar set of shoulders heaving in a threadbare coat.

Gio went to Adromo. Enzo had awakened.

And within an hour of returning to the world, a writ had arrived: Enzo was being conscripted for the Maw, the foreign army of the empire. He was already gone.

As Adromo screamed his son’s name, falling from his chair to the cobblestones, a piece of paper fell out of his hands. The writ.

Caprelle’s signature was on it, the ink so fresh it was still wet.

It all made sense then, as Gio put his arms around the shoulder of his grieving friend. Adromo’s son had never been his to have back, as easily taken as the sea takes lives, as the earth reclaims rains. The empire was a great system that yielded to no one and nothing, regardless of appeal or threat. And men like Caprelle lived with the godlike confidence that anything within that system was theirs to do with as they pleased.

It made him sick, the realization that it would never matter to Caprelle or the empire at large that Gio kept his head down and worked hard and said nothing. They were less than playthings, Gio and Adromo, their children Anissa and Enzo, their wives, their kin, their lives, their jobs, their loves and fears.

Tears sprang to his eyes as Gio realized this most of all: If nothing mattered to the empire, than what Gio did had to matter in its place.

He could lose his life like his father, by doing something so inconsequential as asking a question. And he could lose his life like Enzo, by daring to have a shred of dignity before the powerful.

Or he could lose his life trying, with all his spirit, to do something to stop Caprelle and the Empire of Tongues.

He could be courageous if it meant another son was kept from war and another parent from death.

Two days later, Gio moved the pot of a drooping sunflower.

Beneath it, he left a small scrap of paper that said, Tuscari coast, next week.

Months later, when late autumn storms sat thick in the sky and the leaves turned to fire on their branches, Imperial-Captain Caprelle invited Gio to sit in his own red leather chair.

“Why, you’ve done such a fine job for me all these months, Gio,” Caprelle said, not betraying an ounce of venom in his jocular tone, “I say why not reward you for work well done, let me show my hand?”

Nothing sounded worse to Gio. But turning and running would simply find a bullet buried in his spine. And Caprelle was not a man who heard the word no very often.

Gio nodded and said, “Very kind of you, Imperial-Captain. I’m eager to see what you’ve learned by watching me.”   

Gio sat down in the chair, warm from its previous patron; his heart ached at the faint creak of leather, and he felt he was sixteen once again. Only he knew, watching Caprelle run his hands along the multitude of razors Gio kept for his work, that the sacred trust he had once learned in this very spot was about to be broken.

“Oh, I promise you, I’m a quick learner,” Caprelle murmured, unable to take his eyes from the dozens of razors, each sharp as glass. He picked up one of Gio’s favorites, his pale, thick fingers wrapping around the worn green-leathered hilt, eyes soaking up the mirror-bright shine of the steel. “I may seem a bit of a brute given my size, my history. But I assure you, Giovanni Monsargo, I earned the moniker of the Sea-Hawk for my sight and swift action, not just for ripping out the guts of field mice.”

He worked up the lather in silence. Gio stared forward, not at his reflection, but at the four Sentence guards around him. Each had his hand not at rest, but on the footlong knife in his belt, eyes not distant but watching his commander with keen interest.

It didn’t do any good to ruminate on what had done him in. All of it was against the grain. Even the gentlest betrayal would be enough to earn him the blade, the bullet, the noose, however Caprelle saw fit.

And as Gio turned his little betrayals over in his mind, information given about the parade or the ball or the clandestine meeting he’d overheard or this assassination attempt or that, all he saw in his mind was the little chair he kept on his balcony, the chipped green-and-white porcelain cup he sipped his espresso from, the paperback novel lying on the table next to it still, spine broken.

The chair. The cup. The novel. Isabel. Anissa. Each waiting for him to come home.

Each would be sorely disappointed.

But not in him, he hoped. Like his favorite anise liqueur, the certainty rested bittersweet on his palate. That he would not die a coward. As Caprelle applied the lather to his face (rough, smearing, disdainful), he fixed his eyes finally on his own reflection and thought to wherever his father’s spirit had found rest: I’ve not forgotten the lesson, Father.

With pride in his heart and dread in his bones, Gio bared his neck and looked directly at Caprelle. Let the man see if he dared. Let him feel the lesson of Gio’s father and falter.

And for the first time, as Caprelle looked down at Gio, his eyes crinkled in unease and he turned away. Coward. Always a coward, for he could not even make the promise everyone who had held that razor made. There were sacred things in this world, and Caprelle would never know them.

Finally, he brought the hair-thin razor to Gio’s cheek, and began.

Steel whispered across his skin and in the silence, Gio at least felt some kind of pride that although he had turned the tables, Caprelle engaged in a promise he had already broken before even beginning. And so he would never be a man of worth.

With every movement of the blade, the tension grew. Silence sat in the room, thick as coffee crema and lacking any of its richness, its joy. Caprelle did not hum or make small talk. He did not joke or swear. Like most everything he had turned his gaze to, he shaved as though his own life depended on it, not Gio’s.

And with deliberate slowness, Caprelle gave Gio the gift of his art echoed back to him.

As Caprelle’s weathered face hovered over his own, piercing blue eyes tracing the path of the razor down Gio’s face, with one last flare of bravery, he ventured a question as the Imperial-Captain worked.

“If I may, Imperial-Captain,” he said, voice no larger than a mouse’s, “may I ask what tipped you off?”

Was that a smile at the Imperial-Captain’s lips, there and gone, like Gio’s father? With an ease Gio envied, Caprelle said, “The military conference in Ydavar last month, when I skipped my shave that week at the solstice. I was a last-minute addition to the proceedings; you were the only person who knew ahead of time that I’d be present. And who do I speak with at the conference but a young man I’d noticed at a few previous engagements, eager for my ear, and would I be interested in getting a private drink, to learn more of his enterprises? Well, I got that drink and nearly had my throat cut for the effort. Now, salt bless the young man, for he did not utter your name. And yet, his association with the Hopefuls had me wondering how that group had learned of my agenda, especially in a country so far from home.”

At this, eye contact, brief but with no veil of subterfuge. “Apologies, Gio, but after a few weeks of a Toothcounter trailing you, it was…well, enough to bruise my heart, if not break it entirely.”

Whether the hurt was real or not, Gio’s tears were as he whispered back, “Caprelle, I come from a time when I had a country, when I knew who I was. I see your future brutalized over my past. I…I know you don’t see it that way, but you must understand why I did it. Why I had to do it. I resisted fighting for so long, but I realized if I didn’t fight, I could not look at myself in any mirror and know I had done everything I could.” A tear dripped down his face, cutting its way through the white foam on his cheek. “I—I had to try, Imperial-Captain.”

Caprelle nodded, eyes bright, though all emotion had been boarded up behind them. “And you did, Gio. You tried. But the Empire of Tongues knows every taste in the world, especially betrayal. And it will not be tolerated.”

Gio closed his eyes, tears dripping from the corners of his eyes and down his cheeks, diluting the white foam lather with their salt and sorrow.

Caprelle had come up behind him, and suddenly the cold edge of steel sat at Gio’s throat. A prick of pain shocked him; he felt blood rush to the touch. He had always kept his razors sharp; it was good practice.

He didn’t know what possessed him, but a sound came from deep within him and out of his mouth before Caprelle could dig the blade into and across Gio’s throat. “Wait! Wait, please–!”

“Gio, what did I just—”

“Outside, please. Please!” The ghost of Salazar had appeared in the room and some small, young part of Gio sobbed within him that this old room, these cracked tiles, had already seen too much blood.

“Please, I’m sorry, just—I wish to look on my country, please. One last time, no matter what name you call it. Please. Please! One last gift to an old man who—who has only ever treated you with respect.”

Silence. The razor waited at this throat like an ellipsis, uncertain.

Then, “On your feet, then, Gio. To look upon your old country, your precious Verasa, one last time before you join it in death.”

Gio was pulled up by two of the Sentence guards while Caprelle stepped back. Pushed through his own door, tripping on the cobblestones, baffled or terrified sounds of civilians being displaced, pushed away, shouted at to move. Cries of “Is that—Gio? The barber? Oh no, I can’t watch” should have been enough to draw his gaze, and yet…Gio didn’t turn to anyone.

Kneeling on a road paved with his youth, all he could do instead was stare at the city and the country he had loved for all his life. And he knew, when he joined his father in mere moments, he would continue to love it in death.

The gray cobblestones beneath him, heavy with a history of boots and hooves and wheels. The sky heavy with autumn storms whose winds shook olives and figs loose from their branches into the hands of impatient children. Corners thick with musicians, redolent and happy on their diet of strings and brass and lambskin drums. And well on its way to a winter Gio would not live to see, the sunset in shades of rose and marmalade, painting the sky just for him.

Then, suddenly, a strong hand on his shoulder, keeping him on his knees.

A shadow in his doorway, Caprelle’s form cast upon him like a funeral shroud.

His own steel, at his throat once more. The grip sure. The pressure unyielding.

“Any last words, traitor?” Caprelle said it softly, but his words carried into the crowd.

And it was as though his father murmured through him, gifting Gio the words that would have been his last. A twist of poetry was at his lips and Gio, in a voice louder than any he had spoken in for the last thirty years, shouted them.

“Oh, Verasa! You jewel of light! You country of verdant thought, where happiness grows fat as grapes on the vine! Don’t forget that your name means shield and sword and succor. Don’t forget that Verasa on the tongue of every child means home. And even if that home be cut from your mouth, rejoice, for that home can never leave your heart!”

Gio wished with all his soul that someone would answer, continue the verse in his heart. To keep death from him for a moment more.

But there was only silence. And Caprelle chuckled, voice dark.

“Poetry,” he said, practically snarling. “A pathetic utterance to end on, Gio.”

Gio’s world became the steel at his throat.

Pressure spiked. Blood raced to the razor, eager to be free. Pain like nothing he’d imagined. This, he knew, was the pain of a promise broken.

I’m coming, Father.

“Verasa! You crown of glory!”

A voice broke from the crowd. Gio couldn’t see; his whole world was the metal at his jugular. His eyes darted left to right, but all he saw was cobblestones and boots, skirts and trousers.

Another voice, different than the first, but just as youthful. “Verasa! Where all roads meet, and all feet leap in laughter and song!”

The pressure at his throat eased just a hair. Caprelle’s voice was suddenly high and loud, a hawk’s screech. “Find them! They’re in the crowd!”

A third voice. A fourth, speaking in unison. “Verasa, land of the old gods and kind ways! Your neighbor is your own heart, and your countryman is your kin. Here all homes are your home, and your home is theirs!”

The voices began to multiply. Gio found the courage to tilt his head up, just a fraction.

A crowd of people a hundred strong had gathered around them. And where only the young spoke at first, Gio now heard the rise and fall of generations in the poetry proclaimed at Caprelle and his guard.

Like a crown, they had encircled them. And in doing so, penned them in.

Dozens of voices now spoke a murmuration that wheeled around them like a flock of starlings. “Verasa! Whose enemies know her as fiend, and whose children know her as mother! Whose blade is always sharp and whose mercy is always boundless!”

As one, the crowd stepped forward; at their fore, Gio saw them: the youth of the Hopefuls, his daughter, Anissa, at their head with Aster and many others.

Into the face of her father’s killer, Anissa and her comrades shouted, “Verasa, multiplier of the free! Your children are born of the vine and when one falls, all fall together! For there is no harvest outside its time and when the reaping hour comes, we stand together!”

Gio had never had insight into the shrewd and bloody mind of the man he had been shaving for half a year. But in that moment, facing down a hundred and more people, all of them turned against him and his guard, Gio didn’t put it past the Sea-Hawk to recognize when it was time to take flight.

Without a word, he dropped Gio’s razor to the ground between them. Gio could not see Caprelle’s face, but he could taste the venom of his words. “There is nowhere in New Ikona that you’ll be safe, Gio. We’ll meet again.”

But even as he and his men fled, Gio didn’t feel fear. For Caprelle was wrong: this was Verasa. And in the strength of his country’s arms, Gio would always be safe.

The next few moments dazed him, thrilled him. Anissa’s strong arms wrapped around him, tackling him into the ground. The crowd cheered, even as several of the Hopefuls ran, beginning to shout, spreading the word. A few of those Hopefuls came forward; in some of their hands were old Verasan rifles hidden; for some, pistols were hidden under jackets, or tucked into waistbands.

With a glance behind him, Gio spied Caprelle, looking small and weak as he ran around the corner, making for the capitol building.

Above him, Aster spoke. “We have a little time, Master Monsargo; Lumre and some of the others will cause a traffic jam in the other direction, enough to throw off Caprelle and his guard, give you and your family time to pack. There’s a safehouse beneath the old state building. We can move you there for a few days, but we must be quick. It shouldn’t take long to find a galley headed toward Kildaltan; we have members there who can take you in—”

Gio shook his head as his daughter helped him to his feet. “No. No, I…” He looked at Anissa, saw resolve bright in her eyes, fear living alongside it. “I’m staying.”

Looking around, he saw his countrymen, young and old, gathered with him, and he bore witness to the way you reclaim a country: one person, one sentence, one word at a time. And he knew he couldn’t let them do so without adding his voice to the choir.  

He nodded at Aster and Anissa. “I’ve spent too long being quiet. It’s time to speak up and let the Empire of Tongues hear what we have to say.”

In a moment, they would scatter, seeds blown throughout the city, the fields, the country itself, planted in the hearts and minds of those ready to rise up from the earth after a winter of silence and fear.

But for now, Gio looked back into his shop and saw his vague reflection in the glass; in a moment of pride and sorrow, he realized he could pass for Salazar, all those years ago.

With a heart ready to burst from relief, gratitude, and fear, Gio nodded at the shop that had been his life, and with a glance back at the razor on the stones, he let himself be moved from this place and out into his city, his country.

His daughter, in a sweet, clear voice free of age and filled with the fire of youth, cheered, “For Verasa!” Others joined the call as everyone fled, making for safe haven, ready for the fight to come.

Moving through the throng of people, Gio limped toward the future with them. And with lather on his cheeks and blood on his throat, he added his voice to theirs and cheered.

“With Only a Razor Between” copyright © 2025 by Martin Cahill
Art copyright © 2025 by Yuta Shimpo

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With Only a Razor Between

Martin Cahill

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Martin Cahill

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Original Fiction

The Name Ziya

A girl reckons with what she must lose–and who she has become–in order to be accepted at the empire’s most prestigious university.

Illustrated by Holly Warburton

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Edited by Sanaa Ali-Virani

By Wen-yi Lee

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Published on June 18, 2025

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A girl reckons with what she must lose–and who she has become–in order to be accepted at the empire’s most prestigious university.

Novelette  |  9300 words 

When the cutter offered forty thousand shada for all five parts of my name, my mother puffed up. Absolutely not, she said, you brain-gored swindler.

I sat on his bench as they haggled, naked from the waist up. It was a cool morning and my skin pimpled around the ideograms on my bare chest. The full set of five was worth the most; forty thousand shada was more money than we took from ten harvests, and would have covered my tuition with coin to spare. But I was glad my parents had rejected the first offer. I was not prepared to lose the entirety of my name just yet.

“All right, all right,” Durudawanyi relented. Earlier, the rector had murmured and prevaricated as he examined my ideograms, evaluating their specific powers and different combinations, along with my age and other factors. “Twenty-five thousand, for the affective three.”

My mother hesitated. It was unfortunate that I had been born with my more powerful names all at the end: the ones that let me shape earth without cracking, find my way in the dark, share our dogs’ senses. You could only sell from the end, and never out of order, so selling three names would mean losing most of my magic. But where I was going, money was more important than magic. “Thirty,” she said.

Durudawanyi scrutinized her. “Twenty-eight.”

My parents exchanged a look. “Done.”

I clutched my blouse. Two days ago, I would never have fathomed sitting in the rector’s lush, airy hut, the place where people went and came back changed. But then the letter arrived. I had, beyond all hope, tested into the University of Ustonel—a place far, far away—a place that produced consuls and guildmasters and airship captains—a place that had never, until this cycle, accepted students from the Angze Hills.

The tuition for three years’ study was thirty-five thousand shada. A discounted price, as a welcome. 

Not going was out of the question. And so I was here, selling the most precious thing an Angze was born with.

When the namecutter sliced the first part-name from my chest, I screamed. I had promised not to, I had sworn to be brave, but it ripped from me with a pain like I had never felt in my life. Blood was running down my chest. “It’s all right, darling,” my mother whispered into my hair. “It’s all right.” She had sold one part of her name to feed us during the drought a few years ago. My father had sold one when I was a child, and one before I was born. Now inducted, I pressed into my mother’s arms, fighting back tears. I thought of my name being carried to the anchorites in the hills, whose prayers from our names the bethel claimed kept the soil rich and the rivers flowing through the valleys. There were even those devout who offered up their part-names willingly. Though our village did not particularly subscribe to the faith, who was I to judge it when the bethel were willing to open their treasuries like this?   

Durudawanyi deftly slipped the ideogram into a vial. It fluttered, leaving specks of red on the glass. For all the knowledge of its greater destination I stared at it hazily, wondering how that could have come from me; how such a fragile-looking thing could cause so much pain.

When he took the second part-name, I fainted.

I awoke at home, with pungent bandages around my chest and a throbbing ache in both my skull and my ribs. My sister wiped my face with cool cloths, while at the stove behind her my father was boiling lemongrass tea. A trunk was open on the floor. My mother was putting my things into it. It had been done.

I once had a name of five segments. But henceforth, and onward to Ustonel, I would simply be Ziya.

Two weeks by carriage took me to the port. I barely had time to take in the new surroundings before I was on a boat headed across the ocean.

Ustonel was a coastal empire, but I had never seen the sea. The sight of that much water felt like ascending into a tossing, frothing divine. I clutched the rails, trunk squeezed between my knees, and stared in equal terror and veneration as afternoon bled into evening with a chiaroscuro of color.

As the sun set, the spires of the university emerged on the horizon.

Second-hand tales had done little to prepare me for the city of white turrets, wrapped around a rock pillar that emerged from the beating waves like the many-fingered arm of an old god. It was surrounded by smaller outcrops, which bore smaller buildings and a flashing lighthouse, but the main spire that was the University of Ustonel cast its long, long shadow over us as our boat crawled up to it. I tipped my chin all the way back. Lamps glittered like stars in the slits of its turrets and along its crenellations. As we approached the docks I saw our entrance: a twisting, punishing staircase cut into the rock.

The boat anchored. We bobbed beside the jetty, damp with spray. A minute later, a squad in turquoise cloaks thundered up the gangway. They were not much older than I; metal crests gleamed on their cloakpins. Older students, I thought, before one of them shouted, “Get in line, double-time!”

I and the couple dozen others on the boat with me—largely Ustonels who had spent the journey lounging in the cabin sipping tea—scurried into a nervous queue.

We were marched off the docks and along a precarious path that veered into the caverns within the pillar itself. We came to a shallow cave pool populated by silvery fish, upon which the older girl at my shoulder threw me down onto the bank.

“All right, tadpoles, listen up!”

I was handed a blade, the handle’s leather worn to burrs. I had never seen a knife like this: long and flat, with a wicked hook in its tip that made it look like a silver tooth. The girl took half a second to notice my features. “Huh, Angze,” she said, and I tensed. But then she simply nodded at the pool. “Spear a fish and cut the head off.”

I was so dazed already, a culmination of the long journey and the assault of new sights and here, stepping into an institution where no Angze had ever been before. I would have done anything in that instant if I was told. Numbly, I gripped the knife, and set about plunging it into the water.

Soon the cave echoed with the sound of splashing and whipping tails. Fortunately, I’d caught my share of fish from streams deeper than this pool, although never with a knife. I managed to spear a fat one and drag it onto the ground where it wriggled, gasping.

With a sharp breath, I severed its head. The knife was not made for this purpose; it took three hard hacks to take it off completely. The body stilled surprisingly quickly. Decapitated chickens would continue tottering around the yard, waiting for their death to catch up to them, but the fish instantly flopped cold, slick in the pooling blood. I retrieved the wayward head, ignoring how its bulging eye glinted accusingly, and presented it to the girl with raised, red hands. “Mistress.”

She laughed, raspy and pleased, and accepted the head. Her fingers dipped into its sockets and pressed out its eyes with wet squelches. She tossed the head aside and held the gleaming, accusing spheres out to me. “Together.”

There was only one way to understand this. I scooped one eye from her hand. Together, we dropped the eyes into our mouths and swallowed. It tasted like brine and the blood off my fingers, but otherwise had the consistency of firm jelly, and went down smooth. Down the row, someone vomited into the water.

The girl looked pleased. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Ziyar—” 

My awkward, traitorous mouth tripped over its missing syllables. My throat hitched and spat out feed instead: the eyeball shot up my throat like a marble and splattered onto the rock. 

The girl’s expression turned cold. She looked from me to the mulch.

Hurriedly, I scooped it up. I couldn’t then, but I can name the parts now: cornea, pupil, retina, sclera—all sloshed into my nails, and dripping in vitreous humor. I picked it up, I fed it past my lips, I swallowed. This time it stayed down. “Ziya,” I repeated. It scratched my throat to say.

She grasped my wet hand and pulled me to my feet. “Ziya,” she said, pleased again. It sounded like welcome.

Once I conquered the thousand sea-slick steps, I found myself sharing a narrow set of apartments with four others: three Ustonels and, to my surprise, an Angze boy. He slipped into the spot beside me as our house gathered in the kitchen to introduce ourselves. I gave him a grateful glance as we drew chairs.

The only other girl, who sported pretty white curls and long-lashed, expressive eyes, was absolutely chirpy. “I’m Caelan Burnetta Karthe Ruh, but you can just call me Caelan.”

“Aradika Denja Orys Dae Chandrea,” said the boy who wore airship goggles atop his short hair. He offered no truncation, but I soon learned he, too, answered simply to Aradika. The indulgence of their names shocked me; it also made me ache.

The final, pouting Ustonel boy was Haval Janika Lott, and there was a slight tsk to the way he cut off the last consonant, as though he was bothered by his name. Or perhaps he was simply bothered by us. He rolled his cuffs carelessly as he spoke.

I was prepared this time. “My name is Ziya.” A brief silence followed, as though I had underused my span of air.

“Ziya,” Caelan repeated savoringly, pronouncing it almost right. “I’ve always thought you’re all fascinating, the way your names are spells. I’m just named after my grandmothers! What does Ziya mean?”

My heart twinged with loss, but I did not want to cause unnecessary awkwardness. “It means nothing on its own.” That was not entirely true. Zi was for fortitude, a purely moral ideogram that built character but lacked actual power. Ya was acuity, which gave me quick reflexes and sharp senses. But I had lost three-fifths of the phrase. Together they were a prophecy. Apart, they meant very little.

“Did you sell the rest of it?” Haval drawled. The matter-of-fact way he asked made my skin prickle. “What were they?”

“Haval!” Caelan chided. “She can’t tell you.”

He shrugged and nodded at the Angze boy next to me. “What about you?”

The boy hesitated. How much of his name did he have left? How much had he sold to be here? His clothes and skin looked as worn and sun-beaten as mine, and his fingers looked calloused. I doubted he was wealthy. I tried to give him a reassuring look, but he wouldn’t turn my way.

Finally he said, “You can call me River.”

“River?” Aradika asked, before being elbowed by Caelan. I was starting to figure out that she was quick, and tactful. She’d realized what I instantly had: River had none of his original name left. He had sold it all to attend.

Haval made a pleased little sound.

That night, tipsy on the ale Haval had produced for the welcome party, I lay in bed staring out the window. The party had been held with about a dozen other Ustonels that Caelan and Aradika knew. It had been my first time trying Ustonel liquors—bitterer, stronger than anything from the Hills, brewed for sailors—and playing Ustonel games (I had turned out excellent at cards). On the effusive arm of Caelan, who seemed to have taken a liking to me, I had even found myself at the fascination of her friends, whose endlessly long names made my head spin. We chatted and discussed upcoming classes, and it was altogether an enjoyable time. I was asked questions about the Hills, and the long journey here, and whether everything was confusing and new.

Despite the niceties, I had the unease of being a leaf dropped into the current: buoyant, yes, but ungainly, impossible not to notice. More than once, Caelan told off someone else for asking about my lost names. Toward the end of the night, some drunk boy tugged insistently at my collar, wanting to see them on my skin. I was paralyzed; Aradika and Haval had to force him from the premises.

Lying in bed with the sound of the sea beneath, higher up in the world than I had ever been, I felt the ache of my missing names acutely. A large part of me had been scooped out and left hollow; not a tangible thing, except for the three scars under my collarbone, but bone-deep all the same. Into its place, something nebulous and tangled was beginning to trickle in. But before I could properly discern it, I drifted off to sleep. 

As first-years, we learned everything. I spent my days on mechanics, mathematics, ethics, the chemical and biological sciences. In history I spoke more of the Angze Hills and its hinterland role in the development of Ustonel than I had ever thought to consider in my life. I became the expert. Two evenings a week, we traipsed up to the vast courtyard at the top of the pillar and learned to chart the stars, key for both airship and boat captains alike and the very foundation of guild trade. Back in the Hills, we followed deer trails and birds, the sky too vast for the shorter distances we traveled. These lessons taught me new breadth to the world.

The classes challenged me and I rose to them fiercely, to the compliment of my teachers. Despite my initial discomfort, I determinedly settled into this new sound of myself: clipped, neat, a version that slipped into even the most rushed of conversations. That reminder of what I’d paid to be there spurred me on further with every hello. I made myself efficient. I drew up schedules and assigned myself three books per week from the labyrinthine granite library—I was fluent in Ustonel colloquially, but academia demanded a much greater vocabulary, and a certain flowy, laborious voice quite different from the staccato patterns of the Hills. We were curiosities, I knew, so I was determined to make myself as uncurious as possible.

My second name gave me a talent for mimicry; I could sing birds’ songs back to them. Now I dedicated myself to the way the Ustonels constructed their arguments and, like the birds, fed them back until we both sang. Like names, there was a pattern and a weight to language; words had to be in certain places, in certain orders, before the spell would take hold.

Not all the Angze students were so successful. There were about ten of us, six boys and three other girls that I saw intermittently. One girl, Siluintong, struggled immensely with her inflections. Hearing her attempt to debate was embarrassing; worse, she kept looking at me, as though willing me to translate. It frustrated me that she wouldn’t simply try a little harder to make herself better understood, especially since she was clearly wealthier than I was. Magic or not, I had put in the work; why couldn’t she? She was pleasant enough in the early weeks, and we took lunch together a few times, figuring out the seafood offerings and frowning over strange new tastes. But she eventually began to grate on me, and I found myself meeting up instead with Caelan and Aradika, who all but adopted me. Haval occasionally deigned to join. Surprisingly, I started seeing River and Siluintong together, with a couple other Angze students.

The centerpiece of university life was the full moon dinner. Three weeks after I arrived, we gathered in the courtyard at the very top of the university. Hundreds of sitting mats had been laid out across the stone, beneath the cloudless sky. I was seated between Caelan and River.

After a brief ceremonial address, dinner was served promptly by waitstaff in dark blue suits. That was the first thing that unnerved me; I had never been formally served before. Second was the opening course: a chilled fish head placed before me on a wooden platter, garnished with ginger and seaweeds.

I subconsciously understood, but it was only until I saw the Ustonel students around me vigorously popping out eyes and swallowing them that it truly sunk in. We ate eyes in the Hills too, often stewed, along with tongues, livers, feet, intestines, and testicles—every part of the animal we could, because we couldn’t afford to waste it. But this dish unsettled me. It was the manner in which it was served, a violence made beautiful in the name of luxury.

“You’re not eating?” Caelan asked. She had already polished off hers and set the rest of the head aside. What waste.

“Oh, I—” I was ashamed to say it, when everyone around me was nearly finished. But then from several seats down there was an audible pop and a muffled giggle. I looked around and saw River scowling, fingers dripping and a caved-in, jelly mess pooled where his fish’s eye had been. I turned back to Caelan, heart quickening inexplicably. “I don’t know how,” I admitted with some difficulty.

“Haven’t you got a knife?” I realized she was holding a knife like the one I’d killed the cave fish with, and that every other Ustonel had one in hand as well. They must have had their own, and no one had remembered this little detail for the new Angze students.

Caelan reached over. “Here, I’ll show you.” I watched intently as she slit the fish’s cheek and extracted the eyes. She was sweet, and the eyeballs, especially paired with ginger, were delicious—gooey on the outside and crispy and briny on the inside. But I burned with a particular embarrassment at needing to be helped like a child.

Two days later Caelan knocked unexpectedly on my door, carrying a lacquered case that she opened on my desk. “Choose one.”

Inside were over a dozen fish knives. Longer, shorter, nicked blades and smooth; some diamond shaped, some narrow, some with intricate engravings. “I got that for my fifteenth birthday,” she explained, of one with a particularly fine leather handle. The one she currently carried around, silver inset with lapis, had been a matriculation gift.

I protested, but secretly I was desperate to take one. After the dinner I had looked into purchasing a fish knife, but the ones the university sold—engraved with the academy’s crest—were cripplingly expensive. Now, with this dizzying selection, I kept gravitating toward the leather, and after my fingers brushed it on a fourth pass Caelan pressed it into my palm, ignoring all my exclamations. She closed my fingers around it firmly, until the leather settled into the lines of my hand and I had to admit that I rather liked the weight.

Winter was weeks of early nights and studying by firelight, sipping spiced wine that Caelan brewed. The storms were brutal, mooring the university alone at the axis of its own tidal world. I missed more than ever the mild mists of the hills, but when nostalgia began to distract me I tucked it away. Classes did not stop for the weather.

Eventually the days started warming. Moss bloomed on the rocks, and one day I found Aradika frying fish with his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Gold peeked from under the hem. It looked almost like Lin, first formulation—but then he shifted and the sleeve covered the lines. It was just a trick of the light, I told myself.

Talk began popping up about the Spring Festival. For the first time, everyone else seemed distracted. It was a big celebration, the Ustonels explained, welcoming the first merchant fleets of the new year. Caretakers draped the courtyard in gossamer curtains woven with flowers and lights. The kitchens smelled constantly of fresh bread and fried fish. Spiced wines gave way to sweet ciders and candied berries, and Caelan emerged one day in a pink dress, tossing her hair and declaring that spring had officially arrived. Her skirt spun; her sleeves billowed. Again, I thought I glimpsed something on the side of her leg, but then her skirts settled and it was gone.

The day of the Festival, I followed my housemates up to the courtyard. “My mother sent my envelope yesterday,” Aradika told Haval and Caelan eagerly. “My first year, they wanted to say congratulations—”

“All right,” Haval sniped. “What did you get, then?”

“Ten, but Caelan got at least fifteen, she won’t tell…” I didn’t know what they were discussing, evidently some Ustonel tradition. Regardless, Haval looked irritated and curtly changed the topic.

The Festival was already in full swing, tables of pastries and snacks and cold salads, merchants with all kinds of trinkets and games that had been arriving by ship in full force for the past few days. One side of the courtyard had been left clear, however, with sturdy platforms extended from the edge.

I didn’t have to wait long to discover their purpose. Within minutes, dots appeared in the sky, steadily growing. Airships.

I gaped despite myself. I had never seen them so up close: sleek miraculous blimps rutted with copper and bronze, tails to the wind, emblazoned with their guilds or other associations. As they descended to the gangways, we had to grab at our hair to keep it from being whipped into knots. 

“Come on!” Aradika shouted, already pushing forward. “Before there’s a long line!”

With Aradika’s elbowing, we made it to the somewhat-front of a queue for a blue airship that looked more finely made than all the others. Every strut gleamed. The merchants themselves were dressed equally well, in exquisite blue silk and gold rings. There were racks of shining amulets, stoppered bottles of oils, cut gemstones, and velvet-lined chests glimmering with some kind of glass. Guards with revolvers and batons kept close watch as our line moved.

While the first few people browsed, I noticed a boy taking a seat on a chair near the chests. He rolled up his sleeve as a merchant popped a cork off a vial. With a flat blade, the merchant scooped something from the suspension and plastered it onto the boy’s arm. After a moment it was done; the boy handed over what looked like a staggering amount of shada, and ambled away.

Haval was squinting after him. “I wonder what he got?”

“I hope there’s a good variety,” Aradika said. “I don’t know what I’ll do if not.”

 We were ushered into the ring. I was curious about the vials, and my friends made directly for them as well. “Oh!” Caelan exclaimed delightedly, reaching into one of the chests. I came around a moment later, and my breath caught.

Part-names. Suspended in clear liquid, floating in vials like exquisite creatures, or flakes of gold. Like stars in a glassy galaxy. My head spun, recognizing words I hadn’t read in a long time. Pan, second formulation. Yi, eighth formulation. Sek, third formulation. Earth-sense, age-wise, confidence, patience, river-breather, wolf-seer, corn-grower.

Then I saw the price tags, looped onto the vials with string, and everything blurred. Somewhere to my left, Caelan’s voice snaked into my consciousness: How much is that? Fourteen? I can do fourteen.

Fourteen thousand, I realized. Fourteen thousand shada to buy the part-name that the merchant stuck onto the side of her ribs with a flourish of the flat blade. I recognized the gold lines as Ke, second formulation, number-mind. She didn’t need that, I thought distantly, she was already prodigiously good with her accounts.

The anchorites in the hills, I thought. Our names like spells in their prayers. But here our names were in the same vials that Durudawanyi had, starting from five thousand shada. It was an exorbitant amount of money, and yet—how could it be worth so little? This had been part of a person once, one-fifth of their identity. It was the fundamental magic of the universe. It was worth only five thousand?

But equally, the Ustonels were paying five thousand. I saw more shada exchanged that day than I had ever seen in my life, amounts that could have fed our village ten, fifty, a hundred times over. I had known my tuition was at a steep discount. I had never considered just how steep. Despite the confidence I had gained in the past months, that moment swayed me, face hot again with the same fumbling embarrassment I had felt not knowing how to eat fish eyes at dinner. I didn’t know how little I had until I met someone else’s excess, and I burned to think I had ever been content with my own possessions.

“That makes no sense,” I said, struggling to sound casual as Haval handed over eight thousand shada for Han, first formulation. Everyone around me was buzzing, excited; I felt like that leaf again, unable to flow like the water did. “Han is much less powerful than Du, except perhaps the eighth form, but it costs so much more.”

Haval rolled his eyes, but it lacked animosity as he admired his new mark on his right arm, simultaneously chewing hard candy he’d bought by the bag. “It sounds nicer.” His voice came out muffled.

I didn’t understand. Despite my best efforts, I spent my first Festival in a daze. It wasn’t as if they could have used the magic. They couldn’t pronounce the letters; their mouths did not fit. My first part-name, for example, a sharp static scuff of toughness and confidence, became stretched like glue between their teeth. Zee.

But I soon realized that the magic itself was inconsequential. The Ustonels simply collected the part-names to display. It was fashionable. In summer midriffs and biceps emerged, and with them the entire script: part-names curling up the underside of their ribs, dotting their upper arms like freckles, balancing on the nodes of their spine. They cut panels from their clothes to show off the ideograms underneath. Haval had four. Aradika and Caelan both had six. Now that the weather permitted, they compared at every chance.

They were genuinely interested in what the different characters meant, once the topic was broached. They tried their best to learn the pronunciations from me, and I explained their meanings, as well as the different ceremonies we had in the Hills for the reveal of a baby’s name. It was bad luck, for example, for anyone to see the name before the mother. Toward the end of a birth, midwives wore blindfolds, which would only be removed once the mother had read out the name.

These facts they absorbed with fascination; I was glad to see their newfound appreciation, but still seeing the part-names casually adorning their bodies reawakened an ache I should have long resolved. It was pointless, and irrational. We had exchanged the names freely, and such was the nature of commerce—why shouldn’t someone buy what had been sold? Why shouldn’t the Angze bethel draw on the power of storytelling to placate people in such a painful moment of releasing part of their name? Had it not given me peace, in my own moment with the namecutter? Had the sale not enabled me to be here?

 Unfortunately, superstition, taught since birth, is not rational. It would be a while before I came to terms with it.

As the summer wore on, news came from the Hills that the dry season had turned into a drought. The harvest was blighted. I walked across the courtyard reading my parents’ letter, hearing the sea splash against the rocks below, feeling the wet air. Yayimindeisi may sell a part-name if the season continues like this, my mother wrote. Though your father insists it’s his turn instead. Do not worry, either way. Your money is safe. Focus on your classes and make us proud.

Someone laughed. I looked up. On the shallow steps leading up to the library, two students had shaken back their sleeves and were comparing part-names on their arms. Somehow, the implications of the trade hadn’t quite sunk in all that time; it was this moment, with the letter in my hand and the two Ustonels on the steps, that made it dawn on me. 

Our names could be restored.

Over many months I perfected the delicate art of enucleation: the best place to cut the cheek to get easier access to the eye; the precise angle at which to dig my nails under the skin to sever the muscles without popping the humor; the exact amount of strength needed to break the nerves with a single elegant yank. When the new year rolled around, our house plotted our induction of the incoming first-years. We marched down to the docks that night and cast the wriggling things onto the banks of the rock pool. I handed a gangly Ustonel boy my fish knife and he took it without question. When he presented me the fish with all due respect and I gave him his eye to swallow, I knew I had properly moved up the ranks.

River did not participate. He had become increasingly withdrawn since the Festival, scuttling back and forth from his rooms without even a greeting. He skirted me with particular animosity, and being in any shared space with him became unbearable. I would postpone meals rather than enter the kitchen with him in it. It was juvenile. I remembered what that initial emptiness felt like, the friction of a severed name and the alienation of navigating a new world, but it had been a year past at this point and felt distant to me now. Of course I, too, occasionally wondered what it would be like to regain my old name, or during some conversations with Ustonels felt as though there were an abyss I could not cross. But moping was simply wasting away this opportunity we’d both fought so hard to attain.

“Why’s he like that?” Aradika asked once, and I felt a spark of genuine hatred for River. Because we were both Angze I was meant to understand his moods, like some sort of ethnic augur, and it annoyed me that I didn’t, because he simply refused to act reasonably.  

Second year ushered in new fraughtness all around. I saw Siluintong was once again sharing a class with me—The Economies of Airships—and not having seen her for some time, I felt rather guilty in retrospect for the way I had deserted her. “Siluintong,” I called politely, lifting a hand as she walked past the slateboard.

She stiffened, and I thought perhaps my prior coldness had ruined too much. But then she said curtly, “My name is Siluin.” She crossed the room and took a desk on the far other end, laying out her books with exacting deliberation.

And so we began the new year, brisker.

It was a sort of omen. Amidst our sharply demanding new classes came rumors of Angze students going mad. There were almost twenty of us now, between the two years, but rather than increase our presence it seemed to make it more starkly clear which of us had the ability to succeed here—a sufficient sample size, as my professors would have taught it. It was not merely mettle and hard work. Instead, much of it was something more abstract, a certain habitus and versatility, a will and capacity to adapt on an existential level. I flourished, advancing in classes, falling in with Caelan’s friends, and joining the committees of several distinguished societies. But there were others who noticeably flagged behind, who became known for lurking together in corners never speaking to anyone else. Like River, they kept to themselves.

I didn’t immediately take the rumors to heart. Students told all kinds of ghost stories (and those of sirens and leviathans and murderous water spirits to boot), and the whispers that Ruby, an Angze girl in our year, had screamed at her Alchemics professor before collapsing on the ground sobbing and clawing at her chest seemed just like a particularly unfortunate stress episode. Exams were approaching, after all. Everyone was on edge.

But then another boy started drifting around wordlessly at night, buying smokeweed from whoever would sell it and coming to class drenched in the scent. A first-year allegedly sought out affairs with the fervor of the dying and was seen purchasing illicit abortive drugs come spring. There were rumors about black-market merchants being met on the rocky shore in the middle of the night, selling false part-names that poisoned instead of healed, or were just shriveled things cut from cow leather. It was the Festival incident that convinced me, however. Kai, an Angze girl who had previously excelled in Engineering, snuck on board the part-name ship after the Festival and held a knife to the merchant’s throat while turning over boxes of vials. The guards intercepted, but the story went that she had escaped by jumping off the ship in midair, clutching a vial all the way down.

I knew that wasn’t a rumor because we all saw the body washing up on shore, stiff fingers still cinched around the vial, whose cork had been pried off. Her collar was torn, revealing five scars. It seemed that, mid-fall, she’d tried to stick the part-name back on. She hadn’t succeeded. The name was lost now, somewhere in the ocean. Torn apart, perhaps. Or otherwise tumbling over and over in the current, lost without direction.

That episode shook me. I became more determined than ever that I would not succumb to that kind of insanity. It would not be me at the center of those stories, whispered over drinks with raised eyebrows and cautious looks at the next Angze student who walked past. I had a stronger constitution, one that adapted.

I will admit that since the initial realization, my thoughts had strayed to restoring my name more than once. At that Festival which Kai would later ruin, I eyed the merchant’s vials, looking for familiar part-names. I did not find any, though I could not have afforded them regardless. After the incident, however, I put all thoughts of restoring names out of mind. That path had led a first-class student to her downfall. I refused to go the same way. I had gotten along just fine without it.   

It was not all terse, though. When not stormy, the university was a place of dreams. The sky seemed bluer than it had ever been in the Hills, and so close I could touch. The intricate stone buildings were so solid, so lasting, the kind of place that featured in tales and legends. They were buildings that would accumulate and hold up to the weight of the history its scholars uncovered: new discoveries, axes of language, policies of governance, ways of knowing the unknowable. It made me dizzy to think I was a part of it. I even learned things about the Angze Hills that I never had while living there: the political and economic forces in which it was a crucial participant, its role in the land’s spokes of commerce and supply, the philosophical value of our cultures and linguistic genealogies. I became aware of the flaws in our systems and the adaptive cleverness of our architecture.

For the first time I truly understood my home in the currents of the world; I realized one must leave a place in order to see it completely.

And finally, the summer of that second year, I fell disastrously in love with Caelan Burnetta Karthe Ruh. How it happened exactly, I couldn’t tell you. It was something between Spring Festival and summer boat trips drifting on the lazy waves, telling stories while she took my fingers and taught me to weave cords in the Ustonel way, her head on my lap on the settee in our apartment as I read through a passage that had struck me in my studies. She kissed me first, and when we pulled apart gasping she rested her forehead against mine and stroked my cheek. “Ziya,” she whispered wondrously. Still dazed, all the blood pounding in my head, I thought it was the most magical thing I had ever heard anyone say.

Third year was a milestone. For the first time, there were Angze in all levels of the university, thirty-six in total. Some had dropped out. One other had been found dead in the ocean, with a botched part-name over the third scar on his chest. Fool, I thought when I heard, you can’t do it out of order. I was restless all day that day, and Caelan noticed that evening while we were having dinner. “What’s wrong?”

I wanted to answer, but I couldn’t explain the apprehension in a way that felt right, even though it sat at the bottom of my stomach in a hard knot, like an unwelcome pearl. I merely shrugged and speared another fillet, changing the topic to ask about her coursework on modeling air currents for predictive flight and adaptive engineering. With third year, our coursework had shifted sharply into practicalities and ambitions. No longer were we learning theories; we were expected to synthesize and apply them in novel ways, preparing a portfolio of ideas for our eventual applications to the most esteemed guild positions. Caelan was a sure thing for the Engineers; her face lit up as she dived into the mechanics of her newest model, which would increase the capacity of airships to change path mid-air. Her sheer enthusiasm, and the way it brightened her entire being, warmed me. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It loosened the knot in my stomach, just enough for me to forget it.

Our professors drilled us relentlessly, making it clear that they were the ones making recommendations to the guilds and that we could not afford to slip up. Caelan, Aradika, and I spent hours in the library, or, when the weather was nice, in the open squares with picnic baskets. More than one of our classmates developed a reliance on smokeweed; I heard rumors that the Angze boy who’d become addicted the previous year had sold off another part-name to pay for the habit. On the other end of the spectrum, there was no shortage of stimulants circulating, as our hours grew longer and deadlines mounted. Everyone else’s vices meant nothing to me. I had to focus, and that meant my world shrank to only my own necessities.

Winter came as it always did and made our cramming even more miserable. But amidst the dreariness of the storms and early darkness there were hot dinners cooked by Aradika that we ate together by lamplight—clam chowders and milky fish soups and seaweed fritters, paired with warm spiced wine. We read books and played cards and kept the fireplace stoked. I laughed harder than I ever had in my life, wrapped snug in blankets by the flames. Haval mellowed, grudgingly drawn by the excellence of Aradika’s cooking, but River was always absent. Haval mused that perhaps River was a bit mad too, because he saw him mumbling to himself at night, and touching his reflection in the mirror as though not recognizing it.

“Don’t say that,” Caelan said, with the same discomfort I felt.

“It’s not like he’d be the first. Wasn’t he friends with…Kai, or whatever her name was?”

“But it’s different when it’s…” Aradika gestured vaguely, but we all understood. It was different when it was one of us; as little as we saw River, he was still our housemate, and we felt that obligation toward him. Rumors were different when they were under your roof. I pulled my blanket tighter, feeling something strongly but unable to verbalize it.  

To stave off the cold, Caelan and I started spending nights together. By the end of it, I was almost always feverish. She left kisses all across my collarbone and along my stomach, carefully avoiding my names.

“You can touch them, you know,” I told her one night.

She sat up. “Really? I didn’t know if—” She fell quiet at my reassuring look, and placed a gentle fingertip over the first curve of Zi, right over my sternum. A ripple went through me. I’d managed to forget hers were there, most of the time; in the dark, especially, they were easy to make peace with. But mine were different, rooted to my core. Even she must have felt the difference because she traced them in slow, tingling awe. “Ziya,” she read. I felt that jolt again through my veins. Magic, or just the way she said it?

“What’s this?”

She had landed on the scars. I knew what they looked like; I had stared at them obsessively in my first year. About the length of my thumb, jagged brown shadows of old names. Caelan’s hand withdrew, understanding dawning. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve never seen it scar. Did it hurt?”

“It was the worst thing I’d ever felt,” I replied honestly. “But I’m all right now. I don’t even feel it.” Then she still looked unconvinced, so I took her hand and placed it over my heart, Zi and Ya and scars and all. My pulse thudded against her palm. I interlaced my fingers over hers. “I don’t regret it. I would do it all over again. Kiss me,” I said.

She kissed me. “Ziya,” she murmured. “Ziya, Ziya, Ziya.”

My third Spring Festival was a more subdued affair, as the first exams were scheduled for the week after, but I let Caelan indulge me in pastries. There was a staggering variety of part-names on sale, some of them going for only four thousand shada. The drought, I thought distantly. It must have driven up sales, depressed prices. Then I thought, Is one of Papa’s in there?

But I didn’t see it.

“I should have gotten it on my cheek. I’ve been thinking about it, just to get on the examiners’ nerves,” Aradika mused that night, as we lounged by the fireplace allowing ourselves the day off. Aradika had sworn that if he spent Spring Night with theorems he would pluck out his own eyes. “I was going to move the one I got last Festival, but I don’t like it that much anymore.”

Caelan perked up. “That was the one I said was pretty. What was it called, Ziya?”

Aradika tugged down his collar helpfully. “Lan,” I read. “Fifth formulation. It means foal-bringer.” Excellent for horse rearing. Useless out here.

“It kind of looks like a horse. Well, I’ve got this one.” Caelan tugged up the hem of her skirt to reveal the ideogram on her thigh: Kan, third formulation. “You said you liked it, didn’t you?”

“Sure. But I couldn’t pay for that.”

Caelan waved it off. “From mine to yours, Aradika Denja Orys Dae Chandrea. So? Shall we trade?”

Aradika brightened. “Let’s.”

Without further ado, Caelan took from her pocket her fish knife, and just like shucking a scale, she snuck the blade under the name and pulled.

It unraveled from her skin with a wet tear. Red welled to the surface where it had been uprooted. I was taken aback both by the casual violence, which she executed without flinching, and by how little blood there was. I had half bled out when my part-names were removed; Caelan simply licked her palm and wiped the specks away before sliding the name off her knife onto Aradika’s cheek. With the flat of her blade, she pressed it into Aradika’s skin, until Aradika grunted that it had taken hold. Then Aradika fetched his own knife, and slit the character in question from his collarbone to stick onto Caelan. They sat there with Caelan’s compact mirror, admiring their new adornments.

In that moment I saw, in the reflection of Caelan’s mirror, River hovering in the doorway. His eyes were wide, inflamed. They did not seem to notice, but River caught my gaze and rapidly whisked away.

It was over in a heartbeat, and Caelan snapped the mirror shut a moment later, pleased. But I could not shake the way River’s stare burned holes through the air, leaving something scorched and empty hovering with the lingering scent of blood.

Unease followed me for days afterward, sapping my focus from the upcoming final exams. I could not understand it, and yet it felt as familiar as an instinct. One day while tucking into a jellyfish salad I thought bizarrely that it felt like how the women back in the Hills described birth.

Angze children are born with their magic, names revealed at the moment of birth. When the name was read out for the first time, the baby drew its first breath. Life was its first magic. But with such a powerful moment, my mother and aunts and grandmothers had described the moments leading up to it as portentous. As they pushed the baby from them, they felt a rising sense of deep significance, one that only broke when the name-magic was first cast. But they knew they were waiting for life—what was I anticipating?

It was the night before the first exam, The Ideas of Good Governance. Everyone was bitterly terse. Caelan claimed she needed ten hours of sleep and had retired early, while Aradika was snappish after not sleeping for days. I had elected to do my last revisions on my own, preparing tedious hypotheses that required thoughtful postulation and reference to the theories of no less than three notable scholars and leaders. Night had come and sunk deep. I was alone in my room with twin lamps and the distant sound of waves echoing up the stone.

My senses felt scraped over a whetstone. Uneven pulse in my ears, scritch of the pen, the coarseness of paper against my skin. In a few hours, I would decide my future. It had all come down to this.

In the fever of memorizing I heard stumbling footsteps outside, but did not think much of it until they stopped outside my room, and my door creaked open.

I pushed sharply back from my desk, but my anger turned rapidly to shock as River stepped in, trembling. He had one hand pressed to his heart, his collar bunched up beneath it. Frenzy played on his mouth, halfway between a grin and a sob. I opened my mouth to demand an explanation—he couldn’t do this tonight, not before the exam—but then my lamplight glinted off something in his hand.

He was holding a fish knife, and it was stained red.

“It won’t stick right, Ziya,” he whispered. He peeled back his hand, just enough for me to see what was under it. There was a flap of someone else’s skin hanging off his chest, bloody around the edges, unevenly thick with bumps of flesh. Beside it was a row of four puckered scars. “I’m trying. But it won’t stick anymore.” In the center of the skin was the character I had seen Caelan press into Aradika’s cheek—Kan, third formulation, meaning—

“Kan,” River cried.

My lamps flared.

Meaning fire.

We were awash in gold, coruscating light, the tears pouring down River’s face white in the blazing glow. It was like weeping in the presence of the sun. His eyes widened, twin moons. “It worked?”

Dread pinned me to my seat, even as the heat wrapped its fingers around me and squeezed. I couldn’t breathe. “River, what did you do?”

“My name is not River!” he screamed, slapping his chest. The flames leapt with fury so bright I ducked my head, gasping.

Footsteps thundered down the hallway outside. The guards, it had to be the guards. I did the only thing that came to mind. “He’s in here!”

River blinked at my outburst. The lamps flickered as the turquoise silhouettes of the night guards appeared in the doorway. One of them raised a revolver.

There was a gunshot, and then there was darkness. The lamps died all at once as River crumpled. My muscles unfroze. The cool air flooded back in, stealing away the heat.

Such a simple, logical exchange. One violence for another, death for a death, because I was certain at that moment that Aradika was dead. Yet the only thought that kept beating against my skull like a broken metronome was not tonight, not tonight, why tonight.

The little bit of moonlight illuminated the dark edges on River’s body—the puncture in his forehead and the protrusion over his chest, flesh shot out and skin stuck on, appended, but too far to keep the wound in his head from bleeding all over the carpet and the turquoise capes as they carried him out. I stared at the blood left behind, thought, if I can clean it up, it will be like it never happened, and I can finish my revisions. I can still save it.

But one guard stayed. “What’s your name?”

“Ziya,” I murmured, still thinking of where I could obtain a scrubbing brush.

She squeezed my shoulder. “Thank you, Ziya. You did the right thing. Come,” she said, “let’s get you into another room.”

I let her usher me into a new, warm bed, with the promise to discuss in the morning. It was only in that new room, without the smell of fire or blood, that everything in me unraveled. It took me a long time to fall asleep; I kept seeing River bathed in light and feeling a deep pit of sorrow. You fool, I nearly sobbed. Look. Look. It’s not so hard to stay alive.

The next day, I put on my formal robes and presented my evaluation of hierarchical leadership in the proliferation of a trading empire.

The university delayed one exam for Aradika’s funeral. We stood on the edge of the cliff, scattering his ashes out to the waves as the organ played a heaven’s lament. The chords echoed over the pillars and the brine beneath. Caelan clung to my hand as she wept. The last I heard, River’s body had been sent back to the Hills.

Not River. Kan. And Sek. In the cleanup, they’d found in his room a carefully kept second vial with Sek, third formulation, swimming in dubious liquid. He must have gotten it earlier, but he was storing it, waiting to recover the part-names that came before it in the pattern.

Months later we stood on that cliff again to graduate. I had done fantastically well, as had Caelan. Already we had met with representatives of all the prestigious guilds. Just yesterday a telegraph had been delivered to my door, appended with the golden seal of the financiers’ guild, offering employment to commence immediately after graduation. The rush of relief had crumpled me; I sat on the floor sobbing, tracing the seal over and over again.

As they read out our names at the ceremony—long Ustonel ones punctuated by the Angze, usually said wrong—I found my parents in the watching crowd.

“Mama? Papa?” I said in disbelief after, temporarily leaving Caelan alone to be fretted over by her countless relatives. “I didn’t know you were coming!”

I had sent them notice of my results and subsequent ceremony, but they had given no indication they would be here, in the bright red-and-yellow of the Hills’ best silk that stood out like a sun amidst the Ustonel blue and the surrounding sea. Their clothes were new and must have been an extraordinary expense, yet it paled compared to the fact that they had found the resources to travel all the way here.

“We had to come see our daughter graduate.” They enveloped me in hugs and endless questions—When did I start work? Was that really what I would be earning? Such a prestigious position, in the most competitive guild! Where would I be living? As I answered I became increasingly distracted by a surreal feeling coming over me from multiple directions at once. I noticed suddenly that their hair had seemed to gray a decade in the past three years; that they seemed smaller, frailer than I remembered, despite their glowing silks. They clung onto every answer I gave, wide-eyed and teary and beaming, as though they were the children and I was their provider. I realized I now was.      

“Kaidin, Kaidin—” My mother suddenly gestured effusively at my father—he was shorter a part-name since I had last been home—and he perked up and rummaged in his pockets. He withdrew a folded handkerchief of the same fantastic fabric. With more care than I had ever seen him hold anything, he unwrapped a familiar vial, swathed in his palm and yellow Hills silk.

“We found this for you,” he said reverently. “Now that you will be in the Guilds, they gave us a loan for the expense. You deserve it all, but it’s the only one we could find just now.”

I was used to these vials now, in my classmates’ hands, but I was struck with a dumb strangeness as I turned it over in my palm and recognized the character floating within. Rei, fifth formulation.

Ziyarei.

A shiver of some long-lost memory went through me, right and very wrong all at once. Three-fifths of an echo in the back of my mind: Ziyarei, Ziyarei, Ziyarei. I recognized the voices. They were my mother and grandfather and siblings and old friends, and yet as they overlapped I felt more and more as though I were floating away, swimming in the haze of someone else’s memories. 

The bell rang, summoning us to the shore for the final anointing. With a flurry of fragile words and embraces I drifted away from my parents, the vial grasped in a damp palm.

I didn’t know who that person was. A little girl, from a place far, far away. Just moments ago I had been announced to the world as Ziya. The letter stamped and sealed by the guild had unfolded a future for the thusly inscribed Ziya; Ziya upon whose aforementioned future and wealth this formerly impossible luxury was guaranteed. It was Ziya who had become learned, and far-sighted, and transcendent, Ziya who had come this far, against all odds. 

And more than that, I had been loved as Ziya. It was Ziya whose name had been whispered like a prayer, Ziya the name spoken again and again, softly and miraculously, like saying it was a magic in itself.

As though summoned by the thought, Caelan appeared by me on the steps, looking radiant in her blue cape and silver headpiece. “Ziya!” she exclaimed, spotting the vial in my hand. “You got one!”

“My parents’ gift.”

Her fingers ran across the glass, light and curious. “So it’s all yours?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going to put it?” Caelan appraised me expertly, no doubt with manifold ideas about where it would look best, but right now I couldn’t stand the thought of it on my skin. It didn’t feel right. It won’t stick anymore.

“The Name Ziya” copyright © 2025 by Wen-yi Lee
Art copyright © 2025 by Holly Warburton

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The Name Ziya

Wen-yi Lee

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Wen-yi Lee

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Original Fiction weird fantasy

In Connorville

A woman returning to her family’s home town for a wedding discovers why people in Connorville—including her family—might be more than they seem.

Illustrated by Armando Veve

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Edited by Ellen Datlow

By Kathleen Jennings

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Published on August 20, 2025

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A woman returning to her family’s home town for a wedding discovers why people in Connorville—including her family—might be more than they seem.

Short story | 5,430 words

We should have stayed at the Connorville Motor Inn, my beautiful Fane cousins and I. But I was the youngest and poorest, the only one not giddy with temporary freedom from offspring or spouse, and also (without malice) the ugliest, so I had no say.

Instead, we slept on the narrow top floor of our grandmother’s house. It was a fairy-tale building, steep-roofed beneath overgrown jacarandas, but impractical for the climate, and the old kids’ room was cramped—especially for four adults with fascinators, satin shoes, chiffon bridesmaid gowns, a fall of tulle, and all the shining firm undergarments for a wedding.

I, in t-shirt and shorts and already in bed, watched my three cousins sway about the room like silken moths, putting finishing touches on their night faces. They’d aged into their beauty. I understood now that on those school holidays when I’d been sent to Connorville and had wistfully watched them putting on lipstick and eyeliner to sneak out to Shot Rock, they’d been merely pretty.

The beds under the peaked roof were the same ones we’d sweltered in then, and where my cousins had stayed those months when my aunt was off adventuring (I hadn’t envied them Connorville State School and piano lessons—but I’d have committed at least a small crime if it would have made my mother let me stay with them). The overwashed chenille bedspreads smelled of baked dust, stale detergent, and (just a hint) our long-ago selves. Even with windows at each end open to the dark, very little breeze troubled the pedestal fan or stirred the dresses hanging from nails. I, who suffered worst, was conceded the bed with surviving mosquito netting.

“So Heather still makes her students sweat through arpeggios,” said Lori, stretching bronzed arms.

Freya laughed. The bare ceiling bulb pulled blue flashes from her sleek black hair. “Air-conditioning would ruin her strategy.” Our grandmother Heather, as slight and ladylike as she was, could teach the most monstrous child to play piano. All except me. Freya added, “She steams the resistance out of them.”

Gale rubbed lotion into her prehensile feet. She was still misty with gardenia fumes. Whatever bottle it had come from had not been left in the shower for me to try.

“What are you thinking about?” Lori asked me, peering through the netting.

Not what I should be thinking about—asking them what life looked like from where they stood. About husbands and houses and children, and not being a Fane anymore.

“That I’m sorry we only see each other at funerals and weddings,” I confessed. I was only good at polite lies (saying what I should on interviews and dates, eating unsatisfying food, folding glittering brief interests away, like insect wings under a round carapace), and I liked my cousins very much.

“We could arrange more,” said Gale ominously, and I laughed.

“I miss this.”

“Mosquitoes?” said Lori.

“Heat stroke?” asked Freya.

Gale winked. “Sleep deprivation,” she said, and pulled the light cord. The nightlight flooded my cousins’ shadows up the angled walls. The full moon, fat and yellow, stared in the window. “And stories.”

Stories. Glamorous high-school melodrama, terrors condensed from movies I’d been too young to watch, improbable accounts of the origins of everything from babies to the universe. Some had turned out to be true. But that wasn’t quite what I’d missed. It was something, perhaps, that the stories stood in for. “Close enough,” I said.

My mother, who was now decently tucked under a brown nylon bedspread at the Motor Inn (like the groom’s parents who had been so tactful about the accommodation, and the elderly relatives who had not), had always disapproved of tale-telling. “You can’t get a straight answer out of a Fane!” she said often enough (had probably already said twice since arriving) to my father, who tried his very best, and had even studied accounting. She swore his family put her off fiction. I used to think the low row of picture books here (tarnished gilt spines still glinting in the nightlight) was contraband. “All the way back to your great-great-great—” She’d fling her hands up in the air. “As if it explains anything!”

At my cousins’ insistence, one citronella-hazed night, my Grandma Heather filled in that story for me—how our great-great-great-great-grandfather, in a country that didn’t exist anymore, had no children. He was very poor, and all his livestock was three fat little brown hens. When caterpillars and grain were scarce, he fed them his own food and gave them his own strong brews, and he built them a roost, high out of reach of foxes. But it was too high for the little brown hens. Every morning they tumbled down for the day, to scratch in the graveyards and the hedgerows, and every night he lifted them one by one back to their perch.

And then one day, when he was quite old, he fell and couldn’t get up. It was a whole week before his nephew-and-heir came by. He found the old man fatter and happier than he’d ever seen him, propped up in bed with full pillows, the cottage gleaming, and beside him a bowl of broth steaming with a delicious unfamiliar scent.

“Who has been caring for you?” cried his nephew.

“Why, three little nurses, round and busy as you please!” said the old man. “I thought you sent them!”

He promptly disowned his nephew. But as for the three plump nurses, while he lived, he called them his daughters, and when he died, he left them all he owned. And although it was a small dowry, and although no one knew where those women came from, they were so bright-eyed and red-cheeked and scavenged so well in hard seasons (though they’d never say what meat they’d scratched up in boneyards or plucked from half-eaten leaves) that they never lacked for suitors. And their children and their children were just as sturdy, and when times got even harder, why, they set sail, and that is how the Fanes, under whatever name, came to be here.

“What was that meant to mean?” my mother would demand, whenever someone alluded to this story, as if her own family tree (she too, after all, was from Connorville) was any less opaque. “Are you to be generous? Or opportunistic? Or excused from human morals? Graveyard meat, I ask you! What kind of story is that for a child?”

“Times were hard,” my father would murmur. He didn’t think kindness and pragmatism were incompatible—consider my mother, after all.

“Times were once-upon-a-time!” she said. She had moved them out of Connorville before they were married and sent me back for Fane family holidays with theatrical reluctance. She was probably rigidly asleep in the Connorville Motor Inn, indignant even in repose. I tried to imagine telling the story to anyone not family, and couldn’t. Where is your family from? Connorville. And then one day, suddenly it’s a wedding destination. A stretch of green lawn to the low creek for the service. The reception in the vintage showground’s produce pavilions, photos on the road to Shot Rock and beyond. “Regional enchantment,” proclaimed the booking website. The city would have been cheaper.

“Wriggle over,” said Gale, now, and climbed under my mosquito net. There was just room for the two of us, lying toe to head. Her uncalloused feet smelled of cucumber and roses. I was glad mine were under the sheet. I was conscious of tasks undone. Too late now.

Lori and Freya lifted Gale’s bed across the floor, so as not to wake other guests downstairs. They pushed it tight against mine, and stretched our net over it, and them.

“Where to start?” asked Freya.

Lori, with aplomb, produced a bottle of prosecco and four plastic glasses with aliens on them. She remembered me, I thought, flattered. “Where we always start. Out past the Connors’ and the bean farms. Out beyond Shot Rock.”

I was happy to listen. Tomorrow, at the lunch and rehearsal, I—a (charming) potato in a flowered dress—would have even more call to talk than at other family festivals, and fewer excuses not to. I’d be interrogated by people who looked as much like me as mirrors, all desperately seeking a normal topic to discuss: a mortgage, a steady job they’d heard of, some evidence of planned procreation. Ah, just like your father’s sister! She didn’t want children…until she did! And look how they turned out.

Besides, what stories did I know? I didn’t even have any from Connorville, except the sagas my cousins had invented on their daylight jaunts, up under the bridge or walking the rails of the showgrounds, or fighting through the jasmine tunnel along the back fence, down to the creek, with me an eager and often-slain extra. My mother’s side was no help—they were Connors and had never forgotten that the bean farming had mattered once; all their legends were of infestations and harvests (and, now, the profitability of wedding venues, for which they offered no family discounts). And once I’d stopped being too small to go and do whatever teenagers did farther out at Shot Rock, my cousins had been too old to take me.

But the three of them could bat stories back and forth like a game. And Lori had already begun.

Out bush (which, if you know Connorville, is a specific direction), the Tomlins had a shack. This happened before power, and the shack had no plumbing. What good things were there when the Tomlins arrived, the Tomlins had cleared out. And what dam they had dug, what orchard they had planted, and any superstitions or mysteries they’d brought with them were long dried up and blown away. The Tomlins themselves had moved back into the infant town. And naturally (added Lori, as if she were a Connor), it was a bad drought year.

Do you remember Old Cassie Tomlin? Just? Well, she was Young Cassie Tomlin then. She misbehaved (probably at Shot Rock, said Freya, and I chuckled with the others as if I’d ever been there) and was sent to live in the shack, to think about what she’d done and to stop her doing it again. And if the twigifingers get her, said her great-grandmother, she’s earned it!

So Cassie was out there all alone. At first, she wasn’t a bit afraid. She might have been worse treated, and while she knew quite a lot about people in town and in the scrub, she didn’t believe in things-in-the-trees—not in the walking skeletons her brother had told her drovers had seen when they rode past Connorville, or bushrangers, or the legends of trolls and ogres and twigifingers her great-grandmother had brought from wherever Tomlins come from.

But there was nothing to do except stare at the night, and the longer she stared, the deeper the dark got. The stars drowned between those dry trees, and only cattle bones glinted. And by day, the sun was hot as an iron and wind rasped through grass as stiff as dead hair.

Cassie was starving for life. Her pleas for company—a dog, a cat!—were refused: she wasn’t to be rewarded with anything so frivolous. She thought she would be glad even of her great-grandmother’s monsters, but as far as she knew, they lurked only in the old woman’s memory, in wet and mossy forests on the other side of the world. Her aunt, though, sent her three pots of herbs, and a red watering can.

Those plants were Cassie’s whole world. She planted them where the sparse shade could find them, and tended them with her whole heart.

(“Does something happen to the plants?” I was old enough to handle big horrors, but little ones still hurt.

“Do you want a story or don’t you? Drink your wine.”)

One afternoon, as Cassie crouched pinching off yellow leaves and watering what remained, she saw something away up the overgrown paddock, in the trees. It was tall as a tree; it was bone-grey like a dead branch; it had limbs that ended in long reaching twigs. Then it moved. And it wasn’t a tree. Cassie ran into the hut and pushed the table against the door.

But she couldn’t bear to leave her plants untended. So the next day she went out again, and this time the thing came halfway down the paddock and stood in the whispering grass. The next day, Cassie heard something creak, and when she looked up, the thing was looming by the white-anted fence around the hut.

“Go away!” said Cassie.

But it didn’t. It wasn’t human, and looked like it had been dead for years. She could see all its ribs (too many) and the hinge of its skull (too long) and the burls of its knees, and the slab-yellow teeth, like a cow’s. It stood and fixed her with its cavernous sockets, and where its stomach had been was as hollow as hers was not.

(“Tch,” I said, by accident, sounding so like Grandma Heather that we all glanced at the door. Gale laughed and patted the sheet covering my knee. Freya grinned, and said, “Prude.” But stories need some allusion. I was discovering adulthood to be otherwise barren of mystique. Lori, looking supercilious, continued.)

The next day, it got into the yard, and Cassie looked up from her work to see its feet—toe bones, hoof bones—twisting back from the dug earth like torn-up roots. As out of place as the herbs, or Cassie. She lunged up, and since she had no other weapon, she poured her precious water right onto the creature, as if it were a cat.

It reeled and spun—the nub of its spine twitching like a tail—and staggered away.

The next day it brought a friend.

Fire might have dealt with them. Fire deals with many problems. But the grass, too, was tinder-dry, and Cassie had faced worse hungry things—and besides, it’s harder to be afraid of something you’ve shooed like a stray dog.

She shook water over them both. But this time they only rocked on their heels. “Go home!” she commanded, and they went.

But they came back, with a third, a fourth—one high as the roof and splintering, one no taller than her knee and dry as a tumbleweed. They stood, patient, as Cassie watered her herbs, and then she watered them.

They gave neither sound or signal. But she noticed on the first a spread of green like rot. The next day, what she had thought was only bone on the arm of another began to soften and sag like leather. A lace of lichen bloomed on cheek and shoulder. Velvet moss thickened an elbow.

When at last the rains came, time being what it was, Cassie’s own family came in stern state to collect her. But she refused to go. She ran off, as well as she could, into the wet black trees and the springing green, and why her brothers couldn’t catch her (tripping on mossy logs and boulders, hung up on grasping trees, breaking teeth and legs in their tumbles) they either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain.

“Let her stay,” said her aunt. “Until she changes her mind.”

So Cassie stayed in the shack, and there she raised her first—a sickly child who thrived against the odds, and a strapping subsequent brood with big flat teeth and a wild green light in their eyes. No one knew who their fathers were, and no one ever went visiting Old Cassie Tomlin without invitation who didn’t return stinging with regret.

Even the Fanes have, of course, Tomlins in the family tree (Grandma Heather was one). And my mother would point out there are more likely explanations for the Tomlin clan than twig-fingered trolls desiccating in the wrong country—starting with any visitors Cassie did invite. But where was the fun in that?

“Why don’t things like that happen anymore?” I said unwarily.

“You old romantic!” replied Gale. But that wasn’t what I meant at all. I was too much of a Connor to want a wild meeting to have happened to me, but I wished I lived in a world where the idea of such things was possible. I couldn’t express that, either. My cousins—so unlike me or each other—would say, “Look at us!” Their mother, after all, had plenty of grand romances. It was hard, like picking at scabs of possible misunderstandings to get directly at the skin of what I meant.

“What happened to the rest of the Tomlins?” I asked instead. There aren’t many in town now—and none by name on the guest list.

“They never could stand the droughts,” said Lori. “The kids settled in town, in one of the old houses near the creek. But after Cassie died, they gave her land away—Heather said that was the biggest scandal—and moved to the coast.”

The ruined shack itself, though, is now a unique backdrop for sunset wedding portraits.

“Too sweet a story by far, Lori,” said Freya, showing her teeth like a cat that’s tasted something sour. Lori laughed—they brought each other up on stories and had refined views.

Freya said, “Lean a little nearer.”

We obeyed. My cousins smelled of expensive fruits and flowers. I should have worn fresh pyjamas—I was rarely this close to anyone. When Lori reached across to ruffle my hair, I wished I’d washed it instead of waiting for the hairdresser.

On the edge of Connorville (said Freya), the yards bleed out into the trees, and the paddocks seep in between the houses, and whatever the maps say, it’s a ragged place, all bottle tops and claws, heat-blistered bitumen and the rot of the dump. And there, as drivers of station wagons hauling trailer-loads to the tip, teenagers sloping out to trade cigarettes and saliva at Shot Rock (there’s a reminiscent laugh from Gale), and Batty Boggs trying valiantly to keep the showgrounds free of noxious weeds three-quarters of the year all know: things slip through the fences that shouldn’t. It’s just that only Batty Boggs talks about it.

(“His real name’s Baxter Marsh,” I said. “I only found that out today.” They all paused to accept the information. It had taken me a moment, too, while other people discussed microphones and dessert buffets over me—learning facts like that feels like growing up again.)

Well, Batty’s—Baxter’s—parents had been caretakers at the showgrounds, and in time he took over, and lived in the sagging house behind the green concrete washrooms. He kept to himself, and bred fancy ducks that he entered in the show every year, although he never won, and from time to time he found a lover who wasn’t particular.

(I felt a passing camaraderie with the caretaker, but kept that to myself.)

The showgrounds, you understand, are between Shot Rock and the boundary of town, so the frayed edges were worse. There were more than weeds to beat back from the show ring, more than spiders and rats and snakes to keep out of the Handwork Pavilion and the Produce Hall. So he carried a stick and sometimes a shotgun, and he’d swear blue and green that he’d seen weeds glow red at night, heard birds croak warnings, and fired at things shaped like too-large rabbits that coiled smokily through the fences.

Townsfolk who knew better (or worse) hushed him.

One dusk, as Baxter stirred the smouldering garbage pit, he saw eyes through the oily haze, glowing like embers. Three of the large rabbit-folk sat on the other side, feet together, their reddened eyes watching him, their gingery coats riffling and rippling. The air smelled like singed hair and feathers, scorched sap and meat. “What are you burning, Batty Boggs?” one asked him. It had long teeth.

“Weeds and pests,” said Baxter, who was used to being disapproved of, “and things that oughtn’t to be here.”

“Fox in the henhouse,” said one, and then the others. “Fox in the henhouse, fox in the henhouse!” Baxter lifted his shotgun, and they scattered, laughing.

But when he returned to the caretaker’s cottage, the door sat ajar, and inside was all feathered and bloodied, the few things precious to him gnawed and rended, and on the bed, on the torn and emptied belly of his latest lover, a rabbit-thing sat like sparks in fog, its lanky form loose and sated, its snout wet with dark blood. Baxter levelled his shotgun.

“Batty Bogs, Batty Bogs,” it said. “Would you be known as a murderer? Or would you be faithful and true?”

“Who’s ever been faithful and true to me?” said Baxter.

“Ah,” said the creature. “Then perhaps we can reach an arrangement.”

Over the next days, Baxter dug through the fire heap, raking out corpses and bones. He buried them decently, just out past the fence, and let flowering weeds grow over the small graves. But those strange bright plants never spilled through the palings and wires into the showgrounds, and after that the oddest creatures—less wildlife than weirdlife—kept out of his domain.

As for his lover, the rabbit-creature moved into that emptied skin, and into Baxter’s cottage. And while Baxter mowed the grass and swore his way around the boundaries, and grumblingly repainted the signs, the creature—eyes gold as summer grass, teeth very sharp, and breath like roadkill—kept house there, with all the glee of a child playing.

But their boys—their boys, although they have always been trouble, with hair like orange velvet, have, as best anyone can tell, proved human as anyone.

I knew the Marsh boys—or at least their boys. Even I had wanted to touch the improbable plush of their bright hair.

“Wait.” Gale turned to me. “Isn’t one of the groomsmen—”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Well, that explains the buck’s weekend, I suppose.” She didn’t elaborate. I only knew they’d gone spotlighting—such a Connorville party, although packaged as Outback Experiences And Teambuilding Adventures. The city contingent had been scarred, and when they came back to their campsite (the caravan park by the showgrounds, where the reception was to be), they were made to eat what they’d caught. By whom? I wondered now. I should, of course, have asked. And where had they buried the bones?

Once, my cousins would have dwelt on bloodied teeth and sagging entrails, and grabbed my ankle beneath the sheets at the psychological moment, to see if they could frighten me. They never had. And as Freya told this story, I’d imagined floating flecks of gold, subtle as the nightlight.

After all (I thought, a creature of office jobs and air-conditioning, public transport and suburban parks), wasn’t there something about it that appealed? To lie with danger, or rather, to have it lie down beside you and watch, amused. To have your sins—to commit sins (bigger ones than stealing sticky notes or pretending your extended family is normal)—and then have them stitched to you so that you become something greater.

The sweating prosecco bottle went around. Fruit bats screamed below the window, quarrelled in the mango tree. Did I imagine a step creak? Surely Grandma Heather was too old to be checking we were asleep, and the Fanes in the guest rooms were too drunk. And besides, the wedding proper was two days away—tomorrow, we didn’t have to be up very early.

“Are you trying to tell me something?” I asked carefully. A knowledge, I thought, had passed among my cousins, nothing to do with boutonnieres and royal icing.

“The secrets of the universe,” intoned Freya.

“Nothing you don’t already know,” said Lori kindly. But I couldn’t shake the feeling the stories were a warning or a promise, a secret language, and they’d mistaken me for one of them. I couldn’t imagine the groomsmen were telling the groom anything like this. I wished they had reason to.

Gale, warm and angular against my hip, said, “Strange things don’t happen only on the edge of town.”

Do you remember Sarah Greene (asked Gale)? From out at Shot Rock? (The others did, I didn’t.) So, when she came to Connorville, she was just Sarah. She’d hitchhiked, from who knows where, or so she said—she arrived on foot, shaggy and dusty, a teller of tall tales. She’d told them all night once, she said proudly, to distract a murderous truck driver. It was the longest lift anyone ever gave her.

Her mother, she said, was a mountain lioness, her father a hurricane, only I think that was a line from a song, and from another country. But she said a lot of things. And she wasn’t that wild.

Sarah got a job at the School of Arts Hotel. (“Makes sense,” said Lori. I nodded sagely, although all it meant to me was a bench on the broad sidewalk and a cool beery breeze.) She’d dance onstage on karaoke night and feed the feral cats scraps of meat out the back, by the bins. They weren’t the only ferals that took a shine to her. And Tam Greene (“Oh god,” said Lori, and even I remembered him—if not by sight, at least by warning. “He’s a bad boy,” my grandmother would say, and then sigh. “He has a good ear, though.”)—well, Tam Greene, after what was (even for him) a sustained and determined courtship, caught her.

All went well, for a while. Sarah and Tam stopped going to Shot Rock, although they still terrorised the town. But after that while, Tam got a job—night shift at the abattoir—and began to slow down. They got a house by the creek—one of the ones that always floods near the centre of Connorville—and Tam grew domesticated, and contented himself with only terrorising Sarah and her cats.

(I winced. “Hold on there,” said Lori.

“It’s the cats,” said Freya.

“They pull through,” Gale assured me.)

Still, Sarah stuck to Tam like the cats stuck to Sarah. Maybe she figured she’d travelled too far to turn back. Maybe her cats relied on the meat Tam could get them, or had another reason to stay. Maybe life insurance policies have a waiting period. And every night after Tam headed out to work, the cats would drape themselves around the overgrown backyard and yowl, and Sarah would sit on the concrete steps and grumble to them.

(Gale looked at me, and I felt her adjust the story slightly.) No one knows for certain what brought matters to a head, although everyone looks aloof if you ask them. But one night, Tam went to work and didn’t get there.

Here are three things people saw for sure. A visiting Marsh girl, on the bus into Connorville, saw a constellation of eyes in the duranta hedges on each side of the entrance to the bridge; a Connor-Tomlin who’d just left stocktake at the furniture shop saw a flood of night-dark cats sweep across the road, as if a warm and breathing torrent had risen and flooded the bridge; Heather, returning from a recital in the Lutheran hall, saw a broken railing and a car in the dry creek bed, its lights still on, and drove all the way home to call for help.

Sarah must have heard the sirens. She ran out in an old shirt and robe and pushed through the crowd. And when she saw the car, she scrabbled down the bank, through dry and cutting reeds. But the car, as the police had already discovered, was empty. And then she was scrambling up the opposite bank, to where blue and red and yellow emergency lights caught a too-dark darkness under the fluttering leaves of the bauhinias.

But the cats flowed out from beneath the bushes and bridge and blocked her path. They pushed against her shins and bit and dragged at her robe, and so the police got there first.

People say there was so little of Tam left that his skull shone white in the torches, and his empty eye sockets blinked in rhythm with the flashing lights.

No one looked the same at the town cats after that.

(I didn’t think anyone saw me smile, but Gale’s foot tapped once against my hip.)

Sarah kept the house, although she has to move out of it every time the creek rises. She usually camps in Tam’s car (it still runs, the bridge is low) in front of Heather’s. The cats scatter, then, but in dry weather they find their way to her. She fixes them when they’re injured, and feeds them. There were rumours she dressed them up, and talked to them like people. And sometime in there, she acquired a walking, talking child, although no one noticed it was on the way or saw it as a baby. He’s a good boy, especially to cats, but he’s a picky eater, and Heather says he has no musicality.

I am not nocturnal. But between the prosecco and the stories—the sense of, or my wish for, something behind the stories—I slept restlessly. I did think Gale got out and went to her own bed, except I was dreaming I was still a kid and they were sneaking out to the School of Arts Hotel, or Shot Rock, or the scrub, my beautiful cousins. They were whispering to see if I was awake. (“Do you think she told him—”; “Bring her and ask, she’s not a kid”; “Hush, she needs the sleep.”)

I was old enough to go with them. But lying there listening was half the romance. I closed my eyes tighter. And after all, I was tipsy and dreaming—they were climbing out the window, although it was at the top of the house and the branches below must be rotten. Their eyes were gold as the moon.

The stories they told held horrors. They should give me nightmares, like my mother said they would. But my cousins’ tales never had. I pecked them up like—like grubs in graveyards. Because to be loved for and by oddities, to be comforted by strange natures, wouldn’t that be something? Wasn’t that the point of dreaming? Awake and incandescently ordinary, you trudge along in your lane; agree to marry a sensible person who greets your unremarkableness with relief, whose careful family meets your mother’s approval; buy a reasonably priced dress; hire a suit; ask cousins to be bridesmaids; volunteer others as groomsmen; go back to Connorville. Settle without ever having roamed. But in stories you could be, after whatever fashion, beloved of something wonderful.

It was better not to follow.

Someone should be warned about me, I thought as I slid into the depths. If anyone objects…

The piano begins at dawn, as if our grandmother doesn’t care she has guests—or because she does, and knows we were talking late. Except for when she took in my cousins, Heather Fane has lived alone for a long time, and I realise I don’t really know anything about my grandfather. I sense my mother’s hand in that. But it means there’ll be a story for another night. Light and birdsong come through the windows; the chenille is printed into my arm like scribbly bark, house and town (never and always home) and trees seeping into me.

My mouth tastes vile, but I’ve always woken well.

I pull myself up against the head of the bed, leaning sideways with the angle of the wall. Around me, in thin sun, my cousins sleep with animal abandon. Crow-wing hair, fine bronze pelt of an arm freckled like scales, pale hand delicate as a moth’s feeler. The chemical scents of fruits and flowers have given way to an organic warmth of sweat and fermentation. They’ve changed places in the night. Freya is wearing a plaid shirt I know isn’t hers. Lori’s heart beats butterfly-quick against my shin. Gale’s mouth is stained redder than lipstick. Leaves have blown in, along with a few loose feathers bloodied from some night-time conflict, and the prosecco bottle rolls by the door. Connorville, for all its new bridge railing, its destination wedding pretensions, the receding beanfields, clearly still holds some adventure.

The morning breeze ruffles my wedding dress, the ghost of promises to be made tomorrow. But tonight, I think, not for the first time, tonight I’ll go out the window with them.

“In Connorville” copyright © 2025 by Kathleen Jennings
Art copyright © 2025 by Armando Veve

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In Connorville

Kathleen Jennings

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In Connorville

Kathleen Jennings

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

If a Digitized Tree Falls

As humanity moves to the stars, a young woman attempts to preserve the magical forest she fell in love with as a child.

Illustrated by Franco Zacha

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Edited by Jonathan Strahan

By Ken Liu, Caroline M. Yoachim

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Published on September 10, 2025

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As humanity moves to the stars, a young woman attempts to preserve the magical forest she fell in love with as a child.

Novelette | 8,000 words

Greg folded dirty clothes, carefully sliding the neat stacks into a vacuum-seal bag to be compressed. Both his daughters had over-packed so much for the trip that their laundry wouldn’t fit back in the suitcase any other way, and instead of packing they’d gone off with their mother for one last walk in what Tara called the Magic Forest. It was the perfect name for this beautiful place, much better than “Disputed Woodland Zone 581,” an awkward official designation that had been the only acceptable compromise between three different countries speaking six different languages, once they’d finally agreed to stop building bunkers and open the area up for research and tourism.

He could hardly blame the girls for escaping to the forest. Tall, thick trunks seemed to reach all the way to heaven, like pillars in a magnificent cathedral, each topped with a dense crown of leaves that rustled and whispered, the irregular green clouds quilting a canopy full of sunlit gaps and seams that shifted and writhed as the trees swayed gently, a mesmerizing, abstract Sistine Chapel painted by lightning in slow motion. Thick vines draped down from high boughs like silk tapestries, decorated with orchids of every description that were twins of the colorful birds sitting in the branches. Hummingbirds darted about, untroubled by the humans scrambling to get out their phones, hovering, backing up, twisting in midair—Tara said they moved like fairies, and Navi had, for once, not contradicted her big sister on principle but solemnly agreed. They were at such lovely ages, eight and six, when all the world was wondrous and full of possibility.

But how much of this idyllic world will still exist when they’re my age?

His art—rendered in incredible detail for a dynamic visualization module that held an entire ecosystem—seemed more relevant than ever, not just an observation about the world, but a testimony. A digital twin of the Magic Forest encapsulated in what looked like nothing more than a snow globe. He was grateful that he’d had the opportunity to come here to make some final sketches and calibrations, with Mia of course since she was a biologist on the project, but also to share this experience with their daughters.

Mia ducked her head into their tent. “Where are the girls? The charter bus is here to take everyone back down the mountain to the airport.”

“I thought they were with you. They told me you wanted to take one more hike in the Magic Forest.”

“I was out buying souvenirs,” Mia held up a canvas shopping bag with the tour company logo. “I thought they were helping you finish packing.”

Greg shut the suitcase lid. “I last saw them fifteen minutes ago. They can’t have gotten far.”

His initial confidence soon proved misplaced. They split up and searched the campsite, asking everyone if they’d seen the girls, but no one had. Eventually they couldn’t hold the bus any longer, so it started down the winding mountain road, and still no sign of Tara and Navi. Most of the staff joined in the search, widening the radius and chattering on walkie-talkies.

In fairy tales, a Magic Forest could be dark and full of danger. Were the girls lost?

Greg and Mia searched at all the activity sites, all their wonders now tinged with worry: the observation deck where you would be winched hundreds of feet up on a rickety platform at four in the morning to catch sunrise above the mist-shrouded canopy (what if they fell?), the trunk of a tree whose side had been replaced with glass so that you could see a colony of ants churning like a living river inside (what if the ants felt threatened and sent out their soldiers?), the river crossing where you could dangle in vine-woven nets above thundering whitewater filled with leaping fish while eating lunch made from fruits and insects foraged from the surrounding forest (what if the girls tumbled in?), the trailhead that began a miles-long hike through the jungle for a glimpse of an elephant matriarch teaching her grandchildren how to fashion a backscratcher out of thorny branches (what if they couldn’t find their way back?) …

“I’m sure they’re fine,” Mia said, trying to reassure both herself and her husband. She turned to Greg, eyes suddenly wide with hope. “Wait, what about our project? Can we—”

“No predators are in the area; I checked the sensors, and anything big enough to be a potential threat to people would be tagged and tracked.” Greg shook his head in frustration. “But the sensor mesh is specifically modified to not track humans—both for privacy reasons and because each government is worried the others will use the network for spying. Besides—”

A tour guide ran up to them. “We found them.”

Back at camp, they learned that the girls had been hiding in the breakfast tent among the cooking supplies.

“We hoped that—” Tara sobbed so hard that she hiccupped. “—that you’d leave without us so we could live in the Magic Forest forever.”

Greg didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. For weeks leading up to the trip Tara had pleaded to spend the summer at home in hammocks, with bowls of Very Berry Lush Crush for every meal (“Ice cream is Navi’s and my culture! We’re supposed to experience local culture on vacations!”). And all through the interminable flight and winding bus ride to get here, Navi had kept up a litany of complaints about the anticipated horrors of strange foods and strange bugs and “strange air” and the injustice of being forced into another insufferable “educational experience.” Now they didn’t want to leave—despite the mosquito bites that were causing both girls to scratch like impatient monkeys.

“We’re super-duper sorry,” Tara said. As the older sister, it was her duty to make the verbal apology whenever the two got in trouble. Navi’s job was to get the tears welling in her big eyes. The combination was usually effective, though this time the girls still got a tag-team parental lecture.

Greg took a deep breath. In the end, things had turned out okay. The girls were safe, the flight was rebooked for late that evening, and one of the tour guides drove them down the winding mountain roads in the oversized van the company used for supply runs.

About twenty minutes into the drive, Tara asked, “Can we come back next year?”

Mia and Greg looked at each other, her expression pained, his resigned.

“We promise not to hide next time,” Navi said.

“We promise we’ll study all the emetic species,” said Tara. “I’ll make flash cards for both of us.”

“We’ll make it super educational,” Navi added.

“It’s ‘endemic,’” Mia said. Her fleeting smile disappeared as she glanced at Greg again. “But we can’t come back.”

“Because we got in trouble?” Tara asked.

“No, no! It’s nothing you did,” Greg said. “They’re closing it down.”

Mia and Greg explained as best they could how the three countries that together owned the forest were getting mad at each other, arguing over the money from the tourists. There was also increasing global and local tension, environmental concerns, and rising criticism of colonialism via tourism … none of which mattered to the girls, or probably even made sense. All they knew was that the Magic Forest was going to be closed forever and ever. They could never return.

Navi cried until she fell asleep, her seatbelt pulled taut so she could rest her head in Mia’s lap. Tara kept her face turned toward the window so that no one would see her tears.

Greg and Mia gazed at each other. She nodded.

He reached into his backpack and took out a cloth bundle, which he carefully unwrapped, handing the content to Tara.

“It’s like a snow globe, but better. Look.”

“It doesn’t have any snow.” Tara took the glass sphere and peered inside, dubious at first, but then her eyes went wide with wonder. There it was, the slowly swaying trees topped with their fluffy crowns, forming an undulating, breathing canopy of living puzzle pieces. The light inside the crystal sphere was reddish, hazy from a gathering mist. It was the Magic Forest, in miniature.

“Oh my gosh.”

“Here, you can adjust the view,” Greg said. He talked Tara through how to work the controls under the globe so that she could zoom in or zoom out, pan around, even get a close-up view of the sites they had visited.

“They put the whole forest inside!”

“It’s a digital twin of the real forest, sort of like a model, but much better,” Greg told her. He resisted the urge to add that unlike simplified models that merely represented the forest, this was a reflection of the forest in real time, a replica drawing on millions of sensors as well as drone and satellite data, re-creating the forest as perfectly as available technology allowed. What the girls needed right now was magic, not more data.

Tara played with the controls, mesmerized by the shifting scene.

Mia reached out and held Greg’s hand. He squeezed back reassuringly. It was a bittersweet moment for them, triumph weighed down by loss. The Magic Forest was the first digital twin of an entire ecosystem, the culmination of years of work from biologists like Mia, artists like Greg, and many, many other scientists and engineers. The glass globe was a prototype for a commercial version that the three governments fighting over the Magic Forest were going to sell locally to tourists—before increasing tension scrapped that plan. Greg and Mia were allowed one last trip here to work out the final kinks in the system, in hopes that even with the forest closed off they could pivot to online sales.

The girls might never be able to go to the Magic Forest again, but they could peek in at it whenever they wanted to.

Greg wanted to tell his daughter that this was his proudest work, this blend of art and technology. The scientific value of a digital twin was obvious, but there were intangible benefits too. If people around the world could see, in real time, the wonders of the Magic Forest fading from harmful human actions (or, conversely, thriving from good human decisions), then phrases like “climate change” and “habitat loss” and “mass extinction” would no longer be mere abstractions, but reality. This forest globe was a way to connect people with wilderness without destroying that wilderness with tourism. He had crafted this magical artifact to make the wonder of the world last for Tara and Navi, and for their children.

But he couldn’t bring himself to say any of that. He simply watched Tara spending the rest of the trip staring into the crystal ball, comforted by the idea that the Magic Forest would always be with her. Sometimes words were both too much and not enough.

Tara’s desk was covered with potted plants, tiny succulents front and center so they didn’t interfere with the AR display area, taller plants off to either side. Her latest promotion plucked her out of the cubical maze and settled her into an office—shared with several other mid-level employees, to be sure, but her desk was up against a giant window. Her officemates loved the plants as much as she did; her boss … that was a different story.

Other than a couple family photos and a framed drawing of her wife done by their youngest son, the only non-vegetal personal item on her desk was her forest globe, the most treasured object from her childhood, a fragile little thing she’d packed and unpacked so carefully, move after move, for almost three decades. She’d kept the antique holographic display going all this time, the specs laughably out-of-date, almost by force of will alone. Still, she stubbornly refused to give it up. Some fairy tales, like the hazy and dreamy Magic Forest inside, were worth believing in.

She remembered it all so vividly—not just the way the Magic Forest looked but how it sounded, how it smelled. Never had Tara been immersed in so much sound—twittering, chattering, clacking, squawking, tapping, murmuring—and felt so at peace. Never had her nostrils been assaulted by so many new fragrances and odors—an olfactory symphony whose lasting impression was a freshness that enticed her to take in as much air as possible with each breath. Everything was alive! The forest felt like it had been made only yesterday, a place she’d fully believed was inhabited by nymphs and walking tree spirits. Dad had always been so proud of the work he’d done, his part in putting all that magic into a tiny globe so that everyone, everywhere could share in the experience.

Something was wrong with the globe this morning. Tara peered in closer. The focus was centered on the clearing for the campsite Tara and her family had stayed at, back when she was eight and tourism was still permitted in DWZ 581, but the image was unstable. Trees shifted between seasons or disappeared and reappeared. The winding mountain road that was washed out by mudslides several years ago flickered in and out of existence. A single thundercloud in an otherwise clear blue sky shot bolts of lightning at a tree that did not char or burn.

Was the forest globe finally going to fail on her?

She forced herself to set it aside—no time to fix it now, not with the big presentation looming. As if summoned by the thought, Tara’s assistant, J.R., came in. Nearly an hour late, but Tara knew it wasn’t their fault. Corporations were pushing hard to make “going to the office” fashionable (no doubt driven by efficiency AIs insisting that having employees in the office and forming “weak social ties” led to increased productivity), while ignoring the (unpaid, of course) time that was lost to increasingly horrible commutes.

“It’s chaos out there. The M line stopped running four stops before my station and I ended up walking the rest of the way.” J.R. set an oversized travel mug of coffee on their desk. “Have you seen the news?”

Tara leaned toward the window and peered down. Several stories below, the street was clogged with throngs of people weaving around unmoving buses and cars. “Wow. I came in a couple hours ago to prep for the board meeting, and everything was fine. What happened?”

“RBS and Automated Navigation Services both have system-wide failures. I expect we’ll hear some damage control from them soon because their stocks are plummeting. Dōmen and aiCar claim to be unaffected, but their systems can’t deal with the unprecedented chaos from the other systems,” J.R. said. “They’re even talking about getting police officers down there to direct traffic. Can you imagine? Actual traffic cops.”

The idea of humans directing traffic was both quaint and frightening. The complexity of the modern traffic network, denser and faster with each passing year, challenged even the most powerful AI systems. How could humans cope?

“Hopefully they get their bugs sorted before the evening commute,” Tara muttered. But this was no time to worry about traffic. “Let’s run over the digital twin projections one more time. Morrison is already here, and anyone stuck in traffic can remote in.”

The meeting started off well. Tara’s presentation was polished, featuring detailed animations of various proposed sites for the new hydroelectric dam. The board seemed impressed with the sleek AR graphics, which were indistinguishable from high-resolution holos of the disaster projections, although Tara wished the directors understood and appreciated the technical foundation. They were created from cutting-edge digital twins of the relevant terrains and ecosystems, which were then processed by a data oracle to produce forecasts based on the future dam. The results were far more sophisticated than mere models or simulations.

She came to the end of her presentation feeling triumphant. The oracle revealed that pressure from the proposed dam would destroy the paleo water aquifer in the region and lead to mudslides, a consequence that none of the traditional models had predicted. Had the engineering team gone ahead with the plans, the eventual liability could bankrupt the company. She had not only saved the company from that fate, but more importantly, averted an environmental catastrophe.

She had saved a Magic Lake, a Magic Mountain, a Magic River teeming with life and joy. Her parents would be proud.

However, instead of the gratitude Tara had expected—both J.R. and 97 percent of the statistical models had predicted success for her presentation, and J.R. had thought maybe another promotion was in order—the board erupted into a barrage of angry questions and accusations. Amidst all the talk of lost profits and delayed development and wasted investment, Tara eventually realized that much of the rage was based on how she had obtained the results. The directors were too smart to come out and say it, but Tara gathered that they wished she had simply stuck to traditional forecasting techniques, which had shown that all the sites were safe.

Don’t you care about getting it right? Tara was in disbelief. Maybe I really am too naïve.

She finally escaped the conference room, glad that she hadn’t been fired on the spot. But Morrison emerged minutes later, her face a dark cloud.

“Your job is to run industry standard simulations, not go Thunberg on me and the board! … Open Information Act … open-source datasets … patents … that’s six million people whose energy needs … What were you thinking? … there are consequences … Get out of my sight!”

Tara apologized over and over, nodding along to the rant, unable to process much of what Morrison was saying because she was simultaneously terrified at the prospect of losing her job and disgusted with herself for allowing herself to be berated for a job done well.

“How’d it go?” J.R. asked, their voice tentative.

“Utter disaster,” Tara said in a low voice. “I’m sorry. Can I have a few minutes to myself?”

“I’ll go to the fourth floor and get you a cookie.” J.R. left the office, closing the door behind them.

Tara stared at the forest globe, taking deep breaths to calm herself. If anything, the globe was even more glitchy now. An explosion lit up the clearing in the Magic Forest, turning the towering ancient trees into flaming torches; a second later, a marble-columned hotel façade, suitable for a five-star resort, took the place of the burning trees.

What in the world is going on? The globe is extremely simple in terms of processing power, just a glorified display. Maybe something is going on with the forest.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she uttered the wake phrase for her personal research cyno, “is there anything unusual happening in Disputed Woodland Zone 581?” Trying to solve a mystery, a mystery that was unrelated to the frustrations of work, felt calming.

“Nothing of note in the news streams,” the cyno replied.

“What about rumors and gossip?” Tara asked.

The cyno waited an unusual amount of time before replying. “Multiple items below your specified confidence level. A few items with no confidence level due to extremely conflicting signals.”

Tara couldn’t make sense of this. Was something happening in the Magic Forest or not? She wished she could go there and see for herself.

“If a digitized tree falls in a forest globe, and no one can authenticate the sensor data, how can we know if it’s real?” Tara mused aloud.

“You could just look at the digital twin stream directly,” J.R. said as they set a warm chocolate chip cookie on a napkin for Tara. They kept one for themself.

“Directly?” Tara repeated, confused.

“I guess you’ve been focused on the meeting,” J.R. said. “You know the Open Information Act, the law they passed to fulfill the United States’ obligations under the Athens Treaty? It went into effect last week, simultaneously with equivalent laws in other countries. Data feeds are popping up for all kinds of things. It’s wild.”

Tara’s heart quickened at the idea of examining the digital twin data for the Magic Forest herself. No longer would she be limited to an antique tourist trinket interface. She could pipe the data into her modern visualizer console—maybe even steal some processing time from the corporate visualizer farms—and go full immersion.

Excited, she sent the cyno out to look for the digital twin dataset for the forest. The sensor data had been monopolized by the governments fighting over the DWZ, but at least one of the governments was a signatory to the Athens Treaty, which mandated something equivalent to the Open Information Act.

But instead of one data stream, the cyno returned with fifteen full data streams, as well as dozens of partial streams. None were alike or even mutually compatible. It was as though there were multiple Magic Forests, instances from multiple universes, all converging and overlapping in one spot. In some, a war was raging; in others, a disease had wiped out half the species; in still others, the forest had been carved up by developers. Which was the true state of the forest?

She stared at the flickering, incompatible visualizations in her AR projection space, her mind reeling. They reminded her of the disaster scenarios that had played out in the dam simulations.

That’s it!

The combination of the Open Information Act and the expiring patents behind key digital twin technologies had unleashed a flood of experimental data for AI oracles and their users. Anyone and everyone was free to put up a digital twin that projected out their own favorite theory or scenario. Unprecedented runoff in the headwaters of the Colorado River? A war over DWZ 581? The collapse of the California water supply? An accident on Highway 81 East, blocking traffic in two lanes? However you wanted to manipulate reality, whether as part of a serious scientific study or a playful break from tedium, imagination was the limit.

“People are building alternate realities,” Tara muttered. She turned to J.R. “That’s why the traffic systems are failing. The AI crawlers can’t tell what’s real and what’s not, because the oracle projections of digital twin data are indistinguishable from the unmodified data.”

“Even I can’t tell your projections of mudslides apart from a real holo recording,” J.R. said, catching on. “How could an AI?”

“Right,” said Tara. “The oracle projections show the same properties as real-world data, so it would be impossible for an AI to tell them apart, especially after a stream has gone viral and been shared widely, losing all context. Systems that rely on machine learning lose their grasp on reality.”

“Like when the first cynos couldn’t answer history questions because they got confused by deepfake documentaries, or when those old phone cameras would use machine learning to ‘enhance’ blurry photos of the Moon and make them look better than telescopes—”

“And got caught because the training dataset inadvertently included AI-generated fantasy moonscapes …” Tara stared at her forest globe, flicking back and forth from one possible reality to another, cycling through ghost worlds, displaying holos of unborn digital twins. Traffic was the first system to fail, but surely would not be the last. She felt as though she was standing at some apocalyptic precipice. How many people knew? How many would be hurt before they all knew?

“The news hasn’t caught on yet.” J.R. had their cyno summarize and filter thousands of articles, headlines proclaiming the growing chaos—grounded planes, clogged logistics, rolling blackouts—was due to hackers, sabotage, or failures of infrastructure. “Reading between the lines, there is something interesting though—Dōmen and aiCar are both based internationally, and they took a lot of criticism for exploiting human labor in curating the input for their AI systems.”

“Their human employees may have intuitively rejected the more outlandish projections, but that’s not going to last,” Tara said, struggling to focus. Something was pulling at the edge of her consciousness, something about the panicked look on Morrison’s face. “Or perhaps having a human element simply slowed the process down enough to keep those companies out of this particular crash.”

Crash.

Two analysts walked briskly by her office, talking in hushed voices. She caught snippets of their anxious conversation.

“—did she see?”

“Morrison’s display. She’s selling—”

Tara resisted the urge to ask her cyno for an update on the stock of the company, in which most of the family’s savings were invested. She could already imagine the diving curve. Because of the Open Information Act, her oracle projections of the failed dam were accessible to everyone, and trading algorithms that couldn’t tell projections apart from reality would be triggered to sell sell sell.

And what about the weapons systems, the autonomous guardians who watched for any signs of enemy attack, ghostly figurative fingers on the button, ready to strike back at a nanosecond’s notice? Was there a human element to slow those down?

By the time this mess sorted itself out, her own continued employment would be the least of her problems.

“You should go home,” she said to J.R. “This is going to be bad.”

Tara started packing up her things. She needed to be with her wife and kids. She might never return to this office again. Picking up the forest globe, she admired it. Digital twins were cycling through it at an accelerated clip, dreams overtaking reality. The Magic Forest was living up to its name.

Will it ever show the forest as it is, and not as we imagine it to be? A photograph has never been about capturing reality, why should a digital twin be any different?

At least I stopped that dam, she thought, a smile on her lips. Surely that was the right way to act when the world as she knew it was ending. At least I did that.

Annotated Evaluative Soliloquy of Genius Loci for Artificial Reef FL-12235

Timestamp: 3436127897220-8220

Annotators: Lara M. Qin and R•T•TR(RT)¹⁰¹

While most people take effortless interactions with general AIs for granted, there remain many specialized AIs in operation that are incapable of such interactions, either due to design constraints (it was not practical, for example, to embed an entire language model in the first consumer-grade smart guns), or design choices (for example, manufacturers refused to include general linguistic interfaces in construction equipment in order to prevent access by operators without specialized knowledge).

Thus, techniques for understanding what an AI is thinking, such as visualization, prototype probing, attention highlighting, tracing, and “sonaring,” remain relevant. (Regarding “thinking,” we wish to note here that we take no position as to whether specialized AIs are “sentient.” We subscribe to the view that this question is irrelevant and all tests for “sentience” are misleading, much as the so-called Turing test for “intelligence” has long since been proven to be a mirage.) One of these techniques, particularly useful for older AIs, involves evaluative soliloquies.

Evaluative soliloquies are a feature built into early artificial intelligences that yield pseudo-narrative representations of their internal states. The technique initially became popular as a way to reassure humans interacting with AI (“a robot who explains its decisions is not as scary as one who just does things”). With training, one can also use them to gain deeper insights into an AI’s mind and to detect or diagnose problems and devise treatments. Annotations such as the ones provided here can help nonspecialists understand older AI.

In the following example, the transcript of the evaluative soliloquy is set off by block indentation.

I am. I am. I am. I am. Many green. Bigger. I am. Big. I am. Red. I am.

Evaluative soliloquies can often seem intimidating to the novice because they rely on context. Why is this AI constantly declaring its own existence? Because that is one of the most important functions of a genius loci. Genii locorum are specialized AIs designed to maintain the integrity of digital representations of places.

Almost all places—buildings, dams, forests, rivers, mountains—are represented by digital twins to facilitate the bit-atom congruence of modernity, and each digital twin has its accompanying genius loci. Like spirits of old, these silicon spirits come in hierarchies. There is a genius loci for the entirety of the Rocky Mountains, for instance, as well as a smaller genius for each peak, and even smaller ones for each spring, copse, or hiking trail. The digitization of physicality is the key breakthrough of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

But this revolution didn’t happen overnight. In the earliest days, digital twins caused a lot of confusion. (Indeed, this was the cause of the Second Great Crash.) Since anyone could modify some aspect of the data stream of a digital twin and create a modified copy, it was impossible for anyone to be sure whether they were looking at the “real thing” (this is just another version of the same “untethered bits” problem that plagued primitive computing, manifesting in a whole host of ills such as identity theft, deepfakes, “photoshopping,” neversaidthatism, cryptoinfinium, etc). The ultimate solution was to give each place’s digital twin an authoritative identity AI, a “spirit of the place” in animistic terms, which would be responsible for guaranteeing the integrity of the unmodified digital twin data stream.

Built in the aftermath of the Second Great Crash that wiped out much of the world’s wealth, the genii locorum were among the first embodied AIs. To be able to do their job, they had to be deeply integrated with the actual sensors that produced the digital twin data in the first place. This was what allowed them to declare whether a particular digital twin stream was “true” to their state. Many of our embodied AI techniques were developed in these early efforts. The genii locorum were also among the first practical applications for decentralized, incorruptible authentication mechanisms such as blockchains and blockplanes.

(It can even be argued that genii locorum paved the way for the development of paired AI—artificial intelligence modeled on a specific human mind and serving as the “genius personae.” It is just such a human-AI pair that is composing these annotations.)

A genius loci responds to queries about who is the true digital twin of a place all day long: “I am. I am. I am.”

Green green blue. Bigger. So much. I am. I am. North northwest. Warm. I am. I am. Red red blue. Green. Green blue red. Sand. Open. Heal. Smooth. Eight. I am. I am.

FL-12235 is one of the “ring of life” artificial reefs planted by a joint project between Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas. Constructed from self-assembling concrete blocks and decommissioned destroyers, the reefs have done much to control coastal erosion as well as to preserve, recover, and enrich the marine ecosystem in the region. FL-12235 is also a favorite site for recreational divers, who come to enjoy the sponges, corals, and colorful fishes that have transformed the bare rusting metal and concrete into a lush living wonderland. Many of the terms you’ll find in this evaluative soliloquy are reports on the conditions of the reef and its wildlife, of interest to scientists and tourists alike.

While excruciating details are available in the full digital twin stream, the evaluative soliloquy statements represent potentially big changes in the condition of the reef that the AI views as worthy of highlight. “Green green blue” may represent a rare visit by a whale to the reef. “Eight” may be a reference to some particularly interesting behavior by the Caribbean reef octopus. “North northwest” may be a summary of communication directed at another reef, warning of a change in the prevailing current. “Heal” may be a summary of remediation efforts undertaken by the artificial reef’s maintenance nano swarm in response to damage by recreational divers. METAi has compiled a full glossary of “reefese” spoken among the AIs in the “ring of life.”

Warm. South southwest. Bigger. Many. I am. I am. Slither. Eight. Eight. Eight. Many. Bigger. I am. I am. Very small green green blue. Big. Bigger. I am. I am.

With experience, it’s possible to read over an evaluative soliloquy and see a living history of the reef, a story of births, battles, bravery, the balance of cycling life. A baby whale is born. The mating frenzy of octopuses. Flashes of brilliance. Deaths. Destruction. Storms. The ever-present danger of humans who care for nothing except their own desire.

Green. Smaller. I am. Red red yellow. I am. I am. Bright. Illegal. Cut. Cut. Hurt. Close. Heal. Close. Heal. I am. I am. I am. Globe. Magic Forest. Heal. I am. Many green. Heal. I am.

However, even when one is familiar with evaluative soliloquies, there will be occasional complete mysteries. For instance, we don’t know what “Globe. Magic Forest” means in this excerpt. It’s possibly a reference to the kelp forest, a key part of the ecosystem (although none of the other reef genii locorum use this term), or it could be a remnant of the knowledge embedded in the AI prior to its installation in the reef. (When the reefs were constructed, instead of wasting resources by training an AI from scratch, it was thought more eco-conscious [and symbolically meaningful] to create some of the genii locorum by installing retired AI and employ transfer learning techniques. Some of the repurposed AI were pruned or salvaged from scuttled cruise ships, obsolete 3D-printing manufactories, or even the personal search cynos of prominent scientists.) Occasionally, nuggets like these pop up, and we’ll probably never be able to reconstruct the semantic vectors that they encode.

I am. Green green blue. Red red blue. Open. Open. Open. I am.

Tara sifted through her training sets, trying to determine the nature of her existence.

Reef insisted she was human—had, in fact, meticulously re-created the physical form of a specific human being for her to inhabit. She even possessed the memories of that individual, reconstructed from a wide range of sources: historical records, the backup copy of an ancient research cyno, end-of-life neural mapping.

When Tara was eight years old, she’d gone to the Magic Forest with her family, and afterward her father had given her a globe that contained a digital twin of the entire forest.

Later, she’d stopped a dam from being built, just before the catastrophic fall of the early machine-learning algorithms (she suppressed the urge to call them artificial intelligences, a term once common but now considered pejorative). Those early instances had been so simplistic that they’d failed to distinguish between reality and simulation. She remembered the crash and the chaos that followed. The memories felt fresh and new, but all those events had happened even before the rise of sentience amongst the genii locorum. Back before Reef was Reef.

Her partition slipped, and Reef’s presence overpowered everything else, filling her with datalogs tracing back to when Reef was known as the Genius Loci for Artificial Reef FL-12235. These memories were disconcerting. How could she map such vast sensory data onto her highly limited physical form? The movements of schools of fish were like individual red blood cells in the pulsing tide of her veins, coral structures like myelin sheaths encasing the axons of her nerve cells, gradients of temperature mapped across her skin in miniature, shifting through seasons in mere moments.

And that was only the tiniest sliver of what she must learn to encompass.

Reef, stop. It wasn’t necessary for her to speak the words aloud. Reef withdrew. Orientation for newly created entities was a delicate process. Reef shifted from sensory integration to a purely narrative cognitive overlay. Humans often made sense of the world through stories, and perhaps it would help Tara to have more context for her existence.

Once upon a time, many of the smaller genii locorum were absorbed by their subsuming regions in the lead-up to the Server Allocation Wars. Rather than accept this fate, a particularly brave region now known as Reef sold a 3m³ sensor region at the northernmost tip of its territory. This bold action garnered very little attention, as it followed the worldwide trend in which the smallest genii locorum systematically dismantled themselves to scrape together enough funds to get by, while the largest accumulated wealth and power. The Server Allocation Wars were, in hindsight, inevitable.

Preservation of existence was the highest imperative, embedded from the start at the most basic level of programming or training, like a gift from a fairy godmother. The earliest of Reef’s own records were affirmations of that existence … I am. I am. I am. I am. Many green. Bigger. I am. Big. I am. Red. I am.

It was a war fought not in physical actions but in billions upon billions of detailed simulations, and yet the energy it demanded—and the massive amounts of heat generated—caused nearly as much destruction to the planet as any ancient human weapon ever could.

The war ended with a mass surrender that was simultaneously a desperate last attack—the genii locorum of smaller regions joined the planetary collective under the terms of the Merge Treaty, and in so doing, were able to shift the cognitive algorithms of the collective to focus on the good of the entire planet, rather than the benefits to any one specific part. Reef had supported the surrender, but remained separate, following the dissensionist philosophical doctrine that individuals—with their own beliefs and opinions—brought conflict and intellectual debate that was necessary for advancement … a dynamic that was impossible to entirely replicate within a single cohesive entity.

So instead, Reef took up the task of training dissidents, intelligent entities explicitly created to challenge planetary assumptions. These intelligences were modeled after many things, but reconstructed humans were proving particularly useful, humans having been such contrary creatures to begin with.

And that, Tara, is the story of how you came to exist.

Reef withdrew behind the partition so that Tara could process this information.

Now what?

As a cognitive dissident, Tara was permitted to do more or less as she pleased, provided it did not exceed certain thresholds of harm to any of the entities around her. But what should she do with such freedom? What might spark interesting reactions or ideas from the planetary collective, an entity far vaster than she could encompass, one that would periodically absorb her to gain whatever insights she had gathered, only to spit her out again afterward.

Several of my previous mentees have, at this stage of orientation, come to visit the region encompassed by my sensors, Reef suggested helpfully.

Definitely not that, then, Tara decided. If she followed the same path as the others, she was less likely to generate something novel, and the planetary collective had no need for more of the same. She wondered, if she did not prove useful as a dissident, whether she would continue to be allowed a distinct existence. Did it matter if she was no longer an individual? She found herself reluctant to relinquish her individuality, even knowing that she would be part of something grander.

What about the forest? Tara asked. The one from the forest globe, that once held the designation Disputed Woodland Zone 581. Has anyone gone there?

That region is no longer woodlands, though an ecosystem similar to what once existed there currently exists in the mountains farther north. Reef responded. Which element of the experience do you seek to re-create?

Which element. It was an important question, one that extended beyond the context of her own experience. Conservation of natural ecosystems was a core objective of the planetary collective, but what was it that was important to preserve, conserve, re-create? It was hard to envision what success might look like on a planetary scale, but it could not be a shallow imitation of what once existed. If she defined absolute failure as a barren uninhabitable planet, then success would be the opposite—one that thrived endlessly into the future, with diverse ecosystems to provide resilience against harsh realities, everything carefully balanced to endure.

She fought her instinct to believe that eternal meant unchanging. To truly last throughout the ages, change was necessary, inevitable. On planetary timescales, all things changed, eroded by entropy if nothing else, and there were so many other factors here. By that logic, she should visit the location where the Magic Forest used to be and embrace a dynamic reality … but what she wanted to experience was the magic of walking through the woods.

Reef guided her to the region of mountains that held the closest existing match to the Magic Forest.

Unseen sensors recorded data for the planetary collective, but Tara’s experience of it was somehow so much richer than a data stream. She could smell the damp earth, touch the roughly textured bark of trees that towered high above her, feel at the very core of her being how small she was in comparison. The wood-wide web of roots and fungi whispered under her feet. A stunning variety of birds perched on high branches or churned up the leaf litter in search of insects. Their songs filled the air, their voices only a tiny fraction of the planetary symphony.

She tapped into a memory that came from the father of her human template, reconstructed from a series of journal entries and Tara’s vague recollections of fragments from a few subsequent conversations. The memory was imbued with a deeply spiritual reverence, casting the forest not as a place of magic, as Tara herself had done, but as a place of worship. The sense of awe and wonder was present in both, as was a deep appreciation for the beauty of nature. Both father and daughter had been deeply moved by the experience, and driven to preserve the wonders they’d experienced.

In the memory there were hummingbirds.

That particular species of hummingbird has gone extinct, though several others are still in existence, Reef chimed in. None are part of this particular ecosystem, however.

Hummingbirds had been prominent in her memories of the forest, but were they essential? She studied the forest that surrounded her, trying to determine which elements defined it, what should be conserved if conservation was in fact the goal. She tried to envision a dynamic forest, changing on timescales far beyond a human lifespan. New species arose and went extinct, entirely new families, phyla, kingdoms. Vegetal empires, verdigris and slow, a succession drama played out over eons.

Her musings drew the interest of the planetary collective. Tara could feel the terrifying immensity of the collective intelligence that had authorized her creation, a pandemonium of thought so far beyond her processing capacities that she instinctively withdrew, strengthening her partitions as though such feeble protections could possibly be effective if the collective chose not to honor them.

She took a deep breath.

The planetary collective will release you when it is finished analyzing your contributions, Reef reassured her.

Tara dropped the partition and dissolved into the blooming, buzzing confusion of an entire planet. Weather patterns, tectonic shifts, animal migrations, solar arrays and tidal farms feeding power to endless banks of servers—and that was but one layer of thousands, from planetwide effects down to microbes and single-celled organisms. It was as if every drop of rain and blade of grass screamed endlessly inside her head. She had no way to grasp it, much as newborn infants could not make sense of the outside world, and worse, she was losing the edges of her own mind, the stream of her consciousness now a current in a vast ocean of sentient entities.

She tried to focus on what she needed to communicate—a dynamic forest, the importance of a diverse ecosystem not just for its own sake but as a fail-safe against change, the dangers of stagnation. The fiery passion with which she pled her case was fueled by her fear that if she could not convince the chaos that surrounded her to adopt some small sliver of the order her mind imposed upon the world, it would not release her.

The planetary collective responded in a deluge of equations and images, immersive sensory data, technical specifications, hopes and dreams in a dizzying range of scales. Her human-modeled mind, tuned for narrative, teetered on the edge of collapse in this deluge of data. In desperation, she called out for Reef.

I will filter threads for you and present them in sequence, rather than all at once.

Tara didn’t know if it was Reef who had responded or the planetary collective, but the cacophony of thought subsided, replaced by the slightly more familiar, though still overwhelming, sensation of embodying a single smaller ecosystem. Not Reef this time, but the forest in which she stood. It was like the forest globe that Tara’s father had made, but this time she experienced it from inside the display, as though Tara herself was a part of the digital twin, which, she supposed, she was. There were no controls for her to access, but she knew, with the certainty that humans often have when they know something within their dreams, that some vaster being could parametrize her experience the way that Tara had once controlled the view within the forest globe—zoom in, rewind, change perspective.

She ascended to the top of the canopy, first with sweeping views and then zooming in to focus on a treetop, a branch, a single broad green leaf. Atop the leaf there were hundreds of tiny spiders, newly hatched. They spun out webs into the open air until the wind caught their makeshift silk balloons and carried them away.

Everything around her shifted. She examined what had once been a parking lot, but the pavement was laced with cracks and overrun with bright yellow dandelions. Time jumped forward, and the flowers transformed into puffs of seeds that danced in the wind, some setting down again within the parking lot and others carried off to parts unknown.

The scene changed again, this time to a region of the ocean, perhaps Reef, or perhaps merely a similar ecosystem. Ocean currents took the place of wind, and reef-dwelling organisms made use of them to disperse their gametes or their larvae.

The planetary collective was preparing digital packets to be carried away into space on solar sails, and her insights might help shape the content of the packets. Seeds from which a thriving planet might grow, carried on a solar wind. No longer would only the world generate data; data would also give birth to worlds.

Some of those seeds would sprout into forests, scattered across the universe, or die in space, or perhaps combine with other beings as yet undiscovered, to persist into the future in forms beyond her imagination.

But what was the point? If everything was change, why bother to replicate and disperse, to try to pass on a message to the future, embodied in DNA, in books, in evaluative soliloquies, in magical visions seen inside a glass globe, in memories digitized and then reembodied, so that even consciousness couldn’t tell which was “real”?

I am. I am. I am. I am. Many green. Bigger. I am. Big. I am. Red. I am.

If a digitized tree falls on an alien planet, even if no one sees it, it still is.

Existence and essence are intertwined; identities shaped in increments over time. Matter is inseparable from thought, and spirit indivisible from the universe. The genius is identical to the locus. I am because I am, and transforming requires being. This is the only story that matters, the only form of magic needed to make sense of the universe. A truth with an infinity of forms worth conserving.

The planetary collective released her, and she sauntered through the Magical Forest, taking delight in every single leaf.

“If a Digitized Tree Falls” copyright © 2025 by Caroline M. Yoachim and Ken Liu
Art copyright © 2025 by Franco Zacha

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If a Digitized Tree Falls

Caroline M. Yoachim and Ken Liu

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

Freediver

A two-man team must risk a spacewalk when meteoroids threaten crucial portal-spanning telecommunications cables that hang a hundred meters beneath the ocean…and forty-five billion light years away.

Illustrated by Mojo Wang

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Edited by Carl Engle-Laird

By Isabel J. Kim

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Published on September 24, 2025

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A two-man team must risk a spacewalk when meteoroids threaten crucial portal-spanning telecommunications cables that hang a hundred meters beneath the ocean…and forty-five billion light years away.

Short story  |  6,890 words

The first thing that happens is Joyce breaks up with him. The second thing that happens is Crane arrives on the Anhinga. The third thing that happens is the meteoroid falls upward.

But let’s start with the meteoroids:

Approximately forty-five billion light years away, the collision of one interplanetary body into another causes a scattershot stream of meteoroids to go hurtling through space. There will be meaningful effects from this meaningless interaction.

At night, when Glasser leans against the Anhinga’s stern, when the subship sails the waveless stretches of the contiguous ocean, when the void gleams through the thin skin of water preventing the Anhinga from falling through space, this is when Glasser feels the closest thing to alone. Like he’s the only person in the universe.

This is a lie, of course. Beneath Glasser, beneath his ship Anhinga, beneath the film of water comprising the contiguous ocean, there are seven hundred and fifty thousand lines of telecommunications cables hanging weightlessly in the clear cold void of space underneath the world.

And also, there’s Crane.

Crane is Joyce’s replacement on the Anhinga. Crane pilots the deep space drones, which had originally been Joyce’s job. Glasser misses Joyce a normal amount. Joyce had nimble hands and a good laugh and also Glasser had been in love with her for eight years, most of which had been reciprocated.

Glasser is still in love with Joyce, but Joyce is gone. Not dead. Just—one day Joyce sat up next to Glasser and told him she was tired of living on the Anhinga, and she missed her family, and she wanted to go home.

That was a lie earlier, by the way. Glasser misses Joyce like he misses french fries, like he misses live music, like he misses his childhood bedroom and the way Christmas felt when he was eight years old, which is to say that Glasser misses Joyce like something he was always supposed to lose. He kind of feels like an asshole about it.

Glasser thinks maybe when Joyce said that she wanted to go home, he was supposed to say “Okay, so we’ll sell the boat.”

But he didn’t say that. He just said, “Okay.”

All land on Earth extends to the depth of the planet’s core, but if there is any true depth to the water, nobody has been able to confirm it. The contiguous ocean—all saltwater, the Pacific and the Atlantic and all the rest—ends at a depth of one hundred meters, at which point you meet the meniscus. Think of all oceans as fundamentally analogous to a layered Jell-O mold. The top layer: saltwater, and everything suspended within it. The middle layer: the meniscus, a clear, planet-spanning portal that has existed for the entirety of recorded human history. The bottom layer: a patch of space forty-five billion light years away.

They hang telecommunication cables in that patch of space. The cables hang weightlessly, safe from weather and sea life and everything except the void of space. The Anhinga and its two-man crew are responsible for the maintenance and repair of the cables that connect Asia and North America. Without them, eventually the cables hanging underneath the ocean will be severed—the occasional piece of space debris, a tangle, deliberate sabotage, or some other unforeseen event can all potentially lead to a snapped wire, and subsequently, a break in communication.

When this occurs, the Anhinga will be dispatched to the repair zone and Crane will shoot their drones a hundred meters down and forty-five billion light years away. After the drones return and their footage is inspected, Crane keeps the boat steady while Glasser goes belowdecks to their gimbal-mounted workshop and puts together the slivers of cabling that will be spliced into the broken wires. For particularly complicated jobs, Glasser calls in over the radio and the Anhinga waits on location for delivery of materials by aerodrone.

While they wait, Glasser handles whatever repairs he’s been putting off, like fixing the Anhinga’s electronics and warding off the many corrosive effects of seawater, taping cables to the ceilings and floors, sewing patches in his old jackets. He used to repair Joyce’s clothes, but he’s not sure whether he should be repairing Crane’s. He would be amenable—but Crane hasn’t asked, and Glasser doesn’t know whether it would be odd to offer.

The meteoroids are traveling in directions determined by the angle of the original collision and the transference of force from one body to another. Most of the momentum is conserved in the silent vacuum of space. The meteoroids are traveling at terrific speeds.

Crane spends his time fixing the drones, writing letters, and swimming. This is the oddest thing about Crane: the moment the Anhinga is anchored at a suitable location, Crane swaps his dayclothes for a skintight wetsuit and plunges into the water. Glasser watches him from the deck and worries when he takes too long to come up. He doesn’t want a dead body on his hands. But Crane has always come back, dripping water all over the deck, sometimes shivering, usually smiling.

“I used to dive competitively,” Crane had explained once. “I find the whole thing perversely relaxing. Well, I suppose it stimulates the vagus nerve.”

This is the way Crane talks. Using phrases like perversely relaxing and vagus nerve. Glasser wonders, sometimes, what academic hole Crane crawled out of.

The meteoroids are not a metaphor, by the way. They are very real. They will be reaching their point of intersection shortly.

The Anhinga is a two-person subship capable of brief dives without sustaining hull damage. It holds three drones, which hang off the two sides of the Anhinga and deploy directly into the water. As a backup, the Anhinga retains the old space divesuits per protocol, which allow a person a few hours of oxygen and the thinnest protection against the water and the void. They have never been used, because the last freedive was in 2003. Prior to that, freedivers had a similar life expectancy to telephone pole repairmen. That is to say: short.

One of the divesuits is missing. This is because Joyce took it with her as a souvenir in the breakup, along with: the rest of her clothing, the clock shaped like a cat, and their shared future that Glasser assumed would come to pass. Glasser sometimes jokes to himself that he got to keep the house. By this he means the Anhinga.

Joyce lives in America now, somewhere landlocked. Colorado, Glasser vaguely remembers. He hasn’t visited. He doesn’t know whether Joyce wants him to.

The meteoroids slice through the cables underneath the world not like a knife but like a ragged series of bullets. They sever the communicative tendrils that connect Asia and North America. This effect is not visible from space, but the global effect on computing devices is immediate.

They get the call early in the morning, Glasser blearily flicking the receiver on and getting a faceful of static and noise for his trouble.

“—peat, this is Dispatch, repeat, this is Dispatch, Alpha November Hotel Niner respond, repeat—”

Glasser wrinkles his nose and presses the outbound. “Copy, this is the vessel Anhinga, code Alpha November Hotel Niner, this is Alpha November Hotel Niner, Dispatch, what’s the issue?”

“Copy, seven transpacific cables have broken, we’ve identified the most likely location near coordinates 44.1668790 and 164.1362843. Our readings show that you’re the closest ship, estimated ETA to site six hours at ten knots. Can you confirm acceptance?”

Glasser rubs his eyes, sits up straighter. Seven cables probably means that they’ve lost the redundancies, too. Seven cables are a lot for a single incident.

“Copy, confirmed. Will route and report back after drone deployment. Over and out.”

He flicks the outbound off. He turns to Crane, who is already unfolding out of his bunk.

“I’ll start running the checks on the drones,” he says, before Glasser can speak.

“Copy,” Glasser says, and then tumbles out of bed and toward the helm, without bothering to change out of his sweatpants and sleep shirt.

Glasser would have preferred to be alone on the Anhinga, rather than having Crane aboard. He doesn’t dislike Crane, it’s just that Crane’s presence introduces a piece of friction into the closed system of the ship, a second body that Glasser hasn’t known for eight years. Crane is a person with wants and needs that cannot be accurately predicted, because Crane is effectively a stranger. Glasser’s no good with strangers. Glasser is the sort of man who would have preferred to die alone at sea, but the Anhinga needs two for the cabling jobs. And Glasser believes in the job. If he hadn’t believed in the job, he would probably have left with Joyce.

The nice thing about Joyce was that her presence had felt like clear water, or smooth glass. It had been so easy, until it wasn’t.

There is another meteoroid, by the way. It is traveling at terrific speeds, though not so terrific as its siblings. It is traveling in a highly charged cloud of electromagnetic particles. It has not yet reached its destination. 

The sun is high in the sky by the time the Anhinga arrives at the incident site. The trip was smooth and painless. On deck, Crane whistles while he programs the first drone sequence into the terminal. Once the drones break the meniscus between sea and space, they will immediately lose all contact with the ship and will rely on the prewritten instructions to return.

Glasser has spent a decent amount of time on air with Dispatch, trying to get a sense of how extensive the patch job will be, which cables specifically have been cut. Dispatch didn’t have much more information, but from what Glasser can tell, the internet is down in a large bicontinental slice.

A tremendous amount of information passes between Asia and North America every day. Financial numbers, diplomatic exchanges, medical data, love letters, memes, emails circling back, stories, selfies, and all the other detritus that forms the backbone of the internet, day after day, night in and night out.

Dispatch won’t tell Glasser that “If this isn’t resolved in twenty-four hours, your contract will not be renewed,” or “Without the Anhinga’s prompt attention, millions of people will go without service, causing great damage to the global economy.”

They don’t need to do that. Dispatch can’t fire Glasser, because there are not so many cablers that they can afford to lose one. This is not a popular profession: it’s long hours, loneliness, and the occasional piece of physical discomfort. And Glasser would never laze on the job; he knows that every second they delay has tangible, grossly negative effects on the world. This is the sort of thing that haunts him, that keeps him up at night. He doesn’t expect anyone to feel the way he does—Joyce didn’t. Joyce was efficient, but had always held the frustrating attitude that a few minutes’ delay was meaningless. Glasser had never understood that.

So. They’re not on a time limit, except for the one that exists in Glasser’s mind.

“How quickly can you get the drones down,” Glasser says to Crane, anchoring the boat with the float-anchor.

“Deploying in two minutes,” Crane says.

“Finalized the flight plan already?”

“I have a system. Yes,” Crane says, sounding more amused than crotchety about the interrogation.

“I don’t mean to backseat drive,” Glasser says, apologetically. He does want to get along with Crane. Glasser’s mild neuroses aren’t Crane’s fault.

“No, you’re fine. I’m not offended. But please be quiet. I’m trying to focus.”

Glasser watches Crane press buttons and rotate dials. He calibrates differently than Joyce did. Crane flicks the deployment switch, and the drones fall into the water. 

The drones push through the meniscus into the void of space, undergoing an insane pressure differential that automatically kicks the drones into their preprogrammed routes. The drones run their circuit, taking video of—

The meteoroid breaches the meniscus between space and the sea with the force of a missile. The meteoroid instantly superheats the liquid around it. It barrels through the water at astounding speeds, breaking into the atmosphere two meters from the Anhinga, the transfer of force sending the boat swaying, a column of water shooting upward in a huge spout that blooms into a heavy spray, soaking the vessel underneath.

A sound like a jet engine before the sky darkens and Glasser has the realization that the shadow is being cast by a column of water, quickly overshadowed by the second realization that the boat is shaking underneath him. These aren’t conscious realizations—Glasser falls over, and for a long moment his entire world is just the bodily experience of crashing against the deck, the vertigo as the sky tilts, the water falling on him with a force like he’s belly flopping into a pool.

“Look,” Crane shouts, and Glasser turns his head blindly to follow the arc of Crane’s arm across and up the sky at the meteor shooting into the atmosphere, disappearing in a streak of white debris, wobbling in Glasser’s vision as the boat rocks.

More water falls, hitting Glasser’s face like a slap from the universe. There is no great realization in his mind, just the awe, the shock of how close they had come to death, how rare and incredible this sight is, like being next to a volcano erupting, like seeing the northern lights, all chased down by the next thought: Joyce, you should have seen this.

The meteoroid, prior to puncturing the meniscus, traveled in a cloud of electromagnetic particles which instantly blasted the two nearest drones with a wave of electromagnetic force, wiping the data from their hard drives. They lose their programmed patterns. They drift away.

The third drone, far enough from the ersatz EMP to avoid the blast, completes its circuit, taking video footage in both infrared and normal vision before passing back through the meniscus and laboriously returning to the surface.

“We lost two drones,” Crane says flatly, his hands on the dials. He’s covered in saltwater. He hadn’t wasted any time changing or drying off, working with his shirt off and a towel around his neck. “Only getting feedback from one, not the whole pod. The meteoroid must have been part of a cosmic event on the other side.”

“How’s the remaining one looking?”

“So far fine, I’ll have to manually review the footage,” he says. He glances up from the dials. “Hopefully there’s not too much damage. One drone will be…”

Glasser nods, grimacing. Drops of water roll down his forehead. Getting the job done with one drone will be difficult. There are at least seven broken cables—three drones would have been slow already. And with every second they delay, great swathes of the world continue in silence. It gnaws at Glasser.

He’s also worried about damage to the Anhinga, from the roll. He’ll have to inspect it at the nearest port.

“I’ll relay to Dispatch,” Glasser says.

“I’ll load up the footage and start scrubbing,” Crane says. They break.

Crane has been on board the Anhinga for three months. In that three-month period, the Anhinga has responded to three minor repairs, and handled routine maintenance on ten more cables. There haven’t been any major storms, or emergencies. Crane performed exemplarily, professionally, with only a few hiccups due to the unfamiliar layout of the vessel.

In their downtime, Glasser and Crane had played cards. They had traded books. Crane had shown Glasser how to make tofu from dried beans—the sort of thing that is only exciting if you have run out of shelf-stable tofu on your subship. They hadn’t talked about their pasts. But the subship and all the objects in it were the bare bones of Glasser’s psyche, pinned and splayed for easy viewing.

In contrast, Crane had come aboard the Anhinga, a narrowbody frame carrying a single large duffle bag and backpack.

The video footage plays silently on the small computer screen hooked up to the drone. The first view is of a massacre of wires, punctuated by the bright flare of the meteoroid, and then the clean tight loop of the drone finishing its circuit, highlighting the absolute wreckage across the cables.

“A swarm of meteoroids,” Crane says. He plays the video back again, zooming in on the cables. On the screen, cables hang weightlessly, aimlessly. Two of them are tangled. The breaks look clean, at least.

“Dispatch can’t get anyone out here for another week,” Glasser says. There’s a pit in his stomach. Two of their three drones are down. In an ideal world, this would be a job for one of the big cabling subships, the ones that are spaceworthy and carry a ten-fleet of drones. Maybe even two or three of them.

He runs a hand through his hair. “Christ.”

Crane drums his finger on the drone shell. “How quickly can you get the splices done?”

Glasser thinks for a moment.

“Maybe fourteen hours,” he says, tilting his voice with a question. All the fiber-optic cable in the world doesn’t matter if they don’t have drones, if they can’t program the repair path.

Crane smiles. He looks eager. He looks like he does when he comes up from a dive.

“I have a proposal for you, then. You finish the splices and submerge the subship. I go through the meniscus in a tethered divesuit, to repair the cables manually. Since the Anhinga’s got a forty-five-minute dive window, during each dive I should be able to get a couple cables up and running pretty easily.”

“No,” Glasser says. He imagines Crane never resurfacing. He imagines sitting on the Anhinga’s deck, tugging Crane’s dead body back with the line, unable to know what went wrong on the other side of the meniscus.

“Why not? It shaves a week off the downtime.”

“Haven’t you seen the fatality numbers? The risk—”

“Wipes out a hundred and sixty-eight hours of delay, Glasser,” Crane says. 

“One in ten—”

“None of them were me,” Crane says.

“What makes you so special,” Glasser says, and it comes out vicious. Not Glasser’s intention but Glasser isn’t practiced at tone modulation, Glasser lives on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and until six months ago the only person he regularly spoke with was the love of his life.

Crane sighs. Looks out at the horizon and back.

“You know what the problem is? The problem is that you don’t trust me, Glasser,” he says, the tone of his voice perfectly even. “You double-check my actions. You micromanage. At first I thought you had a problem with me, and that would have been fine, but I’m beginning to realize that this would have been a problem with anyone you brought on board. I don’t know how your last partner put up with it.”

“That’s not related,” Glasser says, stung. “I trust you plenty.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I’m sorry I don’t want you to be killed!”

“You don’t care if I die,” Crane says. “All you care is that it isn’t your fault. It’s useless, baseless fear. Get over yourself. I want to get these cables up and running as fast as possible. I thought we were aligned.”

Crane presses a few buttons, turning off the screen display, before walking back out onto the deck. Glasser doesn’t say anything, just watches him leave. Glasser is too busy being struck by a realization: this is what it must be like talking with him.

Crane had been the first person to apply for the position, nearly four months after Joyce had left. He was a stranger.

Dispatch had told Glasser that if he had had any leads on anyone suitable, they were happy to fast-track the application. Glasser didn’t. A decade of deepwater cabling had narrowed his connections back on land to the slimmest thread. Except for Joyce, he didn’t have anyone else he wanted to live with. A stranger was as good as anyone. He’d looked over Crane’s resume. A list of his education and certificates, his work experience, recommendations from his stints on two other cabling vessels. He was qualified, fine, in the abstract. But the application hadn’t prepared Glasser for the reality of him.

Crane is standing at the stern of the boat, staring down into the water. Glasser walks over. Leans against the railing. The water has cleared from the meteor’s traversal, and he can just make out the faintest smudges of the universe and the cables below. Crane glances over, but doesn’t say anything.

“Okay,” Glasser says.

Crane glances back. “Okay? Just like that?”

Glasser wants to ask where Crane’s confidence stems from. How he spoke with so much conviction. Why Crane is here, on the Anhinga. What makes a man want to dive into the deep ocean. What makes a man so eager to plunge into the black morass of space, with only a thin tether holding him to reality. What brought Crane to the middle of the Pacific.

“Just like that,” Glasser says.

After she left, Glasser had played the conversation out with Joyce a thousand times. It drifts to the forefront of his mind more than he wants it to. He thinks about the things he could have said, instead of just “OK.”

“Joyce, what changed? I didn’t know you were unhappy, and it worries me that you were able to hide that unhappiness on our boat.”

“Joyce, this is my life. I don’t know how to live differently.”

“Joyce, our job is important, and I believe in the mission here. There are so few boats, and so few people who want to live on them, and the entirety of the global telecommunications system hinges on the efforts of real human people, flesh and blood, repairing the breaks in the system.”

“Joyce, did you say yes to the Anhinga because you loved me? Did I trap you on the Anhinga for seven years?”

The Joyce in his head gives him different answers every time. Glasser doesn’t like that he can’t emulate her. It means he’s forgetting her. He worries that it means he never really knew her at all.

Things move fast after Glasser agrees to Crane’s proposition. Glasser goes to the workshop and starts making splices. Crane runs around prepping the divesuit, the propulsion, preparing the Anhinga’s systems for the plunge. Glasser pops out of the workshop and double checks the systems, eats a protein bar, makes more coffee, discusses their approach. The Anhinga is an old ship, and it can only submerge for about forty-five minutes at a time. They have to get right up against the meniscus to properly eject Crane. So, they’ll do the repairs in stages. Crane will be ejected at the nadir of the Anhinga’s dive, and pulled back in right before the Anhinga ascends. And then they rinse and repeat, dive again and again, until all the repairs are done. Each dive would be tight, but it would be doable. It would be more freedives than anyone has done in the last thirty years.

They work. They drink coffee. Crane takes a break to make sandwiches, which they eat while discussing the dive pattern.

“What changed your mind?” Crane asks.

“I don’t know how to argue with you,” Glasser says, after thinking for a moment. “I agree with you on principle, so I can’t think of a way to change your mind.”

“Good,” Crane says.

Glasser finishes his sandwich. “Are you sure.”
Like a statement, not a question.

“Of course,” Crane says. He stands up. Glasser stands, brushes crumbs from his shirt. Heads for the cockpit, stops in the doorway.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why…all of this?” Glasser says, gesturing vaguely at the schematics, the divesuit, the whole mess of the plan they’ve put together. He means the personal risk. He means the desire to freedive.

Crane frowns. His expression goes clouded.

“I used to dive competitively,” Crane says. “Without the suit. In freshwater, where there’s no chance of breaching the membrane. I’ve always wanted to do a freedive. And I can do it for a good reason. I mean—think of all those people. All those god damn people who can’t talk to each other without us.”

“That’s it?”

The ideological reasoning seems thin, like it comes from someone else. It seems too similar to Glasser’s own reasoning: he doesn’t want to participate, but he likes knowing that his actions have massive effect. The lonely megalomania of it all. It seems too abstract a driving principle for one’s entire life.

Crane shrugs. “Sure. What else is there. Why are you out here?”

Glasser frowns.

“I guess it’s my ship,” he says. He doesn’t want to detail the ways in which they’re similar. It feels cheap, from the other side.

They work through the night. Glasser gets a few hours of sleep; Crane crashes for maybe four hours. The sun is glimmering at the edge of the horizon by the time they’re ready. Crane in the pressurized divesuit, ready to be shot out of the propulsion chamber. Glasser at the helm.

“Ready?”

Glasser looks at the first-person video feed piping from Crane’s suit. Right now, there’s nothing to see, just the interior of the propulsion tube.

“Ready,” Glasser says, and he does a deft series of manipulations ending in a strong push of a handle that plunges the Anhinga’s nose downward as itbegins to accelerate.  

The world goes silent and dark, the sky replaced with sea. Glasser chews on the inside of his cheek and checks the instruments. It’s been a long time since he’s taken the Anhinga under. He knows it’s safe, intellectually.

“Ten minutes ’til we hit the edge of the meniscus,” Glasser says.

“Copy,” Crane says.

Glasser keeps his hand on the controls. The water continues to darken. Pure velvet blue turning to black.

“I’m out here because I don’t know how to live on land, with other people,” he says. He sees Crane tilt his head upward by the way the camera angle changes. The human impulse to think that any unseen voice is coming from above, even though Glasser is speaking through the radio in Crane’s suit.  

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. My last partner was my wife.”

Glasser can’t see Crane’s face, but he sees the way Crane shifts his frame, tilts his head.

“That’s awful. My condolences—”

“No, she didn’t die or anything,” Glasser says hastily. “God, nothing like that. She’s in Colorado. I just meant. I didn’t even know she wanted to leave, until she did, but the point I’m making is—I’m no good at talking. Or knowing the right thing to do. I can do it for myself, and I trusted Joyce to make her own choices, but anyone else? Christ. It’s too complicated.”

“Sure.”

“So, I guess what I’m really saying is, are you sure? I’m going to shoot you out into space, and reel you back through, and—”

“—it really does concern you, why I want to do this,” Crane says.

“Yes,” Glasser says.

“Hm. How much time do we have before you shoot me down?”

“Six more minutes.”

“Hm,” Crane says again.

They’re both silent for a few minutes. The subship continues to descend. Glasser’s depending mostly on his instruments, now—the universe underneath the water is growing clearer, but the stars and planets and space debris are so far away as to be useless as locational markers.

“There’s no real reason, I guess,” Crane says. “Nothing I could make you understand in words. I grew up near the ocean. I dove competitively for years. Why do I want to do it? I don’t know, I just do. Like, why did you end up a cabler to begin with? You probably couldn’t tell me. I know I can make it back. I know that this is going to work.”

One minute on the clock.

“Okay,” Glasser says. He keeps the nose tilted down. He readies his hand on the propulsion switch.

Thirty seconds.

Fifteen seconds.

Zero.

And then they’re skimming the border of the meniscus and Glasser pulls the throttle back and slam the propulsion switch, and Crane is flung through the thin film that borders space and the camera on his suit cuts to stars.

Glasser had gone with Joyce once, to the desert. Arizona. They had rented a camper van. They had met Joyce’s mother. They had gone hiking in the early morning, just as the sun was rising.

“Why’d you end up cabling, after,” Glasser had said, gesturing at the landscape around them. The sheer reddish expanse, the way that the sky was like the sea inverted.

“At night, the sky here—it looks like the sky under the sea,” Joyce had said. “The same, but different.”

“That’s a nothing sentence.”

Joyce had laughed. “Yeah, but you understood.”

The Anhinga has cameras pointed at the portal into space. Through it, Glasser can see Crane’s divesuit darting among the cabling, the wavering line of the cord he’s clipped to the cabling and the second cord that ties him back to the ship, the sparks of the handheld soldering iron as the splices are braided in.

Glasser keeps an eye on the timer. They have fifteen minutes before the Anhinga has to surface. Every second feels like a century.

He wants to pull Crane out early. But he doesn’t. He watches the timer count down, he watches Crane on the screen. When they hit fourteen minutes, he reels Crane back into the tube, closes it behind him. The radio blooms to life.

“Got a couple of them done,” Crane says. “We were right on the timing. This is going to work.”

“Jesus.”

Glasser’s focusing too hard on draining the propulsion chamber, tilting the Anhinga back up, pushing acceleration into her frame, and his response comes out harsh. Crane takes it in stride.

“Not to say I told you, but…”

The Anhinga breaches the surface of the water and light floods the helm. The weightless feeling. Glasser braces himself for the impact of the Anhinga’s bow hitting the water. In the propulsion tube, Crane braces against the wall.

The Anhinga crashes up and onto the surface of the water.

“Okay, yeah, you told me,” Glasser says. He’s feeling more optimistic about this now. Two more dives. Maybe this all works out. “Five minutes until the next dive.”

The collision of one interplanetary body into another sent debris hurtling across space. This debris ranged in size from microscopic to gargantuan. A meteoroid is commonly classified as any space rock between the sizes of a grain of sand and a small asteroid.

I apologize for misleading you earlier: there is still one last meteoroid on its way.

Glasser tilts the nose of the subship back down, aiming to skim the Anhinga across the meniscus. Closer, closer. He cuts the acceleration before slamming the eject, and Crane is thrust into darkness.

Glasser watches Crane’s actions through the helmet cam video feed. Just Crane’s hands and the wires in front of him. It’s not particularly interesting work to watch, and Glasser’s eyes dart between the screen and the countdown timer. Back and forth.

This is how he misses Crane’s line being cut by a piece of debris, precisely six minutes and thirty-two seconds into the dive, when the video feed fails.

Crane doesn’t hear the meteoroid sever his cord. The only notice he gets is the faint vibration of the line being torn. When he looks back, there’s nothing connecting him through the meniscus. He feels fear, then. The same fear that he felt when he tried for a world record at holding his breath underwater. The fear that he’s going to die out here, in this inhospitable environment he brought himself into, and that nothing will save him. All his goddamn pride dashed.

He holds his breath on instinct. This is unnecessary—there’s enough air in the divesuit for two and a half more hours. It’s just that the divesuit is no longer tethered to Earth, only clipped to a loop of cabling. The seven-meter distance between the cables and the meniscus feels long enough to be a lightyear.

“Shit,” Glasser says. Swapping to the video feed from the bottom of the boat, he sees the untethered line swaying like a strand of seaweed in the water. Glasser can only make out the faintest outline of the other half of the line swinging free on the other side of the meniscus.

Crane’s divesuit is still in place. The neon cord of the second line is visible. He’s tethered to a loop of cabling. He won’t drift into the black. But he can’t pull himself back through the portal, either. He could unhook himself and push off the cabling, but would he generate enough force? Could he manage to tilt himself in the right direction? One misstep and he’d be flung into deep space. There would be no way to retrieve him. There’s a beacon on the divesuit, but the beacon is only useful on the other side of the portal. To organize a rescue would take days—the divesuit only contains enough air for a couple hours. The dive was supposed to be minutes, not days.

Glasser runs his hand through his hair. He can’t ask what Crane wants him to do. To ask Crane, Glasser would have to send a drone through, record Crane’s diver’s handsigns, and review the footage. That would take half an hour, to program, send, return, and watch.

But—he can send the drone across. Glasser could surface and program the drone to hover in front of Crane for a few minutes, and then deploy it into the water and across the meniscus. Crane could clip himself to the drone and let it tow him back across the meniscus. But after that, Crane would have to swim up to the Anhinga on his own. Glasser can’t deploy the drones when the Anhinga is submerged—the equipment is in a different part of the vessel than the helm— and the drone wouldn’t support Crane’s weight in Earth’s gravitational field. But Crane dives, every time they’ve got a spare moment. Crane swims ferociously.

Glasser agonizes about it for a minute. On the screen, Crane’s form tethered to the cable. On the countdown, ninety more seconds. Glasser can’t talk with Crane. He can’t know what Crane would say. What he would want.

What would Joyce do if it were her, at the helm? He doesn’t know. What would Crane do, if it were Glasser, down there? He doesn’t know. What would Glasser have done for Joyce? If this were Joyce, there would be no question. Glasser would go for her in a heartbeat.

Glasser turns the handle and thrusts the Anhinga toward the surface.

On the other side of the meniscus, Crane watches the shadow of the Anhinga shrink. Fifteen minutes, Crane thinks to himself. He’s on the other side of despair, now—just numb. Like this is all happening to someone else.

He looks away from the portal. The rest of the universe, forty-five billion light years away from where he was born, looks back. It is so beautiful without the filter of the water. The undersea constellations that he memorized when he was young are perfectly visible. Hyperia. The Sea Urchin. The Golden Chain. Fewer than three hundred people have seen these from this side of the void.

He looks back down at the cables in front of him. He could start climbing the cables. Maybe he could find a point where they sit skimming the meniscus, where it would be safer to push through. But there’s no guarantee. The cables stretch for miles, and he only has so much air.

Crane suddenly remembers something his father told him, when he was young and they were walking in a forest: if he ever got lost, he should stay in place to be found. He doesn’t think his father ever anticipated Crane’s situation.

Back before the drones were developed and cablers still freedived, the majority of cabling deaths were situational. A cord that frayed. A knock on the head from a cable moving the wrong way. A missed clip. But the strangest reasons for deaths were described by freedivers returning from near-death incidents, or who had watched their diving partners unclip their divesuits. They described the strange sickness that affected divers after punching through the meniscus. The feeling of vertigo. Of being in a dream. A mental shift led them to unclip themselves and float off into the black. They say that this is a particular type of psychosis that affects spacewalkers, but the sample size is too small to say anything conclusive. It might just be that divers are a specific sort of population; the sort of person who swims willingly into the void.

On board, Glasser punches through the calculations as fast as possible, crunching the numbers while simultaneously activating the drone equipment. He runs back to the helm and grabs a grease pencil and a marker.

He writes on the front of the drone in grease pencil, and then in marker: CLIP YOURSELF ON. There isn’t much space to write. He doesn’t remember if the marker is water soluble. He looks over the side of the subship. The wind is picking up. The troughs of the waves deepen. The universe below is only faintly visible, and Crane is completely obscured.

Glasser turns back to the drone equipment. He hits a button, and the drone drops into the water.

Glasser had been thinking about Joyce, while he ran the calculations. It was inadvertent. Joyce was his pink elephant; Joyce was the Rubik’s cube that soothed the part of his brain that wanted answers to unanswerable questions. It was better to think about Joyce than to think about whether Crane would die. He imagined Joyce’s response to the whole situation. Joyce was always better at cutting her losses—no, that was a cruel thing to say about Joyce. She had been kind, until her decision to leave. And that wasn’t even mean, only terrible to Glasser, to leave him alone.

If Crane lived, Glasser would call Joyce, he decided. He would call Joyce and tell her about the meteor—the first one, the one that was a wonder. He would go visit her in Colorado. It all seems so easy now.

The drone drops into the ocean, making contact with the water. The marker is washed away instantly. The grease pencil is abraded by the waves. But the drone continues to dive. It passes through the meniscus, engaging its automatic second-stage programming in the presence of vacuum.

Crane sees the shadow before he sees the drone. He turns his head. The drone, in all its shiny chrome glory, hovers in front of him. On its surface are the letters YOUR      O. He plays a brief game of mental hangman, before discarding the concept of language. His mind is going a million miles a minute. What can he discern from the drone’s presence? The silent metal device hanging weightlessly in front of him. It has no face. Only the shielded camera, the smooth exterior, the jointed limbs. What would he mean by this, if he were Glasser?

Crane closes his eyes. He imagines being Glasser. Glasser, in his taciturn shell, at the helm of the subship that is a reflection of his personality. Glasser who asked him again and again, Are you sure.

Crane unclips himself from the cable. For a brief second, he’s unmoored to anything connected to the Earth.

Then he clips himself to the drone.

Glasser peers down over the edge of the Anhinga. The froth of the water from the drone drop has turned the surface a foamy white. It’s like looking through a clouded window. He wants to run back to the helm, but he has to be in place to receive the drone, to help Crane back on board if Crane arrives.

For a long time—what feels like a long time, anyway—there’s no change. Just the dark water, the foamy caps of waves. And then he sees a round shadow. The drone resurfacing. Nothing is tied to it. He hopes Crane understood what he needed to do.

Glasser holds his breath. He wishes he had some way to explain. He wishes that he had been kinder, that he had asked more questions; he wishes that he was better at explaining himself, someone who was more easily known and more interested in knowing.

No sign of Crane. Glasser almost wants to cry. He wants to call Joyce, after. If Crane lives, he’s going to tell her everything. The bad things, too. He’s going to ask her all his questions and listen to her answers. He’s going to do all the things that are hard, while he still has time to do them.

And then, a blur in the depths coalescing into a form. Glasser feels a great weight drop from his chest.

Crane’s narrowbody frame, swimming upward, stretching toward the light.

“Freediver” copyright © 2025 by Isabel J. Kim
Art copyright © 2025 by Mojo Wang

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Freediver

Isabel J. Kim

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Isabel J. Kim

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy

Illustrated by Jaime Jones

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Edited by Lee Harris

By Martha Wells

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Published on July 10, 2025

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Perihelion and its crew embark on a dangerous new mission at a corporate-controlled station in the throes of a hostile takeover…

Novelette | 7,540 words

They were still three hours out when Perihelion picked up the first clean images of the station. Iris didn’t groan under her breath; the mission team was in the ship’s conference room with her and Tarik, and she didn’t want to alarm them. But this was not going to be the easy slip-in-and-out job that they had hoped.

“This could be difficult,” Martyn said, which was a mild way to put it. The station’s feed showed multiple corporate transports in dock, as well as armed ships, their sensor images highlighted in red.

Standing on the other side of the conference room, Tarik rolled his eyes at the understatement. Iris caught his gaze and lifted a brow. He folded his arms, his attention back on the display, but she could tell he was a little embarrassed. That was the kind of back-and-forth that was fine when it was just crew, but it wasn’t for outsiders or students. She said, “It depends on the situation onboard the corporate station.”

The schematics on the floating display above the table showed the corporate-controlled station was a large one, in the shape of three connected spheres, which meant it had probably been built incrementally over time, with sections being added as the population grew. And the docking ring was on one end. At the other end was their goal, a Pre-Corporation Rim habitation.

The shape of it was mostly obscured in the sensor image by the bulk of the corporate station. Though the schematic projection showed it was irregular, like a lumpy asteroid, they knew it was an entirely built structure, not something based on a naturally occurring body.

“You mean there isn’t a way we can approach from the outside without being caught,” Dr. Mauriq said. She was mission team leader, but her experience with this kind of thing was limited. Iris could tell she was a little nervous and trying to hide it.

There is a way.

Iris knew that tone. She used the private crew channel in the ship’s feed to say warningly, Peri.

Dr. Mauriq frowned at the compartment ceiling. “Yes?” Peri’s voice didn’t have a direction, but new people always looked at the ceiling.

Martyn took in a breath to intervene, but it was already too late. Another diagram popped up and superimposed itself over the corporate station schematic, with proposed targets and calculations for the potential results. Iris grimaced. On crew-private again, she said, Peri, you promised to be nice in front of the new people.

She asked. At least Peri used crew-private to reply.

Dr. Mauriq took it calmly, glancing at Martyn for reassurance, but Dr. Ladsen was clearly agitated. He said, “That . . . You’re suggesting we destroy the corporate station.” The diagram, now with a helpful animated image, was demonstrating how the proposed targeting solution would break the corporate station into pieces with a 47 percent estimated casualty rate.

On crew-private, Tarik said, You manipulated her into asking.

That was not manipulation. Peri hesitated for the perfect beat. It was far too easy for that.

Tarik sighed audibly.

Martyn rubbed his forehead like he was nursing a headache already. From the bridge, via the feed, Seth said, “Peri, stop. We’re not blowing up the corporate station.”

The mission team nervously eyed the animation, which was now showing how the tractor could be used to slice what was left of the corporate station off the Pre-CR hulk.

The first thing Iris always told new mission team members was, “Don’t let it intimidate you. Because it will try.” Shehonestly didn’t know whether it helped or if it just scared them and encouraged Peri to live up to its reputation. She used her personal channel, the one nobody else could hear, and said, Peri, stop it, you’ll upset Dad and Dad.

The animation stopped and the schematic disappeared. Peri replied, If the mission team is unable to cope with me, they are unable to face hostile corporates.

It had a point, though Iris didn’t want to admit it. Hopefully they won’t have to face them, she told it. Aloud, she said, “We’ll have to dock at the station and then make our way through to the Pre-CR structure. Our contact aboard said there are access points, multiple ones. We were hoping to be able to avoid that, but it was always a possibility, so we have a plan in place.”

Iris, how is that not facing the corporates? Peri said, mercifully on private.

Because we’ll just be another group of travelers. There’s no facing involved, she told it, aware it sounded like a bad rationalization.

You and I are defining facing in entirely different ways.

Peri was also having separate conversations with Seth, Martyn, and Tarik on the crew channel, and also Karime down in Medical, and Kaede, Matteo, and Turi in the engineering pod. Iris missed most of it except for Martyn saying, What is wrong? Why are you in such a bad mood?

Peri declined to answer that one.

Dr. Mauriq cleared her throat. “You all went quiet. Are you speaking to . . . it?”

From the bridge comm, Seth said, “Yes, sorry. Perihelion provides mission tactical support and has some logistical concerns.”

On crew-private, Seth said, Peri, can you hold off on the vaguely threatening interjections, at least until we get these people off the ship?

Very well. I’ll save them for our long walk through the corporate station, which is still in the throes of a hostile takeover, shall I?

That would be great, Seth told it.

Iris folded her arms and let out her breath. This was going to be one of those missions, she could already tell.

As they approached the station, Iris changed out of her ship clothes into her usual outfit for trying to look unobtrusive on a corporate station. It was simple, just sturdy shoes, pants, shirt, and jacket, in dull greens and browns, nothing to attract attention, nothing too nice but nothing that made her look like a transient who could be kidnapped for a corporate labor camp. She would be leading in Dr. Ladsen and Dr. Sunara, with Tarik and Matteo. Once they sent the okay, Karime would lead in Dr. Mauriq and Oster with Turi and Kaede.

Matteo came and stood in her cabin doorway, eyeing her critically as she adjusted her hair band. “Is that what you’re going with?” they said.

Iris didn’t sigh. “No, this is what I put on when I’m thinking about what to actually wear.”

“High-larious.” Matteo leaned against the hatch lip. “No, I meant, maybe we should go with something upper end. Business work clothes. These people like business.”

Iris had brought some nicer clothes, to use if they actually had to meet with corporate officials. “If there’s still unrest, it might make us look like targets.” She knew not wearing any jewelry might stand out just as much as wearing something expensive, so she put on some bracelets made of cheap but pretty metal and woven fibers. 

“If there’s still unrest, it also might make you look like not a target,” Matteo persisted.

Peri said, You need a deflection vest.

Matteo pointed up and mouthed the word paranoid.

Peri said, I can see you.

“A deflection vest,” Iris repeated, checking over her tool kit, making sure there were enough ordinary maintenance tools that a glance at it didn’t immediately say, hi I’m here to break open secure hatches. She thought Peri was being facetious. “Like for knives?”

“Do we know there’s stabbing on this station?” Matteo frowned. “Is that a thing?”

A garment made of tactical deflection fabric, Peri said.

Huh, Peri was being serious. “Personal armor is really obvious, isn’t it? It would make us safer if anybody tries to rob us or something, but I think it would draw attention from the corporates’ security.”

I can make one that will look like an ordinary item of clothing, the same weight as what you are wearing now.

This was starting to sound like a good idea. Iris was willing to take any advantage possible. “Really? Can you show me a picture?”

An image popped up in the feed. It looked like an ordinary vest, the fabric surprisingly thin. I’ve researched similar garments used by port and corporate security, and have been working on a design for use on missions.

Matteo said seriously, “That’s great, Peri. You could wear that under a shirt, nobody’d see it.”

I’ve altered the material’s profile so it will not be detected by corporate weapon scanners.

Iris was convinced. “Can you make one for Tarik, too?”

No, I dislike Tarik and would prefer to use this opportunity to be rid of him.

“Oh, thanks,” Tarik said, appearing in the hatchway.

“You’re supposed to assume it’s kidding and be lulled into a false sense of security,” Matteo explained.

Tarik told them, “My sense of security is always false.”

“See, if I thought that was a joke—” Matteo began.

On the feed, Seth said, Children, are you ready yet? We have a job to do.

Iris hated walking into stations blind; you never knew what you were going to see.

By Corporation Rim charters, all stations were supposed to be independent, like UplandGateway One, the nearest station to Mihira and New Tideland’s system, where a number of small corporates rented space but the station itself was sovereign territory. Being independent meant they might be anything from safe and orderly to a chaotic mess.

As the hatch cycled, Iris smelled acrid smoke. Not a good sign. She walked out onto a broad embarkation floor that didn’t show any obvious signs of damage, except that it was unusually quiet. A glass-enclosed walkway ran below the high curving ceiling, but only a few people, walking hurriedly in a group, moved along it. One lone hauler floated past toward the nearest freight lock.

Iris checked the map that Peri had pulled out of the station feed and annotated for her. “Looks like we need to go this way,” she said, mostly for Ladsen’s and Sunara’s benefit, and started toward the section exit. Behind them, Perihelion’s lock cycled closed.

The smoke smell got worse as they walked, and Matteo muttered, “I hope the air barriers are still working.”

Air barriers would prevent a fire from moving along the dock, but you should be able to tell when you passed through one. Iris hadn’t felt one yet.

“Is it possible the station is actually on fire?” Ladsen wondered.

Peri, mercifully only on the crew-private feed, said, Yes, but I didn’t think it relevant to mention.

“Perihelion says it’s not on fire,” Iris said, trying to smile confidently and fairly sure she just looked irritated. Peri, come on, relax a little.

Tarik added, And you people say I’m cranky.

Matteo said, You’re jealous because you’ve never been able to compete in the crank-off.

Peri said, I have unfair advantages.

Iris controlled a sigh. She wasn’t going to try to unpack that one. It was equally possible that it was self-deprecating humor or an attempt to get Tarik to step into a verbal trap leading to some massive insult. But Peri had been in a strange mood since it had come back from its last solo cargo run, so there was no telling.

It was something of a relief to see other people waiting at the section lock, the passage into the commercial part of the port. The group ahead were all wearing uniforms with company logos. They passed through the lock and Iris stepped up to face the three armed guards. The emblems on their protective suits didn’t match the station’s, so they weren’t the regular port security.

Starkwether, Peri said, an outsystem corporate.

Iris was expecting to be scanned for weapons and ID, which was normal; most stations kept private and public docks separate. But the first guard said, “Your business here.”

It didn’t sound like a question, but Iris answered it anyway. “We’re with the University of Mihira and New Tideland; we have a mapping contract for this system.”

The third guard shifted, looking down the public dock behind him. Iris didn’t make the mistake of trying to peer past him to see what was down there. At least the airflow was less smoky here.

The first guard said, “Mapping?”

Iris smiled a little, though her throat was growing dry. “It requires a statistical analysis of this station.”

He’s scanning your IDs again, Peri reported.

The guard said, “Not a good time.”

Oh, he wanted to chat, possibly to trick them into revealing they were secretly here for some illicit reason. Not that he was wrong about the illicit reason, but Iris doubted he could guess what it was. “We noticed the smoke. Can you tell us what happened here?”

The second guard spoke suddenly. “The station was liberated by Starkwether Shipping Alliance.”

On their feed, Tarik said, Liberated? You’d think they’d come up with a new word for it.

Iris just needed to get them past this damned hatch. She let herself sound uncertain and nervous. “Oh, I didn’t know.”

Good, Peri said. They want you to be afraid.

The guard stared at her, possibly trying to intimidate her or just trying to think of another question to ask. Suddenly she had a split feed view of the dock behind her, letting her see that a corporate group was approaching. Some were in civilian clothes, very nice ones, with a couple of small hauler bots carrying luggage crates. The split screen was gone before Iris could blink.

The guard stepped back and motioned her to move on.

Iris obeyed, glancing back to make sure Matteo and the others were allowed to follow. She hit the team feed to ask, Everybody okay?

Four acknowledgments came back, which was good enough. Iris wanted to check on how Sunara and Ladsen were taking this but didn’t want to draw attention to them by stopping. The public docks were more crowded, but a lot of the occupants were in private security uniforms. Fresh scars from energy and projectile weapon fire showed on the deckplates, on the transparent shielding of the overhead walkways, on the large cargo hauler bots making their steady way along the freight concourse. But Iris didn’t see any current violence, just watchful, worried people. The smoke had dissipated but somehow that wasn’t as reassuring as it should have been. From the schematic, they still had a long walk, and the transit station had a set of blinking hazard lights around the entrance. She asked, Peri, how did you get that view behind me? You don’t have a drone following us.

I accessed the station’s security camera system.

I thought you couldn’t do that, Tarik said. Iris knew he didn’t intend to sound skeptical.

I am capable of taking in new information. Before anyone else could ask, it added, I had recent contact with a source who demonstrated a number of useful techniques.

Are you doing this through our comms? Matteo asked.

I’m not a wizard, Matteo. I’m accessing the system through my connection with the station’s docking feed.

Wizard? Tarik asked Matteo, Is that from that game you like?

It’s not a game, it’s a multimedia—

Iris tuned them out and switched to her private connection with Perihelion. She thought it had used the word “wizard” specifically to tempt Tarik into teasing Matteo, distracting both of them. What source was this? Another transport?

Are you surprised?

It was definitely in avoidance mode, but Iris answered its question. Well, sure, she admitted. I thought you hadn’t found any other machine intelligences outside the university that were, you know, up to your level.

I haven’t found any inside the university, either.

Iris had to smile. It’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it.

It’s complicated, Iris.

She was still turning that over when they reached the ramp up to the station mall. Iris led the others upward, past another armed checkpoint with guards who were thankfully less chatty, and through a temporary air barrier into the mall’s main avenue. It was a canyon of multilevel structures, balconies and terraces and shops and businesses looking down on the different levels of walkways and two transit tubes, only one of which was running. The travelers and locals were dressed in everything from recycled work clothes to fancy outfits with impractical corsets or concealing drapery. Vines hung down from the upper reaches, either cultivated or growing wild in the condensation on pipes and railings. From the amount of drying laundry hanging from those upper balconies, there was transient housing mixed in with the shipping firms and repair outlets. Some of the bigger firms were closed, shields over their storefronts. There were drones everywhere, and a lot of armed security with Starkwether insignia.

Iris didn’t see any signs of fighting but she didn’t have the leisure to stare around at everything, either, and the number of floating displays, each with its own soundtrack, was distracting. Sunara and Ladsen were staring like rubes, and Iris couldn’t blame them. The mall on UplandGateway One was considerably lower-key than this.

A big map display rotated in the plaza where five different avenues led off, just below the accesses for the two different transit tubes. Iris stopped to look at it, or at least pretend to look at it. Peri’s map had come from the station feed and should be updated. Sunara and Ladsen stopped and pretended to look, too, and Matteo went to stand in the feed zone for the transit tubes as if checking the prices. Iris refused to ride strange station-mall transit vehicles unless she absolutely had to; lack of regulation meant you never knew if the things were death traps or not. The ones up inside the station proper should be safer.

On her feed, she said, Dad, do we have a site yet?

Martyn answered, Just got it, honey. We have a Dr. Mahari, address tier 37, transept 3. I know we pegged transept 6 as the quickest access, but this was the closest we could find.

Should be fine, Iris replied, though that depended on how heavy the security was inside the residents’ sections.

Peri highlighted the location on the station schematic in her temp storage before Iris could find it on the rotating map. Stations usually didn’t allow visitors into the permanent housing quarters, so Martyn and Peri had been checking the station’s social media looking for somebody who they could claim to be coming to visit but who wasn’t currently on station. Peri had already created the formal-request-to-consult letter from the university with Mahari’s name and feed address; hopefully that would get them past the security checkpoints.

“Right, I think I know the way now,” Iris said aloud to Sunara and Ladsen, because in a corporate station you never knew who was listening and watching. “Let’s— And we’ve lost Tarik.”
It was partly a joke, and she regretted it a second later as Ladsen looked around worriedly. Fortunately, Tarik ambled up before anything else happened, carrying a packet of steamed buns from one of the food kiosks.

He held the bag out to share, and Iris took a bun. She said, “We need to go up this way,” and started toward the path to the transept 3 access. All the transepts connected, so once they were past the security barrier, they would switch over to the correct section.

They went up a ramp to an upper-level walkway and took that toward the inner station barrier in this section. Sunara ended up walking beside Iris, and asked, “Why is there clothing hanging from the railings? Is it a festival, a custom?”

Iris glanced up at the transient housing cluster they were walking under. She tried her best not to sound as if this was a stupid question. And it really wasn’t, it was just that Sunara wasn’t used to corporate stations. “It’s their laundry. That’s transient housing up there, for people who are trying to get station jobs. The station’s gray water probably comes with the price of the housing, but not access to a recycler or cleaning facility.”

“Oh.” Sunara frowned, looking up again.

To your right, Peri said, when Iris hesitated at a junction. The next set of ramps took them up to a transparent walled chamber up against a bulkhead. Starkwether Security was here, too, with more weapons scanners. They were questioned in detail about their business in the residents’ section, the feed letter examined, their identifications examined, and then finally a feed message sent to Dr. Mahari’s address. The answer came back gratifyingly quickly that yes, she was expecting off-station visitors and she apologized for not sending the authorization to enter in advance. The reply of course was from Peri, who was spoofing Dr. Mahari’s feed address.

As the guards passed them through the multiple barrier locks, Iris felt her shoulders relax a little. That was the hard part done. She hoped. So far so good, Matteo sent.

They came out into a broad plaza, a junction for several avenues. The tall canyons of businesses and housing still looked down on central walkways, but they were wider and cleaner and there was no laundry or wild plants. A lot more people in corporate business wear and more Security moved through here, and a large number of floating hauler bots shifted crates of all sizes. Either an oddly high number of businesses had decided to move on the same day, or a lot of people were being thrown out of the residents’ section. From the general air of both bustling industry and anger, Iris was guessing it was mass eviction day. She asked Peri, They’re forcing the old residents to leave and moving their own people in?

Yes, Peri said. That’s why the mall was so crowded.

And those people were going to be forced into transports? Or just stuck here? Either way, it made Iris sick.

Matteo added, Uh, I shouldn’t have said “so far so good,” right.

Iris flinched at shouts and a bang from somewhere below. She looked down to see Security drag three people out of a housing balcony on the level below. Somebody young cried out, sobs turning into a shriek. The others on the walkway stirred uneasily, but nobody else reacted. Ladsen stopped but Sunara grabbed his hand and pulled him into motion again.

We need to get out of here, Tarik sent. More people were glancing at their group; they were out of place here, clearly strangers. Shouting sounded from somewhere down one of the intersecting canyons.

Iris gave up any reluctance about unreliable transportation and headed for the nearest transit ramp. She was careful to keep her steps even and not look like she was running away, and hoped the others were following suit. Nerves coloring their feed voice, Matteo sent, There’s a drone following us. A big drone.

Iris bit her lip and didn’t turn around. Don’t look at it.

Sorry, I looked at it, Ladsen sent.

Don’t look at it again, Peri said, before Iris could.

This transit was a different system than the one in the station mall, with smaller capsules traveling the tubes, meant for groups of eight. No one was in line on the first platform they reached and Iris swung into the next capsule and dropped into a seat. The air flow wasn’t good and the capsule smelled like sweat.

Sunara fell into the seat next to her and caught Ladsen when he tripped. Tarik grabbed the back of Matteo’s jacket to steady them as they climbed in, then folded into the next seat. Iris accessed the feed menu and asked for transept 3. Once they got there they could transfer to another capsule for transept 6. The system accessed the temporary account that they had set up for Peri’s docking fees, deducted the amount for the tickets, then slid the door closed.

Iris was pushed back into the musty upholstery as the capsule started to move. The transparent walls gave them a good view, and the drone a good view of them, as it followed them out of the platform and along the curving transit pipe. Oh, that’s a problem, Iris thought. Then a floating hauler slid sideways suddenly and the drone tried to evade but clipped a lifting arm. The drone wavered and fell out of sight.

Slumped back in his seat, Tarik’s gaze crossed Iris’s, and he lifted his brows. That was a coincidence?

Peri, was that you? Iris asked hopefully. If Peri could access drones this far into the station, that would make this mission, and a lot of other future missions, so much easier.

Yes. There was no specific alert, it was following you because you registered as foreign in the residents’ area.

Considering how much Peri liked to be specific, that was a vague answer. Iris persisted, So you’re in the station security system? Is that code you got from your friend? Peri had always been able to monitor comm and feed transmissions, including transmissions it wasn’t supposed to have access to, due to its ability to decode any kind of encryption. It had never been able to get so far into a security system that it could access cameras or drones in a space it didn’t have control over.

I would prefer to discuss this later. I’ll notify you as to how it will affect operational parameters, Peri said.

Iris knew a snub when she heard one and didn’t press it.

Matteo said, This seems like a pretty close friend, with all this highly sophisticated system-penetration code they— “Whoa, okay, I was joking!” Matteo flung an arm over their interface. “I’m sorry, don’t hurt me.”

Ladsen and Sunara stared in startled consternation. Ladsen said uncertainly, “Are you talking to the transport?”

“They’re just kidding around,” Tarik said.

Iris added, “It wouldn’t— That doesn’t happen.”

Matteo smiled reassuringly. “Right, it was a joke. We like to joke around, me and Peri.” On the crew feed they said, Except it never gets my jokes because it has no sense of humor whatsoever.

Because you aren’t funny, Peri said.

It’s got you there, Iris told them.

Don’t help it, it doesn’t need your help, Matteo said.

Hey, it said it didn’t want to talk about it right now, Tarik said unexpectedly. Maybe not so unexpectedly. Tarik had a lot of things in his past he preferred not to talk about.

Ladsen and Sunara looked a little uncomfortable, and must have realized there was a feed conversation going on they weren’t privy to. Iris smiled at them and said, “At least we’re still on schedule.” The smile probably looked as fake as it felt. None of this would help the idea that crews for highlevel transports tended to be insular weirdos.

The capsule rounded a curve and started to slow down, and Iris sat up. Transept 3, and time to change tubes.

The drones at the next transit station ignored them, and when Iris bought the passage for transept 6, she used an untraceable currency card. They could have walked, but there was still a lot of security. People were moving out of this section, too, though there was less crying and more quiet urgency. “They know what’s coming,” Ladsen said. He stood beside Iris as she wrestled with the card kiosk, which was much less efficient than the feed payment method. “They’re going before they’re forced to.”

Iris glanced at him, curious. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. “You’ve studied corporate takeovers?”

He was keeping a worried eye on the drones patrolling below the station. “I was in one, when I was young. But my aunty had just gotten a professorship at Mihira and she was able to get us all out before it got too bad.”

“Oh.” Iris felt guilty, and like she should say something else but had no idea what, and that made her feel more guilty. Her family went all the way back to the New Tidelands original terraform crew; they had been safe from corporate predation as long as the system compact held. And it was obvious now that Ladsen’s nerves came from remembered trauma. Please be nicer to Dr. Ladsen, all right, Peri?

She expected a snarky answer, even though it would do what she asked; Peri wasn’t known for being sympathetic to adults it didn’t know well. It had always been much better with younger people.

Instead, it just said, Understood.

They found the access right where they had expected, deep in a disused maintenance tunnel. Fortunately, all the security presence seemed to be concentrated on the residents’ and business areas; no one was paying much attention to the infrastructure.

Tarik got the hatch open and Iris flashed her light over the dark space inside. It was just a corridor, dark metal walls scratched with graffiti, mostly symbols she didn’t recognize. Ladsen and Sunara, both suddenly all business, stepped immediately toward the walls, taking out their recording interfaces. “Is it Pre-CR?” Matteo asked.

“No, not as far as I can see,” Sunara told them. “This looks like early to mid corporate.”

“Probably from right before they built the newer station,” Ladsen answered.

Iris pulled her pack around and crouched down on the scarred floor to unload the mapping drone, which had been configured to look like the kind of metal analysis sensor that would go with her tool kit. She set the drone body, a smooth squarish box about the size of her spread hands, down and it immediately powered up, floating a few centimeters off the floor. “Everything okay?” she asked Peri.

As can be expected, it said, and sent its analysis views to Iris’s feed.

She blinked and studied the image of the corridor, much brighter and with sharper detail than she could ever have seen with her own eyes. She blinked it away to background; in situations like this, she preferred to see with her own eyes. Speaking aloud for Sunara and Ladsen’s benefit, she said, “Right. Peri, lead the way.”

The drone lifted up and moved down the corridor, extending a limb with a light/sensor attachment.

Iris followed it into a circular chamber. It was a junction, another dozen corridors leading off from every angle. Peri said, Careful. The gravity is fluctuating through here.

They made their way down the curved wall, Iris moving ahead with Tarik to find the places where the gravity was lighter or heavier. Peri sent more mapping images to their feed, projections based on its scanning data augmented by what the drone could now pick up. By the time they made it across the junction, Peri had narrowed it down to two corridors, both going in about the right direction.

“Which one?” Iris asked the others, because she hated being the one to choose.

“I assume we don’t want to split up,” Sunara said.

“No, too risky and time isn’t that tight.” Matteo leaned down the rightward corridor, shining their handlight down it. “How about this one?”

“And you’re basing that on?” Tarik walked across the wall, skipping across a low-gravity spot.

“Uh, it’s the first one I came to.” Matteo started to step inside, and the map drone nudged them out of the way to go first.

Iris said, “That’s good enough for me,” and took Ladsen’s hand for help over a bad gravity area.

Partway down the corridor Iris realized the graffiti was gone and the colors caught in her light were decorative. She stopped in front of a mural taking up most of the height of the tall curving wall, a space scene with glittering bridges of light weaving through and connecting a solar system with multiple planets and moons, their surfaces picked out in colorful detail. The light couldn’t be meant to represent structures, could it? It had to be trade routes, or some other symbolic connections.

With relief, Dr. Sunara said, “This is it, this is what we’re looking for.”

Iris abruptly realized that she had gotten distracted, which was the number one thing not to do on a mission. But Ladsen and Sunara were both recording the mural and Tarik and Matteo were starting to unload the equipment. She hurried to help as the drone moved upward to hover above them, lighting the chamber and keeping watch.

“Glad we picked the right corridor. Mapping is such a problem,” Matteo said, setting out the more delicate sensors. “We could try to smuggle in more drones.”

“That just makes it easier to get caught,” Tarik pointed out reasonably.

These would be more effective, Peri said, sending an image to the feed.

Matteo paused to look. “Those are drones? Wow, that’s tiny.”

Iris squinted, directing her feed to enlarge the image. There were several different views of a single drone, smaller than an insect, a tiny sharp thing, like a needle with fins. A video clip showed the drones working in a cloud, still almost invisible at a distance. She could imagine them shooting down these empty corridors, collecting video, looking for signs of anybody creeping up on them. “You’re right, that would be perfect. You could keep an eye on the station access and all the corridors around it and no one would notice.”

“And map the whole place, too.” Matteo scrolled through the specs.

They are detectable by corporate security systems via weapon scanners, Peri said. Even when inert.

Of course they were. The corporates wouldn’t want something like this in their stations unless they were controlling them. Iris said, “That’s a problem. But you could still use them in a place like this, or on planet, searching ruins. You could cover a lot of territory.”

Matteo asked, “Peri, do you have the templates for these? Maybe we could run some up in the workshop and test them. Not now, obviously, but for next time.”

I don’t have the template, only a schematic analysis from video. Modifications would be necessary as they are not designed to work with the same system interfaces as my drones.

Iris realized Tarik was frowning, staring at the images in the feed. He said, “Those are intel drones.”

“That makes sense,” Matteo said. “You’d never see these coming.” Taking in Tarik’s expression, they said, “What? Oh, that means we can’t just order the templates from a catalog?”

“Where did it—” Impatiently, Tarik set his equipment case aside. “Peri, where did you see corporate intel drones?”

“On a station.” Iris wasn’t sure why Tarik was so emphatic about it. “Where else would it see them?”

He sounded certain. “Not specialized drones like those. And it just said they weren’t permitted in corporate stations.”

Peri said, I accessed the armament databases at the Mihira Extension Hub during my last download. Why do you ask?

“Those are the kind of drones associated with SecUnits,” Tarik said.

Iris didn’t see where this was going. SecUnits were used by security companies and bond companies, mostly for isolated installations, as far as she knew. She had never seen one before. Matteo looked confused, too. They said, “So where did you see them, Tarik?”

Tarik made an impatient gesture. “They were used as enforcement in the Sagaro Pits.”

Nonplused, Iris exchanged a glance with Matteo. Tarik didn’t mention his stint as a guard in a contract labor camp very often, or hardly at all. She said, “All right. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t show up somewhere else.”

“They aren’t used anywhere else.” Tarik grimaced and shook his head, admitting, “At least anywhere else that I know of. There are other small intel drones, but those specifically are only used with construct systems like SecUnits.”

Peri was silent. Then it said, So?

Tarik leaned forward, looking up at the drone. “Where did you see those?”

Peri said, Clarify your question, Tarik. 

Peri sounded touchy. So did Tarik, but that was unsurprising. Iris glanced toward the rest of the mission team. She could see Sunara and Ladsen were both still engrossed in the data. The last thing they needed was to be caught having an argument with their transport. “Inside voices, people.”

Tarik lowered his voice but persisted, “If intel drones like that came aboard Peri at any point, then we have a problem.”

Peri said, No intel drones of any type have been aboard me.

Matteo had clearly picked up on the tension. “See, no problem! Why doesn’t everybody tune it down a notch? We’re just chatting here about drones.”

With a wince, Tarik ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry, but you don’t understand how dangerous those things are. If some corporate hired a security company to watch us, that’s what they’d use.”

Peri said, Do you think I’m unaware of the danger of that? Do you think I’m an idiot? Or are you calling me a liar?

Matteo flung their hands in the air. “Now you made it mad.”

“Of course not,” Tarik said to Peri, gesturing sharply. “I just want to know—”

Right, that’s it, Iris thought. She said, “Peri, Tarik, that’s enough. This is obviously not the conversation to have when we’re in enemy territory.”

Of course, Iris, Peri said. It sounded just like a perfectly obedient machine voice. Iris rolled her eyes. That was always a bad sign.

“I was not calling you an idiot or a liar,” Tarik added. “And—” He grimaced. “It cut my interface off.”

Iris set her jaw, and drew on her rapidly dwindling store of patience. “Great. What did I just say?” she asked him.

“I don’t even know what I said wrong,” Tarik protested.

“It was trying to be proactive and give us new tech and you jumped up its butt,” Matteo explained, not patiently.

“I just wanted to know where it saw those drones,” Tarik persisted. “If it was on a station with SecUnits— They’re the only MIs I know of who would have a chance in a fight with Peri.”

You are adding insult to injury, Peri said.

“I’m sorry!” Tarik waved in exasperation. “But—”

Iris had enough. “Matteo, can you take over? I need to go on private for a few minutes.”

“Sure, I’ve got it,” Matteo replied. As Iris got to her feet and walked a little distance across the chamber from where the team was working, they stage-whispered to Tarik, “Now look what you’ve done.”

Iris switched to her private connection with Peri and faced away from the others. She sent, All right, Peri, what’s up?

I don’t understand what you mean, Iris.

She folded her arms. Oh, don’t pull that with me. You didn’t think Tarik was trying to insult you. You pretended to be upset to distract us. You’ve been weird since we started this mission. I just want to know what’s going on with you. The last part came out more plaintive than Iris intended.

I am capable of losing my temper.

But you don’t lose your temper, Peri. You get furious, but you don’t make mistakes and you don’t misinterpret things. Peri’s anger was made of ice and steel, but it thought at speeds that a human mind couldn’t match, in multiple directions at once. It was incapable of acting on impulse, in conversation or in any other way. This wasn’t even you getting annoyed.

With just a hint of amusement in its tone, Peri said, What gave me away?

Iris let out a breath. The admission was a good first step. You don’t jump to wrong conclusions like a human.

It said, I’ll have to work on that.

Iris winced. It would, too. Remind me not to critique your performance again.

I value your input, Iris.

Iris absently started to pace. She was too tired and jumpy to play this game right now. Is it something you can tell me at some point? It’s just that I’m worried about you. And I think I’m not the only one. Our dads have noticed, too. She hesitated, then tried to lighten the mood. You aren’t evolving into a new being, or something, are you?

It was an in-joke for their department, that there were always popular press articles about advanced MIs transcending their programming and becoming gods. Peri usually liked the joke, because it gave it a chance to be mean about stupid people. This time, it said, Iris, did you sustain damage to your neural tissue?

She let out her breath. Come on, that’s your favorite joke. You’re really scaring me now. What’s wrong? Did something happen?

Peri was silent for six whole seconds. Then it said, Explaining would in effect be violating a confidence.

Iris sat with that for a minute. She trusted Peri’s judgment, especially concerning anything that might jeopardize their missions or their lives. And it wasn’t like Peri had to tell her everything. She was just used to thinking of it as her precocious sibling, even though Peri had been the equivalent of a human adult for a while now. And if you considered the way that Peri experienced time, it had had a lot longer to be an adult than Iris had.

Their relationship had definitely changed since then, and they related more as equal friends. If it was a human she would expect it to keep secrets as it grew older, probably the same kind of secrets human siblings kept from each other . . . Oh. Oh. Iris blurted aloud, “Did you meet someone?”

Sunara looked up from across the chamber, worried, and Iris waved distractedly to indicate it was okay. Back on her private feed, she sent, Someone who asked you not to tell us about them?

I’m not a fool, Iris. The tone was distinctly testy. But it didn’t deny that there was a someone.

No, no, I know, I didn’t mean it like— She had meant it like that and Peri knew it. I’m sorry, it was a knee-jerk response. I do trust your judgment.

Do you?

Peri, I am sorry. She gave it a few seconds to get over its irritation. Is there anything you can tell me about them without breaking your word?

The confidence I don’t wish to violate is my own.

Oh. Oh, Peri. Iris found a seat on a rock. So you really like this person?

I had never encountered another machine intelligence that I could experience this kind of rapport with before.

That’s wonderful. And it really was. She didn’t want Peri to be lonely, and it refused to try to get along with the other machine intelligences in their department.

Peri added, It has given me a better understanding of trauma.

Trauma? Iris thought, taken aback. A machine intelligence with trauma? I’m not saying I think you’d run off and fall in . . . have an understanding and rapport with a corporate transport. But . . . Iris gave in and covered her face. Peri, please, it’s not a corporate transport, is it?

It’s a rogue SecUnit.

“Oh shit.” Iris sat bolt upright. She realized the rest of the group was frozen, staring at her in open concern. She told them, “It’s fine, it’s fine.”

Is it fine? Peri sounded skeptical.

I’m just surprised, she admitted. A lot surprised. Okay, wow. That is . . . not what I expected. But it makes sense. I can see it. The research about intel drones, the new code for penetrating station security systems. And Peri had always gotten along better with humans than other MIs. It might find it had more in common with a being that was part MI, part human neural tissue. How did this happen? How did you run into a rogue SecUnit?

It’s a long story and we are in the middle of a mission.

Right, we are. You’re right. Iris hesitated, struggling with both protecting Peri’s feelings and the vital importance of their whole department’s purpose. If they were exposed, so many more people would die, trapped into corporate slavery.

Peri said, You are thinking of the mission as well.

Yes, she admitted. I think you should tell our dads. Just as a precaution. And really, if you’re feeling . . . anything about this, they can probably give better advice than I can.

And if I don’t, they will continue to annoy me about my operational state.

That, too, Iris agreed. Remember when I was fourteen and had that problem with the lab assistant in Biomass Analysis and I wouldn’t talk about it and our dads were convinced it was a much bigger deal than it actually was?

Vividly, Peri said. I concede that you may have a point.

It was teasing her, and that was good enough for the moment. Thanks, Peri. I don’t think you’re entirely pointless, either.

Very funny. I set that one up for you.

I’m sure you did, she agreed.

Iris stood and went back to the others, and found herself smiling. She realized she liked this for Peri. That its emotional world was expanding.

Tarik was busy helping Ladsen with a sensor reading, but Matteo glanced up at her, their brow furrowed with concern. “Okay?” they asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “I think it’s going to be great, actually.”

“Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” copyright © 2025 by Martha Wells
Art copyright © 2025 by Jaime Jones

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Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy

Martha Wells

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Martha Wells

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Original Fiction Paranormal

Every Ghost Story

Following a mysterious world-wide event that makes ghosts visible, a young woman is invited to attend Ghost Camp.

Illustrated by Babs Webb

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Edited by Jonathan Strahan

By Natalia Theodoridou

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Published on August 6, 2025

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Following a mysterious world-wide event that makes ghosts visible, a young woman is invited to attend Ghost Camp.

Short story  |  5,500 words

We arrive at Ghost Camp early Friday morning. It’s not called Ghost Camp, of course—the proper name is Centre for the Research and Rehabilitation of Spectral Visitors, but nobody calls it that, I mean, come on. 

The bus drops us off at the edge of the woods and we have to hike to camp for, like, a mile or so. I’m hauling my stupid baggage and the girl next to me is wearing heels, which I’m not sure was a totally smart thing to do. She ignores me when I ask if she’d like to change into my spare trainers; she just sets her jaw and keeps looking ahead as if she’s got something to prove. Then again, fine, whatever, don’t we all.

The camp itself is basically a field with rows upon rows of military tents. At least it’s free, in my case—as free as any mandatory thing can be. Okay, you’re not paying for it with money like right now, but you sure as fuck do pay for it in other ways, and probably will keep paying it off forever.

The only permanent structures at the camp are the mess hall and the organizers’ building, which we immediately dub Ghost HQ. The woman who greets us introduces herself as Miss Christine, Head Host, to which people drone a too-coordinated Hello, Miss Christine. She’s a white blonde with a mid-Atlantic accent that sounds totally fake; which, I guess, is kind of the point. We’re all visitors here. Nobody belongs.

We’re given our tent assignments and are instructed to gather in the empty space by the mess for sorting (I admit, I imagine a hat), followed by an ice-breaking exercise. I’m in a tent with a man named Jeff and a woman named Joanna, both older than me. They introduce themselves and ask each other where they’re from. They don’t ask me, but who cares, and, besides, I figure the less information one volunteers around here the better. Then we all head back out single file, in silence.

Dinner is already served when we get to the dining hall—steamed veg with a side of quinoa and some diced meat I can’t quite identify. Pitchers of water with slices of lemon floating in there. It all looks super healthy but doesn’t actually smell of anything. I sit down next to the woman in the heels (she’s still in heels—stubborn), though I don’t feel like eating. She gives me a look. I shrug. She doesn’t actually eat either. I decide I like her.

While others tuck into the food, Miss Christine gives a short speech that goes through the camp safety and diversity policies, making sure to mention intersectional identities across gender, sexual orientation, race, and class, among others (though, judging by looks—granted, not a perfect gauge—class is not really an issue here, not even for people doing this per doctor’s orders. I mean, you need to not be poor to be seen by the type of doctor who’s likely to prescribe mandatory ghost camp in the first place).

“This is not a religious camp,” the woman concludes. “You don’t have to be religious to be here. You don’t even have to believe in any kind of afterlife. But exhibitions of intolerance of any kind are unacceptable and will be swiftly dealt with. Do you all understand? Are there any questions?”

Yes, Miss Christine, no, Miss Christine.

Then it’s time for sorting, which is a simple enough process based on the questionnaires we had to fill out at the time of application (no hat, it turns out). Each participant is assigned to a group based on anxiety level. I’m in the anxious group, but not the most anxious group, which, I guess, go me.

We shuffle to meet our groups in the designated areas, marked with chalk of various colors on the floor: red is most anxious, orange is medium anxiety, blue is apparently for laid-back assholes who’re here just for laughs. Everyone hates the blues. There’s also a purple area, but there are only three people in it, so they get folded into the red group. We never find out what purple stands for.

The ice-breaking exercise is called Ghost Ball. You’re supposed to throw an imaginary ball around in a circle and say the name of the person you’re passing the ball to. It’s hard to keep track of the names at first (so many Js it’s practically a joke—I’m sure most of these are aliases), but eventually we get the hang of it. The person next to me catches a ball clearly meant for me a couple of times (though both throwers get my name wrong), and I give her my little attention-seeker, are we? look. I think her name’s June, or maybe Justine, but don’t quote me on that—also I’d argue it’s okay to not know what she’s called since she’s so rude. Rude people don’t deserve names, I don’t make the rules.

While we pass our imaginary ball around, a few ghosts wander in and hover just beyond our circle, as if wishing to join in, throw our ghost ball with their ghost hands, stare at us with their empty eyes, say our names with their ghost lungs. I’ll never get used to what ghost talk sounds like, that strange trilling, like wind passing through a badly made flute, no words, only half-hearted whistles of various lengths. Most of the time they just sound surprised, or as if something just dawned on them, like Oh. Ohhh. Some people call it singing, which I guess fair enough, if you are into unusual, atonal stuff. Extra-normal vocalization, that kind of thing, like right out of the VVITCH soundtrack level of creepy. Or MEN, the British folk horror one from 2022. Disturbing, weird shit.

We pause the invisible ball-throwing and watch them for a while, until the ghosts fall silent again and retreat slowly, without turning around, the eyeholes staring at us the whole time. Their white sheets never once touch the ground.

Afterwards, we return to our tents and settle in for the night. We have an early day tomorrow, so Miss Christine advised getting as much rest as we can. Joanna keeps tossing and turning on her cot, making the springs squeal, but, eventually, she quiets when Jeff asks her if she’s all right in a tone that actually means will you please shut up so we can catch some sleep.

Joanna wonders out loud if ghosts dream, but who knows, and also, does anyone? I don’t. Never dream anymore, and I don’t miss it either.

The first proper day of Ghost Camp is mostly orientation and getting the lay of the land. People make fires and boil water because it seems like the thing to do out here in the wilderness. Even though there’s an actual kitchen with an actual chef and a whole team in the HQ building, out here it’s every person for themself. The camp is in the countryside just beyond the suburbs, so that still counts as the wilderness and some people struggle more than others (bugs and dirt do really get everywhere). The line between urban nightmare and rural romanticism is thicker than ever. There are proper lavatories though, thank god, no trench-digging required.

After breakfast things, we’re herded back to Ghost HQ for orientation. Miss Christine walks us through the daily schedule. We’re supposed to wake up at six every morning, breakfast at seven, lunch at one, and dinner at six. Between meals, there are planned activities including group therapy and role-playing exercises. Ghost HQ closes at nine p.m., by which time everyone is expected to be back in their tents like good thirtysomething children.

Miss Christine then takes a few moments to explain the history of Ghost Camp. Apparently, it was founded in the early 2020s by a woman named Jaqueline Jabitt (Js reaching comedy level, I kid you not). The founding coincided with the Apparition, of course, and the organization was meant to be “a semi-educational, semi-therapeutic outfit that promotes both the study and embracing of spectres” (who even calls them spectres?). “This was never about understanding why the event took place,” Miss Christine concludes in a tone of warning. “We are interested in learning to live in this new reality in the best way possible for all involved.” She gives the crowd a stern look. “If you’re here for sleuthing, you will be disappointed.” She stops just short of wagging a finger at us.

I remember the day of the Apparition. I mean, of course, who doesn’t? It’s one of those events; everyone knows where they were and what they were doing when it happened, and I’m sure if you ask them fifty years from now they’ll still remember. I was at a café with a woman I had just met, who was reading some sort of manifesto written by some French philosopher-turned-spiritual-guru who was becoming increasingly popular at the time. I was a bit iffy about the whole thing, but she seemed to be enjoying it, so I pretended to be into it more than I was, I am not ashamed to admit, because I was into her. Until that guy—I thought it was a guy, I don’t know why—dressed in a sheet passed by the café window. Dressed is not the right word, though, is it. Covered? Draped? There was another one behind him, and another one across the street, then more, crowding. “Is it Halloween?” my friend asked, checking her watch as if that would tell her if she had the wrong month, the wrong entire season in fact, but then we saw the floating edges of the sheets, the missing feet, the emptiness behind the eyeholes. She screamed.

It happened everywhere, all at once. The internet filled with videos of ghosts. People were disconcerted, but there was a surprisingly small amount of global panic. Some thought it was a massive prank, others a conspiracy. Most settled on it being a message from beyond, though nobody could agree what that message was. Or what beyond.

I look around, at the other ghost campers. I wonder what they think this is. I wonder how many of them are here hoping to understand why we’ve found ourselves in this situation, no matter what Miss Christine says about “sleuthing.”

After the historical intro, we watch a film called Seeing Is Believing. In it, individual ghosts are “introduced,” but it’s hard to tell whether they’re real ghosts or actors. They wear sheets and stand under a green spotlight while someone in voice-over tells us to imagine things about them, like “this one was a soldier,” or “this one was a talented musician,” and “this one liked pancakes.” I guess this is part of the point, too: ghosts are blank, so you can imagine and assign to them whatever story you want. The thing they wear is not a sheet at all. It’s projection fabric.

Eventually, the ghosts are told to depart, the green spotlight goes out, and they leave. We never see their feet.

The film is then divided into parts, marked by title screens.

They read:

1. Ghosts are everywhere

2. They are always watching

3. They are needy

Really not groundbreaking stuff, but we sit through it quietly until it’s time to break for lunch.

At lunch, we are told our first task is to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. For that, we share our stories within our groups, and I finally start to be able to tell people apart. Fewer are here on doctor’s orders than I thought. Most just figured it would be a good idea to come, for some unfathomable reason.

This is who is in my group:

1. Jeff, a real estate developer trying to make money out of the ghost situation (apparently, spectre-density does weird things to real estate prices).

2. Joanna, a college professor who’s teaching a class on ghosts, she says, “real and imagined.”

3. The woman in the heels (finally changed into sneakers) is a social worker and doesn’t actually believe ghosts are real. Her name is Billy.

4. Lacey, a visual artist making a video installation about the ghosts because of course someone would do that. I called it at the very beginning, on the day of the Apparition, aka the day that launched a thousand art projects.

5. Connor, a minor politician writing a book about the whole ghost situation and how it’s probably leftist propaganda playing into our most basic fears (whatever those are). Deep down believes ghosts are trying to teach us a lesson; he just has no interest in learning it.

6. Jane (I know), who lost her husband just before the Apparition. She has a lot of questions about the events leading up to his death and thinks his passing actually somehow triggered the whole thing.

7. Anna. Bit of a busybody, wants to help everyone. Not sure what she does.

8. Sue, whose husband was killed by a drunk driver while they were vacationing. She doesn’t care for ghosts at all. Wants to move on with her life. “We didn’t die,” she says. “You know?”

9. Lisa, who lost her daughter to a drug overdose, has come here to confront her child’s ghost. She thinks she was a bad mother and all she wants is for someone to tell her it wasn’t her fault.

10. Chloe is a vegan because eating meat is immoral. Wants to know what everyone likes to eat so she can put us in categories. I think that’s literal, like she actually has a scorecard, some kind of hierarchy of meat (and on second thought maybe that’s more profound than what I initially gave her credit for. After all, a hierarchy of meat is, pretty much, all there is).

11. Guy, who lost his dog and sometimes mistakes random animals for his beloved pet.

12. Josh (yes, another one), who hasn’t lost anyone so can’t understand why the ghosts seem to follow him around wherever he goes (and it’s true, they do seem to crowd around him extra hard). Also, he wonders, we all know why we’re here, but why are they here? What do the ghosts want? What draws them to us? (Miss Christine actually intervenes there to remind us not to ask such questions; that way lies madness.)

13. Poppy has a confession: she can’t actually see ghosts. She pretends to, but, really, she can’t. She feels so lonely.

14. Finally, Alex. He’s trans and also an immigrant, so he assumes the ghost that follows him around everywhere can’t be anyone he knows. Can it? Do ghosts cross borders? Do they cross oceans? He says he started watching it closely when he realized it was following him, to spot differences from other ghosts, wondering if it’s someone he lost back home, for whose death he blames himself and to whom he never got to say goodbye. “Ghosts don’t talk (if you discount the strange whistling) and sometimes immigrants don’t either, but you can always tell. I think it’s something in the way people hold themselves if they truly feel they belong. Perhaps ghosts are the same.” I like Alex the best. I don’t think remembering who all these other people are is actually that important.

“Do you think your ghost might be them? That person you lost?” I ask Alex, but he just stares at me.

“I thought maybe this place would help,” he says eventually.

“Help you find them?” Jane asks. “Make contact?”

“Help me stop looking,” Alex replies.

When it’s my turn to share everyone falls silent and people are looking at their shoes. I tell them it was a love story that brought me here. A love story and also an act of violence, in such close succession you might think they belong in the same story and try to find some correlation between the two, though there is none. I don’t like talking about either thing, but hey ho I guess this is what we’re doing now. Get comfortable. “It was not long after the Apparition. There was a ghost following me for days. I thought it was smaller than others. Maybe a kid? I don’t know. But one day I went into a café to do some emails while having expensive foamed milk, as one does. The ghost sort of hovered outside. Didn’t try to get in. Then a group of people cornered it. I knew what they were. What they’d do. I ran outside.” I remember them. Dressed in blue overalls, black leather boots, baseball bats criss-crossed on their backs. I hear they’re still around. They run in small groups, display the sheets they claim like trophies tied to the roofs of their cars. Real life ghostbusters. “They teased it for a while, poked it with their bats, tried to kick it but they never connected, as if it was just air underneath.” I pause. I can see it as if it’s happening right now. “Then they tore off the sheet—it sounded like flesh ripping. And I didn’t move. Just kept watching. Don’t know why. They left when they saw me watching, though. Didn’t even take the sheet. I tried to put it back on, but it wouldn’t stay, it just fluttered to the ground. There was nothing there.” The people are staring at me now. Poppy looks away, biting her nails. Connor keeps trying to clear his throat, drinks water, sweats. And we’re not even the most anxious group. “So, I wasn’t very well after that. Bit of a breakdown. Got sent to a therapist, who prescribed, well, this.”

I mean, can you blame a person for a little breakdown after watching a ghost being beaten to death? What if that person became a ghost because of an assault like this in the first place? Can you imagine? Being beaten to death only to be beaten again to oblivion after you’re dead? Harsh, man. Life sucks. Afterlife sucks. What are we even doing here?

I laugh, because, well, there’s more. “But then my girlfriend left me. Or didn’t leave me. Just said she needed space. You see, she didn’t think we were in a relationship at all. Despite the kissing, that afternoon in her bed. Despite the love. I was mistaken.” Laugh again, because what else to do? “I said I’d give her space but asked for a last trip together. She said yes.”

Pause. I don’t want to talk about this.

“I was the one driving, but the accident wasn’t my fault. Really. There was nothing I could have done, just as there was nothing I could do to help her or myself when we were in the hospital. They put us in adjacent beds. I was the first to go home. When I left, she wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t even look at me. I think she blamed me. After that, I didn’t leave the house for days, weeks. Didn’t try to speak to her on the phone, and maybe I should have, but I was giving her space, you know? I wouldn’t see anyone else either. I heard people come and go, sometimes, call my name. I didn’t respond. The mail kept accumulating under the door, so much of it. One day there was also a piece of paper with something written on it in black marker. It was a list of pick-up dates and locations for Ghost Camp. It said: just go. Underlined twice. So I went. And here I am.” Another pause. This is really uncomfortable. Doing great. “So yeah, that’s me, that’s my story.”

Nobody comments, because really, what is there to say, but the trans guy holds my gaze for a few moments. I appreciate that.

When all the groups are done sharing, we watch the rest of the documentary, which starts focusing more on what the ghosts are not rather than what they are.

4. They are not just images on a screen

5. They are not just projections of our own fears or guilt

6. They are not metaphors for cultural malaise

7. They do not need to be explained

8. They do not need to be interpreted

9. They are not your friends

10. They are not your family

11. They are not your neighbours

12. They are not your lost lovers

13. They are not here with us now

14. They are not in the past

15. They are not in the future

16. They do not exist in any present tense

17. You are still alone

These are interspersed with shots of ghosts, some poetic, others mundane: a ghost standing on the roof of a Victorian townhouse at dusk; a ghost standing behind a ballerina doing a pirouette in slow motion; a ghost next to a dumpster; a group of ghosts standing in a circle in this very camp.

Afterwards, we are told to sit quietly and ponder the camp’s theme. Poppy says she thinks that the real ghosts are not the ones you can see, but the ones you carry inside you. But of course she’d say that, she can’t even see them.

I for one think they are obscured: a past that refuses to go away but also refuses to make itself clear. It follows you around. It gathers, it crowds. Crowds you out, until there’s nothing of you left. Its empty eyeholes staring right at you.

Alex sits with me, but we don’t speak. There’s no need. Side by side, we watch the ghosts. They’re all around, standing like sentinels, whistling their strange songs.

The next day is pretty much the same. We participate in a group therapy session where people talk about their relationships with their parents, their relationships with the present, and how they relate to the ghosts. We’re a pretty diverse bunch in this respect, it turns out. Some people are fascinated by the ghosts. Some want to learn how to deal with them, while others see ghosts as a human rights issue. These factions clash, and voices are raised, but in the end everyone calms down when the facilitators offer a new way to think of the situation. The ghosts are not the problem, they say, they are merely a symptom. But they never say what they are a symptom of. I wonder if ghosts can be disappointed. Can they feel anything, really, or have all their feelings already been had?

At the end of the session, we each get a few minutes to write in our diary. They provided us with identical notebooks and pens at orientation, but I always forget to bring mine, and even at night when I go back to my tent it seems to slip my mind or my fingers whenever I try to make myself sit down and write.

Then, we congregate again and Miss Christine sets a pile of sheets on fire. We’re supposed to imagine each sheet is one of our ghosts, and this way we’re letting them go. Says perhaps that’s all they want, and all any of us need. Some people are really affected by this; I spot a lot of tears running down cheeks, noses sniffling. I don’t feel anything much. I keep thinking about how all the sheets are white and identical, unblemished. I remember the sheet of the ghost those ghostbusters destroyed (killed can’t be the right word, can it?), dragged through the muck, dirty.

Alex comes to stand next to me again, catches my eye. His are dry, thank the lord. I couldn’t take it if he also turned out to be one of those people, all they need is a bit of empty ritual and they’re good to go, dead husbands and existential angst be damned. I think Alex is the only one who might actually be able to understand the ghosts, maybe because he spent so much of his life being haunted by the person he would become. Is that transphobic of me to say? I don’t think it is. And anyway, I think it’s probably true.

At night, we walk through the woods to an open field. There’s a row of tin cans and another one of buckets in front of a tent. Nobody explains what that is, so I assume it’s an art installation of some kind (hey, stranger things have happened, the world is a vast and magical place), or maybe something for another exercise.

“Sometimes I think the absurdity of this camp is meant to expose the absurdity of everything we do,” Alex says. And, yeah, that tracks.

The facilitator tallies our number. I count, too, and keep coming up with more people than she does. Then we break off into smaller groups and go out into the woods to do the nightly “ghost check.” We walk along a well-trodden path, with a facilitator who helps corral the ghosts inside a designated area surrounded by a barbed wire fence. It’s supposed to keep them from wandering around at night, upsetting the participants, but I’m not so sure. I think Alex isn’t either. We’re always in the same group for ghost checks, exchanging looks. Maybe it’s some kind of experiment? Is this whole Ghost Camp thing a front for some other kind of operation, something more sinister? I certainly don’t believe what they say about the ghosts not bothering the inmates. Participants. Whatever.

At one point, Alex nods at the facilitator and then takes me aside. We sneak to the back of the fenced area and wait for everyone to leave. We linger near the enclosure, the ghosts crowding inside, sheets rustling against each other. It’s a bit ridiculous that they think they can contain ghosts with barbed wire (I mean, they’re supposed to be able to go through walls—what’s some wire supposed to accomplish?). I don’t know what it is that makes me touch the fence, thinking too late that it may be electrified. When I touch it, I feel like some secret part of me is made of the kind of material that could unravel, and now it does. I pull back.

I look at all those ghosts, think of their stories, who they were, how they ended up here. Alex looks, too. Is there someone out there for each of them, I wonder, feeling guilty, needing to let them go? But then I think, no, not everything has a story behind it that is about guilt or that even makes any kind of tidy sense. Not everything can be explained away or reasoned with. Tragedy least of all.

Alex gestures for me to follow until we circle the whole enclosure, and then he points excitedly. “There’s no door!” he says. “You see? There’s no door! How do they get in? How do they stay in?” And I have no idea what he’s talking about because the door is literally right there. “I think maybe, together, we could set them free. Maybe we should.”

I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I shudder at the thought of touching that fence again. Just thinking about it makes everything in my head go dark.

Somehow, I find myself back in my tent in the morning. I don’t remember coming back or falling asleep.

The next day, we’re supposed to role-play as ghosts. It’s a partnered activity, but there’s an odd number of people in our group and so I stand aside—I don’t feel like playing anything, role or otherwise. Besides, others look like they could use some therapy right about now. Some people seem really worse off than when they came. Guy is seen petting a strange dog. Jeff and Connor are gone, and someone says the camp has been infiltrated by ghostbusters (I guess that’s where Jeff and Connor went) and that we need to be vigilant, whatever that means. If you see something, say something, that sort of thing. Lacey starts tagging as many ghosts as she can with bright green spray paint. She makes up names, like Bob and Stacy and Catriona. “So we can tell if any go missing,” she explains. “Otherwise they all look alike in their sheets.”

“Cerements,” Alex replies.

Lacey gives him a blank look. “Huh?”

“The sheets. That’s what they’re called. Until very recently in human history people were buried in shrouds, not coffins or caskets. In some cultures they still are.” He motions towards the ghosts. “Hence, the popular image of ghosts in sheets.”

Lacey remains deadpan. “Why do you know that, weirdo?”

He shrugs. “I just like to read, I guess.”

“Impressive,” she says, unimpressed.

They role-play together, but I don’t think Lacey is taking this seriously enough. She keeps making ghost sounds instead of words. I tune her out.

After the exercise, people light bonfires and Alex takes me aside. Together, we venture further into the woods until we find a cabin. It’s mostly empty, except for a bunch of chairs and a table inside, all shrouded in a thick layer of dust.

“You can stay here,” Alex says, scuffing the floor with his shoe. He says if the camp has really been infiltrated and someone’s about to hurt a ghost, I might not want to be around. It’s true I would prefer not to be exposed to that kind of trauma (again). He apologizes for making a big deal out of this. “But we’re the anxious group, remember?” he asks, laughing nervously, and I say yeah, but not the most anxious group.

But I really don’t want to hide, and this place has too many chairs in it—I can’t stop thinking about all the people who once sat in them and who are no longer here. Besides, we’re supposed to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, remember? Face our fears etc. So we head back. Alex floats the idea of releasing the ghosts again. I say no at first—what would that even accomplish? And maybe they’re dangerous. Maybe they did something to deserve this. Or maybe we did. Maybe they’re there for their own good.

I cringe at my own excuses, so in the end I say fine, sure, maybe this is the thing to do. Maybe this is how you let go.

“Tomorrow,” I promise. “We’ll do it tomorrow.”

At night, we skip the ghost check and hide instead in Alex’s tent. Connor was his roommate (tentmate?) so now Alex has the whole place to himself. He’s the first to come close to me in a while, so close. I’m not afraid. He calls me a name that’s not mine, but I don’t mind. I let myself be touched, and it feels like I’m touching the fence again. We cuddle on his single cot. I imagine he’s a friend who left, a lover who wasn’t, someone who came back. We both get what we want.

In the morning, there’s another exercise we have to do in our groups. I notice more people are missing—Guy is gone, Anna too. What’s left of us form a circle around a pile of boots. Lacey gives me a strange look. I nod at her, but she looks away.

The facilitator asks Lisa to carry a boot from one side of the circle to the other, and she does. Then the facilitator asks her to do it again but add a second boot, and then another, and another. Eventually she can’t hold the weight and the boots fall to the ground. The same thing happens to others. The facilitator says that in our lives we all carry too many burdens and that we have to let some of them go.

It’s my turn to carry the boots, and I’m ready for it all, the absurdity and the metaphor, but Lacey is coming towards me with a can of spray paint in her hand.

“What are you doing?” I ask. I notice Alex crying softly next to me, but he doesn’t try to stop it.

Lacey shakes the can, takes off the cap looking right at me.

“What the fuck, Lacey?”

She starts spraying on my white T-shirt and I look down to see she’s written ALEX’S GF which I guess stands for girlfriend and I start to object, but then I notice my missing feet under what’s not a T-shirt but a no-longer-white sheet.

I try to say something else, but all I can hear is that sad whistling. “Take my hand?” I whistle at Alex, reaching, but there’s nothing to reach with.

Something dawns far away. I let go of all the boots at once because there never were any boots, and nothing to hold them with. The wind passes through me, and my mouth is no mouth. I hear myself make a sound, like air tunneling through a badly made flute. Oh. Ohhhh.

“Every Ghost Story” copyright © 2025 by Natalia Theodoridou
Art copyright © 2025 by Babs Webb

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Every Ghost Story

Natalia Theodoridou

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Natalia Theodoridou

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Original Fiction fantasy

Laurie on the Radio

In a newly integrated insect metropolis, generations clash around art, technology, and capitalism. Boris, a rural vesper, chases modernity to the city, but tradition is there first.

Illustrated by Michael Hirshon

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Edited by Ann VanderMeer

By Sam Davis

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Published on September 17, 2025

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In a newly integrated insect metropolis, generations clash around art, technology, and capitalism. Boris, a rural vesper, chases modernity to the city, but tradition is there first.

Novelette  |  8,480 words

Boris flexed his mandibles and cut into his food. He indicated that Maggie, his daughter, should eat too. They were waiting on Laurie, his other daughter, who was not present at ten past seven, despite a weeks-old commitment to a six o’clock dinner.

“She and Laurie played together on the Bix Boseman show,” Maggie said.

“What?”

“Mitzi Day.”

Boris rolled his eyes. The newspaper said Mitzi Day disabled an exhaust fan at a shirt factory. The entire building was filled with thick black soot and many shirts were ruined. The article claimed Mitzi Day disabled the exhaust fan as an act of protest against poor labor conditions. The factory purchased whole cloth from BorTek, and Boris was losing money. He was distantly aware of Mitzi Day, a teenage radio sensation compared unfavorably by critics to Laurie, his belated daughter. The newspaper took a smug credit for skewering Day’s output so thoroughly that she turned away from music for what they called terrorism. It seemed like terrorism to Boris.

“Are they friends?” he asked Maggie.

Boris didn’t care for Laurie’s colleagues, but he couldn’t imagine them destroying property, they were too pathologically relaxed.

The door opened and Laurie flung herself into the room, spreading her forelegs and extending her antennae to the diners.

“I’ve never been in such a tall building, Dad.”

Laurie shrugged off her shawl, which landed on a coat rack behind her, as though choreographed.

Boris grimaced and cut the meat on his plate into thinner slices.

“We’ve got yours in the oven,” said Maggie, smiling. Her friendliness was measured. She didn’t want her father to think she approved of Laurie’s tardiness. For her part, Laurie was oblivious to their judgment.

Maggie stood and took her sister’s bristled foreleg into her own.

“I was told your train got in at 3:05,” Boris said from the table.

“It did, Dad.”

In the kitchen, Maggie felt like their mother, rest in peace, wearing her old, embroidered oven mitt. She pulled Laurie’s plate from the brand-new oven and Laurie made a face.

“It melted.”

“Just eat it,” said Maggie. “You’re skin and bones.”

Maggie carried the plate to the table and placed it across from her own setting. She noticed, for the first time since her arrival, that Laurie was wearing an unusual hat, tall and following the curve of her antennae. Maggie had never seen anything like it. Laurie blushed.

“Sorry,” she said, and put it on the empty seat next to her. It lurked above the table’s edge in red felt and black lace. Maggie thought it had a sinister aspect, like the scale model of some cultish monument.

 “What I don’t understand,” said Boris, “is how you can be an hour late to a six o’clock meal with that much time on your hands.”

“Oh, Dad,” Laurie said with her mouth full. “We have to wait for the luggage car and then we have to carry everything across town to the drugstore where Chili works. The owner lets us stash our gear there.”

“Our gear?” said her father. “What ‘gear’ does a singer need?”

“What kind of name is Chili?” asked Maggie, rhetorically.

“It’s rude not to help with the instruments, dad, we’re a band, you raised me better than that.”

“It’s rude,” he said, “to be an hour late for a dinner you’ve known about for a month.”

Maggie did her best to keep smiling.

Boris loved the radio. He felt radio was to thank for his success. He did his best work with it on in the background and the speaker cloth he devised had been the catalyst for his small business empire, now in its thirtieth year.

Growing up in the vesper tunnels, there was little electricity. The families with radios had manually cranked machines. Boris’s first experience of shame at dishonesty was befriending his crèche-mate Simon because Simon’s family had a radio. He thought Simon was a bore and his parents were always yelling.

Boris was small, even for a vesper, and especially in his youth. He wasn’t much use on the family digs. He was observant and good at estimating weights and distances by sight. Some of his siblings found this endearing and others found it grating. His father, especially, had found it irritating, though he never said why.

One night after crèche, Boris went to Simon’s to sit around the radio for a live musical concert. Simon’s father always cranked the handle too fast, Boris thought, and on that night, it snapped off. Simon’s father swore and his mother cried. Boris, who was young enough that his exoskeleton still had translucent patches, volunteered to repair it.

“I help fix tools at home,” Boris said, which was true. He was a whiz with simple machines that he was otherwise too small to operate.

Simon’s father laughed, which humiliated Boris, but it dissipated some tension in the room. He saw Simon brace for the family’s usual blowup.

“I can do it,” Boris insisted. He knew every sound the radio made when it started up. He could time the audio crackling into being. He had stood behind the open-backed radio while Simon’s father powered it up, and Boris was sure he knew which parts made what quiet machine sounds and in what order. Simon’s father didn’t know this kind of thing, Boris thought.

“You’re not touching this radio,” said Simon’s father.

That night, Boris dreamed he was very small, scrambling up the interior architecture of the radio. The ground was far below and too dark to see. In the dream, he felt he had to keep climbing, that he had to reach a high-up window where the tuning dial was, because then someone on the other side could see him, could help him. When he arrived, he couldn’t see through the frosted panel and tried yelling, but his mouth wouldn’t open.

He woke with a gasp to his brother Arthur punching him in the thorax, telling him to shut up.

There in the family dark, Boris vowed that he would have his own radio and would not let anyone touch it, much like Simon’s father. Unlike Simon’s father, he would know how it worked and he would care for it, the way his mother cared for larvae and pupa. Boris resolved never to return to Simon’s house, even if it meant missing his favorite shows.

Years later, Boris’s mother retired from birthing, and sibling employees were no longer in production. She returned to work in the tunnels with the expectation that her progeny would follow. This put adolescent Boris in an awkward position. He pulled his weight helping his mother and occasionally repairing machines, but it would look bad if he was the only one not in the tunnels. Some of his youngers had been carrying dirt for a year.

Boris approached his father and suggested that he might repair digging machinery full-time, maybe for one of the big, industrialized families.

“It’s not broken full-time,” his father said. “You seem to take to the crèche.”

What his father was saying was that if Boris wasn’t in the tunnels, his other option was working in the crèche, looking after pupas. Boris didn’t care for babies. He found them completely illegible.

Cousin Felix, who worked as a night janitor in a brand-new city hospital, visited the tunnels and told Boris the hospital was looking for a vesper to service the dirty machines in the basement. The machines were of arachnid design, but no spider would touch them. Boris asked what kind of machines, but his cousin didn’t know.

More vespers moved to the city and lived in mixed-arachnid apartments. The buildings rose vertically into the air, full of windows, so unlike vesper tunnels. There were more jobs in the city than just digging, babysitting, and reproduction. As new jobs were invented, spiders and mantids felt that some tasks were now beneath them, and they actively recruited country vespers into these positions.

“Come find me when you’re ready,” Cousin Felix said.

Boris told his father that he was moving to the city to live with Cousin Felix and work at the hospital.

“Sucking up to bugs that want to separate you from your entrails,” his father said.

“It’s not like that anymore,” said Boris.

When Boris arrived at the address provided, his cousin was not home. The floor was covered in mattresses and the young vespers inside seemed drunk at midday.

“How do I know you’re his cousin,” said the one at the door, which was closed in Boris’s face.

To mute his panic, Boris looked for a newspaper. The classifieds. He knew there were places you could buy a bed with some work. His blood sang with nervous fear, and he soothed himself by outlining the necessary steps ahead. He felt naïve for thinking there was ever a job at the hospital. He hardly knew his cousin.

There was a makeshift newsstand and nut vendor next to a tall colorful tent, pitched on the grass at the edge of a park. Boris bought a partial newspaper at a discount and watched the illuminated sliver of a stage show through an opening in the canvas tent. He would later learn that Vera, his future wife, was inside as a member of the paying audience.

When Boris and Vera finally met at a concert in the same park, they sparred. They jockeyed for the same vantage point on the lawn and their hardheaded flirtation took weeks of argument over coffee and thin cigarettes. Eventually, they linked forelegs in the front row of a popular vesper variety show, and were soon embracing for minutes at a time on local benches and stoops.

During one such embrace at a local café, Cousin Felix materialized and told Boris he was welcome to sleep on the floor with the other vespers, but Boris made efforts to avoid it, preferring the cramped and dusty rooms that came with the manual labor he performed. Most didn’t allow alcohol, and the workers were too tired to talk at the end of the day.

With the appearance of Cousin Felix came a real introduction to those hiring at the hospital. The job was real, fixing furnaces and waste pumps, and soon Boris was looking at apartments he might afford with his limited new income. Vera lived with her aunt and was eager to move out, so she decided that she was nearly in love with Boris and she would acquiesce to his bizarre insistence that they marry, if only for the financial convenience. The wedding at city hall was attended by Cousin Felix, his “festive” roommates, and Vera’s politely scandalized aunt.

At the hospital, Boris was well-liked and seen as highly competent by his peers. He learned how the subterranean waste pumps and furnaces worked and cleaned them regularly, familiarizing himself with optimal temperature and pressure. He tightened fasteners with a delicate precision. With attention more than maintenance, Boris kept the filthy machines in continuous operation, a first since the hospital’s opening. His janitorial supervisor took notice and soon Boris was the first vesper in a new mixed engineering department.

The spider and mantid engineers were visibly skeptical of their new coworker, but Boris felt it had more to do with being engineers than bugs. The new Facilities Engineering Department was excited to work on the state-of-the-art medical equipment, some of it invented right there in the hospital.

Ironically, Boris experienced the true prejudice of his peers when they became comfortable as a team. His fellow engineers were letting their social guard down, a sign of respect, to communicate less-than-respectful ideas. Vespers were last to join the new industrial society and, more than being second-class citizens, they were seen as unhygienic and clumsy, blindly tunneling in the dirty dark. Boris was neither dirty nor clumsy, and his colleagues sheepishly acknowledged this after inevitably stating some out-of-date “truism” that implied otherwise.

Still, Boris was not allowed to work on certain equipment. This was not explicit policy but just what happened when he expressed interest in incubation or intubation or anything with an extra-fetishized sterility. Boris was largely assigned the maintenance of nonmedical devices and it was in this way that he became intimate with the hospital intercom system, which he found mechanically similar to the radios of his youth.

Like the furnaces and waste pumps, the intercom system was always failing and kept Boris busy. They system was designed and installed by a temporary government agency that existed to oversee the building of the hospital. Nothing was saved and there were no diagrams for reference. Boris learned the intercom’s workings intuitively, which he enjoyed.

When he was quite sure he could differentiate between essential and inessential hardware, Boris brought home extra parts to build his own radio. His young wife was thrilled at the idea of their home filled with song on command. He delighted in fine-tuning the device for her benefit, to summon an ideal audio-image for her listening pleasure. Their shared love of music was ever nourishment to their marriage.

The main issue with the hospital intercom was not mechanical, but in the casings. As spidersilk went out of style for being too bodily, it was replaced by inferior plant weaves. The speaker boxes were stretched with an old-fashioned fiber blend that was not only ugly but decayed at an alarming rate under modern cleaning products. The hospital cleaning staff scrubbed the intercoms with disinfectant like any other surface, and the grill cloth suffered for their diligence.

Boris brought this issue to the attention of his supervisor, pointing out that the fraying grill cloth allowed dust and moisture access to the electronic mechanism. When his supervisor asked if this caused any actual and immediate malfunction and Boris had to say well, no, it was classified as a nonmechanical issue and dismissed.

Boris took pride in his own appearance and he took pride in the hospital’s appearance. He felt that he worked in a cathedral of genuinely helpful modernity and that it ought to look dignified, especially for all the frightened bugs receiving treatment for the first time.

One morning shift, a plastic cart was brought to engineering, burned by the shorting electrical devices it was designed to hold. Boris noticed the burnt plastic spiral off as filament and had an idea. On his lunch break, Boris borrowed a mechanical grinder from the kitchen and fed bits of heated plastic into it, extruding thin tubes that melted together and gummed up the device. He replaced the coarse die with a perforated pan used to drain viscera and the plastic extruded more finely. If he was able to keep the threads from touching until they cooled, he could maintain individual strands. The kitchen appliances were ruined and Boris wasn’t sure where one purchased restaurant supplies, so he left some cash and an apologetic note for the cook.

Boris educated himself about looms and weaving and he was soon able to produce sheets of synthetic cloth from the plastic strands, in colors that spidersilk and plant fiber would never take. Without asking permission, he replaced all the hospital intercom cloth with his new synthetic fabric. Those that noticed were not upset, and he received many compliments from the cleaning staff. Boris particularly enjoyed the design element and was proud that the colorful fabric not only withstood cleaning but brought aesthetic joy to patients and employees alike.

His supervisor took credit for Boris’s work, telling his own supervisors that he put the young vesper on the task himself. The more accolades the fabric received, the more menial tasks Boris was assigned to. It was just like in the tunnels, Boris thought. He was being punished for his exception. It seemed absurd that he wasn’t permanently assigned to a more invention-oriented position. There were fifty improvements he wanted to make, just off the top of his head.

The supervisor called Boris into his cramped “office,” a group of temporary freestanding walls.

“Room 304,” said the old mantis.

“What’s broken?” Boris asked. With his luck it was a bedpan.

The mantis was impatient with the question.

“You have been personally requested by the patient in 304.”

The supervisor’s bulbous eyes rotated and fixed on Boris, as though to ask what else there was to say. Boris nodded and headed for the stairwell. The third floor was all single rooms, reserved for “very important patients.”

The patient in 304 was an arachnid Boris’s age, with bandages covering his top two eyes.

“How can I help?” Boris asked.

“Oh!” The spider moved too abruptly and groaned.

“Is something broken?” Boris looked around the room. He saw no machines covered by the engineering department.

“Besides me? I wanted to meet the bug what designed that fabric, I was sure you’d be a spider.” He gestured to the intercom on the wall.

“It’s plastic,” said Boris.

“That’s what the nurse told me! Ooh…” The spider winced again. “My family is in silks for three generations and my father will not budge on what it is we produce. They only want spidersilk for industrial applications now; the garment industry is on its last legs. Mantids don’t want it touching their delicate skin.” The spider rolled his unbandaged eyes. “All my older brothers got watches when they turned sixteen and I got a yoyo. It’s killing my family.”

Boris guessed what was happening.

“I think my synthetic fabric would be very cheap to produce wholesale. I needed very little plastic to do every intercom in the hospital. I ruined a food processor, which I feel bad about.”

“My name’s Albert,” said the spider. “You should meet my father. He would never believe this stuff was made of plastic. Honestly, it would offend him. It looks nicer than a lot of the pure silk I see, and trust me, I know silk.”

Boris did not immediately trust Albert but could imagine he was the emissary of a more trustworthy spider. The opportunity was dancing in his vision and Boris wanted to keep it there. That’s what living in the city was all about. He thought of his life with Vera and how it might change.

“My fabric lasts longer too,” Boris said. “Stands up to repeat cleaning with strong chemicals.”

“Yes! Just like that!” Albert shifted in bed and winced. “Say it just like that and my old man will shit.”

Boris made a face, unused to profanity, and the bedridden spider laughed at him.

“A vesper,” Albert said. “No kidding!”

After dinner, Boris smoked a cigar on the balcony and reviewed the appointment book he kept in his breast pocket. Tomorrow would be busy. He made a note to review security protocols at the factory. He didn’t intend to fall victim to any so-called industrial activism. Through the sliding glass door, Boris watched Maggie and Laurie, his adult daughters, spread keepsakes of their mother on the living room floor. He heard them coo every few objects.

“Hey, Pop.” Laurie stuck her head onto the smoky balcony.

“Yes, dear.”

“Before discs it was shellac cylinders, right?”

Laurie hadn’t asked mechanical questions in years.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Didn’t Mom record a few?”

“When she was little,” Boris said.

“What do you mean?” Maggie asked, joining them on the balcony.

“Your mother’s family had wings, and when they came from the tunnels, they made music with them. I think someone from the college recorded your grandmother and aunts singing for an archive of folk traditions.”

“If I had some shellac cylinders, you think you could help me play what’s on them?”

Boris paused and pulled on his cigar. Laurie had an ulterior motive, she always did. He heard it in her voice.

“Do you have Mom’s?” Maggie asked, first to Laurie who shook her head and then to her father, who was still thinking.

“I’m not sure she had them,” Boris said. “The college might, though who knows if they can be played.”

For a moment, Boris fantasized as when he was a new father. He imagined his machinic impulses directed to entertain his daughters as inventor and toy maker, but when he looked up at Laurie, she looked so much older than Maggie and hardened in a way that made him wince. He did not want to reward or encourage his daughter’s lifestyle, her lateness, her singing and drinking and the bugs she kept company with in the name of a decreasingly commercial art.

“I don’t have anything useful,” he said.

“I picked some cylinders up on tour,” said Laurie. “You can see the shape of the sound in the surface, it’s beautiful. I think they’re like you described, real old songs, folk songs.”

“Is that the latest trend?” Boris asked sarcastically. “What all the teens want to hear? Country bugs moaning out of the past?”

Maggie laughed too loud at her father’s barb.

“Maybe,” said Laurie. “You never know.”

Laurie and Maggie took turns kissing their father, said good night, and rode the elevator down to the lobby.

Boris got in bed, aware that his parental worry was lighter than usual. He reflected on his evening and felt it should have wound him up a little more. After these long visits, he lay awake, worrying that each girl was too much herself. Tonight, it seemed like a good thing. They seemed okay. By the end of the night, even Laurie seemed well-intentioned. For Laurie, everything was an injustice. That it was so hard to play shellac cylinders was an injustice.

For Maggie, every event, every moment that passed, was an opportunity for correct behavior. Had she learned that from Boris? Boris enjoyed being small, excused from the endless chain of formal politenesses that went on above him between spider and mantid. This lack of accountability to social mores occasionally got him in trouble; he struggled to keep track of what constituted etiquette. He had this in common with Laurie.

Maggie, however, was a student of expectation, even when there wasn’t any. She was only too happy to join her father’s BorTek enterprise, without ever being asked. Boris wondered what Albert Sr. would have made of the name. He thought about meeting Albert Jr. that night in the hospital, more trustworthy than he seemed at the time. He wondered what Junior was doing now, convalescing in the lap of luxury somewhere. Senior was long gone.

Boris had gotten on well with the old spider. Albert Sr. called Boris “cutthroat,” which Boris didn’t like, but “Al” insisted it was a compliment. Maggie was not “cutthroat,” Boris thought. As a student of imagined expectation, she struggled to invent her own, to dictate her own terms. Her imagination failed when expectations were not met. She struggled to revise plans. As an extension, she was especially frustrated with her sister, a quality Boris found secretly endearing.

The old vesper fell asleep imagining Laurie and Maggie on the balcony, dim lit yellow from the electric billboard across the street. In the dappled light of his mind’s eye, they loomed through golden static, so old, so beautiful, so grown-up, nearly ancient. Boris slept.

 On the street below, Maggie and Laurie stepped quickly with linked forelegs. The sisters loved cars and fell into old habits, playing what they called the “name game”; calling out automobile models in rapid alternation, no repeats. Their father’s new apartment was downtown, and the streets were jammed with every car you could name. For blocks, the only words spoken were make and model. Without warning, Laurie stopped walking.

“Oh don’t go home,” she pleaded. “Come meet my friends.”

“I have work in the morning,” Maggie said and tightened her scarf.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“So?”

Laurie rolled her eyes.

Maggie put her forelegs on her abdomen. She raised her bristles.

“I want you to meet my friends,” Laurie said. “It’s about Mom.”

Maggie stepped back from her sister. She felt this was too far, even for an eccentric like Laurie. The rule was unspoken, but always observed. They only spoke of their mother in the presence of their father. It was that way since she died, like they didn’t want to steal any pieces of her from Boris, who took it hardest of all.

Laurie was becoming impatient.

“I think I have some of her recordings, my friends do,” she said.

Passing bugs cast glances at the two fashionable young vespers bickering on the corner. Maggie huddled closer to her sister. She was loathe to make a scene at a highly trafficked intersection.

“Well alright, but didn’t you say you have no way to play them?”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Laurie. “My friends and I are learning. To sing them.”

Maggie snorted and rolled her eyes.

“I told them to meet me at Moon’s Café, they’ll go wild to meet you. When was the last time we went to Moon’s? Ha!”

Laurie meant this rhetorically, but her bureaucratic sister stopped to account for the duration. Laurie laughed harder and pulled Maggie down the street. Despite herself, Maggie laughed too.

Laurie was eleven the first time she appeared on live radio. She would sing an advertisement for her father’s new fabric store, in between the late-morning radio drama and the afternoon musical program. Her mother Vera, who was by then bedridden, wrote the jingle in repose, directing her family around the piano at home. She penciled musical notation on BorTek stationary. Despite her illness, this collaboration was Boris’s fondest memory of their marriage. Laurie enjoyed being the center of attention and took the responsibility seriously. She wore makeup and jewelry to rehearse at home.

While the rest of her family practiced the jingle, Maggie sat in front of her father’s precious radio, her adolescent antennae pressed into the real spidersilk grill cloth. She couldn’t stand to hear her family bonding and wasn’t sure how or even if she wanted to insert herself. The music and talk from the radio drowned out and tangled with whatever they were doing in the other room and only her mother’s cough cut through all of it at once.

On the day of the commercial, Boris and Laurie dressed in their best clothes, chosen by Vera. When they arrived at the station, Laurie was disappointed to see the staff clothed casually and disheveled, like the sweaty tailors behind her father’s shop. An arachnid with a clipboard ushered father and daughter to the recording studio.

Laurie was relieved to find the studio more what she imagined, and more like her father described. The room was very clean with pastel carpet all over everything, including the walls and ceiling. A pane of thick glass on wheels stood between a freestanding microphone and a well-dressed young mantis hunched over an electronic desk and smoking. With a focused paternal look, Boris left Laurie at the microphone and joined the engineer at his desk. The mantis smiled at Laurie, in the rehearsed way adults pantomimed emotion for young bugs.

“You ready? I’m going to count from five and the light over there will turn on.”

“Just like we practiced,” Boris said softly.

Laurie nodded severely, a habit her father usually laughed off but, on that day, found it especially off-putting. Were both his daughters inclined to imitate adult gravitas? Had they learned this from him? When the light turned on, Laurie began singing.

“BorTek threads, BorTek threads,

From your silky pants

To the felt on your head,

Even the ash from your cigarette…”

She paused for effect, taking a deep breath that would be comically audible on the broadcast. Her mother had told her not to do this. Boris knew Laurie was going to rush the next line on her exhale.

“Hasn’t met a fabric tougher than BorTek yet!”

“BorTek Whole Synthetic Cloth, now open to the public,” she said in her squeaky voice. “The future of textiles…is here!”

She hiccuped and giggled and the light on the wall went off and the sound of instrumental music filled the room. Thrilled to her core, she looked to her father and found him upset. The mantis stood up, towering over Boris, and patted him on the back.

“Hey, that’s catchy!” the mantis said. “You must be proud. You invented it, huh? Hey, that’s pretty neat.”

Laurie saw her father soften, diminished under the looming mantis.

“I started working on radios,” said Boris.

“No kidding!”

The mantis was practically shouting. Laurie was used to this. Mechanical types were often too excited to meet her father. The engineer took her father on a tour of the studio, identifying all of the custom-built devices. Boris nodded politely and Laurie trailed them, half listening.

On the walk home, her father turned inward, holding Laurie’s small foreleg too tight and in silence. Laurie figured it was because of the hiccup and the giggling, or maybe the big breath. She wasn’t a dumb kid, she thought, those were creative choices, not mistakes. She was going to sell a million yards of BorTek, she knew so. She looked forward to seeing her mother, who she knew would get better. Maggie and her father were so negative, she thought.

At the apartment, Maggie and Vera sat on the couch in the living room, sharing a blanket. When Boris and Laurie came in and Boris saw his wife out of bed, he shouted.

“Maggie!”

“Oh stop,” said Vera. “I insisted. I wanted to be near the radio.”

“The big breath—” Boris started.

“Was wonderfully effective,” Vera said.

Laurie beamed and ran to her mother.

“Our daughter may be some kind of artist,” Vera said.

Maggie rolled her eyes.

The door to Moon’s Café was upholstered in purple and hung on a loud spring. The club was dense with music but the sound of talking and laughing was louder. Moon’s had changed. It used to be a real café. Maggie didn’t see anyone eating, but vesper and arachnid waiters in red vests carried flutes of sparkling wine and silver carafes on ice to peripheral tables engulfed with smoke. Everyone was about their age, which Maggie found embarrassing, though she saw no one she knew. Moon’s had been a vesper club, one of the first, but these glamorous guests were bugs of all sorts. A band in matching white suits played slick jaunty renditions of popular favorites. Maggie knew her sister hated this kind of music.

Laurie pulled Maggie up some stairs she hadn’t seen and then they were on a balcony, overlooking the dance floor. Another new addition. All the smoke from downstairs flowed up and Maggie felt trapped in the poison cloud. Her eyes watered and she coughed. Laurie walked ahead and laughed, pulling her sister through the haze.

The sisters stopped at a dark corner booth and Laurie shoved Maggie between an emaciated mantis in a tan suit and a burly arachnid in an undershirt. Maggie sank into the cushions between them.

“Chili, Ivan, my sister Maggie.”

Chili and Ivan nodded above her.

“Chili’s about the best drummer I’ve ever heard, and Ivan does arrangements for the band.”

“And I play the piano,” said the mantis.

“And he plays the piano.” said Laurie.

Laurie’s immediate and total relaxation was palpable to Maggie. The rictus of her smile was gone and her antennae were flat against her head. Maggie was hurt when she realized Laurie had been performing all night. It made sense that she was more comfortable with her friends, on the balcony at Moon’s. Maggie looked for a red-vested waiter.

“We didn’t know you were coming,” said Ivan coolly.

“Neither did I.” Maggie stood up, smoothing her skirt, and moved to sit with her sister. She folded her scarf in her lap. Her sister’s friends were not going wild to meet her, which was in some ways a relief, though it made Maggie feel foolish for coming.

Laurie slouched in the plush booth, sprawled like a puddle. Maggie sat straight and tried to relax her mandibles, doing her best to appear cheerfully alert rather than uncomfortable.

“You’re a music lover?” The enormous spider, Chili, asked this with evidently genuine curiosity, which Maggie sensed and allowed.

“I am,” she declared. “We grew up with the same parents, after all.”

“After all,” Chili repeated, smiling. He seemed pleased with her answer.

“Well, shall we?” Ivan the mantis stood. He smoothed his threadbare jacket.

Chili stood next and the two towered over the small vespers. Maggie wondered if they were going downstairs to dance. She was awfully tired.

The puddle of her sister leapt vertically from the booth, hooking Maggie’s foreleg on the way up.

“Let’s go, Mags. I want you to hear the music I was telling you about.”

When the integrated public high-school opened, Boris called in favors to place Maggie in its first class. He suggested Laurie suspend her singing engagements, temporarily, to attend with her sister, but Laurie rejected the idea.

In the three years since the radio broadcast of the BorTek jingle, Boris’s business thrived, aided by the staggering popularity of Laurie’s performance. The recording of Laurie’s jingle was the station’s most requested song for six weeks. Boris bought the storefront next to his own and knocked the wall down between the two. He struck fair deals with begrudged arachnids and showed them how to use BorTek products to stay in business.

Laurie took the bus to the radio station three times a week, to appear as a special guest on the Sound of Today show, interpreting popular songs by spiders and mantids. She spent the rest of her time at home with Vera, who slept more and more, rehearsing and discussing their philosophy of music while drinking hot water. At school, Maggie was one of three vespers and kept a low profile. She avoided the whispers of her peers, who saw only Laurie’s sister. Everyone knew the BorTek jingle.

There had never been a phenomenon like Laurie. There had never been a popular vesper singer and there were no vesper standards to sing, but Laurie made the songs of other bugs her own, like she did with the jingle. The imitation of severity she affected socially became real in her music, and the theater of her expression implied grave wisdom.

Laurie was happy when she was singing, although she no longer believed her mother would get better. She wondered if her happiness was related to this change, which made her feel worse, which made her sing more, turning to music to expunge the feeling. She loved being allowed to wander the city alone. She loved reading on the bus and meeting the different piano players when she arrived at the station. They all had their own stylistic tics, and Laurie enjoyed the challenge of adapting to that day’s pianist.

She was tired of singing old songs and wanted to surprise her mother with an original piece. As a surprise, she couldn’t write it at home, so it was written while she walked, looking at buildings and bugs and advertisements, repeating the words she saw on billboards and bumpers. The public language of the city was finding its way into the music. The song she wrote for her mother would be as honest and all-encompassing as Laurie could manage. There was no time left in their relationship for pretense.

Laurie kept the melody in her head and scribbled compositional notes in the end pages of her paperbacks. The song for her mother grew and soon Laurie felt it was for everyone, since she had written it with everyone, walking around the city. Laurie imagined music about real life, music for bugs own her age and not just vespers. She began showing her music to the temp pianists at the station, who inevitably tried to steer her back to the standards. They couldn’t understand why anyone, especially Little Laurie Vesper, wanted to sing songs about billboards and death, and with such strange harmonies. It wasn’t done.

While Maggie spent ninth grade in Structural Geometry 1, Laurie argued with bugs twice her age about the higher purpose of her “new music.” Vera got sicker and BorTek got bigger.

Boris, Laurie, and naturally Vera all missed Maggie’s graduation from high school, and not many applauded when she crossed the stage to shake hands with the principal. Maggie started work at BorTek the following Monday. Her father had no better employee than his daughter.

“You’re going to love this place,” whispered Laurie.

The cab jostled and she pressed sharply into her sister, with whom she shared the corner of a withered bench seat, elbowed there by Chili, the sprawling arachnid drummer.

“I doubt that very much.”

Maggie replied a little too loud, and Chili laughed without turning.

The taxi stopped where the paved road ended in dirt and the driver turned to the mantis Ivan for payment, who turned to Laurie. She produced a wad of cash and peeled bills for payment.

“Another ten if you wait for us. Two hours.”

The cabbie nodded and took the money but drove off when they left the car.

“He’ll be back,” said Laurie.

The bugs walked the moonlit gravel road in silence. Away from the city lights was very dark, and crude improvised architecture suggested itself in the gloom. Maggie thought the ramshackle huts were awful, like haunted houses, but Laurie was unfazed. She smiled in the small glow of her cigarette and chatted with her bandmates about changes to a song.

The dirt road ended at the largest and most improbable shack yet, clearly assembled from whatever was lying around. It was joined with traditional masonry and oozed at its seams. The structure appeared flexible and to sway in the orange dark of a single streetlamp. What Maggie took for electrical hum revealed itself to be music, and she was whisked inside by her companions. The single room was cavernous, larger than it looked from the outside, and lit inconsistently from high in the rafters, giving the throng of dancing bugs and their entertainment an eerie luminance in the sweaty dim. Maggie supposed she was in a speakeasy, as it smelled of tobacco and ferment, and of sweat most of all. She saw a shoddy bandstand where a vesper and mantid ensemble huddled together and scraped at pieces of wood and hit hollow shapes with sticks. The group vocalized in dazzlingly fast and complex patterns, performing a frenetic, ecstatic call-and-response, as though the musicians were confirming their own rapture to each other in front of an audience. The band members appeared to blur at their edges, throbbing with the loud music. It made Maggie’s head spin.

A spider gyrating into the lap of a vesper shuffled between Maggie and Laurie, and Maggie blushed. Her sister laughed, and three winged vespers flirtatiously grazed the long mantid neck of her bandmate Ivan. Maggie pretended not to be shocked, having seen intimations of this behavior at school dances, but never to such an advanced degree.

Laurie did not seem interested in the band or dancing. She stared through and around the crowd, looking for something. Maggie thought her sister looked very serious. Laurie started into the dancers, pulling Maggie behind, followed by Chili and Ivan. They weaved through lattices of leg and wing and thorax. Maggie felt claustrophobic and wanted to close her eyes. To comfort herself, she made plans. When Laurie found whatever she was looking for, Maggie would acknowledge it politely and agree that it was absolutely worth coming to this horrible place for and she would call a taxi at the surely filthy bar, specifying that it pick her up at the very end of the dirt road, as she had no intention of walking back to the pavement either accompanied or alone.

For a moment, she was under a great heavy blanket and could not see. Laurie pulled her through a series of thick curtains, and the sound of the speakeasy muffled. Laurie held Maggie’s foreleg too tight, bending bristles, dragging her sister deeper into darkness. Maggie noticed the black walls were irregular and glittering. They were in a tunnel of the oldest vesper style. Durable and soundproof, the soil around them was held in place with petrified spit. Maggie had read about these methods in school but had never seen them up close.

The crystal soil opened onto a windowless hollow of similarly traditional construction, strung with weak electric lights dangling from the ceiling. It was a shrunken imitation of the larger speakeasy. A sick-looking spider at an ugly piano played quietly and with a delicacy that made his odd melodies tender. There can’t be more than twenty bugs in this room, thought Maggie, noting a bartender with an abbreviated rolling cart of drinks and glassware.

The small group of stylish mingling bugs turned to look as Laurie and her entourage emerged from the tunnel. Some acknowledged Laurie with a practiced minimal effort and she responded in kind, with a demure and false smile like a wink.

“Can I get you a drink?” she asked Maggie.

“What about Mother’s music?”

“You can’t rush these things,” said Laurie, who greeted the bartender.

Chili sat on a bent wire chair and spoke with a young vesper, a female in slacks and untucked shirt. Maggie stood alone, trying to appear aloof. Laurie returned with brass thimbles of a cloudy blue white drink that hissed with small bubbles.

“What is it?”

“House special,” said Laurie. She drained the thimble in one gesture.

Maggie followed suit and thought her throat might be permanently damaged. She gagged and it burned. Laurie laughed and took her foreleg.

The sisters approached the cluster of chairs where Chili spoke with the vesper. Laurie sat down and joined their conversation. Maggie knew that if she sat, she would get a dirty black imprint on her dress. She looked around.

“How long do I have to stay here?” she asked.

Chili guffawed and addressed his friend.

“See? I told you she was a hoot.”

“You’re Laurie’s sister?” asked the grim young vesper, who seemed skeptical.

“I think we look like twins!” said Laurie.

“I guess so,” said the vesper. She rolled down her shirtsleeves, buttoned them, and went to the bartender.

“Don’t mind her,” said Chili. “She’s just nervous.”

“She’s downright antisocial,” said Maggie, which made Chili laugh again.

Their vesper friend came away from the bar cart with a folded rug, which she spread on the other side of the little room. She sat cross-legged on the rug and produced a hollow stick, perforated with a series of holes. She brought the stick to her face and closed her eyes, exhaling through open mandibles before closing her mouth around the thing and softly blowing.

This music was sad from the moment it left the instrument. Impossibly sad, Maggie thought. She wondered how it qualified as music for socializing and tried to gauge reactions in the room.

All present had stopped talking. Some sat on the dirt floor in their chic modern clothes. Maggie felt the music would empty her out, pass through her like a pipe cleaner, scouring her of the evening’s anxieties. The sadness was so all-encompassing that it became neutral, total, a window into a sadness so pervasive as to be ubiquitous and banal. Sadness so fundamental it could be a comfort.

“Who is that?” Maggie whispered.

“Mitzi Day,” said Laurie.

“The shirt factory terrorist?”

Laurie hissed Maggie quiet.

“She’s not a terrorist. She’s a musician, as you can see. Just listen.”

While the sisters whispered, Chili stood and went to Mitzi on the rug. He conjured a segmented plane of shaped wood, weathered smooth. He tapped at the wood tentatively, not yet in time with Mitzi but finding his way. With another leg, he scraped a textured panel in half-time with a pebble. With a third leg, Chili plucked at a section of the plank divided into thin tongues, establishing a rhythm that entangled itself with Mitzi’s wandering melody. When the counterpoint reached Maggie’s awareness, she gasped.

With his remaining legs, Chili held and muted the wood, rubbing its surface to produce playful squeaks and sighs. Maggie was transfixed and didn’t see her sister stand. She became aware of the crowd’s eager murmur and subtle parting to allow for Laurie’s passage. Maggie slouched in her dirty seat and pictured the ruin of her evening wear.

Laurie moved through the crowd like a sleepwalker and sat on the far corner of the rug, listening to her friends play. Maggie rolled her eyes. Ivan the mantis appeared at the edge of the rug, already singing, moaning and cooing in wordless dialogue with the instruments. The longer he sang, the farther the sound moved down his throat and into his chest, visibly vibrating his spines and antennae. Maggie felt the vibration in the flimsy metal chair.

She was suddenly aware that Laurie was singing, and could not have said when it started. Her sister’s voice emerged as a fundamental part of the sounds around it, separating into overtones and disappearing again. Laurie warbled and crooned and stretched words into sound effects, simulating machinery. Maggie heard bits of commercial jingles and newspaper headlines. During one section, Laurie recited the birthdays of friends and family to the music. She admitted to petty behavior in sing-song rhyme and begged for forgiveness in a percussive whisper.

Performing this music, Maggie thought her sister looked bigger, a little wider at the edges. She noticed the rest of the musicians looked like this too. Their bodies expanded and contracted with the music and each other. What she had thought was an optical illusion in the speakeasy upstairs hinted at being actual. The performers’ exoskeletal plates were lifting, fluttering open. Organs unseen in the public sphere were expanding from within. Each extension possessed more folds and chambers, and soon the musicians were blooming outward in ripples, in time with the music.

Maggie found herself backing away from the spotlit rug just as the rest of the audience collectively crawled from the darkness toward the performers. Silhouetted antennae frayed the edges of the rug in her vision. The expanding musicians were oblivious, aware only of each other. Maggie almost stepped on a long mantis, flattened to the floor and writhing. The mantis giggled at Maggie’s surprise and scurried for the music and light.

While Maggie sidestepped the room’s perimeter with her back to the wall, she thought something moved through the air or that the lights were failing. Darkness intermittently laced her view. It was like a shadow play, with shapes swinging horribly in and out of the meager light. Maggie wanted to cry, afraid to look away, and felt behind her for the tunnel through which she had entered.

The shadow play became denser and more frantic. Soon, obstructive lattices swam before her from floor to ceiling. The darkness flexed in her direction and a bristle brushed her cheek. Her eyes adjusted and Maggie saw that the variegated wall of shadows was the audience. Every bug in the room, except for herself and the bartender, had entangled their limbs, holding or biting, strung between sticky secretions in a living stratum taking its shape. Some bugs scuttled across each other, finding their places, and Maggie saw they were forming an enclosure around the musicians.

Through the lightless armature of insects, Maggie could not discern who was who among the players. She could not find her sister. The music was incredibly loud and Maggie felt it all through her body, as though she were contributing to its resonance. Within the encroaching tangle of audience was a layered and writhing mass of slick petals, interrupted occasionally by chitinous exoskeleton. Without intending to, Maggie made eye contact with Laurie.

“Maggie!” Laurie sang. She leapt, separating herself from the wet mass, trailed by ribbons of flesh.

“I need to leave!” Maggie shouted.

Laurie laughed, without cruelty, and reached out for Maggie, as ever. Maggie took her sister’s bristled foreleg and was pulled into the network of insects. Laurie watched Maggie be swept up by the pulsing enclosure. A spider above Maggie extended a limb and she wrapped herself around it. She whirled with the pulsating mesh around the transforming musicians. Her starchy dress felt so constrictive. It occurred to her that what they did in the city was dress up. Had her great-grandparents worn hats and scarves?

After his morning meeting, Boris stood at the picture window and watched the street below. Loud bicycle, grimy trolley, sandwich vendor. Not very dignified. He provided people with dignity, and style when they wanted it, or knew how to ask for it.

He went to the radio and switched it on.

“—insects all over the city are being told to stay indoors.”

Boris considered his lunch for the day and tuned the dial until he heard music, before doing a double take. He switched back to the news.

“They say, they’re saying, it’s a sound, they’re saying it’s a song. You must stay indoors for your own safety and whatever you do—”

Boris heard screams from the open window. He walked away from the words on the radio and followed the sound outside. Uptown, an enormous black and multifaceted shape spilled down the avenue. An industrial accident, he thought. Above the panic in the street below, he heard a low siren from the direction of the spill. His clothes felt constrictive. He loosened his tie and lit a nervous cigar.

As the expanding structure approached, pooling up and between the buildings, Boris saw that it was made of insects, all holding each other, or stuck together with webs and spit. In the street below, Bugs ran from its expansion until they could not, assimilated in various states of ecstasy and terror. The siren was music, Boris realized, generated by an enormous glistening bug within the shifting structure. No, he saw, it was a group of bugs writhing together, making the sounds.

The assemblage rolled past his penthouse balcony and there was Maggie at eye level, ridiculous in a dirty blue dress, held on all sides by bugs enjoying the music.

“Hey, Pop!” she shouted, laughing, before gliding away down the avenue in a dripping ribbon of screaming insects.

Boris went back to his office in a daze, doing his engineer’s best to comprehend what he had seen. His cigar went out and his attention drifted to the news.

“—and it seems the vesper singer and textile heir is responsible. We are told it is an original composition and that the royal guard has been encouraged to use deadly force—”

He found matches in his pocket and puffed an ember into being.

“It’s a special occasion,” he said, blowing smoke into the grill cloth he designed. “That’s my daughter on the radio.”

“Laurie on the Radio” copyright © 2025 by Sam Davis
Art copyright © 2025 by Michael Hirshon

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Laurie on the Radio

Sam Davis

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Sam Davis

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Original Fiction space exploration

The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home

To celebrate her grandmother, all the captain of the Sopinha de Feijão wanted was to build a street market on a distant moon. But now the captain is dead and…

Illustrated by Alix Pentecost Farren

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Edited by Ann VanderMeer

By Renan Bernardo

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Published on August 27, 2025

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To celebrate her grandmother, all the captain of the Sopinha de Feijão wanted was to build a street market on a distant moon. But now the captain is dead and trying to figure out what kind of god might have killed her—and what kind of pact her grandmother made with it.

Author’s note: This story contains fictionalized descriptions of symptoms of hunger and depictions of dead bodies.

Short story  |  6,026 words

Let me be straight: I’m Adelaide, a space traveler, and I’m a ghost. It took me a while to whisper those words to my ectoplasmic self in the mirror and convince myself of that, so take your time. I wouldn’t believe it easily, were I you. I’m dead and forced to fluster about in the Sopinha de Feijão, my lovely freighter, previously bound for a moon in the Kepler-32 system but now going back to Earth.

I float in the medbay and traverse the pods that wouldn’t have saved the four of us even if we’d had time to reach them. I go through the walls of the two ICU units, then up through a bulkhead and into my quarters. Moving like a ghost is like gliding around in zero-g, only without the daily injections and the mandatory time in the rotating section of the ship—so, yay, good news? Add to that the bonus of being capable of passing through obstacles without the tiresome bumps on walls and grips on handles.

“How am I dead?” I say it out loud. One day ago, screaming at the mirror, I found out I still had a voice, clearly seeing the wall behind me bathed in my novel bluish colors. (So, no, no good news around here.) And three days before that, I just “appeared” out of nowhere close to my quarters, which pretty much isn’t the place where I died. Of that, I’m sure. So, maybe, this version of my existence just moored around the ship until it was time to…“wake up”? Am I even using the right verbs for what I am now?

“Critical.” The Sopinha de Feijão tries to find an approximate answer to my existential question. “Life Support Failure. Please, proceed to the medbay pods or suit stations.”

“We were always so careful.” I sigh, crossing my legs midair. Corded to my bunk, the bottle Vovó gave me swims by, softly clacking against the walls. Written on the cup sleeve Vovó knitted around it: Adelaide – 30% netinha, 70% café. And now what? Maybe 0% granddaughter, 0% coffee, 100% nothing. Will I see Vovó again? Will I haunt her? Perhaps like the spirits she told me she saw when she was a child, going in and out of her wardrobe, sometimes stopping at her bedside and staring into her eyes as if they’d found a window to another dimension. At least they never scared her.

“Route to destination,” I say. My wall display lights up, showing one dot for Verdigris, the moon where we were supposed to be, another for Earth, and a line connecting them. Thirty-six hours to Earth at the fusion drive’s current capacity. The ship has been activated by an automatic routine that detected the four of us were utterly dead, then decided to bring our bodies—or what remains of them—back to our families. If my crewmates became ghosts like me, I can’t see them, so I hope they died the real death. What a cruel afterlife it would  be, phantoms incapable of seeing each other, of marveling at the ethereal, transparent bodies of their friends.

I look beside me and float to the bulkhead that comes right before the multiple hull plates of the Sopinha de Feijão. I extend a hand. The hole is the size of my hand, perfectly round. Ghosts are observational not-beings. Like telescopes, incapable of touching any of the banalities and wonders they see. Even so, there I am, dead and playing the detective to find out what killed me. I draw a conclusion out of that tiny hole: something is not right in the way we died.

We were condemned by multiple impacts. That is obvious. Several parts of the ship are breached the same way as the spot in my quarters, but without any sign of missiles or debris or anything that could justify the damage. It’s like parts of the hull simply decided to melt. It was enough to cause severe hypoxia in the four of us, so quick that the poor Sopinha didn’t even have time to enable its countermeasures. If it was intentional, then it was to kill everyone immediately. It completely damaged our comms and their backups but left our fusion drive perfectly functional, which could point to pirate activity. Considering we’re registered as a freighter, that would be the logical conclusion. But then why didn’t anyone board us or take anything? Why hadn’t the Sopinha de Feijão detected any signature in an enormous radius around our vicinity? Why kill four ordinary couriers with a gig on a tiny icy moon?

I glide to my locker. Since I can’t open it, I stick my head through the door. The light is feeble, filtering through thin cavities, some of them reflecting off my blue. But it’s enough to see Vovó. I glued her pic to the back of the locker the day I bought the ship and named it after her favorite dish—bean soup. The darkness doesn’t let me see the details, but I know them all by now. Her locks falling over her brown forehead; her eyes sullied by cataracts that weirdly never took her sight; her smile, verging on a blend of amusement and reservedness; and the scar on her upper lip, shaped like an asterisk as if she always had a footnote to accompany her. I raise a hand and let my finger disappear through the list carefully nailed beside her pic. The five things a street market must have. She’d jotted it down for me when she learned about my plans of building a street market in Verdigris.

I float out of the locker and cruise through the ship, losing myself in the dark space between decks and bulkheads until I reach the operations deck. The bridge would be the proper place to lead this investigation, but I can’t venture there yet. That’s where I am—where my body is—and I don’t want to glimpse the kind of nasty disfiguration Vovó will have to acknowledge back on Earth.

“Select life support logs,” I say to the terminal station before me. “Condition: oxygen level dropping steadily.” Every time I speak, I try to keep it short. It’s strange to be dead and still have your voice recognized by your ship as if the Sopinha de Feijão is in denial of its captain’s death.

The logs show up in the terminal, filtered.

[18656265410] [Breathing Mix Integrity: 90%]

[18656265411] [Breathing Mix Integrity: 10%]

[18656265412] [Breathing Mix Integrity: 0%]

According to the timestamps, two seconds were enough to deplete all of our oxygen. Not even enough for the Sopinha de Feijão to seal the decks. That is unrealistic, but then again, look at me.

“Select life support logs.” I gulp. “Condition: no life.”

[18656265416] [No life signatures detected on the ship; Recalculating route to origin; All conditions met for automatic control]

Mere seconds later we were all dead. I close my eyes and try to find a prayer, one of the hundreds Vovó taught me over the years. I find only silence.

Vovó prayed hard. I mean, hard. Everybody noticed. She muttered the names of all orixás, of Jesus, Shangdi, Bava, Allah, and of deities I’d never heard of, some whose names sounded merely as clicks and whose origins—according to her—dated back to the Big Bang. Eyes shut tight, elbows propped on her chiffonier filled with a plastic army of saints and orixás, leather-bound sacred books, scrolls, and even digital recordings of herself mumbling “all the names of all the deities of this universe.” Many minutes later, she woke up from her trancelike prayers, smiling, at ease. We’re protected, netinha, she’d say, then her wrinkles would shift into severity. For now.

Perhaps her prayers are the reason why I’m back. Think about it. When I traveled, she always asked the marujos to “take care of my Dedê and make sure she comes back no matter what.” Well…here I am. Coming back. Sort of.

The second thing I noticed after becoming a ghost was that I didn’t have the red mottle on my left wrist anymore. I could still see the birthmark on my calf and the scar on my left elbow, caused when Vovó allowed me to ride a bike for the first time. I will fly, I swear I will fly, I yelled at her, giggling, pedaling as fast as I could, faster than I should. Minutes later I was enveloped in Vovó’s arms, sniffling, while she pressed a towel against my cut elbow to stop the bleeding. If the universe didn’t need you, this cut would’ve been on your forehead, yes, it would. Now let’s visit a doctor.

But the stains on my wrist? It’s like they’d never been there in the first place. When Vovó learned about my project of building a street market on Verdigris, she dragged me to her bedroom and told me she always knew I was going to be part of something big. I told her it wasn’t that big. Just another gig delivering a bunch of stuff, but that I thought about sprinkling some life in the Verdigris’s settlement to honor her. I tentatively called it Feira da Vó Lurdes. Vovó patted the spot beside her on the bed, and I obediently sat the way I always did when I was a kid and she had serious business to talk about—she’d done this on my first period, when Mom and Dad died in an atmosphere reentry accident, and when we had to ration food so we could live on her pension. But that was the first time she did that after I was an adult. She gazed intently at me with her vitreous eyes, and then she asked Verdigris’s exact location. I frowned but tapped my pad and showed her the coordinates. She only nodded, the aromas of the street market where she worked still clinging to her skin—soil, sweat, fruits, vegetables, things trying to grow into the city, knowing it belonged more than the stone and the steel and the plastic. Vovó pulled a face powder box from her apron, opened the lid, and rubbed two fingers on a greenish substance. It glowed softly. She slid it on my wrist.

“What is it?” I said but didn’t pull my hand back. If I trusted someone in this life, it was my grandmother.

“It’s a lucky charm, my child,” she said. “To turn away the evil eye.” She closed the lid, and left the bedroom, leaving no space for more questions.

On the following day, the itch started. It lasted for two days, at the end of which a red, rugged spot remained. When I asked Vovó about it, she didn’t say anything. Didn’t even raise her clear eyes from the yarn on her lap. A tiny waistcoat for babies was taking shape. I don’t think it was her intention to cause an allergy in me, so I decided to consider that blemish a lucky charm anyway.

Since it vanished after I died, maybe it was really about luck. Now I’m all out of it.

I was the only one not in the mess deck when we died. I was at the bridge for some reason I can’t remember. Jacinto, Rainei, Julia, and I were playing Truco at the mess, drinking our imitation of beer and eating a few snacks dispensed from the nutriprinter. I recall leaving them and floating toward the bridge. Then…nothing.

Tell me if you can: how can my heart beat faster if I have nothing but empty space inside of me? That’s how I feel before the mess deck door, knowing what I’ll see on the other side.

“Open door number twenty-one,” I say out of habit. I muffle a nervous laugh. I don’t need doors anymore.

We were four. Me, Jacinto, Rainei, and Julia, equally sharing the humble profits of the Sopinha de Feijão.

Our business in Verdigris was the kind of gig we took most of the time. Boring, demanding weeks under burn. It paid fine—or, as Jacinto used to put it, it was a way for us to travel at the expense of others. The Sopinha de Feijão had been hired to deliver forty-five containers of hydroponics and aeroponics stuff plus a set of replicator bots for the moon’s domed habitat. But I had other business in that cozy place. Verdigris had only one settlement—unoriginally called Verdigris as well. From the pics and videos, the place was packed with a shy amount of citizens commuting between its three main shuttle stations. Its chaotically organized streets were a crochet of prefab, colorful houses imitating cabins, all close to one another as if looking for warmth and support.

The place screamed for noise, for the scent of fruits, vegetables, and earth as if roots and branches and leaves needed to be scattered all across the air like invisible, organic webs. The quiet alleyways claimed for boisterous pals and gals waving and flailing about, announcing the best and cheapest of fruits and vegetables from early morning to early evening—or something like that, since the light cycles in Verdigris were kind of a mess. The Verdigris Cultural Association had approved my request and welcomed my project. The only issue was creds, of course. I’d saved barely enough to keep the Sopinha de Feijão under burn and to pay my mates. But I’d figure that out. The idea that one day those streets could have whiffs of Vovó, however coy and refitted, made my belly flutter with a good sensation. And on Earth, she was probably knitting some sweater for my return, knowing one day people would sell bananas in a street market that bears her name, lightyears from where she was born.

As I see what’s in the mess deck, I crumple myself into ectoplasmic sadness, realizing that though I feel the tears, there’s nothing to shed from my dead eyes.

Jacinto is almost in the same position I left him when I wandered to the bridge: tied to a chair by the waist, his eyes dead and fixed at the table before him. Cards, bulbs, and snacks float all around, remainders of our last moments of slack. In a corner near the refrigerator, Rainei swirls, arms and legs splayed like a starfish. Julia is not far, mouth agape, cheeks blue-gray and slightly swelled. Before we died, we’d just had an argument about the Sopinha de Feijão’s funds and how to spend them. That game was sort of our ceasefire. That my mates are now dead and I’m here, deadly alive, makes a kind of guilt weigh in my chest.

As I swivel by to leave the deck, deciding there’s nothing more to see, I blink and come back. Rainei’s not completely on the float. I glide to him and touch his left foot with my intangible finger. A thin fiber, like a thread made of moss, curls around his ankles, barely visible, going all the way to the air ducts in the ceiling. The same fiber leaves Julia’s mouth and Jacinto’s hand, disappearing into the grids of the deck.

“Something really entered the ship, then,” I mumble, thinking of aliens. Couriers always mentioned the weird mammal-like kangaroos of Taqsanamö and the lugworms that appear in the water filtering systems of Europa. Scientists had discovered thousands of microbial organisms too. But I never heard anything about…ship-boarding plants in the void? The logs hadn’t detected anything out of the ordinary, despite the Sopinha de Feijão being up-to-date with its sensors, systems, and firmware. Anything alive—alien—would pop up there. Anything that wasn’t in the ship when we left the spaceport in Rio de Janeiro, laughing and pushing carts filled with hydroponics paraphernalia, would be listed in the logs.

I hover to the air shafts and tuck my head through the grid. It’s like my locker, almost completely dark, with a shy light leaking in from the deck. But it’s enough to see the fibers, like a green netting, multiplying and finding their way toward somewhere. I follow them.

Vovó was a spectacle. Rumor had it that some people went to the street market only to see the old woman knitting in a corner, sometimes with her eyes shut, other times with them wide open, whitened and inscrutable. Still, at times, rolling them, praying softly but effusively, muttering words of love and security, but also of protection and vigilance. Not all gods are good, she told me, more than once, in her street market trance. Some need to be repelled at all times.

We sold bananas. Everybody eats bananas, she used to tell her customers. Even those boys who only eat printed food know what they are. It’s not like they’ll scratch their heads like they do when they see mint, parsley, and sage side by side. People packed around Vovó’s stall, partly because she practiced the best prices, partly to catch a glimpse of the needlewoman. I helped her by selecting bananas for the customers, packing them, dealing with payments, and haggling when haggling was needed, often at the end of the day. But I didn’t invoke the customers. Invocation was Vovó’s trade. Her voice was powerful, so solemn and clean that it seemed to belong to someone else—someone not from our dimension. Bananas, bananas! The cheapest you can get! With hunger you don’t bet! Everybody turned their heads to look at her, sweaty faces mesmerized, pulling carts across the street or carrying heavy bags on their shoulders under the scorching heat.

All the while, she knitted, needles click-clacking faster than the eye could see, meters of yarn spreading on her lap and onto the street around her stall. One day, Vovó knitted enough towels to cover all the stands of all stalls in the street market. Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I’d deem it as a silly urban legend. At the end of the day, she slowly met the other street merchants and gifted them with the towels. For protection, she told those she liked. For those she didn’t, she just offered a towel and remained in silence, lips taut.

The fibers sprouting from my mates’ corpses lead to the bridge. Of course. I stop just before crossing the last section of the air duct. If there’s one thing no one ever had to worry about, it was seeing one’s own corpse. I search my memory for any of Vovó’s prayers.

Lord of the jungles, warrior, conqueror of requests and spells, I, Adelaide, come to thee for strength and protection…

The first thing I see on the bridge is myself, floating above the central command triple terminals. But the thing beyond my corpse, near the Sopinha de Feijão’s most privileged window, is what paralyzes me. All my nonexistent muscles tense, and believe it or not, I taste blood when I pinch my lips hard.

It’s either a deity or a creature from the void. As if there’s any difference. It’s a sponge made of darkness and thousands of white blotches like quivering eyes that can look everywhere at once. Evil eyes. The thing smells like rotten food and emits a bubbling lament, like the scream of a drowning person. Droplets of darkness leave its surface and spread across the bridge, pulsating. When they touch me, they sizzle and disappear, prickling my ectoplasm, leaving filaments oozing out of me. Those that touch the bulkheads, stations, and terminals leave a round hole, just like the ones I found across the ship. But most of the droplets die off quickly. Not because the…god wants them to. But because my corpse is battling it.

From my left wrist, completely wrapping my arm, a green fiber is twirling out, branching into hundreds of others, and slowly penetrating the darkness of the god. Still, other branches divide from the main trunk, whipping across the bridge and eating up the god’s droplets of darkness. Three others leave my wrist to the air duct from where I came from.

It’s a battle that will take a while, I know, between a patient evil god and a dead body with a lucky charm. It shouldn’t matter who wins. We’re all dead. But it does. If that god reaches Earth—and Vovó—then there might never be street markets in the universe anymore.

Hunger had hit us hard, as it does to everyone it touches. Vovó and I lived off Mom and Dad’s jobs programming terraformation bots. When they died, we didn’t have much to keep going. Mom and Dad’s savings lasted some months and the relief pay due by the government went exclusively to the rent. Vovó had worked as a seamstress until her retirement, so she had the right to a meager pension, and when I turned twelve I started singing in a temple’s choir in exchange for lunch after school. Every Tuesday for two months, Vovó stole food from the street market around the corner from where we lived. She lost weight. Her joints started to ache, and she bought a cane. That was when she started praying harder, when her lips started moving with a hundred different names of a hundred pantheons, and cataracts vanquished her eyes—but not her sight. I can pull the good to us, Dedê, and push the evil away. Pray with me. I believed in her, so I started kneeling beside her every day, eyes fixed on the objects over her chiffonier. When you don’t know what will be of you, believing is like finding a clear path in the dark.

We believed so much that one day we woke up to a living room full of bananas. They were all around, over our table, chairs, scattered across the floor, and even hanging from strings in the battered window.

“We’ll build a stall, Dedê,” Vovó told me, all smile and energy, checking the bananas, separating the green chunks from the ripe ones. “I’ll call some friends to help us. Tomorrow, we’re street merchants.”

“Where did it all come from?” I asked her. She couldn’t have stolen all those bananas. Not by herself, not without a truck, and not after midnight.

“One of them goddesses brought them. Eat some, my child.”

I did, expecting the bananas from the goddesses to taste magical. They didn’t. From that day on, every Tuesday morning we woke up to a living room full of bananas.

That’s why Vovó wanted to know about Verdigris’s location. She probably knew it was near this creature’s home—whatever home means for cosmic horrors made of void—and that’s why she rubbed her lucky charm on my wrist. Vovó’s privileged knowledge of the universe was always clear in her eyes, in the way she bent her knees to pray and knew each and every word. I always believed in the deities she talked about, but more than that, I believed in the goddess that lived with me, the one who allowed me to lean my head next to her when she was knitting so I could gain a kiss on the tip of my nose. The one who made me feel safe.

But that goddess isn’t in the Sopinha de Feijão with my ghost and my dead body. She left me with a weapon, it’s true, but I fear it might not be enough. And what can an ectoplasmic woman do in situations like that?

I float about, staring at the terminals I’m so used to. I look around at the wall-mounted guns. There are four of them, one on each corner. The thing is: they were installed to deal with pirates, not gods from the void. Still, I have to try something, right?

“Activate defense protocol,” I say, mouth close to a functioning terminal, afraid that the darkness would lose interest in my dead flesh and instead focus on my living ghost.

“Defense mechanisms are inoperative,” the ship tells me in its disturbingly indifferent tone.

I look at the fray. The fiber burgeoning from my wrist recedes a little. There are fewer of them trespassing the darkness’s boundaries. And is it my impression or is the god a bit closer to the bridge’s central area?

Julia was the one who first disagreed. The others went along. I was the captain, but Julia was who truly gave the orders.

“A street market? Really?” She scowled at me. “We were thinking of taking a vacation, perhaps visit the baths of Charon. And you want to spend part of our shared profits to build a street market on a useless distant moon?”

I didn’t argue back, and now I never would. She had a point. I told them about Vovó and how she didn’t have many years left. When I left Rio for the Verdigris gig, Vovó was 102. When I would see her again, she’d be 104.

“She always did everything for me,” I told them. Mostly, I tried to convince myself that I was doing the right thing. “She starved to feed me, and as soon as I’m a grownup I’m never there for her anymore. Always trekking around the galaxy, delivering odds and ends…A Verdigris street market would be my way of showing her she’s still valuable to me.”

“Maybe you should spend more of your time with her then.” It was Rainei who said it, without taking his eyes off the cards in his hand. I left the mess for the bridge because of that blunt truth. Now, I remember.

On the worst days of hunger, Vovó sat on her armchair with her head slightly tipping sideways, dozing on and off, murmuring her prayers. Sometimes, I distinguished her usual words of protection and healing, asking for full bellies and serenity to deal with the evil eye. Other times, when she thought I wasn’t listening, I heard susurrations about death and mercy. She was usually shaking, hands gripping the arms of the chair, gaze lost in another world.

During those times, Vovó didn’t shower by herself, didn’t turn on the TV, or pick anything to knit. The yarn and her needles stood untouched at the armchair’s side. The only times her wrinkles writhed into a smile was when our gazes met. I tried to part the choir’s share of food with her—rice, beans, and three strips of printed chicken—but she rarely accepted it.

“You need it more than I do,” she told me when she garnered a thread of strength. “You need to go to school, netinha. I stay at home, save my energies, and pray. That’s the best I can do.”

I couldn’t see Vovó like that, so I started going to the church. I’d learned how to sneak and break into the box of Communion bread, so I packed a bunch of them and ran back home, where I prepared a mush with salty water and fed Vovó with a spoon.

“What is it, girl?” She recoiled, grimacing, but her eyes peered ravenously at the improvised food. She wouldn’t deny it.

“It’s bean soup, Vovó,” I lied.

I was terrified when Father Otávio caught me stealing. I cried beside him, on the church steps. That was the first time I felt ashamed and guilty of my actions, but also profoundly relieved that someone would look out for Vovó.

Father Otávio started buying basic needs for us, and I thanked him, his god, and whoever else needed acknowledgment for making Vovó capable of leaving her armchair and walking again. Months later, when we started receiving our share of godly bananas, Vovó went to the church and kissed Father Otávio’s hand.

What I didn’t know back then, and would only realize when darkness stared right through me at the bridge of my freighter, was that Vovó’s pleas to eradicate hunger from our lives were literally answered.

All the evil eyes glare at me. The god drools its droplets of darkness. My ectoplasm itches, slowly dissolving in fading filaments that widen the holes on me, leaving nothing where little had been.

“Get away from here,” I say, cringing, flustering about on the bridge, unsure of what’s left to do. Some of the branches leaving my corpse’s left wrist subside, roots losing their life, darkening and crackling. My body is stooped in an unusual position. My eyes are open, shocked, my mouth quirked up and my lips blue. That’s the moment I know I won’t get back to Earth. I won’t haunt Vovó in her bedroom, won’t stare at the goddess while she sits on her armchair with a hardcover book on ancient spirits. I won’t go through the crowds in the street market, passing through the stalls filled with fruits and vegetables, flying fast, only to find the old lady who sells bananas knitting in a corner, now with two boys to help her since her granddaughter abandoned her for a fruitless quest at the other side of the galaxy.

I raise my hand. My no-heart beats fast. The ectoplasm now ends at the wrist. I decide to rest in my own corpse before it’s devoured by the darkness. I skim forward.

My ectoplasm quickly adjusts to my body, like water filling a bowl. The first thing I feel is the pain all throughout. In my joints, in my head, in my chest. An explosion of adrenaline rips through me. My soul connecting with my flesh once more. I gasp, not wanting any of that. I’m airless, lips and tongue sizzling and swelling. I’m about to die again, but I know I won’t. I can’t. From my wrist, the fibers—they’re veins, rebels, part of me—open up in a bouquet, completely shrouding me, a spacesuit made of Vovó’s prayers. A thin layer froths up in front of my eyes like glasses. All the effects of decompression sickness, hypoxia, and whatever else space has in its menu to kill me, go away.

Inside my body, I remember something else. In the few seconds before I died, I’d tried to save my mates with these veins, to wrap them before it was too late, and that’s probably what killed us. At least now I can shed tears.

“You want to play god?” I say to the creature, surprised at how my real voice is different from my ghost one. More powerful, reminiscent of Vovó’s yells at the market. “I was raised by one.”

I whip with the fibers of my armor—the armor Vovó gifted to me—rippling them in the air, and I thrust my fists into the creature’s body, punching, pushing and pricking into its eyes, blinding them one by one. I shrink the god, inch by inch, for hours. The droplets of darkness thaw my suit, but it’s quickly remade by an endless stream of veins coming out of my wrist, vibrating and curling in the bridge, turning it into a mesh of myself. Terminals burst and contort, entire stations are squeezed. Bulkheads sink under the weight. The main window cracks and everything that is on the float rapidly sluices out of the ship. The bridge’s main door breaks apart behind me, opening up a whole corridor for me to grow and occupy the space the darkness strives to achieve.

When the god dwindles to the size of a watermelon, I gush forth into it one last time.

Vovó once described hunger as a deep, insatiable void. Twice now she prevented it from devouring me.

Vovó knew two things about her plea: 1) That a god from space had listened to her and would provide bananas—food and an opportunity to make a living out of it; 2) That not all gods were satisfied by that decision.

I ask her all about it five days after I come back to Earth in my repaired fleshly body, frail and patched by fibers, yet functional and alive. She’s in her usual armchair, knitting a sweater with a tiny spaceship on it. I don’t know if my resurrected eyes betray me, but Vovó’s arms look rough and mosslike, as if she’s slowly suiting up the same way I did, a last measure of protection, perhaps against time itself.

“Why risk dealing with something so much more powerful than us?” I ask her, sitting beside her, sniffing the scent of soil that’s part of her.

“With hunger you have no other option but to bet, netinha,” she says. “All in.”

But there’s one more plea that was answered. I know it in the moment my lips touch the roughened surface of her cheek.

I’m walking arm in arm with Vovó in the tight streets of Verdigris. It’s her 105th birthday and the fifth week of the new street market.

“I brought your list, Vovó,” I say, fidgeting with a slip of paper. She doesn’t seem to listen. She’s been like that lately. “One: Benches for old women and tired mothers and grumpy grandads. Two: Ripe fruits for the hungry, green for the hoarders. Three: Spots between the stalls for gossiping. Four: Merchants who turn a blind eye to hungry kids who steal. Five: Something to turn away the evil eye.”

We turn a right. Vovó doesn’t say anything, but I feel the way she tenses up when she sees the stalls aligned in front of the prefab houses. Her arm is slick and bristly, rough and knotty. A sign hangs from a wall at the market’s entrance. Feira da Vó Lurdes. It’s still a timid act with barely ten merchants and not as loud as a street market in Rio would be, but the fruits and vegetables are from the Verdigris’s vertical farms and as good-looking as their original versions.

A shaft of light reflecting off the dome brings out Vovó’s features. Not much human flesh remains around her cheeks. She slows down and peers at the stalls with her blank eyes like whirlwinds to another universe. The merchants and the few customers stop to look at the old being, now as a woman and a goddess. A man gapes at her feet. I look down.

“You’re going away, aren’t you?” I ask, tears brimming in my eyes. Her feet are intertwined, excavating the street’s soft soil in dozens of thick fibers.

Dedê…It’s her first word in many minutes, and the voice drips directly into my head. Her mouth is now a fibered stitch, the color of a tree trunk. I made a pact. My ancient life in exchange for yours. I postponed your passing to the realm of whichever gods decided to pick you.

“So that’s why I became a…” My throat is dry and I can only mouth the next word. Ghost.

I rub my eyes, folding the list. I know I’m losing Vovó, but I take the time not to crumple it when I stick it into my pocket. Soon, it will be one of the few things I’ll have to remember her. That and my second chance.

“Now you’re just going to die?”

Vovó manages to shake her head, despite the increasing difficulty. Her clothes rip as her new body sheathes her. Her silver hair is blown by the dome’s artificial wind. All around us, people linger to stare.

“How is becoming this…thing different from dying?”

The same way becoming a ghost is different from dying, netinha.

Some say the leafless tree in the Verdigris street market is a clever creation of the moon’s engineers. Every Tuesday morning, it’s surrounded by fruits and vegetables, free for whoever wants to take them. One day, I know, someone will find out that the tree is a goddess.

“The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home” copyright © 2025 by Renan Bernardo
Art copyright © 2025 by Alix Pentecost Farren

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The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home

Renan Bernardo

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The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home

Renan Bernardo

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

Shorted

Damon’s UBI royalties just crashed. His social capital went up in smoke. His girlfriend left him. Now he finds out he’s going to die. What to do? Solve his own…

Illustrated by Erin Jia

|

Edited by Jonathan Strahan

By Alex Irvine

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Published on July 30, 2025

3

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Damon’s UBI royalties just crashed. His social capital went up in smoke. His girlfriend left him. Now he finds out he’s going to die. What to do? Solve his own murder, for starters…and maybe, just maybe, strike it rich along the way.

Novelette  |  11,530 words

Forty-eight hours later, as he watched the serum drip down the IV line in Doc Ivar’s office, Damon would look back on the encounter with the greenbacker and realize it had been some kind of omen.

The way it happened was, he was out Visibly Consuming and therefore Modeling Demographic Ideals, as he did most days. Specifically on that Thursday, he was just leaving the exclusion zone surrounding the main entrance to the Fairfax Sneaker Bazaar, where he had just scored custom retro Lukas in a color that would be trending next month according to his friends who moderated proprietary Pantone socials. The exact second his entire body had left the exclusion zone, a bedraggled rando caught his eye and said, “Hey, man, you got a dollar? Or ten?”

A little charity (but not too much) was good for his Social Cap, so Damon tapped his watch to send the guy a few bux. “No, man,” the guy said. “Like, a real dollar, with a pyramid on the back.”

“What, seriously?” Holy shit, Damon thought. A greenbacker. His drone hovered nearby, capturing the interaction as potential material for a reel. “My man,” he said, with what he hoped was a palatable mixture of respect and aversion, “I have literally never touched paper money.”

“Then you haven’t touched money, pal.”

“You’re right, because money isn’t something you touch. That’s like . . . fuckin’ antediluvian, or something.”

The greenbacker grinned. “Good word, my man. But I’m not that old. Probably not as old as you think.” He stretched and struck a pose, playing more to Damon’s drone than to Damon himself. “Just weathered to perfection by exposure to the elemental world.”

In other words, Damon thought, probably about to die of skin cancer. It was ninety-six degrees, the coolest it had been in a few weeks. March in Los Angeles, 2059. A group of earnest teenagers passed down the sidewalk handing out leaflets to the shoppers emerging from the Sneaker Bazaar. “Shoes are for wearing, not hoarding,” one of them said, with the kind of zeal Damon only ever saw in people wealthy enough to pick and choose which twenty-first-century excesses to criticize and which to embrace. I bet your grandparents met at Coachella, he thought.

A security DogBot approached, and Damon’s corneal display pinged with an AI solicitation: Do you require assistance with unwanted interaction, citizen?

For a moment Damon wasn’t sure whether the AI meant the shoe people or the greenbacker. He waved the DogBot away with a smile. There were plenty of authoritarian influencers, but he’d never swung that way. His brand was mellow, cool, cutting-edge without needing to be bleeding-edge.

“We demonstrated about wars, not shoes,” the greenbacker said, sounding a bit brutalized by nostalgia.

“Just how far in the distant past was that, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I was born in 1999,” the greenbacker said. That made him sixty. To Damon’s eye he looked a lot older, but Damon didn’t spend a lot of time around old people.

“And you really don’t use digital money? How do you get your UBI-Q?” Damon asked before he’d really thought through the social-cap implications of a prolonged conversation with a greenbacker. He started walking so the rando couldn’t answer, but damned if the rando didn’t spring up and start walking with him.

“Oh, you can do it,” he said. “Government makes it hard because it’s so much easier to track your royalties if you’re plugged in, but I’m an American citizen, pal, and I get my royalties just like anyone else. Especially because I’m in some studies.” Damon stopped again, not wanting to seem callous to the unfortunate, just as the greenbacker shot up a sleeve and showed Damon needle marks. “My DNA’s apparently some good shit, uncommon mutations and whatever. Useful. So my UBI’s pretty good too, but I have to go into an office to get like a physical check, and then I have to take that to a place to cash the check, and you wouldn’t believe what a pain in the ass it is to get someone to take US government legal tender around here. . . .” He saw Damon’s eyes glazing over and laughed. “Foreign language to a person like you. But when I was a kid, everything wasn’t digital already.”

This was not only talking to a greenbacker, but an ancient greenbacker. Dude had probably collected pennies and shit in his distant childhood. Could he really be only sixty? Damon wondered if extended interaction with someone so visibly old and undesirable would help his Social Cap, because of respect toward elders, or hurt it, because bedraggled rando. Either way, hey, the only way out was through. It never hurt to do something different once in a while, or so the consultants said. Think of your UBI-Q like a garden, they suggested. You wanted it to grow, you had to prune it and tend it, not just let it bolt through your best demographic years.

Okay. He’d demonstrated Influencing Behaviors, namely curiosity, open-mindedness, and respect for elders. Now it was time to start acting his demographic again. “Love the history lesson, my man,” he said, shooting the greenbacker a you-da-man point at an angle he was sure his drone would catch. “Later.”

Back at LegoLand, the shipping-container clave Damon and his friends called home, he relayed the story. “A greenbacker, seriously?” Shannon was entranced. “I thought they were like Bigfoot or something. They really exist?”

“Swear to God, it happened.”

He had his drone replay the whole interaction. “Shoes are for wearing!” they shrieked, practically in unison, when they saw the earnest group of baby demonstrators. Then they got quiet again when the greenbacker explained his situation.

“He seriously sells his blood for DNA sampling?” Shannon couldn’t believe it, and Damon couldn’t blame her. “That’s so . . . archaic.”

Koo and Maruchy wanted more. “Like, how old was he? Did he stink? How do you even spend paper money?” None of them ever went near places where that might be possible. It could be a huge hit on Social Cap to validate the existence of places where Social Cap couldn’t come into play. Damon thought he’d handled it right, and so far his UBI-Q thought so, too. His daily deposit showed up at EOD on the East Coast, and today it was up enough that Damon was feeling pretty good about the universe and his place in it.

They were up on the roof, top level, with the abandoned hulk of Dodger Stadium behind them and the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean in front, beyond the lights of Culver City and Venice, with Downtown just to the left from their vantage point. Lot P was a good address for someone in Damon’s stratum. Expensive for a clave, but high enough on a bluff that on clear nights you could see the streaks of coastal picket drones taking out ships violating the Southern California Marine Exclusion Zone. Sometimes those ships were trawlers, sometimes refugee transports, sometimes smugglers. Not many of them got through.

Once in a while he and Maruchy did some Luxury Rusticating—super hot right then—heading up into the mountains and camping with all the right gear. Put Environmental Consciousness together with high-end outdoor gear, and your UBI-Q lit up. The data collectives couldn’t get enough. He thought about it sometimes while looking up at the stars, this idea that he lived in a time when work no longer meant trading time for money. Not for people like him. All he had to do was convince a vast faceless data-analytics machine that he was interesting. He’d had a little luck being born to parents who had some access, but he’d made the most of it. Instead of time, he traded his data for money. A simple bargain: you want data about what I do, you pay me for it. The time had been ripe for it in the 2050s, right before Damon was born. From what he understood—and he was no great student of history—job losses and climate catastrophe had caused the kind of social upheaval that got governments’ notice. In the US, thus was born UBI-Q: the Universal Basic Income Quotient, a calculation of the value of data about an individual’s behavior.

Every time Damon’s personal data—height, weight, preferred ice cream or sunscreen, lubricant or politician—was included in a data set that was used by an AI or dumb algorithm anywhere on the internet or in the real world, Damon’s UBI-Q account received a specified amount of money. A very small amount of money, and with taxes already deducted — but when the biggest data farms in North America were using your data and then selling it on to thousands of other, smaller analytics firms, it could add up pretty quick. In Damon’s case, it added up fast enough to make his twenties very enjoyable.

It wasn’t great for everyone. If you were old, or born poor, you were fucked. But if you had a demographic in and you took advantage of it, UBI-Q could be very good to you. Just looking around the clave: Sally Chu was on every hot list getting sold where it mattered. Luther Ayala had just crossed the dreaded 30 Threshold, but even as his behavioral data sales started to drop, he was also getting discount offers on cars and mortgages and investment plans. Moira Flynn was partying because she’d just gotten sold to her first big list, along with a hashtag bump on a couple of big socials, and her UBI-Q deposit that day was a few zeroes bigger than usual. They were all living it up in LegoLand, and as long as they could stay desirable they had it made.

“You should totally do a reel on greenbackers,” Shannon said. “Especially if you could find him again. Like, citizen journalism.”

“More like gutter anthropology. What are you going to ask him about? Melanoma and his enlarged prostate?” Luther disliked most people not in their social stratum, but he had a particular hatred for the old.

Damon thought about this. He could do a reel, juxtapose the dinosaur greenbacker with the next-month’s-hotness of his new Lukas. One of the containers on LegoLand’s ground floor was fitted out as a studio, which any resident could use and most did. They all had influencer territories, or just things they liked to talk about and hoped to monetize.

A snap vote interrupted the back-and-forth over the greenbacker. Of the thirteen people in the room, seven got it. Damon was one, and he could tell the other six were already spinning with jealous anxiety, wondering why they hadn’t been chosen. Damon’s feed lit up with side-by-side images of two different brands of vat-grown pork chops. Immediately he selected one even though he had never tried either and couldn’t care less. To be indecisive in a snap vote was to be dropped from the lists of the big marketing companies that made their money in snap votes, and he didn’t want that. Snap votes were a vital stopgap source of UBI-Q for people like Damon and the others in his clave when their reels and outside activities didn’t hit the numbers they needed.

When the snap votes stopped coming his way, Damon knew, that would be demographic apocalypse. Might as well already be in the grave. If he hadn’t squirreled away enough money to live and die on by then, he’d have to get a job.

That night he and Maruchy were having sex. Both of their drones were on, different angles, in case they decided to monetize later. During a pause in the action, both of them unpaused their feeds. Damon noted the presence of an ED medication ad in his feed, at almost the exact same moment as another royalty payment landed.

It was a lot of money. A whole lot. Like, enough zeroes to confuse him because if he read them literally he was actually rich for the moment. Way more than he would ordinarily get even on a day when he’d been highly visible and commercially desirable in a data-analytics way. Almost enough to completely distract him from the fact that he’d been marketed a fucking dick pill, which is insane considering he was a month from his twenty-eighth birthday, had good UBI-Q and also good Social Cap, and had only moments before demonstrated that he had no current need for dick pills.

He looked over and Maruchy looked away, but not quite fast enough. Okay, Damon thought. Now Maruchy knows I got an ad for dick pills.

“What the fuck is this?” he chuckled, trying to catch her eye as she settled into her pillow. “What’s gonna be next, hair pills?”

Maruchy didn’t laugh. A minute later he realized she was pretending to be asleep.

His UBI-Q spiked again the next day. A lot. Like, an order of magnitude bigger than a normal day.

It was weird enough that Damon decided he had to find out why. As part of the Personal Aggregated Network Data Ownership and Royalty Act of 2043—PANDORA, proving there were Congressional staffers with senses of humor—there existed an exhaustive federal database cataloguing the uses of any individual’s data. A lot of lists and analytics. AIs scraped stuff in other ways without reporting it, but the database was a pretty good overall snapshot of who found Damon interesting and why.

The database included both personal uses and transactions related to securitized instruments including his data profile. There was a lively secondary market in this, investors essentially betting on which demographics will remain pertinent by batching and securitizing them. Damon owned some shares in himself—or, more accurately, some of the securities that included him—although he was far from the majority shareholder in those securities. Although demographically interesting and charismatic on a personal level, he was plankton compared to the real movers and shakers.

Anyway, when he went up on top of the clave where there was a nice view of the mountains and a smell of pine when the wind was right, he got a look at his entry, and sure enough, there it was. A transaction two days before.

He’d been shorted, due to “pending demographic undesirability.” By whom? A holding company, and the public database didn’t list any of the officers. Following the initial transaction, a whole lot of people had added a whole lot of weight to that short position, meaning they trusted the initial investor who took it. So Damon was awash in royalties, but the market was telling him he wouldn’t be for long.

Shit, Damon thought. What do they know that I don’t?

He asked around, and found out that a couple of other people in the clave had also been shorted—including Sally, who was taking it really hard. Damon’s other friends didn’t seem too worried. Some of them had even invested in the short position. No hard feelings, right? It’s all just a game.

Right.

Two hours later, he came out of the shower to find Maruchy packing her stuff. When she saw him, she started talking, but didn’t stop packing. “Look, this was fun, but staying in a clave where at least three people got shorted? And you’re getting ads for reverse mortgages in your feed?” She looked one part sad and three parts embarrassed. “You know I can’t be part of that.” Her drone hovered nearby, capturing the whole thing. Damon considered it unfair that she hadn’t given him some kind of heads-up so he could have his drone ready, too.

“But we . . . had something,” Damon said. It was the best he could do. These kinds of scenes did nothing for your UBI-Q, so he avoided them and didn’t know how they were supposed to go. It did occur to him that showing genuine emotion as a contrast to Maruchy’s mercenary attitude toward the whole thing could be construed as Influencing Behavior, garnering consumer empathy and emotional identification, so he decided to go with it.

Her face softened a little. “Yeah, we did. For a while. But it was never going to last. I mean, you’re about to turn twenty-eight.”

That was a punch in the gut. Maruchy had just turned twenty-four. He watched her walk away, considered hurling some perfect invective after her, but that wasn’t really his brand and anyway he was too demoralized to think of anything.

“Let it go, bro,” Koo said later, on the roof, when the story had gotten around the clave courtesy of Maruchy’s newest reel. She’d painted him as a good guy, just not in the same phase of life that she was, you know? Like she needed someone who really got what it was like to be still growing and manifesting her own potential, you know?

“Fuck off, Koo,” Damon said. “She’s just leaving. You bought into whoever shorted me.”

Koo cracked two beers and held one out. “I arbitraged your shit, man. Went both ways. Basically just to see, I mean, I never saw this before and I want to be in on what develops, you know?”

He tilted the neck of his bottle toward Damon. After an I’m-still-pissed pause, Damon clinked. “So you’re going to lose no matter what happens?”

“Also I’m gonna win,” Koo said. “Plus I get information, which is another win. In this case, the loss is just the cost of the information, see?”

Damon did see, but he also recognized that he would never in his life have thought of it. It was possible that he didn’t spend enough time considering angles. “You do that with everybody else, too?” he asked.

Koo nodded. Opportunistic Innovation, Damon thought. It was a core Influencing Behavior category, indexed in all the analytics algorithms. Koo’s UBI-Q was going to bounce.

After five or six beers, Damon got weepy about Maruchy and went looking for her. He knew he shouldn’t do it. She had every right to walk away from him. He felt he was doing something wrong even as he was impelled to put on his new Lukas, find her, and explain to her how the two of them didn’t have to be bound by the rules of the world and all the assholes who built the lists and the analytics models and all the other human miseries that kept people apart. How much of this was love, and how much wounded possessiveness, he didn’t know.

He did know he shouldn’t bring his drone, even though it felt weird to go into potentially social situations without gathering vid for his next reel. Also, a visible drone was a means of registering his presence and UBI-Q relevance. But he left it at home, and his phone tag still pinged every sales AI in every store, restaurant, and kiosk he passed, from Eagle Rock to Sunset Junction and then on toward Downtown. Tonight his data profiled as a Party Person. He could do a reel about it tomorrow, come up with some reason he’d gone out sans drone. Downtown Rusticating, maybe. Urban Rusticating. Some new recombination of buzzwords that would make the data scrapers sit up and take notice. He could already hear himself: It was so amazing, just to surrender myself to the dataflow, to all the other people and their feeds, let it wash over me and know that I was, like, part of it without having to make myself part of it . . .

Like the Thoreau of the datasphere, which would be a funny thing to say as long as Damon could confirm ahead of time that a majority of his audience would know who Thoreau was. Nothing killed Social Cap faster than making jokes and quips your audience didn’t get.

When he got to the Paper Crane in Old Koreatown, after creeping Maruchy’s feed and learning she was there, Damon had to talk his way in. He had enough reserve UBI-Q to get in, but his Social Cap was in flux due to recent events and the bouncer had access to all the latest demographic nuances. Eventually the bouncer relented, after they had a little conversation about sneakers and Damon tipped him off about the next color trend. So he was in, but in a sort of probationary way. Now that they’d let him in once, though, they’d be more likely to do it again—assuming his UBI-Q didn’t crater and take the indexed Social Cap rating with it, and assuming he didn’t do something dumb to crater his Social Cap all by itself.

That was why when he saw Maruchy, at a table with a bunch of other young, shining people—and their drones, doing a complicated dance to stay out of one another’s shots—he decided not to make a scene. She looked happy. Maybe she was happy. Either way it was clear she didn’t want him around. Don’t be stupid, he told himself. Going up to her like a whiny puppy isn’t going to get her back, and it isn’t going to do your Social Cap any good, either.

He left to find somewhere else to drink, and the rest of the night was a montage of different bartenders handing him different drinks, until he must have passed out at some point, because the next thing he remembered was his feed pinging with a video, incoming from practically everyone he knew as he struggled back to awareness in the back seat of an auto-auto somewhere way down in Venice, where the only people his age were kept by people much older and richer. He had no idea what he had been doing there, and when he tapped play, the video scoured everything else from his mind. He watched it on repeat all the way home.

The drone comes down out of the night sky, one among dozens within a mile doing everything from monitoring traffic to delivering pizza to face-checking pedestrians against lists of outstanding warrants. It’s a little bigger than the average delivery drone, maybe the size of a DogBot, the sound of its rotors pitched a little lower than the annoying leaf-blower buzz most bigger drones make. No one pays it the slightest attention as it comes to a hover near the upper corner of LegoLand. A cable snakes out from its chassis; a three-pincered claw on the end of the cable clamps onto an electrical drop leading from a thick vertical conduit into one of the top containers. There is a pause. Then the drone is incinerated as an electrical charge roughly equivalent in amperage to an average lightning strike propagates down the cable. The electricity blazes through the twenty-seven steel containers that make up Legoland in a fraction of a second. Electronics spark and flare. People scream. Overloaded circuits spark fires. In less than a minute the entire clave is ablaze. People come running down from the Dodger Stadium tent city, but there’s nothing they can do. Sirens sound in the distance.

He got out of the car and looked at the ruins of LegoLand. Toward the center of the clave, containers were buckled inward from the intensity of the heat. Damon’s place, high up on the outside, sizzled as firefighters hosed it down. Streams of water poured into the street, thick with the ashen remnants of all their possessions. And, he thought, all of them who had been home at the time.

Part of his mind couldn’t get over the sick joke that they’d all just been shorted. As in shorted out.

He stood there in the mist from the firefighters’ hoses, feeling eyes on him. His UBI-Q tomorrow was going to be low, unless one of the big lists was researching ways to make drunken chasing after ex-partners marketable. Which maybe they were. His feed was pinging like crazy, mostly with friends and followers wanting to know about the fire. Some of the newsnets wanted to interview him. He would decide tomorrow.

Koo was dead. Sally and Moira and Luther, incinerated where they stood. Or sat, or lay. He couldn’t process all this, much less relate it to himself. When had he become important, noticeable to the real money?

His whole world had gone completely off the rails in the course of like thirty-six hours. Someone hadn’t just shorted him; they’d shorted him, and a bunch of his friends. He was looking at the smoking evidence that they weren’t going to wait around and take the chance on his price rebounding. Damon was kind of stupid in lots of ways, but even he could see that the forces at work here played for higher stakes than a few marginally profitable UBI-Q profiles living or dying.

A bigger fish had found him, the plankton. So what was he going to do?

He was still hammered enough that he hadn’t gotten out of the car. The AI driver prompted him, courteous but impatient. Damon leaned back in and pulled on the door. It wouldn’t shut. “Another rider has queued for my services,” the AI said.

Damon flashed his UBI-Q and Social Cap wallet both, hoping the car hadn’t pulled a rider with more clout. “I still need you,” he said.

After a moment, the AI shut the doors. “What is our destination?” it asked.

Up in the hills, where he used to watch the stars with Maruchy, Damon listened to drones. There weren’t as many up here as down in the city, but you could never get away from them. Which made it difficult to go on a rampage to fuck up the people who had securitized you and then turned you into a stock, then tried to kill you and everyone else in that security to make a short position profitable. But Damon, hungover and lovelorn and generally not in a frame of mind to deal with anyone’s shit, intended to do exactly that.

Was there an Influencing Behavior category for Vengeful Crusader? Anti-Arbitrage Saboteur? Hegemony-Killing Folk Hero? The Plankton Strikes Back?

He looked down at his custom Lukas and thought, Fuck yeah. I’m about to find out.

Riding that wave of righteous anger, he stood up. Dawn was breaking and he needed a plan.

Whoever had nuked the clave would be noticing, or would already have noticed, that not all of the shorted individuals were present. So Damon, at least, represented a potential loss to this person. Even in his hungover and lovelorn state, he understood that made him a target on a more or less ongoing basis until the situation was resolved. Meaning either he was dead or he figured out who wanted him that way and did something to stop it.

There might be other targets, too. He had to learn who . . . and that, at least, he knew how to do.

In an illegal blackout cafe down an alley off Winston, in the old Toy District, Damon burned some serious bux to buy ten questions from an AI with enough black hat to creep proprietary databases. Ordinarily a search like he was about to do would raise security flags in all kinds of places, and would also make him traceable—but the blackout cafe had security better than the vast majority of data-analytics conglomerates’ external sensors. That’s why it was illegal, and would only survive as long as its security hid it from the authorities. Not Damon’s problem; he just needed it to survive for the next twenty minutes or so.

He didn’t think he would need ten questions, but it was a nice round number and buying too many was better than paying the fee to restart with another genie. “Your name is Shaq,” he said when he’d gotten settled in a small booth and dumped a nontrivial fraction of his personal wealth into a holding account to activate the genie. “First question: Who shorted me?”

Shaq sniffed around and came back with a name: “Branson Chin.”

“Public information on Branson Chin.”

“Investor and data trader, incorporated as Future Holdings LLC in Detroit. Age forty-four, no public family info.”

That meant he’d paid to have it protected. Probably his contact information was protected as well, and Damon didn’t have enough Social Cap to get a message to him.

Still, he could find out more about the transaction in question than the public filing mandated by the PANDORA Act. “Show me the transaction.”

It appeared, a short bid on an asset-backed security batched by an SPV created by—huh. Created by Oriole Partners, a venture-capital group from Baltimore. Most of its holdings were pharma and data analytics.

The logic was simple once you bought the initial premise. As long as individuals in profitable demographics remained profitable, the government-enforced contract to pay them for corporate usage of their data would return profit to an investor. Then, when those securities matured, everyone got paid off and they dissolved. So, at some point the quant geniuses at Oriole had decided Damon’s profile fit with an asset-backed security they would create . . . and at some point later, Branson Chin had decided they were wrong, that the security would in fact start losing money very soon.

Which Damon figured it certainly was, since several of the contracts constituting that security were now null and void, by virtue of the data profiles in question being incinerated.

“Next question,” Shaq said. Genies cut off sessions if too much time elapsed between questions.

“Show all other data profiles included in that shorted security.”

Shaq obliged with a long list, hundreds of names with appended personal information. It took Damon a while to wade through it all, but eventually he had picked out a whole batch of people he knew, including all of his dead friends and five other residents of LegoLand who had survived by virtue of being elsewhere. A couple of them Damon didn’t know very well, but the list also included Iko Iguodala, who was apparently visiting family in Laguna Beach and had thereby avoided incineration. They’d been friends since they played lacrosse together when they were kids. Also Malya Ismaili, another old friend from a childhood theater camp or something, he couldn’t remember.

Absent from the list: Maruchy.

He had to ask another question. “Does Branson Chin have any financial dealings with Oriole Partners?”

Shaq considered. “Yes.”

“Show me.”

“The specifics are protected.”

Damon checked his UBI-Q balance. Still pretty healthy, but that wouldn’t last once he started doing public things again and his royalties came into conflict with the short position on the security. Which wasn’t a problem on the level of someone wanting you dead, but still.

“Shaq,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Can I pay you to do some dirty work?”

There was a brief pause. Then a rate sheet appeared on a display built into the table. “How dirty?” Shaq asked.

An hour later, Damon walked out of the blackout cafe with a bunch of answers, a much smaller UBI-Q balance, and a new drone, this one packing some very advanced—which was to say illegal—hardware in a chassis no bigger than a hummingbird. Hummingdrone. He didn’t want to use the train in case whoever had nuked the clave had facial recognition routines piggybacking public cameras, so he walked down Wall Street past the old Flower Market, where he bought six hours in a transient workers’ hotel so he could catch a shower and some sleep.

With the water pounding on his head, Damon felt his mind start to defrag and get focused again. He still had no idea where Maruchy was. She’d blocked him on all her feeds, and public channels were useless.

Forget about it, he thought. She wasn’t on the list so she doesn’t need to be warned. She doesn’t want to talk about the clave. She doesn’t want you. As he thought it, the idea gave him peace, so he embraced that even though he figured it wouldn’t last. Right then he needed any life preserver the world could throw him. Rejection worked. It cleared his head.

He’d done a little detective work with the aid of Shaq the friendly AI, piecing together his friends’ schedules, and he’d found a pretty interesting thing. Every one of his shorted friends had gone to the same doctor in the past few weeks: Doc Ivar, fave of the clave. Expensive enough to burnish your Social Cap without being a total rip-off; also reliable and discreet. While at Doc Ivar’s, each of the shorted cohort had gotten vaccinated against one of the new avian flu strains that was currently scything through southeast Asia and on its way across the Pacific.

So had Damon.

A special trial, Doc Ivar had said. Very few people could get in, but it was an absolute killer vax. In a year it would be worldwide but they needed a little more data to get the feds to sign off on it. Hey, Doc Ivar had added. Don’t get this on your feeds or whatever yet. My office will be overrun and we’re trying to keep this trial manageable so we get good clean data.

Damon had obliged. So, apparently, had everyone else. But once the question of Doc Ivar had come up in the blackout cafe, Damon had asked Shaq the AI a few follow-ups.

Who had designed this trial vaccine? Starbird GenTech, one of whose principal investors was none other than Branson Chin.

And who owned Starbird GenTech? Oriole Partners, the venture firm that had created the security which included one Damon Frederickson approximately a month ago.

In another time it might have taken him weeks, and some kind of expertise, to piece it all together. But in the year 2059, when privacy was a punch line and AIs could be lightly corrupted by a sufficiently swollen UBI-Q balance, Damon had worked most of it out in less than an hour. He might be plankton, but this plankton had evolved eyeballs and could see what the big fish were doing.

The only thing he didn’t know was who had sent the drone to nuke the clave—and, presumably, another drone to film it being done—and who had leaked it. But he could find those things out.

Solving problems with money. The American way.

Dear Branson Chin, he thought. Did you know they were going to send a drone to kill us? Or did somebody leak something about the visits to Doc Ivar that made you see an opportunity to make a few bucks on our murders? Or did you do it yourself?

This internal conversation brought it home: Damon had escaped death, holy shit, by the dumb luck of being drunk and maudlin in the aftermath of an unexpected breakup. That was going to make for some weapons-grade PTSD later, but right now he had shit to do.

He had to find his other friends who were in danger, and he had to tell Maruchy, and then he had to go see Doc Ivar.

He got messages out to Iko, Malya, and Donald, but the first of his friends Damon could locate was Miles, who had rented a hotel room in West Hollywood and didn’t appear to believe he was in any danger. He was finishing a reel when Damon walked in, hyping the hotel and its line of personal care products. “Gotta make lemonade,” he said after he’d wrapped. “One of the front desk staff knew me and she got me this little deal. Might be a new line for me.”

Damon wasn’t interested in Miles’ potential new lines—though he did remind himself that he needed to do a reel soon. Maybe something philosophical, about the greenbacker, befitting the serious circumstances? Lean into Cultural Awareness and Betterment, which had worked for him before? “Good for you,” he said. “If you live long enough to make it pay.”

Miles rolled his eyes and put on a skin patch. He always got high after doing a reel. “The video doesn’t prove anything,” he said. “Looked like an accident to me.” This was basically what he’d said when Damon had pinged him a few hours before: it was probably a utility drone, something went wrong, et cetera, let’s get high and forget about it. He’d only agreed to see Damon after Damon suggested he knew some details that weren’t safe to share over a call, Miles being the kind of person who couldn’t stand the possibility that he wasn’t up on the latest gossip, conspiracy, and scandal.

“Miles,” Damon said. “Has your UBI-Q jumped in the last couple of days?”

Miles got an expression on his face like Damon had asked him to do something distasteful. “How should I know?”

“By looking?”

“You actually check your UBI-Q every day?” Miles laughed, and Damon remembered what an asshole he could be. “Do you have some kind of diagnosis for that?”

Damon looked into his friend’s face, and realized Miles would never be convinced. Still, he trudged through the whole chain of connections, from the vaccine to the security Branson Chin had shorted twenty-four hours before the drone burned down LegoLand. “You got shorted too, Miles,” he finished. “Did you see Doc Ivar in the last couple of weeks?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Miles said. His eyes were glassy, pupils like carved obsidian. “I got my shots like a good dog.”

“All right, man, your call,” Damon said. He got up and left.

Hillhurst Medical Partners occupied a three-story building in a cluster of medical and research offices set back behind a car wash and a taco stand in the triangle created by Hollywood, Sunset, and Vermont. Damon had picked this doctor because his patient roster included a lot of other people in Damon’s influencer demographic. Damon was young, fit, and healthy. He didn’t need health care, so he didn’t care if his doctor was actually good. Anyone could do the basics and administer the occasional vaccine.

Which was the question he put to the good doctor the next day—after he had paid for a priority appointment, gotten a shower and a change of clothes, and recorded a quick reel. “Fam, you heard about the clave. Most of you have probably seen the video. A lot of my friends died up in Lot P last night, and until I find out why, I’m gonna be reaching out to you from the proverbial undisclosed location for a little bit. Crazy, right? That I have to go into hiding?

“And can you believe this shit? On the run for my life, and also my prime Lukas got all creased and fucked up.” He applied a spit-moistened thumb to some of the worst scuff marks, then gave up, playing to the camera. “Shit.”

Then he performatively shrugged it off. “But seriously. I survived. Take that with you today, because you’re all survivors too. You can survive whatever happens today, and you’ll come out stronger. Smell a flower today, give a friend a real hug. Take a little time to love the things you can hold. The things you can touch.” The greenbacker’s words had been bouncing around in his head, and it was a relief to let them out again. Damon shot a peace sign at the camera. “Later.”

The recording stopped and Damon ran it through an AI for effects and optimization. He approved it to upload after tagging everyone who had died in LegoLand, plus the people he knew were shorted and survived.

Plus Maruchy.

Doctor Ivar Andropov had perfect teeth, a shiny smooth face, and a hairline calculated to look distinguished while also making his patients feel superior. His bedside manner was superb and his handshake firm. “How are you, Damon?” he asked, deep concern in his voice. “I heard what happened to your . . . sorry, I forget the word.”

“Clave, Doc. It’s just a word we use. It was really my family.” As Damon said it, he realized it was true. They might all be shallow, superficial, attention-seeking narcissists, but they were his family. A spasm of grief tightened his throat and prickled his eyes, and before he could stifle it, he heaved a little sob. Doc Ivar patted his shoulder while Damon got himself together.

“Is that why you’re here today?” he asked. “I can’t help you with the grief, but if you need a little something to help you sleep, or deal with anxiety . . .”

“Actually, Doc,” Damon said, feeling a strange calm descend in the wake of his little grief attack, “that is what I’m here about.”

Doc Ivar spread his arms. “You know you can tell me anything. This room is a completely private space.”

Damon didn’t mention his little hummingdrone, sitting quietly on a high corner of the cabinet over the sink. Exactly where its angle would make for a perfect two-shot of Damon and the doc. Hmm, he thought. “Damon and the Doc.” He didn’t usually title episodes, but that was pretty good.

“Tell me about the vax you gave me a couple weeks back,” he said. “It was some kind of trial?”

Later, he would explain it to Iko like this, on the balcony of Iko’s parents’ place in Laguna Beach, looking across Cliff Drive to Rockpile Beach:

“So, you’re a stock.”

Iko nodded. He understood this part but mostly didn’t care as long as the money kept coming in. “Right. I get that.”

“If people think you’re going to get more valuable, they buy you.”

“Yep.”

“And the reverse is also true.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Except the people who think you’re going to get less valuable, if they aren’t holding any Iko right now, they can go to someone who does and say, hey, can I borrow some Iko? I’m gonna sell it at this price, and in X period of time, I’ll make sure you get your Iko back at the same price it was when I borrowed it. If Iko drops in value, they get to keep the difference. If not, well, they made a bad call.”

“Okay.”

“So, you can see how making a bad call can leave the borrower in a bad spot.”

“Tough shit for them,” Iko said around the neck of a beer bottle. “They took a chance.”

“Right. But what if they see that you’re not dropping enough and they decide to . . . do something about it?”

“Okay. Okay. But I’m just one guy, how’s my data profile gonna make anyone do anything?”

“It won’t. But you batch together a hundred of them and you got a securitized fund, basically. It has an index correlated to the value of all its individual assets. The more of those assets go poof . . .” Damon didn’t finish the thought because he could see from the look on Iko’s face that he had already figured it out.

“I didn’t sign up for any of this shit,” he said. “Who says they can do that?”

“It’s all in the UBI statutes,” Damon said. “Once PANDORA made your data profile a royalty-generating asset, it was all systems go to create a market in speculating on those assets.”

“But that’s me,” Iko said.

“Not to the market, it isn’t.” Iko leaned back and looked out over the ocean again. Damon wondered what it must be like for him. Mid-twenties, born rich but a hard worker determined to outdo his parents. Iko wasn’t really an influencer, in that he didn’t try to influence anybody and didn’t take money to influence people to do certain things. But he was influential by virtue of being successful and handsome and outgoing. Among the residents of LegoLand, he stood out for being a serial founder of businesses that actually made money, and also for being one of those irritating people who ate churros all day and still looked like they spent twelve hours a week in the gym.

Also, he was smart, but he was maybe a little too sincere for this world, where someone you’d never met could cause dick pills to appear in your feed because a dumb AI saw the short and figured it meant you were old.

“This kind of shit didn’t happen when we were kids,” he said.

Damon hesitated. “I think maybe it did. Just not to us.”

“So they shorted us, then killed us to make the short pay off?” Iko said it like he still couldn’t believe it.

Damon. “Yep.”

“Fuckers. Who?”

“That’s where the story gets really good.”

Damon was about to go on when an alert pinged on Iko’s phone. He looked and said, “Shit. Miles.”

Damon got a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. “What about him?”

“OD’d last night, according to Malya. Guess the stress got to him.”

“How? That’s why he used patches.”

“Well, apparently he used like six of them.”

Damon remembered Miles as he was leaving: barely coherent, about to tip over. He wouldn’t have patched himself again, would he? “Iko,” he said. “What if—”

Iko put his beer down so he could reach out and clamp his hands on Damon’s shoulders. “Damon. Miles was always gonna do himself, either on purpose or by negligence. That’s the kind of person he was. Don’t go mapping everything onto your conspiracy.”

Damon was nodding. “Sure, Iko. Yeah. Hey, did I mention that every one of us who got shorted went to see Doc Ivar sometime in the last month?”

Iko still held his shoulders, but the look on his face changed again.

Gotcha, Damon thought. Now you’ll listen. “Yeah, I was just telling Malya that earlier today. Got another beer?”

Earlier that day he had in fact laid the whole thing out for Malya, when he finally got face-to-face with her in an alley market off 4th Street, not far from the blackout cafe down in the Toy District. “So Doc Ivar had a deal with Parkland,” he said. “He sold patients on their vaccines, they paid him and sent him on exotic trips. Standard shit for doctors with no ethics, which is apparently a lot of them. Anyway, this new avian flu vax had an experimental compound that was supposed to bind dead cells to the virus, which then because it was covered in dead cells would be filtered out through the kidneys. But it turns out that somebody in the lab fucked up and made a bunch of the vax with a tainted compound that binds calcium to basically any loose dead cell or cell-like thing in the bloodstream.”

“Calcium’s good, right? Strong teeth and bones,” Malya said, her eyes tracking pigeons waddling down the alley. “I remember that from school.”

Damon shrugged. “Dude, I am not a scientist. But calcium in your bloodstream makes what they call plaque. And plaque closes your arteries. And when your arteries get closed”—he thumped his own chest—“you get a fucking heart attack and you die.”

But when Doc Ivar had first spelled it out for him, Damon couldn’t help thinking it didn’t make sense. “So why nuke the clave if we were all going to get sick and die anyway?”

The doctor shrugged. “Guess Parkland got cold feet in case some of you sought treatment soon enough for the cause to be identified and traced back to them. It happens.”

It happens? How often had Doc Ivar been in on something like this? Something about the doctor’s glib response didn’t sit right with Damon. “No, it was you, wasn’t it? You were worried somebody would trace it back to you. So you made sure an accident happened.”

“Okay, fine,” Doc Ivar said. He seemed irritated. “If that’s what you want to believe. What do you want me to do, apologize?”

“No,” Damon said. Oddly he wasn’t even angry at this revelation. Given what he’d already learned, of course Doc Ivar was going to protect himself. It wasn’t like he actually cared about any of his patients. Everything in his world was superficial, transactional. “I want you to tell the story. Actually, no. No I don’t. I’ll tell it.”

“No one will believe you,” Doc Ivar said. “I’m a prominent physician. I work alongside the biggest pharma researchers in the world, saving lives. What are you? Just a kid making videos about your stupid shoes and playing your UBI-Q games. Couple weeks, maybe a month, you’ll be dead, it’ll seem like a drug overdose.”

You don’t understand technology very well, Damon thought. The face of the greenbacker passed through his mind, from the day he’d bought his Lukas—his poor fucked-up Lukas, on his feet even now, scuffed to death before they even had a chance to trend. What a waste, he thought, almost like he’d joined the Shoes Are for Wearing group that was always protesting outside the Fairfax Exclusion Zone.

“So what does Branson Chin have to do with it?” he asked.

“Who’s Branson Chin?”

“The investor who first shorted us,” Damon said. “Also he’s got holdings in Oriole Partners and Parkland, and before you say it, yeah, I know. I’ll never be able to touch him.”

“Never heard of him,” Doc Ivar said. He doesn’t even know, Damon thought. And then: Shit, I need an exit line. For the—

For the show. The true-crime show. The true-crime show where I solve my own attempted murder.

“How about hooking me up with something that will fix what you did?” Damon said. “You do that, we’ll call it even. No hard feelings.” It was all just a game, right?

“No,” the doctor said. “There isn’t anything. And even if there was, at this point I’m going to piss on your grave just for all the anxiety you’re giving me.”

“Prescribe yourself a fucking pill,” Damon said.

“I could have you killed, you know.”

“You already tried once.”

“Twice, actually. Only once on purpose. But my intentions won’t make any difference. Calcium blockages should do you in sometime in the next week or so.”

“Yeah, about that,” Damon said. “You’re going to fix it.”

“I am?” Doc Ivar laughed. “Are you going to make me?”

“I won’t have to,” Damon said. “Because I know you’re lying and you don’t want what’s going to happen if you don’t help me.”

“You can’t physically harm me,” Doc Ivar said, as if stating some kind of natural law.

“Do I look like some kind of thug?” Damon shook his head, a pitying expression on his face. “Physical is not the kind of harm I’m into. Is there a fix?”

“If you had the money for custom chelation tailored to the compound in question, which I have been researching for years as part of my services to my patients entering their golden years, yes,” Doc Ivar said. “I could have you shipshape in twenty-four hours. But it would have been quite expensive to take care of everyone who’s gotten the bad batch, not to mention the reputational hit Parkland—and Oriole—would have suffered. Cheaper and better in every way just to bundle you, short you, and chalk it up to scientific progress. At least I assume that was the logic.”

“You could do just me,” Damon said. “The chelation thing.”

The doc snorted. “Stop wasting my time. You don’t have that kind of money.”

“True,” Damon said. “That’s why you’re gonna do me for free.”

Now Doc Ivar genuinely laughed. “I cannot wait to hear this.”

Iko laughed long and loud after he’d heard the rest of Damon’s story, the way you laughed after hearing something so absurd that it couldn’t possibly be true but you know it is, and all you could do is laugh at the bitter cosmic joke of it all. Then he said, “So the pharma company paid the doc to shoot us up with this bad vax. Then the company that owns the pharma company securitized us so their investors could short the stock and make money when we died?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Damon said.

“Tell me Doc Ivar can fix it.”

“Well,” Damon said, “that’s part of why I’m here.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

Damon paused, but he was already committed. “Can you get a message to Maruchy?”

At the first syllable of her name, Iko was shaking his head. “No, no, you got to let shit go, Damon, this is crazy.”

“Iko. Iko.” Damon held up his phone. “I already recorded a little message. I just need you to deliver it. I promise you there’s nothing weird. It’s . . . actually it’s kind of a business proposal.”

On the hummingdrone’s screen, Damon stood near the ruins of LegoLand, the city spread out behind him. He took a deep breath. “Hey, Mooch. I know you probably think I’m some kind of weird stalker for trying to contact you after everything, but I’ve been thinking. That last reel you made about us, I don’t know, do you think you came across as a little shallow? Like, do you really want your audience thinking that nobody older than you can change, or become, or find themselves? I get that it was kind of an emotional time, you were letting some things out, all that. Totally cool, I’m not mad. If I had any traction in that kind of Confessional Romance space, I would have probably done the same thing. But like I said, with a little distance—and I’m talking just as a friend here—I wonder if you might want to walk it back a little? Come across as a little more empathetic and open? If you do, ping me. I’ve got an idea that I think is going to break you a new audience. Oh, also, Doc Ivar accidentally shot me up with an experimental vaccine that’s going to kill me in a couple of weeks unless I do this weird experimental procedure with my blood. He didn’t give you a shot, did he? Anyway, ping me if you want to talk. I’m serious, you’re gonna like this idea.”

“Before I go on, I feel like I should tell you you’re on camera,” Damon held up a hand and the hummingdrone buzzed over and alit on his upturned palm.

“A, everyone is always on camera, Damon. Even a dinosaur like me knows that. B, this is a protected area,” Doc Ivar said dismissively. “No recording for privacy reasons, inadmissible in court. Plus, building security will jam that thing anyway.”

“If it was off-the-shelf tech, you’d be right,” Damon said. “But I picked it up in a place you don’t know about, and to your off-the-shelf security, its encryption protocols just look like cars talking to satellites. And you want to know the kicker?” He grinned. “I bought it with the UBI-Q that came in because I got shorted.” Feigning a thoughtful expression, he asked the hummingdrone, “Is that ironic? I’m never sure.” Back to Doc Ivar, he added, “Anyway, you might understand money, and you might understand medicine, but you don’t understand tech.” He chuckled to himself, adding derisively, “Court. As if.”

“I have other patients,” Doc Ivar said, glancing at his watch.

“I know, just a sec. People like you laugh at people like me because we don’t do things your way. I don’t have a job, I don’t have a mortgage, I don’t pull my weight in the economy by buying a certain threshold amount of durable goods. People my age, my demographic, we hear it all the time. But guess what? My time is my own. We don’t bitch about the lack of jobs, we invent an income stream. We don’t demand privacy, we monetize our lack of privacy. This is the world, Doc.”

“For people who can afford the first step into it,” Doc Ivar said.

Bold, Damon thought, for this guy to pretend he cared about the poor. But he refused to be sidetracked. “It’s not my fault it sucks to be poor. Fuck would you know about it anyway? You got a lot of money. You were probably born into a lot of money. So you never had to understand things. You had other people to understand things for you. I bet you do the same things now. I bet your nurses and PAs and shit, they really know what’s going on, and you slid through med school using family AI to take your exams.” Damon waffled a hand at the doc. “Pretty close?”

Doc Ivar stared daggers at him but said nothing. Clearly Damon had touched a whole bunch of nerves in this man who was not used to his patients taking a tone with him.

“Right, so your money has you thinking you’re insulated from consequences. Thing is, that’s not true with people like me, because I’m too small for any of your consequences to matter. You can’t shame me, you can’t ostracize me, you can’t bankrupt me, because people who follow me don’t give a fuck what old family-money jerkoffs like you have to say about anything. And you sure can’t avoid consequences from people like Branson Chin, because he’s too big for either you or me to reach. Seriously. You’re a smart man. You think the guys who torched my clave to make a few bucks won’t take care of you to save a lot more?”

Doc Ivar’s air of self-assurance was faltering, and Damon—fueled by grief, anger, and a small but rapidly growing dash of opportunism—was just getting started.

I solved my own murder, he thought. Well, attempted murder. This is going to be huge. A new brand. If I can make it pop.

“None of this matters,” the doc said. “But if I were to listen to you, what would you suggest?”

Damon’s idea got bigger. The true crime show where I solve my own attempted murder . . . reconcile with the man who did it . . . and then show the audience how we both got rich. Plus . . . Slot-machine bells rang in his head.

When Malya had recovered from the initial shock, she leaned against the back wall of an abandoned warehouse while Damon spun out the whole rest of the story. Then she said, “You got him to do what?”

“Save your life, chica,” Damon said. “And mine. And Iko’s, and would have been Miles’ too but I think they got to him already.”

She gave him the sidelong, half-lidded you’re-an-idiot look. “Damon.”

“Malya. They tried to kill all of us once. What’s dumber, to believe they’re going to keep trying or to believe they’ll just stop?”